Chickenlandia Mystery

by Daisy Pettles

  Brenda and Hayley were being questioned by a second state trooper. She was a short woman with her blonde hair yanked back in a ponytail. She had a voice as deep as a well and was studying Brenda’s driver’s license, scanning the details into her tablet.

  Harry was the last to arrive at the party. He was backslapping the men, handling out business cards, soaking up all the glory on behalf of the agency. He wandered around the barn, his stubby tie loose, his shirt collar flapping open at the top. He looked like he was wilting in the humidity. His nose was running, hay allergy most likely. He never had adjusted to life in the country. Probably never would.

  Brenda spied Harry and tried to slide behind the state trooper.

  Harry strolled up, his eyes red. He squinted at Brenda. “Brenda?” he said, his voice hoarse either from the allergies or something else, maybe surprise. “Brenda Peters, is that you?”

  Harry darted around the trooper. He and Brenda went around in circles until the policewoman took hold of Brenda and stopped her in her tracks. “Ma’am,” the trooper bellowed, “please, you’re making me dizzy.”

  Harry chewed on the end of his mustache. “Brenda, what on earth are you doing here?”

  “Visiting,” Brenda said tersely. “It’s a public festival.”

  Harry narrowed his eyes. “A chicken festival. Last I saw you, you were a vegetarian.”

  Brenda fussed with her hair. “Still am.”

  “Well, we ought to get together. I’ll buy you a drink for old time’s sake.” A smile snaked across Harry’s lips. He lit up like he always did around the ladies. He tightened his tie.

  “I don’t think so,” Brenda said, her voice cold and brittle.

  “Aww, come on. We had some good times back in the day. Admit it. We were good together.”

  Little Hayley was standing to one side, mesmerized by the interaction between her parents. Her dark eyes slid back and forth between them. Harry noticed Hayley and threw an arm around her. “You met Hayley? She’s working for me. Intern. I have my own agency now.” He pushed out his chest and tightened his collar. “Doing all right for myself.”

  “Glad to hear that,” Brenda said.

  Harry sidled up to Brenda. “You’ve held up well. Say, can’t we just let bygones be bygones. Let’s just agree that what happened in South Bend a long time ago stays in South Bend. No hard feelings. Let’s have a drink or two to celebrate.”

  Veenie, who had been watching the interaction and keeping mum, chortled.

  Harry turned to stare at her. “What’s so funny?”

  Veenie’s eyes sparkled like blue fireflies behind her Coke bottle glasses. “Harry, somebody ought to tell you that what happened in South Bend didn’t stay in South Bend. Fact is, it’s standing right there beside you.”

  “Huh?” Harry turned to face Hayley.

  “Daddy?” Hayley squeaked out, her eyebrows raised.

  “What the—? You mean—?” Harry spun around to face Brenda. He looked a bit green around the gills.

  Brenda nodded.

  “But … you never told me.”

  “Frankly, I didn’t think it was any of your business.”

  “Well, I mean—” Harry sputtered. “Geez, kid,” he addressed Hayley. “I never knew. I mean, I’m sorry.”

  “We’re all sorry.” Brenda sighed.

  “Hey!” Harry tossed out.

  The woman trooper, who’d remained quiet through the exchange, busy logging in crime details on her tablet, glanced up at Brenda. “Ma’am, if you all are done with this heartfelt family reunion, I need a signature on this report.”

  Brenda took the tablet and swiped her signature across the bottom. “Can we go now?” she asked the trooper.

  In response, the woman holstered her tablet and motioned toward the barn door. “We’ll contact you if we need you for anything related to the crime.”

  Brenda took Hayley by the hand and they scooted toward the door, leaving Harry holding his hat and his manly pride in his hands.

  The barn was clearing out now. Hiram was one of the few people left. He’d told the troopers everything he knew and was cleared to go. He’d not committed any crimes except maybe the crime of keeping quiet too long trying to protect his son. Heck, I didn’t know a court in the state that would convict him for that.

  I felt bad about all the things I’d accused him of, but he should have trusted me, let me in on his secrets. I reckoned I’d lost all chance at a lifetime supply of free chicken wings, but then again, I could always save up my pennies, buy them by the case at Costco. I’d been supporting myself all my life. I reckoned I’d just keep a steady course, keep heading upstream, keep paddling my own canoe until I hit rapids big enough to spin me around and take me under, heart and all. Hiram Krupsky, Pawpaw County’s Chicken Wing King, had turned out to be just another little trickle along the way.

  Hiram looked a bit sheepish. “I’ll have Jay Bob get in touch, work with you on those new security features.”

  “Sorry the romantic thing didn’t take between us.”

  “Can’t blame a fellow for trying,” Hiram sighed. He looked sad but resolved. He plopped his cowboy hat on his head and strolled out of the barn, his high heels clicking. I imagined it wouldn’t be long before some lady hog-tied his old heart. He was quite a catch in a lot of ways, just not my type. All that fancy living and high-priced meat would have been wasted on me.

  I was headed out of the barn when Ma bustled in and gave me a big hug. She was cradling a small wire cage. Ginger and Dewey poked their heads out of the wire and gave me a few pecks hello. They looked happy, excited to be home again.

  “Thank you! Oh, thank you!” Ma cried, tears in her eyes. She stuck one of her hair braids, which were coming loose in the humidity, back behind her right ear.

  “Glad to be of help.”

  “We can’t afford to pay you,” Ma said, looking sheepish. “But I thought maybe you might be open to some free pies.”

  Veenie squealed. “Free pie for life!?!”

  Free pie for life? Lordie, I reckoned that might be worth dying over.

  Ma smiled at Veenie. “I was thinking free pie for the rest of the year.”

  “Heck,” Veenie chortled, flapping her wings, “at our age, that might be the better deal. We’ll take it.”

  We shook on the deal as Ginger and Dewey flew around the barn, and Ma got a sweep broom from the back and started setting things right again.

  Veenie and I strolled out of the barn into the early evening, where the crickets were already rubbing their legs together, singing a country tune. The air smelled fresh, heavy with hay, still warm and sweet from an ordinary day. It felt very much like summer was just about to wake up big time and smile widely across the river valley. I had my crazy best friend riding shotgun through life with me, free pie for the rest of the year, and a pair of tickets that would allow me and Veenie to walk straight into the chicken BBQ dinner tent and snort up all the fowl we could eat. (Boots had begged off on our chicken supper date claiming we’d created a mess of paperwork for him that he’d not have done until the Fourth of July.)

  I’d already learned from one of the troopers in the barn that Gertie had won the BBQ cook-off contest—again. She and Tater must have made up because I could see them sitting together at the awards table through the door slit in the BBQ tent as Veenie and I strolled up and handed our tickets to the checker at the gate.

  Gertie was bubbling with pride. She was signing autographs, passing on cooking tips to a crowd of chattering, envious ladies. Tater was perched on a folding chair next to her, quiet, his white hair slicked down with some crème. He was stuffed into a yellow polyester leisure suit way too small for him, which, if memory served me right, he’d owned since high school. His face was bright and shiny, raw and shaved clean. He was facing a plate piled high with chicken drumsticks, a tiny bit of BBQ sauce splashed on his right cheek. It was true and lasting love, Pawpaw County style.

  A free excerpt from Catfish Cooties: The Sh
ady Hoosier Detective Agency, Book 4.

  Chapter One

  We’d been bobbing in lazy circles on Greasy Creek all morning, slapping flies off our sweaty necks, but now the tide had turned.

  “Hellfire! Help me reel this sucker in before he flips me off!” Pappy Tuttle leaned back in his captain’s seat and jerked on his fishing pole. His watery brown eyes were as big as chestnuts. It was the annual Greasy Creek Catfish Tournament, and he’d hooked a big one. He’d gone darn near breathless, trying to reel it in.

  “Hold on just a cotton picking minute!” I yelled. I was in the back of Pappy’s boat, serving as ballast and navigator. I threw down a foam cushion, got on my knees, and poked my short paddle into the muddy creek bottom, hoping to steady the boat.

  Pappy was wild with excitement. He was strapped into the captain’s swivel seat but he was wiggling like a wooly worm, pitching his body, and the entire fishing boat, to and fro. The normally smooth water was boiling with bubbles and chocolaty swirls of mud. I had to duck to keep Pappy’s dancing fishing line from wrapping around my neck.

  Behind me I could hear other fisherman, several boats of them, whooping and hollering. It had been a slow day, and Pappy’s screaming had woke them up.

  “Land that monster, Pappy!” I heard someone yelp.

  “Hold on! We’re coming to help!” another boomed.

  Balls of sweat had popped out on Pappy’s forehead. He was wheezing and snorting like an old donkey. His sock cop had slid sideways on his head. His gray hair, what little of it he had left, was plastered to his forehead like wet rat tails. “Hellfire!” he yelled. “I think it’s a shark. Might be Jaws!”

  I grabbed my paddle and poked at Veenie, who was next to me. She was leaning back on a pile of orange life vests, a white plastic Hoosier Feedbag grocery sack pulled down over her head for shade, snoring.

  “What the tarnation!” she cried as I poked her. She startled awake, rubbed at her eyes. Her homemade hat slid off, revealing a topknot of sweaty, silky white hair. When she saw what a mess her daddy was in, she scrambled over to give him a hand.

  Together, Veenie and Pappy reeled the heavy catch toward the boat. I slipped on some cotton gloves and grabbed the line. Pappy’s catch was so heavy it threatened to snap the line. It took all three of us to flip the darn thing out of the water, into the belly of the boat.

  Splat! The catch, plastered in a glob of gluey black mud, was tangled in a wad of weeds and cattails. The mess slid to a stop at Pappy’s feet. It didn’t flip. It didn’t flop. It just lay there wrapped in weeds, looking like a trashy piece of river sushi.

  “Christ Almighty! Lord of Mercy!” Pappy yelped. “That’s the best fish I ever did catch. It’s got a foot, and everything.”

  I leaned down and scraped mud off the tangled mess. I studied the thing. “That’s no fish,” I said.

  Pappy smirked. “Damn right! More like a whale.”

  Pappy’s catch was four feet long. Well, maybe a foot long might be more accurate. His whopper of a catch wasn’t a fish at all. It was a foot. And part of a fibula. A human foot, wrapped in a Day-Glo orange running shoe, about a size eleven, from what I could see.

  “Uh-oh!” cried Veenie. She scrambled forward and used her pocket knife to cut away some of the weeds. “I think we got us a problem here.”

  “Why is that fish wearing a sneaker?” Pappy asked as he leaned forward and caught the line in one hand. Yanking on the line, he drew the catch closer to his face. His spine was bent, sending him so close I was afraid he might snort the rotten thing right up into his lungs.

  Pappy was ninety eight years old, the oldest contestant in the Pawpaw County competition. Normally he spent his days perched on the brick patio in a motorized power chair at Leisure Hills, the old folk’s home. But today was the annual catfish tournament. Veenie, his seventy-one-year-old daughter, and I, had sprung him for the event. Once we had him strapped down in the captain’s chair on the fishing boat he could cast with the best of them. He wasn’t sure what year it was, or what age he was, but he remembered every little thing there was to know about fishing.

  Another boat bumped up and scraped us on the starboard side. It was my older brother Basil Lee, and his wife, Nancy Jane. Basil was born with the voice of a radio announcer. He was a big bald guy, as short and round as a watermelon, with the same Elvis Presley sideburns he’d worn since high school. Words shot out of him like cannonballs. “Whaddaya got there, Sissy?” he hollered as he grabbed hold of the side of our boat.

  Basil wrapped a stretch of yellow nylon rope around his fist and used it to lash our boat securely to his skiff. He was wearing his lucky fishing hat, a droopy, brown, stained affair that had always put me in mind of a cow pie. Fishing lures dangled off the rim like Christmas decorations. His big blue eyes twinkled with excitement. His eyes grew even bigger when he saw what Pappy had hooked.

  “Hey!” shouted Nancy Jane, who was kneeling in the boat behind Basil. “You can’t cheat like that! That’s not a fish!” Nancy was wearing a straw hat with a yellow silk sash, black capri pants, and a t-shirt with a nylon fishing vest. Her vest pockets sagged with tubes of sun block, bug juice repellant, and moisturizers. Her eyes were shielded in yellow, moon-shaped sunglasses, huge ones, like the ones Jackie O used to wear.

  Basil grabbed hold of our boat and rocked us backward until he was sitting dead across from me and Pappy. “Got any idea who you hooked there, Pappy?” He yanked his hat off and fanned the gnats off his face. We’d drifted into a pool of shade near the shore, deep into a cloud of insects.

  Pappy didn’t answer. He was busy. He’d grabbed a red Solo cup from the beer chest and was dribbling and splashing water across his catch. He was mumbling to himself, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

  Basil shrugged and shot the question at me.

  “I got no idea.”

  Nancy’s drawn-on, blonde eyebrows, arched up. She leaned forward in the boat trying to get a better look at Pappy’s catch without knocking us all sideways. “That’s a foot, isn’t it?”

  “Course it’s a foot,” chided Basil.

  “Don’t start with me,” Nancy warned. The tip of her nose was sun-boiled. Nancy hated fishing, but she loved a good party and chin-wag. She’d tagged along with Basil to the tournament hoping to reel in the latest gossip. They lived over in Washington County, just outside Salem, so this was Nancy’s chance to load up on fresh gossip and tote it across county lines while it was still hot. I reckoned Pappy had just given her euchre club something juicy to gab about.

  I yelled over at Pappy, who was poking at the foot with his grab stick, still mumbling to himself. “Better leave that alone,” I advised. “Don’t wash away any evidence.”

  Pappy tossed his Solo cup aside. He fiddled with his sock cap before looking me in the eye. “Who are you, girlie, and why you yelling at me?” he snapped.

  Oh boy. Every now and then Pappy’s little mental choo choo chugged off its tracks. Like right then and there. No biggee. Veenie and I were used to that.

  Veenie crawled over and offered Pappy a beer, a frosty PBR, his favorite. “Drink this,” she ordered. “Your brain got boiled sitting in the sun too long. This will cool you right down. Get your blood sugar up a bit, too.”

  Pappy grabbed the sweaty can with both hands and poured it down his gullet like his belly was on fire. He belched and sat back in his chair looking fairly satisfied.

  By now a flotilla of boats was surging toward us. The churning water sent us rippling toward the shore. I heard the bottom of our boat scrape rock, then sand. I grabbed the paddle and tried to push us back out to the main current, into deeper water, but someone yelled. They called my name, shouting at me to bring the boat to shore.

  We weren’t that far from the dock. I could see the sand access lane barely a stone’s throw away. High green rows of corn blocked my view of what lay on the other side. A big man, dressed in a beige uniform, was standing on the shore, in front of the rows of corn, waving his arms in my
direction.

  Jesus, someone had called the law already. Probably some busy body contestant in one of the boats behind us.

  I watched as the big man on shore put a bullhorn to his mouth and blasted away. “This is the sheriff. Bring that body to shore. Bring it to shore. Bring it now! You hear me, Ruby Jane?”

  Uh-oh. I knew that voice, and that tall stout Santa Claus like body. It was Boots Gibson, the Pawpaw County sheriff. He had a mouth and an attitude on him that was fairly loud and bossy without the aid of a bullhorn. Still, he was the law, and Pappy had just reeled in something that looked like it might be connected to some fairly suspicious circumstances.

  Dagnabbit. It was Saturday and a lovely June day. I’d been hoping for a quiet day off from work, a peaceful day outdoors, capped off by a tasty fish fry under a blanket of stars. But, no, here Veenie and I were again, knee-deep—or should I say foot-deep—in somebody else’s messy kettle of fish.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake! Hold your horses! We’re coming!” I groused as I grabbed the paddle and pushed our boat reluctantly toward the sandy shore where a crowd was already growing.

  END BOOK 4 EXCERPT

  Don’t miss any of RJ and Veenie’s crime-cracking cases.

  Order your copy of Catfish Cooties, The Shady Hoosier Detective Agency: Book 4 at Daisy’s website today: https://www.daisypettles.com.

  If you missed Book 1: Ghost Busting Mystery or Book 2: Baby Daddy Mystery, download them today wherever ebooks are sold, or enjoy them as print paperbacks. Daisy’s books are available in the larger trade paperback size (5.5 x 8.5 inches) because itty-bitty paperbacks aren’t oldster friendly.