A Bobwhite Killing (5 page)

I took the hand he offered and shook it. “Of course. And if there’s anything else I can do, let me know.”

Graham left the room and shut the door behind him. I figured it was time to shift into grief counselor mode, but when I turned to Shana, she wasn’t on the verge of more tears as I had expected.

Instead, she smiled apologetically.

“Sorry, Bob,” she said. “You came to get a Bobwhite, and instead you landed in the middle of a soap opera. Welcome to a nasty part of my world.”

I walked over to the bed and perched on the end of it, my hands on my knees.

“You want to talk about any of this?” I asked her. “I’m an experienced counselor, you know. Though I have to say that most of the time, the extent of my counseling involves badgering students to quit cutting classes or mouthing off to teachers. Insanely jealous stepsons don’t usually figure into the mix, you know.”

“Wow,” she noted. “You really do have it easy, don’t you?”

“My momma didn’t raise no fool,” I assured her. “Of course, I haven’t told you about the zombies, wannabe vampires, and unrelenting egotists that brighten my day, either. And, believe me, a teenage girl in her first crush or dump is pretty intense. No job comes without risk, Shana. In fact, I’m lucky to be walking around with most of my brain cells still intact despite daily exposure to what often becomes mind-numbing routine, not to mention outright lunacy. And that’s on a good day.”

I caught a hint of amusement in Shana’s eyes as she let out a sigh.

“Enough about me,” I said. “How did Chuck get wind so fast of his dad’s death? He sure hightailed it down here.”

Shana rubbed her fingers against her temples. “I’m afraid that’s my fault, actually. I called him on my cell this morning, just after we got to the police station. I thought he should know. I didn’t want him hearing it from anyone else. I had no idea he was going to come to Spring Valley, let alone insist that the sheriff arrest me for … for …” She shook her head, hastily wiping away the tears that were collecting in her eyes.

Without thinking, I reached out and patted her knee in comfort. “Shana.”

“Just give me a moment, Bob,” she said, taking a deep breath. She wiped her eyes once more and then picked up where she’d left off.

“I guess it was a good thing that Ben rode over with the sheriff. Chuck has always respected Ben and his friendship with his father. He’s known him practically his whole life. I think Ben’s being here was probably the only thing keeping Chuck from going totally ballistic.”

I blinked at her. “What I just witnessed wasn’t totally ballistic? I thought Chuck was going to bite off Sheriff Paulsen’s head for an appetizer before he tore you apart for the main course.”

A loud knocking came from the other side of Shana’s room door.

“It’s probably Bernie,” Shana said. “She’s been so sweet, trying to take care of me.” For a moment, she studied my face. “And she thinks the world of you, Bob. That you can do no wrong.”

“Yeah, right,” I laughed. “That’s why she couldn’t wait to tell Sheriff Paulsen this morning about my Angel of Doom persona.” I got up from the bed. “I’ll get it.”

But when I opened it, it wasn’t Bernie in the hallway. Instead, a hundred lights flashed in my face as voices shouted over each other to be heard. A crowd of people pressed toward me and I had the distinct impression of cameras and microphones being pointed in my general direction.

“Mrs. O’Keefe!”

“Who found the body?”

“Is it true that you and your husband were having marital difficulties?”

I slammed the door shut.

“It wasn’t Bernie,” I told Shana, who had covered her face with her hands. “A pack of vultures, maybe, but definitely not Bernie.”

I could see one emerald eye peeking at me through Shana’s fingers.

“You don’t want to get involved with this, Bob. I should have realized the press would be all over it as soon as they heard. They love Jack.” She closed her eyes and lightly placed her hands on the mound of her belly. “Loved Jack.”

Now it was my turn to study Shana. If she’d slept at all while I’d been birding with Tom, it wasn’t obvious. She had gray shadows beneath her eyes and her lips were tightly pressed together. I could feel the tension radiating from her all the way across the room.

The woman needed a break.

I walked over to the large window behind her and slid open the pane, then removed the screen. Setting my hip on the window sill, I angled my legs through the open space and stepped outside the building. As I’d figured, there were a bunch of cars and television vans in the parking lot, but no people. I turned back and held out a hand for Shana. With a little careful maneuvering, I was sure we could get her out through the window.

“Let’s blow this pop stand, honey. We’ve got birds to chase.”

Since we still had hours of daylight left, I headed south and east for the part of Mystery Cave State Park that straddled Forestville and Carimona Townships. Earlier in the week, I’d seen postings on the MOU net of three different flycatchers and five different sparrows in the area, and I was hoping that would be enough to keep us occupied for a few hours while the media cleared out of Spring Valley. Once we got out of town, Shana called Bernie and told her to let everyone know that she’d gone into seclusion and would make a formal statement to the press the next morning. She also told Bernie that she was with me, not to worry, and that we’d be back in time for dinner.

“Meadowlark,” I said, pointing to the birds sitting on the wire fences near the road. “Both Eastern and Western Meadowlarks, I’d guess.”

Shana nodded. Since Eastern and Western Meadowlarks look identical, I’d have to stop the car to listen to their two distinct songs—one a slurred whistle, the other strong like a flute—to make a positive identification. Knowing that Shana and I had both heard meadowlarks plenty of times, though, I decided to keep driving. Besides, the birds would probably take flight as soon as I stopped the car on the side of the road. That happened to me all the time: I see a bird—one I’ve been looking for—while I’m driving, but when I stop to make the identification, it takes off.

Kind of like the way I felt that summer when I finally admitted to myself that Shana was exactly the kind of woman I wanted in my life, only to have her take off for college again and then on to grad school in California.

“Bobolink,” she said, pointing towards a dark-breasted bird rising out of a young hayfield. “Horned Lark,” she added almost immediately.

“Geez, Shana, leave some for me,” I pretended to complain. “It’s no fun if you get all the birds.”

“Girls just want to have fun, Bob,” she replied, a touch of lightness in her voice.

Which, unfortunately, immediately faded away.

“I didn’t think anyone else knew.” Shana’s voice was barely audible in the car. “I wasn’t even sure myself until last night.”

“Sure about what?” I asked.

“Jack was having an affair.”

I almost drove off the road.

“What are you talking about?” I glanced over at her after I straightened the wheels back onto the pavement. “Are you nuts?”

There was no way on earth that Jack had been cheating on Shana. The man wasn’t blind, or stupid. Not only was she twenty years his junior, but she was smart, beautiful, charming and funny. Not to mention pregnant with his twins. What man could possibly be married to Shana and still wander into another woman’s bed? Granted, I wasn’t privy to the details of their relationship, but last night when Jack had shepherded Shana out of the lobby, I could have sworn he wasn’t thinking about going to sleep when they got to their room. I’m no marriage expert, but I’ve seen enough body language in my counseling career to know what physical attraction looks like, and that’s exactly what I had seen last night in the hotel hallway between Jack and Shana.

“You heard that reporter in the hall back at the hotel, didn’t you?” I guessed. “Just before I shut the door. Come on, Shana, you can’t think that. Jack was crazy about you. I saw it last night—he was practically glowing.”

“It’s the woman who glows when she’s pregnant, Bob, not the man.”

“On no,” I corrected her. “Jack was glowing. Trust me. I could feel the watts from across the room.”

“Then how do you explain my husband being out all night last night?” she challenged me. “And, by the way, it wasn’t the first time, either. It’s been happening a lot the last month—overnight trips he needed to take down here to
Fillmore County. Alone. Come on, Bob,” she echoed me. “Minneapolis is barely two hours away, but Jack couldn’t make the drive home after his eco-community planning sessions in Spring Valley? Meetings that wrapped up by 10:00 p.m.? Give me a break.”

She turned away from me to look out her side window. “They say the wife is always the last to know, but not this wife. My momma didn’t raise no fool, either.”

Since I had no idea what to say to that, I said nothing. Not only were crazed stepsons beyond my counseling repertoire, but so were cheated-on wives.

Make that pregnant cheated-on wives.

Definitely a rarity in my line of work.

Not that I was looking to add it to my list, that’s for sure.

We drove another mile in silence before I saw two Turkey Vultures circling over a distant field. It reminded me of the media people who’d tried to storm Shana’s room. Talk about insensitive. She’d found her husband murdered this morning, and they were already trying to cook up sensational headlines about a marriage gone bad. I thought some more about Shana’s accusation about Jack, but I still couldn’t believe it.

“So you don’t know it for a fact, do you?” By the time I realized I was thinking out loud, it was too late: Shana heard the question.

“No, Bob, Jack didn’t give me the details.”

I stole a glance at her while I drove. She had covered her eyes with her hands again.

“But I was suspicious enough that when our last cell phone bill came to the house, I checked for numbers I didn’t recognize,” she finally confessed. “I found one that he was calling a lot. And then, one night, while Jack was sleeping, I took his phone and called the number to see what name popped up.”

Shana’s hands dropped to her lap. “It was Kami Marsden.”

The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t place it right away. Then it hit me.

“The exotic animal sanctuary person?”

Shana gave me a piercing look. “Do you know her?”

“No, but Tom and I were just birding on the edge of her land this afternoon,” I explained. “That’s where I was when Bernie called me to mount up and ride to your rescue from Chuck. You think she and Jack were having an affair?”

“The pieces fit,” Shana said without enthusiasm. She shifted in the seat, readjusting her seatbelt to ride lower across her abdomen. “His frequent calls to her number. The overnight trips he insisted he had to take alone to Spring Valley for ‘meetings.’ His being gone last night—all night.”

I pulled onto the entrance road into the park. “Yeah—I’ve been meaning to ask you about that, by the way. This morning at coffee you didn’t say Jack had been gone all night. You told us that he’d left ahead of everyone to scout the area for the cuckoos.”

For a second or two, she didn’t reply. When she did, I could hear the embarrassment in her voice.

“What do you think I was going to say? ‘Okay, everybody, Jack spent the night with his lover so we’ll just meet up with him at the youth camp.’”

“You have a point,” I conceded. I thought I heard Shana sniffle.

Smooth move, counselor. Make the lady cry some more.

I parked my SUV at the trailhead and grabbed my binoculars from where they were laying behind the driver’s seat. Then I reached across Shana, popped open the glove compartment, and pulled out the extra set of binos I kept there. I handed them to her silently and got out of the car.

Knowing how my last conversational attempt had bombed, I was more than happy that the mother-to-be wasn’t in the mood for talking as we struck out on a path into the woods. That’s one of the nice things about birding with someone else, actually—if you don’t feel like talking, or you have nothing to say, you don’t have to feel awkward about it. You can just walk and walk and listen and look for birds. You get fresh air, exercise, and the pleasure of someone else’s company. If you want to talk, you can. If you don’t, that’s okay, too. And if you want the people you’re birding with to shut up because they like talking and you don’t, you can just ask them to be quiet so you can hear the birds. Very civilized and polite. And, as in my case, keeping quiet to listen for birds also prevents you from opening your mouth just so you can stick your foot in it.

Isn’t birding a great hobby?

“There it is,” Shana said in a low voice, pointing into the trees.

I lifted my binoculars to examine the little flycatcher she’d spotted sitting about two-thirds up into the canopy of the forest. He had the distinctive long wings of the Acadian Flycatcher, and when he opened his bill to sing, we heard the short burst of his
peet-suh
song.

“I thought you said you were going to leave some of the birds for me,” I grumbled.

Shana dropped her binoculars back down and continued to watch the bird. “I never said that. You just assumed it.”

Just like I assumed any man married to Shana would never look twice at another woman.

Although, to be honest, it would probably take two looks to see all of Shana at this point in her pregnancy.

Keep mouth shut, foot out,
I reminded myself.

“White.”

I practically jumped out of my skin. I grabbed my chest and spun around.

“Geez, Stan, you’re going to give me a heart attack yet,” I told the man who had materialized directly behind me. As I would have expected, he was dressed entirely in camouflage. “Can’t you just, like, announce your approach with snapping some twigs like a normal human being or banging a gong or something?”

Although, I have to admit, if Scary Stan Miller acted like a normal person, I’d probably never recognize him in the field. As it was, he had a habit of totally blending into his surroundings; if he stood out like every other birder I know, I’d never guess in a million years that it was him. Stan being normal would be an aberration.