A Murder of Crows (7 page)

Savage’s new art teacher also carried something else, I noticed.

Slung over Paul’s left shoulder was a satchel bursting at the seams with art equipment. I could see the tips of paintbrushes and the edges of drawing pads poking out … just above the silhouette of what looked suspiciously like two Greco-Roman wrestlers silkscreened on the satchel.

Paul Brand had an interest in wrestling.

Shoot. Had I bet on the wrong teacher?

Could the intimidating Bonecrusher have turned into a scrapbooking art teacher?

Not in my universe.

Then again, I was a birder who found dead bodies.

Go figure.

I popped the lock on my SUV and laid the bag of flour on the back seat. Whether he was the Bonecrusher or not, I was glad I’d run into Paul and that he’d given me the heads-up about Sara’s absences. As soon as I saw my favorite delinquent, she was going to not only get her baby back, but she was also going to get another lecture about skipping school.

Not that I had any illusions that one more lecture would make a difference. Sara was a habitual truant. With two workaholic parents who seemed to show little interest in her, I was fairly certain that her school-skipping behavior was a desperate plea for attention. In that sense, Sara was a wild success, because she got my attention all the time.

Unfortunately, it didn’t do jack for her visibility with her parents—from what I could tell, they hardly noticed they even had a child, which just encouraged Sara’s own irresponsibility and acting out even more. From years of being a school counselor, I knew that I could talk until I was all shades of blue in the face, but if a kid wanted to keep doing something, she’d do it … until the stakes got high enough to make her pause and hopefully make changes.

In my experience, that frequently meant that the stakes had to entail a close encounter with either the police or the Grim Reaper, or in some cases, both.

Seeing as Sara had already added the Wisconsin highway patrol to her list of acquaintances, I wondered what kind of near-death experience it would take to make her change her delinquent ways.

A vision of Sonny Delite, sprawled dead in the woods, popped into my head.

Yup. That would certainly cause a change in a person’s behavior—being dead. The downside was that it would also change everything else about the person. Permanently.

I thought again about Luce’s theory. Could Sonny’s death have been the result of a fatal mistake in a natural diet? The absence of any suicide evidence had caused the police to label it murder, but I seriously doubted that organic tea fans routinely left notes stating that in case they were found dead, the investigators should know they had picked their own tea leaves that morning.

My, what a pleasant way to start another day of counseling high school students. Some people repeated affirmations or listened to music. I pictured dead bodies.

I pulled into my usual parking space behind the gym and turned off the engine. As I opened the car door and stepped out, a perfect V of Canada Geese flew overhead, heading south.

In another month, we could be looking at highs in the teens for temperatures. We’d already had one hard freeze, and the
Farmers’ Almanac
was predicting another long, frigid winter. Last week, Mr. Lenzen had even posted his annual ridiculous list of energy-saving tips in the teachers’ lounge in hopes of miraculously lowering the school’s heating bills.

Somehow I doubted that putting up posters of tropical destinations was really going to make a difference in how students and teachers perceived the chill factor in a freezing classroom. I knew from my own cubbyhole-of-an-office experience that when your fingers got too cold to feel a pen in their grip, not even the memory of a hundred-degree day in July was enough to get the blood pumping again. If Mr. Lenzen was really serious about reducing energy bills, he should have pushed harder to get one of those wind turbines that the Savage school district installed last spring near the middle school.

I’d forgotten about the wind turbines.

A year ago, the School Board had asked for input from the schools in the district about where the turbines should go. It was part of a project with the local utilities company, as I recalled—something about ensuring compliance with the Minnesota state law that required electrical utilities to provide twenty-five percent of their total electricity sales from renewable sources by the year 2025. I think there had been some debate about the turbines functioning in sub-zero weather, but the turbine manufacturer assured everyone it wasn’t an issue and swore that the schools wouldn’t get stuck without power in the middle of winter.

Of course, if I was representing a multimillion-dollar project that was dependent on turbines, I’d probably say the same thing, especially if I was staring at a government deadline for developing alternative sources. What utility company wouldn’t be eager to tap into wind power first and then work out the kinks in the technology as it developed? Being the first kid on the block—or in this case, the first turbine on the block—could only be good for business.

Which would also make it understandable that those same energy companies wouldn’t appreciate Sonny’s vehement protests against their wind farm plans in Stevens County.

Renewable sources versus conservation.

Weren’t those two supposed to be on the same side?

I wanted to believe that, but anyone who read the news in Minnesota would find out differently.

The LeSuer/Henderson Recovery Zone utility battle had ended years ago, but another environmental debate was now raging in Goodhue County, east of Savage, between a proposed wind farm project and federal and state wildlife officials, not to mention local residents and conservation advocates. The issue was what would happen to the eagles—nesting and migrating Bald Eagles, as well as visiting Golden Eagles—that used the proposed site, once the wind farm was up and running. With fifty turbines planned for the farm, everyone knew that some eagles would be killed by the big blades of the wind towers—eagles that were protected by federal law.

Consequently, every interest group involved was trying to come up with a way to combine land use and energy development with environmental responsibility, but, as usual, sometimes the strategies got ugly. I’d even heard that the wind company was accusing local residents of deliberately luring more eagles into the area to pad the numbers of potential bird deaths from the turbines. At the same time, the developer’s plans to remove nearby habitat in order to keep the birds and other wildlife away from the deadly turbines was getting a thumbs-down from state and federal officials. While putting distance between the towers and nests would save some birds, land-clearing would only displace the other critters in the area.

Basically, what used to be simple utilitarian decisions about land use had become intricate balancing acts of a multitude of interest groups and subgroups. Depending on where in the state a piece of property was located, a real estate transaction could come under the scrutiny of a dozen agencies, not to mention public discussion and debate.

And Sonny Delite had often been smack in the middle of a lot of those discussions, according to his wife, verbally slugging it out with the opposition, giving utility groups and project developers a painful, and often embarrassing, black eye.

If Sonny was repeatedly going to step into the ring with big bucks energy providers, maybe he should have taken a page from the Bonecrusher’s book by wearing a mask and remaining anonymous. That way, if someone had decided to go after Sonny looking for payback, he’d still be looking.

And Sonny wouldn’t be dead.

In that case, I’d say anonymity was a huge advantage.

“Mr. White!”

Sadly enough, I wasn’t acquainted with that particular advantage in my own line of work. I turned to find Sara Schiller, Goldie’s missing mom, weaving her way through a row of parked cars towards me.

“Where’s my baby?” she asked.

I pointed at the bag of flour laying on the back seat. Sara peered through the car window.

“That’s not safe,” she informed me. “You have to use a carseat with a baby. Just like you have to plug your electric outlets with covers and make sure kids don’t eat poisonous plants at the playground. We had a whole unit on child safety last week. It’s a good thing you don’t have any kids, Mr. White. Ms. Knorsen would flunk you in a minute for not using a carseat.”

“I’m not taking the class, Sara,” I reminded her. “You are. Supposedly.”

“What do you mean, ‘supposedly’?” she argued. “I show up… sometimes. It’s a stupid class. Ms. Knorsen just keeps harping about how important it is for parents to spend time with their kids. That’s ridiculous. My parents never spend time with me—my mom’s too busy with work and her club, and my dad’s always traveling for his job. I don’t need to spend time with them.”

And I was pretty sure that was exactly why Sara didn’t like Gina’s class. As her counselor who was aware of her family situation, I could just imagine that every time Gina started discussing healthy family relationships, Sara immediately tuned her out. Not having experienced a nurturing bond with her own parents, Sara wasn’t interested in hearing about others’. Along with her truancy problems, Sara’s disciplinary issues in the classroom were directly related to her feeling that no one cared about her. To cope with that void in her life, she’d perfected deceiving her teachers—and her counselor—to an art.

Which reminded me about the conversation I’d had earlier with possible-Crusher Paul Brand.

“What about art, Sara?” I asked. “Mr. Brand told me you’ve been skipping his class. Is that a stupid class, too?”

“Yes,” she snipped. “He wants us to scrapbook.”

Well, okay, maybe she had a point there. Personally, I was still pretty much lost about that whole scrapbook thing, let alone it being high school art class material. To be honest with you, it sort of reminded me of trying to braid leather strips into key chains when I was in Cub Scouts.

Time-consuming, yes.

Artistic? I don’t think so.

In its great institutional wisdom, however, the school district of Savage High didn’t pay me to question the curriculum. My job—a fairly large part of it, as it turned out—was making sure that students parked their little cabooses in their classroom seats at the designated times.

Whether or not they were going to be scrapbooking in those seats.

“Sara, you have to attend classes,” I told her. “That’s how school works. You go to class, you do the work, you get a grade, you graduate… hopefully. Eventually.”

I reached into the back seat and grabbed Goldie.

“You’re welcome,” I said to Sara, plopping the flour into her arms.

She looked down at the sack and frowned.

“This isn’t my baby.”

“Sara, it’s your baby.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it’s not,” she insisted. “My bag of flour had a picture of a gold medallion on it, and this one has Robin Hood.”

I looked at the bag she held up in front of my face.

Sure enough, Robin was there. He even had a green cap with a feather in it.

“What did you do to my baby?”

I could have sworn she actually sounded upset. Sara Schiller, world-class truant and absent pretend-parent, was distraught over a bag of flour she hadn’t wanted in the first place.

“Your baby turned into some excellent buttermilk biscuits,” I informed her. “They were great with the salmon. I tell you what. Just take old Robin here and wrap him up in a baby blanket. Ms. Knorsen will never know the difference.”

Sara gave me a glower. “Yes, she will. I will never trust you again, Mr. White. That’s the last time I ever ask you for help.”

She tucked Robin under her arm and stomped off into the building.

That went well, I decided. Now I didn’t have to lug Goldie—or Robin, as it turned out—around for the morning, and, with any luck, Sara would park her little caboose in front of the other counselors for a while whenever she got in trouble with teachers.

Not bad for a Tuesday morning, and I hadn’t even stepped into my office yet.

More geese honked in the sky as I walked into the building and hung a right to detour by Alan’s classroom. As the faculty’s local news junkie, he might be able to fill me in on any other controversies that could be cooking with turbines in Minnesota.

Not that I intended to do any extracurricular sleuthing for the police, mind you. I was, after all, a high school counselor, as I’d been so recently reminded.

Although, if I did uncover an important clue to Sonny’s untimely demise, I might consider sharing it with Rick.

If, in return, he would tell me which teacher was the Crusher.

True, I already had a deal with Rick for that information if I helped him find the Ferruginous Hawk in Morris later this week, but since the MOU-net had been silent about the bird yesterday, I was beginning to lose hope. Fall migration had a way of becoming unpredictable with some species. A sudden cold front could push migrating birds through the state much faster than expected, while a lingering spell of warm weather could entice other species to stick around their summer haunts longer than normal. Either way, the hawk’s absence from any sightings on Monday didn’t bode well for finding it Thursday.

Then again, when it came to birding, you just never knew what you’d find until you looked.

Kind of like my weekend walk at the Arb.

“Look! Here’s a late Green Heron.”

“Look! Here’s a dead man dressed like a scarecrow.”

I leaned into Alan’s classroom and spotted him back in the corner, his head down on his desk top and his eyes closed.

“Rough night, huh?” I said.

He opened one eye.

“Parenting is not for the timid,” he informed me, “or for those who want to sleep at night.”

I walked to the back of the room and sat down in a student’s desk across from my brother-in-law.

“Are you finding fault with my niece?”

“Not at all. Louise is perfectly incredible,” he insisted. “It’s the rest of the world that has its nights and days mixed up.”