Chickenlandia Mystery

by Daisy Pettles

The kitchen wall clock told me it was midafternoon. I decided I had time to look up some computer items on Hiram, Pam, and Gertie—financials, credit history, arrest records, and so on—see if they had any secrets that might give us a clue to follow in untangling all the mysteries. I whipped out my iPad and asked Hayley if she was good with computers.

  “Sure,” she said. “I help my mom on her cases. Just tell me what you need to know.”

  I gave her the web addresses and passwords for several databanks Harry had a subscription to. I also gave her a list of vital information on all three clients so she could dig out as much dirt as possible.

  Hayley hunched over the iPad and started punching and typing like she knew her way around the web. No lip. No sass. Just like that, she went to work. Blew me away. Working with Veenie was like trying to put socks on a rooster. She was always squawking and clawing and pecking at me and all the suspects. I was thinking Hayley might be the best thing that had happened to me. Probably make my job a whole lot easier. I didn’t get too far in that thought when the back door swung open and Veenie hopped into the kitchen.

  “What in the Sam Hill—” I started.

  Veenie grabbed a chicken wing and plopped down in a chair next to me. “Your boyfriend sprung me.”

  “Hiram paid your bail?”

  “Yep. I dunno what you did to that old man, but whatever it was, keep doing it. He seems right appreciative.” Veenie stuck a napkin in the top of her shirt and dug into another chicken wing. She popped the top on Hayley’s Mountain Dew then turned to face Hayley. “Sorry. Was you drinking this?”

  “No. That stuff rots your teeth.”

  Veenie stuck out her dentures. “Lucky me. I got store-bought teeth. Nothing rots these babies.”

  Hayley looked a little horrified. I could tell she was relieved when Veenie pushed her teeth back in.

  Veenie asked Hayley, “Why you here?”

  I answered. “Harry hired her. Temp.”

  “Why?”

  “We thought you’d be in jail for a piece. I needed some help on our cases.”

  Veenie eyed Hayley. “Harry paying you?”

  She nodded. “Intern. A hundred bucks for the week.”

  “You’re getting snookered,” Veenie snorted. “Me and RJ get minimum wage.”

  “I’m an intern,” Hayley repeated.

  “That what they call it nowadays? Back in my day they called women who worked for nothing wives.”

  That seemed to hurt Hayley’s feelings. Her face drooped. She went into mope mode, just like Harry.

  “Don’t pay Veenie no mind. She spits out whatever floats to the top of her head.” Poor kid was going to have to toughen up or else life was going to sink its fangs into her neck and not let go until she was drained dry. My son, Eddie, an artist, a rock musician, and a song writer, was so darned sensitive that life bounced his heart around like it was a dime-store basketball.

  I asked Veenie how the bail hearing went.

  “Okay, I reckon. Good thing too. With my complexion, I look plumb awful in orange.”

  “I don’t understand. The judge let you go? Merry Lumpy got you off?”

  “Merry didn’t do much of anything. She came to court one wheel down and an axle dragging. She was pretty corned. I think she has a drinking problem. I know she has a problem with her hair. You seen her lately? She looks like a wilted pot of marigolds. Tinky Sue needs to get a comb in that nest and do something about that color job.”

  “Merry colors her own hair.”

  “A body can tell.”

  “But she must have given you a good defense. You’re free.”

  Veenie drained her Mountain Dew and slid over to the refrigerator to get another. She popped the top. “I think I annoyed the judge. He seemed mighty eager to get rid of me.”

  That I could imagine. “How much was bail?”

  “Ten thousand.”

  I couldn’t imagine having that much money sitting around unused. I guess the rumors about Hiram sitting on top of a pot of gold were true. “Judge Slaughter let you go?”

  Veenie leaned on a kitchen chair and stuck her chubby little leg up on the tabletop, heel down. She was wearing capris, so I could see her ankle. “Judge said the county jail was crowded. Drug freaks. He gave me an ankle bracelet. I can’t leave the county or go past twenty-five miles. Trial ain’t for two weeks.”

  The ankle bracelet wasn’t pretty, but I knew that they worked. Half of Pawpaw County was running around with the very same ankle bling. Knowing Veenie, I was pretty confident she’d figure out a way to accessorize around it.

  “You ready to go back to work?” I asked Veenie. She was draining her second can of Mountain Dew and about to answer when Hayley broke in. “I got something here I think you two ought to see.” And her face looked dead serious.

  Chapter Eighteen

  We crowded around the iPad. Hayley had pulled up Gertie’s credit card history. Gertie had posted a charge the day before at the Buddha general store and Marathon station. Buddha—pronounced "boo-dee"—was a tiny town on the Tunnelton Road headed toward Bedford. It was an old, odd, little town where people sat on their porches and argued about the origin of the town’s name.

  Oldsters called it “boo-dee,” supposedly after an English family that had settled the town. Millennials had taken to calling it “Buddha,” like the spiritual leader. They claimed it was a scared place. Millennials were like that. Everything and everybody had to be awesome. Nothing could be plain or ordinary. “Boo-dee” sounded too hick for the hipsters, I reckoned.

  Like most towns in the area, Buddha sat on top of a series of limestone sinkholes and a network of underground caves and waterways that wound around for miles. Folks called the underground network of rivers and caves the Lost River. All sorts of things had been pulled out of those caves and sinkholes, most notably four of crazy old Mrs. Henderson’s ex-husbands. Turned out she’d been knocking them in the head and storing them in the caves for a couple of decades.

  Hayley spoke. “You said Gertie’s been missing for more than a week.”

  “That’s right,” I said. The kid was a quick study. “Tater, her husband, thought she might have gone to visit her sister in Tunnelton. But Veenie and I went there and couldn’t find any trace of the sisters.”

  Hayley opened a Google Maps page tab on the iPad. “It’s only like five miles from Tunnelton to Buddha. She have any reason to be in Buddha?”

  I thought about that. “Well, they don’t take credit cards at the Tunnelton store. Maybe she stopped at Buddha to get gas or supplies.”

  Veenie eyed the map. “If she was staying with her sister in Tunnelton, it’d make sense that if they didn’t have cash she’d drive on over to Buddha to fetch supplies.”

  Hayley shook her head. “Somebody else could have stolen and used her credit card.”

  I poked around on the screen, but the database only told me where and when the credit card was used. It didn’t tell me what was bought. The charge wasn’t much, less than twelve dollars with an uneven amount of cents tagged on the end. Looked to me like a gas purchase.

  Veenie said, “Gertie’s either fine and dandy and hunkered down hiding at her sister’s or else someone’s running around pretending to be her.”

  “I dunno,” I said. “If I stole a credit card I’d be living high on the hog. Buying expensive things.”

  Veenie nodded in agreement. “I’d not be hanging in the mud caves of Buddha neither. I’d be on a plane to Toledo, someplace fancy like that.”

  Hayley stared at Veenie like she was half crazy.

  I thought Veenie’s reasoning was solid, even if her idea of the best getaway spot was a bit odd.

  Hayley pulled a cell phone out of her pocket and punched in some numbers.

  “Who you calling?” Veenie asked.

  By then the phone had rung and been answered. Hayley set the phone on end, put it on speaker, and said, “Gertie?”

  “Yes,” the voice crackled, sounding annoyed and
speaking too loudly. “Who is this? What do you want? Who is this? If you’re a telemarketer you best be hanging up before I sic the law on you.”

  “Wait!” Hayley cried. “There are some people here who want to talk to you.”

  “Is it my husband? Because I’m not talking to him. Tell him he’s dog poo to me. Big steaming pile of dog poo. I ain’t talking to that old man. He was eating up all my chicken inventory. I told him to stop, but, oh no, he couldn’t be bothered.”

  “Wait!” Veenie screeched. “It’s us, Gertie, Veenie Goens and Ruby Jane Waskom. Tater said you was missing. He hired us to find you.”

  “I ain’t missing,” she shouted back. “I know where I am.”

  Oh boy. “Where are you, Gertie?” I asked.

  “Who is this and why you being so nosy?” Gertie asked.

  “It’s Ruby Jane. Ruby Jane Waskom.”

  “You hunting me down for that pesky Pam Perkins? Ol’ Cheaty Pants was following me everywhere. Tell her I saw her sneaking into the test tastings down at the VFW. Tell her that black stocking cap she shoved her tower of hair under didn’t fool me none. She ain’t getting my secret recipe. Tell that Pam to stop pestering me. You’re working for ol’ Cheaty Pants, ain’t you?”

  I thought Veenie had answered that question, but maybe the cell reception was bad on Gertie’s end. If she was in Tunnelton, the knobs might have been blocking her phone reception. I took another run at the situation. “Pam didn’t hire us. Your husband, Tater, he hired us to find you. He’s worried sick about you.”

  “Tater?” she screeched. “The one I’m married to? I left him a note stuck to the side of the refrigerator, under the Last Supper magnet, the one where Jesus’s eyes look to be following you wherever you go. Told him I was leaving for a piece to get some work done on my recipe. Old man was eating up all my chicken inventory. I don’t want to talk him. He’s dog poo poo.”

  Before I could come up with a response, the phone went dead.

  Veenie stared at me. “Well, she’s not dead. That had to be her. No one could fake being that addled or that ornery.”

  Hayley asked if we wanted her to dial Gertie again.

  “Sure. Give it a whirl,” I said.

  Hayley punched in the number and the phone rang, but no one answered, not even a voice mail system. After a minute of listening to phone static, I motioned for Hayley to hang up, which she did.

  Veenie shrugged. “Well, at least we can tell Tater that Gertie ain’t dead.”

  I pondered that. “She didn’t sound like she wanted to talk, not to anyone.” I turned to Veenie. “She sound to you like she wanted to be found?”

  Veenie shrugged. “She sounded like she was fine and dandy with never seeing ol’ Tater again. She’s holed up at her sister’s place hoping to make him sweat it out, come begging, I reckon.”

  “You think it’s a domestic dispute?” I asked. Veenie watched all those Real Housewife TV shows. She was more up-to-date than me on how married couples came at each other these days.

  Hayley, who was back at the iPad searching for data, looked up. She put a finger to the bridge of her black-framed glasses and pushed them up. “Gertie didn’t sound like she cared for her husband all that much. She called him dog poo.”

  Veenie lifted a shoulder. “That’s just how people get after they’ve been married a piece.”

  Hayley stared at me with a horrified look that said she hoped that wasn’t true.

  I told Hayley that marriage could be trying. “You don’t always know what you’re signing up for. It takes a while to learn about your spouse and then, well, sometimes you learn things you’d rather not know.”

  Hayley scrunched up her face and ran the heel of one hand over her skunk stripe. “They should see a marriage counselor. Talk it out.”

  Veenie snorted. “That what you think? Heck, child, everybody is odd in one way or another. Why pay somebody to yak about it? That’s what bars are for. You go in, hop up on a stool, order a cold one, get everything off your chest while knocking back a few. It’s cheaper than therapy, plus you get a good buzz going.”

  Hayley looked puzzled. I reckoned that wasn’t her idea of how a marriage ought to work. It hadn’t been mine at her age, either. I figured she needed a husband, a pile of bills, a couple of kids, and another decade of belly fat on her before she’d start to understand married people. Some things you just can’t learn in books.

  Veenie asked Hayley if she’d ever been married.

  “No,” she said, making a face like I’d just ask her to smell a string of dead fish. “And I don’t plan on it, either. All my mom does all day is calm hysterical women. I’m gender-fluid, nonbinary, myself,” Hayley said, nodding her chin.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Veenie jumped in. “It means she could fall in love with most anything. It don’t have to be a man. It could be a woman, or a ketchup bottle.”

  I eyed Hayley, who was shaking her head in the affirmative. “Unless you want kids or have some type of religious hang-up, there isn’t any reason a couple has to be a man and a woman these days. I mean, you can buy sperm, and you can hire a woman to have a baby for you. Nobody my age wants to do it the old-fashioned way. You can get diseases, yucky stuff like that.”

  “What?” I said. That first part—the part about buying sperm and renting a womb was sure enough true—but that last part, the part that there weren’t two distinct sexes, just gave me a headache. Some days I couldn’t get it together in the morning to find my trifocals. I wasn’t up to any special surprises in the pants-shucking department. I reckoned that was how my grandparents felt about things like women wearing pants suits and men wearing their hair as long and sassy as Godiva back in the sixties. Every decade life grew more confusing. No wonder half the county was popping happy pills or knocking back PBR like it was Vacation Bible School Kool-Aid.

  Veenie, who prided herself on keeping up with clothing styles and love trends, nodded toward Hayley in an understanding manner. “Love is messy. It don’t matter who or what you take up with.”

  Hayley added, “You know, I thought you two were an item.”

  “Us?” I squeaked.

  “You live together … and, well … Harry told me you two had a special relationship.”

  Veenie took that comment in stride. “Oh, shucks, RJ and me have known each other all our lives. I reckon we do a lot of couples stuff, like arguing, and fighting, and sharing a house and a car, but we don’t kiss on each other, nothing romantic like that.”

  I eyed Veenie, tried to imagine us being married. She must have read my mind because she stuck her dentures out at me, and then we both cackled.

  Nope, it was never going to happen.

  As if on cue, the glass in the back door rattled, and Dickie Freeman, Veenie’s main man, burst through the door with a load of clothes in his arms. A pair of chicken feet house slippers attached to white leggings were draped over one arm. On top of that was what looked to be red, feather-ruffled underpants, knee-length bloomer style. Dickie looked all set to play the rooster to Veenie’s hen in the Chickenlandia dance off.

  “Howdy, gals!” said Dickie as he plopped down in a chair at the kitchen table. He was wearing a Pacer’s baseball cap, which he tossed onto the table. He didn’t have any hair on top of his head but still had little tufts of reddish hair tinged gray nested above each ear. He was a trim, athletic guy who’d retired from his job as a mechanic at the Lube It Up Auto Shop. He came out of retirement from time to time to keep the Impala purring like a turquoise pussycat. He and Veenie had a good thing going, the kind of thing you didn’t mess up at our age by getting married and trying to merge families or bank accounts.

  Veenie slid over and gave Dickie a peck on the cheek. “Hey, honeybuns.”

  Dickie laid a lip kiss on Veenie. “Mighty happy you got sprung from jail. I was afraid we’d miss the big chicken dance competition.”

  Veenie laid another smooch on Dickie’s cheek.

  Hayley looked
shocked, like she’d never seen oldsters making out before.

  Dickie draped his rooster costume over the back of a kitchen chair. “I brought my outfit, sweet pea. Thought we’d practice a bit.” He patted the bottom of the red, feather-ruffled underpants.

  “They”—I glanced at Hayley, and then Veenie and Dickie—“are an item.”

  “I can tell,” Hayley murmured.

  Dickie stuck out his hand and offered it to Hayley. “I’m Dickie,” he said. “Dickie Freeman. Don’t think we’ve met before. You from around these parts?”

  Hayley shook Dickie’s hand and gave him a bit of her backstory by way of an introduction.

  They were chatting about South Bend and the criminal cases we were working on when my cell phone started jumping. It was a text from Hiram. No hieroglyphics, just words. I was mighty impressed that all the words were spelled out. No “u bizzy??” or other such nonsense. He told me he was making us dinner and that his limo would be by to pick me up at five. He asked if that was okay with me.

  “Sure,” I typed back. “Want me to bring anything?”

  “Veenie out of jail?” he texted.

  “Yes, thanks to you.”

  “Okeydokey, bring her along,” he responded. “Got some news on Pam. The case.”

  “OK,” I thumbed back.

  Veenie peered over my shoulder, trying to see the phone screen. “That your new boyfriend?”

  My face reddened.

  Dickie said, “If that’s Boots, ask him if I have to buy a new license to pick up all them fish that washed up in on the floodwaters and got stuck in the plow ruts in the Sparksville bottoms.”

  “It’s not Boots,” I said.

  Dickie looked confused.

  Veenie clarified. “It’s Hiram. Hiram Krupsky. Ruby Jane has been working him for some free chicken wings.”

  “I am not working him,” I protested. “We’re on this case for him, and I said I might go out with him. Get to know him better. What kind of a town is this? Isn’t a grown woman allowed to make new friends?”

  “Hiram Krupsky?” Dickie scratched his head. “Ain’t he a little old for you? Plus he’s a bit of a rascal. And what about Boots? Boots know about this? I bet Boots don’t know about this.”