Everybody ate at the Pancake Palace. Sunday morning after church, if you were a Baptist. Wednesday nights after Bible study, if you were a Lutheran. Just about any time if you were drunk or down in the dumps. Pancakes cheered everybody up.
“The Pancake Palace never closes,” I said. “People go there all hours for the biscuits and gravy and the comfort food.”
I eyed the photo of the Skaggs kids. It appeared Barbara Skaggs’s womb might have been on the same 24/7/365 schedule as the Pancake Palace. It wasn’t inconceivable that Doc Apple had enjoyed more than biscuits and gravy in his late-night quests for consolation. I reckoned anyone married to Avonelle might have needed a good bit of consoling over the years.
“Got a photo of Barbara?” Veenie asked.
I hit the print button. A photo slipped out of the printer. We studied the photo together.
Barbara wore square gunmetal glasses and squinted into the camera. Her forehead was creased in three places. Her hair was dark and dyed, with a wild flip above each ear. Her throat was long and skinny. It might also be described as scaly. She was wearing plastic daisy earrings, clip-ons from the looks of them. In the photo, she was wearing a flowered blouse with a rounded lace collar and a cardigan. She looked nothing like a Jezebel and more like a runaway Pentecost in need of a fashion intervention.
“Maybe she can cook?” suggested Veenie.
I shrugged. Not much of life looked like it did on TV. People loved to be big fish in small ponds. Knobby Waters was so small it was more like a mud puddle. It was not a town chock-full of beauty queens. Most people were pretty plain. Doc Apple had been more Don Knotts than Burt Reynolds. Still, I had no trouble seeing Barbara Skaggs and Will Apple lip-locked in a wanton embrace.
I glanced at my Timex. It was after five on Friday. Quitting time. I bundled up the paperwork on Barbara and stuck it in a file folder. I stuck the folder under my armpit, turned out the lights, and locked up.
Veenie and I ambled down the sidewalk to the Road Kill Café to see what was on the specials board for supper. Fridays, we always treated ourselves to a meal out. Halfway there I stopped thinking about Doc Apple and his biscuits and gravy ta-ta girl and began to wonder if the café would have any of Ma Horton’s coconut cream pie. I hoped so, because I was planning on eating two pieces. All that talk about wanton sex had made me extra hungry.
Chapter Three
Saturday morning, assuming Barbara Skaggs would be home, we gassed up the ’60 Impala and hot-footed it toward Hound Holler. The holler was a twenty-minute drive up the knobs, then down a gravel road that dropped deep into a butt-like crevice between two knobby hills.
In Knobby Waters, there were two kinds of people: town people or holler people. Everyone knew which they were, which they aspired to be, and which they hoped to God never to become. Barbara Skaggs was not among the fortunate. She lived smack on Hound Holler Road. One look at her rented house and you knew she’d given up all hope, along with a good bit of her self-respect, about a decade ago.
The plan was to stake out Barbara’s place, see if anything untoward might be going on that would lead her to engage in unscrupulous acts to earn a little egg money on the side. Barbara lived in To Jo Scott’s old farmhouse, which had been nice enough back in the day, meaning the Depression. These days, the house looked more like something out of Mother Goose. The roof was a mossy carpet. Foot-tall maple saplings sprouted from the gutters. The front porch, which was missing most of its spindle posts, sagged in a toothless grin. A sway-backed barn struggled to remain erect in the backyard. A scarecrow made of moldy corn stalks, wearing a tattered, brown-felt hat and a large overall jacket with patches, stood watch over rows of corn stubble and what may have once been tomato vines.
I had a pair of binoculars resting on the bridge of my nose. My glasses were off, laid on the seat of the Impala between me and Veenie. A family-sized bag of pork rinds we’d picked up at the Go Go Gas rested on the seat between us. It was almost noon. We were on stakeout behind a tall stand of weeds in a tractor pull-off on the soft shoulder of Hound Holler creek. We were just across from Barbara Skaggs’s place.
Barbara’s oldest boy, the one with the pitcher ears, was playing with a rusty dump truck along a line of mud puddles in the front yard. He was chasing a rooster back and forth. The rooster, all wings, was squawking, occasionally trying to peck the dump truck to death. Every now and then, another boy, dressed only in ragged denim shorts, the nipples of his bare chest blue as raisins, would burst around the corner of the house trying to lasso a chicken. He was wearing a red cowboy hat and shooting a cap gun.
Veenie asked, “You gonna eat them pork rinds?”
“Nah. Have at ’em.”
For the next ten minutes, while I watched the boys trying to lasso chickens, Veenie crunched pig skin. Stakeouts had never been portrayed like this back when I was watching Magnum, PI. I tried to shut my ears as Veenie crunched pig skins, then washed it all down with a quart of chocolate milk. She topped off the skins with a fistful of fruit-flavored Tums. Why that woman suffered from perpetual heartburn was no mystery to me.
It was a May day and had rained all night. It was getting steamy in the Impala. I punched out the wing on the window to let more air circulate and motioned for Veenie to do the same.
Veenie had been fidgety all morning. She wore stretch capri pants. It was approaching noon, and the white leather and plastic seats on the Impala were heating up. Her plump little calves were sticking to the seats. She licked the last of the pork rind salt from her fingertips and belched.
I said, “Dr. Duhaney,” that was Veenie’s cardiologist, “wouldn’t approve of you eating all that salt and fat.”
“Dr. Doohickey can go suck an egg.”
Veenie made a show of fanning herself with a fluorescent sales circular for chicken parts from the Hoosier Feedbag. She was growing impatient. “Let’s bust on in.”
I drew the binoculars away from my eyes and slipped on my glasses. “You want to do the questioning?”
“Nah. I want to be the muscle.”
We never carried firearms—left that to Harry, who ran the collections department—but Veenie’s BB pistol was in the glove compartment. The toy pistol looked real. It was the expensive model, with a solid wood handle and brass trimming. It shot BB pellets. Men tended to wet themselves when they saw two nearsighted old ladies packing a piece. The criminals we dealt with were the world’s biggest pantywaists. Most of them surrendered as soon as Veenie waved the pistol. They fell to their knees and blubbered like babies. Veenie enjoyed cuffing them. The Shades Agency used those new-fanged, plastic twist-tie cuffs. Bringing a perp down was a lot like bagging the kitchen trash: very satisfying to any woman who’d wasted her youth as a frustrated housewife.
Bored with waiting, we scrambled out of the Impala and walked across the muddy road to the farmhouse. The oldest boy stared us down. “You Holy Rollers?”
I tried to look sweet, harmless. “We’re looking for your Mama, Barbara Skaggs? She home?”
The boy hiked up his shorts and circled me, then Veenie. He brushed a flap of dirty blond hair out of his eyes. His ears were big enough to catch and hold rainwater. “You bill collectors?”
Veenie eyed the boy. “We look like bill collectors?”
The boy wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “Nah, you look like old ladies.”
They were standing at the porch now. The boy asked Veenie, “That a real gun?”
“Sure.” She pointed the pistol right at his head.
The boy screamed, “Mama!” and ran into the house. The torn screen door banged after him.
A squinting woman wearing gunmetal glasses appeared in the doorway. A child appeared in the doorway next to her. It was the girl with the big ears. She clung to the balloon legs of her mother’s baggy shorts. One watery blue eye peeked out trying to get a good look at us without exposing herself.
“Don’t want any,” Barbara said.
I slid my big foot into the doorway. �
�Mrs. William Apple sent us.”
Barbara opened the door wide and stepped back. She bent and picked up the little girl, lifting her up until she could ride down on her hip. “Well, come on in, then. Been expecting someone.”
Once we were inside, Barbara seemed welcoming, not at all unreasonable. “I want what’s due the children. Child support, you know,” she explained.
I nodded sympathetically. “You have proof? Mrs. Apple would need proof before money could change hands.”
Barbara pressed her knuckles to her lips and mulled over the question. “What would I need?”
“DNA. Tests cost a hundred dollars each. You’d have to deposit that with us.”
Barbara looked at her two younger children. They were tumbling over each other like dung beetles on the braided rug in front of the TV. The TV was on, but Barbara had clicked down the sound when we took our seats in the living room.
“Can’t we just test one of them? Assume the others would be the same? I work at the Pancake Palace. Don’t make a heap of money. I mean, if I had money to throw around, I wouldn’t be writing to Mrs. Apple now, would I? But William up and died. He used to give me an allowance. And that was fine. But now Billy Junior there,” she pointed to the oldest boy, “needs braces. William’s cousin was supposed to take care of that. Wasn’t supposed to cost me a dime. Show the nice ladies, Billy.”
Billy Junior pulled back his gums, revealing a gap between his two front teeth. It was identical to the gap Avonelle’s boys had sported at about the same age before their cousin the orthodontist had intervened.
I considered the options. “Maybe we could test the oldest boy. Make a good faith gesture. You could save up. Do the others one at a time.”
“You mean like layaway?” The creases eased in Barbara’s forehead. “I don’t mean her no harm.” She bit her lip. She gathered the collar of her cardigan closer to her throat. “I knew William was married, but he seemed sweet. And he was lonely. Guess I was too.”
I could tell Barbara wanted to talk about it, but I didn’t want to hear the Jerry Springer version of the whole sordid affair. Every time people talked about sex, I got hungry. My butt couldn’t afford the extra pounds.
Veenie came to my rescue. “I can run out. Get a spit kit from the Chevy.”
“Won’t take but a minute,” I promised. “If Billy Junior would oblige us, we could be on our way. Takes a week to get the test back. We could discuss confidential payment possibilities and arrangements with Avonelle in the meantime.”
Barbara stood and smoothed the front of her shorts. She eyed Billy Junior, who was rolling around on the rug on his back with all fours in the air panting like a dying dog. “All he has to do is spit? No written tests?”
“Yep, just spit in a tube.”
“Well, I reckon he can do that all right.”
Veenie was out the door. But almost as soon as the front screen door slammed, she was screeching at me. “Ruby Jane? Uh, can you come out here for a second. We got us a little, uh, problem.”
I ambled toward the door and peered out onto the porch. A man was slumped in the metal porch glider. He was wearing the tattered brown hat and denim overcoat that the barn scarecrow had been wearing when we had first arrived. At first I thought someone had dragged the scarecrow onto the porch. But on closer inspection, I could see that it wasn’t a scarecrow but one of Avonelle’s sons, one of the Apple twins, Bert or Bromley, I couldn’t tell which. They weren’t identical twins, but they were close.
His mouth was open. He could have been snoring. But from the cool white of his face—it looked like a peeled egg—and the way his body slumped, not a tense muscle in him, I could tell he was toast. A speckled chicken was perched on the glider rest next to him, pecking at his lifeless hand.
I looked at Veenie.
She shrugged. “Don’t look at me. He wasn’t sitting there when we went in.”
Barbara stepped out on the porch and stood next to Veenie. She looked a little green, like a thinly sliced zucchini. She hugged herself. “I don’t know a darn thing about that,” she said, sounding defensive.
END BOOK 2 EXCERPT
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to all the great friends who read drafts of the Ghost Busting Mystery and provided invaluable feedback that helped me create the world of Knobby Waters and its quirky characters.
A special shout-out goes to my Jackson and Lawrence County Hoosier Facebook friends, whose stories and daily postings helped spark the creation of this series.
This book would not have been possible without my mother, Reva June Phillips, of Bedford, Indiana, who fed me books of every kind from as far back as I can remember, and her mother, Anabelle England, of Brownstown, Indiana, who did the same. I was born into a house of books and read to until my ears burned and my imagination soared. Lucky me. Growing up in a small town in southern Indiana, I had the great good fortune of attending a tiny school where everybody knew my name and where the rules of the English language were taken seriously and instilled in all students whether we cared to learn them or not. (Thank you, Wilma Scharbrough).
I have to thank the Burlington Writer’s Workshop (BWW). Vermont is my adopted home state, and the folks at the BWW were very generous in sharing their ideas for improving this book. I am especially grateful to Diane Donovan, Robin Zabiegalski, and Laney Webber for their suggestions for improving the work overall. This series was inspired by the swapping of porch stories between me and my great friend, Linda Beal, one summer when I was in horrible, desperate need of a laugh or two. Linda helped me tap into long-lost memories of Kentuckiana and its good-hearted people. Way to go Sneeter. I can never thank you enough.
The town of Knobby Waters is not a real place, nor is there a Pawpaw County anywhere in the great state of Indiana. I did, however, grow up in Medora, Indiana, a tiny river town in Jackson County. Those who live around Jackson, Washington, Lawrence, Pike, and Orange County, Indiana may recognize in these books a host of half-forgotten, tiny towns, many of which still pepper the hilly (some say knobby) landscape in the southern part of the state.
Southern Indiana is, in many ways, more a part of the South than the North. The southern Indiana dialect, known as the South Midland Dialect, infuses the speech of this region with a peculiar drawl, and that drawl along with the dropping and stretching of many vowels, colors the speech of the farmers and families who populate this area. The aphorisms in this book are true to the region, many of them borrowed from conversations with my mother and my big sisters, Ginger East, of Bedford, Indiana, and Cathy Smith, of Medora, Indiana, and my little sister, Tammy McPike, of Greasy Creek, Indiana.
I have, from time to time, borrowed the surnames that surrounded me as a child in an effort to lend authenticity to the book, and as a playful way to bring back to life many of the small-town characters I knew growing up. I really did, for example, have an Uncle Dode, though he has long since passed and bore no resemblance to the character of the same name in this series. My great friends Melissa and Pete Horton of Mitchell, Indiana, who always make me laugh, really do raise chickens (They’d have a Chickenlandia, if they could.). They were kind enough to name a chicken after me. Unfortunately, she went too free with her range and was recently eaten by a mangy possum.
While I freely borrow Hoosier surnames, any similarities between real people and the characters of Knobby Waters are coincidental, not meant to capture the essence of any living person or family. Like most writers, I have sewn together tiny scraps of reality and fragments of a half-remembered childhood into a tent of tall tales whose sole purpose is to delight and entertain.
Pretty much everything in the Shady Hoosier Detective Agency Series is fanciful storytelling. May you enjoy reading these books as much as I enjoyed writing them, and
may you spend many a pleasant hour eating pie, fishing for catfish in Greasy Creek, and hanging out on porch swings with the zany citizens of Knobby Waters, Indiana.
Visit me online anytime at https://www.daisypettles.com.
Subscribe there to the Knobby Waters newsletter to receive free gifts, T-shirts, and advance notice of forthcoming books. I’ll be publishing the latest gossip from Knobby Waters and introducing you to new characters as they push their way into consciousness and print.
Keep in touch and. I promise I’ll do likewise.
About the Author
Daisy Pettles is the pen name of Vicky Phillips, born in Bedford, Indiana. She grew up in Medora, Indiana, where her parents ran the gas station and ice cream stand. She learned to read while sitting on her grandmother’s lap, under an apple tree in Brownstown, Indiana. As a child, she was fed a steady diet of books, pies, and Bible stories. Her favorite song was “I’ll Be a Sunbeam for Jesus.” Graduating Medora High School in 1977, she attended DePauw University, where she was graduated Phi Beta Kappa. A world traveler, she has lived in San Francisco, London, and Athens. She has raced camels in Egypt and eaten Kentucky Fried Chicken with Communists in Shanghai. She was a therapist before becoming an Internet entrepreneur, designing America’s first online university system in 1989. Her current home lays at the end of a dirt road in Vermont. For all her travels, her heart remains a Hoosier. She loves persimmon pudding and stories where good stomps all over evil. The Shady Hoosier Detective Series, a comic crime cozy set in the fictitious Knobby Waters, Indiana, is her debut mystery novel series.
Blog Website: https://www.daisypettles.com
Email: [email protected]
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