Southern Fried

by Tonya Kappes

  “Rae Lynn did make a mighty fine okra dish.” Poppa licked his chops and rubbed his hands together as he recalled Owen’s mama’s recipe.

  “Jolee questioned him about it too since she already makes that okra burger everyone loves.” Myrna nervously talked and talked. Her voice rose an octave. “Now Viola is the only thing standing between me and the prize.”

  “Viola White?” I asked, looking her over with a critical eye. I had a niggling suspicion she was keeping something from me.

  “Yes. Me, Owen, and Viola are Team Jolee.” Her face was stone-cold serious. “Now with Owen out of the way, I’m sure I can beat Viola.”

  I couldn’t help but think that if it did turn out Owen Godbey had been murdered, Myrna had just handed me a motive.

  Chapter Three

  “Evening, Sheriff.” Max Bogus walked by me and Myrna with his briefcase and his usual attire of khaki pants and a blue button-down shirt. “Myrna.”

  “It’s not a good evening, Max Bogus,” Myrna quipped. “Any time you find a dead body in your greenhouse is not a good time.”

  “Excuse me for a minute, Myrna.” I excused myself to follow Max into the greenhouse to give him the update, stopping when I felt Myrna hot on my heels. “You stay out here,” I instructed her, which made her none too happy.

  She opened her mouth to protest. I gave her the wonky eye. She closed her mouth and sucked in a deep breath.

  Max and I walked in. “Owen Godbey,” he noted, sticking the case on the counter next to a few glass vases.

  He opened his case and took out a clipboard and a pair of gloves before he bent down to take a look at the body. He made notes and took measurements and his own photos before retrieving the church cart. Finn held the door as Max wheeled Owen’s body out of the greenhouse.

  We stopped shy of Max’s hearse. Poppa stood next to us, taking it all in. It was critical for Max to determine if Owen’s death was due to natural causes or a homicide.

  “Well…” Max rubbed the top of his head, his eyes encased behind thick spectacles. “I found some little burn holes around his ankles. I’m not sure what those are. I have an idea, but I’m not real sure. So for now, I can’t say this is natural causes.”

  “Give me a call when you have the autopsy scheduled.” I looked from Max to Finn. It was law that any time a body was found under unnatural circumstances, there had to be an autopsy. I gave Finn the slow nod that he knew meant we had to secure the scene.

  “I’ll get started on him first thing in the morning. I should have some preliminary results in the afternoon, but I’ll call Betty and let her know.” He referred to Betty Murphy, my dispatch operator. “Unless you want to be there when I perform it?”

  “No, no.” The sooner I got this one solved, the better. After all, re-election was only a couple of years away, and I didn’t want to lose my job or my Poppa’s ghost. Poppa and I knew he was here in a ghost-deputy capacity to not only try to help me from the great beyond, but also to keep me safe. Both of us figured he was here because of the crime and we were afraid if I wasn’t sheriff, he wouldn’t be here. “I’ve got some leads I need to follow up on.” I had to go see Jolee and talk to her about Owen and Myrna’s interaction in the competition.

  “I know it’s late and this has been a long night for everyone.” I tried to smile. “Myrna, you can go on in for the night. Finn and I are going to secure the scene while Max takes Owen on down to the morgue.”

  “But what about my tomatoes? I need to get my salad made up before I go into town tomorrow to see Jolee.” She blinked at me in bafflement.

  “You are going to have to use Dixon’s tomatoes for your recipe,” I stated.

  “Well, I never.” She put her hand to her chest and drew in a big breath. On the exhale, she bellowed, “You think that’s okay? It’s clearly not. This is a competition and I have to have my prize tomatoes. What would your mama say about your manners?”

  “Not tonight or anytime soon are you going back into that greenhouse.” Times like these I found it hard to be the sheriff of the town I grew up in. Before I even did something, my mama already knew about it. In this case, I was one-hundred percent sure the first thing Myrna Savage was going to do was go in her house and dial my mama directly.

  Myrna gave a few huffs and puffs before she turned on the balls of her feet and stormed right back up to her house.

  By the time I turned back around, Max had Owen’s body covered on the church cart. Finn had used evidence markers to mark off some spots, along with dusting for fingerprints.

  “It’s going to be a long night, Kenni-bug.” My Poppa’s face was all lit up. He always loved being sheriff, especially when there was a crime to be solved.

  “We don’t even know if he was murdered,” I whispered, under my breath so Max or Finn wouldn’t hear me.

  “Oh, it was murder alright.” Poppa’s voice was tight as he spoke. “Them burn holes around his ankles.” The grin on his face sent chills all over my body. “High-grade barbwire electric fence.”

  “No one uses that kind of fencing anymore.” I knew Poppa was a great sheriff, but I hadn’t seen anyone use barbwire electric fence around here since I was a kid.

  “Someone does.” Poppa’s gaze came to rest on my questioning face. You’d think this would’ve been a time that him being a ghost would come in handy. But he was really here as my guardian, to keep me safe in my job and help me solve crimes. He wasn’t all-knowing. His voice cut the silence. “Those burn holes are spaced twelve inches apart. If you look at the holes around his ankles and wrap a couple feet of barbwire around him, they will match right on up.”

  “Well, we’re out of here.” Max rolled Owen past me.

  “Wait a second.” I walked over to the church cart. While Max opened the hatch of the hearse, I pulled the blanket off of Owen’s feet. As gross as it might sound, I bent down and took a whiff. Owen Godbey’s feet were as clean as a peeled egg. Not a speck of dirt, piece of grass, or even a bit of stink.

  “What are you looking for?” Max asked me.

  “I was looking to see if he walked here.” I pointed to the clean piggies. “He must have been placed here or thrown in the greenhouse.” I pointed to Owen’s ankles. “The burn marks. Do they look like barbwire electric fence burns?” I asked.

  Max’s jaw dropped. He didn’t have to say another word.

  “Max, it looks like we have another homicide.” The sound of my own voice was a blow to my chest. My gut sank remembering the last homicide.

  My eyes clung to Max’s as I analyzed his reaction.

  “You might be on to something.” He simply shook his head. He walked to the front of the hearse but turned back around. He pointed directly at me. “It takes a mean son of a you-know-what to kill a man using electric fencing, if that is the case.”

  I felt Max’s anger as much as I saw it.

  I stood there and watched Max drive off with Owen in the back before I walked back into the greenhouse.

  “Anything?” I asked Finn about the fingerprints he was lifting on the back door of the greenhouse.

  “There are a couple sets of prints. I’m guessing that both are accounted for. One being Myrna’s and the other Owen’s.” He had put a sticky marker on the door and the handle. “The handle and the door look to be same prints just by my naked eye, but we’ll run them anyways.”

  “Do you have a gut feeling?” In this business, when something like this happened, there was generally one. I looked around, careful where I stepped.

  He shook his head. “I’m not familiar with the citizens here and I’m going to have to listen to your direction.” He smiled that fancy white smile and made my heart go pitter-patter. “You okay?”

  “Thinking.” I looked around the crime scene. “Owen worked for her, but they are in this competition. She came outside and saw the body.” I paced back and forth. “One pr
oblem: if she did it, how did she kill him? Those burn holes around his ankles are likely from an electric fence that keeps anything or anyone out of the herd. It’s not just a little bitty shock, though you really don’t need a big shock to go into cardiac arrest.” I looked around and then through the back door, where Poppa was doing a little investigating on his own. I had learned that murder investigations were like a puzzle. There were pieces here, but how did they all fit together? “If he was killed by the electric fence, then how on earth did Myrna Savage wrangle him to the ground to do it?”

  Like I said, Myrna was a savage, but not in the physical way. She was a grudge holder. It only took a person one time to wrong Myrna for her to hold it against you and your kin for the rest of her life and theirs. She was a short stack that couldn’t wrangle a garden snake, much less a man the size of Owen Godbey.

  “How big would you say Owen Godbey is? Was?” I asked Finn.

  “I’d say he was a good two-fifty.” Finn confirmed my thoughts. “There’s no way she took him down.”

  “Plus, I don’t recall Myrna ever having livestock. There would be no reason to have an electric fence.” I had a quick thought. “Tomorrow I’ll head on down to the Tractor Supply and see if anyone has bought any electric fencing lately.”

  Cottonwood was too small for someone not to notice. My guess was that not many people were buying barbwire these days, much less electric fencing, since electric netting had become so popular.

  “This is definitely a crime of passion if someone would go as far as truly making sure he was dead by using electric fencing.” The thought of it boggled my mind. I really shouldn’t have been surprised because as a sheriff, I’d seen a lot, just not in Cottonwood. “They would’ve had to get the wire around his ankle before they turned on the electric charge. So was he passed out first or killed first?”

  “Good question.” Finn looked down at the body. His eyes slide up to mine. “How did you even think of barbwire fencing?” Finn asked.

  “It was divine intervention,” I teased, glancing over his shoulder to where Poppa was still outside looking around. “Did you notice anything outside?”

  “I haven’t gotten that far.” Finn continued to poke around the greenhouse.

  It was my chance to get to snoop. I went outside with Poppa.

  “Can’t see a whole lot out here in the dark.” Poppa used the sole of his shoe to brush across the tall grass.

  “I think we’re going to have to wait until daylight, but I can go to Owen’s house to see if anything is out of sorts.” I glanced around the grass on my way back to tell Finn he could go on back to his hotel room. The city had been renting it for him since he’d been here helping out with Doc’s murder.

  Something crunched underneath my shoe. I stopped. My flashlight was in my bag inside, and since I’d been in street clothes at the festival, I didn’t have on my utility belt. I took my cell out of my back pocket and turned on the flashlight feature, shining it toward the ground.

  As soon as my light hit the ground, a small triangle shimmered. It was some sort of colored glass.

  “What’s that?” Finn questioned from the back door.

  “I’m not sure.” I pointed to a pair of gloves Finn had folded over out of his jeans pocket. He handed them to me and I slipped them on before I bent down and picked up the glass. I palmed it and walked inside the greenhouse.

  Finn held open an evidence baggie for me. “It might be something.”

  I opened my fingers and let the glass fall into the baggie. It was like slow motion as my brain tried to figure out where I’d seen something like this before.

  “Are you okay?” Finn asked. “It must be hard being from a small town and seeing someone you know murdered.”

  “It’s not that.” My eyes drew up to meet his steely gaze. “I have seen something like this before, but I can’t place it.”

  “Think.” Poppa stood next to me, encouraging me. “Use that noggin.”

  “Like I said before, all the clues are here. We just have to wait for them to talk to us.” Finn logged in the evidence. “I guess we can wait until morning. I’ve got everything I think we need bagged up and ready to be sent off. I’ll be sure to have it sent to the lab.” His cell chirped from his pocket and he answered, telling the other person he’d be right over. “That was Lulu McClain. She said she heard I was going to be staying a while and offered me the apartment above the boutique.”

  “I bet hotel living is getting old.” I smiled, knowing Lulu McClain was a dirty old woman who wanted to make Finn her lemon bars and watch him go goo-goo over them.

  He checked his watch. “If I hurry, I can grab my stuff and move in tonight.”

  That was my cue to get him back to the fairgrounds where we’d left his car. Finn was right about the clues being under our nose. But what were they? Who would want Owen Godbey dead and why? Owen knew something, but what?

  Chapter Four

  It was strange to talk to my Poppa’s ghost. Sometimes it was surreal. I gripped the steering wheel of my old Wagoneer, which had been his. He sat in the passenger side and hung on to the door as we rattled our way down Catnip, where the Godbeys had their compound. Owen and his brother, Stanley, lived on adjoining properties. It was rumored that Stanley got Rae Lynn’s house when she died. I wasn’t sure what Owen had gotten, but it was worth looking into in case there was a family rift.

  In the dead of the night, I could talk to anyone I pleased and no one would see me. But in the daylight I had to be more cautious. It wouldn’t take but one person seeing me carrying on a conversation with myself to start a rumor that the sheriff had gone and fell off the cuckoo wagon. Especially during election season.

  The sheriff position was an elected four-year term in the great state of Kentucky. I was honored and grateful to be able to serve the people who made me who I was today. But if an elected official made those people mad, they didn’t care what your roots were. They’d turn on you in a minute; you’d be gone. Outcast. And in my case, I was the first female sheriff ever elected in Cottonwood, which made things a little more difficult when it came to solving things like murder. Some old timers still didn’t think it was fittin’ for a girl to be sticking her nose in a crime scene.

  They didn’t mind a gun-totin’ one. That was common around these parts—if you didn’t have a gun, then something was wrong with you. But a girl playing cop was another story. That wasn’t common.

  “You might want to give Stanley a holler.” Poppa was good at reminding me of things I needed to do and the order I needed to do them in.

  “I know, Poppa. I’ve been doing this for some time now.” I took a right onto Catnip Road, one of our most dangerous roads with all its hairpin curves, even though it wasn’t considered to be in the country part of our town.

  Owen lived pretty far off the road, down a gravel driveway.

  “You might know to go to the next of kin, but I bet you don’t know the Godbeys own almost two thousand acres of these woods.” He peered out the window of the old Wagoneer. The woods were on both sides of the road.

  “Do they farm?” I asked. “Or hunt?”

  Those were the two main reasons people owned land in Cottonwood.

  “They did a lot of okra planting as far back as I could remember.” Poppa’s voice was deep and dusty. “Though I can’t recall if the boys continued to grow the crop after Rae Lynn died, about four years before me.”

  I glanced over. It was just plain eerie hearing Poppa talk about his death. And a time I didn’t want to remember.

  We pulled in to the driveway. I could see Owen’s trailer was one of those that could just hitch up to a truck and haul out at any given notice.

  “All this land and that tiny trailer.” I shook my head and put the Wagoneer in park.

  “Do you know where Sandy moved?” Poppa asked about Owen’s ex-wife.

  �
��No. I need to interview her.” A line formed between my brows.

  Recently at my girl’s Euchre night, I’d heard some rumblings that Sandy and Owen still hadn’t finalized their divorce. Of course, it was during the gossip session between taking trump at the Euchre table, but still, it was noteworthy now.

  Owen was older than me. Even though Cottonwood was small, our paths rarely crossed, unless there was a festival or he happened to come to a town-council meeting. I’d certainly forgotten about the wedding and their divorce until now. I remembered I’d also heard at the Euchre table that Sandy had moved as soon as they signed the separation papers.

  I got out of the Jeep and reached over to grab my bag. Poppa ghosted himself out of the truck and over to the driver’s side. I grabbed my bag off the floorboard and slipped my phone in my back pocket before I shut the car door.

  I put the bag on top of the hood and stuck my fists on my hips. “I wonder how on Earth Owen got to the greenhouse. Or more importantly, who took him to the greenhouse.” I hesitated, bewildered. “It would make sense if he was using the Petal Pusher van for deliveries because he’d been driving it. But according to Myrna, he wasn’t working and he liked to use his truck for deliveries.”

  “We’re going to figure this out,” Poppa assured me. “We always do.”

  Poppa’s death had been really hard for me. We were so close, and the times I came home from college, it was to see him. Not that I didn’t love visiting my parents. But every time, my mom seized the opportunity to try and talk me out of being a police officer. She wanted me to leave the academy to come home to Cottonwood, where she’d love to see me be in the Sweet Adelines, a Baptist Women’s church group, a teller at a local bank, a wife, and a mother—which all sounded a lot like her.

  Instead, she’d had to settle for me being elected sheriff, joining the Euchre club, and every now and then throwing back a couple of beers.

  “I’m glad I’m here to help out still.” Poppa smiled back at me.