Lowcountry Bombshell (A Liz Talbot Mystery) by Susan M. Boyer

license plate. I’m just curious. What does it mean?”
    “Fifty-cent soul.”
    “What’s the significance?”
    “It’s something Marilyn said once. It stuck with me. She was so much deeper than people gave her credit for. She said, ‘Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.’ I owe her quite a lot, when you think about it. If I hadn’t known how her story ended, I might have let them turn me into a movie star. Instead, I kept my fifty-cent soul and left town.”
    TWELVE

    Mamma called as I pulled out of Calista’s driveway. “Liz, honey, your daddy has gotten himself another computer virus. Can you run by the barn? I’m positively mortified. I’ve heard from three members of the church, and Father Henry to boot. Your daddy’s computer has been broadcasting pornography over email.”
    I resisted the urge to bang my head on the steering wheel. “I’ll head over there now.”
    “Liz?”
    “Yes, Mamma.”
    “See if you can get him to go to the doctor and have his blood pressure checked.”
    “I’ll do my best.” Daddy wasn’t fond of seeing doctors, even Warren Harper. And he liked him, generally speaking.
    “Thank you sweetheart. Come by and take some more of this pimento cheese if you can use it.”
    “Thanks, Mamma, but that’s not in my best interests. That stuff is like crack cocaine to me.”
    “Well, I guess if I don’t see you before, I’ll see you at dinner Sunday.”
    “Okay. Wait, Mamma. Nate’s in town.”
    “Well, bring him along.”
    My stomach clenched. “All right. See you then.” I ended the call wondering how Nate was going to feel about having dinner with my family, and how they would receive the news that Nate and I were partners in more than one sense of the word. They purely hated Scott, with good reason. This might be weird.

    Before she would let Daddy retire, Mamma insisted he find something to occupy his time besides sandpapering her nerves all day. Since his two favorite pastimes consisted of haunting flea markets and cussin’ at the stock reports on cable news channels, we all put our heads together and came up with the idea for Talbot’s Treasures.
    It was in an old red barn on the other side of the island from their house on Marsh Point Drive just south of forty acres of woods. It was out of Mamma’s hair, is what I meant.  We pitched in to help renovate the barn, and air-conditioned it to the point you could’ve hung meat in there. Daddy didn’t like to sweat. To help pay the outrageous electricity bills, he rented booths to a few of his cronies and the occasional bored housewife. Near the front door, he sat vigil over the stock ticker with his sad-sack basset hound, Chumley, surfed the World Wide Web, and occasionally sold junk.
    And that’s exactly where I found him when I stepped out of the sweltering heat and a swarm of no-see-ums and into his massive, frigid man cave. 
    “Top of the afternoon, Ms. Tutie,” he called out, not taking his eyes off the television.
    Apparently, he had trouble recalling the name they’d put on my birth certificate, because he seldom used it unless something was wrong. Tutie was the latest in a long succession of nicknames that came from the vast, unknown frontiers of my daddy’s brain. It wasn’t just me. When all was right in his world, he rarely called anyone by their actual name.
    I hugged his neck, careful not to muss his hair. He looked much younger than his fifty-two years and was quite vain. There wasn’t a single gray hair in his sandy blond head, which was the exact same color as mine before Phoebe got ahold of me.
    “Hey, Daddy. How’re you feeling? Mamma’s afraid your blood pressure’s up.”
    “The whistle pigs got into your mamma’s bulbs again last night,” he said, eyes still glued to the stock ticker.
    Stella Maris had a thriving herd of