The Money Bird (An Animals in Focus Mystery) (4 page)
Read The Money Bird (An Animals in Focus Mystery) Online
Authors: Sheila Webster Boneham
Tags: #Fiction, #mystery, #cozy, #mystery novel, #mystery fiction, #novel, #animals, #soft-boiled, #dog show, #dogs
“The song, Janet, the song, although …” He chuckled as he draped his arm across my shoulder and steered us toward the punch bowl, then spoke low into my ear. “How long did you say we have to stay?”
I handed him a cup of what appeared to be sherbet-and-ginger-ale and said, “Here, let me punch you.”
A short fellow I had seen before at Shadetree was reaching for the ladle, and Tom passed his cup to the man. Then he bowed slightly and gestured toward the dance floor. “Shall we dance, m’dear?”
“Oh, I, uh …”
Holy cow, I really am at the prom,
I thought, recalling that less-than-stellar event of my teenhood. I glanced down at my wide-soled running shoes, fluorescent-green anklets, and denim capris. “I don’t know, Tom. I forgot my dancing slippers and frock.”
He just grinned at me and held out his hand.
“Oh, why not,” I said, and we joined the other dancers just as the tune ended. I tried to turn back but the vocalist said, “Now we’re going to slow it down a bit, so grab your sweetheart,” and Tom did just that.
He pulled me close and I was once again astonished at how easily our bodies fit together. A reasonable rendition of “Unforgettable” coiled like audible smoke around me. I closed my eyes and let everything go except the movement, the music, and the man. When the music stopped, we just stood like that for a moment. Then the band launched into “Rock Around the Clock” and broke the spell. I declined to jitterbug in my clodhoppers, so we turned back toward the punch bowl.
Neil Young was standing with an elderly woman in a lovely floor—
length pink gown and firmly sprayed blue hair. He was speaking to her but looking at me. Tom said, “My, your friend gets around, doesn’t he?” He sounded almost as annoyed to see Neil as I was.
“Let’s go see Mom,” I said, changing course and circling the dance floor.
She had disappeared.
“Back to the punch bowl,” said Tom, nodding in that direction. My mother was standing by the table, loading finger food onto a little paper plate. The woman in pink had vanished and Neil was beside my mother, smiling his high-school-heartthrob smile. He leaned in to say something. By the time we got there, she was giggling.
Neil nodded at me. “Janet,” he said, and held his hand out to Tom. “Neil Young.”
“Tom Saunders.”
I couldn’t tell whether they were squeezing the feeling out of each other’s hands, but the grip seemed to last a long time. Or maybe time was just losing its shape and oozing around like a Salvador Dali clock. They reminded me of a pair of male dogs posturing. The body language was right, both standing as tall as they could. And the direct stare. I almost looked around for a chair to set over one if a fight broke out. I saw Marietta Santini do that once at Dog Dayz when a couple of dogs got into a squabble. She pinned one down with the rungs under the chair while somebody pulled the other dog away. I watched the men’s faces, hoping one of them would give in and feeling a little tremor of hope that it would not be Tom.
It wasn’t. Neil retrieved his hand and turned toward me. “So what are you doing here, Janet?”
“Visiting my mother.” I nodded toward Mom, who was busy loading her plate with olives. I was sure I had told him she was living at Shadetree. “What are
you
doing here?”
“I came to see my aunt.”
Something about that bothered me, but I couldn’t think what, so
I focused on my mother. I touched her arm and said, “How you doing,
Mom?”
Her mind might be flickering on and off, but her reflexes still work. She let out a screech that rattled my earrings and whacked at me with her paper plate, launching a dozen olives into the air. One of them hit Neil square in the silk hankie and another lodged in my hair.
“Ma! Calm down!” I made a move toward her and she backed into the table.
“Get away from me! I don’t know you!” She sidled along the edge of the table, then looked blankly at Tom and spoke to Neil. “Do you know this person?”
I’d like to say I was getting numb to the impact of having my mother
react as if I were an axe murderer, but I’m not sure that will ever be true. My heart was pounding in my ears and my eyes stung. I felt strong hands moving me a step away from the direction my mother was headed and I heard Jade Templeton’s soothing contralto. “It’s okay, Janet. I’ve got her.” And she did. She put her arm around Mom’s shoulders and said, “Mrs. Bruce, let’s go sit down for a minute, okay?”
Mom looked sideways at Jade and pursed her lips and stiffened her backbone, but she let herself be led to a chair by the wall. A young woman who looked to be about sixteen appeared with a
whisk broom, dust pan, and towel, so the rest of us moved out of her
way. Tom extricated an olive from my frizzy hair. “You okay?”
“I’m great.”
Neil folded his olived handkerchief and put it in a pants pocket. “Sorry, Janet. That’s tough. How long has she been like that?”
“A while. She’s been here since May, but it started, I don’t know, a year or so …” My voice petered out under the weight of recent events and I changed the subject. “Neil, what is going on at that Treasures on Earth place?”
Tom cleared his throat and a look like he had been slapped moved
across Neil’s face, but he recovered almost before I saw it. “What do you mean?”
“Janet, maybe this isn’t …” Tom started, but I cut him off.
“The parrots, for one thing, Neil. What’s with the parrots?” I heard
my volume rising but couldn’t seem to reach the controls. “You people all have parrots, Neil. What’s up with that?”
Neil took a step back and looked around, but no one seemed to be paying any attention. That’s one advantage to raising your voice in a nursing home, I supposed. Half the residents can’t hear you.
“Janet,” said Tom, gripping my elbow and trying to turn me toward the exit. I tried to pull away but he tightened his grip and whispered, “Janet! Not here, not now.”
I craned my neck for a last look at Neil, but the good doctor had already bolted for the other door, so I went with Tom, shrugging him off my arm when we got to the building exit. I pointed toward the other side of the parking lot. Neil was unlocking a car. Black. Beetle-like. “Tom, is that the car we saw on Tappen Road last week?”
“Probably not. Come on, Janet, why would your doctor friend …”
That hit me all wrong and I snapped, “What, you don’t still know any women you knew in school?”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. But why would Neil be skulking down Tappen Road like that? There are lots of black cars.” We watched Neil pull onto South Anthony and Tom said, “I don’t even know what that is.”
“You didn’t know what the one on Tappen Road was, either.”
We sat in the car without speaking for a long couple of minutes, but glaring through the windshield so hard I half expected it to crack. Tom broke the silence.
“Come on, let’s take Leo to my place and then take the dogs for a walk. Then we can all go to Zesto’s for a cone. I’ll save some for Leo even.”
I was a little steamed that he thought he could distract me with ice cream. I was more steamed at myself that he was right.
thirty-two
We had planned to
sleep in Sunday morning for once, but a bright flash followed by a roar that sounded like a mountain being dragged across the roof landed two dogs on us when there was just enough light to see shapes in the room. One of those shapes was Leo. He was hunkered down on Tom’s dresser.
“Drake, you big weenie,” said Tom, but he wrapped his trembling dog in a securing arm and pulled him in close. He lay his chin on top of Drake’s head and grinned at me. “He doesn’t even flinch when we’re outdoors in a storm. I think it’s an excuse.”
Jay wasn’t bothered by storms, but he knew an opportunity when he saw one. He had squeezed in between Drake and me and rolled against me into belly-rub position. Of course, I obliged.
An hour later the storm had passed and Tom’s backyard radiated summer scents of wet grass, mulch, and a chorus of flowers. I breathed it all in so deeply that I could almost taste the roses, lavender, flowering tobacco, sweet alyssum, and more that fringed the
back of Tom’s house. Jay and Drake were getting noses full, too,
although they were more interested in following some sort of track across the grass and under the fence.
A flash of red in the air made me jerk my head around. The image of a scarlet parrot flashed through my mind, but was quickly replaced by the male cardinal that had landed on a feeder in the neighbor’s yard.
“Open the door, please, ma’am.” Tom was inside the sliding screen holding a tray with two steaming mugs and two plates bearing whatever he’d been heating in the oven. More inspiring morning scents hit me when I liberated him. Coffee, cinnamon, and yeast.
“You baked cinnamon rolls?”
“Sure,” he said, pulling a kitchen towel out of his pocket to dry the table and chairs. “Was up at four mixing and kneading and working my fingers to the bo …”
“Frozen, right?”
He held my chair out for me and said, “Refrigerated.”
When we had finished eating, Tom took the dishes in and brought
more coffee and I cranked up my laptop. We had already emailed my photos of the three parrots—Persephone Swann’s lovely Ava, the dead bird on the island, and the live one—to George Crane,
the ornithologist Tom had contacted. We were both eager to see what
he had to say, but first I checked my own emails for anything critical, then passed my computer to Tom. As he signed into his account, he said, “It’s too soon to expect anything, you know. His auto reply said he was gone for the weekend.”
Jay and Drake raced onto the deck, a floppy flyer in one mouth and a tennis ball in the other. Dogs and toys were all sopping wet, mucky, and very close. “Not now, guys! Off ! Of
f !
” I waved them away, curling my legs up into my chair to keep from getting slimed. They looked so disappointed in me that I almost caved in, but the sound of Tom’s phone saved me from having to do a load of laundry before I could leave.
Tom got up to answer the phone and handed me my laptop. “You could leave more clothes here, you know, in case of wet dog attacks,” he said, touching my shoulder and grinning.
“Stop that,” I said.
“Stop what?”
“Reading my mind.”
He was still laughing when he shut the door behind him.
I looked at the dogs. They were still on the deck, Jay lying in sphinx position with the floppy on his paws, Drake sitting, his lip bubbled out where it was caught between tennis ball and tooth. “He does, you know. He reads our minds,” I said. They wagged their tails in agreement.
The door slid open behind me and Tom said, “Janet, come here. Bring your computer.” When I turned I saw that he was gesturing for me to hurry, and seemed very excited. “Hang on,” he said into his phone, and pressed the mouthpiece against his shoulder. “Set it up and open my email again. Here.” He re-entered his password and opened his account, then spoke in the phone again. “Okay, downloading now.”
There was an email with photos attached, and he opened the first
one. It could have been a portrait of Ava, I thought, although I’d have to see the photos side by side to be sure. The lovely creature was perched
on the shoulder of a grinning, bare-chested child with the bowl haircut characteristic of Amazonian Indians. Tom opened the second photo, then the third. Two more parrots, or possibly the same bird. In one shot, the crimson bird was perched on a branch, and the photo was obviously taken at considerable distance from beneath, meaning it was a very tall tree. The third photo showed a parrot in flight, and aside from the forest in the background, it might have been the bird flying around Heron Acres. But one small red parrot in flight looks pretty much like another to me.
“What are we looking at?” asked Tom.
The voice on the other end of the line was speaking fast and sounded agitated. I couldn’t make anything out, but Tom’s forehead had puckered up in his worried-and-potentially-angry look. I’d have to settle for the retelling, I guessed, so I went into Tom’s office and turned on his printer. I’d loaded the printer software onto my computer a week or so earlier when I needed to print something. I found some photo paper on a shelf, so once I slipped it into the feed tray we were all set. I went back to the computer and sent all three photos to print, then opened my own parrot photos and printed them. At least we could compare them side by side.
“No, really, plenty of room,” Tom was saying into the phone. “In fact, you can have the house to yourself if you like.” He winked at me. “Great. See you Tuesday.” He paused, then said, “Right. Nothing until then. Thanks a lot.”
I retrieved the photos and spread them on the counter.
“Wow,” said Tom, frowning and shaking his head.
“He’s coming here?” I was leaning over the pair of Avas. “Do you have a magnifying glass handy?”
“He wants to see the birds for himself, but he’s pretty sure …” He disappeared down the hall and came back with the magnifier.
“Sure of what?”
“Two endangered species,” he said.
I raised my head and gaped at him. “What?”
“That’s what he thinks. This one,” he said, pointing at the photo of the bird that looked like Ava, or whatever his name was now, “is an endangered Amazonian parrot. He’s emailing us the names, but wants us to keep it to ourselves until he gets here. And these,” he pulled the other photos toward himself, “are, he thinks, a critically endangered African species.”
“So Anderson was right. Something is going on out there.” I looked
at the photos, trying to take it all in. “You know, that dog I met at the vet’s, the wildlife dog, his handler said bird smuggling is pretty active around here.”
“Some greedy s.o.b.’s will do anything for money.”
“No wonder Persephone didn’t want me to photograph Ava. Although come to think of it, I think she said ‘they’ didn’t want the birds photographed.”
“‘They’ means whoever is placing the birds with people. Treasures on Earth. Moneypenny.” Tom got up and let the dogs in. “Janet, if they
are
smuggling endangered birds, there’s a lot at stake—money, possibly big money, and criminal prosecution if they get caught. They have a lot of territory to defend.” He stood in front of me, put his hands on my shoulders, and looked into my eyes. “Please don’t go snooping around out there alone.” He paused. “Or at all. Leave it to the cops.”
“Okay.”
“At least be careful, will you?”
“Okay.” I started to collect my things, preparing to go home.
“You’re coming back, right?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it. I have a lot to do at home. Laundry, mowing, fun stuff like that.”
And besides, I’m terrified to give up my autonomy, so back off, Bub!
As he does so often, I think the man read my mind. “I know, you need your space.” There wasn’t a trace of snark in his tone, but I looked at him to double check. He just grinned at me and said, “That’s one of the many things I love about you. But if you change your mind, the door is always open.”
A few hours later, I decided that being alone might not be such a hot idea, so I loaded the critters up and went back to Tom’s house for the night.
thirty-three
Monday, Monday.
The Mamas
and Papas were rocking it out when I stepped out of the shower. Maybe it’s because I work for myself, but Monday doesn’t seem any less trustworthy than any other day to
me. Mondays do tend to be busy, though, and this one promised to be
a doozy. I had a lot to do, including some of the things I had planned
to do the day before, and I had to go home to do a lot of it. First, though, I needed some exercise to fight back at the white chocolate macadamia cookie I’d eaten on Saturday. Okay, that was just a mouthful, and if I stuck to just a mouthful of things I like, I wouldn’t be constantly trying to drop twenty pounds. I had eaten too well over the weekend and I needed a long walk.
Tom was starting breakfast when I got to the kitchen, but I declined. “I’ll get something later. Want to go for a jog before it heats up.” I gave him a kiss, keeping a hand on his chest to make sure that’s all it was, and left. A quick stop at home to drop Leo off, and ten minutes later Jay and I were jogging east on the River Greenway along my favorite stretch of the muddy Maumee. There’s a bend there in the river, and the path descends into a shallow dip maybe forty feet across before it rises again. The elevation loss is no more than three feet, but it’s cooler there, more moist, and on a bright day the early sun through the leaves colors the air a warm gold-green. I always breathe a little more deeply as I pass through what I think of as “the green bowl.”
As we came out the east side of the green bowl I caught motion in my peripheral vision and turned to look toward the river. A great egret rose from the near bank, almost indistinguishable from the strings of mist rising from the water to dissolve in the air. A few strides later we reached the two-mile mark and I slowed to a walk, then stopped for a drink. I took a couple of swallows from my bottle, then pulled Jay’s folding water bowl from my pocket and poured some water. Jay took three polite laps and quit. His tongue hung out the side of his mouth as he watched me, eyes sparkling with pleasure.
“Okay, let’s go back,” I said, and we began the walk back to the car.
At that slower pace, Jay got to sniff the grass and brush alongside the paved path and I got to watch the river and field for interesting wildlife. In the forty-five minutes it took us to reach the parking lot I saw a pair of mallards, two rabbits, a chipmunk, and, by dumb luck, because I almost never see snakes, a lovely common garter snake. And lots of those ubiquitous sparrows and finches and the like that my birder friends call “LBJs.” Little brown jobs. Lovely term.
My phone rang just as I started my car. It was Peg at my vet’s office.
“Can you pop in today? You have a delivery.”
“A delivery?” That didn’t make any sense.
“Yep.”
“This isn’t a butt joke, is it?”
“Nope.” I think she snorted. Hard to tell on a cell phone. “No, something was just delivered for you, so if you can come by …”
I remained suspicious, but the fact was that I did need to drop off copies of the photos I’d taken the previous week. The good ones, anyway. I had them ready to go at home. I told her I’d be there in an hour or so. “But if this has anything to do with my posterior …”
“Can’t guarantee that,” she said, and I’m sure she was laughing when she hung up.
When I pulled onto my street, a pink delivery van was parked in front of my house and a middle-aged man was walking across my lawn toward the front door.
Oh no
, I muttered.
No no no.
But yes, he was indeed delivering flowers. To my house. I got out of my van just as he reached for the doorbell.
“Mrs. MacFall?” he asked, stumbling over my name.
Close enough
, I thought, wondering if I could get away with claiming to have moved away. But it wasn’t his fault that I already had five big bouquets in my house. I took the flowers in through the garage and went back for Jay. Once I had refreshed his water and filled a glass for myself, I focused on what to do about the latest floral invaders. Leo was on the table checking the flowers, and Jay was flopped in the middle of the kitchen. They both seemed to be eager to learn who sent the latest fragrance blast, this one a mix of pink and white snapdragons, big white daisies, and a blue flower I didn’t recognize. I pulled the card off the little plastic holder and opened it. “That’s a surprise,” I said. Leo licked his paw, a maneuver I recognized as a ploy, and I told him so. “You are too curious.” Jay was openly interested and cocked his head in anticipation. “They’re from Jo Stevens.” Jay’s cocked head swivelled the other way and Leo set his foot down and stared at me. “It says, ‘I have news, but in the meantime, thank you for getting me back in touch with dogs. Tell you soon. Jo.’” I looked at Leo, then at Jay. “What do you suppose this is all about?” We all just looked at one another for a moment, and then I set about finding a place for the flowers. In the end, I moved Goldie’s garden bouquet to my bedroom dresser and kept Jo’s bouquet on the kitchen table. Then I headed for my vet’s office.
The parking lot was crowded, which wasn’t unusual on a Monday morning. In fact, as I recalled all too clearly, it was on just such a crowded Monday morning that I was bitten by dear Tiffany Willard. My
gluteus maximus
contracted at the thought.
Peg grinned when I walked in. I could hardly see her behind a big bouquet of candy-colored lilies on the counter.
“Nice flowers,” I said.
“They’re for you.”
“No!” It came out much too loud. Two vet techs turned to look at me and a Corgi in the waiting room stood and started to bark. “Sorry,” I said, and then leaned over the counter toward Peg. “What do you mean, they’re for me? You already sent me flowers last week.”
You and practically everyone else I know.
Peg handed a file to one of the vet techs but she was looking at me. “That box goes with it. All I know is that the delivery guy said it was for you. Arrived just before I called you.”
“Oh my gawd,” I groaned as I picked up a white box shaped like the gift boxes my dad’s Christmas ties always came in. I split the tape holding the lid shut and opened it. Inside was a lovely braided leash. “Oh my!” I picked it up and repeated myself. The leash was about four feet long and made of leather as soft and pliant as velvet, three strands of it braided into a strong and elegant piece. I opened the envelope that was inside the box. It held a beautiful if schmaltzy get-well card, and inside that an engraved card of some sort. I read the hand-written note at the bottom of the get-well card first while my other hand continued to play with the buttery leather. The note was written in a tiny, tight hand and said,
We hope you have recovered from your accident, and are feeling as well as ever. Please accept this invitation as a token of our friendship.
Sincerely yours, Mr. and Mrs. Floyd Willard and Tiffany
“Oh, man, this is bizarre,” I said, staring at the writing.
“Let’s see,” said Peg, holding out her hand.
I gave her the get-well card and looked at the smaller insert. It was an invitation to a reception at Treasures on Earth Spiritual Renewal Center. It was for two. “Now that’s just weird.”
“It is,” said Peg, handing the greeting card back across the counter and pointed at another card in the box. “What’s that?”
I picked it up. “Free pass to visit the art gallery at Treasures on Earth.” The pass turned out to be two passes. Just when I had been wondering how I might sneak into the place I suddenly had two opportunities. Three, if I didn’t give one of the gallery passes away.
Peg gestured for me to lean close and then whispered, “My brother lives in the subdivision across the street from that place, and he says there’s a lot of activity there really late at night.”
“They do seem to have a lot of services, or events, or whatever. The parking lot is always busy when we go swim the dogs.”
“Late at night, Janet! Like delivery trucks in and out.”
“So they have to get food and stuff,” I said.
“At midnight?” She said that in a normal voice.
I focused on what she was saying. “No, that doesn’t make much sense.”
“Don’t go,” she said.
“Oh, I’m going. I’ve been wanting to get in there.”
Her eyes closed and reopened in a long blink, and she said, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“You want to go with me, don’t you?”
“I’m off tomorrow.” She scribbled on a sticky note and handed it to me with a big grin on her face. “Cell number. Call me.”
thirty-four
My cell phone rang
just as I reached my van with the invitation and my beautiful new leash clutched in one hand, keys in the other. I had talked Peg into keeping the flowers. I had more than enough at home and didn’t really want another reminder of Tiffany dear. I remembered her well enough whenever I sat a certain way. The leash was too sweet to pass up, though.
A fog of sadness settled around me when the caller identified herself as Anderson Billings’s mother. Sadness well-seasoned with rage. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Billings.”
“I just don’t understand what happened,” she said. “He was a good swimmer. I just don’t …”
His drowning didn’t make sense to me, either, although I knew nothing about his swimming ability. It was just that he must have been in his car, or getting in, when he left his message on my phone. Mrs. Billings didn’t need that tidbit added to the load she was carrying, though, so I kept it to myself and said, “What can I do to help?”
She was slow to speak, but I knew she was there so I waited, pressing my fingers against my chin to stop it trembling. Finally she said, “I was going through some things he left …” Her voice trailed off again but she recovered more quickly this time. “He left some things in his car. I found something in his jacket, in the little pocket at the back, you know, I think it’s for a music player or something?”
“For an MP3 player?” Electronically challenged as I am, the only reason I knew to make that guess was that my new rain jacket has the same feature. I had to read the tag to figure out why I would want a teensy pocket at the back of my collar.
“Right. MP3. But I don’t think that’s what this thing is.”
“What is it?”
And why did you think to call me?
I was surprised that she even knew who I was.
“Well, I thought at first it was a toy. It’s Tweety Pie. You know, from the cartoons?”
Anderson had a Tweety toy in his MP3 pocket?
“Okay.”
“Anderson loved Tweety Pie when he was a little boy. I guess he still did.” I heard a huge sigh. “So I just sat here and held it for a while, and then I noticed that Tweety Pie has a line around his neck, so I pulled his head off …” She paused long enough for me to form a macabre image of poor Tweety having his cute little head yanked off. “… and it’s one of those, what do you call them? Thumb drives? For the computer?”
“Thumb drive. Right.” I had seen cartoon and action figure thumb drives. I almost bought one of Marmaduke but it didn’t have enough memory for my purposes. “Mrs. Billings, why are you calling me about it? Is there something on the drive?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t tried it. But the thing is, there was a tiny slip of paper tucked into Tweety’s body, you know, the cap. It had your name and number on it. So, I don’t mean to be rude, but who are you?”
I explained how I knew Anderson and asked if I could drop by to get the thumb drive.
“Anderson called me from the lake that day. He … he was supposed to drop by and he called to tell me he’d be later than planned. He had to see someone first. Was that you?”
“Maybe. Probably.” I told her about the message he had left me.
“I have to go to the … to make arrangements. I …” She choked a little and I waited, not wanting to rush her. “My daughter is here. We’re going to the funeral home. Family …” Another pause, then she told me where she lived and said she’d leave Tweety in an envelope inside the screen door.
I checked the time. Mrs. Billings lived across town in a lovely older part of the Aboite area, and the trip there and back would eat up most of an hour. I considered picking Jay up and going for a walk at Fox Island Park, but the thermometer at Times Corners said it was already ninety-one degrees, confirming that he was better off at home. I cranked up the AC and the radio. Springsteen was dancing in the dark. Perfect. But maybe whatever was on Anderson’s thumb drive would shed a little light on whatever was going on out at Regis Moneypenny’s place.
I found the house with no problem, and liberated Tweety Pie from the big manilla envelope that was propped between the doors and asked him, “What do you have to tell us, little guy?” In its ever-convoluted way, my mind flitted from Tweety’s perky little face to birds of the flesh-and-blood variety, and from there to Dr. Crane, the ornithologist who was interested enough in “our” parrots to fly up from Florida. I decided to call Tom to find out if there was any further news.
“Dr. Crane will be in tomorrow afternoon. He’s getting a car, so I gave him directions. He’ll come to my office and wants to go to the lake right away. You want to go with us?”
Are there parrots flying around northern Indiana?
“Of course I want to go.” I told him about the thumb drive and promised to call him if there was anything important on it. I started to tell him about the passes for the Treasures on Earth art gallery, then decided to wait until I saw him at Dog Dayz in the evening. He was going to ask me not to go, and I was going to go anyway. Maybe I wouldn’t tell him until after the fact. Avoid the argument.
It took about twenty minutes once I got home to do a few things and make a pot of coffee, but I finally pulled Tweety’s head off and attached it to my laptop. A series of jpg files appeared. Photos. I opened my photo handling program and put up an array of images. The thumbnails were too small to show much so I started through them one by one. The first three didn’t seem very interesting but I had a hunch that they had been taken in fairly rapid succession and that Anderson had been slowly panning across the island as he took them. Had he been trying to follow a bird in flight? If so, he missed. Then something in the fourth photo caught my attention. A shadow where I wouldn’t expect one, knowing as I did the dearth of fat-trunked trees out there. It was at the top right of the photo frame. I was sure Anderson had been using a telephoto lens, so whatever made the shadow was fairly far away.
I went on to the next photo. Nothing. I jumped back to the previous photo and compared the two. Anderson had definitely been panning from right to left. I kept going. The shadow reappeared, and this time I could see what made it. A leg, clad in dark pants standing between two scraggly shrubs. The next photo showed legs and torso, and based on height, I was pretty sure it was a man. The photo also had a date and time imprint. Anderson must have turned the marking feature on for some reason. I clicked through to the next shot.
I stared at the photo on the screen in front of me. The figure stood in the brush in front of a clump of maple saplings, turned a quarter turn to my left. He—or she?—was holding something out with both hands. The position of hands on an object made me flash on an image of my mother emptying her big canvas tote bag of garden clippings. I zoomed in on the face, but the lighting was bad and I couldn’t make out the features. Maybe the same creep I had seen on the island on Saturday. I moved the photo so that I could see what was in his hands.
It was a canvas bag. In fact, I was pretty sure it was the bag that Drake had found out on the island, the one that had started this whole strange adventure. The figure held it by the bottom corners as if shaking it. Anderson had caught the exact moment that its contents fell from the opening, and suddenly at least one question was answered.
I zoomed back out to the full picture and clicked to the next one. The figure was kicking the thing on the ground, maybe to push it into the brush. The canvas bag hung slack in his left hand. The next picture was zoomed in farther. The shot overreached the lens’s capability and the focus was fuzzy, but it still showed that what had fallen from the bag was the body of a bird. A bright red parrot.
There were two more photos. The first of them showed the figure walking toward the far side of the island, left arm flung up and out, the canvas bag flying toward a stand of brush. The final photo made my shoulders tighten up. The person had stopped and turned toward the camera, toward Anderson Billings, mouth open as if to yell. I’ve photographed thousands of animals in action and I know the posture of impending motion. Knees bent, upper body leaning into a sprint. But which way? Which instinct took over? Flight? Or fight?
thirty-five
I leaned back in
my chair and tried to clear my mind, and suddenly the memory I’d been trying to tease out of the tangle popped into view. The man in the photos, the man who made the creepy gestures at me, had been at our training session the day Drake found the bag. I remembered now, I had seen him talking to Tom and asked later who he was, what he wanted. “I just wondered what all the dogs were doing here.” Wasn’t that what Tom had told me the man said? And something about the guy really liking dogs? He hadn’t stayed more than about five minutes, which didn’t exactly scream “dog lover” to me. But now it was starting to make sense. Was he the mysterious figure in Anderson’s photos?
If he was dumping dead birds and bloody tote bags on the island, he must have been surprised to see a bunch of dogs swimming around, and Drake’s little discovery must have really shaken him up. But how did that make sense? Anderson was out there on a Friday, the Friday before last, and the retriever training session was the following Sunday.
Think, think.
I grabbed my phone and found Anderson’s message. He left it last Tuesday, so I was clear about that. I listened again to the message. “I was here a few days ago, too. Saw a friend of yours … came back with my canoe to get to the island … That was Friday night. Well, you know, evening.”
The dates on the photos. I checked them. Why hadn’t I noticed that they were dated more than a week ago, the day before Drake found the mysterious bag?
Oh, Anderson, why did you wait so long to say anything? Why did you go back there alone?
Then it hit me that if someone had killed him, they would have looked for the photos. Especially if the killer was the man
in
the photos.
I dialed Jo Stevens’ number. As usual, I got her voice mail, so I left a message about the thumb drive and the photos. I closed with a question. “Jo, what images were on Anderson’s camera? I know it was in the car, but he had it on the island earlier. At least, I think he
did.” I had almost hung up when I thought of something else. “Jo, was Anderson’s laptop there, in the car?” It must have been, I thought.
He
needed the intermediate step of a computer to move the photos from
his camera to Tweety.
I was about to get up when Leo waltzed into the room. Jay was sacked out by the wall, but he opened a sleepy eye when Leo sniffed his ear before coming to me. Leo sat down in front of my feet, yawned with all his might, made a couple of passes over his paw with his tongue, and stared at me through half-closed lids.
“Whatcha doing, Leo
mio
?”
He hopped into my lap, sprawled across my torso, and pushed the top of his head into my chin. The rumble that rolled out of his little body sounded like a motorcycle trying to rev up.
“I have things to do, Mr. Cat.”
He squinted at me as if to say, “What’s more important than this?”
I scooped him around and cradled him, and he snuggled against me, then reached with one paw and laid it, soft and warm, against my cheek. He was right. Everything else could wait a while. Or at least until the phone rang. I might have let it go to voice mail, but
Leo scrambled out of my lap at the sound, so I went ahead and
answered.
“Do you want to go to Michigan the end of the week?” It was Tom.
“Is this a rhetorical question?”
“Puppy search question.” I swear I could hear the grin in his voice. “I talked to a breeder near Ann Arbor. She says she has the perfect obedience prospect, eight weeks old.”
I couldn’t think of a single reason not to tag along to see eight-week-old puppies.
“I wasn’t really planning to get a puppy quite yet, but if this little bitch is as nice as she says …” The excitement in his voice made me want to run right over and hug him. “We can take the dogs with us. She said she has shade we can park in and we can open the van …”
“You don’t have to convince me, Tom,” I said, laughing. “I’m in.” I thought of my plans to visit Treasures on Earth.
You mean snoop around
, whispered the prissy little voice in my head. “Not tomorrow. I have something I need to do.”
“No, too much going on this week, and Dr. Crane is coming in. I’m thinking Friday.”
That settled, I told him about the thumb drive and the photos.
“You called Jo, didn’t you?” Tom’s question irritated me even though I knew he was just looking out for me, and I didn’t answer right away. “Janet?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Aw, come on. That’s not fair.” Now he was the one who sounded irritated.
For some reason, my eyes filled up with tears and my nose started to run. I decided to blame it on hormones and took a deep breath in hopes of a counterbalance. “Sorry.”
Silence on the other end.
“I called her. Left a message.” Then I told him about the bouquet she had sent, and her note. “I wonder if she’s getting a puppy, too?” If she was, I wondered when she would ever have time for it. Not that I’m the boss of other people’s relationships with their pets.
“See you tonight?” Tom asked.
“Ha!” I couldn’t remember the last time I had missed Monday night obedience practice at Dog Dayz. Then I asked, “Hey, what color is she?”
A non-dog person might have wondered what I was talking about, given the nonlinear direction of the conversation, but Tom didn’t hesitate. “Yellow.” I knew it was said with a smile, and, picturing a baby yellow Labrador Retriever in my mind made me smile, too.
Jay woke up restored. Bouncing off the walls, really, so I took him out back for a game of “tennis ball that way, frisbee this way” in hopes of taking the edge off before Dog Dayz training. Goldie waved at me from her kitchen window, so when Jay’s tongue seemed to hang reasonably far out of his mouth, I refreshed his water bowl and walked through the two gates, mine and hers, and up the steps to Goldie’s back door.
“Come in, come in! Just making iced tea,” she called. “Want some?”
“What’s in it?” Goldie’s summer teas nearly always feature fresh herbs from her garden, and love Goldie though I do, some of her concoctions don’t appeal to me.
“Green tea, fresh spearmint, and johnny jump ups.” She plopped ice cubes into two jelly jars and, when I nodded at her, poured the tea.
We carried our glasses out to her covered porch and I told her the summary version of what was going on. She peered over her glasses at me. “You’re at it again?”
“I’m not at anything.” I tried to out-stare her but knew right away that it wouldn’t work. “Okay, yes, I want to find out what happened to Anderson and what the heck is going on out there at Treasures on Earth. And I don’t like being threatened by creepy guys.”
“You don’t know that he’s connected to Moneypenny’s place,” she said.
I hadn’t mentioned the photos Anderson had taken of the man and the dead bird. For a moment I debated whether I should, because I knew that any mistreatment of animals would light a fire under Goldie, and she was no stranger to taking a stand on issues. In the end I told her about the photos of the man, but left the bird out of my story.
When I had finished, Goldie took a long drink, set her glass on the table, and said, “You’re not telling me the whole story. That’s okay. I’m sure you have your reasons.” In anyone else, I would take such words as pure peevishness, but that’s not what I heard, and when I looked at Goldie and saw the love in her eyes, in the soft lines of her cheeks, something almost tangible drained out of me. I thought back to my conversation with Tom and my hurt feelings when I learned that Goldie had lied when she said she wasn’t ill. What was it he had said? That I wouldn’t need to know she was sick to be there for her, because I was always there for her.
Fear. That’s what left me in that moment. I had been terrified and hadn’t even known it.
thirty-six
Dinner was an English
muffin with cream cheese and grape jelly, which I calculated to cover my grains, my dairy, and my fruit. All my
dishes were in the dishwasher but I’d forgotten to turn it on, so I ripped off a stretch of paper towels and made that my plate. I grabbed a bottle of diet root
beer and plunked myself down on the couch to watch the six o’ clock news, which was the usual uplifting mess. When the national news finished, I went to brush my teeth, and sat back down to put my running shoes on just as the local news got rolling. I stopped mid-tie of my right lace and stared at the screen.
The reporter was talking about Anderson’s death; the backdrop was Twisted Lake and a bunch of wet dogs and their mucky owners. The reporter led her cameraman toward the shore and asked one of the dog owners to explain what they were doing. Tom. And behind him, hanging back from the group, was the creepy man whose face was becoming much more familiar than I wanted it to. He was looking toward the camera, at Tom, it seemed to me.
Don’t give your name
, I thought, just as the reporter asked, “What’s your name?” Of course he answered. He explained that it was an informal meeting of the Northern Indiana Hunting Retriever Club, and the camera panned toward the water and zoomed in on one of the Flat-coated Retrievers bringing back a bright orange bumper.
Jay was hopping around in front of me. I swear he checks the calendar for dog-training nights. “Yeah, yeah. Let’s go.” As I loaded him into his crate in the back of the van, I said, “I really wish he hadn’t told them his name.” Jay replied
brrffff.
“I don’t know. Just makes me nervous.”
Tom wasn’t there yet, but I spotted Giselle and Precious as soon as I walked into Dog Dayz. I still couldn’t get over how great Giselle
looked. Made me wonder if I might be able to wangle a photo assignm
ent at the fat camp she went to, but I dropped the idea in about three seconds. I would never go away for a month without Jay and Leo. Even a week was a stretch, although I did that occasionally. I started toward Giselle, but a voice calling my name changed my course.
“Sylvia!”
“Hi, Janet. Long time!” Sylvia Eckhorn pushed a blonde curl out of her eyes and gave me a quick hug. We both executed body blocks to keep our dogs apart while we greeted each other, then let Jay and Tippy, Sylvia’s lovely multi-titled champion Cocker Spaniel, say hello. They’ve played together many times, so we were careful to keep the greetings subdued so they didn’t rile up any less mannerly dogs—or owners—with their antics.
“Mama!”
“Mama Mama.”
Two little voices piped up from behind Sylvia. Meg and Liz, Sylvia’s twin daughters. They were playing on a quilted comforter spread out and anchored under an exercise pen, the dog-person’s equivalent of an old-fashioned play pen.
“Wow, Syl, they’re getting big!” I had Jay lie down and took a step closer to the twins. “Hi, girls.” Meggie giggled and said, “Ha.” Lizzie blew a raspberry and threw a teddy bear in my direction.
“Yeah, they are. Fourteen months almost, if you can believe that. Lizzie is walking, running almost, all over the place. Meg’s happy to crawl.” She sighed. “Guess I should be glad for an extra week or two with just one on her feet!”
There was a time when I desperately wanted kids, but now I was exhausted just thinking about keeping up with these two. I said, “They’ll be showing in Pee Wee Handlers pretty soon.”
“What’s that?” Sylvia had the full attention of Jay and Tippy and a few other dogs nearby as she filled the treat pouch she wore around her waist.
“Oh, right, I always forget that’s pretty much an Australian Shepherd Club thing. It’s a handling class for kids under five. Mostly with really kind dogs that take charge of their peewee handlers.” Also the cutest, funniest classes I’ve ever had the pleasure to photograph.
“How fun! But we don’t have an Aussie, so …” She looked genuinely disappointed.
“The dog doesn’t have to be an Aussie.” I told her a bit more about that and promised to get her information on Pee Wee classes when the girls were ready.
“So how’s your mom, Janet?” Sylvia was a nurse and had helped deal with my mom when we checked her into Shadetree Retirement Home. It was no longer safe for her to live without supervision and care, but that didn’t mean she wanted to leave her home.
“Off and on.” I told her the latest, and then she shifted to a direction I didn’t expect.
“I saw Tom on the news tonight.” Sylvia suddenly looked very serious. “He isn’t hooked up with that Treasures on Earth bunch, is he? Because if he is …”
“Heavens, no! Why would you think that?”
“Oh, thank goodness.” Sylvia’s face relaxed slightly. “It’s just that I saw, well, oh, never mind.”
“Oh no no no, Syl,” I said. “You can’t get away with that. Why did you think he was?”
“There was someone in there, in the news clip. He seemed to be with Tom, but maybe he was just interested in the reporter and camera.” She pushed her treat pouch around to the small of her back so Tippy wouldn’t be staring at it during training. “I just, well, I kind of know him. Not a … Never mind.”
“I know who you mean, Syl. The creepy guy in the background.” I told her about my encounter with him, but stopped short of mentioning the photos.
“Be really careful, Janet,” she said. Her bright blue eyes were open wide and a little wrinkle drew a line just above her eyebrows.
“What do you mean?” I laughed when I said it, but felt a chill set in at the base of my spine.
She shook her head, checked that the twins were okay, and gathered the leash’s slack in her hand. “Just be really careful.” Then she and Tippy joined the group already heeling around the ring and I was left staring at the moppets. Lizzie was sprawled on the comforter, sound asleep. Meggie was trying to feed a plastic ball to her teddy bear. And I was wondering what in the world Sylvia was talking about. More to the point, who
was
that guy and what was he up to?
Jay was getting antsy so I pulled myself back into dog training mode and we stepped into the heeling mob just as Marietta Santini, Dog Dayz owner and drill sergeant, called, “FAST!” I couldn’t have chosen a more effective way to clear my thoughts and focus on the
task at hand. More than one bruise in my past bore witness to the need
to pay attention when running with a dog on a leash and twenty other dogs and people doing the same in a confined space. Jay was delighted with the chance to move a little faster, even if it only lasted a few seconds.
Tom and Drake showed up just as Marietta called out “Normal!” to bring us all back to a brisk walk. He set his training bag down, changed Drake out of his every-day collar to his training collar, a lovely tooled black leather job with no tags to get in the way. Tom draped his leash over his neck, told Drake to heel, and stepped into the ring behind Judy Herschel and her well-behaved Boxer, Corey, and in front of Elmer Bruebaker and his not-well-behaved Lab, Beeswax.
It’s not the dog’s fault. Elmer rewards her for every behavior.
Bark bark bark
, says Beeswax, and Elmer strokes her head, tells her she’s a good girl, and shoves a treat in her mouth.
Pull pull pull,
Beeswax drags Elmer across the room to jump all over someone else’s unamused dog, and Elmer says, “She just wants to say hello,” strokes her head, and pops another treat in her mouth. She’s been snapped at a couple of times, but Beeswax is nearly as oblivious to the unhappy reactions of the dogs she accosts as is Elmer, so most of us have learned to just watch for them and body block Beeswax to protect her, and our own dogs, from her lack of social graces. I was a little surprised that Tom chose to step into the crowd in front of the blonde bombshell, since she’s particularly fond of Drake.
Marietta directed us to halt, then to line up for stays. Tom looked at me and lifted his eyebrows, and we moved to the mat where people
were setting up their dogs and found an opening big enough for Drake and Jay. I removed the leash and set it down behind my dog, as we would do in an obedience trial, and pulled a large folded index card from my training pouch and unfolded it.
“What’s that for?” asked Tom.
“Remember when he,” meaning Jay, “got up and grabbed my arm band during stays in the last two trials?” In obedience trials, each handler wears an armband with an entry number. When we do the stay exercises, we take off our armbands and set them behind our dogs so that the judge can see who is who. I had come back into the room at our last two trials to find Jay where he should be, holding my number. That meant that he had moved out of position to pick up the card-stock armband and then had returned to the place and position I had left him in. Clever little trick, but it meant a non-qualifying score. “This is a set up, ” I told Tom as I set the card behind Jay and slightly to one side so he could see it if he turned his head.
“This will be a five-minute stay. Position your dogs.”
All along the line commands could be heard to “sit” or “down.” The more experienced trainers chose the position most challenging to
the individual dogs, or created a challenge of another sort. As we often
do, Tom and I gave our dogs different commands, so when we walked away Jay was sitting and Drake was lying down. I noticed that Rhonda Lake had her lovely Golden Retriever, Eleanor, facing the opposite direction from the rest of the dogs. Pilot, the Golden I had met with Rhonda at the practice session on Saturday, was lying down next to Eleanor but oriented like the rest of the group and wearing an ear-to-ear doggy grin. I wondered whether I could sneak out to my van for my camera. Pilot’s smile was definitely photo-worthy.
“Are you going to hide?” asked Tom, meaning go somewhere the dogs couldn’t see us.
“I can’t. I need to see that he doesn’t grab the number.” I’m working on out-of-sight stays, but Jay finds them a bit stressful.“We need to fix this if he’s going to get his CDX,” I said, referring to the mid-level obedience title. “You can go. We can talk later.”
“Nah, doesn’t matter. Rather be with you.” He winked at me.
“Wow. I win out over a musty storage room,” I said, referring to the glorified closet where the out-of-sight handlers crowded together and stressed out over whether their dogs were staying put. Then I shifted to more serious things, telling Tom what Sylvia had said about the man in the news clip and in Anderson’s photos. “I’m more interested in what she’s not saying, but this didn’t seem the time and place to ask her.”
“No, she doesn’t get to spend quality time with her dog very often anymore,” said Tom. “Cute kids, those.” He nodded toward the x-pen where both of the toddlers were now asleep on the comforter.
I agreed, and fought down a twinge as an old, painful memory tried to surface. “I don’t think she gets a lot of help with them, but I can’t think of a more cheerful, competent person to manage two lively little girls. So, any news?”
“Funny you should ask. George Crane called. He got an earlier flight to Indy and is driving in from there.”
“Tomorrow?”
Marietta called, “Back to your dogs,” so we had to shut up for a moment. We repositioned the dogs so that Jay was lying down and Drake sitting, and walked away again when Marietta called, “Leave your dogs.”
Tom picked up the conversation again, saying, “Tonight.”
“What’s tonight?”
“Bird guy is tonight. George.” He looked at his watch. “Should be here any time. He called from north of Anderson just as I pulled into the parking lot.”
I knew that he meant the town of Anderson, but Anderson Billings’s young face seemed to hover before me and that sense of loss that had been simmering inside me burst into flame. Tom usually picks up on my little shifts, but he was watching Elmer try to get Beeswax back into the line of dogs. Again.
“Think I should offer to help him?” Tom asked.
“He won’t listen.” I paused. “Then again, you’re a guy, and you have a Lab who complies with your every whispered wish. Elmer might think you know a little something.”
Tom turned to me with his here-comes-trouble grin and waggled his eyebrows at me. I couldn’t help but laugh, and said, “Uh oh.” He leaned toward me and whispered, “How about we get together later and see if you will comply with my every whispered wish.” Then he turned with a throaty chuckle and left me for Elmer and his cute and wild Labby girl.
thirty-seven
After we finished the
stays, Tom took Drake to the other ring to practice directed jumping. Maybe it’s all the retriever training, which requires Drake to work at a distance from Tom, but they make it all look easy. As I watched them, I wished again that I had brought my camera in with me.
Tom stood at one end of the ring with Drake sitting at his side. Then he gave a command that I couldn’t hear, he spoke so softly, but I knew to be “fly out.” Drake raced straight ahead, running between two jumps set up halfway down at right angles to the side of the ring. One, the high jump, consisted of three wooden boards held edge to edge by the standards to form a solid obstacle. The other was a single wooden bar set into cups on the standards. The ends of the two jumps stood about twenty feet apart.
When he reached the far end of the ring, Drake spun around and sat down, his tail whipping back and forth and his face alight with anticipated fun. Tom stayed still for a couple of seconds, then raised his right arm toward the high jump and said, “Over!” Drake took off, veered to his left, and cleared the twenty-four inches he was required to jump with plenty of air beneath him. He was already turning toward Tom when he landed, and he slid into a sit right in front of the man. Again, I wished I had my camera to catch their matching grins.
Tom was setting Drake up for the other jump when I saw a man I didn’t know walk in the front door. That wasn’t unusual. But he didn’t have a dog with him, or a woman with a dog, and the only man I’d ever seen come in here unaccompanied by one or both of those was Neil Young. This guy was about Tom’s size, five ten or so, but a good decade younger, maybe more. He was clean shaven and had his hair pulled back in a ponytail. He scanned the room, then started our way. When he got close I realized that although he nodded at me, his smile was for Jay. But he did have the grace to greet me first. “Janet, I presume?”
“I’m going to take a wild guess. Dr. Crane?”
“George.” We shook hands, and he nodded toward Jay and asked, “May I?”
“Wow. Thanks for asking, and yes, of course.”
He knelt and held out the back of his hand. I released Jay from the down-stay and he was up in a flash, wriggling like a hula dancer and pushing his shoulder into George, who quickly had his fingers deep in blue-merle fur.
“I’m going to take another wild guess. You know about Aussies and their affinity for butt scratches?”
George said, “I grew up with them. Just lost my old dog a few months ago.” He stood back up and looked at the action in the ring. Drake sat at the far end from Tom again. “That must be Tom and Drake.”
Tom signaled Drake to take the bar jump, and once again Drake was nearly perfect. Tom finished up the session by giving Drake a jackpot of treats, handing him five or six of them one right after the other. Then he pulled Drake’s special training toy, a five-inch stuffed mallard with one wing and evidence of several “surgeries,” from his back pocket and tossed it. Drake pounced on it, tossed it in the air, caught it, and shook it.
To George I said, “Male bonding. Could go on for hours.” Then I called, “Tom.”
Drake ran to the edge of the ring and showed me his duck, and Tom followed. Once the introductions were out of the way, Tom suggested we go to his house so George could settle in. I pulled Tom aside in the parking lot and said, “I’ll come over for a while, but then I have to go home.”
“It might be easier if you stay the night at my house. I think George wants to get out to the lake early to see if we can spot the parrot.”
I hadn’t told him about my plans to snoop around Treasures on Earth with Peg, but I had told him I had an appointment the next day. “I can’t go in the morning. I have an appointment.”
“But I thought you wanted to be in on this?” Tom looked into my eyes. I know he was reading my mind. “You are, aren’t you? You’re up to something.”
Offense being the best defense, I dodged a direct answer and said, “I didn’t think he would be here until tomorrow. I kept Wednesday open, but made an appointment for tomorrow morning.”
Tom leaned back against my van, folded his arms across his chest, and looked at me through half-closed lids. “What are you planning?”
“What do you mean?”
“Janet … Never mind. Do what you want.”
“I will.”
“I know.”
We stared at each other, and something passed between us. Not anger, not resignation. It seemed more like understanding. After a moment, I sighed and said, “Look, I just have a lead …”
“A lead? A
lead
?” Tom stood up straight and I couldn’t be sure in the yellow-tinged light of the parking lot but I thought his face darkened a tad. “The only lead you should worry about is the one attached to your dog.”
My own face heated up at that. “Excuse me?”
“Janet, whatever you have, give it to the cops. You said yourself that something very weird is going on. It isn’t safe. Don’t be st …” He caught himself before he said “stupid,” and his voice softened. “Janet, let Jo and Hutch look into things. Just give them what you have and leave it.”
“Look, Tom, I’m not going to do anything dangerous. But Anderson was my student, my friend. I sent him out there. Someone killed him, and I think the autopsy will show that, somehow. Even if it doesn’t, I
know
it.” My voice cracked, but I recovered. “And something is going on with those birds.”
“But you don’t have to …”
I cut him off. “Don’t tell me what to do, Tom.” I signaled Jay to hop into his crate and took the opportunity to take a deep breath while I filled his water bowl and shut the hatch. I considered going straight home, but I wanted to hear what Dr. Crane had to say about my photos of the parrots and about the birds themselves. “Shall we?”
George entered Tom’s address into his GPS in case they got separated.
“Anybody else hungry?” I asked. My cream cheese muffin was long gone, and it turned out George hadn’t eaten. I called our favorite pizza place and said I would swing by there on my way. I checked my messages, too, but didn’t have any. I thought that was odd since Jo was usually quick to get back to me, especially about potential police business. She did say she had something big going on, though, so I decided to wait until morning before I pestered her. I was just setting my phone down on the seat when it rang and scared the bejeebers out of me.
Note to self: what were you thinking when you reset the ring to “Vintage Telephone”?
It was Peg, verifying our early morning rendezvous outside the Kroger store at Coldwater and Dupont. Before we hung up I asked, “Peg, do you have a camera?”
“Sure.”
“A little one? You know, point and shoot?”
“Yes. Nice little one. Fits in my pocket. Oh, I get it. That’s what you want, right?”
“Right. One that fits in your pocket. Charge it, okay?” Common problem among my beginning students, forgetting to charge their cameras. One reason I prefer regular batteries.
The pizza was just coming out of the oven when I got to the carry-out counter and Jay and I walked in Tom’s door a quarter hour later. Drake, always a perfect gentleman, ushered us in with a smile on his face and a wag in his tail. Tom and George gave me back-handed waves but kept their noses pointed at Tom’s laptop. I set the pizza down and looked over Tom’s shoulder.
An array of six parrot photos filled the screen. They were all basically red, but the shades varied from a deep red approaching purple to a bright tangerine-red. “How true are those colors?” I asked George, knowing that photos don’t always show colors as we see them in real life, and that the screen settings would further affect their hues and intensity.
He glanced at me and nodded as he answered. “Reasonable. At least the colors. But seeing them here is nothing like seeing them in the open, in the sun. This one, for instance,” he pointed at the tangeriney bird, “practically glows in the flesh. Or the feather, I guess. And this one,” he clicked on another photo and it filled the screen, “is almost iridescent.” He clicked the mouse again and the photo array reappeared.
“Okay, let’s feed the man,” said Tom. He put his laptop to sleep and cleared the table, pulled three Harps from the fridge, and opened the pizza box.
I grabbed some plates and napkins and told the dogs to lie down.
“So, what did I miss? George, what are you thinking?”
“The birds in the photos are not common parrots.” He stuffed most of a pizza slice into his mouth and rolled his eyes and groaned. Both dogs cocked their heads, and when I looked toward the movement I saw that Drake had strings of drool hanging to his paws and Jay had little drops of saliva dripping from his dangling tongue like a leaky faucet.
“All of them?” I asked. “They’re all rare?”
George swigged some beer and studied the bottle as he set it down, as if considering his response. “Okay, the parrot in the veterinary office, he’s not rare. Not exactly. But he’s not a common pet species either, and he’d be expensive to buy. South American species, doesn’t breed well in captivity. So his owner must really be into parrots, or into conspicuous possession.” He seemed to be waiting for an answer.
“Possibly conspicuous possession,” I said, remembering Persephone Swann’s expensive duds and jewelry and her pulled-together chicness. “But I don’t think she had a clue what kind of parrot Ava was, or is, whatever his name is now. She didn’t even know he was male.”
Tom joined the conversation. “Could she have forgotten? I mean, we run into that with dog owners all the time. People who can’t remember what breed the shelter told them they were getting, or they never check it out and realize the I.D. was wrong.”
It’s true. I remember a woman who came for a beginning obedience class at Dog Dayz. She had an Australian Cattle Dog, probably
purebred and a pretty nice example of the breed. Unfortunately,
the shelter had misidentified the dog as an Australian Shepherd, and the woman held tight to that claim despite the obvious differences between her dog and Jay. I wasn’t sure the comparison worked for Persephone and her bird, though.
“I don’t know. Remember what Giselle said about becoming a foster home, or, what did she call it? Guardian?” Tom nodded but George needed an explanation. “She made it sound like some sort of fostering program. Like they farm the birds out to members to take care of, but I didn’t get the impression it was meant to be permanent. Tom, remember what Goldie said? That Moneypenny was planning to build an aviary of some sort out there? Big fancy one?”
George leaned back and closed his eyes, letting his head fall forward and nod up and down a few times. I waited until he seemed to come back to us, then asked, “What about the other birds? The loose one and the dead one?”
“Ah, yes, a whole different matter with them,” George said. “A whole different matter.”
“Endangered, you said?” asked Tom.
“Critically endangered.”
“What does that mean, in terms of numbers?” Tom again.
“We don’t know how many are left in the wild, “ said George. “Hard to get accurate counts in Congo. This species has been documented only in one remote valley. It’s hard to get to, and dangerous. I know one field researcher who studied them there several years ago, but she got out when the fighting got too hot. I have a call into her, but she’s on sabbatical, in the field. In the Malagasy Republic. Might be a while.”
We all sat silent for a moment, then George said, “So what do I think? I think you have some black-market trade in very rare, critically endangered, expensive parrots going on here.”
“Why would anyone let a bird, two birds! like that loose?” I knew as soon as I said it that it was dopey. “Or more to the point, how would they get loose?” An image of the dead bird and the flight of the bereaved mate or friend came back to me like despair itself. “And the one that died. Sad enough, but sadder yet for an endangered species.”
“Tip of the ’berg,” said George. “The numbers of animals killed in the illegal trade, the smuggling, is obscene. Not just birds, of course. Trade in live exotics, trade in pelts and body parts and eggs … To the poachers and middlemen, dead and injured and diseased animals are just part of the cost of doing business. To the animals …” He lifted his beer bottle to his lips but put it down without drinking. “To an endangered species, it may mean the end of their road.”
“And not only for the individual species in question,” said Tom. “Whenever you remove an entire species, or reduce its numbers so much that it may as well be gone, you affect all the other species around it. Plants as well.”
I can only take so much of this topic at a time. It makes me roiling mad, but more, it makes me feel I’m drowning in sorrow with no hope of ever surfacing. So I changed the subject, although not to a happier one. “Tom, did you tell George about Anderson Billings?”
Tom looked like I felt after the previous few minutes. “Right. Let’s fill him in. You start. Be right back.” He picked up the empty pizza box with one hand and the two bits of crust he had saved with the other and turned toward the kitchen. “Janet, you want to release the boys?”
George seemed to have just realized that the dogs had stayed where I told them all through our dinner and conversation. “Impressive. They’re really good.”
“Free!” I said, and Jay and Drake were on their feet and crowding into Tom’s legs faster than you could say “pizza bones!” To George I said, “Consistency. That’s about all it takes.”
Tom had the dogs sit and handed a piece of crust to each of them. From the looks on their faces you’d think he had given them each a haunch of venison. Then Tom pulled a towel out of a drawer and wiped each slobbery canine chin and said, “Good thing we didn’t have a four-course dinner. They’d have drowned themselves.”
We moved out to the back patio and filled George in about all the strange goings-on—Ava’s visit to the vet, the bag that Drake had found with the red feather and blood inside, Anderson Billings’s photos of the man on the island disposing of the dead bird, my gruesome discovery, and the dead bird’s companion. I told him that several people associated with Treasures on Earth seemed to be getting involved with parrots. I’d heard that from Persephone Swann and then her cousin Giselle, from Dr. Neil Young, from Mrs. Willard. Tom told him about the creepy guy and his not-so-subtle apparent threat.
