Page 138 of The Body in the Backyard

“Can we rewind for a minute and talk about why you two are on the suspect list in the first place?” Riley asked, setting aside her berry belly blast.

“Gentry told us you had a merchandising dispute,” Nick said before slurping up some of his root beer rocket.

Riley saw Rain pause halfway up the inflatable climbing wall to hang by one hand so she could take a bite of the chipotle chicken roll-up she’d squirreled away in her pocket.

The way-too-young-to-be-responsible-for-children’s-lives attendant blew his whistle. “No outside food or drink!”

“Merchandising?” Betty repeated as if Nick had just said, “Selling kidneys on the dark web.”

“Oh my God. I’m gonna kill him. Figuratively, of course,” Tyra said quickly.

“Griffin’s recollection has historically been a little skewed,” Riley said sympathetically.

The couple shared a look. Betty sighed. “We knew Griffin from a few golf tournaments. We played a few rounds with him, had dinner a couple of times. He seemed like a nice, good-looking guy.”

“So we asked him for his sperm,” Tyra said, cutting to the chase.

Nick choked on his drink.

“It was more like we floated the idea,” Betty explained. “We wanted to have kids, and we didn’t want to go through a sperm bank, so we had a list of men we knew who seemed somewhat normal.”

“He said yes. Immediately,” Tyra said, picking up the story. “We were ecstatic.”

“I bought a frigging onesie,” Betty put in.

“And a crib,” Tyra added.

“Yeah, but I’m trying to make myself sound more stable. You were so grateful you built that lean-to thing in his backyard over that god-awful naked statue that he never paid you for.”

Tyra blew out a breath. “Fine. We were both unstably grateful. About a month after he said yes, we get this letter in the mail from his lawyer stating that our ‘transaction’ fell under Griffin’s trademarked branding and that we could license his sperm for $500,000.”

Riley’s spoon slipped from her fingers and hit the floor. “Half a million dollars for hissperm?”

“What’s sperm, Daddy?” asked a little boy who was being dragged away from the claw machine by an aggrieved man in flannel.

“Ask your mother.”

“The agreement also included clauses about allowing him to borrow the offspring for public appearances if said offspring was deemed attractive enough,” Betty said. “We’d told our family and friends. We’d spent a butt-ton of money on baby stuff. We’d picked out names. One of them was even Griffin.”

Tyra rubbed her temples. “I just can’t believe we even considered him to be baby daddy material. I mean, what a fucking dumbass.”

“The baby would have been born with a mirror in one hand and a selfie stick in the other,” Betty agreed.

“One second,” Nick said, getting to his feet. “Esmeralda! Let the kid out of the headlock. He didn’t push you. He tripped.”

“That’s awful. I’m so sorry that happened to you,” Riley said.

Nick sat back down. “Sorry about the yelling and the Gentry-being-an-opportunistic-sphincter thing.”

“Look, do we have a reason to hate Griffin?” Betty asked.

“Absolutely,” Tyra said.

“But we didn’t hire some contract killer to take him out.” Betty said.

“We don’t have the budget for that. I work for a general contractor, and Betty is a fourth-grade teacher. We do okay, but not pay-for-murder okay, and day care is crazy expensive.”

“We know this because we have two kids in it,” Tyra said, smiling for the first time.