Megan Stine - Murder To Go

“I know,” Pete said with a smile. “All that work cuts into his dating time.”

Jupe started tinkering with a small device that was supposed to read electronic lock combinations, and Pete busied himself at another table, cleaning out the sprayer of a new fuel injector for his car. They talked until it got very late.

They talked about Jupe’s wish for a car, about not seeing Bob too much anymore because of his job, and about running into Big Barney Coop. And Jupe talked about Juliet Coop’s accident. It drove him crazy not to know the details about something.

Suddenly the telephone rang, startling both Pete and Jupe. They looked at the clock. Nearly midnight. Pretty late for calls, even on a Friday night.

Jupe sat down in an old swivel chair. It had a Niagara Falls 1982 souvenir pillow for its cushion. “The Three Investigators,” he said in an I-mean-business voice.

“Jupe, it’s Kelly. Put me on the speaker phone, okay? I’ve got to talk to both of you.”

“It’s Kelly,” Jupe said as he switched on the speaker phone.

Pete looked as surprised as Jupe. “What’s going on, Kel?” Pete asked.

“Something weird,” Kelly said. “Juliet Coop has been moaning and talking in her sleep.”

Jupe got that feeling again. But he didn’t want to jump to conclusions. “Bad dreams aren’t uncommon after an accident like hers,” Jupe said.

“Okay, okay,” Kelly said impatiently. “But it’s what she’s dreaming about that freaks me. She keeps saying, ‘Millions of people will die.’ ”

The words gave Jupe and Pete a chill.

“And that’s not all,” Kelly continued. “She keeps saying, ‘He’s poisoning the chicken. It’s wrong. It’s wrong.’ And she sounds like she means it. I mean, it doesn’t sound like a dream.”

Pete let out a low whistle. “Heavy duty.”

“I told you I had a feeling!” Jupe said.

“Yeah,” said Pete. “But who knew it meant the Chicken King was poisoning my favorite food!”

“Hello?” Kelly Madigan’s puzzled voice came out of the speaker phone in Jupe’s workshop. “Are you guys still there?”

They were there, but their tongues were in shock. How many times had they eaten at a Chicken Coop restaurant in their lives? Hundreds? Thousands? Probably more for Jupe. How many times had they seen Big Barney Coop’s friendly face on TV and heard his crazy but sincere voice telling them, “I’ve built my reputation selling legs and not pulling yours.”

“Big Barney Coop. poisoning his food.?” Pete said, shaking his head. His voice trailed off and his face got serious. “I can’t believe it.”

“And there’s no reason why we should,” Jupe said, having given the matter some thought. “As Aunt Mathilda frequently reminds me, the trouble with jumping to conclusions is you don’t know what you’re going to land in.”

“What’s that mean?” Pete said.

“It means,” said Jupe, “we can’t accuse Big Barney Coop of anything. For one thing, there’s no reason to think that Big Barney is the person Juliet was talking about in her sleep. It could be anyone who’s poisoning the chicken. And for all we know, Juliet Coop is having a bad reaction to her medication or to the shock of her accident, or maybe she’s just having bad dreams.”

“Hey, guys,” Kelly said, talking into her hospital phone. “I’d love to put Juliet on the line so you could talk to her personally, but the phone cord’s not long enough to reach her in dreamland. Oh, listen. did you hear that?”

Pete shook his head. Jupe answered out loud, since Kelly couldn’t see through the telephone. “No. What?” Jupe asked.

“She said it again,” Kelly reported. “She said, ‘No — people will die. Don’t do it!’ ”

“Okay,” Jupe said to Kelly. “We’ll be there at eleven a.m. tomorrow to talk to Juliet. That’s when visiting hours start. I’m certain she can tell us whether this was just a bad dream or not.”

“Fine,” Kelly said. “But I’m telling you there’s a mystery here.”

“See you in the morning, babe,” Pete said, and hung up the phone.

Nobody got much sleep that night. For one thing, Jupe stayed up trying to figure out who would want to poison millions of people, and why. Was it Big Barney? Or was Juliet Coop mixed up with some kind of crazy political terrorist group? Or was there someone else who would want to poison the Chicken Coop’s prime fillets?

Then at two in the morning Jupe called Bob Andrews to fill him in and to make sure he’d be at the hospital early too.

After the phone call, Bob had trouble falling back to sleep because he knew that when Jupe got into one of his agitated moods, he called frequently.

Kelly didn’t sleep, either. She stayed awake in her hospital bed most of the night, waiting for Juliet Coop to say something more. Every time Juliet moaned in her bed, Kelly would ask her softly, “Who, Juliet? Who’s poisoning the chicken?” But Juliet didn’t answer.

Pete slept like a rock.

The next day bright sunlight filled Kelly’s hospital room when Pete and Jupe arrived.

The first thing Jupe noticed — besides the fact that Kelly looked very tired, and that the number of vases of flowers in the room had quadrupled during the night, and that a large stuffed chicken wearing a golden crown now occupied the guest chair by Juliet’s bed — was that the curtains had been drawn around Juliet Coop, sealing her off.

“Who’s in there?” Jupe asked, pointing to the curtained area. He wanted to talk to Juliet right away and settle this mystery.

“Shhh.” Kelly hushed Jupe and then spoke in a whisper. “No one’s in there except Juliet. I think she’s asleep.”

Just then Bob Andrews walked in.

“Sorry I’m late guys. Car trouble,” the tall, lanky teen said, taking off the cotton sweater that was tied around his neck.

Bob had always been a thin kid with glasses who was good at school but usually got lost in the background. Maybe it was because he worked for so many years in the dark, hidden stacks of the town library.

But all of that was changed now. Contact lenses, brighter clothes, a job with Sax Sendler’s talent agency, a car of his own, karate lessons, and a lot of self-confidence had transformed The Three Investigators’ researcher into one of the most popular guys at Rocky Beach High School.

“Where’s our case? Or did the Chicken Princess fly the coop?” Bob asked.

“The case is behind the curtains,” Pete said, motioning with a jerk of his head. “She’s asleep. We can’t talk to her.”

“I’m sure that Jupe would be the first to point out that logically we could talk to her all we wanted,” Bob said with a smile. “She just won’t answer.”

“At least she’s quiet now,” Kelly said softly. “You should have heard her moaning all night. And she had some interesting visitors.”

“In the middle of the night?” Jupe said, surprised. “How’d they get past the nurse with the red hair and hot temper?”

Kelly shrugged. “Very mysterious, isn’t it?”

“Who were they?” Jupe asked skeptically.

“Well, Big Barney was in here every hour. He even gave me a couple of free coupons,” Kelly said.

“Who else?” asked Jupe.

“A good-looking guy named Sean Fellows,” Kelly said.

“How do you know his name?” Pete asked, suddenly frowning.

“Because I asked him — and don’t be so jealous,” Kelly said. “He’s Juliet’s ex-boyfriend. He came at about four a.m. and just sat there watching her. Then early this morning there was another visitor, Maria Gonzales. She said she was Juliet’s college roommate.”

“We can forget about her,” Jupe said.

“Why?” Bob asked.

“Because Juliet said, ‘ He’s poisoning the chicken’,” Jupe explained. ”And I’m not too worried about this Sean Fellows, either. An ex-boyfriend doesn’t sound like someone who would kill millions.”

“Not even for revenge?” Pete asked. Jupe gave a “maybe” shrug.

“But you haven’t heard about mystery guest number four,” Kelly said, lowering her voice even more.

The four teenagers looked toward the closed curtains around Juliet’s bed to be sure she wasn’t waking up. Then Kelly continued her story. “The fourth person I call Mr. Sweetness,” she said. “He was like a brick wall with a bad temper. He was big, in his thirties, wearing an army camouflage jacket. As soon as he saw me, he put the collar up to hide his face. Maybe ’cause he was so ugly!”

“Why didn’t you ask his name?” said Pete grumpily.

“Hey — I did, and he told me to mind my own business. And he meant it,” Kelly said. “Then he drew the curtains around Juliet’s bed so I couldn’t see anything.”

“But what did you hear?” asked Jupe.

“Well,” Kelly said, “I heard him go through her closet and after that, every drawer on her side of the room.”

“Slowly or quickly?” Jupe asked.

“Quickly,” Kelly answered with a decisive nod.

Jupe smiled. “From that I’d have to conclude that he wasn’t just browsing. He knew exactly what he was looking for.”

“But he didn’t find it. He left empty-handed,” Kelly added.

“Unfortunately, there’s no way to get any more answers until Juliet wakes up,” Jupe said, starting to pace the floor.

“And she’d better wake up during visiting hours or the dragon lady will kick us out again,” Pete said.

Bob peeked around the corner of Juliet’s curtains. “She doesn’t look too bad,” he said. “The newspaper this morning said she was lucky to be alive. She totaled her car in the crash.” Bob turned back to his friends. “Have you been to the scene of the accident yet?”

Jupe shook his head and kept pacing back and forth. Just then the nurse with red hair came into the room carrying a large bouquet of flowers.

She looked at Kelly and then at each of the guys in the room. “Three boys?” she said, shaking her head at Kelly. “Don’t you think you should let someone else have one?” She set the flowers down by Juliet’s bed and then walked to the door. “I’ll be back,” she said, almost like a warning.

“What for?” Pete muttered when she was gone. “Well, this is interesting,” Bob said, examining the flowers the nurse had left. “These are from Michael Argenti.”

“Why is that interesting?” asked Pete.

“Because he’s the competition,” Bob said. “He owns the Roast Roost restaurants.”

“How do you know all this stuff? I mean, between you and Jupe, it’s disgusting,” Pete said.

Bob laughed. “No, it’s just that one of the bands we handle at the agency just played at the grand opening of a new Roast Roost franchise. And Michael Argenti was supposed to be there, but he kept us waiting four hours in the hot sun until he showed up.”

“Can you explain why Argenti would send flowers to the daughter of his rival?” asked Jupe.

“Sax does things like that sometimes,” said Bob. “It’s a business practice. Doesn’t mean you actually like the guy. I heard Argenti and Big Barney can’t stand each other. Every time Michael Argenti makes a wish on a wishbone, he wishes Big Barney would drop dead. And it’s the same for Big Barney.”

“Well, now at least we’ve got some suspects,” Pete said, pounding his fist into his hand.

“Yeah, but do we have a crime?” Jupe asked. At that moment Big Barney Coop opened the door. He froze for a second, obviously surprised at seeing a roomful of people.