Veenie waded across a pile of junk on the front porch and tried to peer in a cracked picture window, but ragged bark-cloth curtains blocked her view. She strolled up and down the creaky, weathered porch trying to find a way to peer into the house, but the place was shuttered up tight as a girdle. “I dunno, RJ. Whole place looks abandoned.” Veenie peered around the corner of the porch to the backyard. “No car. No livestock.”
Veenie jumped off the porch and pushed through the wet weeds to the backdoor.
I followed her, on the lookout for spring snakes or other grass varmints. I hadn’t seen any snakes, but knew full well that blue racers, huge blue-black rat snakes, loved to curl up in the crumbling limestone block foundation of old homesteads and munch on what was usually a plentiful supply of rodents. In the backyard, someone had stacked up crumbling cinder blocks and leaned them up against the backdoor as steps. Veenie hopped up, flipped her hippie sunglasses up, stood on tiptoe, and peered in the window on the back door.
“See anything?” I whispered, feeling like we were trespassing at the very least and maybe about to get our heads shot off at the worst. Old Hoosiers made the best hermits. And most of them didn’t take kindly to peeping Toms—or snooping Veenies.
Veenie grunted, then grabbed hold of the painted doorknob and rattled it with both hands. The glass in the door shook and tinkled, but no one responded to the racket. Disgusted, Veenie hopped down into the weeds. “Don’t look like nobody is home.” Veenie cast her eyes over to the railroad tracks in the direction of the big tunnel. “Maybe the headless ghost got them,” she pondered, her voice lower than normal.
Legend had it that a headless railroad man walked the tunnel, waiting to trap victims inside until a train could come and run them down. One fellow had honestly died in the tunnel over the years—a railroad foreman named Henry Dixon—but most of the stories were wild distortions of the truth. Truth was Dixon was shot in the head first, then placed in the tunnel where the murderer hoped the train would run over the corpse. The corpse’s head survived though, and the investigating officials knew a bullet wound to the head when they saw one. You’d have to believe in ghosts big time—which Veenie did—to think that the old tunnel was a bona fide portal to the dark beyond.
I could tell that Veenie wanted to poke around in the train tunnel while we were there, but I put my big foot down. It was already late afternoon. Gertie clearly wasn’t at her sister’s place. Heck, it looked like even Lottie wasn’t at Lottie’s place. And we’d promised Ma Horton we’d stop by Chickenlandia to scope out the crime scene and try to figure out what had become of Dewey and Ginger. I was pretty sure they hadn’t eloped, so that left foul play—or “fowl play” (ha ha), as Veenie had suggested.
Veenie grumbled as she climbed into the Impala. We were so busy speculating about what might have happened to Gertie, and Dewy and Ginger, that neither of us spied the pair of old, blue, bloodshot eyes that followed us from a hole in the tattered front porch curtains, tracking our every move, as we spun gravel and rattled across the knobs toward Chickenlandia.
Chapter Five
“What in the name of Sam Hill do you have against chickens?”
“They’re mean. And they’re sneaky,” said Veenie as she peered at me over the top of her hippie sunglasses. We were parked in Ma and Peepaw Horton’s barnyard. I was trying to convince her to get out of the Impala and search the henhouses and barnyard area with me. There probably weren’t any clues worth chasing down in the henhouses, but we wouldn’t know if we didn’t poke around. Normally, there wasn’t anything Veenie loved as much as poking her nose into other people’s lives and possessions, but she had a chicken phobia, so she was stalling, refusing to get out of the car.
“Mean?” I questioned Veenie. “Chickens are mean?”
“Their grandpappies were dinosaurs. Saw it on the Discovery Channel. They’re ticked off God shrunk ‘em up. They’re just waiting to swoop down and peck a hole clean through the soft spots on the top of our heads.” Veenie jabbed at the Kewpie doll topknot that crowned her own head.
I snorted. “Name one person you ever seen killed by a chicken.”
Veenie unclipped her shades and stashed them in the glove compartment. Her watery blue eyes shone behind her thick glasses as she pondered that request. “Can’t. Chickens are sneaky. But there’s lots of evidence. Remember that old seventies song by Eddie Money?” Veenie croaked out, “‘I got two chickens to paralyze. Two chickens to paralyze.’ That was all about having to quiet down the evil chickens.”
“That’s definitely not what that song says.”
“What’s it say?”
“It says, ‘I got two tickets to paradise.’”
“I like my version better. Plus, lookie how them chickens got all them other fowl riled up in that Hitchcock movie.”
I sat aside my binoculars, which I’d been using to sweep the woods around the henhouses. “The Birds?”
“Yeah.”
“That did not start with chickens. That started with seagulls.”
“That’s what I said. Sea chickens. Peck the eyes right out of your head.” Veenie made a face and jabbed two fingers at her own eyes.
“Why would they do that?”
“All God’s creatures have bad days, Ruby Jane.”
“For Pete’s sake. Put that helmet on, Lavinia. Let’s get rolling.”
“I like chickens all right,” Veenie mumbled as she slid on her football helmet and tightened the chin strap. It was a dented, red IU helmet that she liked to wear if she thought we might be butting heads with hillbilly hoodlums or the likes. “I like chickens, all right,” she huffed again. “Ain’t nothing a mess of fried chicken can’t fix.”
I gave up trying to convince Veenie that chickens were not the evil spawns of Satan and hopped out of the Impala. I made a beeline for the henhouses where Peepaw Horton was walking the perimeter, scattering a bucket of seed and scraps.
Over in the hay meadow by the barn a gang of teenaged kids were crawling around in the grass, constructing food and game booths from two-by-fours and scrap plywood. Some were down on their hands and knees painting signs and stapling homemade paper decorations to wooden booth frames. I reckoned those were the 4-H kids Ma said was helping them set up for the festival.
Spying us strolling his way, Peepaw stopped scattering scraps and threw a welcoming wave and a shout. He was as tall and scrawny as a birch tree. His white buzz-cut hair had not changed since Sputnik blasted through outer space. He wore a dirty, gray bowler hat that helped shade his face from the sun. His gray eyes shined like nickels set in the middle of a weathered, walnut-colored face. He was so bowlegged he looked like one of those toy cowboys pre-formed to sit in a horse’s saddle.
I loped toward Peepaw, careful of my right knee which was fussy from hitting the brakes so hard coming down the knobs from Tunnelton. Veenie hid behind me as best she could, her football helmet strapped to her head. I could hear her BB pistol rattling—she carried the BB gun when she thought we might hit trouble—and I could hear her wheezing. Might have been her heart condition acting up, but more likely she was pumped up with chicken panic. Veenie could have stayed in the Impala, but, per usual, her nosiness got the better of her. She didn’t want to miss out on any good gossip or sleuthing.
I strolled toward Peepaw, walking straight through a clutch of chattering chickens. The chickens swarmed Peepaw’s booted feet, pecking the scraps as fast as he could toss them. They mostly ignored me.
Tossing aside his dented scrap bucket, Peepaw gave us both a warm welcome. “Thanks for coming out,” he said. “Ma told you about all our troubles?”
I eyed Peepaw. “You got anything to add?”
Peepaw took off his bowler hat and scratched his head. He blew his nose on a red kerchief he drew from the back pocket of his overalls. “Not that I can think of. Didn’t see what happened. Just found the feathers, like Ma told you. Ain’t seen Dewey nor Ginger since.”
I asked Peepaw some more questions, th
en he volunteered to show us the spot where he had found the tail feathers. “It’s right over there.” He pointed toward the edge of the hayfield where the 4-H munchkins were hard at work with hammers, staple guns, and a rainbow assortment of tissue pomps.
Peepaw and I were headed that way when a scream caused us to halt. We turned around to see Veenie dancing on a tree stump in the chicken yard. She had her BB pistol aimed at a pair of fluffy yellow chicks that were hopping up and down, peeping at her to beat the band. I reckoned they imagined she had feed for them.
Veenie screeched, “Back off, kids, or I’ll turn you into a box of chicken nuggets!”
I didn’t have to explain to Peepaw that Veenie was deathly afraid of chickens. The whole town knew that. Truth be told, Veenie was odd in lots of ways. Her fear of chickens was not her oddest trait. In fact, it was hardly noticeable once you got to know her. Most folks, myself much included, just worked around her eccentricities.
“Put that pistol away and get down here,” I called to Veenie.
Veenie eyed Peepaw. “Call off your killer chickens!”
Peepaw strolled over and scooped up the pair of fluffy chicks in his big, tanned hands. He cooed at them before slipping them into the giant pockets on the front bib of his overalls. They nested there peeping softly, clearly glad for the ride.
Veenie jumped down and adjusted the chinstrap on her helmet. “Thanks. Can’t be too careful.” She kicked her feet and rattled her BB pistol, warning the curious chickens away as we traipsed across the barnyard toward the meadow.
The chickens got the message that dinnertime was over and flew back up on the henhouse rails. Some ducked into the coop. Chickenlandia had been built out of scrap lumber and leftover tin. The main coops were rough replicas of the Senate building, the White House, and the Supreme Court. Ma claimed every time she and Peepaw watched the nightly news all they saw was a lot of meaningless clucking and pecking. That had inspired them to build Chickenlandia.
By the time we reached the hay meadow, the chickens and junior roosters were clacking and clucking like career politicians, probably talking about Veenie, trying to figure out what kind of creature she was. I wished them luck.
Ma greeted us as we strolled into the tangled mess of kids and half-constructed festival booths. “You gals find Gertie?”
“Nope,” I said. “Went to Tunnelton, but there didn’t appear to be anyone home at her sister Lottie’s place. You heard anything from her today?”
Ma shook her head. “Not a peep. Course we been busy all day. If the phone rang up at the farmhouse, we wouldn’t have heard it. Me especially.” She reached up and fidgeted with her right hearing aid.
A girl I didn’t recognize came up to Ma to show her a sign she’d been working on. The girl was maybe eighteen. She was wearing thick black glasses like NASA guys wore in the '50s, and paint-splattered men’s blue coveralls with a white sleeveless undershirt. Her head was shaved, her hair just long enough to reveal it was black except for a strip of white she’d bleached on each side, kind of like skunk stripes. A tiny gold stud decorated her right nostril. She was almost as short as Veenie, but had dark brown eyes and was on the sinewy side. Ma introduced her as Hayley.
I asked Hayley who her folks were. She said she was an orphan just passing through, hitchhiking south to Pensacola, Florida. Said she was from around Chicago, South Bend to be exact.
Veenie reached up and rubbed Hayley’s head like she was a kitten. “Boss hair. You do that yourself?”
“Yeah, sure,” the girl mumbled as she backed off from Veenie and ran a palm self-consciously over her own head.
“It’s the bomb diggity,” said Veenie. “Wish I could get RJ here to dress her hair up a bit.”
Hayley glanced at me, but didn’t say anything. I could tell by the look in her eyes that she was thinking something like “who the heck are these crazy old ladies?”
Ma inspected the sign that Hayley had presented to her. It was for the chicken dance contest and was pretty impressive. A line of cartoon chickens danced across the sign, their wings fluffed out and fluttering. One of them wore blue bibbed overalls like Hayley and the other wore hot pants and a halter. “Just Winging It,” a banner read above the chickens.
“You paint that?” I asked.
Hayley nodded.
“First time I ever saw a chicken in hot pants. You an artist?” Veenie asked Hayley.
She shrugged. “Guess so.”
Ma said, “Don’t be so modest, honey. She’s talented. Real talented. She’s gonna do some paintings for the henhouses while she’s here. Cheer up the chickens. They’re a little down since Ginger and Dewey vanished. They were the ringleaders. Ginger was the boss chicken. Big squawker. The other hens looked to her and Dewey for guidance. They’ve been besides themselves since Ginger and Dewey vanished. Most of them have stopped laying.”
Ignoring us, Hayley took her sign and returned to an old blanket she had laid on the grass. She began spray-painting a white background on another large piece of plywood.
“Good kid,” Ma whispered. “Showed up here a couple of days ago. Think she’s a runaway. Been staying with us. Peepaw made her a bed out in the barn.”
Veenie asked, “What you reckon she’s running from?”
“Hard telling,” said Ma. “A bad home? Youngins don’t usually run away unless things are awful bad at home. She made it all the way down here by herself, a couple of hundred miles. Claims she hitched down 65, then came over on 50 from Seymour. Something must have spooked her, got her running.”
Peepaw said he didn’t want to rush anybody but he had to get up on the barn roof and finish repairs before sunset. “Wicked storm moving in tomorrow. Want to get that roof hammered down before it blows away.”
We all took that as a sign that we should hustle over to the edge of the hayfield where Ginger and Dewey had disappeared.
Ma led the way. Just inside the trees she pointed out where they’d found the feathers. The patch of weeds was high and ran along the rutted tractor path which led from the barn to the back forty where Ma and Pa kept a few cows, a herd of Tennessee fainting goats, and a large kitchen garden.
Veenie got down on her knees and ran her hands through the tall weeds. The grass was so high she would have disappeared if her poncho and pants hadn’t been so bright and loud. As it was, she looked like a bumblebee rolling around in the golden rod. “Nothing here,” she wheezed as she popped up in the weeds alongside the tractor ruts.
I asked if the tractor road led to another main road. I was thinking maybe someone drove in and snatched Ginger and Dewey, then spun out on a quick getaway.
Ma said no, that the tractor road just petered out once it hit a creek bed about a half mile in.
I eyed the tractor road, which led back to the barn, and then connected to the main driveway. “But somebody could have driven back here, then drove straight out again, right?”
“Oh, sure, but we didn’t hear no one.”
I studied Ma’s hearing aids. “You wear those at night?”
“Nah,” she said. “I take them off after watching the evening news most nights.”
I asked if she and Peepaw had come up with any suspects who might want to sabotage the Chickenlandia Festival other than Hiram Krupsky and Pam Perkins.
She shook her head.
“Nothing here,” Veenie squeaked again. “Maybe Ginger and Dewey got raptured,” she suggested with a shrug.
“God doesn’t take chickens.”
“How you know that for sure?”
I was puzzling over that question as we headed back to the farmhouse. I still hadn’t come up with an answer when a white stretch limo pickup truck pulled into the barnyard and someone laid on the horn, which sounded like a rooster crowing. It wasn’t hard to tell who was crowing at us. A giant red rooster statue, big enough that Veenie could have ridden it, perched on the roof of the stretch cab. The rooster sported a crown. A sign, styled like a sash draped around the rooster’s breast, read, “H
iram Krupsky: Hoosier Chicken Wing King.”
I heard Ma groan under her breath as she threw up one hand and waved reluctantly toward the stretch limo.
Chapter Six
Hiram Krupsky popped out of the stretch cab of the Caddie pickup and waved at us with both hands like we were long lost relatives. He was short, barely over five feet, but that didn’t stop him from moving fast. He wore high-heeled, white cowboy boots and a baby-blue leisure suit with wide bell bottom pants. His silver hair was buzzed in a flattop accented by faded lamb-chop sideburns that nobody but him had sported since the Korean War. He carried a white ten-gallon hat in his hands and mashed it to his head before marching toward us.
Hiram strutted like a man on a mission. But what really caught my eye, and Veenie’s too, was the driver who popped out of the limo and trailed half-heartedly, with a slight limp, after Hiram. He was wearing a limo driver’s gold-braided black cap set far back on his head with a faded Levi’s jacket and a plaid shirt. His dense, wavy, black-and-white hair, dressed with Brylcreem, rippled backward like a waterfall. He looked a good bit like Sam Elliott, if Elliott had spent the last fifty years chewing tobacco and wallowing in a tub of Jim Beam. His face was lined and cracked from hard living, and he was as thin and flat as a pull of taffy. A bushy black-and-white mustache wiggled around his lip. As soon as the limo driver stepped out of the pickup, he plucked a cigarette out of his jacket pocket and fired up.
“Isn’t that Fergus Goens Senior?” I whispered to Veenie. Fergus was her ex.
Veenie made a sucking sound with her dentures. “Well, I’ll be. Looks like he finally got himself a job. Sits on his butt in a limo all day. Figures.”
Pumping all our hands so hard I heard wrists popping, Hiram bellowed out that he was at Chickenlandia on business. Ma suggested we go up to the farmhouse to chat for a spell while Peepaw finished his barn chores.
Chickenlandia Mystery Page 4
