by Tonya Kappes
Chicken’s small grassy yard was filled with chicken and hen lawn ornaments. The wind chime was dangling hens. Marla Maria stood with her back to us.
No wonder she killed you. Who would want to ride in a beat up truck when you owned a Cadillac? The words almost escaped my mouth, but I knew I’d be better off keeping my lips shut.
“Marla Maria, baby!” A man yelled from across the gravel road. He looked both ways before he crossed. I squinted trying to get a good look at his face. Unfortunately, his John Deere hat shadowed his face down to his chin.
“Baby?” Chicken fussed. “Well. That no good sonofabitch! I’m gonna jerk a knot in your ass!”
Before I could say anything, Chicken was out of the hearse and right next to Marla Maria baby, winding up his arm to get a good swing at the guy in the John Deere hat. Not paying a bit of attention to Chicken and his tomfoolery, I rolled down my window to see if I could hear what Marla Maria baby was saying to the guy.
“I’ll show you baby!” Chicken swung. His fist went right through the guy’s jaw. For a brief second Marla and the guy’s conversation came to a halt. The man took his hat off and rubbed his jaw. He was much younger than Chicken, I’d guess by ten or fifteen years. He wasn’t a native to the area or I would have known him. He had deep blue eyes, a five-o’clock shadow, and appeared to be muscular under his green Henley shirt. Not half bad looking. Especially standing next to Chicken, whose hair was now falling down in his face.
“I think I just got a toothache.” John Deere hat guy thrust his jaw side-to-side and front to back. He opened his mouth and Marla Maria looked in.
“I think he felt my fist!” Chicken hollered over to me. The couple said a few words, but I couldn’t hear them because Chicken continued dancing around telling the guy he was going to give it to him some more and continued to wind up his arm, laying a few more air punches on the guy’s jaw.
“Come on, Duckie.” Marla Maria rolled her eyes before she walked over to the passenger side of the Cadillac. He did what he was told.
“Duckie?” Chicken fisted his hand and punched the palm of the other like he was going to sock Duckie again. “What is it with Marla Maria and fowl names?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. He did have a point.
Marla and the Duckie jumped into the Caddy. I slithered down in the seat so they didn’t see me—even though the hearse was a good indication that I was there. The car sped by so fast they probably didn’t pay any attention to me.
“What are you waiting for?” Chicken appeared right next to me in the passenger seat, sucking up the air around me. He jutted his finger in the air. “Follow my Cadillac!”
“I’m not following anyone.” I reversed the hearse and eased up to Chicken’s double-wide.
“What kind of detective are you?” Chicken silently fumed with his arms crossed over his chest.
“I never said I was a detective. I’m a funeral-home director,” I reminded him. “You have to remember you are the second ghost I have ever helped. I still don’t know what I’m doing.”
“How come Ruthie Sue Payne raved on about how good you are?”
“If you don’t like what I’m doing, I will be more than happy to bury your ungrateful murdered butt six feet under and forget all about our little visits.” My blood pressure rose and I swallowed hard to get my wits about me. I could threaten him all I wanted to, but I knew he wasn’t going to leave me alone until I figured out who killed him. I put the car back in reverse like I was going to leave the trailer park.
“Wait . . . wait.” Chicken put his hands out in front of him. “It’s hard seeing my Marla Maria dating another man.”
“How do you know she’s dating another man?”
“He called her baby. And no man calls a woman baby without more intentions.” Chicken had a point. The guy did have a tone about his voice. “And he’s wanted my Marla since we moved to the trailer park.”
“Did Marla ever give him the time of day?” This was probably a hard question for Chicken to answer. It would be an important piece of the pie.
“She never had the chance to. I ran him off every single time.” Chicken snorted. “One time I had Lady Cluckington chase him clear across the trailer park. He looked like a fool running as fast as his scrawny legs could carry him.”
“Looks like we have company.” I watched a dark Ford sedan pull up behind us.
“Aw shucks.” A big smile crossed Chicken’s lips. “That’s my buddy, Sugar.”
“Sugar?” What the hell had I gotten myself into? Who has the name Chicken? Who has the name Sugar?
“Sprinkle a little Sugar on it.” Chicken broke out into a fit of laughter. “That’s what he used to say to all the girls down at the Watering Hole to get a date. They all flocked over to him. That’s where I met my Marla Maria.”
Hmm. I wondered what type of women went to the Watering Hole Bar. My parents forbade me to go there and now that they’ve retired to Florida, I might just have to stop by.
Sugar stepped out of his sedan. All five feet of him. He dabbed his hairline with his handkerchief and replaced it in the pocket of his blue jeans.
“He has always been such a snappy dresser.” Chicken slapped his hands together in delight when the spurs on Sugar’s cowboy boots jingled as Sugar walked up to the hearse.
Sugar tapped on my window. I gulped. Why was Sugar there? Was he part of Marla Maria’s harem of men? I rolled down the window.
“Hello darlin’,” Sugar’s tone dripped with a Southern drawl. He tugged on the edges of his pleather jacket sleeves. “You pickin’ up a body? I’ve always been interested in the afterlife.” He dragged his fat finger along the window seal of my car door. There was a big gold ring on it.
“Sugar is hitting on you.” Chicken winked like it was a possibility I would even think of dating Sugar. Chicken had lost his mind. “He’s a good man.”
“I don’t think my business here is any of your business.” I tried not to look at the black lines running down the sides of his face. I pointed up to his face. “You have some sort of black stuff . . .” I raked my fingertips down my temple to show him.
He pulled the handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed the sides of his face.
“Damn stuff.” Sugar glanced in my side mirror, coming closer to my window. He didn’t need to bend down since his height was perfectly even with the door.
“Is that the spray-on hair?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking. “Like the infomercial?” A smile cracked my face. I always wondered who bought the As Seen On TV stuff. Now I knew—Sugar.
“I told him not to buy that crap.” Chicken couldn’t stop laughing.
“It has a guarantee to work.” Sugar’s hair was dripping faster than he could clean it up.
“Well Sugar, I guess you shouldn’t believe everything you see on TV,” I suggested.
He jerked up and glared at me. “How do you know my name?”
Crap.
“Oh, oh.” Chicken chose this moment to get serious. “He is really smart. Not a dumb one. Sugar Wayne is the smartest friend I have.”
“You told me.” I never had a good poker face.
“Darlin’, I never said my name.” Sugar didn’t worry about the dripping black fake hair. The spurs jingled as he leaned against the hearse and crossed his ankles. “I think you need to come clean as to why you are here at my dead friend’s house.”
“Did you say dead friend?” I asked. “I’m here to talk to the family about pre-need arrangements.”
I grabbed a piece of paper out of the glove box and pretended to read Chicken’s address off it.
“Oh no.” I did a quick show of the paper so he really couldn’t read what I flashed and threw it back in the glove box. “This paper is old. I must’ve grabbed the wrong sheet from the funeral home.” I shrugged. “Silly me.”
&n
bsp; “I still didn’t say my name.” Sugar’s eyes dipped, his brows followed.
“Thank you!” I waved and put the hearse in reverse before I punched it. Gravel spit from underneath the wheels, making dust fly all over Sugar. His dripping hair was now a dull gray from the mix of the dust and black.
Looking in the rearview mirror, I noticed that Sugar didn’t take his eyes off the hearse until we turned out of the trailer park.
Chapter 7
What was that?” Chicken turned his body in the seat and looked back at the trailer park, which was fast disappearing in the background as I sped toward Sleepy Hollow.
“That was me getting the hell out of Dodge.” I gripped the wheel hard as the hearse hugged the curves of the back road. Hearses were not meant to go fast and I had the sucker floored. And there was no need for Chicken to tell me to keep my eyes on the road.
“Go back!” Chicken screamed at me as we barreled back to town. “He was there to check on Lady Cluckington.”
My phone beeped from the seat. I glanced over to see it was Granny texting something about her scooter. Instead of trying to decode her message, I decided to pay her a visit. Yoga was on my agenda, and maybe Hettie Bell was there and I could talk some sense into her nonsense of this yoga epidemic she’d started with the Auxiliary women.
“What do you mean he was there to check on Lady?” I asked, wondering if my fear made me a little too hasty in getting away.
“He knows how much Marla Maria hates Lady. Over a beer one night at the Watering Hole, I told him that if anything ever happened to me he had to look after Lady because I knew Marla Maria wasn’t going to hold to her end of the agreement.”
That was the second time he’d mentioned the Watering Hole. I was definitely going to have to check it out now.
“Tell me about the agreement,” I begged. “You’ve mentioned the agreement a million times, but you haven’t told me what was in the agreement.”
“It’s in writing.” Chicken’s eyes grew big. “I might not have had a will, but I read somewhere on the library computer Internet that you could write an agreement and sign it. Good as a will.”
“What did the agreement say?” I was losing my patience. Granted, Chicken was a good ol’ country boy and he really did believe a handwritten agreement was good, but it was no good if only he and Marla Maria knew about it. If she had to hold up to some part of the deal in order to get something, then why would she share the agreement? I was beginning to realize Marla Maria wasn’t as stupid as she wanted us to think.
“I have a bit of money.” Chicken hesitated and eyeballed me.
“The real estate?” I asked.
Chicken’s mouth flew open, and then he snapped it closed. “You ain’t going to tell no one that I got some money, are you?”
“Depends.” Did he forget he was a ghost and that he asked me to find out who murdered him? “If Marla Maria knows you have money, that could be a motive to kill you.”
“Uh.” Chicken’s mouth dropped. “You think she’d kill me for the money?”
“You had an agreement, didn’t you?”
“Huh.” Chicken’s mouth dropped again. The creases around his eyes deepened into a frown.
“Did the agreement have anything to do with the money?” Not that the end result about money wasn’t enough of a motive, but I had to know what Marla Maria had to do to get the money. “Did she have to follow through with something in order to get the money?”
“Marla Maria has to take care of Lady Cluckington just like I did in order to get the money.”
“What do you mean ‘take care of’?” I asked.
At this point in the investigation, I had to get the particulars. Every single detail mattered.
“Marla has to feed her, bathe her, groom her, and keep her cage clean.” As he read off Marla’s chores again, he held up his fingers, counting them out. “And she has to enter her into all the prize hen pageants.”
I held my hand up in the air to stop him. “You already told me about the chores. Till me more about the pageants.” I slowed the hearse down once we made it into the square. There were so many people still setting up for the evening’s big festival kickoff. Tonight was the annual hoedown and chicken dinner.
“That’s the problem, and that is where Sugar comes in.” Chicken peered out the window. “Marla never went to the pageants with me so she had never seen how to show a prize hen as fine as Lady.”
Chicken paused. He swallowed back tears.
“Are you okay?” I asked pulling into the Sleepy Hollow Inn. I put my phone up to my ear to pretend to talk on it. I didn’t want to risk anyone seeing me and telling Granny I had another case of the Funeral Trauma. “I know it’s hard to relive all of this, but in order for me to mark Marla Maria off the suspect list, I need to know everything.”
Unfortunately, the more he told me, the more Marla Maria looked guilty.
“I’m sure Sugar was there to get Lady for practice. The big state fair is coming up and it’s a surefire way to get into the national competition coming up in three months.” He smacked his fist on the dashboard. “I’m sure Marla Maria is avoiding Sugar. I never wrote in the agreement that she couldn’t avoid Sugar. Marla is a smart one.” He tapped his temple. “She ain’t no dummy.”
“Let me get this straight.” Getting Chicken to tell me what the agreement was about was like pulling candy out of a kid’s hand. “You have this land in Lexington that is worth money. The agreement states that Marla Maria has to take care of Lady exactly like you did, but Sugar is the one who is to take Lady to the pageants and show her?”
He nodded.
“And Marla Maria knows that if she isn’t home, Sugar can’t make good on his promise?” I had to get clear, straight answers. Especially before my romantic dinner with Jack Henry. The quicker we get Chicken back in the ground, the faster I can get on with my love life and future with Jack.
“Yes. Sugar is a realtor in Lexington. I bought the property from him years ago. We became fast friends.” Chicken had a faraway look in his eyes. “Marla Maria never hid her feelings about Lady. Over the years, Marla Maria got more and more jealous. Every day she said nasty things about me and Lady.” He swallowed hard. “Sugar and I were getting Lady ready for a show and Marla Maria told us that she wished Lady would get out of her cage and claw our eyes out with her talons.”
“Wow. That’s harsh.” Need I remind him of a woman scorned? Only this time it was by a chicken.
“That’s not all.” Worry crept into Chicken’s eyes. “After Sugar and I got Lady loaded up and on the road, she got out of her cage and flapped all around, almost causing us to wreck.”
I gasped. Marla Maria was looking guiltier by the minute.
“When I got the car under control and pulled over, I went back to investigate how Lady got out of her cage.” Chicken shook his head like he was trying to shake the memory from his mind. “Someone had cut the lock.”
“Didn’t you put Lady in the car and then get in?” Something wasn’t adding up. How did he not see someone cut a lock?
“Sugar and I went back in to grab a snack for the road. I had no idea where Marla Maria was because I walked around yelling for her trying to tell her good-bye.” He sucked in a deep breath. “I have a secret video camera system installed. No one knows about it.”
“What?” My mouth dropped.
“Yeah.” He grumbled. “Lady didn’t win the show because she was still so upset about being loose in the car. Prize hens don’t like to be in cars. I went home and rolled back the video tape. Marla Maria was walking away from the car when Sugar and I were inside getting a snack.”
My heart dropped. I truly didn’t want to believe that Marla Maria had anything to do with Chicken’s death. Memories of them flooded my mind. I recalled how proud he was when Marla was by his side. He even looked like a proud banty roos
ter with his prize chicken. Not that he looked like a rooster nor she like a chicken, but it seemed fitting.
“There you are!” Granny yelled from the front porch of the Inn. My eyes glanced over to the big tree in the yard. Granny’s moped was chained up to the tree with a heavy-duty industrial chain and lock.
“We will talk in a minute,” I told Chicken, and put my phone down before I got out of the hearse. There were so many more questions I needed to ask about the agreement and the property.
“Morning ladies,” I stood at the bottom of the Inn steps and said hello to Mable Claire, Granny, Beulah Paige and Hettie Bell. I felt I should keep a safe distance from the four of them doing Godknowswhat to their bodies. Plus, I had heard some of those positions made some people pass gas, and I didn’t want to be downwind from any of them. Granny included. “What are y’all doing?”
The women were in the downward dog position. The only yoga position I knew other than the Prasarita Padottanasana pose that Beulah had demonstrated.
“We are getting in touch with our feelings.” Mable Claire waddled up to stand. Her fuller hips jingled from coins in her pocket. Mable Claire could be heard before she came into view. As long as I could remember, she loaded her pockets down with change and handed out a dime here and there to children she saw. “You know”—she picked at the bun on the top of her head—“you should join the Auxiliary. We’d love to have you.”
Beulah popped up. If the downward dog was supposed to calm her, it wasn’t working. Mable Claire’s suggestion of me joining the Auxiliary made Beulah as nervous as a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs.
“You can’t ask someone to join the Auxiliary, Mable Claire.” Beulah scolded poor old Mable. “She has to be formally checked out and an invitation sent. We have to vote on who we invite.”