If Fried Chicken Could Fly

by Paige Shelton

  Cliff’s phone buzzed again. He folded the magnifying glass into the case and put it in his pocket.

  “Gotta take this, too. Sorry, Betts.” He walked to the other side of the roof and talked quietly into the phone.

  “I took my time because I thought it might be kind of fishy to walk directly to the blood,” I said to Jerome.

  “I just didn’t want you to miss it.” He smiled.

  Were ghosts capable of teasing?

  “No chance of that.”

  Jerome smiled again.

  “Betts, we gotta go,” Cliff said as he hurried to the door to the stairs.

  “What’s going on?” I asked as I joined him.

  “Just police stuff.”

  Jerome didn’t walk behind me but popped himself down to the stage while we took the wobbly steps.

  “I’ll get the drops processed quickly, but I have to get somewhere else first. Good catch, Betts,” Cliff said when we reached the stage.

  Fortunately it didn’t look like it was going to rain. I hoped the spots stayed where they were until Cliff could get back to them.

  “The breaker board is back here. I’m going to switch off the lights, and we’ll use my flashlight to guide us out,” Cliff said.

  Cliff turned on the flashlight and flipped some switches on a breaker board that was on the stage left wall, next to a podium. The theater fell into thick darkness, dotted only by the flashlight.

  If I thought Jerome looked lifelike before, the deeper darkness caused him to reach a whole new level of reality.

  He wore a ratty cowboy hat that suddenly seemed rattier with worn spots and tears here and there. I thought his eyes were dark, but now that they were clear, I saw they were a deep blue. I could see the laugh lines that framed them. I could see some hair on his chest peek out from the collar of his shirt. I hadn’t noticed any hair before. My eyes were drawn to his hands that were defined by calluses and straight, rough fingernails. As a ghost, I’d already decided he must have been a handsome man, but with the lack of light I could see how he was not only handsome but handsome in a rugged-I-could-maybe-pull-down-a-big-tree-with-just-my-thumb way. I couldn’t stop staring.

  “Betts?” Cliff said as he extended a hand to me. “You okay?” He looked in the direction of Jerome.

  “Miss, you’re making me blush,” Jerome said as he did exactly that.

  I shook my head slightly but didn’t take my eyes off of him as I gave Cliff my hand.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” I muttered.

  “Like what?” they both said.

  “So real, so real.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Cliff said as he guided me off the stage and into the theater’s side aisle. Jerome followed.

  Once we were outside in the bright sun, Jerome took on his previous less-than-stellar ambience as he tipped his hat and told me he’d see me later. And then he disappeared.

  Cliff, with a confused look and without many words of good-bye, left, too.

  I stood in front of the theater, alone but for a young couple walking directly to me with a camera and big smiles. They would want their picture taken. I was happy to oblige.

  As I snapped the picture I thought about the two men who’d just departed. One I’d suspended in my mind as the picture of perfection for almost fifteen years.

  And the other one was a ghost.

  And there was something about both of them that caused something to stir in my chest, something that hadn’t stirred in a long time. It had been so long, in fact, that I wasn’t sure what it was right away, but it didn’t take too long to remember.

  All the years that had passed since Cliff and I broke up, I’d been waiting for something that made me feel the way I’d felt with him. Here he was again, and here it was again. I just wasn’t sure if it was stronger for him or the ghost.

  I was worse off than I’d previously thought.

  CHAPTER 17

  “That really doesn’t look good at all,” I said when Jake opened the door. His eye was swollen all the way shut and black puffy skin surrounded it. It looked less fresh but worse.

  “It only hurts when I touch it, or hold my head up, or walk, though, so no big deal.” Jake smiled. “Oh, and when I smile, too, so I won’t be doing any of that either.”

  “Maybe you should have stayed home today.”

  “Not a chance. Tomorrow’s the big day. I’m not allowing anyone to scare me away from missing all the fun.”

  “I didn’t think you were scared. You could use the rest.”

  “I’m fine. How are you?”

  “I have some archival questions.”

  “You’ve come to the right place. Come in. I’m locking the door and Patches will hang with us. I’m not scared, though, just being cautious.” Jake held up the stick horse.

  I petted its head. “Patches, thank you for saving Jake yesterday. I hope we don’t need your brute strength again.”

  “What’s your archival issue?” Jake asked as he and Patches escorted me to the back room.

  I’d run home for a couple of small plastic sandwich bags to hold the small pieces of paper. I reached into my pocket and pulled them out. I explained where I’d found them and under what circumstances.

  “Fascinating. You found the first piece of paper in the tombstone and only hours later found something almost identical in the office?”

  “Sounds like a setup, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know, Betts, let’s think about it. Who would have known you would look inside a hole in a tombstone, of all places? And then of that group, who would know you would be looking in the desk in the theater. To me it sounds like more a coincidence than a setup. Weird, sure, but planted ‘bread crumbs’—I think that would be hard to pull off.”

  He had a point. “What do you think they are?”

  “I’m pretty sure they’re both copies, of what, I’m not sure. The thief took my Jerome stuff, but I can probably still round up some Jasper stuff.”

  “What makes you think they’re copies?”

  “The paper. Both of these are in pretty good shape. Paper from that time would be more disintegrated. I do think someone made copies of something and placed these pieces of paper where you found them, but I have my doubts that they were for you to find.”

  “Who should have found them?”

  “It seems pretty clear to me that Everett was searching for the treasure. Perhaps they were bread crumbs for him or even for Miz. They were at the tombstone and this was in Everett’s desk. Maybe he found it somewhere. You need to show them to Miz and see what she says. Does she know about the coins in the tombstone?”

  “If she didn’t already know, I didn’t tell her. Everything was too crazy today.”

  “Well, you’re looking at an authentic Broken Rope treasure.”

  “The papers are a treasure?”

  “No, I’m the treasure.”

  “Of course.”

  Jake set Patches against the table and reached for a file on the end of the shelves.

  “These are some old flyers from the Jasper, back in the day of live performances. Let’s take a gander and see if anything matches.”

  Jake flung the large plastic folder onto the table and pulled out a stack of its contents. There were mostly papers, each piece also individually wrapped in plastic. He spread them on the table. There were notices of shows, even a couple wanted posters, neither of which had Jerome’s face. One talked about Elsa and her fanning feathers. And the last one, the one that Jake pulled from the pile and examined more closely, began with “Tonight!”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Lookee here,” Jake said as he slowly and dramatically took the two small pieces of paper and held them to the bottom of an advertisement to compare. The very last line, written with letters the same size and the same kind as my finds said: Jasper Theater, Broken Rope, Missouri, Proprietor Belinda Jasper, daughter of recently murdered Homer Jasper. “The ‘Jaspers’ are an exact match.�
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  “They sure are. What a strange thing to put on an ad, though. And I thought they were handwritten.”

  “Not too odd. The original proprietor was a man. If his daughter, a woman, took over, the public would want some explanation. Plus don’t forget, we’re Broken Rope, and we make a big part of our living based upon strange or horrible deaths. As for the handwriting, you were just fooled by the fancy letters. The original was most definitely made using a printing press, but remember, letters for presses were just individual blocks and weren’t lined up all the time and sometimes ink didn’t cover them completely.”

  I looked closely at the picture. The woman was the same woman with dark hair and dark eyes who’d been forever immortalized in a picture on the Jasper’s wall. Belinda Jasper was the contortionist and the woman Jerome felt certain he had somehow been close to.

  “She’s the contortionist from the picture in the Jasper,” I said.

  “Oh. Yes, she is. I hadn’t thought much about it, but you’re right.”

  “How did you find this so quickly?”

  “I’ve spent the entire morning looking through these archives. I know that Everett spent time looking at the Jerome and Jasper stuff, so I spent a lot of time memorizing it. When I saw your pieces of paper, I thought I might have a match. Everett must have made many copies of many things, Betts. I bet that what you found today are parts of the copies he made. One in his office would be normal. Maybe he planted one in the tombstone. Remember, we didn’t know the man that well. Do you suppose he was trying to set Miz up for something, maybe taking her on a wild-goose chase instead of a treasure hunt?”

  I thought about Mabel and Amy’s behavior earlier, what they’d said about him being horrible.

  “None of us knew he had a wife, Betts,” Jake continued. “I hope the police are looking at her or someone from his past as suspects, too. To me, all this only makes Everett look suspicious of doing something he should not have been doing. Maybe someone got mad enough at him for whatever shenanigans he was up to and decided to kill him.”

  “In the cooking school.”

  “In the cooking school,” Jake repeated.

  “That information might make Gram look guilty again.”

  “It’s not really information as much as speculation.”

  Jerome appeared on the other side of the table. “Isabelle,” he said. “Sorry to interrupt.”

  “Jerome’s here, Jake.”

  “Where?”

  “Right there.”

  “Hi, Jerome.”

  “He says hi back,” I said.

  “Isabelle, I have some news to share,” Jerome said.

  “He has some news, Jake.”

  “Tell her and then she’ll summarize it for me,” Jake said as he looked slightly to the left of where Jerome stood.

  “I rushed off earlier, so I could go with Cliff. He seemed to have an urgent situation and you’d mentioned that you’d like for me to spy.”

  “Good job. What did you find out?”

  “Mabel Randall,” he said. “Well, Mabel and Amy.”

  “What about them?”

  “The best I could tell was that last night, Mabel told the other officer, Jim, something bad about Everett. She told him—and others—that Everett had done something terrible to her granddaughter, Amy.”

  “Oh no,” I said, my mind conjuring the worst possible thing again.

  “Here’s the rub. He didn’t. Amy lied to Mabel. That’s what was being straightened out today.”

  “Did Mabel kill Everett because of what she thought he did to Amy?”

  “Jim and Cliff think it’s possible, but there’s not a scrap of evidence.”

  I thought about how the small pieces of paper and the treasure hunt might work in conjunction with Mabel or Amy potentially contributing to Everett’s death. It didn’t work. None of those thoughts fit together at all. Maybe I was placing importance on things that weren’t important in my desperate attempt to prove that Gram didn’t kill Everett.

  I made some sort of frustrated gurgle at the back of my throat.

  “What? Tell me what he said,” Jake said.

  “We have a whole other angle,” I began.

  While I told Jake what Jerome had said, Jerome moved to the side of the table and looked closely at the advertisement Jake had found. He studied it with full attention.

  “That is a whole new angle,” Jake said. “And how horrible to have blamed Everett for doing something he didn’t do, something that was probably terrible. Mabel’s got her hands full.”

  “I think I’ve figured something out, Isabelle,” Jerome said.

  I held up a finger to Jake: Hang on a second.

  “Remember how I’m so certain that I knew this woman, Belinda Jasper?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m becoming more and more certain, but there’s something else. Look at her closely. She resembles someone else you know.”

  I did as he instructed but couldn’t see a resemblance to anyone.

  “What if her hair were blond?” Jerome said. “She’d look like the woman who works in the saloon. What’s her name? Jenna?”

  It occurred to me that maybe Jerome was just as desperate as I was when it came to proving that Gram wasn’t a killer. The advertisement was old and I thought that the picture might either resemble no one or everyone; it seemed impossible that the person in the picture, a person long dead, would resemble someone alive today. But I looked closely and realized that Jerome was right—there was something about Belinda that reminded me of Jenna. There was something similar about their heart-shaped faces and thin but straight lips and their wide-set eyes.

  “Jake, does this woman look like a brunet version of Jenna?” I asked as I moved the picture in front of him.

  Jake looked at the picture even more closely than Jerome and I had. The same thoughts must have occurred to him, too, because I saw the look on his face transform from doubt to curiosity to a surprised discovery.

  “I’ll be…Well, I’ll be…Betts, Jerome, I think you might have just found yet another angle,” he said.

  CHAPTER 18

  “Do you suppose they’re related?” Jake asked.

  “The resemblance is kind of uncanny, except for the hair, but I’m sure Jenna dyes her hair,” I said.

  “And what would it mean if they were related? Does this have something to do with…You’re sure he left?” Jake said. I nodded. Jerome, looking as though more memories were coming back to him, disappeared again with a quick good-bye. “What does this have to do with Jerome?”

  “Just when I think we’re onto something, something else happens.”

  Jake laughed. “I’m not sure we’re very good at investigating crimes.”

  “Probably not, but still…it’s all so…”

  “Interesting, strange, odd?”

  “Yeah, but mostly interesting. No matter what, all of these things are interesting. Ghosts, coins in tombstones, bartenders who resemble dead contortionists. Interesting.”

  “That’s Broken Rope, sweetie. We’re nothing if not interesting. In fact, I found a few more interesting things, things I’m not sure Jerome should see yet. We still have The Noose files. As frustrated as I am about not having this place as organized as I’d like, I’m glad I hadn’t filed all the newspaper articles with their respective citizens yet. I know a little more about Jerome just from some of these articles that weren’t with his stolen files. The Noose, though a semi-respectable newspaper, spent a good amount of space telling gossipy stories about locals.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Jerome started off his life in Broken Rope as a loner. He lived out in the woods and came into town infrequently, but something happened toward the end of his life that caused him to not only spend more time in town but to start thieving.”

  “Right. You kind of told me that before.”

  “But why, why did he turn into a criminal?”

  “Maybe he ran out of money?” I said.


  “I don’t think so. I don’t know for sure but from all I can glean he was a big strappin’ guy.”

  “He was.”

  “Those were valued qualities back then. Life wasn’t easy; big and strappin’ could get you a job. He could figure out how to make a living. He didn’t need to steal.”

  “Why did he, then?”

  “Dunno. Read this. You’ll see why I didn’t want him to see it.”

  It was another copy of something old. This time it was a newspaper article from The Noose. It was dated July 23, 1918. I read aloud.

  Local citizen and wanted bank robber Jerome Cowbender was shot and killed dead today by Sheriff Earp. Wanted for stealing a treasure of gold from the Broken Rope Bank a month ago, Jerome was shot down after robbing the bank of a parcel of cash today. Before he was killed, he left a poorly aimed storm of bullets in his wake. It seems the man was not good with a gun.

  The dead criminal had mostly worked a herd of cattle on his land outside of town. No one had claimed to have seen him since the gold robbery and since he’d been posted as a wanted man.

  As he rode his horse down Main Street, he was approached by Sheriff Earp. No one heard the words they exchanged, but the sheriff pursued Mr. Cowbender on horseback. Witnesses say that Mr. Cowbender fired all the bullets in his gun but didn’t hit more than a building or a post. The sheriff took three well-aimed shots, two of them finding their target and killing Mr. Cowbender dead. He’ll be buried in the outlaw cemetery beside the church. Word has it that an anonymous person has purchased a tombstone so his grave will not be unmarked.

  A lump formed in the back of my throat. It was as if I were reading about the killing of a friend, not someone I hadn’t known and who was a ghost. I knew the ways of the Old West. I knew guns ruled the day and bank robbers and horse thieves usually weren’t treated to a jury of their peers. Shoot-outs occurred all the time. They still did, but blanks and fake blood were used.

  “You okay?” Jake asked.