A Murder of Crows (28 page)
Authors: Jan Dunlap
Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Mystery, #Mystery & Detective
And now that she was a part of our lives, I couldn’t imagine life without her.
“I’ll take her.”
I looked up to see my brother-in-law in a red leotard with the same “I” on his chest as the one on Baby Lou’s.
“It’s somebody’s bedtime,” he said, lifting my niece up and against his shoulder. He turned to greet the new arrivals. “Hey, Gina, you look great. What are you doing with Savage’s worst?”
Rick clasped his hand around Gina’s and tugged slightly on his white bow tie.
“Since I am too much of a gentleman tonight to respond to that insult in the company of these lovely ladies,” Rick announced, “I will instead see you on the basketball court, very soon, and I will repay you for your words then.”
“I will crush you,” Alan promised him.
“In your dreams, Mr. Incredible.” Rick nodded at Alan’s shoulder. “There’s drool on your suit, big guy. And, by the way,” he said, turning back to me. “I think we identified your tire slasher, Bob. We finally got a good image from the security camera in the high school parking lot. Does the name Greg Bernson ring a bell?”
I groaned. Greg Bernson was already my number one pick for delinquent of the year, with more hours logged sitting in my office this fall than even Sara Schiller, prior to her turn-around, that is. Less than six days into the new school year, Rick had predicted that Greg wasn’t going to make it three weeks before he became a regular in detention hall, and unless my memory failed me, I’d just renewed Greg’s detention pass the day before my tires were slashed.
“Can you spell ‘suspension’?” Rick asked me.
A chorus of laughter rang out from the front hallway.
“Who’s here?” Alan asked, rubbing his daughter’s back, her eyes already closing.
A lean, muscular man, clad in a head-to-toe leotard, stepped into the living room. He struck a wrestling pose I recognized from the internet photos Alan and I had looked at weeks ago.
“Hey, Alan! What do you think?” Paul Brand’s voice carried across the room.
“I knew it!” Alan said, throwing me a grin. “You owe me ten, White-man.”
“Do I?” I asked, pointing at another party-goer who had followed Paul into the room.
It was another, slightly larger, Bonecrusher.
“I’m the man,” Boo said as he peeled his mask off.
Though he still looked huge, I had to admit that the black was slimming on him. From a distance, the two men could almost be identical.
I looked at Alan’s face for his reaction. His eyes jumped from one Crusher to the other and back again. Paul pulled off his face mask, and he and Boo circled each other while other faculty members cheered them on.
“It’s not either one of them, is it?” Alan asked me. “If the Bonecrusher wants to keep his secret identity secret, he’s sure not going to show up at a Halloween party in his old work clothes.”
“You wouldn’t think so,” I agreed, putting my arm around my wife and pulling her close. “What do you think, Dr. Watson?” I asked her.
Luce threw a smile at Rick and Gina. “I think the mystery remains a mystery, Sherlock.”
“So much for your skill with clues, White-man,” Alan groused. “I think you better stick to birding.”
I grinned and tipped my Sherlock Holmes hat.
“With pleasure, old boy. With pleasure.”
Bob White’s A Murder of Crows Bird List
Canada Goose
Wild Turkey
Green Heron
American Crow
American Goldfinch
Red-winged Blackbirds
Downy Woodpecker
Bluejays
Sanderling
Purple Sandpiper
Red Phalarope
Merlin
Red-tailed Hawk
Ferruginous Hawk
Tundra Swan
Killdeer
Northern Shoveler
Mallard
Redhead
Ruddy Duck
Snow Goose
Common Eider
Acknowledgements
As always, I am grateful to many people for their kind assistance in helping me out with the details that make my stories real. My brother-in-law took time out of his busy schedule to track down some facts and figures for me regarding wind farm leases, and Dean Beck of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources verified that the Frog Lake named in the 1964 Birding Almanac of Stevens County is today’s Gorder Lake. The controversy about the power line project through the LeSeur/Henderson Recovery Zone is well documented and was my initial inspiration for this story; I want to thank Delores Hagen for her enduring commitment to the birds of the Minnesota River Valley. Once again, I am indebted to my son Bob, who continues to have enormous patience with his mother’s requests for his birding expertise, and to my husband Tom and daughter Colleen for their endless support and witty repartee that makes me think they should be writing the Birder Murders, and not me.
My enjoyment of the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum has spanned decades, and even though I think the annual scarecrow display is pretty creepy, I couldn’t resist using it as the setting for a murder. Finally, I want to salute the real Chef Tom, Red, and everyone at Millie’s Deli for the wonderful meals my family enjoyed there over the years. You are sorely missed!
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