Engagement and Espionage (Solving for Pie: Cletus and Jenn Mysteries #1)(10)

I shook my head absentmindedly, distracted by Billy’s slow plucking progress. He was older than me by a year, and the hardest working person I knew—aside from Jennifer—but he’d plucked just one chicken in the last half hour, and not for lack of trying.

Obviously sensing my attention, Billy asked, “Can I help you, Cletus?” He wore a small smile, but his baritone was as flat as a bookmark.

“What are you doing?” I continued surveying him from beneath lowered eyebrows and behind narrowed eyes, not disguising my dissatisfaction at his inefficient feather elimination technique.

He adjusted his grip on the bird and wiped a gloved hand on a towel hanging over his thigh. “Plucking this chicken.”

“That ain’t chicken plucking,” Roscoe muttered under his breath.

Loathe as I was to agree with Roscoe, I agreed with Roscoe.

“Leave him alone,” our sister Ashley called over. “Let Billy figure things out on his own. Besides, his fingers are too big for this kind of work. We’ll get these done, no problem.” She sat between Roscoe and where Drew dipped the chickens. Drew Runous was Ashley’s not-yet-fiancé, and their lack of formal engagement was a source of great turmoil for me, but that’s not pertinent at present. It was warmer over there, but that wasn’t the reason we’d insisted she and Roscoe sit closest to the pots.

It was a little-known fact that my sister was the fastest chicken plucker in Green Valley, maybe even all of Tennessee, and Roscoe was a close second. This was likely because they used to do it together when we were growing up. Giving them prime spots closest to the pots made the most sense.

“First of all, you’re supposed to start with the legs, move to the breast, leaving the wings for last,” I instructed Billy.

“Cletus. Leave Billy alone,” Ashley said again, making an irritated face.

“He needs to do it right, otherwise he’s just wasting his time and ours.” I held my sister’s stare, which grew increasingly peeved.

“Stop your meddling.”

“But if he would do it right—”

She made a frustrated sound, turning her attention back to the bird in her own hands. “You think you always know what’s best, and sometimes you don’t. Let him alone and quit meddling.”

Now I frowned at my sister, getting the sense she wasn’t talking about plucking chickens. Quit meddling? Not likely. She might as well ask me to make a batch of substandard sausage.

“Let me show you,” Roscoe offered gently, demonstrating on the chicken still in his hands, which was already good and thoroughly plucked. “A hen ain’t going to cooperate if you spend ten minutes plucking the wings. Get your fingers between the legs first.”

My brother Beau, sitting on Billy’s right, nodded at Roscoe’s advice.

I lifted my chin toward Roscoe. “Or between the legs and the breasts at the same time, if you got the skill, like Roscoe.”

“What do you mean? Cooperate? How can I get the hen to cooperate?” Billy affixed a mystified stare on his bird. “The hen is dead.”

“Listen, the point is, you pluck a bird when it’s wet and hot,” Beau said, giving the dead hen he was holding a saucy looking grin. “Everyone knows that.”

Ashley snorted, rolling her eyes.

Ignoring Beau’s miserable attempt at a double entendre, I refocused everyone on the task at hand. “In summary, if you dawdle with the big feathers at the wing, the bird will dry out, and won’t welcome a plucking. And you can’t get it hot, not if you want it to stay raw.”

Ashley snorted again, but this time her shoulders shook with unabashed laughter. Both Drew and Jackson, I noticed, watched her with rapt interest, slightly dazed smiles on their faces.

“You are exactly thirteen years old, Ashley Winston,” Billy grumbled, ignoring our advice and continuing to pluck at the wing.

“And you are too stubborn and serious for your own good, William Winston,” my sister tossed back at him good-naturedly. “Stop being an old man and have some fun for once. Live a little.”

“Now who’s meddling?” I said under my breath, earning me a glare from Ashley.

“Live a little? By plucking chickens?” Billy’s questions were monotone and likely rhetorical.

Beau, a big grin on his face, opened his mouth as though to respond, likely with another tasteless observation. Thus, I lifted my voice and spoke over him, “After we’re done here, Billy, I’ll need your help getting these birds into the freezer at the church. I don’t have the trunk space in my Geo.”

“Can’t, Cletus.” Billy removed several more wing feathers, tossing them into the paper bag between his legs. “I have a meeting in Knoxville tomorrow midmorning. I’ll need to head home in a bit to get some sleep. But you can take my truck if you want.”

“I do want. Thanks,” I said, shifting my attention to Beau. “That means you’re helping me load and unload.”

“Fine, as long as I can take a nap after in your room at the homestead.” The redhead spoke around a yawn.

The homestead to which Beau referred was our family ancestral home, an old Victorian farmhouse with a wraparound porch Jethro was in the perpetual process of restoring for his pregnant movie star wife and their future seventeen children. Set several acres backing up to the Great Smoky Mountain National Forest, the house was worth restoring.