The Price of Indulgence: A Short Story

by Carolyn Haines

Jackie Muldoon knows how to find a story. She also knows how to make moonshine as good as her murdered father’s.

By day, she’s a cub reporter in Mobile, Alabama. By night, she keeps the family still running and searches for the person who shot her father. Then someone steals a teenage girl’s body from its grave, and Jackie’s newspaper assignment begins to cross paths with a radio preacher she’s been watching for reasons of her own.

The missing dead girl sang for Brother Fred March’s Angels in White. Fred promises salvation over the airwaves, but Jackie has photographs that suggest his private life deserves a closer look. As threats close in and the missing body remains unfound, Jackie follows a trail through Mobile’s newsrooms, back roads and late-night bars.

The truth could cost her the last thing her father left her.

37 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 2, 2026

About the author

Carolyn Haines is the USA Today bestselling author of over 70 books. In 2020, she was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. She was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Alabama Library Association, the Harper Lee Award for Distinguished Writing, the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence, as well as the "Best Amateur Sleuth" award by Romantic Times. Born and raised in Mississippi, she now lives in Alabama on a farm with more dogs, cats, and horses than she can possibly keep track of.