Jupiter felt sorry seeing Big Barney so upset and disoriented. He walked over to the nurse’s desk. “Mr. Coop, it’s that room,” Jupe said, pointing.
Big Barney Coop, who was practically a foot taller than Jupe, looked down. “You sure?” he asked.
“My friend and I were visiting the patient who’s sharing your daughter’s room,” Jupe said. “As a matter of fact, Juliet is sleeping now.”
That seemed to be enough reassurance to make the Chicken King relax a little. “Here are a couple of freebies,” he said, handing Jupe two coupons from his sweatshirt pocket. “I like you, guy. Plump but tender. I’ll bet you’d look great dipped in my secret golden batter. Thanks, guy.”
Jupe smiled and watched Big Barney walk into the hospital room. Then he tore up the coupons.
“Hey!” Pete said, grabbing for the coupons, but too late. “Why’d you do that, Jupe?”
“My diet,” Jupe said unhappily. “No fried foods allowed, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember,” Pete said. “And you have to eat a piece of melon with every meal. Weird. But just because you’re dieting doesn’t mean I am. I love the Chicken Coop’s fried chicken.”
“Don’t even talk about it,” Jupe moaned. “I love it too. I can smell that crispy crust and juicy tender white meat right now.”
They dashed out into the rain-soaked parking lot and Pete drove them back toward Jupe’s house. Jupe lived with his Aunt Mathilda and Uncle Titus Jones, who owned a junkyard across the street. When Jupe, Pete, and Bob were kids, they hung around the junk-yard together, especially when they were on a case. The Three Investigators even had their secret headquarters there, in a trailer that was hidden by junk. But now that they were seventeen years old, the trailer was no longer hidden, and they mostly hung around in Jupe’s electronics workshop, which was right next door.
“Too bad we couldn’t have heard the details of Juliet Coop’s car crash,” Jupe said. Then he noticed Pete looking at him out of the corner of his eye. “I know, I know. There’s no sign of anything mysterious about it. I just have this feeling. Call it a premonition.”
Finally Pete pulled into the junkyard and they splashed through the mud into Jupe’s workshop. Inside were desks and countertops filled with high-tech electronic gadgets and parts, catalogs of modern surveillance equipment, tools, high school notebooks, empty pizza boxes, music tapes, and a couple of chairs. There was also an answering machine, and as always Jupe checked it first thing.
“Hi, guys,” said a familiar voice on the message tape. It was Bob Andrews, the third Investigator. “Sorry I didn’t make it over to the hospital tonight to see Kelly. I had to check out a new band for the agency because the boss is out of town. Then Jennifer called to remind me that we had a date, which came as a shock to me and an even bigger shock to Amy, who I was supposed to meet for a clambake on the beach. Guess those clams got rained out. Anyway, Jupe, maybe you can work out a database computer program for me, to prevent accidents like this from happening. Think about it. Talk to you guys tomorrow.
“Bob works too hard at that talent agency.” Jupe scowled as he turned off the answering machine.
“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!”
2
After-hours Visitors
“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.