“Thanks girls,” said Sassy. “You two staying in tonight?” She gathered both dresses in her arms.
I tucked the afghan under my chin. “I got a hot date later with the men of Bonanza.”
Sassy shook her head. “You ought to date that sheriff. I hear tell he’s sweet on you.”
“I had a husband,” I mumbled. That was true. I’d married Charlie “Whiskers” Waskom right out of high school, and we’d popped out two kids, Eddie and Joyce. Eddie still moped around Pawpaw County but my daughter Joyce, a social climber, had attended IU and moved over to Monroe County in Bloomington. She was married to Mr. Insurance of Southern Indiana, Rusty Krotch, a successful pot-bellied little guy from Atlanta with a hawkish face, who I’d always found a wee bit light in the loafers. He was one heck of an insurance salesman, though. My own husband, Charlie, had died suddenly when our kids were still in high school. He was a good man and a great daddy to our kids, but our marriage, in hindsight, had been a heap of work.
“Have another go at a husband,” recommended Sassy. “I’ve had four. The more you do it, the better it gets. Don’t you miss having a big old man hugging on you?”
“I don’t miss having a big old man leaving his laundry all over the place.”
Veenie asked me to toss her the bag of Cheetos. I complied, and she ripped right into it. “RJ ain’t romantic like us,” she mumbled at Sassy between cheese curls.
“Fiddlesticks,” I said. “I’m plenty romantic. I’m just tuckered out.”
Sassy sat down at the end of the sofa. “You need you a man who can take care of you. Some big old hunk who’ll juice you right up.”
“I’m not sure I want to be juicy,” I complained. “Being juicy was a heap of work, and I wasn’t very good at it.” It was true. I’d always been tall and giraffe like. Now that I kept my white hair short and wore unisex glasses, people often said to me, “Excuse me, sir,” when they bumped into me at the Walmart. It’d take a lot of work to gloss me up. At my age, I could drop dead from that much effort.
Veenie kicked off her clogs. “Bootsie thinks you’re juicy. You wouldn’t have to gussy anything for him.”
Sassy volunteered to help glamorize me.
I flashed back to high school when Sassy had bought some Ms. Clairol blonde bomb and rubbed it into my hair. She put up my hair in orange juice can rollers and tried to convince me I looked like Marilyn Monroe. Not everyone at the Spring Fling Corn Husker’s Ball had thought I looked glamorous. My cousin Harvey, aka “Snake Hips” Jones, for one, had called me Miss Andy Warhol all night long.
Sassy had moved on to her shoes and was trying to decide which pair would be best for the VFW gala. She flipped open four boxes. She held one shoe out on the flat of her hand, like Cinderella. “I can’t decide which Melvin might like best. He has classic refined tastes, being a Southern gentleman and all.”
Veenie choose a pair of white satin slippers with little rhinestone hearts across the stitching. “You’re feet are honking big. And you’ve got toe corns. Those there will make your feet look more dateable.”
I had to agree.
Sassy swooped back to her room to get ready for Melvin.
No sooner had Sassy disappeared than the doorbell rang. Veenie answered the door bell. It was Melvin. He was early and all gussied up. He had on a gray turtle neck and a nice white dinner jacket with white pants and patent leather shoes. He had the cutest little red carnation in his jacket button hole. He leaned on his cane a little as he came in. It was black with a fancy gold bulldog’s head as the grip. “Good evening, ladies,” he said.
“Howdy,” I said. “Have a seat. Sassy is still getting pretty.”
He sat next to Veenie in the empty recliner. “You gals not going to the dance?”
Veenie said Dickie loved to dance, but Dickie was busy working on the Chevy, trying to get the new radiator installed and the car ready for an inspection.
I said I was too pooped to tap and twirl.
“How’s the ghost hunting?” he asked Veenie. “Heard you all found interesting things out at the mansion.”
Veenie squinted her eyes. “How’d you hear that?”
“Read it on the Hoosier Squealer.”
“Tarnation,” I said. “That Squeal Daddy has one big mouth.”
Veenie agreed. “Where you reckon he gets his intelligence? You reckon he’s following us around with one of those flying spy drones?”
“Nah, I think he gets his stories the old fashioned way. No shortage of gossips in Knobby Waters. Probably paying our neighbors to spill the beans.” I meant old Mrs. Nierman. We’d both seen her with night binoculars trying to hide behind the lace curtains in her parlor while tracking our every move. Every now and then Veenie mooned her just to give her something to get all whipped up about.
Melvin asked if we’d found anything of real interest.
“Nah,” I said. “Just some lights and shovels. Looks like someone has been digging late at night around the back apple trees.”
“Ghosts?”
“Nah. I think we got live people involved in this.”
“What on earth are they digging for?”
“Got me,” I said.
“It’s the treasure,” said Veenie.
Melvin sat up. His ears perked up. “Treasure? Do tell.”
“Alta, or her ghost, done told us she’d hid a treasure. Jedidiah’s gold. The gold he stole from the town and the bank.”
I felt compelled to point out to Veenie that we had no evidence at all of any treasure or gold. For all we knew, someone was digging for night crawlers.
Veenie shook her head. “Nah. Even Randy Ollis done told us there’s gold out there.”
Melvin asked about Randy.
Veenie explained how he was Alta’s great-great-nephew, and how the Ollis family had a notion that Jedidiah had buried the gold before he fled town.
“My,” said Melvin. “You two going to dig for the treasure?”
I said “No,” the same time Veenie said, “Darn tootin’, we are.”
Sassy twirled into the room.
Melvin “ooed” and “aaahed” and helped drape a delicate crocheted shawl over Sassy’s shoulders.
Sassy told us not to wait up for her.
Veenie said, “Why would we do that?”
Melvin gave us a polite, little bow goodbye. “You ladies stay out of trouble now.”
As soon as Sassy was gone, I said, “I am not digging for gold.”
“Who asked you to?” Veenie crunched on some Cheetos. She had an orange ring around her mouth like a clown. She washed the Cheetos down with a bottle of Big Red pop.
“You told Melvin we were going to dig for gold.”
“I said ‘we.’ I know people other than you. Everything doesn’t have to be about you, Ruby Jane.”
Veenie clicked the channel over to Bonanza and slid up the volume. A herd of cattle thundered through the living room. We sat like that the rest of the night tossing a bag of Cheetos back and forth between us.
Chapter Twenty-One
Harry paced back and forth behind my desk. “We still got Dode on retainer?”
I’d piled a handful of bills and checks on Harry’s desk earlier. I needed him to sign the checks so we could get up to date on the bills. Gratefully, Harry owned the old building and lived a cozy bachelor’s life in an upstairs apartment. The downstairs we used as an office and storage. He’d inherited the building from a spinster aunt on his mom’s side, so we didn’t have to worry about being tossed out on our behinds.
“Darn near used up Dode’s first money jar. I was waiting a piece before busting open the second one. I figure we’ll need to bust it open soon to cover Kandy’s second séance.”
Harry stopped pacing and petted his moustache. “We got enough to cover these bills?” He picked up the stack I’d placed on his desk and rubbed the papers between his thumb and forefinger.
“Sure do.” He didn’t really have to ask. He knew darn well I’d not have writt
en the checks if we couldn’t make good. I’d never bounced a check in my life, and I wasn’t about to start this late in the game.
“Enough to make the next payroll?”
“Nope.”
We had two weeks before payroll was due again. Technically, it was Harry’s job to beat the bushes, drum up business. It was his company, after all. I asked him if he had any particular new clients in mind.
He looked up from signing the bills. “Why do I always have to do every little thing around here?”
“Hold your horses there, Harry,” I said. “Veenie and I found the last client. Last two clients, in fact.”
That seemed to tick him off. He grabbed his hat, clutched up the paid bills, and headed toward the door. “I’ll be out on the streets drumming up business to help feed you and your whackadoodle sidekick. If you need me, call. I’ll be sure not to answer.”
Harry bumped into Veenie as she came barreling into the office. She’d been down to the Road Kill Café loading up on day-old donuts for breakfast.
“Hey!” she cried as Harry blew past. “What’s got the big boss man huffing and puffing?”
“Need some new clients. Cash is getting low again.”
“Ought to advertise on the Hoosier Squealer. Everybody and his brother reads that rag.”
“I dunno. Everybody has a heap of troubles, but nobody seems to have any cash money these days.”
Veenie pulled a flier out of her pocket and smoothed it across my desk. “Here’s a right nice, quick case for us. Saw this tacked on the community board at the Road Kill.”
The flier read: Dog. Missing. One hundred dollar reward. Answers to the name Puddles Beesley. There was a picture of a wiener dog. He was fat and looked more like a swollen tick than a canine. The picture was fuzzy, but it looked like he was missing quite a few teeth and some whiskers too. The flier gave a number to call. Said to ask for Bet Beesley. Bet, one of Chin Wilkerson’s girls, had been a year behind me in school. She’d married Pard Beesley, who was a year ahead of me in school. He was retired now, but used to drive a dump truck for the brick plant. They lived in a cute, little yellow brick bungalow right around the corner from us.
“Okeydokey,” I said. “Let’s go pay Bet a visit. See if she has any tips. Maybe she can tell us where Puddles likes to hang out and howl it up.”
I locked up the office, and we rolled out to the go-kart, which was parked in front of the office in a spot where the meter read “expired.”
“You didn’t feed the meter?” I asked Veenie.
“You don’t need to feed the meter if it’s a go-kart.”
“You sure about that?” I asked as I climbed into my orange bucket seat.
“Course I am. It’s common sense. We got no license plate. I got no license. Parking laws only apply to licensed vehicles.”
I had my doubts Boot would see it that way, but luckily the go-kart hadn’t been ticketed.
Veenie strapped on her helmet and climbed into the driver’s seat. Excited, she wiggled down into her seat and fiddled with the safety strap until she had herself tightly locked in. You would have thought we were off to the Indy 500. Veenie came alive every time we took on a new case. It didn’t matter how big the case was. Her one true talent was snooping. Now that she was a paid professional snoop, nothing could dampen her spark. “I figure we can look for the pooch as we tool around town running errands. He looked mighty old in that photo, like he could pop and roll on into the Holy Hereafter anytime now.”
I was about to answer when Veenie sparked up the go-kart. The thing certainly worked, maybe too well. Every time she started it up and released the hand brake, I got whip lash.
I grabbed the roll bar, and we bounced down the street in a rattling ball of exhaust smoke.
By the time we arrived at Bet’s house her eyes were red as firecrackers from crying over her missing dog, Puddles. She shuffled around the kitchen in a housecoat with big pockets shaped like sunflowers on each side. Her hair was short and streaked gray. She poured us some fresh-squeezed lemonade, and we put our heads together to figure out how best to track down Puddles.
The kitchen smelled like fried chicken. Last night’s supper, I reckoned. Bet handed us a photo off the refrigerator. In the photo, she was sitting on the davenport, kissing on her wiener dog. She dabbed at the corners of her eyes with a tissue as she pointed at the photo.
“Bless his little fur baby heart. He’s old, but he don’t know it. All his ass hair fell out couple of weeks ago. Came out in clumps. All that hair clogged up my old Hoover,” Bet said as she blew her nose into a tissue. “Got the high sugar too. Needs his nightly meds.”
“How’d he go missing?” I asked.
“My genius better half, Pard, left the back door open.” Bet sort of yelled this in the general direction of the living room.
Pard screeched from the interior of the house, where the evening news was blaring on the TV. “I heard that, old woman!”
Bet shook her head. “He never did like that dog. Jealous of him, near as I can tell.”
Pard shuffled into the kitchen, pushing a walker. “It was hot. I left the darn back door open just this one time to get me some cross breeze.” He pulled a hankie out of his pocket and snorted into it. “Stupid dog must’ve fallen out the back door.”
He’s blind as a beach ball,” said Bet. “Special needs dog. I got him from the wiener dog rescue.”
“Well,” I said, “if he’s that blind, he couldn’t have stumbled too far.”
“You reckon?” Bet’s face was lined with worry. She wiped her hands on her apron.
Veenie, who had a soft spot for dogs, told Bet not to worry. “Me and RJ have found all sorts of things. It’s a senior specialty of ours.”
I looked at Veenie, puzzled.
Veenie said, “Don’t look at me like that. Remember when Otis Helms couldn’t find his new false teeth? And we found them for him. In the refrigerator.”
I looked at Bet. “They were behind the butter.”
Veenie asked where Puddles liked to hang.
Bet thought for a minute. “When he was younger, he just loved to squeeze out the back gate and run down the block to party it up with Bernice, Lolly Shepherd’s Saint Bernard hussy. They had a real cute litter together, back a decade ago. I mean Puddles and Bernice, not Lolly and Puddles. Anyway, they were wiener puppies with long Saint Bernard coats. Never seen anything that cute. He’s tubby now. Couldn’t squeeze through anything, even if he could see to make his way. He likes trash. The smell of it. Used to jump into the dumpsters down in the alley behind Pokey’s. Fished him out of there once or twiced.”
Pard, who’d been standing in the kitchen listening to us, loaded the wicker basket on the front of his walker with towel-wrapped, fried chicken drumsticks from the stovetop. He tossed in some napkins. He clumped back toward the living room, stopping just long enough to bend down and whisper in my ear, “I’ll pay you another fifty not to find that smelly, little dog.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Junior slinked into the living room. He was wearing bell-bottom blue jeans and a hippie, tie-dyed T-shirt for Ben & Jerry’s Wavy Gravy ice cream. His belt buckle was shaped like a giant marijuana leaf. He was wearing about a dozen strings of Mardi Gras beads. His eyes were hidden, as usual, behind round, green glasses. He slumped into the recliner next to Veenie, who was reading a Father Mackie book. “Hey, you guys know how my hog got back here?”
Without looking up from her book Veenie shook her head.
I shrugged.
Junior said, “That’s funny. Cause Squeal Daddy says you do.” He flicked open his iPad and held it out toward his mother. “Squeal Daddy says you were popping wheelies out by the covered bridge. He wrote you up in his police blotter section. You got no license, you realize? Riding a motorbike with no license, that’s against the law, just so you know.”
Veenie peered at the screen. “That’s a pretty good photo of me.” She went back to reading her book.
�
��Ma!” protested Junior. “Did you steal my bike from Pokey’s for a joyride, then bring it back here?”
“Course not. Why would I do that?”
“Same reason you do everything. You’re freaky.”
“You got your bike back. What’s it matter?” Veenie still had her nose in the book.
“Ma, the guys down at Pokey’s are making fun of me.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much what them fellows think of you. They don’t think all that often.”
Darnell popped into the living room. He was wearing a red paisley do-rag. His pigtails were clean and neatly braided. He had on a crackly, old, brown leather bomber jacket and a pair of denim capris. He had a guitar slung over his back. A pair of army-green Crocs topped off his breezy rock ’n’ roll look.
“Yo, Grannies!” he called. He flipped his guitar around to his front side and slumped onto the couch by my feet. “Heard you been back at that mansion snooping it up. See any more ghosts?”
“Nah,” I said as I worked on my crossword puzzle. “Just found some stuff stashed outside the house.”
“Like?”
“Couple of flashlights. A shovel.”
“Whoa. What’s that about?” Darnell had a bottle of PBR and was taking fast little slugs of it.
“Dunno,” I said.
Veenie looked up from her iPad. “She knows. Someone’s been poking around looking for Jedidiah’s buried gold.”
“For real? You mean that stolen bank gold what Randy was yacking about?”
“Randy tell you anything about that gold after that séance or while you two been knocking back drinks down at Pokey’s?” Veenie asked.
“Heck no. I mean, he did mention how cool it would be if there was gold and all. How if there was gold, he reckoned he and his kin deserved some, being as how they were the rightful heirs and all.”
I shook my head. “Even if there were gold—and that’s a honking big IF—if it was stolen it’d belong to the town, or the people he stole it from, I reckon.”
“The way Randy sees it, it’s probably mostly the dowry his great-great-grandpop laid out, so Jedidiah would take Alta Iona off their hands. That being the case, wouldn’t it belong to the Ollis family?”
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