Chickenlandia Mystery

by Daisy Pettles

  “Sure,” I said, wanting to get on with the day, and not one to refuse a free chicken dinner. I reckoned my saying yes would salve his manly pride. I really didn’t want bad feelings festering between us. He was a good friend, and handy to know in our line of business. I wasn’t one to toss those things aside lightly. There weren’t that many people in Pawpaw County. If I crossed Boots, half the town would feel obliged to tell me what they thought of me, and I was getting too old to waste time being lectured to by all my neighbors.

  Boots’s face lit up. The skin around his blue eyes crinkled. He actually smiled. “Text you later to talk details,” he said as he stomped out the door.

  Veenie and I could hear him whistle as he strolled down the sidewalk to his patrol car.

  Boots was barely out of the house when Hayley came dragging into the kitchen. Her skunk hair was leaning to one side like she’d slept on it wrong. She was wearing a torn, black Lynyrd Skynyrd scoop-neck T-shirt, all stretched out in the neck, and a rolled up pair of old, plaid, flannel sleeping pants that I’d loaned her from a laundry pile of old stuff my son, Eddie, had left behind when he moved out in the late ’70s. She poured herself a bowl of cornflakes and coffee. She adjusted the glasses on her nose and eyed the milk carton suspiciously. Putting the milk carton down, she asked if we had any almond milk.

  Veenie chortled. “Dang, we wasn’t up early enough to get all the almonds rounded up and milked this morning.”

  That made me laugh, but Hayley just shrugged. Sighing, she popped open the cow’s milk and let it pour. I’d practically forgotten about Hayley. She’d been sleeping huddled in a lump on the army cot in the laundry room when we’d arrived home. I reckoned we needed to be taking her along with us over to Krupsky’s since Harry had “hired” her as a tagalong. I had no idea what we were going to do with her, but she was ours, so I reckoned we’d eventually find a way to put her to good use.

  • • •

  Hiram was busy at his desk when we arrived at the egg farm. He had a private office and one of those huge, dark, wooden desks with carvings of lions and leaves, stuff like that, on the legs and trim. He was wearing the same baby-blue leisure suit and white hat and boots as when we first met him out at Chickenlandia. I reckoned that was his regular uniform. He must have been sitting on a booster pillow because he was high in his seat. Probably some sort of executive power pillow made for short guys like him. When he hopped out of the seat and came around to greet us, he was as short as ever.

  Jay Bob Burris, head security guy, was in the office, prepared to escort me and Veenie around. He was beaming, his blond curls waving, the gap in his front teeth as cute and welcoming as ever. I noticed that Hayley gave him the once over in that girl-meets-boy way. So, despite her fancy big-city spiel about there not being two sexes, the old country game of hen meets rooster seemed to be kicking in.

  Jay Bob said he was ready to tote us around in his golf cart, show us where all the security cameras were hidden, and where they were thinking of installing more security measures. “We got nothing at all on the loading docks,” he said. “Finding Mrs. Perkins there all packed up made us think we need to beef up that area.”

  Hiram nodded. “Plus Rhea Dawn says research shows most industrial thieving happens in the receiving and shipping bays. Like I said, we been missing bags of feed, antibiotics, a few cages, supplies like that.”

  Veenie piped up. “Sounds like maybe your thief is running his own chicken enterprise, letting you supply him in the process.”

  “Could be,” Hiram agreed. “Lots of folks raise backyard chickens, hoping to scare up a little egg money on the side. Anybody who worked here for a spell could learn the basics of the egg trade.” Hiram checked his wristwatch, clucked his tongue a time or two, and said he had to excuse himself for some conference calls, but that Jay Bob would see after all our needs.

  While Jay Bob was steering us out the back, I grabbed Hayley and told him that we needed to visit the little girl’s room before our bladders got bounced around on the gravel roads. Veenie said she was fine to go and skipped toward the exit door, but I grabbed her by the crook of one arm and said, “No, you’re not.”

  She finally took the clue and the three of us marched into the ladies’ room. Once in there, we hatched a plan to search the place from head to toe. “If Hiram is hiding things, he probably told Jay Bob to show us some things, and to hide others. I think we need to be extra nosy, poke around everywhere.”

  Hayley said she liked that plan. I asked Hayley if she’d ever tossed a room.

  Her dark little eyes bubbled like chocolate pudding behind her glasses. “You mean, like search a room for stuff that I wasn’t supposed to see?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sure. My mom hid all sorts of stuff from me, or thought she did. You know how moms are about sex, stuff like that. I learned how to pick locks on YouTube years ago.” She pulled an impressive knife-tool lock-pick set from the pocket of her coveralls. “And I can scan stuff with my cell phone. I have a night vision app that lets me scan in total darkness. The images convert to visible shots later.”

  Hmm, it looked like little Hayley had some junior detective potential after all. “Okay,” I said. “You stay here in the main building. If Hiram leaves his office, poke around in his drawers. See if you can find Rhea Dawn’s and Phus’s office. Look for business papers, accounting stuff, expansion plans.”

  “Want me to hack their email?”

  Veenie’s eyebrows shot up. “You can do that?”

  “Sure, but, er, what am I looking for?”

  “I dunno,” I confessed. “The Krupskys might have plans related to sabotaging Chickenlandia and the festival, or plans related to acquiring Cluckytown. Bad debts. Be on the lookout for anything related to Pam Perkins. Be creative.”

  We shook hands, and Hayley went on her way. Veenie and I took advantage of the sparkling clean adjoining stalls in the ladies’ room. There were some cute, little, pink, wrapped soaps on a shelf above the sinks, and Veenie dumped a few of these into her pants pockets. “Hiram won’t miss these,” she muttered while I looked the other way.

  On the way out to the cart, Veenie and I masterminded a final plan to split up and search separate parts of the operation. I’d head back to the lab and breeding barn, while she’d take the egg and chicken parts processing barns and shipping and receiving. Once we were outside, Jay Bob belted us safely into his fancy golf cart. “Where’s the girl?” he asked, looking back at the exit door hopefully.

  Veenie and I explained to him that Hayley was staying behind to finish some computer work. “She’s got homework. It’s her senior year. She’s sweet, real bookish, an angel of a girl, just like her mama.” Veenie laid on the lies as easy as icing a cake.

  Jay Bob saw us as sweet old ladies who carried penny candy and dime-store rain bonnets in our purses. Bless his young heart. He seemed hunky-dory with every lie we told him. Veenie flashed him her well-dentured smile, and he keyed the cart, beaming like a Boy Scout doing his duty for the day by helping out Grandma. We shot off toward the farthest points of the operation, Jay Bob pointing out the existing cameras and security features as we bumped along, kicking up a rooster tail of gravel dust.

  What Jay Bob didn’t know was that Veenie and I had our own plans for tossing the place in search of Dewey and Ginger. We also aimed to search for clues related to Pam’s murder. Pam definitely stole our missing lovebird couple, and her last known earthly location was Krupsky’s egg houses. I had a strong hunch that Pam’s murder was connected to some master plan to sabotage Chickenlandia. And I was betting that all this was connected to the Hiram’s lifetime masterplan for world domination of the chicken parts trade.

  It was all connected, we just didn’t know how. There were chickens, and there were eggs. Thousands of them. It was our job, as duly sworn junior agents of the Shady Hoosier Detective Agency, to figure out which came first.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Veenie badgered Jay Bob until she convinc
ed him to tote her out to the fertilizer plant, which sat in the field the farthest away from the executive offices. I reckoned it was located way out in East Jesus because that’s where the chicken poop got processed. High-powered executives like Rhea Dawn and Phus usually preferred to stay upwind of the less glamorous parts of poultry processing.

  Veenie, who was riding shotgun in the cart, kept at Jay Bob. “I always did want to see how they turn chicken poop into fertilizer. Selling chicken shit by the pound. That’s real creative. Wish I’d come up with that idea. You go ahead, let Ruby Jane jump off at the breeding lab. She was there last time. Wants to visit Hiram’s daughters again, Jo and Hira, find out more about their computer security needs.”

  Jay Bob braked the cart at a crossroads to let a forklift carrying a pallet of feed take right of way. He glanced over his shoulder at me, his face scrunched. “The lab already has oodles of security, Mrs. Waskom. Nothing’s been reported missing there.”

  I leaned forward and shouted at Jay Bob, hoping to be heard over the rumbling of the forklift. “Hiram asked me to take a good look at the lab as a special favor to him. He’s worried about computer security. Trade secrets.”

  The forklift buzzed past and Jay Bob hit the accelerator. “Oh, well, I guess it’s all right then if Hiram said so. We don’t have a lot of fancy computer security. Mostly we protect the hard assets—the chickens, the eggs, the packaging of poultry parts, all the supplies.”

  “I know,” I said trying to sound agreeable, “but with all the new competition in the egg business, and Mrs. Perkins murder, Hiram is concerned about how vulnerable the place might be to computer viruses and whatnot.” I was speed-talking out my backside, but it seemed to be working on the boy. He sped toward the breeding barn, then slowed to let me off at the door. I told him I’d see myself into the barn and waved him and Veenie off toward the poop processing plant.

  As Jay Bob disappeared in a rooster tail of dust, I strolled into the breeding barn. I was hoping to sneak back to the lab, try out the keys Veenie had liberated from Hiram’s home office, but a guy I didn’t recognize was on duty at the check-in desk, and he had other notions.

  The desk guy was as round and white as a snowman, and he was chewing on a cigar. He didn’t look that old, maybe thirty, but even his eyebrows and chin stubble were white. He had more than one chin. I reckoned he was an albino, a Swede, or something like that. He kept right on smoking, flicking his ashes onto the concrete floor as I approached. The nameplate on his desk read “Randy Spence: Supervisor.”

  “Christ!” he moaned, looking up at me. “You the new warehouse hand? You’re late.” He eyed me, his face sour. “Christ, how old are you? We recruiting from the cemetery now? No, wait, don’t even tell me. We’re shorthanded. Don’t care. You ever work in a breeding barn before?”

  “Nope.”

  “Oh, great. That’s just great. Super.” He blew smoke out before shouting at a woman who’d come into the barn pulling a pallet of feed. “Hey! Got a newbie! I’m busy. You gotta show her the ropes.”

  The woman dropped the pull tongue on the pallet and greeted me. She was wearing jeans and a white smock with the Krupsky logo. Forty-something. Skinny as a toothpick. Her dyed red hair was tied back with a yellow paisley headscarf. “My name is Ruth Ann. Ruth Ann Weddle. What’s yours, hon?”

  “Ruby Jane Waskom,” I said. “RJ to most.”

  “Okay, RJ. Let’s get you situated.”

  I thought about correcting the mistake about me being a new hire, but then decided it best to keep a low profile. No telling who might be an enemy, or our thief. I decided to play along, act like I belonged there with the best of them.

  Randy waved Ruth Ann and me away as he penciled his initials on the paperwork she handed him from atop the pallet.

  She turned to face me. “I can show you how to run the feeder. That’s why they sent you back here, right?”

  “Yep.”

  Running the feeder for the breeding cages was simple. All I had to do was climb up a set of small metal stairs and dump the chicken feed into a tall funnel-shaped bucket that shot the feed out the bottom and onto a conveyer belt. The conveyer belt snaked the length of the barn. The chickens could reach just far enough out of their roomy pens to peck at the food as it rolled by. The whole operation was a lot like Cluckytown as I remembered it from the Farm Bureau tour, only the chickens in Krupsky’s breeding barn had much bigger cages, pens really, and they were better fed. They hadn’t had their beaks or leg spurs trimmed. There was only one chicken to a pen, so they had room to spread their wings. There looked to be several different breeds of chickens, some with plumage that rivaled the Queen of England. I looked for the hairless Jane Fonda hen who took to me last time, but she didn’t seem to be around.

  Once Ruth Ann saw that I had the hang of the feeder and wasn’t going to upset the chickens, she waved goodbye and went back to her business with the pallets. I was left alone in the back of the breeding barn, close to the glass lab doors. I snuck back to the doors and passed a white keycard against the lock. Nothing happened. I tried the other white keycard and the doors slid open. I darted in fast, holding my breath, hoping no one saw me. I made it. The lab, with its long experimental tables and blinking, shiny equipment, was cold and empty.

  I hightailed it over to the computer terminal and started popping open files. Lots of research related to chicken genetics. Graphs. Math formulas. All the files read like Greek poo poo to me. Actually, some of it was Chinese poo poo, near as I could tell. I kept popping open files, having no idea what I was looking for. After a bit, I gave up.

  Then I spied the big half-frosted glass room on the far side of the lab that looked like it housed chickens. I hadn’t been able to nose into that room when I’d been in the lab before. I quickly slid that way. Darn. It was locked. I flipped the remaining white key card against the lock and the doors slid open. And there, in the middle of the room, well-lit with warm lights, was a runty rooster and a plump Rhode Island Red laying hen.

  “Ginger!” I yelled. The hen jerked her head up and cackled. She cocked her head and flutter-walked toward me.

  I felt like whooping to celebrate, but I heard the main lab doors swish open. On instinct, I dove into the glass room, hiding as best I could behind a steel wall that separated the pens. My heart was thumping like a scared baby rabbit in my chest. My right knee, which I had twisted as I fell, felt like the devil had his teeth sunk in it.

  I’d seen Jo and Hira enter the lab before I dove behind the wall, but between the closed door, the half-frosted glass walls, and the humming of lab machinery, I couldn’t hear a word of what was going on between them outside in the lab. They looked to be arguing. One of them threw her hands up in the air. The other shook her fists.

  Ginger hopped over and clawed at the fodder in front of me. She eyed me, then did a cute little chicken dance. She seemed healthy, fat, and sassy. Dewey fluttered over to check me out. He crowed and did a fancy thing with his tail feathers. They looked like they might be Ginger and Dewey, and they seemed to recognize their names, but there was no way I could be certain. I mean, Rhode Island Reds all looked pretty much the same, and it had been awhile since I’d seen the missing fowl “in person.” The Krupskys probably owned a few thousand Reds. This pair had steel bands on their right legs, but those bands had numbers, not names.

  Only one way to make a positive ID. I snapped their pictures with my cell. I took a whole slew of pictures. Front. Back. Sideways. They seemed to enjoy the attention. They flew around in circles showing off for me.

  Ma and Peepaw would recognize their babies, but gosh darn, the Hortons didn’t own cell phones. I quickly texted the chicken pictures to Veenie along with a note explaining where I was, and that I needed help. I hoped she’d check her phone soon. It wasn’t all that bad in the breeding pen, but it was warm, and the place smelled like wet hay and chicken doodie. Also, it was way past lunchtime, and my stomach was growling like a Doberman. I found a linty peppermint in the pocke
t of my windbreaker and sucked on that while I nursed my bad knee. Nothing to do but sit tight, wait to be rescued.

  My heart leapt with happiness when the frosted glass door on the pen finally slid open. But when I saw who it was, my heart fell into my stomach so fast I darn near choked to death.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Harry strode into the pen, his brown fedora clutched firmly in one hand. His face was clouded. His pewter-colored mustache twitched like a sickly caterpillar. He carried his blue suit jacket draped over one arm. His shirt sleeves were rolled up tight, like he was spoiling for a fight.

  “Hi,” I managed weakly. Not waiting for a response, I limped past him out the door. He looked like he was fixing to pitch a hissy fit with a tail on it, and I wasn’t in the mood to be on the receiving end.

  I didn’t get far.

  Phus blocked my getaway. He was a solid chunk of a guy who looked very in charge with his two-hundred-dollar white suit and his expensive toupee fluffed up like a nest of peeps. His twin sisters were standing behind him, their silver buzz-cut heads cocked to one side. They were wearing the same matching blue-check shirts and bib overalls as before. Up close like that, they had beady, little, dark eyes. Tall and gangly, with matchstick legs, the twins looked a pair of storks.

  I retreated backward into the pens again.

  Harry lit into me. “I told you, we got no retainer from the Hortons, you got no case. Why on earth are you in here snooping around, sending out secret photos of Krupsky’s lab chickens? Krupsky is paying us, you know. He’s our client.”

  I checked my cell phone. I thought I’d sent the chicken photos to Veenie, but I’d hit the wrong button and sent the whole lot to Harry by mistake.

  Oh, great. Just super-duper.

  “Besides,” Harry continued, “all chickens look alike.” He sniffed the air. “Smell alike too. What reason do you have to believe these chickens are the ones that flew off on the Hortons?”