Chickenlandia Mystery Read online

  Chickenlandia Mystery

  Shady Hoosier Detective Agency Series

  Book 3

  Daisy Pettles

  Copyright © 2019 by Vicky Phillips

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any format, now known or to be discovered, except for extracts for book reviews or critical analysis. Contact Hot Pants Press, LLC for information on reprint rights and licensing of this work.

  The Chickenlandia Mystery (Shady Hoosier Detective Agency Series, Book Three) is a work of fiction. All references to people, locations, and events are understood as a part of the fictive process. All characters and events in this crime comedy book series are the product of the author’s imagination. Nothing in this novel is real, other than the great state of Indiana.

  Women Sleuths | Women Detectives | Cozy Mystery | Humor | Indiana Books

  First Print and ebook Editions: September 2019

  Hot Pants Press, LLC | Underhill, VT 05489

  PRINT ISBN: (PRINT) 9780-9815678-6-0

  EBOOK E-ISBN: (Ebook) 9780-9815678-7-7

  Website: https://www.DaisyPettles.com

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/daisypettles/

  Twitter: @DaisyPettles

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Excerpt from book 4: Catfish Cooties

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  “I thought she might have headed on over to her big sister’s place. Over in Tunnelton,” said Tater Wineager, his gray caterpillar eyebrows knitted together in concern. “But I checked, and her sister ain’t seen hide or hair of her since Easter.”

  Tater was trying to explain to me and my pal Lavinia Goens—Veenie to most folks— how his wife, Gertie, could have been missing so long—more than a week—without him reporting the incident. Veenie and I were all ears. This was our first missing person’s case in a coon’s age and we were itching to make pocket money.

  Veenie and I are detectives in training at the Shades Detective Agency, the best—okay the only—PI agency in Pawpaw County, Indiana. Our boss, Harry Shades, had been strutting around the office in his cranky pants all that morning threatening to off somebody just so we’d have a new case to solve. Tater losing track of his wife Gertie was a godsend to us.

  “Anything wrong with Gertie’s memory?” I asked.

  “Nah.” Tater gnawed on his tobacco-stained thumb. “She remembers everything, even things that never happened.”

  Tater glanced around the office. His face was the color of biscuit dough. His eyes were large wet prunes, pressed deep in the dough. He was wearing a plaid shirt, Wrangler jeans cuffed up two inches, and worn, black Red Wing lace-up boots. He was barely five feet tall. His booted feet dangled from his chair, not quite hitting the ground. He was zipped up in a yellow DeKalb corn windbreaker. His hair poked up from his scalp like tiny white scrub brushes.

  “A feller allowed to fire up in here?” His eyes darted around the office in search of something—a “no smoking” sign, matches, an ashtray, something like that. “Used to a feller could smoke anywhere, but nowadays you got to ask. So I’m asking.”

  Veenie, who was sitting next to me, slid a glass ashtray that advertised the Moon Glo Motor Lodge over Tater’s way. “Fire up,” she said. “Me and RJ been around smokers our whole life. We’re still kicking.”

  Tater pulled a Zippo lighter from the pocket of his windbreaker. He torched his Marlboro. When he inhaled, his cheeks blew up like puffball mushrooms. His dark eyes watered. “Not holed up at her sister’s place,” he repeated. “Drove over yesterday. Ain’t nobody seen hide or hair of her since she lit out of the house last week for her regular color and set.”

  “Tinky Sue’s?” I asked. Most women over fifty in Knobby Waters, the small river town where we lived, got their hair done at Tinky Sue Knute’s Curl Up and Dye. But senior penny-pinchers sometimes frequented Henrietta’s House of Hair, the beauty college over in Bedford. If you went to Henrietta’s on a Tuesday you could get a ten-dollar cut from a freshman. A color job was twenty. But then you had to accept whoever was on duty and whatever happened to your hair. And from what I had seen, there was a darn good reason why people referred to the beauty college as Henrietta’s House of Hair Horrors.

  Tater sucked on his cigarette. “Yep. She never lets anybody but Tinky Sue touch that head of hair. Has this bald patch up on top.” He fingered his dome. “Started when she went through the change. Tinky Sue knows how to cover it up right nice.”

  I made a note of that in the file we’d started on Gertie. “Any reason Gertie might have run away? You have a spat?”

  “Not that I noticed, but sometimes we have fights and I don’t know it. She has to tell me.”

  He took another drag on his cigarette and studied the glowing amber. “Long winter. You gals know how it gets. Locked up in a house. We might have said a few things both of us regretted when the river finally thawed. We’ve been hitched forty years. A body can get pretty testy over that long a stretch.”

  Veenie said she understood. “Me and Fergus Senior only lasted ten years. He ran around with any hoochie-coochie gal who looked his way. You ever hound dog on Gertie? Do something stupid like that that might have ticked her off?”

  Tater squeezed his eyes shut against the smoke. “Nah.”

  Like most men in these parts, he wasn’t much for jawing.

  “Anywhere else she might have run off to?” I asked. “You can leave us the contact for her sister over in Tunnelton. We’ll check there, of course. She have other kin? A friend she might have gone to visit with for a spell?”

  “Don’t think so. She wasn’t all that popular. We got a daughter over in Mitchell, but I checked and she hasn’t seen her mama since Christmas. Got two grown sons, but both of them are in the military, overseas. I wrote down Gertie’s vitals so you can trace her if need be. Imagine you use a lot of that fancy computer stuff like on the TV. I wrote down the address for her sister, Lottie. Got a paper on me somewhere. Lottie don’t have a phone. Nervous type. Doesn’t like all that ringing.” He checked several pockets before pulling a creased Rural Electric envelope out of his shirt pocket. He handed the envelope to me. The back of the envelope had a coffee stain shaped like a half moon and Gertie’s vitals written on it: social, date of birth, and a credit card number, all carefully printed in pencil in large block letters. Lottie’s address was on the paper too.

  I asked Tater if Gertie had been planning to enter the BBQ chicken cook-off at the Chickenlandia Festival. The annual festival started next week and was a big to-do for Pawpaw County. “She’s the reigning BBQ Queen, right?”

  “Oh, sure
. She’s right proud of that. She’s taken the crown and sash three years running. Ain’t nobody can barbecue a chicken like Gertie.” His face beamed with pride. “That’s what makes it right peculiar. Her missing, I mean. She was hacking chickens to pieces and slathering them up all last week. Practicing. Tweaking her secret sauce. Reckon she might run out on me, but she keeps that crown on a prize shelf above the TV. Shines it up every week when she dusts. No way she’d toss that crown over to some upstart.”

  The BBQ Cook-Off Queen title was about the most coveted prize in Pawpaw County. The entirety of the Ladies’ Farm Bureau contingent throughout southern Indiana spent most of the year cooking up new sauces and trying them out on the Boy Scouts and the old farts down at the VFW. The Knobby Waters Weight Watchers division had to open up two new meetings just to help all the folks who’d volunteered to taste test for Gertie. Despite the stiff, multi-county competition, Gertie clawed back the title from every new contender.

  Tater laid his cigarette in the ashtray and patted his pockets. He checked his pants’ pockets, his shirt pockets, then both pockets on his windbreaker. “Here’s the retainer you said you’d be needing.” He handed over a folded check.

  I handwrote him a receipt. He slid the pink receipt into the pocket of his windbreaker, stubbed out his cigarette, and hopped up off the chair. “You’ll let me know?” There was a tiny tear in his right eye. He pulled a yellow paisley hankie out of his back pocket and sniffled into it. “Allergies,” he said as he blew his nose.

  He wasn’t fooling me. I could tell he was worried sick. “Don’t worry. Me and Veenie are aces at finding lost people.”

  “And pets,” said Veenie. “We found Bet Beesley’s wiener dog, Puddles, when he went missing.”

  Tater looked impressed. “The blind one?”

  “Yeah. He ran away. Down to Pokey’s Tavern. Had a drinking problem. Hard to find a runaway dog. They don’t have credit cards or anything traceable like that. They travel pretty light.”

  Tater seemed reassured by that. “Well, okay. I got forty acres of soybeans to get in now that it’s dry. Call me when you got anything.” He flipped up the hood on his windbreaker and tottered out of the office. He looked like a sad lemon, his shoulders hunched against the rain, as he rolled down the sidewalk in the direction of the Roadkill Café.

  He was gone a couple of seconds before Veenie piped up. “You ask me, some people are best off left lost.”

  “You never did care for Gertie.”

  “It ain’t just me. Nobody ever cared for Gertie Wineager. You know that, Ruby Jane.”

  “Tater does.”

  That gave Veenie pause. “Gertie is a big ol’ sourpuss. Might be she upset someone. Maybe they whacked her. You know as well as I do that if you gave Gertie the world with a ribbon tied around it, she’d hurl it back at you, hissing, ‘That there is the wrong color ribbon.’”

  “Some people are like that.”

  “Yeah, and them kind of people sometimes accidently trip and fall into the wood chipper.”

  “You think Tater chipped up his wife?”

  “Happens. It was a long, ass-biting winter. They live in the old Wineager homestead down by the river, near the Sparksville railroad crossing, close to the old Huffman homestead. That house is so old they have to seal it up in storm plastic just to keep the heat in and the siding from falling off. You know how it gets inside that storm plastic. All thick and foggy. Like living inside a cold jar of Vaseline. Turns people crazy.”

  “They have new storm plastic nowadays. You can see clear through it.”

  “Winter still makes people crazy.”

  I thought about that for a minute. “I dunno. I think Tater loves Gertie. They got hitched right out of high school.”

  “Course he does, but you know as well as I do you can love someone one minute and want to hold a pillow over their head the next. Marriage is like that.”

  I’d been married, so couldn’t argue with that. I eyed the file we’d started on Gertie. “Guess the best place to start is over at the Curl Up and Dye. Looks like Tinky Sue may have been the last one to see Gertie.”

  “Yeah.” Veenie peered at me over the top of her Coke bottle glasses. “And you could use a spring spit and shine. Ma and Peepaw Horton’s big Chickenlandia Festival starts next week. You’re never gonna get a date with that ratty nest of hair.”

  Ma and her husband, Peepaw, ran a free-range chicken farm, Chickenlandia, on top of the knobs, the hills that surrounded and guarded the sandy river bottoms of Knobby Waters. All week the town had been abuzz about the Chickenlandia Festival. The festival was a benefit for the old folk’s home, and a humdinger of a shindig. Anybody who could walk, crawl, or wheel their chair forward attended the annual event.

  There were mule rides and a bouncy castle for the kids, a BBQ chicken cook-off contest for the adults, a hot wings eating contest, a chicken clucking and rooster crowing contest for the loud mouths, and a chicken dance competition for the hoofers; also hillbilly horseshoes with junk toilet lids instead of horseshoes because horseshoes were apparently hard to come by these days.

  Thinking about what Veenie had said about my hair, I flipped off my laptop and eyed myself in the dark glassy reflection of the computer screen. My hair, snow white, looked like a halo around my head. My ragged bangs hung like drapery across the top of my glasses. I was sixty-seven and looked pretty darn normal to me. “What’s wrong with my hair?”

  “Same darn thing that’s been wrong since high school. It’s flat. Except when it rains. Then you look like a dandelion. Plus, looks like you’ve been whacking at your bangs again. They’re square. You use Scotch tape and the sewing scissors to trim ‘em up again?”

  I had, but I wasn’t about to admit it. “Not a good look on me?”

  “You look like one of them Three Stooges, and not the attractive one either.”

  I ran a hand over my hair. “It’s flat today?”

  “It’s drizzling, so it’s bristled out a bit. Puts me in mind of one of them razorback hogs the Weeselplecks used to keep out on the Devil’s Backbone.”

  The Devil’s Backbone was a narrow limestone ridge shaped like a long twisty spine that dropped down to the White River, between Fort Ritner and Tunnelton. Nothing much could survive down there but feral pigs.

  I mashed at my hair. “You think Tinky Sue could fix me up?”

  “Probably. Maybe she can slap some gel on that hair. Slick you up a bit.”

  “Like yours?” Veenie didn’t have all that much hair, but it was nice and white. She kept it neat, slicked up on top like a Kewpie doll, and professionally trimmed, because at four foot seven and a hundred and fifty pounds, if her hair got too long she started looking like a troll. She’d always been better at fashion than me. My idea of a beauty ritual was a morning rake through with a plastic comb. If I was feeling really frisky, I might pat my lips with a cherry Chapstick.

  I grabbed my messenger bag and the file on Gertie. Tinky Sue’s beauty parlor was only three blocks south. It was set up in an enclosed glass room that used to be her back porch. It was a nice spring day. The drizzle looked to be passing. We could walk, get some sunshine. Since our boss, Harry Shades, was out trying to drum up business, I scrawled a note about our new case and our whereabouts and stuck it to the front door. I slipped Tater’s retainer check under a coffee cup on Harry’s desk. He’d bellyache if he came back into the office before us and found us not chained to our desks. I figured the check would soften him up a bit.

  Veenie slipped on her hooded poncho. It was electric blue with yellow daisies and green pom-pom fringe. A two dollar Goodwill steal. It matched—sort of—her electric blue, zigzag yellow leggings. One thing was for sure, Veenie wasn’t going missing. That getup could be seen from deep space.

  She pulled a new pair of clip-on sunglasses out of her top desk drawer. The lenses, shaped like oversized hearts, were a swirling reflective mess of blues and greens and yellows, kind of like the surface of a mood ring.

&nb
sp; Veenie clipped the sunglasses to her regular red-framed glasses and flipped them down. “How do I look?” She smiled and clicked her dentures.

  There was something Elton John about the whole outfit. “Hip,” I said. “Very hip. No one would ever guess you were a day over seventy.” Veenie was, in fact, seventy-one, four years my senior.

  “These here shades are vintage,” she said. “The kids are heavy into this kind of thing.” She bounced out the door of the detective agency ahead of me, eager, as always, to start snooping into the private lives of the poor and not so famous of Pawpaw County.

  Chapter Two

  Tinky Sue seemed happy to see us. She was a tiny woman, short and wiry, as dark as a dime-store bobby pin. She was wearing her customary red stretch capris and flowered camp shirt. She was draped in a blue work smock that was splotched with bleach and hair color. Her curly salt-and-pepper hair was shaped nicely to her head. She gave me a big hug, but just said howdy to Veenie because everyone knew Veenie didn’t like being squeezed on. “You’re in luck, gals. I got a cancellation right after Thelma.”

  Thelma—most folks called her Mrs. Nierman because she used to teach first grade, and she still taught the Sunbeam middle school class over at the Baptist church—lived across the street from me and Veenie.

  Thelma was slumped over in the pump-up beauty chair. Pink foam curlers sprung up around her head. Foils were stuck here and there, like silver maple leaves tangled in her dark gray hair. Thelma was past ninety, but still getting around with the assistance of a pair of canes. Her spine and neck were going. When she stood full up she was bent over like an Allen wrench. Tall and spindly most of her life, she resembled a giant sunflower whose head had begun to droop in the heat. She still fit behind the wheel of her Dodge van so she drove herself around town, but she couldn’t turn her head to see cross traffic. She crawled around town at twenty miles an hour, her icy blue eyes peering at the world over the dark dashboard. She’d sit at a stop sign for ten minutes, just to be extra careful. Most people, including me, just honked and drove around her.