1 A Cop and a Coop

by Hillary Avis

  A Cop and a Coop

  A Clucks and Clues Mystery Book 1

  Hillary Avis

  Published by Hilyard Press, Eugene, OR

  ©2019 Hillary Avis www.hillaryavis.com

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people, places, events, or organizations is purely coincidental, and all are the creation of the author.

  Cover by Mariah Sinclair www.mariahsinclair.com

  For permissions contact: books@hilyardpress.com

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Killer Cast-Iron Casserole

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  I’d be darned if I was going to ask anyone for help.

  I wiped the sweat off my forehead using the shoulder of my T-shirt and jammed the narrow trenching shovel into the ground again. This dirt was mine now, and if it had any sense, it would yield to me. I jumped on the shovel, hoping the few extra pounds I’d put on since the divorce would be an asset for once. But the tool just clanked against something, tipping me over into the prickly, dry grass.

  “Dug up anything interesting?” a drawling, gravelly voice behind me asked.

  I scrambled to my feet, annoyance crawling up my back. I hate it when people sneak up on me when I’m in the middle of something. In this case it was my ancient neighbor, Walt Sutherland, who was leaning on a post that held up the barbed-wire fence that separated my land from his U-pick blueberry orchard. The whole point of buying a farm out here was to get away from prying eyes, but somehow prying eyes had a way of finding me.

  “Just dirt.”

  He tipped his white cowboy hat back and squinted at me like Clint Eastwood at a gunslinger. “That didn’t sound like any dirt I’ve dug in my years. You hit a rock?”

  I used the shovel to scrape at the spot where the shovel had hit something, revealing the glint of amber-brown glass. “Beer bottle,” I said. I levered it out of the ground and tossed it on the growing pile of flattened cans, bottles, hubcaps, and plastic lighters that I’d uncovered so far.

  “I’m guessing you’ll find a few more. Amos didn’t mind if the local kids had their bonfire nights on his place. Said he’d rather have them under his watch than out in the woods somewhere doing who knows what.” He meant Amos Chapman, the former owner of the property.

  I stuck the shovel in the hole where the bottle had been exhumed and tried again. The shovel sank in all the way, much to my satisfaction. When I’d dug that short section of trench, I moved down the line toward the next stake I’d put out to mark the foundation of my dream chicken coop, trying to ignore Walt’s continued scrutiny from the fence post.

  This time the shovel unearthed an old work boot, the kind that Popeye might reel in on a Saturday morning cartoon. I’d caught myself a whopper. Size twelve, at least. I cursed at it and threw it onto the trash pile, where it landed with a rattle.

  “That’d be faster with a power trencher,” Walt remarked.

  I pursed my lips and rolled my eyes. “If I had one, I’d be using it.”

  “Pretty sure Mike Spence’s got one.”

  I ignored him and dug another foot of trench, grunting and sweating like a music video backup dancer.

  Walt didn’t take the hint. “I’d bet a bushel of berries that he’d bring it over if you gave him a call.”

  “No thanks,” I said between gritted teeth. The last thing I needed was another man doing me the favor of bossing me around. “Anyway, I’m about done.”

  Walt eyed the stakes that remained—more than three-quarters of the sixteen I’d hammered into the ground yesterday to mark the coop’s future foundation. Then he looked at me and back to the ten feet of trench I’d already dug. Then back to me. I braced myself for a smart remark.

  “What’re you building?” he asked mildly.

  I paused with my foot on the shovel. “Chicken coop.”

  Not just any chicken coop. My dream chicken coop. Most people wouldn’t bother with a concrete foundation for a coop and run, but I wasn’t most people.

  “The Chapmans kept their chickens in the barn,” Walt said, nodding toward the ancient building to my left that backed up to the railroad tracks behind my place. Its posts and beams were sound—I’d made sure of it before I put in my offer—but the dark, rough-hewn siding was suffering, rotting from the bottom up. It wasn’t secure enough to keep poultry safe from a determined predator. Anyway, I had another use for the barn that Walt didn’t need to know anything about.

  “Well, mine are going to live in a coop. Keeping chickens in a barn is like keeping cookies in a jar, as far as a raccoon is concerned.”

  He chuckled. “Fair enough. I don’t want you to run afoul of disclosure laws should you sell the place, so I won’t trouble you. ‘A fowl,’ get it?” He laughed at his own joke. “Do let me know if you uncover anything notable.”

  He patted the fence post and moseyed back down a row of blueberry bushes toward the bright white farmhouse he shared with his much-younger wife, Anne, whistling a tuneless melody as he went.

  I shook my head and got back to work. It wasn’t until I’d pulled a tuna can and a crumbling Styrofoam cup out of the ground that I realized I’d been finding things all morning, and Walt had seen the pile of junk that was accumulating nearby. When he said he wanted to know if I found anything interesting, he didn’t mean the trash I’d uncovered thus far. Clearly, he had a more specific idea of what might be buried here.

  Just my luck, I was going to hit some pipes or underground electrical lines that he knew about and I didn’t. Time to call out the utility company to mark the lines before I did anything stupid. Oh well, a glass of lemonade didn’t sound like a bad idea, anyway.

  I left the shovel in the half-dug trench and headed back to the house. I still couldn’t believe the little yellow clapboard cottage was mine, let alone the generous orchard of apple trees older than I was that surrounded it. Sure, a few years of neglect while the place stood empty meant that there were a million little things that needed attention, from roof leaks to pruning. The apples were wormy and small because the orchard hadn’t been tended. But a year from now, when my pullets were laying and the first real orchard harvest was in, I’d be swimming in eggs and apples.

  Self-sufficient for the first time in my life.

  I mounted the steps to the wrap-around porch and caught a glimpse of myself in the glass on the front door. Good lord, I was a mess. My blonde-and-gray ponytail had frizzed into a lion’s mane, and you couldn’t even see my freckles, I had so much dirt on my face.
One sleeve of my shirt was rolled up and the other one had fallen down, and you could see my dingy old bra strap hanging out of the one that was still rolled up. Walt Sutherland must think I was a crazy person.

  Well, good. I was done giving two toots what men thought of my appearance. I’d borne enough of that for two lifetimes, living in Beverly Hills for the last thirty years. I blew a kiss to my dirty-girl reflection and went inside.

  With a glass of cold lemonade dripping on the kitchen table, I phoned the utility people and scheduled them to come out and mark all the lines for my own peace of mind. Two days, the shrill woman on the phone said. That’s when they’d come out and place flags on my electrical lines.

  Ugh. Two days of sitting in the house and counting the minutes wasted. I pulled out my planning notebook and scanned the detailed schedule I’d prepared. I thought I’d have the perimeter foundation poured and all the posts set in concrete by the end of the day today, but that wasn’t going to happen.

  Thankfully, I had the foresight to write the schedule in pencil. I carefully erased the dates for chicken coop construction and changed them by two days. Then I paused, my pencil still pressing a dent in the paper.

  The utility company would only flag buried power lines. They wouldn’t be marking sewer pipes, because the farm had a septic tank. And they wouldn’t be marking water, either—the property was on a well. The pump house was on the other side of the main house, so I knew the water pipes ran that direction, not way over by the fence.

  Maybe I didn’t have to wait for the utility folks. I scraped back my chair and looked out the kitchen window. Sure enough, the house had a service wire from a pole along the fence line that serviced my house and the Sutherlands. There weren’t any buried power lines.

  Triumphantly, I chugged my glass of lemonade while I scrubbed out the new dates and replaced them with the old ones. Whatever was buried in my yard, it wasn’t going to zap me to the moon if I hit it with a shovel. I could dig my little heart out without fear of being electrocuted. I marched back outside and, refreshed by the prospects of keeping to my schedule as much as the lemonade, laid into digging.

  Right away, my shovel hit something about eighteen inches down. A rock or another beer bottle, probably. I kneeled in the grass and used a hand trowel to excavate it. I quickly realized it wasn’t glass, though...it was something softer, organic. A root left from an old apple tree? I jammed my trowel under the object and levered it out. When I realized what it was, I laughed aloud.

  It was the left boot that matched the right one I’d already dug up. I tossed it onto the pile of trash behind me and heard it rattle as it landed. It wasn’t the soft sound of earth and pebbles. It was more of a clatter.

  There was something inside it.

  At first I ignored it and kept my attention on the growing trench, eager to finish it. But curiosity gnawed at me, so finally I set down my shovel, dusted my hands, and went to investigate. I picked up the boot and poured the contents into my hand, nearly choking on my own tongue when I saw what had been inside.

  Bones.

  The boot was full of bones.

  Instinctively, I dropped them. The bones scattered on the half-green, late-summer grass, and I crouched to stare at them. They were small bones, but they didn’t belong to a chicken or a deer. They were clearly the bones of a human foot. They were inside a boot, for heaven’s sake—nobody would stuff a dead cat into a shoe for burial.

  I dumped out the second boot—or rather, the first one I’d found. It, too, was full of bones.

  Two feet in two boots.

  I couldn’t deny it any longer. There was a dead guy buried in my front yard.

  Chapter 2

  I tipped back onto the grass, pondering what I should do. The right thing would be to call the sheriff, but I found myself hesitant to do so. What would come of it, anyway? A big, expensive hole in my yard, a delay building my coop, and for what? An official rubber stamp that the guy in my yard was Old Leonard So-and-so, buried by his loving grandchildren in the family plot? I didn’t need an official stamp—I could just ask around town and find out who was buried here.

  Luckily I knew just the person to ask: Ruth Chapman. Not only was she the realtor who sold me the property, she was the granddaughter of the former owners and had spent a good part of her childhood here, back when we were classmates in school. If anyone knew the ins and outs of this farm, it was her. I found her number in my cell phone and placed the call.

  “Do or Dye!” she answered. Do or Dye was Ruth’s side business, or maybe real estate was her side business and the salon was her main gig. In Honeytree, Oregon, there weren’t enough acres to sell or hairs on people’s heads to make a full-time living at either one on its own, so Ruth did both.

  “It’s Leona,” I said. “Do you have a minute?”

  “For you I do. Since you came back to town, I’ve been dying to get my hands on that head of yours—pun intended. Hairdresser humor, sorry.” Her loud, brassy laugh echoed in the receiver and I held the phone away from my ear, grinning, until the sound died down.

  “This isn’t about hair. It’s about the farm.”

  “Shoot,” she said, her voice still good-humored. “I guessed wrong. Hold on a minute, hon, I’ll be right with you.” The phone clattered. “Tambra, can you get Grace started? She needs a shampoo and then I’ll do her cut and set. OK, Leona, go ahead.”

  Hot flash. I blew air up to cool my forehead and took a deep breath before continuing my question. “I was wondering if you knew of anything buried on the farm?”

  “What, like what, pirate gold? We’re a little too far inland for that kind of thing, although if you have a hot tip on buried treasure, I’ll help you dig as long as I get a cut. A cut, get it? Because I cut hair?”

  I was too flustered to laugh at her joke. “No, not buried treasure. A person. Or people. Did you Chapmans have a family plot?”

  “Not that I know of. Could be an older one on the property, though—my grandparents bought the place in the Fifties, but the house was built probably sixty years before that. Why, do you think there might be one?”

  I stared at the bones in the grass, considering whether to tell her what I’d found. “I’m not sure. I dug up some boots when I was working on my chicken coop and got worried. I thought you might have an idea what it’s all about since you know the property so well.”

  “Hm. Where are you putting the coop? Near the house or up by the road?”

  “That spot in front of the barn between the driveway and the fence, across from the house.”

  “I can’t think of anything over there off the top of my head. We had a fire pit there for a while, and once my grandpa got a wild hair to put a duck pond in that spot, but he changed his mind. Walt Sutherland might know about something I don’t, though. He’s had his place since before my grandparents bought our farm. Your farm, now,” she corrected. “You could ask him.”

  I sighed. I already knew he wasn’t going to tell me anything, if his smug questions this morning were any indication. “Sorry, I’ve sworn off being patronized.”

  Ruth giggled, but then her voice turned serious. “Come down here and you can look through the county property records on my computer. Maybe that’ll shed some light on your underground surprise.”

  Relief washed over me. “Thanks. I’ll owe you one.”

  “Oh, I know. And I know just how you can repay me. I aim to get you in my chair so I can work my magic. You’ll be amazed what a cut and color can do for your whole vibe—you’ll have a new husband before you know it.”

  “Not interested.” Not even a little bit. Peterson Davis had been enough husband for nine lifetimes.

  “We’ll see,” Ruth sing-songed.

  I hung up on her, grabbed my purse and keys from inside the house, and headed back out to the driveway. I almost locked the front door out of habit—I’d locked the door even when I was home in Beverly Hills—but I forced myself not to. That was my old life: keep people out, keep things
in. Any thieves who stopped in here would be sorely disappointed by my selection of second-hand furniture and outdated appliances. Anyway, in Honeytree, someone stopping by was probably bringing over a note, a bunch of wildflowers, or a hot casserole. Not a thief, but a friend or neighbor. Someone you wanted to come through the door.

  I started up the crotchety Suburban I’d picked up when I bought the farm. Though it was twenty years old if it was a day, I chose it because it could haul chicken feed and straw bales in any weather and because it was the type of rig people drove around here. I didn’t want to stand out any more than I already did. In fact, I’d prefer that nobody noticed me at all.

  I pulled out onto the long, straight stretch of highway that fronted my place and Walt’s considerably larger property. The Flats, the locals called it, a favorite place for late-night drag racing. Past the Flats were the Curves, a winding section along the river, infamous for the many car accidents that ended with a vehicle nose-down in the rushing water.

  I eased off the gas when I approached the Curves; the years away from Honeytree meant I hadn’t yet regained a feel for the tight turns. I took them well under the speed limit, and by the time I reached the railroad crossing that marked the city limits, a half-dozen cars had piled up politely behind me and tailed me through town like an informal parade. So much for not drawing attention. By the end of the day, word would be out that a newcomer in town was holding up traffic. Not that there was any such thing as traffic, here. Honeytree traffic just meant “more than one car on the road.”

  When I was a child, the joke was that Honeytree was a one-stoplight town. It wasn’t even that, though—the light had been a blinking red, meaning that most people took it as sort of optional. But in the intervening decades, the blinking light had been removed, replaced with a couple of stop signs. It felt downright civilized to make a full stop at the main intersection instead of just coasting through. I turned off the highway onto Main Street and parked right smack in front of the Do or Dye.

  The salon was across the street from the brick building that operated as the fire station, the sheriff’s office, and City Hall. In fact, the three-block Main Street held half the businesses in town: in addition to the city building and the salon, there was a bank, a lawyer, an accountant, an insurance agent, a pharmacy with a tiny restaurant attached to it called the Rx Café, and the post office. The short street dead-ended at a dusty old building that had a bowling alley downstairs and a VFW hall upstairs that could be considered the social center of the community, at least for those over a certain age...an age I had not yet achieved, I hoped.