A Flock and a Fluke (Clucks and Clues Cozy Mysteries)

by Hillary Avis

  The golden shell seemed none the worse for wear, and it was still sealed with a clear plastic sticker around the seam. Hopefully the damp hadn’t penetrated inside to the prize code. A thousand bucks would solve a lot of my problems, namely the problem of feeding eighty-odd chickens whose eggs were unsaleable.

  Boots cocked her head and stared at the egg in my hand. I grinned at her and held it out so she could see it better. “Yes, I just laid this one. Do you like it? Wanna see what’s inside?”

  She hopped a few steps closer, muttering and clucking curiously as she craned her neck up toward the egg. Then a bra strap hanging out of the hamper caught her eye and she swiveled her head toward it, giving a sharp squawk of discovery and delight. She grabbed it and started yanking on it like it was a juicy earthworm. I waved the egg at her, but she’d completely lost interest in me.

  I snorted. That’s what I got for talking to birdbrains.

  Well, lucky for Boots, the golden egg was going to feed her for a lot longer than one worm slash bra strap. Lucky for me, too. But for some reason instead of feeling happy about it, I felt something else. A squirmy little worm of guilt was crawling around in my stomach, and I didn’t know why.

  Sure, the circumstances under which I’d found the egg weren’t great—I mean, it was in the hand of a dead woman—but I’d solved the riddle fair and square. I deserved the prize. So why did I feel bad about claiming it?

  Maybe it was because I knew other people needed it more than I did. At least my house was paid off with my divorce settlement. I’d have a place to live even if my chicken operation failed. But Ruth had sabotaged her own real estate deal on my behalf, and she had payments on her shop and her house. Without some income, she might lose both.

  Maybe I could split the prize with Ruth. She was my Scramble partner, after all. Five hundred bucks wouldn’t solve her problems, just like it wouldn’t solve mine, but it’d be a Band-Aid until we figured out our next moves. That made me feel a little bit better.

  I was just about to crack open the golden egg when I had another thought that gave me pause. What if Eli was wrong, and the two poisonings weren’t just flukes? What if the egg really was evidence from a crime scene—a huge, terrible crime, Amelia’s murder? Then it’d look really clucking suspicious that the person who found her body and the last person to see Margie un-poisoned were the same person who walked away with a thousand dollars in cash.

  I probably should turn it in, just in case. But that would mean no money for Ruth. Could I just sit back and let her struggle when I could have helped her out?

  I groaned, and Boots dropped the bra strap to give me an accusatory glare. I waved her back to her task. “Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt you with my personal crisis.”

  I left her in the bathroom and took the egg out to the kitchen. I looked around for a safe place to keep it, finally settling on the hen-shaped cookie jar where I stored my stash of emergency cash. It could stay there for a few more days while I decided what to do with it.

  Turn it in? Or cash it out?

  I drummed my fingers on the kitchen table. It’d be a whole lot easier to claim the prize if I knew that Amelia’s death was truly accidental. But at this point, that was impossible to prove.

  Or was it?

  All I really needed to do was rule out all the people who might have caused her death. I counted them off on my fingers. Suspect number one: Cal. Amelia’s death had removed Cal’s major campaign liability—his fake marriage. He planned to withdraw from the mayoral race until she died, and then he was right back on the stump. If that wasn’t suspicious, I didn’t know what was.

  Suspect number two: Sara. I hated to put her on the list, but she’d been close to Amelia in her final days. They may have had some bad blood between them that nobody knew about. Also, she’d served the breakfast that Amelia ate that morning—the only things in Amelia’s stomach were coffee and eggs. That was a hard fact.

  No, I reminded myself. It wasn’t. Sara had served Amelia eggs, sure. But if Amelia was acting sick at the Rx Café, maybe she’d had the coffee before she got to the restaurant. If I could prove that Cal had made Amelia coffee at home, maybe Eli would believe that her death wasn’t an accident. I grabbed my phone and called Sara’s number, praying that she’d pick up.

  “Hi Leona,” came her small voice over the line.

  “Did you serve Amelia coffee on Saturday?” I blurted out.

  “No.” Her answer was instant, automatic, which gave me pause. Did she really remember Amelia’s order among the dozens of customers she must have had that morning?

  “Are you sure? You’re not confusing her with someone else?”

  “I’m sure.” Sara’s voice strengthened. “Really sure, actually. She usually gets cappuccinos, so I offered her one, but she said no thanks. She’d said she’d had enough caffeine already and it had upset her stomach. All she had was the scrambled eggs, no toast, no potatoes.”

  “No decaf, either?” I asked.

  “Nope. I don’t serve decaf. I’m morally opposed.” Sara gave an awkward giggle.

  Her, too? What was with all the anti-decaf activists in this town? But hey, she’d just made my life a lot easier—now I knew for sure that Amelia’s coffee was poisoned, and she didn’t drink it at Sara’s café. “Did she happen to say where she picked up the coffee?”

  “No, why?” Sara’s voice took on a troubled tone. “You don’t think...?”

  I sighed. “I do think that, actually. Or at least, I think it’s possible.”

  “Well.” She paused. I could tell she was struggling with whether she should tell me something. Finally she said, “I’m not accusing them of anything, but I know she met with Margie and Doc before breakfast. She and Cal were working really closely with them on the Easter Scramble. But I have no idea if they drank coffee at the meeting.”

  “Where did they meet?” I asked. The only other place in town with coffee was the Greasy Spoon. Or had they met somewhere else, like City Hall or even one of their homes?

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Hm. I’ll have to ask around,” I murmured, more to myself than to Sara.

  “Don’t tell Doc I’m the one who told you about the meeting, OK?” Her voice was thick with regret and cracked on the last part of the question. “He already hates me for what I did to Margie.”

  I clucked my tongue. “He doesn’t hate you. How could he? They were his doughnuts, anyway.”

  Hm. Doc’s own doughnuts had poisoned his wife. Had his coffee poisoned Amelia?

  My thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the front door that nearly jarred me out of my seat. I said a quick goodbye to Sara and went to see who had knocked, checking out of habit on the way to make sure I was wearing pants. I didn’t want some poor Jehovah’s Witness or vacuum salesperson to get the surprise of their lives when I opened the door.

  I opened the door with “no thanks” on my lips, but it was just Stef from the post office. Her tan sedan with a big USPS sticker on the driver’s side door was parked in the driveway. Usually she put any mail into the mailbox out by the highway. If it wouldn’t fit in the box, then she’d just leave it on the porch. So I was surprised to see her outside my door holding nothing more than a slim envelope and a clipboard.

  She handed me the clipboard and pointed to a box at the bottom. “Sign here.”

  I dutifully scribbled my illegible signature and handed it back. In return, she presented me with a stiff, legal-size envelope with a return address in Salem. “Thanks?”

  “Sure thing.” She gave a quick nod. “Have a good one!” she said over her shoulder as she bounded down the steps on the way to the car. Oh, to have that kind of spring in my step still.

  I looked down at the envelope in my hands—it was from the state and stamped “REGISTERED” across the front—and tore it open. I scanned the letter inside. It was my inspection appointment, set for Thursday afternoon. Case number 8010. Complaint: Inadequate space for housing laying hens.

&n
bsp; I frowned and looked up at the coop across the driveway, where my flock was milling placidly, scratching and pecking at leftover grain they’d uncovered from the morning’s feed. Alarm Clock stood proudly on a stump, overseeing his kingdom. My chicken palace was just that—a palace compared to most egg-laying operations that caged their birds. Though I didn’t pasture my chickens every day, they had more than adequate space inside the run. Maybe ten times the space required by law. Whoever had filed this complaint had never been to my farm.

  It was probably some meddling gossip who thought they were doing the town a favor by shutting down my farm, even temporarily. Well, the yolk was on them—I’d pass this inspection with flying colors.

  Chapter 20

  Thursday, Day 6

  I spent the next forty-eight hours running around like a chicken with my head cut off, collecting eggs that were now piling up on my kitchen counters, ignoring the bills that needed to be paid by the end of the month, cleaning out the nest boxes, dodging Eli’s phone calls, and sweeping the front porch. Though I knew I’d easily meet the state guidelines, it didn’t hurt to spruce the place up a little before the inspection.

  By the time the inspector showed up after lunch on Thursday in a white pickup truck, the flock was spread out under the blossoming apple trees, gorging on their fill of bright spring grasses and fat caterpillars. I was on the porch, sitting with a book and a mug of decaf, opinions be darned, the picture of idyllic farm life. Let anyone say my chickens had inadequate space, and I’d laugh in their face.

  The inspector, a tall, gangly man wearing a dark green Department of Agriculture cap, got out of the truck and squinted at me, tapping the embroidered name on the breast of his bomber jacket. “Inspector Noble from the ODA. You Leona Davis?”

  I put down my book and squinted back at him. “Yep. But my friends call me ‘Case Eight-one-oh-one.’”

  “Well, I guess you’ve seen the complaint. Show me what you got.” He grinned, exposing the gap between his large, yellowed front teeth.

  “You’re looking at it.” I nodded toward the orchard. Inspector Noble raised his eyebrows, his lips working as he counted the chickens and wrote something in a narrow notebook that he pulled from an inner jacket pocket. Then he turned and eyed the coop and barn.

  “I’ll need to take some measurements,” he said. “Do some calculations.”

  I snorted. “Really? I would think you could tell from here.”

  “You’re welcome to accompany me. Most farmers do.” He walked briskly across the driveway toward the coop, clamping the notebook to his side with one elbow while he unclipped a laser measuring tape from his belt. I guess I wasn’t most farmers, because I wasn’t even a little bit anxious about his findings. He could measure my bra size while he was at it, and I wasn’t going to worry about it.

  “I’ll be inside,” I called. “Just knock if you need anything.”

  Of course I glued myself to the kitchen window to keep an eye on my birds—and an eye on Inspector Noble in case he screwed anything up during his inspection. He moved quickly and efficiently around the coop, taking careful measurements of everything, even the headroom in the nest boxes, and noting it in his little book. When he finished with the coop, he headed for the barn with a quick, almost furtive look over his shoulder at the house.

  I rolled my eyes. He probably thought he’d find a bunch of spare layers stashed in there. While I did occasionally use the barn stalls for quarantine of sick chickens, none of them lived in there permanently, simply because it wasn’t completely predator-proof. Barns always had little cracks, holes, and gaps that a determined critter could sneak through, especially antique barns like mine.

  Sure enough, he didn’t spend five minutes in there. He spent more time in his truck filling out forms. When he finally came and knocked on my door, I took my time answering it and then couldn’t help smirking at him. “How are your calculations? Everything check out?”

  He gave me a wink and a nod. “Looks A-OK. I’ll just need your signature in a few places. Mind if I come in? I smell coffee.”

  Pausing a split-second to eye him up and down and assess his threat level, I decided I could take an uncaffeinated, hairless camel in a fight, then led him into the kitchen table and offered him a seat. “I’ve got a pot of decaf; that’s all.”

  He made a face. “Never mind. I’ll pick up some real coffee in town.” He pushed his papers across the table toward me. “Sign the areas I’ve highlighted, and you’re back in business.”

  I sank into the chair and bent my head over the papers, flicking through and groaning at the ten-plus signatures required.

  “Tell me about it,” Inspector Noble said good-naturedly. “My hand got a cramp.”

  “Can I find out who filed the original complaint?” I asked, already on page three. I pressed the pen to the paper and signed with a flourish.

  “Nope, it’s an anonymous process. Usually, anyway. In your case, the complaint was filed with the governor’s office, not us, and then they passed it down. So technically the state of Oregon made the complaint.” He snickered, the air whistling through his front teeth as he exhaled.

  I froze in my seat. “What does that mean?”

  He waved his hand. “Ah, don’t worry about it now. You’re in good shape. Some rich guy probably got his panties in a twist about your rooster crowing and thought he could call on friends in high places to make it stop. But this is a right-to-farm state, so the only way they can get you is to claim you’re breaking livestock regulations. Lucky for you, you aren’t.”

  “Lucky me,” I echoed. I didn’t know any rich guys except my ex-husband. Well, I’d met Jam and Jelly—they clearly had money to burn. But I’d gotten the call from the ODA suspending my license before Jam and Jelly even viewed the old Sutherland place next door. They didn’t file a complaint about my chickens.

  But I did know “guys” who might have connections in state government...namely one, a certain mayor who favored tweed skirt suits and had threatened my business if I didn’t spread her nasty rumors. Maybe Margie had flexed a political muscle to show me she meant business.

  “These eggs for personal consumption?” Inspector Noble asked casually, motioning to the dozens of egg cartons stacked on the counter.

  “Um...” A surge of panic welled in my chest. I could lose my handler’s license again if he thought I was storing eggs improperly. “Yes, of course. My eggs for sale are in the fridge. In both fridges, actually.”

  “Well, I’m certainly glad to hear that.” He pulled out his notebook and jotted something down, then raised his head and flashed his yellow teeth at me again before rising from his chair. “Good to meet you, Ms. Davis. I hope we never have to meet again.”

  “THAT WOMAN IS A TOTAL—”

  “Witch,” I finished Ruth’s sentence.

  “I can’t believe she’d do something like that.” Ruth shook her head disbelievingly as she flipped her salon’s door sign around to CLOSED and lowered the blinds on the front window. “Calling the governor on you!”

  I shrugged and sank into one of the dryer chairs. “You were the one who warned me that she could be dangerous.”

  Ruth took the seat next to me. “I didn’t think she’d do something like this, though. A person who’d purposely ruin a local business has no right to lead this town. I never thought I’d say this, but I think I’m going to vote for the pastor.”

  “She had to know I’d pass inspection,” I said. “It was just a warning. She was letting me know she could damage my business, not trying to actually damage it. Not much, anyway.”

  “Well, I think she’s rotten to the core. You could have had a booth at the farmers market today if she hadn’t orchestrated this nonsense. That’s real money she stole out of your pocket, not just a warning! You know”—Ruth turned to me, eyes shining—“while Margie’s still in the hospital, you should apply for a booth permit for next week!”

  “There’s a six-week waiting period before you can apply aga
in if you’re denied,” I said, shrugging. “Maybe I will in June.”

  “She didn’t even accept your application, did she? She just tore it up, so there’s no record you submitted it. And she’s still sick from the peanuts, so she won’t even know!”

  “Who’s working at City Hall?” I asked. I was surprised City Hall was open at all, if Margie was still laid up. Honeytree had such a threadbare city budget that they didn’t even have a City Hall receptionist—the mayor fulfilled both functions. Maybe they had a clueless city council member filling in.

  “Last I heard, Doc was acting as interim. Tammy Jenson was in—I know you hate her, but she’s one of my best customers and this month is tight—she told me. Doc’s been asked to fill in until the election. If Margie wins, she’ll be out of the hospital by then. If Cal wins, he’ll take over from Doc.”

  I shook my head, confused. “Doc Morrow’s the mayor now?”

  “What? It’s not that weird. Isn’t it a thing? Like, if a guy dies in office, his wife finishes out his term or whatever?”

  I snorted. “I don’t think so. That’s why God made vice presidents.”

  “We don’t have a vice mayor!” Ruth giggled, and shrugged. “I guess everybody trusts Doc to keep the ball rolling until the election. It’s not far off, now. In any case, it can’t hurt to reapply for the permit. What do you have to lose?”

  “Another fifteen bucks?” I got up and went to the window, parting the blinds to stare across the street at City Hall. The building was dark except for Eli’s office window. “Looks like he’s closed for the day, anyway.”

  “But the pharmacy’s open until six. Doc’s gotta be there. Go see him about it,” Ruth urged.

  “I do have a lot of eggs piling up,” I mused. The farmers market would be the perfect place to unload them. Plus, the conversation would be a good excuse to ask Doc about his meeting with Cal and Amelia about the Easter Scramble—a meeting that at some point, had turned deadly.