“They have new storm plastic nowadays. You can see clear through it.”
“Winter still makes people crazy.”
“I dunno. I think Tater loves Gertie. They got hitched right out of high school.”
“Course he does, but you know well as I do you can love someone one minute and want to hold a pillow over their head the next. Marriage is like that.”
I’d been married, so couldn’t argue with that. I eyed the file we’d started on Gertie. “Guess the best place to start is over at the Curl Up and Dye. Looks like Tinky Sue may have been the last one to see Gertie.”
“Yeah.” Veenie peered at me over the top of her Coke bottle glasses. “And you could use a little spit and shine. Ma and Peepaw Horton’s Chickenlandia Festival starts this Friday, you know. You’re never gonna get a date with that head of hair.”
Ma and her husband Peepaw ran a free range chicken farm, Chickenlandia, on top of the knobs. The town had been abuzz all week about the festival, a benefit for the old folk’s home. It was a humdinger of a shindig. Anyone who could walk, crawl, or wheel their chair forward went to the annual festival.
There were mule rides and a bouncy castle for the kids, a BBQ chicken cook-off contest for the adults, a hot wings eating contest, a chicken clucking and rooster crowing contest for the loud mouths, and a chicken dance competition for the hoofers; also hillbilly horseshoes with junk toilet lids instead of horseshoes because horseshoes were apparently hard to come by these days.
Thinking about what Veenie said about my hair, I flipped off my laptop and eyed myself in the dark refection of the computer screen. My hair, snow white, looked like a halo around my head. My ragged bangs hung like drapery across the top of my glasses. I was sixty-seven and looked pretty darn normal to me. “What’s wrong with my hair?”
“Same darn thing that’s been wrong since high school. It’s flat. Except when it rains. Then you look like a dandelion that got caught in a lawn mower. Plus, looks like you’ve been whacking at your bangs again. They’re square. You use Scotch tape and the sewing scissors to trim ‘em up again?”
I had, but I wasn’t about to admit it. “Not a good look on me?”
“You look like one of them Three Stooges, and not the attractive one either.”
I ran a hand over the crown of my hair. “It’s flat today?”
“It’s drizzling, so it’s bristled out a bit. Puts me in mind of them razorback hogs the Weeselplecks keep out on the Devil’s Backbone.”
The Devil’s Backbone was a narrow limestone ridge shaped like a long spine that dropped down into a dead end area known as Daulton Holler, over close to Tunnelton. Nothing much could survive down there but feral pigs. All the Daultons had moved out and over to Washington County long ago. Potato farming on a rock ridge did them all in, I reckoned.
I mashed at my hair. “You think Tinky Sue could fix me up?”
“Probably. Maybe she can slap some gel on that head of hair. Slick your topknot up.”
“Like yours?” Veenie didn’t have all that much hair, but it was nice and white, and she kept it neat, slicked up on top like a Kewpie doll. She kept it professionally trimmed because at four foot seven and a hundred fifty pounds, if her hair got too long, she started looking like a troll. She’d always been better at fashion than me. My idea of a beauty ritual was a morning rake-through with a plastic comb. If I was feeling really frisky, I might pat my lips with a cherry Chapstick.
I grabbed my messenger bag and the file on Gertie. Tinky Sue’s beauty parlor was only three blocks south. She had it set up in an enclosed glass room that used to be her back porch. It was a nice spring day. The drizzle looked to be passing. We could walk, get some sunshine. Since our boss, Harry, was out somewhere trying to drum up business, I scrawled a note about our new case and our whereabouts and stuck it to the front door. I stuck Tater’s retainer check under a coffee cup on Harry’s desk. He’d bellyache if he came back into the office before us and found us not chained to our desks. I figured the check would soften him up a bit.
Veenie slipped on her hooded poncho. It was electric blue with yellow daisies and green pom-pom fringe. A two dollar Goodwill steal. It matched—sort of—her electric blue, zig-zag yellow leggings. One thing was for sure, Veenie wasn’t going missing. That get-up could be seen from deep space.
She pulled clip-on sunglasses out of her top desk drawer. The lenses were a reflective swirling mess of blues and greens and yellows, kind of like the surface of a mood ring. She clipped the sunglasses to her regular red-framed glasses and flipped them down. “How do I look?” She smiled and clicked her dentures.
There was something Elton John about the whole outfit. “Hip,” I said. “Very hip. No one would ever guess you were a day over seventy.” Veenie was, in fact, seventy-one, four years my senior.
“These here shades are vintage,” she said. “The kids are heavy into this kind of thing.” She bounced out the door ahead of me, eager, as always, to start snooping into the private lives of the poor and not so famous of Pawpaw County.
END BOOK 3 EXCERPT
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Acknowledgments
First, a big thank you to the residents of Jackson, Lawrence, and Washington Counties in the hilly—“knobby,” as we Hoosiers say—part of southern Indiana. Medora, Indiana, is my hometown, and I can assure you that no better folk exist anywhere. Go Hornets!
Many people helped me bring to life the quirky residents of Knobby Waters and Pawpaw County. Linda Beal—an honorary Hoosier, hailing from Kentucky—peppered me with sayings and character notes until I created this series. My amazing companion and forever friend Cindy Yager applied her proofreading and plotting skills to polish these tall tales. Her unflagging encouragement and love is a gift that can never be paid. Jonna Yager, blessed with a big heart and a sharp red pen, read a lot of bad drafts and gifted me with feedback that helped refine the plot and flush out the action. My storytelling—indeed the entire world—is much better for her kind-hearted efforts.
Every day my big sister Ginger East and her friend Melissa Horton post something online that tickles me, causing me to create new characters and impossible predicaments worthy of the supreme nosiness of RJ and Veenie. Book 3, The Chickenlandia Mystery, now in progress, is entirely their fault.
Finally, growing up in a small town is a gift. Everybody in town becomes your friend, forever. Little did I know that fifty years after grade school I’d be borrowing bits and pieces of all our lives to create a quirky town populated by love and laughter. Thank you Ramona Guthrie Owens, April England-Haggerty, Pat Hume, and Jean Ellen Hansome for being my first and most loyal Hoosier fans.
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