“A dead person.”
“Anyone we know?”
I jumped in. “Just a skeleton. Pretty darn old from the looks of her. She was wearing button-up shoes and a bonnet and sitting in a rocking chair up in the Wyatt mansion. Just sitting there like she’d had her supper and was fixing to sit by the fire for a spell before bedtime.”
Veenie sniffled. “Ghosts got her, we reckon. Demons maybe. We reckon she’s been haunting the Wyatt mansion trying to get someone’s attention. Wanting someone to give her a decent burial.”
Peepaw squeezed his head into the Chevy’s window. Next to Ma, mashed together like that, they looked like a pair of dried apple bobbleheads. “You gals want some eggs while you’re here?”
“We’ll take a dozen if you gather them,” Veenie said. “My boy, Junior, always has friends coming over, hanging out, mooching. Them boys are eating us out of house and home.”
Ma told Peepaw we’d been ghost hunting for Dode up at the Wyatt mansion. “They found a real live dead person.”
Peepaw’s eyes brightened. “Anyone we know?”
“Nah,” snorted Ma, “a bit older than us.”
“That’s probably good,” said Peepaw. A ruckus started up in the White House. Feathers flew out the Senate coop door. Peepaw shuffled off toward Chickenlandia to see what the fuss was all about. He came back shaking his head and handed us a carton of fresh eggs. “Dewey was trying to mount Ms. Betty Grable.”
Ma shook her head. “Betty not in the mood?”
“Not in the least. Dewey’s sitting up in a sumac tree sulking like a heartbroken Romeo. Left him to lick his wounds.”
Ma leaned into my car window. The batteries must have been waning on her hearing aids. She shouted, “Go on down to the library. Bother Queet. She’s got the dope on Knobby Waters’ pioneer days. If somebody died or disappeared a hundred years ago, she’d be the one to know all about it.”
I thanked Ma for the eggs, the advice, and the emergency pies. And we were off.
Chapter Six
It was bedtime by the time Veenie and I arrived home. I knew the time without consulting a watch because Fergie Junior, Veenie’s son was awake. He was rummaging through the icebox in the kitchen. Junior slept days and the wandered around the house all night like a hungry possum.
Junior lived in our basement, between the canned beans and the zucchini relish, despite his having earned two college degrees in musicology. When he worked, which wasn’t often, he worked nights. He had a part-time gig writing e-music for an Indianapolis Internet company. He called it music, but it sounded to me and Veenie like a rooster scraping his nuts on barbed wire. We preferred the foot-stomping tunes of Dolly Parton.
Junior also had a band, which he’d formed in the seventies in high school, called the Lonely Lip Lizards. Sorry to report that my grown son Eddie is a guitarist in that band. The Lip Lizards played rock and roll every Thursday and Friday night at Pokey’s Tavern and Pool Hall. Every other Saturday they played at the Stumble On Inn over in Ewing.
Junior was standing in his tighty-whitey underwear in the kitchen wearing a tattered wife beater T-shirt. He had one pudgy hand wrapped around a jug of milk, a box of corn flakes clutched in the other. There was no mistaking that he was Veenie’s offspring. He was shaped like his mother. Butt naked, he resembled a fleshy beach ball. He had a bushy red moustache that drooped off his lip like a caterpillar. He wore round eye glasses, tinted green in homage to John Lennon. He was draped in silver and turquoise necklaces. Like his mother, he could have used a good bra.
It was Thursday, so I figured he was fueling up before putting on his concert clothes and rolling out to a battle of the bands. Veenie tossed him the carton of eggs Ma had given us. What was left of the apple pie she kept to herself. “You get a job yet?” she asked.
“Why you always got to ask me that?” he whined.
“Why you always living in my basement like some kind of rodent?”
“I had a rough childhood. My therapist says you and daddy, your divorce traumatized me.”
Veenie snorted. “What traumatized you was your daddy, him being a shiftless idiot and all.”
Fergus Goens Senior owed Veenie forty years of child support. His greatest career achievement had been a year spent drilling holes in the backs of TV sets at the Sylvania plant out at the old Freeman Field up in Seymour. Mostly he lived in his pickup truck with a pack of mangy beagles. He specialized in doing odd jobs at odd hours for odd people. In between he’d managed to climb onto Veenie a couple of times. Fergus Senior liked to shout at Veenie that she should be grateful because he had given her the best gift of her life—that would be Fergie Junior —and that she should be paying him for that.
To which Veenie always replied, “Well that’s debatable.”
Veenie shrugged. “I squeezed you out. Kept you alive. A lot of God’s critters eat their young, you know.”
Junior slurped corn flakes at the kitchen table. He flicked on his iPad as he sucked up breakfast.
“You know,” Veenie said, “you’d enjoy life a heap more if you got a steady job and lowered your expectations. Trouble with your generation is you always wanting to be happy. Happy ain’t natural. Look at the Bible. Those were not happy people. Those were grateful people. Grateful they didn’t get eaten by locusts. Grateful when a whale belched them up. Why not go to work and be miserable every now and then like the rest of us.”
“Got a job. I’m a musician. An artist. I have a right to …” Junior paused. He fiddled with his iPad. “Hey, this you helping out the local fuzz?”
Curious, I leaned over and stole a glance at the iPad screen. It showed the home page of the Hoosier Squealer website, the local gossip rag. A line of pink pigs dressed in purple mini-skirts did a cancan dance along the top of the screen. There was a selfie of Veenie wearing her red IU football helmet, arm slung around the skeleton. They looked like besties, or an ad for the local funeral home.
“Righteous photo, Ma!” cheered Junior.
Veenie peered at the photo, then at me. “Oops! Don’t know how the Squealer got hold of that.” Veenie grabbed her apple pie and made a beeline down the hall. She crashed into her room. I heard the bolt snap before I could scold her for releasing case information to the public. Our client agreement was strict about privacy.
I scrolled through the article online to see if Squeal Daddy knew more about this case than we did. He was an anonymous blogger, but he had ears and eyes all over town. He was a regular Deep Throat when it came to gossip. Everyone in Pawpaw County feared the Squealer. Reading him was way better than watching Jerry Springer. Plus, he could really whip an ordinary spit of a story into a lurid tale.
Ghosts Hosting Late Night Orgies at Wyatt Mansion
Just when you thought things were getting humdrum and dweedle-dumb in Pawpaw County, it appears disgruntled ghosts have chosen our fair hamlet as their new abode. Moreover, they are misbehaving, as ghosts are known to do. Mr. Dode Schneider has reported that he is being visited nightly by specters partying like there is no tomorrow out under the apple trees next door. The trees are part of the old orchard at the abandoned Wyatt mansion.
Being a good citizen, Dode reported the ghosts to the offices of Sheriff Boots Gibson. Sheriff Gibson was reluctant to comment on this story since he has not himself ever seen a ghost. His junior officer, Devon Hattabaugh (related to the Hattabaughs that live over by the Guthrie Mill, not the Hattabaughs that live in the Pansies and Petunias mobile home park) reported that the Pawpaw County police department is exhausted at present policing the living. “By law we don’t have to respond to any calls that come from the dead,” wrote Devon in an email to the Squealer late today.
Since the sheriff’s office would not dirty their hands, Dode, fearing the ghosts were up to no good and might be headed into town to cause a ruckus, hired the Harry Shades Detective Agency. Mrs. Ruby Jane Waskom (RJ to most all of you) and her co-detective Mrs. Lavinia Goens (Veenie to most all of you), went out to investigate
the affair on Dode’s behalf. And, low and behold what did they find but a skeleton in the Wyatt family closet. And I’m talking literally here, folks.
Pictured below is Mrs. Lavinia Goens taking custody of the skeleton, which is itself being held pending further investigation at the county morgue by Ms. April Trueblood, our beloved coroner.
“It wasn’t difficult,” said Lavinia. “She didn’t put up much of a fuss.” Lavinia says this is her first ghost busting case but hopes it will not be her last. She invites anyone who has experience chatting with the dead to call her for assistance with an upcoming séance at the Wyatt mansion. (Her private number is 812-555-5555.)
Ms. Trueblood, the coroner, confirms that the skeleton is female and about as old as Methuselah himself. She has called in the big guns at the university to do an age analysis and a heap of fancy forensics. Ms. Trueblood requests, in the meantime, if anyone is missing an oldster for them to please contact her office.
The story made no mention of orgies. I figured Squeal Daddy put that in the headline just to get people interested enough to click through to the article and the ads. I was relieved Veenie had not gone on public record about ghosts having sex. The ladies auxiliary at the Baptist church would have been all over me about that one.
The comments at the bottom of the story were as good as the story. “If ghosts are living in Pawpaw County scot-free, the law ought to be intervening. The tax rate in this county sucks. I pay almost a thousand a year for my home, and it ain’t even a double-wide. If everybody who squatted here like these here ghost hoboes just paid up, then maybe the school could afford some decent uniforms for the marching band.”
I clicked “agreed,” and powered down the iPad.
Chapter Seven
We couldn’t get a spit of work done the next morning at the office. The phone rang and rang and rang like Christmas bells. It seemed the whole county had read Squeal Daddy’s blog on the skeleton and the ghosts. And they’d all decided to ring Veenie to offer their advice and insightful assistance.
Harry kept taking the phone off the hook.
Veenie kept slipping it back into the cradle. “This here is good publicity,” said Veenie.
“This here is crazy,” said Harry. He had his hat in his hands and was pacing up and down the office. He was so frantic he was wearing holes in the wood. “We’re a respectable agency. I got my PI license to protect. You’re making us look like a bunch of hillbilly crackpots.” He stopped pacing and started chewing on the ragged ends of his moustache.
“Harry,” I said, trying to break it up between him and Veenie before she laid some whoop-ass on him, “we’re barely making expenses. Dode paid us to investigate, and that’s what we’re doing.”
Harry said he’d had enough. He mushed his hat onto his head and stormed out. Said he’d be at Pokey’s if anyone needed him. “Anyone living,” he added. He slammed the door so hard the plate glass windows of the old Rexall drugstore tinkled like wind chimes.
Me and Veenie shrugged. Harry loved to make a scene. He ought to have been born the Queen of Knobby Waters, a princess at the very least.
The phone rang and Veenie answered. She put it on speakerphone so I could get an earful, and so she’d not have to repeat anything vital. I was feeling hopeful. Maybe our dry spell was passing. Maybe we’d get some new clients out of this free publicity. The hood on the Impala had started smoking on the way to work that morning. Black smoke rolled out when I accelerated. It was like gremlins were under the hood frying bacon. I doubted what was wrong with the old Chevy could be fixed with a roll of duct tape and a can of WD-40, though Veenie would try. The emergency fund in the cookie jar was down to five dollars and twenty-three cents. The elastic was going in my underwear, and I was of the age where I’d really begun to appreciate good quality underpants.
If Harry thought we were crackpots, he should have hung around to listen to the ding-a-lings that called all afternoon. Lolly Shepherd called to say that her mother, Vera, had been missing all weekend from Leisure Hills—could that skeleton be her, just how fast did a body decompose, anyway?—but then she called back ten minutes later to say never mind. Her mom wasn’t dead. She’d been out all night making senior whoopee with some hot Elk from Oolitic she’d met at a euchre tournament.
Some young guy with a Donald Duck voice called. He wanted to know if the skeleton had been wearing panties. Veenie hung up on him.
A nut from Sparksville with his own church called to say that he’d been told by God that Veenie was now demonically possessed by a dark she-devil. He said he could grant her salvation, but she’d have to sleep with him at least three times.
Veenie asked how old he was and if he could text her a recent photo.
We were both exhausted by lunchtime. Veenie had just taken the phone off the cradle. We were settling in for a late lunch of bologna and Velveeta cheese double-decker sandwiches and Cheetos when we got a walk-in.
Her hair was puffed up beauty-queen big, like it had been rolled overnight in orange juice cans. It was fire engine red. She dangled a lit cigarette in one hand. Her nails were long and polished purple, sharpened to points like pencils. She was wearing denim stretch capris and a tight purple tube top. Her breasts were impressively perky. Bracelets dangled on both wrists. Not expensive ones. These were cheap and pretty, like those sold at the five-and-dime. She was wearing false eyelashes and enough eyeliner to impress Cleopatra.
“Howdy gals. Name is Kandy Huggins. From the Homer Huggins clan down around Scottsburg. Had a dream told me you gals needed some help up here.”
She plopped down in an office chair and lit her cigarette with a monogrammed “K” lighter that she pulled from her purse, a tiny silver thing that dangled on a strap from her shoulder.
Veenie eyed her suspiciously. “What kind of help?”
“Ghosts, specters, that sort of thing.” Kandy looked around the office. “Hey, this place is kind of cute. Never been in this neck of the woods before. Had an uncle did time over at Terre Haute, but we never drove through this way. Might have eventually come through this way, but he wasn’t there long before they fried him. Some terrible misunderstanding between him and a feeble-minded fella about who owned a squirrel rifle.”
I was intrigued. “What do you know about ghosts?”
“I reckon about everything. They talk to me. Right regular too. They give me messages to pass on to their kin and loved ones. Yak! Yak! Yak! I guess you’d say I’m like a switchboard to the Holy Hereafter.” She barked out a laugh in a cloud of smoke.
Veenie handed her Harry’s special Grand Poohbah Elks water glass to use as an ashtray. “What message you have for us?”
Kandy flicked her cigarette. “The lady ghost, the one attached to that there skeleton you found, says she is mighty grateful you found her. Says she couldn’t rest until she had a decent Christian burial. She’s been waiting for a hundred years, you know.”
Veenie was all ears now.
I was kind of intrigued too. “What else did the skeleton tell you?”
“Said she wants to talk direct, heart-to-heart, to the woman who found her.”
Veenie’s eyes brightened. “That would be me.”
“Well, all righty then. You can set up a séance? Out at that mansion where you found the skeleton?”
“Heck, sure can.”
“Here’s my cell number.” Kandy flipped her cell phone around to show the display to Veenie. The two exchanged cell phone numbers. “Sooner is better. Now that the ghost is kicking around and about to be buried, we don’t have a lot of time before she passes over to the other side. Once she’s gone, there won’t be any forwarding address. I’m staying out at the Moon Glo Motor Lodge, down by the river.”
Veenie said, “They still got them vibrating Magic Finger beds?”
“They got lumpy beds.” Kandy cradled her lower back. “And the water out there tastes like it’s been plumbed from the devil’s own hairy ass.”
Back in the sixties, the Moon Glo had
installed quarter-driven massage beds as a promotional gimmick. People used to meet up there for quickies before going fishing. I reckon they still did. I’d never used one of the Magic Finger beds, but Veenie had once because, well, because she was Veenie and had to try every little weird thing. Her report at the time had been, “It wasn’t all that magical. More like a poke and jab. Then the thing tosses you right out of bed.”
“Sounds like how your ex, Fergus, used to go at it.”
“Yep. Just as magical, but he never charged me a quarter.”
Kandy stood up and tried again to straighten out her back. I wondered how old Kandy was. Her clothes said thirty, but her neck crepe screamed fifty. She was kind of flashy, like maybe how you’d expect a carnie fortune-teller to be. I decided to poke at her some more. “You charge money to do a séance?”
“Course I do, honey. I’m a professional. I got expenses.” She opened her tiny silver purse and slid a card onto the desk that featured a crystal ball and a picture of her in a blonde wig taken at least twenty years ago. She was wearing gypsy earrings and gazing at the glowing ball. The card said she was a traveling psychic and a fortune-teller.
Veenie jumped in. “How much you charge?”
Kandy looked around the place. I got the sense she was trying to figure out how much she could squeeze out of us before we would squeal. “Two hundred dollars. That’s my senior discount. You two are getting on. Closer to the afterlife. Don’t require as much energy to dial-up the dead. Don’t mind giving you old gals a break.”
Veenie considered this. We still had a couple of hundred left on Dode’s retainer and his second jar of moldy money as a backup. “We got to ask Dode. It was him who hired us. This would be on his tab.”
“Who’s that?”
“Dode Schneider. He owns the farm next to the Wyatt mansion. It was him who saw the ghosts and hired us.”
Ghost Busting Mystery Page 4