Read Online If Catfish Had Nine Lives (Country Cooking School Mystery) by Paige Shelton - Free Book Online Page A

people would just leave. He didn’t want anyone to leave yet. I didn’t envy the position he’d been put in.
    Orly steered the truck to the far end of the field, to the back corner that was almost directly across the old stagecoach tracks from the Express station. He’d set up his tent on a corner patch, where anyone who might need him could find him easily.
    He parked and said, “In my tent.”
    “Orly, you need to tell me what’s in there. I’m concerned, and I don’t know if I want to see what you think I need to see.”
    He chewed on the inside of his cheek a second and then said, “Well, I got you this far, so I guess it’s okay to tell you now that there’s a fella inside my tent. He asked me specifically to come find you and get you out here without telling you what was going on first. He thought you’d be so upset or concerned that you wouldn’t come alone, and he didn’t want anyone but you here.”
    “What fella? Who?”
    “Claims to be your brother. I already told him that I’d shoot him if he’s lying or tries anything funny.”
    I was suddenly wedged in between shock and humor; shocked that Teddy might be in Orly’s tent, humor because of Orly’s dry delivery of his threat; but then I realized he meant what he was saying. Teddy really was in his tent, and Orly probably truly would shoot him if he deemed it necessary.
    “Oh, no,” I said. “What’d he get himself into this time?”
    “Your question makes me think he’s exactly the type of young man I suspected him to be. Should we go see?”
    I hopped out of the truck and trudged over and around camping accessories to get to Orly’s tent. I was concerned about what might be going on, but I did experience a small sense of reluctant déjà vu. I’d been summoned a few times to surprising and sometimes mysterious places at often unusual hours to retrieve my brother. He was an adorable, sweet man who attracted women simply by existing, and his judgment when it came to his love life hadn’t been good. Recently, the woman I thought might actually make an honest man out of him dumped him. Ophelia Buford, Opie, a lifelong thorn in my side, had claimed to be head over heels for my untamed brother and, much to my disappointment, he claimed the same for her. And then one day, she just decided that she no longer wanted to be a couple. It had broken his heart, and I’d expected his ways of coping would result in bad behavior, but so far I’d been pleasantly surprised.
    Of course, our quiet and peaceful existence wasn’t destined to last. It was probably almost over; it would probably end when I stepped into the tent.
    Orly reached for the front flap of his very modern tent. “If he’s not who he says he is or if he acts squirrelly, just give me the signal. I’ll take care of him.”
    I nodded and he pulled back the flap.
    “Teddy!” I exclaimed when I saw him. Any irritation I felt was replaced with fear and concern. I knew the man in the tent was my brother, despite the fact that he didn’t much look like him at the moment.
    “Betts, thanks for coming out here,” he said.
    He was sitting on the ground against one of the back tent poles. I couldn’t tell exactly where he was injured, but he was covered in blood. Red and brown camouflaged most of what was supposed to be a white T-shirt. His jeans weren’t as bloody, but they looked too dirty and were ripped in the wrong places. He was holding a small slab of meat over half of his face; the other half was swollen and misshapen. His nose was huge, and his eye sagged. When he pulled away the meat, I saw that the other eye was swollen completely shut.
    “What the hell happened, Teddy?” I said as I went down on my knees next to him.
    “Don’t remember, but I think I got into a fight.”
    “You don’t remember?”
    “We found him,” Orly said. He nodded toward the woods that were across the trail and behind the station. “He was unconscious.”
    I swallowed a sudden surge of