Boots unlocked her cell, and she rushed out and hugged us both, even Veenie, who was caught too much by surprise to side-step the squeezing.
I turned to Boots. “I thought you couldn’t let her go. DA said to lock her up.”
“I did say that, but new evidence has surfaced. DA changed his mind.”
“New evidence?” I said.
A voice piped up from the cell around the corner. It belonged to Bert Apple. We all slid around the corner to see Bert sitting on a cot in an orange jumpsuit, with his knees pulled up. His hair was messed up, but he actually looked happier than last we’d seen him. A good chocolate pie can do that to a fellow. “I confessed,” he said.
“To killing Fussy?” I asked.
“Well, sort of. It was an accident. I was blackmailing him. Trying to scrape up enough money to get out of town, start over again. I was going to lose the practice, lose my license to practice because of all the debt and bills. Bromley dug the debt hole, and I thought investing in real estate would help us climb out, but that was just another big swallow hole. Then mother got wise to the software and called the bank auditors. I figured Bromley owed me after all these years covering up for him, so I threw him under the bus. I mean, he was dead, what harm could a felony charge do him?” He shrugged. “Not like I ever wanted to be a dentist, anyway.” He sniffled. “It’s hard being a dentist. People hate you, you know.” I thought he might cry.
Veenie piped up. “Why’d you kill Fussy? He was one of your meal tickets, wasn’t he?”
“Hated to do that to him, blackmail him and all, but darn it, he could afford it, and I just had to figure a way out of this. I’d always wanted my own bakery. Everybody seems so happy baking and icing things. I figured once I had enough cash stashed, I could move down south to Florida, start my life all over again. Bake cupcakes. People love it when you give them cupcakes.” He got a dreamy look in his eyes, but then his eyes clouded over again. “They don’t love you so much when you drill into their teeth.”
Given how domineering Avonelle was, I could see why Bert might want to run away and be somebody other than a dentist or her son. But murder? I said as much.
“Told you, it was a full-on accident. Fussy had offered me one big payment if I’d come out and pick up the details on a wire transfer. I had pledged to leave town after that. Leave him alone. He never wanted his name attached to that real estate scheme, him being a contractor and all. He was afraid he’d lose his license, that it would ruin him. That suited me. So I went out to pick up the bank numbers where he was supposed to wire the big payoff. I went to his parked pontoon boat like he’d instructed me. I climbed onto the boat, but no one was there. The sun was down. It was dark out there on the river. The boat was sloshing around in the water. I can’t swim, and I don’t like the outdoors. All those bugs.” He made a face like he’s just eaten a heap of raw rhubarb straight up.
“Go on,” Veenie encouraged, as eager as I was to hear the whole story.
“Well, I was trying to stay standing up on the boat, and thinking about leaving, thinking maybe I’d been set up. I was getting scared, and the mosquitoes were eating me alive. I grabbed hold of the row of gig guns to steady myself, and one of the guns came out of the holder and I was trying to stay upright and get it put back when all of a sudden Fussy burst out of that little shed on the back of his boat. But it didn’t look like Fussy. I mean, the man was wearing women’s underwear, for Christ’s sake, and a wig and makeup. He spooked me so bad I accidently hit the trigger on the harpoon gun and zing! he went down. Hit him dead center. I wiped my prints off the gig gun and ran back home.” Bert’s face scrunched up like he might throw up.
It all sounded highly unbelievable, except for the fact that Sassy had told us the exact same story. It made perfect sense that Fussy might have heard someone on his boat and hoped against hope that Sassy had come back to give his fantasies a try. He burst out of the shed, all excited, and well …
I was starting to feel a whole lot better about my Amish sex life.
We were all standing around the cell feeling kind of sorry for Bert as he finished his story. He’d got himself into one heck of a mess. Course he’d also messed up a lot of other people’s lives. “You were blackmailing your mama too?”
“I needed as much cash as I could carry, so yes. I figured she’d pay to keep the bank embezzlement out of the news.”
Veenie shook her head. “But she surprised you?”
“Dug her heels in and sent you two out to uncover my identity.” He sighed. “You were late getting to the barn that night, and I got spooked waiting in the dark. I left soon as I saw Shap sneaking around with that shotgun. Figured maybe Mom had hired him to wing me and bring me in.”
Bert stretched out on his cot. He looked relaxed, more so than the last time we’d seen him in the bank office with his mama.
Veenie asked him if we ought to call his mama.
He twisted his lips. “I imagine it’ll all be in the Squealer come morning. Maybe it’s best if she reads about it first. Give her time to mull it over before she has to face the whole town. This is bound to be awfully hard on her. I was the good one, you know.” He sighed.
I thought that was awfully sweet of him. It made me a little sad though that his life had gotten so messy. Life could get like that. One minute you’re a respectable member of society perched on a front church pew, and the next you’re hobbling around with your ankles twisty-tied together, picking up trash along the roadside.
Veenie asked Bert if there was anything we could do to lighten his load.
He sat up and thought about it for a minute. Then his face brightened. “Could you bring me another one of Ma Horton’s chocolate cream pies?”
We both nodded.
Boots ushered us all out of the cell room. It was the middle of the night, and outside, the tree frogs were croaking a concert. The sky had cleared, and the moon swung over the trees like a magic ball of light. The air smelled clean and fresh, like life was about to start up all over again, as it did every spring.
Harry was standing by his Toyota, smoking. His fedora was pushed back on his head. He was admiring the moon, which he was trying to lasso with smoke rings.
I was about to join him in admiring the moon when my cell started jumping in my pocket. I pulled it out and flicked it on. There was a text from Joyce. It wasn’t a frantic text for a change. “Rusty is home!” read the message. “My love has returned!” It warmed my heart to read a message from Joyce that sounded happy for a change.
I typed back, “He tell you everything?”
“Yes. So relieved!” That was punctuated with a string of smiley faces and a chorus line of dancing Spanish ladies.
“All okay?” I texted in return.
She typed back, “Thank you, Mama. I love you. You’re the best.”
I held the cell phone to my heart and enjoyed the glow of the words for just a moment, while they were still warm. I knew next time I heard from Joyce she’d probably be back to her uppity self, whining like the gears on the Chevy, but for the moment, I treasured that little spark of all-out love.
Harry ground out his cigarette with the toe on his shoe and offered me and Veenie and Sassy a ride over to the Impala, which remained parked in front of the office. Dog tired, we accepted.
When we climbed into the Impala, it started up lickety-split. No surprise there. The car was fussy like that. I made a mental note to have Dickie look under the hood again when he had some time. As I pulled onto Main Street and steered for home, Sassy started in about how she was going to have to have her hair washed and set professionally just to get the jail cooties out of her head. Then she started in on how she loved Doogie, but gosh darn, they’d never let him out of the big house now. She’d just have to keep auditioning for a new mate.
Veenie started chattering about how upset Avonelle was going to be to find out that her “good” baby boy had caved in so completely under the pressures of life. “Though I got to admit,” she mused
, “he seemed awfully happy about not having to be a dentist no more.”
I thought about Avonelle. “She’s got a whole mess of new kids. Two boys and a girl. She could have another run at it.” I tried to imagine Avonelle visiting her new family down in Hound Holler. She’d already set up a trust fund for the kids. I was sure she’d spring for their education and dental care, but Lordie, I had a hard time imagining her cozying up to Barbara Skaggs.
I drove along Main Street, my heart warmed by the knowledge that, at that moment, everybody in Knobby Waters was sleeping peacefully under a blanket of moonlight and a bowl of bright stars, and that up in the big city of Bloomington, my baby girl, Joyce, was sleeping the soundest of all.
Of course, all that peace and quiet didn’t last as long as a Slo Poke sucker.
Veenie and I were back to running around, poking our noses into people’s private affairs almost as soon as the sun popped up over the horizon. The chaos started with the disappearance of local sourpuss Gertie Wineager, Pawpaw County’s BBQ Chicken Queen. It spread across Knobby Waters like the White River bursting its banks, sweeping up everybody, especially the chickens and Ma and Peepaw Horton, in a muddy swirl of feathers, chaos, and confusion …
Read On to begin a free excerpt from the Chickenlandia Mystery, The Shady Hoosier Detective Agency: Book 3.
Chapter One
“I thought she might of headed on over to her big sister’s place. Over in Tunnelton,” said Tater Wineager, his gray caterpillar eyebrows knitted together in concern. “But I checked, and her sister ain’t seen hide nor hair of her since Easter.”
Tater was trying to explain to me and my pal Lavinia Goens—Veenie to most folks— how his wife, Gertie, could have been missing so long—more than a week—without him reporting the incident. We were all ears. This was our first missing person’s case in a coon’s age, and we were itching to make some pocket money.
Veenie and I were detectives in training at the Shades Detective Agency, the best—okay the only PI agency—in Pawpaw County, Indiana. Our boss, Harry Shades, had been strutting around the office in his cranky pants all morning threatening to off somebody just so we’d have a new case to solve. Tater losing track of his wife Gertie was a godsend to us.
“Anything wrong with Gertie’s memory? I asked Tater.
“Nah.” Tater gnawed on his tobacco-stained thumb. “She remembers everything, even things that never happened.”
Tater glanced around the office. His face was the color of biscuit dough. His eyes were large wet prunes, pressed deep in the wrinkled dough. He was wearing a plaid shirt, Wrangler jeans cuffed up two inches, and worn black Red Wing lace-up boots. He was barely five feet tall. His booted feet dangled from his chair, not quite hitting the ground. He was zipped up in a yellow DeKalb seed corn windbreaker. His hair poked up from his scalp like tiny white scrub brushes.
“A fella allowed to fire up in here?” he asked. His eyes darted around the office in search of something—a “no smoking” sign, matches, an ashtray, something like that. “Used to, a fella could smoke anywhere, but nowadays you got to ask. So I’m asking.”
Veenie, who was sitting next to me, slid a glass ashtray that advertised the Moon Glo Motor Lodge over Tater’s way. “Fire up,” she said. “Me and RJ been around smokers our whole life. We’re still kicking.”
Tater pulled a Zippo lighter from the pocket of his windbreaker. He torched his Marlboro. When he inhaled, his cheeks blew up like puffball mushrooms. His dark eyes watered up. “Not holed up at her sister’s place,” he repeated. “Drove over yesterday. Ain’t nobody seen her since she lit out of the house last week for her regular color and set.”
“Tinky Sue’s?” I asked. Most women over fifty in Knobby Waters, the small Indiana river town where we lived, got their hair done at Tinky Sue Knute’s Curl Up and Dye. But senior penny-pinchers sometimes frequented Henrietta’s House of Hair, the beauty college over in Bedford. If you went to Henrietta’s on a Tuesday, you could get a ten-dollar cut from a freshman. A color job was twenty. But then you had to accept whoever was on duty and whatever happened to your hair. And from what I had seen, there was a darn good reason why people referred to the beauty college as Henrietta’s House of Hair Horrors.
Tater sucked on his cigarette. “Yep. Never lets anybody but Tinky Sue touch that head of hair. Has this bald patch up top.” He fingered his own dome. “Started when she went through the change. Tinky Sue knows how to cover it up right nice.”
I made a note of that in the file we’d started on Gertie. “Any reason Gertie might have run away? You have a spat?”
“Not that I noticed, but sometimes we have fights and I don’t know it. She has to tell me.”
He took another drag on his cigarette and studied the glowing amber. “Long winter. You gals know how it gets. Locked up in a house. We might have said a few things both of us regretted when the river finally thawed. We’ve been hitched forty years. A body can get pretty testy over that long a stretch.”
Veenie said she understood. “Me and Fergus Senior only lasted ten years. He ran around with any hoochie-coochie gal who wiggled his way. You ever hound dog on Gertie? Do something stupid like that that might have ticked her off?”
Tater squeezed his eyes shut against the smoke. “Nah.”
Like most men in these parts, he wasn’t much for jawing.
“Anywhere else she might have run off to?” I asked. “You can leave us the contact for her sister in Tunnelton. We’ll check there, of course. She have any other kin? A friend she might have gone to visit for a spell?”
“Don’t think so. She wasn’t all that popular. We got a daughter over in Mitchell, but I checked, and she hasn’t seen her mama since Christmas. Got two grown sons. Both of them are in the military overseas. I wrote down some of Gertie’s vitals so you can trace her. Imagine you use a lot of that fancy computer stuff like on the TV. I wrote down the address for her sister, Lottie. Got a paper on me somewhere. Lottie don’t have a phone. Nervous type. Doesn’t like all that ringing.” He patted at several pockets before pulling a creased Rural Electric envelope out of his shirt pocket. He handed the envelope to me. The back of the envelope had a coffee stain shaped like a half moon and Gertie’s vitals: social, date of birth, and a credit card number, all carefully printed in pencil in large block letters. Lottie’s address was on the envelope too.
I asked Tater if Gertie had been planning to enter the big BBQ chicken cook-off at the upcoming Chickenlandia Festival. The annual festival started that weekend and was a big to-do for Pawpaw County. “She’s the reigning BBQ Queen, right?”
“Oh sure. She’s right proud of that. She’s taken the crown and sash three years running. Ain’t nobody can BBQ a chicken like Gertie.” His face beamed with pride. “That’s what makes it right peculiar. Her missing, I mean. She’d been hacking chickens to pieces and slathering them in sauce all week. Practicing. Tweaking her secret sauce. I reckon she might run out on me, but she keeps that crown and sash on a special prize shelf above the TV. Shines them up every week when she dusts. No way she’d hand that crown and sash over to some upstart.”
The BBQ Cook-Off Queen title was about the most coveted prize in Pawpaw County. The entirety of the Ladies’ Farm Bureau contingent throughout southern Indiana spent most of the year cooking up new sauces and trying them out on the Boy Scouts and the old farts down at the VFW. The Knobby Waters Weight Watchers division had to open two new meetings just to help all the folks who’d volunteered to taste test for Gertie. Despite the multi-county competition, Gertie clawed back the title from every new contender.
Tater laid his cigarette in the ashtray and felt around all his pockets. He checked his pants’ pockets, his shirt pockets, then both pockets on his windbreaker. “Here’s the retainer you said you’d be needing.” He handed over a folded check that he’d retracted from his windbreaker.
I wrote him a receipt. He slid the pink receipt into the pocket of his windbreaker, stubbed out his cigarette, and hoppe
d up off the chair. “You’ll let me know?” There was a tiny tear in his right eye. He pulled a yellow paisley hankie out of his back pocket and sniffled into it. “Allergies,” he said as he blew his nose.
He wasn’t fooling me. I could tell he was worried sick. “Don’t worry. Me and Veenie are ace at finding lost people.”
“And pets,” said Veenie. “We found Bet Beesley’s wiener dog, Puddles, when he went missing.”
Tater looked impressed. “The blind one?”
“Yeah. He ran away. Down to Pokey’s. He had a drinking problem. Hard to find a runaway dog. They don’t have credit cards or anything traceable like that. They travel pretty light.”
Tater seemed reassured by that. “Well, okay. I got forty acres of soybeans to get in now that it’s dry. Call me when you got anything.” He flipped up the hood on his windbreaker and tottered out of the office. He looked like a sad lemon, his shoulders hunched against the drizzle as he rolled down the sidewalk in the direction of the Roadkill Café.
He was gone a couple of seconds before Veenie piped up. “You ask me, some people are best off left lost.”
“You never did care for Gertie.”
“It ain’t me. Nobody ever cared for Gertie Wineager. You know that, Ruby Jane.”
“Tater does.”
That gave Veenie pause. “Gertie is a big ol’ sourpuss. Maybe she upset someone. Maybe they whacked her. You know as well as I do if you gave Gertie the world with a ribbon tied around it, she’d hurl it back at you, hissing, ‘That there is the wrong color ribbon.’”
“Some people are like that.”
“Yeah, and them kind of people sometimes accidently trip and fall into the wood chipper.”
“You think Tater chipped up his wife?”
“Happens. It was a long, ass-biting winter. They live down there in the old Wineager homestead, down by the river, near the Sparksville railroad crossing, close to the old Temple homestead. That house is so old they have to seal it up in storm plastic just to keep the heat in and the siding from falling off. You know how it gets inside that storm plastic. All thick and foggy. Like living inside a cold jar of Vaseline. Turns people crazy.”
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