I didn’t have to ask again. Veenie was on her feet clopping toward the back door. She had her hand on the grip of her BB pistol. Whatever lived in the Wyatt mansion had better have its wits about it. It was about to go head-to-head with Lavinia Goens. And in the sixty years I’d known Veenie, that contest had invariably had only one outcome.
Veenie busted a couple of boards off the bottom of the door window with the butt end of her flashlight. She kicked at the door while I twisted at the knob. We grunted and sweated and kicked some more. We threw everything we had at that back door until eventually the rotted boards gave way and we fell straight into what looked to be the kitchen.
So much for sneaking up on the ghosts. They’d have to be dead not to hear the two of us coming.
Veenie charged on.
It was dark and musty inside the house. A long white porcelain sink with a faded red pump handle squatted to our right. A couple of rusty iron skillets hung from the pantry rafters. A single beam of light shot down the hallway into the kitchen. Veenie decided to follow the beam. She had the only flashlight, so I decided to follow her.
Cobwebs clung to our faces as we worked our way down the hall toward the beam of light. The light seemed to be streaming from the sitting parlor. That room faced Dode’s farmhouse. Dirty streaks of light poured in through the high windows, which were cracked, boarded up tight from the inside. A limestone fireplace on one end was piled high with half-burnt trash and the cotton stuffing out of an old divan. The place smelled like a mouse piss and cat turd salad. Wallpaper wagged in tongues off the walls. Plaster had cracked off the ceiling and splattered in dusty piles across the wood floor. The place was what you might call a “fixer-upper.”
I saw dust flakes and spiders drifting down from the tin ceiling as Veenie swung her light around the room. A creaking sound started up. I bumped into Veenie. We froze together like sweaty melting popsicles. I heard a clacking, and my heart leapt into my throat. I relaxed when I realized the clacking was Veenie’s false teeth and not some ghost demon with a chain about to brain us for coming to give him the final directions to hell.
The creaking was coming from a rocking chair that was in full swing. We could see the back of the chair and what looked like the clothed arms of a person resting on the arm rests. We could see the top of a dingy ragged bonnet.
I felt a little odd. Like I might wet my pants.
Veenie charged ahead. Spider webs flew everywhere. The BB pistol popped off. A shower of plaster fell on my head and into my eyes, blinding me.
The rocking chair upended. A skeleton clattered onto the floor. She lay there, her bonnet askew, grinning up at us with rotten teeth.
Something flew past me toward the door. It was fast and white and wheezing. It took me a moment for me to realize it wasn’t a ghost, but Veenie.
Chapter Four
Veenie beat me back to Dode’s porch by a full five seconds.
He’d heard the clattering and commotion and was standing on the top step, rifle raised to one eye. He had the rifle pointed at us as we erupted from the weeds behind his truck.
“Oh, hell! It’s us. Don’t shoot, Dode!” I screamed.
Veenie was dancing around me screeching the same. “Hold your fire, you old coot!”
Dode lowered his rifle. “What in tarnation?”
Veenie’s football helmet had fallen off. Her white hair was spiked up on top of her head. Her face was red and soaked in sweat. She looked like a fat albino woodpecker.
I imagined I looked just as bad. My short white hair was probably sticking straight up like a horsehair cleaning brush. My knees were rubbery and knocking together.
Veenie was wheezing like a broken pump organ.
It took us both a minute to recover.
I stared at Veenie.
She looked at me. “That was a skeleton? Right?”
“I, er, think so.”
We were both feeling pretty sheepish.
Dode stepped down and took a long look at us. “You seen them ghosts, didn’t you? They chasing you?” He raised his rifle and swung it around at the edge of the goldenrods. He fired a couple of blind rounds into the weeds. Stray cats shot out and bounced across the yard like hairballs.
“We saw a skeleton, Dode,” I said, my breath almost back in my body.
“A skeleton chased you?” Dode’s eyes were as big as headlights.
Veenie puffed up. “It would have, but we hightailed it out before she could get her spirit going. Ghosts sleep in the daytime.”
“Hot diggity!” said Dode. “I knew them were ghosts I’d been seeing.”
A siren wailed. A Pawpaw County police cruiser, cherry spinning, slid into the yard almost slamming into Dode’s truck.
Devon Hattabaugh, the junior officer in training, sprung out of the car. He hunched down behind the open door, his pistol drawn. He wasn’t wearing a cop hat. He was wearing his customary beret, aviator sunglasses, and a tie-dyed T-shirt with a pair of denim knee-knocker shorts. His muttonchop sideburns were bushed out like squirrel tails. He was wearing ankle boots and athletic socks. “Hit the ground!” he squeaked. “Law enforcement! Hit the ground!”
Veenie strolled over to Devon. “Put that thing away.”
Devon kept yelling, “Got you ladies covered. Hit the ground! Go down!”
Veenie walked up to him and smacked him up the side of his head with the butt of her BB pistol.
“What the bejeebers!” He rubbed the side of his head with the edge of his beret.
Veenie peered into the cruiser. “Where’s Boots? We got us a ghost skeleton. We need a seasoned officer of the law to bring it in.”
Devon holstered his pistol. “At a conference. Up at the courthouse. A training on emergency flood evacuations. I’m in charge. Responding to all calls coming out of Knobby Waters today.”
“Lucky us,” said Veenie, who saw Devon as a pimply-faced community college kid, which he was. Knobby Waters was a small town. Everybody knew everybody and their kin. Both Veenie and I had seen Devon waddling around downtown with a loaded diaper a couple of decades ago. We refused to be ordered around by anyone under fifty, or any man who wore a beret, for that matter.
Devon reluctantly holstered his pistol. “Got a call from dispatch. Said there was gunfire. Called for assistance. Backup.”
Dode ambled forward. “That would have been me. I called when I heard the commotion from the mansion. Figured the ladies needed assistance. Didn’t know how many ghosts we were dealing with. Could have been a herd of them.”
Devon eyed Veenie cautiously.
Veenie squared her shoulders. “You know anything at all about ghosts?”
“No. What? Wait a minute. You called me out here because of ghosts?”
Sensing things were about to go from bad to worse, I intervened. “We found a skeleton in the Wyatt mansion.”
“Buried?”
Veenie chortled. “Course not. She was sitting up. In a rocking chair.”
“How long she been dead?”
“Long enough she’s all bone. No skin.”
I could tell by the puzzled look on Devon’s face that he was trying to figure out if this sort of thing fell under his jurisdiction. The way I saw it, a dead person was a dead person. The law ought to be interested in any body or part thereof found outside of a cemetery. I said as much to Devon.
“Well, okay,” grumbled Devon. He radioed dispatch that he’d arrived on the scene at Dode’s place and was going into the mansion to investigate the report of a ghost.
“The report of a what? Of a who?” the dispatcher cackled. I could tell by the voice that it was Bitsy Gorbett, and that she was enjoying this call. She was about our age. Probably hated like heck that little Devon got to boss her around.
“You heard me,” said Devon. “And I ain’t saying it again.” His cheeks were red as peppers as he followed me and Veenie and Dode through the weedy path to the house. We could still hear Bitsy cackling over his radio when we climbed in through the bust
ed back door. When we got to the living room, the skeleton was still there grinning up at us.
“Sure looks dead,” said Devon as he took out his flashlight and swung it around the body.
“You reckon?” said Veenie.
“From the looks of her, I’d say she’s been dead near a hundred years.” He shone his flashlight on her black button-up boots. She was wearing several layers of petticoats under her dress, which looked like it might have once been made of some nice pieces of red velvet. Her hair, what little of it was left, curled from under her bonnet like rat tails.
Devon squatted over the skeleton. He ran his light over the hands. “No rings.” He flashed light up and down the body. “No jewelry of any kind.”
The little walkie-talkie thing mounted on Devon’s shoulder squawked. It was the dispatcher, still laughing. “Sheriff Gibson wants to know if this here ghost call involves Ruby Jane Waskom.”
I stepped up and spat at the walkie-talkie as Devon pressed the intercom button. “We got us a body here, Boots. Up at the Wyatt mansion.”
Some static, then Boots sighed on the other end. “Course you do, Ruby Jane. Whose body is it?’
“Dunno. Looks to be about a hundred years old. A woman.”
“All bones, no skin,” shouted Veenie.
Devon spoke into the intercom. “What should I do, boss?”
“Your job,” said Boots.
“Roger, er, what’s the procedure for a skeleton, boss?”
Boots sighed again. “Call April.”
I knew he meant April Trueblood, the county coroner.
“Don’t matter how old the body is. She can inspect the scene and bag the body. They’ll do an autopsy. Try and get an ID. Determine a cause of death. We don’t do anything more unless April rules it foul play.”
April arrived about an hour later. She was a petite woman who never wore anything but old jeans, a sock cap, and a stained lab coat, even when off duty. Everybody knew her because her dad, Joe, helped lead the Knobby Waters Corn Shuckers to a win in the Pawpaw County basketball tournament a couple of decades ago. Basketball being God’s chosen sport, Joe Trueblood was, and always would be, a Knobby Waters legend.
We were all sitting on Dode’s porch sipping well water and sucking on a cold salted dish of cucumbers Dode had whipped up for us when April’s white van turned into the farmhouse drive. She hopped out of the van, her medical bag in hand. Her salt and pepper hair flipped up over the rim of her black sock cap. It was humid, but she loved wearing that hat. Told me once it helped keep the creepy stuff and smell out of her hair when she worked.
April heaped her bag and gear on the porch steps and looked around. “You gals got a body for me?” She was wearing square, white, plastic sunglasses with bright green lenses. The top corners were studded with rhinestone daisies. I would have looked silly in something so floozified, but those dime store glasses were cute as kittens on April.
Veenie offered to show April over to the mansion and give her the ten-cent tour of the dearly departed.
I don’t know who was more excited, April or Veenie. April was chatting about how she’d never done a forensics analysis on just bones before. She’d have to call in the big guns and ghouls from the Skull and Bones Club in the medical forensics department over at Indiana University for assistance.
Veenie was bouncing up and down talking about ghosts. How we might need a séance to get at the real story. “Dead people love to gab,” she assured April. “Ghosts will talk your ear off if you give them half a chance. It’s lonely as hell being dead. Hard enough to get someone to pay attention to you when you’re alive.”
I was sitting on the porch with Dode. He was sprawled out in the rocker, his long arms and legs dangling off the rocker like rubber hoses. He was dead to the world. His rifle was on the floor at his feet. His lips were puffing out air, like a steam locomotive leaving the station. The ghosts had done tuckered him out.
I sipped on my jar of cold well water and wondered who was going to conduct Veenie’s upcoming séance. I had an uneasy hunch I already knew the answer.
Chapter Five
It didn’t take long for April to remove the skeleton. Veenie helped. She was looking ragged around the edges by the time April left. All that excitement had done her in. I could tell she was envying Dode’s snooze-fest on the porch. The sun was a red marble sinking behind a curtain of baby corn stalks as we gathered our stuff and crept off the porch on tiptoe, leaving Dode to nap.
“We got any emergency pie at the house?” asked Veenie, her bright little eyes hopeful as we climbed into the Impala.
I shook my head a woeful no.
“I’m weak as a kitten. My bones are jelly. Can we stop and get us some pie?”
I skidded the Chevy to a stop, cut a gravel donut, and spun back up the twisty, winding road to the knobs. I headed toward Ma and Peepaw Horton’s place. The sun was fixing to sit, but Ma and Peepaw operated a pie shed that never closed. It was an old tool shed with a pie pantry on one side, a tiny glass refrigerator for cream pies on the other side. If you had ten bucks, you could pick up a pie anytime. There was a metal sap bucket nailed to the door where you could leave your money. Ma had painted a sign that said “Thou shalt not steal.” Underneath, after they’d been robbed once, Peepaw had written, “This means you, knucklehead.”
Ma and Peepaw also kept the largest backyard hen house in Pawpaw County. Well, calling it a house might be a wee understatement. Peepaw Horton was an energetic fellow, and Ma loved her chickens. Together they’d fashioned replicas of the White House, the Supreme Court, and the Senate building out of scrap lumber. The buildings were connected with two-by-fours and chicken wire catwalks. It wasn’t a chicken house so much as it was an entire Chickenlandia. The whole kit and caboodle was fenced with cyclone wire held up by hand-skinned fence posts. Dewey, the big handsome rooster, was the self-appointed president of Chickenlandia. He crowed on and on about nothing at all hours, like most men. The hens ignored him. They ran around pecking for bugs and gossiping out in front of the Senate, where they nested. The hens were in charge of everybody and everything. Veenie was deathly afraid of chickens (long story about a summer job we once had up at Bundy Brothers Packing, scalding and plucking chickens to make canned soup), so she’d never explored the henhouse compound, but I’d taken the grand tour.
Peepaw Horton threw a one-handed howdy as we pulled in next to the pie shed. He was leaning against the shed on a rickety wooden stepladder with screws sticking out both corners of his mouth. It looked like he’d stuck the screws between his lips so he’d have his hands free to work on a roof repair project. Peepaw was skinny. He had a white buzz cut that he’d not changed since Truman was president. His face was the color and texture of a walnut. He wore a dirty gray bowler hat. His eyes shined like nickels. He was so bowed legged he looked like one of those toy cowboys pre-formed to sit in a horse’s saddle.
He gripped a screwdriver in one hand. He was tacking the bottom circle of an aluminum pie pan over a hole up where the bead board on the pie shed met with the corrugated roof. “Varmints,” he grunted. “Got into the shed last night. Made a mighty mess of a pecan pie.”
Veenie shook her head. “They leave the apple alone? We need us some emergency apple pie.”
“Ma baked two. Fresh this morning.”
Ma Horton stepped out of the pie shed. She wasn’t anybody’s mother, people had always called her that because she and Peepaw were kindly to stray animals and outcasts. She wiped her hands on her bibbed apron as she came out of the shed. She was wearing a pair of hearing aids. Black antennae, like on an ant’s head, sprouted from the top of each hearing aid. Her thin gray hair was plaited in braids that wound like a spool of thread around the top of her head. She wore a flower print dress with a lace collar. The dress was tucked up under her breasts. She wore leather farm boots, their laces undone halfway. The tongues on the boots flapped when she walked. She was a short woman shaped like an apple who’d decided long ago that she prefer
red the company of chickens to people. And she made the world’s best pies.
“Howdy gals,” she said. “Just put some pies out to rest in the shed. Help yourself.”
That was all the encouragement Veenie needed. She rolled into the shed and came back with a pie in each hand. “Coconut cream for you. Apple for me.” I could see where Veenie had already finger-scooped apple slices out of her pie.
Ma asked me what we were doing up her way.
“Dode Schneider. On a case. Ghosts pestering him over at the Wyatt mansion.”
“Or aliens. Could be aliens.” Veenie was making a lot of noise. I could hear her having at the pie with her fingers. I decided not to look.
Ma leaned into the Chevy window, her elbows on the hot rim. She adjusted one hearing aid. “Dode ain’t been quite right in the head since that snowplow hit him.”
“At least he has an excuse.” I eyed Veenie.
“That why I heard the cops headed toward Dode’s?”
“Probably. You know any reason a ghost might haunt that old Wyatt mansion?”
Ma shook her head. “Place was empty before my time. Most folks don’t remember old Jedidiah Wyatt. Those that do got no Godly words for him.”
“He have kin?”
“Don’t think so. He came up the Ohio on one of them paddle wheeled boats. His kin were over in Georgia, or thereabouts. He moseyed up here with the river rats right after we Yanks ass whooped the South. Married one of them Ollis girls. Stole her and her kin blind. Left her high and dry.”
Veenie stopped having at her pie. Half of it was gone. “I feel better,” she belched. “Not so weak.”
Ma peered over at Veenie. “Emergency pie?”
“Saw something ugly. Had to fortify myself.”
Ma looked intrigued. “Whad’ya see?”
Ghost Busting Mystery Page 3