A Bobwhite Killing (2 page)

Tom nodded, pulled out his cell phone, and dialed 911 as he went back around the wagon to steer away the rest of our group.

I sat back on my haunches and looked at the dead man in front of me. Jack’s eyes were open and his mouth grim. His neck didn’t feel stone-cold to me when I’d checked for a pulse, so I figured he hadn’t been dead all that long.

Not that that made much of a difference in the big picture.

Whether you’re dead for a short time or a long time, you’re still dead.

“No! NO!”

I looked up to see Shana stumbling towards me, her face white with shock, her green eyes huge in her face.

And then, maybe because of my crouched position, I noticed something else that was huge.

Her belly.

Shana was pregnant.

As in, really pregnant.

I was speechless. How could I have missed that belly last night in the lobby or this morning at coffee before our group set out for the day? From what I could see now, that belly was going to beat Shana to Jack’s corpse by at least a minute or two. The woman was huge.

Then my eyes caught the flapping of the oversized windbreaker Shana was wearing.

Mystery solved. That windbreaker could have been hiding a whale underneath it and no one would have been the wiser.

A whale? Make that a whole pod of them. I mean, seriously, I had never seen any woman’s pregant belly as large as this.

Luckily for Shana, Tom was a lot faster to come to her aid than I was. Before she could trip on the uneven ground, he appeared behind her and put his arm around her shoulders, guiding her carefully closer to me and the body of her husband.

The stark look of loss on her face reminded me of what she was seeing: her husband filled with bullet holes. “Shana, you don’t need to see this. Tom, take her back to the cars.”

“No,” she choked out, sobbing. “I need to be with him.” She shot me a steely look that I vaguely recognized from a long time ago, and her voice sharpened. “Don’t argue with me, Bob.”

“No problem,” I replied. I took another look at her swollen belly. If I thought Shana Lewis had been stubborn, I wasn’t about to test it out with a super-sized Shana O’Keefe. Upsetting very pregnant ladies was definitely not on my list of things I really wanted to do today.

Tom helped her sit down on the ground next to me, and she immediately leaned into me, shaking and crying. I put my arms around her and held her close. “I’m so sorry, Shana,” I said, squeezing her shoulder. “He was dead when I found him. I couldn’t do anything for him.”

She nodded into my shirt front and sniffed.

“Well, I guess that explains why he didn’t meet us for coffee and rolls this morning.”

I looked up to see silver-haired Bernie Schmieg, another familiar birder from our group, standing near the corner of the wagon. She was squinting at Jack through her glasses. “What’d you do, Jack? Spill some coffee on your jacket? Shana, honey, the drycleaners can get that out. It won’t stain.”

“Jack’s dead, Bernie,” Tom told her. “I don’t think the coat is an issue now.”

Bernie shot me a glance. “He’s dead?”

I nodded.

Bernie turned as white as her hair and promptly passed out.

“Oh, crap,” I said, still holding a sobbing Shana and the whales against my side.

Shana and the whales. It sounded like a band from the 1970s.

“I’ll get her,” Tom offered.

He knelt beside Bernie and lightly slapped her cheeks, then propped her up against the old wagon’s front wheel. Tom’s a registered nurse who worked the night shift at a nursing facility, so I knew that Bernie was in good hands. A couple moments later, he helped her stand up and guided her back to where the other birders, I assumed, were waiting for the police to arrive.

Shana whispered something into my shoulder, but I didn’t catch it.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“I know who killed him,” she whispered again, this time louder and clearer.

A chill raced up my spine. I looked down so I could see her face.

“Who? Who killed Jack, Shana?”

Her emerald eyes bored into mine through a wall of tears.

“I did, Bob. It’s all my fault. I killed my husband.”

N
o
, I thought,
you didn’t
.
I don’t think you can take the credit for this one, Shana
.

Before I could say anything aloud, though, the sound of sirens flared and came to an abrupt halt, and Shana fell sobbing against my chest again.

“I don’t have any tissues,” I said, more to myself than to Shana. As a high school counselor, I always had tissues within reach in my office. Dealing with the drama of teenage girls daily, tissues were my stock in trade.

But I wasn’t in my office. School was out for the summer, and I’d come to Fillmore County to find a Bobwhite, not the murdered husband of a long-ago summer crush. A summer crush who looked like she could give birth to triplets at any moment. And here I thought that going birding for the weekend was going to be a relief from the burgeoning production of my sister’s upcoming wedding. Now it looked like I’d landed in the middle of the first night of a B-rated television mini-series—one that not only featured a murder, but an impending birth. The fact was, weddings are over in a day, but murder cases can drag on for weeks.

I didn’t even want to think about how long labor could go on.

Wait a minute.

“What did you say?” I asked the sobbing Shana. I lifted her chin off my chest and looked her in the eyes. “You didn’t kill Jack. You told us he left early to find the Cuckoo, and you’ve been with the rest of us since coffee at the hotel. Whoever did this—whoever shot Jack—was here at the camp with Jack not that long ago. This isn’t your fault, Shana.”

Before she could answer me, three uniformed officers rounded the corner of the wagon and started barking orders at us.

“Step away from the body, please,” said the woman wearing the sheriff’s jacket.

“Don’t go anywhere,” the deputy instructed us. “We’ll need statements.”

“I need an ambulance,” the third officer said into his walkie-talkie.

I helped Shana to stand up, and we moved away to give the officers room.

“I already checked for a pulse,” I told the sheriff as she bent to drop her hand on Jack’s neck. “He’s dead.”

“And you are?”

“Bob White. I’m one of the birding group that Jack’s … that Jack was going to be leading today.” I tilted my head to indicate Shana, who stood next to me, her arms wrapped around her expansive stomach. “This is Shana O’Keefe. The dead man is her husband, Jack O’Keefe.”

The sheriff gave us both a quick once-over with her hard eyes. “And you were comforting the widow, I take it?”

I could feel the blood rushing to my cheeks, though my rusty beard probably hid it from the sheriff.

“They’re both old friends,” I said, bristling at her innuendo. “Actually, I was trying to keep Shana away.”

“Didn’t look like you were being very successful, Mr. White.” She tapped her shoulder patch. “I’m Sheriff Paulsen. This is my county. And it looks to me like we’re going to need to talk. The three of us.”

Oh, boy
. I was really excited about that idea. Especially since the sheriff seemed to be spinning her own version of what had happened.

“You got to talk to me, too!”

We all turned to see Bernie poking her head around the corner of the wagon. She’d obviously made a full recovery from her faint and managed to escape Tom’s supervision. Her cheeks were flushed, but she was clearly eager to be included in our upcoming chat with the sheriff.

“They’ve been with me all morning,” Bernie offered. “Me and the other birders. We had coffee at the hotel about 6:00 a.m.. Then we split up into three cars to come over here, but we stopped at the sewage ponds to see if we could spot any ducks, but all we saw were some turtles. Believe me, it’s a slow day for birdwatching when you got a bunch of birders standing on the side of the road talking about turtles.”

“Bernie,” I said, trying to catch her attention. Judging from the deepening frown on Sheriff Paulsen’s face, I was pretty sure Bernie wasn’t scoring any points with her morning play-by-play. Turtles were obviously not high on the sheriff’s list of suspects at the moment. But Bernie was on a roll.

“Anyway, then we drove over here, and after we parked, Bob and Tom took off in this direction, and Shana and I were still up the hill when Tom came to tell us about Jack.” She paused to take a breath. “Besides, everyone knows that Bob wouldn’t kill anyone. He’s the sweetest man I’ve ever met. He just seems to find bodies a lot.”

Thanks, Bernie.
Not exactly what I would have shared at that particular moment, but hey—what are friends for, right?

Sheriff Paulsen’s dark eyes locked back on mine. “Is that right?”

I started to shake my head and put my hand out in a qualifying kind of gesture.

“Absolutely!” Bernie gushed. “The first two times he found bodies, they were already dead, and the last time, he was right there when a man was shot. Right there! I know because I was right there, too. And then when that sweet little girl student of his got shot—“

“Bernie!” Geez Louise, she was making me sound like a walking death trap. I’d be lucky if I didn’t get handcuffs slapped on me right then and there and hauled off to jail without even getting my Miranda rights read to me. In my peripheral vision, I could have sworn that I saw the two deputies getting ready to pull their guns.

Bob White, sensitive high school counselor and closet homicidal maniac.
Thank you again, Bernie.

“Sounds like we’ve got even more to talk about,” Sheriff Paulsen said, as the ambulance crew finally made it down the slope and hunkered down around Jack’s body. Right behind them were the other six people who’d signed up for a weekend of birding with leader Jack O’Keefe. Standing just beyond the old wagon in a tight clump, they could almost have passed for a small brood of abandoned chicks, their faces ashen and lined with strain.

“You know, I’d kill for a cup of coffee right about now,” Bernie announced. Then she pointed up at a bird in a tree behind the covered wagon. “Yellow-billed Cuckoo.”

All of us, including the sheriff looked up.

“Ow,” Shana moaned.

“What is it?” I almost grabbed one of the paramedics away from Jack’s body. If Shana was going into labor, there was no way I was going to coach her through it.

“My back hurt when I looked at the Cuckoo,” she complained, rubbing her knuckles against the small of her back. “Although, to be completely honest, it hurts when I do anything these days.”

Great. Just what I wanted to hear. The pregnant lady was in constant pain. “I think you should go with the paramedics, Shana. Get checked out. Make sure you—and the baby—are okay.”

“I’m fine, Bob,” she assured me, even while tears continued to track silently down her face. “And I’m not having a baby.”

I looked at her in complete disbelief, and she smiled, her eyes regaining some of their sparkle.

“I’m having twins.”

Okay, so I was right. She did have a whole pod in there.

Holy shit.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon, and four of us were trying to eat a late lunch at the old-fashioned A&W drive-in across the street from the Inn & Suites in Spring Valley. Despite my considerable apprehension about her delicate condition, Shana hadn’t gone into any kind of premature labor or distress during our visit with the sheriff, and while she still looked a little pale around the gills, I could see her old stubbornness kicking in.

“I’m going to find out what happened,” she vowed over her mostly untouched burger basket. Her gorgeous eyes were red-rimmed from crying. “My children are not going to grow up with their father’s murder unsolved. I swear it.”

“I’m sure the sheriff isn’t about to let this slide, Shana,” Tom assured her. “She had everyone in the county down there at the station running around. I bet you she’s already got leads to follow, and by tonight, she’ll have a suspect in custody.”

“I hope you’re right, Tom.” She gave him a watery but grateful smile. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Ah, about the children,” I tentatively began.

Three pairs of eyes swung to mine.

I swallowed. “How pregnant are you, Shana?”

Her green eyes lightened. “Well, let me see,” she looked down at her imposing belly and patted the top of its mound. “I’d say I’m definitely pregnant.”

I rolled my eyes, while Bernie chuckled. “Could you make this any harder for me?” I asked Shana, feeling the heat in my cheeks.

“I’m due in two months, Bob,” she relented. “Is that what you want to know?”

I nodded. “That would be exactly what I wanted to know. And you’re not at risk here, or anything like that?”

She shook her head. “No, I’m not going to pop them out any second, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“That’s exactly what I was worried about.” I looked at the ceiling of the diner. “Thank you, God.”

“So now what?” Tom asked, tossing his napkin into his empty basket.

“I know,” Bernie said. “Let’s go to Lanesboro. It’s just down the road. The sheriff said she wants us to stick close for a day or two, but she didn’t say we had to stay here in Spring Valley.” She polished off her last French fry after swiping it through a puddle of catsup in her basket. “I know the others went on out to bird some more, but I just don’t think I have the energy to hike another mile or two. Besides, Lanesboro has all those cute little shops. They even have a hat emporium.” She pushed her chair back from the table. “And a winery. Something for everybody.”

She looked apologetically at Shana. “No wine for you, though.”

“Actually, I think I want to lie down for a while,” Shana said. “I have some more calls to make … arrangements.”

“Well, of course, honey!” Bernie reached across the table to pat Shana’s hand where it lay on the plastic red-checkered tablecloth, clutching a damp tissue. “Come on. I’ll walk back with you and sit with you while you lie down. You boys just entertain yourselves for the rest of the afternoon. We can talk again at dinner.”