A Roost and Arrest by Hillary Avis

Author:Hillary Avis
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: animal mystery, cozy mystery, pet mystery, chicken mystery
Publisher: Hilyard Press
Published: 2020-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

It wasn’t until Eli was gone and I had all the eggs washed and dried that I realized how few I had to sell. Even accounting for the diminished lay this morning, I was a several dozen short. I checked my lay logs for the last week, where I recorded the number of eggs I collected each day. They were all on target, so yesterday’s count must have been low, too. Eli didn’t mention it, but he wouldn’t have known any different.

I grabbed some of my “rainbow” eggs from the kitchen fridge and scrubbed them up to take, too. Maybe some people would get a kick out of having a variety of colors and sizes in their carton. I loaded the washed-and-dried eggs into my special coolers and, huffing and puffing and crossing my fingers they didn’t leak all over my leather upholstery, wedged them in the backseat of the Porsche.

This poor little car was probably in shock. Here she thought she’d spend her days bopping around the streets of Beverly Hills, visiting boutiques and bistros, and I had her going camping and hauling eggs to the farmer’s market. Well, even loaded down with my coolers, she made good time, and I squeaked into the library parking lot two minutes before the farmers market opened.

About a dozen booths were spaced around the fairgrounds between the library and the covered bridge. I spotted all the regulars under their colorful banners: the berry stand, the nut hut, the woman who makes goat cheese and goat milk soap, the candle-and-honey beekeeper booth, the organic vegetable folks. A travel trailer selling coffee drinks was parked in the lot on the edge of the grounds.

I snagged a cup of iced honey coffee on my way by, balancing the drink in one hand as I dragged my stacked coolers-on-wheels with the other. My table and pop-up tent were waiting for me on the far side of the market, and a short line had already formed in front of my “Fresh Eggs” sign. I didn’t even have time to sit down in the provided folding chair before people were dropping off last week’s empty egg carton and picking up another dozen as fast as I could unload them from the cooler.

Even with the mismatched, multi-size rainbow eggs, I sold out in ten minutes. Usually, that’d be a good thing, but since I didn’t have as many eggs as usual, it was just a thing, kind of like putting on your last pair of clean underwear one day before your vacation is over. I mean, it’s clean, but what about tomorrow?

After I sold out, I sat there like a dummy for a half-hour, drinking my honey coffee and telling people no eggs, sorry, before I realized I should just probably just leave. I felt so bad, though. I’d dragged Ruth and the kids away from the lake for less than twenty minutes of sales. I was supposed to staff my booth for a full two hours, according to the farmers market rules, just to make it worth it.

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