What the Cluck? It's Murder (PAPERBACK) Frankie Chandler #4

“You can’t make me.”

I took a hurried step back from the source of my fear, stumbling over my own feet in the rush. The solid chest of Detective Martin Bowers broke my fall. He hooked his arms under mine to help me catch my balance.

Normally, I’d enjoy physical contact with the handsome police officer, currently off-duty. However, my attention remained on the black eyes that locked onto me in an unblinking stare. It didn't take a pet psychic, which I
was, to tell those eyes held more than contempt. They held murder.

The eyes belonged to the snow-white face of a Leghorn hen, and she showed no signs of the happy, aw shucks
attitude of Foghorn Leghorn, one of my childhood cartoon heroes.

Why on this beautiful early afternoon in March
was I, Frankie Chandler, reluctant communicator with all things furry or feathered, facing off with a vicious hen?

It goes back to my best friend Penny’s wedding cruise last fall. There had been laughter, tears, and a few murders. Not that the murders were part of the agenda. They just happened, and I discovered the first body below my
stateroom balcony.

Penny tattled to Detective Bowers in Wolf Creek, Arizona, and she made it sound as if I was a damsel in distress. That irritated me to no end, as Martin Bowers had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with me. It wasn’t so much that he couldn’t handle the embarrassment of dating a pet psychic.
The clincher came when he, while holding my hand, got caught up in one of my psychic experiences with an angry feline, and he didn’t like it.

Baby.

Anyway, he responded to Penny’s request for a White Knight and joined the cruise a few days later, and in between finding corpses and searching for the kitty who held the key to solving the murders, Bowers and I had a few
friendly moments.

At the end of the cruise, the normally stoic detective
approached me in an unusual state of nervousness to ask for another chance at romance. Or maybe it was a first chance since we had never made it to an actual date.

That was the good news. For balance, there had to be bad news. Bowers also wanted me to meet his sisters. All seven of them.

Yes, seven. After the death of his mother, Bowers had been raised by a week's worth of sisters who doted on him as if he were the pearl without price.

The invitation to meet his guardians, the guardians who would hate me for stealing their little brother away, was as enticing as a naked run through a minefield. I expected disapproval in the form of tight-lipped silence and sarcastic comments. Maybe a voodoo doll.

Still, it was important to him, so after a few months of dating—I mean honest-to-goodness dating with dinners and goodnight kisses and things normal couples do—I finally gave in.

Now, I was paying for my moment of weakness. Here I stood on June’s ten-acre farm in Cave Bear, Arizona, almost paralyzed with fear. Maybe not a farm. More of a homestead. It was a lot of land with some cows, horses,
several sheep, a few goats, and these damn chickens.

Bowers' eldest sister, June, was the only sibling I’d met so far, and though she intimidated me the way Sister Ellen did in high school English class, she seemed nice. So far.

Maybe she was waiting for her six backups to arrive.

In response to my reaction to the angry chicken, Bowers rested his hands on my shoulders and chuckled. “It’s a hen, Frankie. Not a pit bull.”

Craning my neck sideways to address him without losing site of the bird, I said, “Bully breeds are snuggly, friendly pups unless someone’s abused them. This—this hen wants me dead.”

He sighed at what he considered unnecessary drama. “June said there’s a gap in the western fence. I’m going to take a look. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty. You’ll be done by then. You should be done by then.”

He sighed again. “There’s no earthly reason you won’t be done by then. You’re only collecting eggs.”

I was momentarily distracted by the thought of Bowers, wearing a white t-shirt, blue jeans, and brown leather work boots, doing physical labor. Normally he’s performing sedate activities like interviewing suspects or writing reports, but here in the wilds of the Arizona desert, his tall, lean body would be lifting heavy bags of feed, or shoveling hay to the horses. Maybe working up a sweat that would make his dark, wavy hair curl. Perhaps, while chopping wood, he might get hot and need to remove his shirt. I sucked in my breath. Outdoors-man Bowers might be the only highlight of this weekend.

“Tell you what.” I picked up the basket and shoved it toward him. “Why don’t you steal their young and I’ll go look at the hole in the fence?”

“No can do.”

The violent image of what the wannabe mother intended to do to me had left an impression. I stamped my foot, which was a prissy move, but I was one notch below terrified. “Why not?”

“First, how much experience do you have fixing fences? Second, and more important, there aren’t any young to steal. The eggs haven’t been fertilized. Animal husbandry one-oh-one. No rooster, no chick.”

The beady eyes glaring at me sent out a powerful wave of longing that started in my belly and moved to my chest. As the ache intensified, tears filled my eyes. This was followed by a ferocious desire to hurt anyone who might hurt mine. My heart raced as my entire body tensed up in fight-or-
flight mode.

Still riding the wave of emotions sent by the chicken, I twisted around, grabbed Bowers’ shirt in my fists and shook him. “She doesn’t agree with you.”

Bowers and I have been through a lot, much of it involving my reactions—and occasional overreactions—to what animals tell me. Even after his first-hand experience with psychic phenomenon, he stubbornly refused to discuss, acknowledge, or endorse what he refers to, vaguely, as
my thing
.
Naturally, he ignored me.

He kissed my forehead, and with mock solemnity said, “Good luck. When I get back, I hope you’ll have gathered your courage . . . and the eggs.”

And then he left me alone with the murderous chicken.

I sized up my surroundings in case I had to make a quick escape. The coop was a rectangular wooden building with a cement floor covered in earthy-smelling mulch. This was where the chickens slept and laid eggs and ate from PVC piping that released their food. They even had a water bottle
with nipples they pecked at when they were thirsty and a round thingy that held little pebbles to help them break up their food.

I shoved this last item aside with my foot to give me a clear escape path.

Several wooden clothes-drying racks leaned against one wall under a high wooden shelf, both providing places for the chickens to roost. Along the opposite wall, half a dozen nesting boxes sat atop a pine box about three-feet tall and ten feet long. It reminded me of the caskets they used in the
Wild West.

The nesting boxes consisted of milk crates set on their sides and stuffed with hay. Bowers’ sister had put up little privacy curtains, something I found hysterically funny until I opened one and found the angry chicken inside.

Most of the birds had abandoned the coop and moved to the run outside to scratch for bugs or do whatever chickens did to amuse themselves.

Maybe Bowers was right. They didn’t care, so why should I?

I moved down the row of nesting boxes and felt around each one. As I picked up the warm eggs and added them to my cache, the few birds remaining in the coop watched my progress with soft clucks. Too soon, I was back to old beady eyes.

Even though the window shutters kept the warm, spring sun out, and the temperature inside was a cool seventy degrees, sweat trickled down my back.

When June had asked me to perform this chore, I’d foolishly thought, “What an easy way to get into her good graces.”

Stupid, stupid, stupid. If I blew this, she would think I was an idiot or, even worse, an incompetent female who’d spent her pampered life avoiding hard work.

That would not happen. Counting today, Friday, I had three days to win over those seven women, and I would not waste this opportunity because of a moody hen.

“Here chick-chick,” I said in a sing-song voice as I stretched out my hand. “Be a nice girl.”

Her body stiffened, and she hissed at me. I pulled back my fingers just in time to avoid a peck.

I gritted my teeth. “Look. That egg is just an egg. It’s not a chick, so hand it over.”

Then I sent her an image of an egg cracking and no chick inside. I sensed her stiffen.

Reaching out my hand, slowly, I continued to hold eye contact. She stared back without blinking, though she trembled a little. My fingertips touched her feathers, and still she didn’t move. They crept under her, and I
splayed my fingers so they could surround the first egg. Gently, gently, I pulled.

“See? That didn’t hurt.”

And then the chicken from hell attacked.