Kelly froze and slowly turned toward me, cell phone against her ear. "Spiders?"
Rex paused for a second before asking, "Did you say you inherited a house full of spiders?"
I responded to both my husband and co-leader. "Yeah. Apparently, she had pet spiders."
Kelly looked off into the distance for a moment. I knew she didn't like spiders. She wasn't necessarily afraid of them, but she didn't like them.
"I'm okay with that." And she went back to her phone. "All the more reason to stay at camp."
I told Rex about the letter and suggested that he read it.
A few seconds later, he sighed. "That's all I need. For someone to give you the credibility of calling you a detective and invite you to solve their murder."
I wasn't quite sure how to take that. "At least I wouldn't be interfering with one of your investigations."
"That's true," he said a bit too cheerfully.
Then I told him about Kelly's plan to take the girls there. Tomorrow.
Kelly interrupted. "I've got Inez, Ava, one of the Kaitlyns, Betty, and Lauren. The others all have plans."
"That's only half the troop," I said.
"It'll be easier to manage five." She waved me off.
I got up to pay the bill. "I'd better get home and pack. Let me know when we are going."
"Roger," Kelly said with a smile. "Relax. This will be fun."
"Did you hear that, honey?" I asked Rex. "Kelly says this will be fun."
My husband laughed and hung up.
CHAPTER THREE
The next day at two in the afternoon, with Kelly and five ten-year-olds who had been loudly singing camp songs for four hours, we pulled up to a sign that read Behold Behold! Home of the World's Largest Human Tooth! It actually read World's Largest Tooth, but someone had added a caret and hand printed the word Human. As if that made it better.
"Wow!" Ava squealed from the back seat for the one thousandth time since she had gotten in the car that morning. "The world's largest human tooth!"
"We're going to see that, right, Mrs. Wrath?" Lauren asked.
I didn't correct her. Since kindergarten, when we formed this troop, the girls had called me Mrs. Wrath—getting half my name right. Their argument was that any woman over the age of thirty was old and old women were married. In a way it kind of made sense.
Now that I really was a Mrs., but with Ferguson, it didn't seem worth fixing. Trying to correct little girls was a lot like teaching your cat to flamenco dance while learning Swahili. With exactly the same results.
"Let's just get downtown and find someplace to eat before I meet with the lawyer," I suggested and drove on.
The town was right on the Mississippi River with a wall of bluffs on the northern border. From another sign, we learned that it had a population of 947. It looked like it. I grew up in a town of more than five thousand, but there were small towns like this one peppering the countryside.
This place was more like a ghost town. The buildings were weather-beaten and faded, as if it had been abandoned fifty years ago. Main Street consisted of eight dingy, peeling buildings, including the lawyer's office, a diner, a convenience store, a post office, a hair stylist, and three feed stores.
We pulled up to the diner and got out to stretch our legs. An Open sign hung from a nail over the door of Fancy Nancy's Home Cooking. It looked anything but fancy as the paint hung down to the sidewalk in strips.
"Should we find someplace else to eat?" Kelly bit her lip.
"We're starving!" Betty complained before walking through the door.
I was hungry too. "You heard her." I turned and followed the girl inside.
To our surprise, the place was spotless and bright, with a black-and-white checked tile floor and tablecloths. The delectable scent of fried chicken filled the air, and my stomach responded with a loud rumble.
"Hello there!" A late-middle-aged woman with a purple beehive hairdo walked toward us. "I'm Nancy! Come on in! You poor things look hungry!"
She ushered us to a table for seven, and we sat as she plunked down cups of ice water and fresh-off-the-printer paper menus.
"The lunch rush is over, but I've still got some of the best fried chicken in the state back in the kitchen. If you don't want that, I can fix up something else!"
A happy woman who wanted to feed me? I liked her already.
We all opted for the fried chicken, although I wondered how she was going to accommodate five little girls' requests for two drumsticks each. Was she going to have to cook five chickens, or did they have some weird ten-footed chickens in the back?
"Murl!" she shouted in a deep voice that made me jump. "Ten legs and two breasts!"
I assumed she meant the chicken.
"So where are you ladies from?" Nancy beamed.
"Who's There." Betty studied the woman. "Why do you have the world's largest tooth…"
"Human tooth," Inez corrected.
"Right." Betty nodded. "Why do you have that here, and where is it?"
Nancy ruffled the girl's hair, and I got ready to snatch the child back should she attack. You never knew with Betty. I had an unusual troop of very curious girls that included, among others, four Kaitlyn M.s (whom I couldn't tell apart) and Betty, a girl who practically qualified for the CIA already. The girl was all business and mostly interested in doing things she wasn't supposed to.
"Well." Nancy tapped her chin with her pencil. "Tubby Thorkelson had one bucktooth instead of two, and it was one whole inch long. When he died, the dentist over in Dubuque—" She scrunched up her nose in disgust on the last word. "That dentist pulled the tooth and sent it over to our mayor. Turns out Tubby left it to the town in his will."
"That's cool." Betty considered this. "I'm going to do that when I die. Only I'm leaving my spleen to the Who's There Historical Society."
Lauren, a tall, quirky kid who was usually
