Last Impressions (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (29 page)

Schenk clamped his lips together hard to keep a straight face and
tucked the business card in his back pocket. “Uh, ma’am?” He followed her into the barn, clearing his throat. “Who's Henny? A hen?”

The barn was lit by stark white fluorescents and warmed just
enough to take the chill off. The smell of chickens was only mildly worse inside. Epp began rubbing her hands again.

“She’s the Black Jersey Giant. Isn’t she a beaut? Now, hold on.”

She approached the pens and began talking to the chicken. In clucks.

I said, “How come you got a business card and
I
didn’t?”

Schenk was working valiantly at keeping his shit together; he flicked me an annoyed glance, dug the card out, and handed it to
me. It was warm from being tucked against his butt cheek and it read:
Chickens: I “get” them
. The hinky quotation marks made me wonder: how exactly did Tina Epp “get” the chickens? She folded her fists into her armpits to make ersatz wings of her arms and used one boot to scratch at the dirt.

“This might be the best/worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” I confided to the cop in a whisper, “and I’ve been chased by half-naked zombies cosplaying wildlife.”

“Nope,” Tina reported to us, flexing her fingers. “Nope. Sorry. Henny says the girls don’t know nothing. Only the rooster was out.”

I ventured, “And you can’t talk to the rooster?”

“Aw, heck no, not me, ma’am.” She batted at her wig again,
spitting as strands of hair drifted and stuck to her mustache and lipstick: rookie make-up problem. It almost never happened to me anymore. Mostly because I stopped wearing lipstick.

Schenk opened his mouth, and by the hitching of his belt I
figured
he was going to tell Epp we’d be heading out. Epp held up one
finger to tell us to wait.

“You just hold yer bones, officer. I’ll go on in and fetch the Cock Whisperer.”

Schenk and I froze in mutual stunned silence, our eyes slinking sideways to each other’s, while Epp clomped back toward the house
in her black rubber boots, rubbing her hands in one another. I
wondered
if Schenk realized his hand had drifted to check that his gun was in place.

“Are you scared, too?” I whispered.

“I’ve never been so afraid in all my days on the force,” he said.

“Can’t we just leave?” I hissed in disbelief. “Do we really have to interview the Cock Whisperer? What if this nutcase comes out naked?”

“Then we'll call an ambulance for a case of frostbite nobody
wants.” Schenk made a calming motion at me with one big, capable
hand. “Settle yourself, now,” he advised. “I want to find out if
Henny the Hen’s rooster buddy is named Cocky the Cock.”

A gleeful
meep
escaped me and I swallowed my giggles. “Don’t!”

“I’m serious,” he said, but the twinkle in his eye said otherwise.

“I can’t,” I wailed from behind both gloved fists. “I can’t do it. I can’t not laugh at this. I’m sorry!” I tried smothering my laughter,
fanning myself for air. This was a terrible idea because even in the cold air the overpowering reek of avian waste nearly made me gag. “I better go wait in the car.”

I turned to leave the barn, but Schenk snagged the back of my parka by the hood.

“Don’t you dare leave this spot,” he said with a downright ferocious smile. It reminded me of a lion about to tear a strip off of
dinner. I felt my eyes widen in the face of his almost savage amusement. “You wanted to play. The game has just begun, woman.” He cleared his throat again, and slid his sunglasses on, despite the fact that the sun was still hours from rising. “Welcome to my world. Straight face, button your lip.”

“The Cock Whisperer better have a card, because I’m gonna want that.”

Schenk’s sigh told me
grow up
. “Here she comes. Whoops, he’s a he again.”

I couldn’t look. I kept my back to the Cock Whisperer as he jingled forth; I heard the little tinkles and thought
, belly dancer?
Please, Dark Lady, anything but a gimp suit studded with bondage rings
. I studied Schenk’s amazingly blank face for clues and found nothing, but the reflection in his sunglasses gave it away; Lennie Epp had thrown on
a purple and green, three-peaked, King’s court jester hat with bells sewn to the tips. Gone was the housecoat and Marilyn wig. His
Yosemite Sam mustache had been hastily waxed down into dastardly curls.

And suddenly, I was okay. The laughter was gone. I felt the stir
of psi and welcomed the return of the Blue Sense, settling in my brain like a warm, familiar hand on my forehead. I knew in that
instant that
Lennie was not insane, nor was he talking to the livestock, nor did he
believe
he was talking to the livestock. The chickens had seen
nothing. Lennie was our witness. But Lennie didn’t trust us, not yet. In fact, Lennie was torn; he was desperate to share the fishy stuff he’d seen, but he was terrified of policemen. So Lennie was fucking with us to see just how badly we wanted his input. We were being tested.

I could see by the strained expression on Schenk’s face that he was about thirty seconds from tossing his notebook in the air and stomping off. When Lennie began to do a hopping jester dance from one boot to the other in front of the pen where he kept the rooster and singing “
coochie-coo coochie-coo
,” I spoke up.

“Mr. Epp, how much time did you serve at Kingston Penitentiary?”

Epp’s crazy dance stopped. He whipped around so fast his jester hat flew off, leaving his flat orange hair sticking up at the front. “That wasn’t me. That was my brother, Shecky.”

“Shecky Epp?”

“That’s right.”

“You realize that my cop friend here can check that in about two minutes, right?” I had no idea if that was a fair estimate or not, but it sounded good. “Computers. Wonderful things.”

Epp considered me with new interest. “You’re not a cop?”

“Nope. Wait, you mean I look like a cop?” I might have had a little zing of pride there. I might
also
have had an idea for something to do with Harry when we had some privacy.

“You talk like a cop, all polite and cordial—”

“I am freezing my tits off in your chicken-shit shed, Lennie,” I said. “So, if you're done giving us the lowest-rent version of Paris Fashion Week ever, how about telling me what you saw?”

Lennie’s eyebrows shot straight up, and over Schenk’s unhappy curse, the farmer hooted a laugh. He turned on his heel, crooking an inviting finger at us to join him in the farmhouse. We did.

“Saw three of them for the longest time,” Lennie told us, leading us through a maze of plastic bins filled with assorted junk in his mudroom. “Two guys and one girl. Early twenties. Always at night. Always had beer. Bottles, which bothers me, because…” He paused to give me a serious look. “Broken glass.”

I nodded, although I had no idea why he’d care about that. The Blue Sense told me he felt very strongly about it.

“Twenty, thirty times over the past year or so, just about every weekend or other,” Lennie continued. He left the door between the mudroom and a bright kitchen propped open. “They didn’t make no trouble, so I didn’t make no trouble for them.”

The kitchen looked like something out of a post-apocalypse
movie, with empty cans scattered on the floor near an overflowing garbage pail, dishes piled in stacks by a cluttered sink, some broken, some coated in old food. I followed Schenk’s lead and pretended not to notice. Whether or not Lennie was the most slovenly housekeeper in the province had nothing to do with his being a witness.

“After a while,” he went on, shuffling through empty chip wrappers and stepping idly over a basket full of yarn, “they started bringing around a fourth person, another woman. Short. Blonde. Spiked hair. Glasses. Then the goth chick with the blue streak started bringing equipment.”

“What kind of equipment?” Schenk’s notebook was out again.

“For a while just a video recorder. Then other things. Voice recorders, funky readers, temperature gauges. Figured they were ghost hunters. I seen ghost hunters before, on account of the tunnel, eh? Even seen a TV crew once. They didn’t ask me nothing.”

“They missed the Shecky Epp show,” I said with a knowing smile.

Lennie had the grace to blush.

“Aw, I was just fooling around. Had to make sure you guys really wanted to know. Most people don’t take me seriously, so I
don’t take
them seriously. Usually, if someone is legit, they stick around through the antics for the after party. Like my wife.” He smiled
sadly at the messy Marilyn wig on a crowded counter top. “Breast cancer took her. 2009.”

“Tina?”

“Nope, Patty; she took much better care of her mustache.”

I smiled, and he touched his mouth. Deep smile lines flashed around his eyes and they danced mischievously.

“The ghost hunters,” Schenk prodded.

“Oh, at least once a month, usually every couple weeks. Last
time I saw them was…” He went to the wall where a Star Wars
calendar was hung by a clip on a nail, unclipped it, and squinted below Jabba the Hutt. “November third.”

One day before Britney went into the canal at Lock One
. “And you marked it down?”

“Yeah, it was strange because they showed up twice, and mid-
week. First time, at the usual time, around nine o’clock, three of
them,
hauling their equipment bags. Second time, later, around midnight. Only this time, blondie was there. Loud Guy had a metal detector.
They
went out on the point, there. Mighty dangerous, that, what with the frost making all the weeds and rocks slick. Lucky they didn’t fall in. Oh…” Lennie seemed to remember that there had been a death recently. “Sorry.”

“Could you tell if they found anything during either of those visits?”

“Naw, just took their readings, made notes, laughed, talked. The usual. But after midnight, maybe even a little after one, I was up to
drain the snake —ain’t getting old hell — and I saw them down
there. I knew it was them because the tall boy, he’s got one of those fishing
caps with the lights built right into the brim. That’s the only light
they had all the way down to the point. Right out where you found that poor girl’s body.”

Britney Wyatt’s dump site. They’d been there
.

If Batten had been here, there would be an intense barrage of questions, and I’d have seen him lean forward, vibrating — a bloodhound on the scent. In contrast, Schenk leaned back into the
kitchen chair with a long
exhale, looked away like the news bored him, inspected all the interesting things Lennie had scotch taped to his kitchen wallpaper, which skewed heavily towards pictures of bikini-clad chicks
straddling Harley
Davidson motorcycles. Schenk’s unbelievably long legs fell apart at
the knees until he looked like if he got any more relaxed he’d fall
asleep right there in Lennie’s kitchen.

“Can I get you something to drink?” Epp asked. “A beer or some water?”

“Sure,” Schenk said easily. “Water’s good.”

“I’m okay,” I said. “So, Lennie, when the threesome was out
there, which people were there?”

Lennie took his head out of the fridge with a Brita water jug in his hand. “Uh, the girl with the black and blue hair and all the shit in her face—”

Britney Wyatt.
“Piercings?”

“Yeah. She was with the tall boy with the fishing cap and the Asian kid with the Montreal Canadiens jacket whose volume doesn’t go below yelling. Beer only makes that worse. You know the type? Think everything they have to say needs to be heard.”

I smiled as Lennie poured Schenk a glass of water in a cup that
might have been clean. He continued, “They went to the pond then
did some wandering around before coming back to the pond.”

“And later that night?”

“They were joined by the blonde chick, the one with the spiky hair and the big jugs.” He looked sheepish. “Excuse me, I should say big hooters when a lady is present. Boy, yup, Patty woulda cuffed me upside the head just now.”

Ellie?
My brain suggested this as a possibility, but how did she
know Britney and the gang? My mind chewed this over while
Schenk continued to question Epp about specific details: time, exact location,
descriptions of the equipment, everything that Epp might have
noticed
about the group. When he was done Lennie took one of Schenk's
cards and offered to call if he remembered anything else. He walked us to the front door. I noticed him rubbing his hands again, and glanced at the messy kitchen behind him.

“How long have you been suffering arthritis, Lennie?”

His big, ginger eyebrows twitched, and he looked at his hands as
though just noticing he had any. “Boy, now, you got a good eye, young lady. They only hurt me some when the temperature drops,
or I drank too much beer the night before. Don’t know why that’d be. Funny things. Knuckles and knees, them’s the crankiest bastards. Winter’s rough ‘round here.”

“Would you accept a little help if it could be arranged?”

Lennie grinned, showing off horse teeth. “Naw, it’s a waste of time to clean up after a crazy old bugger like me. Just get messed up again. Patty used to try, God bless her, but by the time she fell ill,
she’d given up trying to keep up with ol’ Whirlwind Lennie, here.
What she called me… Whirlwind.” His lips did a sad shrug. “‘Sides, I ain’t really rolling in the dough, you get me?”

“I know some people who have to do volunteer work. And you
could do them a favor by letting them putter around here for an hour a week, pick up some stuff that hurts too much when you try it. Just an idea.” I left that with him and gave him one of my new cards, the FBI ones, which were hopefully not soon to be my
former
business cards.