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 Money Bird (An Animals in Focus Mystery) (7 page)
“Your cover?” Somehow the idea of Giselle as a spy or secret informant struck me funny and before I knew it I was in a full-blown laugh attack and Giselle followed suit. Leo and Precious jumped into our respective laps to see if we’d lost our marbles, and somehow that just spurred us on.
When we finally came back down, I said, “Okay, at least let me drive you partway. I know a back way through the neighborhood that will land you a lot closer to the back of the shopping center.” I glanced at my wrist, still bare, and asked, “How long have you supposedly been shopping for thread?”
Giselle looked at her watch. “An hour.”
“Is that even possible?” I’ve never been good with a needle and hadn’t been in a stitchery shop since I was about ten.
“Yeah, I’m in a class in their back room.” She pulled a plastic bag with the shop’s name and logo out from under her poncho. “See?”
“Giselle, how much stuff do you have under there?”
“That’s it. Well, you know, Precious’s sling.” At which she flipped the front of the poncho over one shoulder and lifted Precious into a contraption much like a baby carrier. “Okay, ready to go.”
I drove her to a path I knew that led to the back door of the embroidery shop and left her with a caution to be watchful and not to talk to anyone about the situation at Treasures on Earth. “Not even your cousin Persephone, okay?”
Giselle blew a raspberry and said, “Oh, man, she’s the
last
person I’d talk to. She’s
seeing
Mr. Campbell, and I’m not sure which one is creepier.”
forty-five
“Holy cow.” George was
studying one of Giselle’s photos with Tom’s magnifying glass. “Holy crap.” He shifted to another photo, then the third. “Holy mackerel.”
Tom and I looked at each other, and Tom said, “Holy ornithologist, Batman, tell us!”
George looked up and set the magnifying glass on the table. “I need to see this bird. I need to be sure.”
“Giselle is pretty scared …”
“Janet, if this is what I think it is, it’s one of the rarest parrots on earth. And it shouldn’t be here.”
“But you’re not sure?” asked Tom.
“Pretty sure. I need to see the bird. For one thing, there’s nothing here to show scale, so I don’t know how big this animal is.” He went back to examining the photos through the magnifying glass.
Tom looked at me. “He’s sure.”
George looked up, put the glass down, and leaned back. He took a deep breath and looked at Tom, then me, then back at Tom. “Yeah, damn it.”
It was two p.m., and I knew that George wanted to get out to the island soon, but his interest in Giselle’s foster bird seemed urgent. “Do we have time?”
“The stuff I ordered to catch the island bird isn’t here yet, so yeah, let’s do it.”
“I’ll call Giselle.” I flipped my phone open, then closed it and looked at Tom. “Give me your phone. Mine’s dead again. It was just working a little while ago …”
“You need a new battery,” said Tom. We traded phones and I went
off to the bedroom.
Giselle’s phone rang five or six times and I expected to get her recording when she squeaked, “Hello?”
“Giselle, it’s Janet. I need …”
“Oh, hi, Mrs. White.”
“No, it’s me …”
She cut me off with, “Yes, I can babysit Saturday morning.”
Silence for a moment, than I asked, “You can’t talk?”
“Yes, that’s perfect. Thanks for calling.”
“Call me when you can.”
“See you then.”
She was gone, and a shiver started at my shoulders and trickled down into my shoes.
What the heck?
I sat down on the bed and tried to think. Who could be there that would make her pretend I was someone else? Campbell? Moneypenny? Not likely, unless one of them came to check on the bird. Her cousin Persephone? That would be more likely, except that Giselle wasn’t fond of the woman and claimed not to have had much contact with her in a long time.
“Did you get her?” asked Tom when I returned to the kitchen.
I told them about the call. “I’m a little worried about her. We should go anyway, make sure she’s okay.”
“Maybe not right now,” said Tom. “She obviously didn’t want someone to know she was talking to you.”
“What if I go?” asked George. “Nobody knows me.”
“What would you say?” It wasn’t a bad idea, I thought, if he could come up with a reason to ring her doorbell.
“What if I’m, I don’t know, looking for my lost dog or something?”
Tom and I looked at each other.
“We’ll take the rental,” said George, standing up. “No one knows that car, even if they’ve been watching the two of you.”
“I don’t like it,” said Tom.
“Then you stay here and man the phone,” I said, grabbing my purse from the back of my chair. George and I were out the door before Tom could protest further. He followed us to the car and said, “Call me when you know she’s okay, will you?”
“We will,” I said.
“Seriously. If I don’t hear from you in an hour, I’m calling Jo.” He looked at George and said, “You said yourself that Campbell is dangerous, so don’t do anything stupid, okay? It’s rare, but it’s still a bird. Wait for help if you think you need it.” He paused. “What if Campbell’s there? He knows you.”
“He won’t know me. I had longer hair and a big bushy beard back then, and I weighed about eighty pounds more.”
Tom looked doubtful. “Just be alert.”
“Right!” said George, already backing out of the driveway. When we were out of Tom’s subdivision he glanced at me and said, “Really nice guy, Tom.”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Worries about you.”
“Right.” I started to get mad, and then it hit me funny and I began to laugh. “What is it with you men? I’ve lived alone for, jeez, two decades. I’ve photographed wild stallions and grizzlies. I’ve hiked most of the Appalachian Trail with my cousin. Girl cousin. And now I need a man to take care of me?”
“What is it with you women?” George sounded mildly amused. “A man shows concern for your safety and you think he’s trying to stifle you?”
I didn’t really think that about Tom, so I kept mum.
“What if Tom were snooping around that place, that Treasure House?”
“Treasures on Earth.”
“Wouldn’t you tell him to be careful?”
“Turn left at the corner.”
He put his signal on and slowed down. “Wouldn’t you worry?”
“That’s different.”
“
My wife is a rock climber. I’ve never asked her to stop, but when she goes off somewhere with her climbing buddies, I don’t eat and I don’t sleep.” He stopped for a light and looked at me. “I don’t tell her to be careful anymore because she gets mad
, like you.”
“I’m not doing anything dangerous. I just want some answers.” I thought of Anderson Billings and felt hot acid bubble into the back of my throat. My voice was thick in my own ears when I said, “Anderson was a friend, and I sent him out there.”
We were both silent for a few minutes, but for my turn directives. When we crossed the Columbia Street Bridge, George asked about the rivers, which come together there.
“The St. Marys and the St. Joseph merge here to form the Maumee.”
“And if my sense of direction is working, the Maumee flows north?”
“It does a little while, then twists and turns its way east into Ohio for a while, then north again to Lake Erie.” I gazed out the window at the muddy water. “I’ve always wanted to follow the river all the way to the end.”
“So this is a regular river city, eh?” George paused for a moment, then said, “You didn’t kill Anderson, Janet, and you didn’t cause his death. But seriously, be really careful about Campbell. Rich was not a nice guy even before his world crashed around him, and if he’s smuggling birds, he has a lot at stake.”
Not to mention if he’s been killing people,
I thought, but I kept my suspicions to myself.
We were on Giselle’s street by then, so I had George park the rental car in the driveway of a vacant house with a for-sale sign. It was about four houses from Giselle’s, and I gave him her address. We decided that he should pretend to be looking at the vacant house, go around back, and cut through some backyards until he was closer to Giselle’s place. As George put it, “A little paranoia never hurts.” He was starting to open his door when I had an idea.
“Wait a second.” I grabbed a red sweatshirt from the back seat. “Take this. You can change in back of the house.”
He smiled and said, “Sneaky,” then stuffed the sweatshirt under his T-shirt. He grabbed a baseball cap from the back seat too, tucked his ponytail up under it, and got out. He strolled along the front of the house, backed into the lawn as if checking the roof, and worked his way around to the side, then disappeared.
I felt a little conspicuous sitting in the car until I remembered how dark the tinted windows were from outside. I doubted anyone could see me from the back or sides, at least not from any distance. A minute later a ponytailed man in a red sweatshirt pushed a wheelbarrow from the vacant home’s backyard into the yard next door. I shifted in my seat and watched, and soon a man of identical build in a green T-shirt and backward baseball cap strolled from the far end of the house next door to the sidewalk, where he turned toward Giselle’s house and, half a minute later, knocked on her front door and disappeared inside.
Sneaky back atcha, Dr. Crane
, I thought.
I scanned the street and noticed a Cadillac SUV parked in the shade of a huge old sycamore across from Giselle’s. Seemed an odd vehicle for this modest neighborhood. I’d only been in Giselle’s house once, but I knew it was tiny. The whole neighborhood had been built in the shadow of one of Fort Wayne’s General Electric plants, long closed now, to house factory workers. Like most of the houses in the neighborhood, Giselle’s had a living room, kitchen, two tiny bedrooms, and a bathroom. The area was fairly safe, but was not exactly prime real estate. In fact, Giselle was the rare homeowner here. Her father had co-signed the contract, and she had moved in a few months earlier. She had told me that most of her neighbors rented and didn’t stay very long.
George had left the keys in the ignition. I reached over and turned them so I could listen to the oldies station. You would think Creedence would distract me, but my thoughts just bounced around in time to “Bad Moon Rising,” which seemed just too appropriate. I turned the key off and leaned into the corner where my seat met the side door, closed my eyes, took three slow deep breaths, tried to clear my head, and nearly had a coronary when someone knocked on the glass behind me.
forty-six
The knock on the
window behind me sent my body straight up and my heart into overdrive. If I were any taller, I would have hit the ceiling of the car. I blurted something semi-coherent and turned around with my arm raised between me and the glass. A woman’s face was smiling at me from about six inches away.
I tried to open the window, but the engine was off, so no power. Despite the temptation to slam the door open and knock the intruder down, I controlled myself and opened it slowly. She straightened up and minced backward on fuschia stilettos as I stepped out of the car. She started to say something, but her delivery got slower and slower in the two or three seconds it took me to clear the door and stand up.
Body language is something people don’t think much about, but being around animals so much has taught me to pay attention to non-verbal cues, and I could see that the woman in front of me was now more frightened than I was. Some goofy image-centered part of my mind wished for a camera even in the midst of this opening parry. A camera and another photographer, since I was one of the subjects. My brain registered actions and reactions even as they happened and I realized that, on some fundamental level, the tables had turned. She may have prowled up behind me, but now I was the predator. The woman had stopped talking and was backing away from me, her eyes very wide and her mouth slightly open.
My shoulders relaxed and I almost laughed. That reaction probably came partly from my adrenaline leveling off, but I confess that whoever she was, the woman in the fuschia suit and matching heels suddenly looked very like a rabbit to me. Body language, no doubt. I was back in control and made myself turn away from her for a moment to close the car door. I figured it would make her feel less threatened.
“Oh, I …”
I turned back toward her and relaxed against the car. “Sorry, but you startled the snot out of me.” Not the worst thing that’s ever come out of my mouth, but the look on her face made me sorry I’d stooped to nasal discharge, linguistically speaking.
Gotta work a little more on your language, Janet
. “Did you need something?”
She tugged down on her jacket hems and then raised a hand full of long metallic-pink nails to pat at her short blonde hair. A “Price Reduced” sign had appeared on the for-sale sign behind her in the yard. A black Lexus was parked in the driveway next door, which wouldn’t have meant much except for the magnetic sign on the door advertising the same realtor as the one named on the for-sale sign.
“Patricia Gilhooley?” I tried to sound breathless at the prospect.
“Do I know you?” she asked, crossing her arms protectively across her chest.
“I’ve seen your photo, I think. Yes, I’m sure of it.
Fort Wayne Magazine
, right? There was an article about you.”
And if you buy that, I’ll sell you the old Wells Street bridge.
Her fear gave way to flattery and she shifted into realtor mode. “
Allen County Business Link
. You must have seen the interview with me in the April issue.” I was nearly blinded by her oh-so-whitened smile.
“That must have been it,” I said. It was a lucky guess. The second one, I suppose, although the first wasn’t pure luck. Her name was on the sign in the yard. But she was, by all appearances, doing well with her business, so I figured her photo had to be floating around. I’d have put my money on her having paid advertising out there, but the interview was even better. Honestly, if I’ve ever seen that magazine, it would have been during a long stretch in a waiting room lacking in reading options.
“Are you here to see the house?” Patricia Gilhooley’s glossy lips puckered. “I don’t recall being notified of a showing today.”
“We were driving by and saw the sign. Just, you know, having a preliminary look.” I hoped George didn’t walk into the middle of this. I could talk my way out, but he would be hard to explain, especially if he appeared from the neighbor’s backyard.
“We?” She looked toward the house.
“Yes, George walked around back to see if the yard would work for our dogs.”
“It’s a rather small house.” She sounded doubtful.
“Oh, it’s for our son, while he’s in school. He babysits our dogs sometimes, so they wouldn’t be here all the time.”
“I see. I’d better go see …” Gilhooley said, starting to totter toward the house.
“It’s pretty muddy back there.” I realized as soon as it was out of my mouth that it was about as ridiculous as I could get since we hadn’t had any rain in ages, but decided to keep bluffing. “That’s why I came back to the car.”
Didn’t want to get my oh–so-dainty beat-up running shoes damp.
“Oh, dear. They were supposed to fix that sprinkler system yesterday. I’m afraid the timer is off.” She fished a smart phone with a fuschia skin from her skirt pocket. I wondered vaguely whether she had skins to match all her outfits. “I hear it at all hours.” She glanced at me, then back at her phone. “My dad lives next door. I’ve been helping him since his operation.” Before she could check on the errant sprinkler guy, she smiled at something behind me and said, “Oh, this must be your husband?”
Oh crap,
I thought.
Busted.
Bluffing had worked before, though, so I turned toward the approaching ornithologist and said, “George! This is Patricia Gilhooley, the realtor for this lovely home.”
George grinned and held out his hand. “George Crane. Cute little place.”
“So, George, dear, what do you think of the yard? Big enough for our dogs when Tommy doggy sits?” I smiled at him.
“Might be a little small, honey.” He took a conspiratorial tone with Ms. Gilhooley. “Hard to find a yard that suits three dogs.”
“Oh, I know what you mean. I have two Yorkies.” She was shifting back and forth on her feet and I wondered whether she might
have overreached with the height of those heels. As if to confirm, she
said, “Why don’t we go inside, as long as you’re here?” and turned toward the front door. “What kind of dogs do you have, George and … I don’t think I got your name?”
“Janet.”
“George and Janet Crane. Okay.”
“Two Great Danes and a St. Bernard,” said George, draping his arm across my shoulders. “They’re just the sweetest little guys, aren’t they, honey?” It was all I could do to keep a straight face, especially when Patricia turned back to us with a stricken expression. “And we’re starting to get a handle on the barking, at least when we’re home.” George went on, “We do have to have an extra garbage can, though, if you get my drift.”
That stopped the sales pitch cold.
“It sounds like you need a much bigger yard.”
“I don’t know. They would only be here a couple days a week. But you might be right. We’ll talk about it.” George took his arm back and said, “Well, shall we, my dear?”
Patricia Gilhooley looked relieved and, I realized later, went down in history as the first realtor who did not offer me her card. As soon as we were in the relative privacy of the car, George and I started to laugh and he said, “Now that’s teamwork!”
“Ohmygod, George. I think you missed your calling.”
“What, flimflam man?” He backed out of the driveway and drove back the way we had come, still avoiding Giselle’s house. “You could be right, though. Two Academy Awards in one day. Purty good.”
“So tell me!” I was dying to know what went down at Giselle’s house.
But as I watched, George’s smile vanished and he leaned forward slightly, staring out the windshield. I followed his line of sight and had just registered someone walking toward us on the sidewalk to the left when George reached over, pushed my head toward my knees, and said, “Duck!”
forty-seven
“What the heck was
that all about?” I yelled, brushing George’s hand away and sitting up. “Jeez, George, I think you sprained my neck!”
“Sorry.” He was staring into the rearview mirror with occasional glances in the direction we were moving. “Campbell.”
I tried to whirl around in my seat and nearly dislocated my right shoulder when the seat belt locked. “Shit!” I released the belt and turned to look out the back of the car. The person I’d seen walking toward us was still walking, but now his back was to us, and the glare on the back window made it impossible to tell much about him. I looked at George and said, “You sure?”
“No doubt.”
“But you haven’t seen him in years.”
“It was him.” George settled back into normal driving mode, his primary attention back on the road. “What’s he doing there? On foot, no less?”
“Good question.” I rubbed my shoulder, knowing I was going to have a nice bruise from the strap. “No one can even see through these windows, you know.”
“Buckle up.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, but I did it. I believe in seat belts. My brother, Bill, wouldn’t be alive if he hadn’t been wearing his a few years back.
“Well, Janet,” and he broke into Music Man mode, singing, “‘Ya got trouble, my friend, right here, I say, trouble right here in River City.’”
“You saw the bird?”
He nodded.
“And?”
“Quite a bird.”
“Is it what you thought? The rare one?”
“It is. And we need to get it out of there.”
“Did you tell her?” Meaning Giselle, of course. “Tell me you didn’t. She’d freak out.”
“She wasn’t alone, remember.”
“Right! So who was it?”
“Her cousin. Penelope?”
“Persephone?”
“Right. Persephone.”
I thought back to Giselle’s comments about her cousin. “That’s very odd. Did they seem, you know, friendly?”
“To each other, you mean?” asked George, glancing at me. “Don’t forget I don’t know where I’m going, by the way.”
“Right. We’re fine. Turn right at the light.” I gestured ahead of us. “So, yes, to each other. I don’t think Giselle likes Persephone much. I’m surprised she was there.”
“I’d go with that,” said George, slowing for the light, then turning onto State.
Then it hit me. “George! You didn’t let Persephone in on why you were there, did you?”
“You mean to measure for the new carpet your friend won in the contest at our store?”
“What? Turn right at the next corner.”
He grinned. “Had to come up with something quickly and it was all I could think of. Have you ever seen the bright green carpet in her living room?”
I had. He was right, it was all you could think about when you first walked in.
“How did you manage to see the bird?”
“The cage is right there in the living room. I told her it was the prettiest parakeet I’d ever seen. That’s the house, right?”
As he parked in Tom’s driveway, George told me that Giselle seemed very nervous around her cousin, but knowing Giselle, I wasn’t entirely sure that meant anything. George shut the ignition off and looked at me, a mix of anger and something like wonder lighting his eyes. “It was all I could do to walk out of that house without that parrot.” He opened his door, then stopped and said, “We have to nail these people, and we have to get the birds into safe keeping.” Then he smiled. “And we’ll have to let Giselle know she didn’t actually win a new carpet. I think she’ll be disappointed.”
Tom was at the kitchen table with a red pen in hand and two piles of student papers. Jay and Drake were wriggling and wagging at the sliding door, so I let them in. “Want me to clean the dog snot off the glass?” I asked Tom.
“Nah, I’ll get it later when I water the pots. It’ll keep.” The master of understatement. In my experience, the slobbery snottery mess that dogs make of window glass will keep forever if you don’t scrub it off.
We told him about our adventure. When we had finished, Tom waved toward the family room and said, “George, there’s a package for you in there.”
George reached into his pocket but came out empty handed. “You have a pocket knife? Couldn’t bring mine on the plane.”
Tom handed over his jackknife. George cut the box open and removed a hefty birdcage, a long coil of lightweight rope and another of even lighter nylon cord, and a small canvas pouch.
“What’s all that?” I asked.
“Let’s go catch ourselves a Carmine Parrot,” said George. He set the cage on the floor near the door to the garage and laid the rope and bag on the table. “I need some bits of fruit and some nuts and bird seed, if you have any?”
Tom cross-stacked his papers and set the red pen on top, then went to the refrigerator and pulled out a couple of apples, some grapes, and a pear. “Will these work?”
“Perfect.”
I got a plastic container from a cupboard and offered to get some birdseed from the garage, and Tom pulled a jar of mixed nuts from the cupboard.
“Got a colander?” asked George.
Salt
, I thought as I pulled the door open, and heard George say, “Gotta rinse the salt off.”
When I got back with the birdseed, Tom was lacing his hiking boots. “Coming with us?” he asked, looking at me.
“I need to make a call first.” I wanted to check that Giselle was okay, and that Leo wasn’t being any trouble to Goldie. It felt as if I’d been gone for days, not hours.
George stuffed the canvas bag, rope, fruit, nuts, and birdseed into the cage and moved to the door. “Maybe we should take two cars, actually. It could be a long wait.”
“I’ll catch up with you,” I said. “You guys be careful out there, okay?”
George looked at me and started to laugh, which prompted Tom to give me a “what the heck?” look. I just shrugged, but realized that George was right. If I could tell Tom to be careful, I grudgingly admitted to myself that Tom could also tell me to be careful without getting an earful. I put my arms around Tom’s neck and kissed him, then whispered, “Just be careful” in his ear. I turned away as soon as I let him go, and heard, “Love you, Janet,” just before the door closed.
Jay and Drake stood staring at me, Jay’s butt wriggling like mad and Drake’s thick tail banging
wham wham wham
against a table leg. I chucked the black dog under the chin and said, “You’re gonna break that table with that tail of yours, mister,” and then asked, “Out?” They had just come in, but their body language was all about
ball game
so I decided to take a few minutes to let them have a run. Drake raced into the yard and came back with two tennis balls in his mouth, and Jay grabbed a floppy disk from a chair on the deck.
For the next five minutes I threw whatever the silly dogs brought me. Since the only mental effort necessary was to make sure I didn’t set them on a collision course, I let my thoughts run to other matters. Of course, the lost parrot was on my mind. It couldn’t survive out there for long. Food would be an immediate problem, and predators were a constant threat. That big red-tailed hawk I’d seen circling the lake, for one, and even the screech owl might be a problem, although the parrot might be big enough to discourage it. And then there were the human predators. Rich Campbell, Regis Moneypenny.
Campbell was mixed up in whatever was going on with the endangered birds. I felt sure of that, based on the man’s history. And Moneypenny had to be up to his toupee in this. He owned the place and, from all reports, ran it. Who else? How many people would it take to shuttle birds illegally into the area, sell them to the highest bidders, and deliver them alive?
Giselle popped into my head and a felt an inexplicable fear run down my spine. “Come on guys, that’s it.” I told the dogs to leave the balls and floppy disks outside, and we went in.
Giselle’s phone rang four times, and then her voice mail answered. I wasn’t sure whether it was a machine that someone else might hear, so as I listened to the recording, I came up with a quick message. “Giselle, hi, it’s Janet MacPhail. Hey, I just wanted to remind you that I’d like to borrow that new book you got on tracking. Maybe you could bring it to agility practice this week? If not, it’s okay, no rush. Maybe you could let me know, though? Okay, that’s all. Thanks. Oh, I don’t think you have my number, so here it is.” I knew even as I left it that I might be overdoing the “we don’t know each other that well” bit, but I couldn’t stop in the middle.
I felt a pressure on my foot and looked down. Jay was leaning against my leg with his head tilted back to gaze up at me, his paw firmly pressed into the top of my shoe. Who in their right mind could resist that? I set my phone on the table and got down on the floor so I could bury my face in Jay’s silky fur. The next thing I knew, a big black muzzle had shoved itself in under my arm, so I wrapped that one around Drake, pulled them both close, and surrendered to the magic that is a dog’s loving touch.
forty-eight
My mind was spinning
faster than my radials as I drove north on Coldwater Road. After our group snuggle, I loaded Jay and Drake into the van and drove them to Bill and Norm’s house for another visit to “the uncles.” There was no way I would leave them alone at either of our houses with a crazy person out there. Norm was thrilled and greeted the dogs with a promise to “all bake dog cookies together while your mom is away.” Bill had gone to the Clothing Bank drop box with another load of stuff. The clearing-out-to-move business was getting serious.
I missed Leo enough to call Goldie once more before I left their driveway, but I got her voice mail. Tom and George would already be at Heron Acres and I really wanted to watch the capture process, so I cruised about eight miles per hour over the limit once I cleared the stretch near Pine Valley that was a notorious speed trap.
Who was that mysterious figure in Kroger’s? The height seemed about
right for Rich Campbell, and the blue shirt he always seemed to wear.
Then again, if you counted the people wearing blue shirts in any given
place, how many would there be? What about that feeling I’d had that I was being watched? Was I just plain paranoid, or had that been real? I hadn’t gotten a clear look, and I had to admit that the baseball cap bothered me. Campbell had been bare-headed
every other time I had seen him, hadn’t he? I was sure he’d been
capless when he scared me on the island, but I wasn’t so certain about Anderson’s photos, and I was annoyed with my own lack of attention to the details.
If they were smuggling birds and selling them for big bucks, I thought, they had to be bringing them in and shipping them out somehow. Peg had mentioned trucks coming in and out of Treasures on Earth in the wee hours. Could that be when they transported birds? The more I thought about it, the less sense that made. They weren’t smuggling horses, after all. Even the biggest parrot easily fit into a smallish crate. Why draw attention with noisy trucks at odd hours when they could move the birds in automobiles? Or was the report of trucks exaggerated?
A bigger question was how many members of Treasures on Earth were involved in this. Conspiracy theories aside, I couldn’t imagine most people going along with a federal crime. Certainly not people like Giselle. Mrs. Willard didn’t seem a likely criminal, unless her cluelessness was all an act. Giselle’s cousin Persephone wasn’t very appealing, but that didn’t make her a criminal. Then again, according to Giselle, Persephone was involved with Rich Campbell. Which reminded me, I’d have to try calling Giselle again later. I wanted to be sure she was okay, and find out why the long-lost cousin was at her house if they didn’t get along.
One thought led to another, as they will, and I suddenly remembered Sylvia Eckhorn’s odd comments at Dog Dayz. What had she said? “Be really careful”? That was it. She was talking about Rich Campbell. She had seen him behind Tom in the television footage of the training sessions, and she had brought it up, then dropped it. I would have to call her and find out what that was all about. Sylvia had a very level head, and I was sure she wouldn’t throw out frivolous warnings. I added Sylvia to my growing list of phone calls to make.
The parking lot at Treasures on Earth was packed with the usual high-end vehicles when I drove by.
Don’t any of these people have jobs?
I wondered, and then chuckled at myself. After all, if I was free to run all over creation whenever I wanted to, why shouldn’t they? Maybe they also stayed up working in the wee hours as I did. Or used to, more often, before I met Tom. Not that I was getting more sleep now, but I had to admit that staying up late was more fun with him than without. I pulled myself back from a particularly fun memory and took my foot off the accelerator to make it easier to scan the lot and the front of the Treasury, as I’d come to think of Moneypenny’s place.
What’s the big attraction with this place?
I wondered. That was something else I needed to ask Giselle, although knowing a little about her history of short-term affiliations with a variety of belief systems, she might not be the most lucid source of thoughtful analysis. But what would attract Neil Young to what appeared to be something of a cult? Or someone like Mrs. Willard, or any of the other people who parked their high-end cars in the lot several days a week?
By the time I passed the gate to the property I was barely rolling, but even so, there wasn’t much to see, especially with the iron fence breaking up the view. I turned my attention back to the road and started to accelerate, figuring that a crowd at Moneypenny’s place was probably a good thing when Tom and George were out on the island. Unless the whole bunch of them were in on whatever Moneypenny and Campbell were up to, it wasn’t likely anyone could go skulking around right now, much less attack anyone close by. Besides, it was mid-afternoon.
My thoughts had just turned to Anderson Billings when something hit the back of my minivan
KAWHUMP!
Reflex took over and my foot moved toward the brake as I looked in the mirror. A second
THWACK
hit the back hatch just as I caught sight of the batter in my side mirror. Tall, blue shirt, baseball cap with the brim pulled down, face in shadow. “What th …,” I shouted through a surge of nausea. An hour later I wished I had had the intestinal fortitude to shift into reverse and back over bat and batter alike, but in the moment raw terror ruled and I hit the gas. My assailant turned away, arm raised as a shield against the stones my tires were spitting into the air, but I knew who it was. My heart felt like it might jump right out of my chest. I looked once more in the mirror. At that angle I could see only from the attacker’s knees to shoulders. A baseball bat hung
from one hand. The other hand came up, and although I couldn’t see
clearly, I knew the gesture. A fist pistol. Aimed at me.
forty-nine
Tom had taken the
kayak with him and left it on the bank for me, which was a good thing because I didn’t think I could have lifted it,
shaking as I was. I had jumped out of my van and run toward the lake
when I parked at Heron Acres, but by the time I reached the water, my knees had liquified and I let myself sink to the ground. My head throbbed, but the initial nausea had passed, and as I sat there I felt fear spin around me like a silken thread around a caterpillar. I closed my eyes, focused on breathing, forced my muscles to relax. When I opened my eyes and re-emerged, my fear was gone. All I felt was rage. Cold, dark rage.
Tom and George were out of sight on the island, but I could hear their wordless voices across the water, so I got up and headed their way. As I paddled, I took stock of myself. I felt better except that my cheeks seemed to be on fire, so I dipped my hand into the cool of the lake and wiped my face. It felt good, and the vague mucky fragrance of the water was comforting somehow. A small voice whispered to me as I started to paddle again.
Don’t tell them.
I repeated the words out loud.
I had no idea how George would react, but I had a pretty good notion that Tom would be inclined to do something about the assault, and I had to think that would not be wise. What kind of person stands on a public road in broad daylight and hits a car with a baseball bat? Aside from the violence of the act, it was plain wacko.
What about the back of my van, I wondered. I hadn’t even looked at it. All I wanted to do when I pulled into Heron Acres was get away. How much damage had he done? I should call Jo, I thought. I let the kayak drift toward the island and fished my cell phone from my pocket. The island itself got inconsistent reception for some reason, but maybe out here on the water … Four bars. I hit Jo’s speed dial button and waited. Voice mail, as usual, so I left a short message. “Jo, call me. Today. Important. I’m at the island now, so probably bad reception, but leave a message or try in an hour, okay? This is an official call.” That was lame, but I wanted her to know I wasn’t just calling to ask about the puppy. “Rich Campbell just attacked me, well, not me, but my van with me in it, with a baseball bat, in front of Treasures on Earth.” My phone beeped at me and I spoke faster. “I’m okay, scared and furious, but okay. I’m on my way to the island.” More beeps. Battery must be going again. “Tom and George are there, trying to catch the …” Long beep. I looked at the phone. Dead. “Great. Just great.”
I pulled the kayak well out of the water and went looking for Tom and George. I found them at the base of the old sycamore. “See the bird?” I asked as I walked up.
“Yeah, he’s …,” Tom started, turning to look at me. “What’s wrong?”
“What do you mean?” The smile I tried to plaster onto my face felt lopsided, and I wondered vaguely whether adrenaline rushes interfere with muscle control. George was looking at me now, too.
“Janet?”
“So, the bird?” I asked, looking away from them and up into the branches. “Oh, there he is.”
Tom kept staring at me, but George went back to work on the cage. He tied the end of the light nylon cord to the cage door and threaded it through the back wires, careful to leave the door ajar. “Okay,” he said, standing up and lifting the cage. “Let’s do it.”
We moved to within a few feet of the base of the tree’s trunk. George set the cage on the ground and pulled the coil of nylon rope from the canvas bag he was carrying. He secured one end to a hanger on top of the cage, then pulled out a small pouch with a strap to which he fastened the other end of the rope. The pouch seemed to be heavy, so I asked, “What’s in that?”
“Rocks.”
“Rocks?” But as he looked up and started to swing the pouch like a lariat I got it.
“Won’t that scare him?” Tom asked, eyeing the bird high up in the tree.
“Probably not, if I get it on the first toss. So cross your fingers.” George glanced at us. “And you might want to stand back a little in case my aim is off.”
I backed away and Tom moved to my side and took my hand while George swung the pouch in one, two full circles. As it whirled into the third swing, he heaved it upward and it sailed past a hefty branch about twenty feet up, came neatly down the other side, and plummeted to the ground, dragging the rope with it.
“You’ve done that before,” said Tom. He squeezed my hand, and although I thought it was mostly a reflex in the presence of George’s rope-pitching prowess, my eyes suddenly felt hot and wet. I sniffed for control, not just to keep from crying but to stop myself throwing my arms around him, all the time wondering why my emotions are sometimes so out of wack.
George grinned at us. “Once or twice.”
I pulled my hand away and asked, “Okay, what now?”
In answer, George pulled the fruit, seeds, and nuts from his tote bag
and scattered an assortment on the floor of the birdcage. He pushed the cage door open as far as it would go, then grabbed the rope by the weighted end, pulled it taut, and continued to pull gently, making sure to keep the light line attached to the cage door loose. It wouldn’t do to pull the door closed before the parrot climbed in for
the ride back down. The cage rose from the ground, swinging slightly
and beginning a slow spin. George stopped pulling and steadied the cage. He waited to be sure it had lost its inclination to swing and spin, then resumed raising it slowly into the old sycamore.
“He’s moving, George,” said Tom, pointing beyond the cage toward our parrot quarry. The bird had his wings open and was leaning forward as if to get a closer look at the topsy-turvy sight of a cage flying toward him.
George looked toward the bird but kept his hand-over-hand rhythm steady on the rope. “I think we’re good. He’s just checking it out. He’s probably pretty hungry, and he’s been in captivity long enough to associate the cage with food.”
I thought about my own routine of feeding my dog and cat in their crates, all the time at first, then sporadically to reinforce the idea that the crate is a good place. Probably worked for birds, too, I thought, even a wild-caught parrot if he’s hungry enough.
“Okay, I think that will do it,” said George. The cage was hanging
just below the branch that held the rope. Two other branches grew at nearly right angles but lower than that one, so the cage was effectively
“in” the tree. “Let’s back off a bit. Now we wait.” George pulled a tent peg from the canvas bag and secured the rope to it. He picked up the light line and found the end of it. Careful not to tug the cage door closed, he walked as far from the base of the tree as the line allowed and sat on a fallen tree trunk. We followed.
“Can we talk?” I whispered.
“Softly, sure.”
“Think this will work?” asked Tom.
“Hope so. Other than darting him, which I don’t want to do, I don’t see any other way to catch him.” George leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees. “Might take a while, though. I’m sure he’s spooked by the death of his friend or mate, and whatever landed them out here in the first place.”
“Not to mention being captured, whenever that was. I mean, he probably wasn’t bred in captivity, right?” I asked. It didn’t seem likely with such a rare parrot.
“Oh, I’m sure he was poached from the wild. No telling how long ago or how old he was. Probably as a chick.”
“You can buy parrots along the road in Mexico, Latin America, farther south,” said Tom. “Habitat loss and poaching are the biggest dangers to birds and lots of other animals. And plants. It all goes together.”
“Right,” said George. “But the poaching problem isn’t fueled by local demand. The poachers just want to feed themselves and their kids. The real problem is the buyers here in the U.S., and in Europe and other well-heeled markets.”
“Like Moneypenny and his minions.” My cheeks went red hot again as the rage I had managed to cool earlier in the kayak came back to the boil. The image of that bizarre pistol fist flashed behind my eyes. I like to think that I’m not a violent person, but as I thought of
baby birds pulled from nests, and adult birds netted or killed, and of
Anderson Billings and Liesl Burkhardt’s untimely deaths, and of
that pistol fist raised to threaten me, I had a sweet little daydream of
smashing that threatening hand with that swinging baseball bat.
fifty
I sat watching the
parrot in the tree while the parrot appeared to watch the cage that hung fifteen feet beneath him, and Tom watched me. I fought the urge to look at him. He would see right through me, see the anger racing like blood under my skin, and I couldn’t trust myself not to tell him what Rich Campbell had done. The last thing I wanted was to say anything that would prompt Tom to confront the guy. Someone would get hurt.
“What’s got you all wound up?” said Tom.
“Nothing. Well, you know, this poaching and shipping birds and all. It’s horrifying.” I gestured toward the frightened, hungry bird in the sycamore. “I’m angry for that guy. And his dead mate.”
Tom and George were both staring at me by that time, so I decided to try to shift conversation to something more uplifting. Maybe my cheeks would cool down before all the skin peeled off them.
“So, George, what made you become a bird guy?”
George chuckled. “Pretty sure I was hatched fully fledged as a bird guy. Can’t remember a time I wasn’t fascinated by birds.” He shifted his position on the log and gestured toward our parrot. “Look.”
The bird was sliding sideways along the branch, his head cocked as if to see the cage better.
“This is good, right?”
“Yep, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. I doubt he’ll go in this
quickly.” The bird stopped and George relaxed again, although he never
took his eyes off the parrot. “I actually started college as pre-law.
Went all the way through my undergrad years thinking I’d be a
lawyer.”
My behind, especially the bitten part, was unhappy about the rough bark we were sitting on, so I checked the ground for poison ivy, stinging nettles, and ants, found it clear, and sat down where I could lean back against the fallen trunk. Tom shifted so that he was straddling me. As he massaged my shoulders and neck, he said, “Ah, the lure of money, right? I started out in pre-med.”
“Yep. Then I got an internship with a law firm. It was supposed to last the whole summer. I lasted four days and knew it wasn’t for me. I spent the rest of the summer slinging burgers, and it took me an extra year to make up science deficiencies to get into a master’s program in biology, but I’ve never looked back.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“How could you?” asked George.
“No, I didn’t know you started in pre-med, Tom.”
He shook my shoulders gently and said, “Janet, I confess, I’ve held
a few things back. Have to retain some mysterious allure, don’t I?”
That made me smile. Tom was one of the most open people I’d ever met. For me that was his allure. Part of it, anyway. I had enough of men with secrets a long time ago.
Conversation petered out after that and, other than the occasional comment from one of us, we sat in silence for the next hour. I may even have dozed off. When I snapped to, my first thought was for the parrot. He was hunkered down on his branch, possibly sleep
ing. Then I checked Tom’s watch and figured we still had a few hours
until sunset. It could be a long evening, and I needed a break.
“Will it bother him,” I gestured toward our feathered friend, “if I get up and walk around a bit?”
“I doubt it,” said George.
“Want company?” asked Tom.
I covered my hesitation with the clumsiness of getting up with a half-numb fanny. “Sure,” I said, although I was anything but sure. Not that I didn’t want to be with Tom. I just didn’t want to slip and tell him about the assault on my van. Not until we got home, or at least away from here and Treasures on Earth. Even better, not until I’d spoken to Jo Stevens and the police had Mister Baseball Bat in custody. I decided I’d just have to try for a poker face.
We moved carefully until we were at some distance from the old sycamore, then walked more freely. Tom took my hand and I braced for more questions, but none came.
“I hope this works,” I said.
“Yeah, me too. But George said on the way out here that it might take a couple of days.”
“That bird has to be starving by now. I mean, what do parrots eat?
There can’t be much out here for him, right?” I thought about the birds
I photograph in Indiana and what they eat. Some do eat fruit, but I
didn’t think there would be much available on the island. “Maybe some chokecherries,” I said, thinking out loud.
“There isn’t much, probably. He might not recognize some of it as food, either.” Tom paused. “Must be eating something, though. I don’t think he could go this long without eating.”
I hadn’t been paying attention to where we were headed, and realized that we had made our way to the shore closest to Treasures on Earth. As we strolled along the edge of the water, I couldn’t help looking across to the fence that separated the two properties. Tom stopped and looked in the same direction and said, “That might be a way in.”
“Obviously he came in that way.”
“No, I mean a way into their place from here.”
Mr. “Let the Police Handle It” wanted to sneak into Moneypenny’s private property for a look around? I couldn’t believe it.
“If my sense of geography is accurate, that,” he pointed at the section of fence directly opposite us, “would lead into the back of th
e property. Seems likely that anything funny that’s going on would be out back somewhere, doesn’t it?” An edge of excitement colored Tom’s
voice now.
“Not a good idea,” I said.
He looked at me, one eyebrow at attention. “What’s this? Caution from the intrepid photographic investigator?”
“Stop it!”
You stop it, Janet
, I thought, realizing how dumb it was to be annoyed when he was right on target. “Just, you know, I think it would be dangerous.”
“Probably.”
“Really, Tom. I don’t think they play fair over there. I think … I know they killed Anderson. Not they. Someone. Campbell.” My voice broke, and I wasn’t sure which emotion had the upper hand, fear, anger, or grief. “George said it, you know. Rich Campbell is dangerous.”
“Glad you realize that.”
“He probably killed his girlfriend, too. Liesl.”
“What are you talking about?”
I had forgotten that Tom didn’t know about Liesl’s death. “She drowned.”
“How do you know that?”
“Duh! Google, Tom. I looked her up. She drowned in a pond on Cape Cod, in cold weather. It makes no more sense than Anderson’s death.” The longer I spoke, the more solidly my thoughts congealed. “Don’t you think that’s a huge coincidence?”
Something moved in the underbrush beyond the fence on the mainland. I grabbed Tom’s arm and pointed toward the swaying shrubs. I didn’t speak and wasn’t at all sure I could have if I’d tried. We were out of baseball bat range, but I wanted nothing more than to take off running and screaming to the other side of the island.
Then I noticed that Tom was smiling. He whispered, “Stand still.”
The brush wriggled a bit more, and a doe and fawn stepped into the open, nibbling as they walked. The fawn still had faint spots on his back, but they were fading. As they stepped fully into the light, the doe froze for a moment, her head turned slightly to give her a better view. I felt the little tingle I always get when I know that an animal sees me, not in some abstract way, but as another individual creature who has impinged on a universe where they didn’t know I existed. People, yes, but not
me
. I held my breath and listened to the pulse in my ears. The doe turned toward her fawn, arced her body around him, and they disappeared back into the brush.
“Wow.”
“Too bad you didn’t have your camera.”
“No, sometimes it’s better this way,” I said. “They don’t see me when I have the camera. She saw me.” Tom never questioned what I meant.
One more thing I love about him
, I thought, as we walked back toward George and the feathered fugitive.
fifty-one
George was right where
we left him, but the parrot had moved about six inches closer to the cage. I knew that because he had been sitting just to the right of a clump of wilted leaves earlier, and now he was to the left. As we crossed the field of coneflowers and Queen Anne’s lace, he unfolded his wings and flapped them two or three
times, making Tom and me stop in our tracks. For a moment I thought
our approach was about to spook him, but he relaxed and we rejoined
George at the fallen tree.
“I’m thinking we might need to up the ante,” said George. “I’m thinking tropical fruits that he might recognize.”
I had been wanting to make a few calls anyway, so I offered to pick up the fruit at the same time. It turned out that George wanted to make some calls, too. We batted things around for a few minutes and finally decided that George and I would both go do what we needed to do and Tom would stay to watch the bird and, if the cage proved alluring enough, to spring the trap. We took the bass boat and left the kayak in case Tom needed to get off the island while we were gone. We left the remaining water with Tom, and I tossed him half a roll of fruit-flavored hard candies I had in my pocket.
We approached my van from the front, so George didn’t see the damage. I wasn’t sure how he would react, but I figured that if he saw it, he would probably tell Tom about it when we got back. It would be better if neither of them knew about Campbell and his bat until we were home for the night. I made sure to park facing the store as well when we got there.
The round trip took an hour and a half. I drove going in so that George could check for critical emails. We stopped at the grocery store at Coldwater and Dupont, where George grabbed a mango, a passion fruit, and some grapes.
“I have no idea whether these will be more appealing than the current spread,” he said, “but it’s worth a shot.” I also checked the battery display, but they didn’t have the right one for my phone.
8up the dogs. “I hate to leave them locked up so long, and
there’s no reason they can’t have a swim,” I said. “They can stay in Tom’s x-pen while we go back out to the island, or I can just stay with them.”
“Don’t have to convince me,” said George, a big grin on his face.
We switched seats from Kroger’s to Tom’s house so that I could make a few calls. First, I tried my mom’s number, but she said she didn’t know a Janet and hung up on me. Twice. So I called Bill next. I told him we were coming to get the dogs and confirmed that he was going to see our mother that evening. He whined a little, but I heard Norm in the background say, “Oh, stop it. We’re going to see your mother and that’s all there is to it.”
Thanks, Norm
. I hated arguing with Bill about Mom, and I knew he was having trouble dealing with her loss of mental function, but so was I. Not for the first time, I was glad he had Norm—both for emotional support and for a kick in the pants when he needed one.
Goldie was next on my list. Anyone watching my house would spot her sooner or later and realize she had been with me at Treasures on Earth, but I couldn’t tell Goldie I was worried about her. I asked about Leo instead. Worrying about my animals, I’ve learned, is always acceptable. Everything was fine.
I thought about calling Sylvia Eckhorn to ask her what she had meant about being careful around Rich Campbell, but decided to wait until I had a little privacy. Besides, we had arrived at Bill and Norm’s. When we pulled into the driveway, Bill was in the garage trying to drag some shelving units away from the wall. George offered to help him, and I went inside to find Norm and the dogs. Jay and Drake made a half-hearted run at me, then spun back around and gave their full attention to “uncle” Norm, who was loading a plastic container with homemade dog biscuits. “It smells like ginger snaps in here,” I said, inhaling deeply.
“I know, isn’t it yumscious?” asked Norm. He sealed the lid on the container, broke a biscuit in half, and told the dogs to sit “like gentlemen.” They both sat, raised their right paws, and crossed them over their left legs. Norm gave them their cookies and grinned at me. “See, I
did too
read that trick training book I borrowed from you.”
“You guys crack me up,” I said, laughing. “All three of you.”
“Did you catch that poor bird?” asked Norm, handing me the container of biscuits.
“Not yet, but George thinks it’s a matter of time.” I peeled the corner of the lid open, inhaled the gingery fragrance, and whined, “You never bake cookies for me.”
Norm shrugged. “Have one of those. Just oatmeal, ginger, applesauce, and a smidge of honey.”
“Really?”
Even I could make those, if I had the recipe,
I thought. Out loud I said, “I really hope we get him yet this afternoon.”
“Oh, I know,” said Norm. He looked like he might cry. “I can’t stand to think of that little bird out there alone and scared and hungry. People are just terrible.”
“Some are,” I agreed. “And then I meet someone like you, and my faith is restored.” I hugged him with my free arm. “I need to make a quick call.”
Sylvia answered on the first ring.
“Sitting by the phone, huh?” I asked.
“As a matter of fact, I was just going to call you. I wanted to finish what I started last night.” I heard a kiddy song start up and then grow softer, as if she had either turned down the volume or walked away. The giggles in the background suggested the latter. “So, yeah, listen … I don’t want to go into a lot of detail, Janet. I mean, I can’t really. Just be careful about that guy, you know, the one who was at the retriever training session.”
“That’s why I’m calling, Syl,” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“Look, don’t repeat this, not even to Tom. I could lose my job.” I heard a big sigh.
“Your job?” I asked. Sylvia is an emergency-room nurse. “What are you talking about?”
“Men who hurt their girlfriends and wives don’t care who they hurt. So be careful. And that’s all I’m going to say.”
I decided not to probe any further. Sylvia obviously was uncomfortable about telling me, so I thanked her for the information and promised to watch myself. Rich Campbell’s violent streak wasn’t exactly news, but Sylvia didn’t know that. Having someone else verify it didn’t calm my fears, but did make me feel supported in an odd way.
“No, wait, it’s not,” said Sylvia just as I was about to close my phone.
“Not what?”
“Not all I have to say. This is hypothetical, okay?”
“Okay?” I was on full alert now.
“Sometimes violence is a two-way street. Sometimes we treat both partners in a domestic situation.” I stopped breathing and thought,
Wow. Persephone?
Sylvia continued, “And even so, Janet, people like this will stand together when they’re threatened.” I remembered Jo and Hutch talking about how they hated responding to domestic situations because victims often turn on the cops that come to help them.
I promised again to be careful and closed my phone. The dogs bounced around me, ready for a ride, so I gathered up their leashes and the container of homemade biscuits and went back to the garage. I held my breath as I tried the back hatch, and breathed easier when it opened, despite the dents. Once they were squared away in the back of my van I more or less dragged George away from a debate with Bill and Norm over which bean goes better with rice, red or black, and we took off.
“How far out of the way is Tom’s place?” asked George.
“It’s not really. Do you need something?”
“I do.” He didn’t elaborate, so I didn’t ask, and we pulled into the shady side of Tom’s driveway about eight minutes later.
I popped the back of the van, opened the front windows, and slid open the side doors, then stepped around to the crate doors to turn on the little portable fans hanging there. A decent breeze was blowing so the fans were redundant, and it wasn’t bad in the shade, so the dogs would be fine for a few minutes. I followed George to the front door and found the key between the one to my mom’s, now Bill’s, house and the mystery key that I’m afraid to take off my key ring in case it’s for something important and I someday figure out what that is.
Just looking at the yellow and pink roses flanking Tom’s front porch makes me smile, and the humid heat held their scent like a canopy over the door. Something about opening this door felt safe, like coming home. I turned the knob, pushed, and stepped over the threshold. George was right behind me, and the scene before me might not have fully registered until I heard him exhale as if he’d been punched. We both froze and stared and said “ohmygod.”
fifty-two
George and I stood
rooted to the floor of Tom’s foyer looking into the living room where a tornado had apparently touched down. “Ohmygod,” I said again, and then, “Do you smell gas?”
We looked at one another and scurried into the kitchen. The oven door was open, the pilot out, and the gas turned on. George pulled the front of his T-shirt up over his mouth and nose, and I folded my arm across my face, nose pressed into the inner curve of my elbow. We both reached for the knob, but I let George turn it off while I moved to the family room and opened the sliding door. When I turned back toward the room, I felt like crying. The wall of books across from where I stood had been torn apart. Books lay everywhere, pages torn out and ripped or crumpled. Tom’s collection of Labrador Retriever figurines had been swept from their place of honor and lay in a heap, some of them broken.
The kitchen table had been tipped over and one of the chairs lay smashed against the end of the counter, where a strip of molding hung loose and broken. George started to reach for the edge of the table as if to right it, but I stopped him. “Don’t touch anything,” I said, pulling my phone from my pocket. “We should step outside. I’ll call … Dammit!”
“What?”
“I just charged this!” I shook the stupid phone in his direction.
He handed me Tom’s handset from the counter. “Wait until we’re outside.”
I didn’t know Jo Stevens’ number other than “number five on speed dial,” so I dialed nine-one-one, reported the breakin, and asked them to notify Jo Stevens or Homer Hutchinson because it was probably related to a case.
“Tell them about the gas,” said George. I looked a question at him
and he said, “In case he monkeyed with more than the oven.”
The dispatcher told me to wait out front, away from the house, until the police arrived, and said she was notifying the gas company as well.
“I’m glad the dogs weren’t here,” said George.
I tried to say, “Me too,” but my voice wouldn’t work. I appreciated what George had said, though. Most people would have wished the opposite, thinking two biggish dogs would keep an intruder out. Truthfully, anyone nuts enough to go into a house in broad daylight and tear it up like that might be violent enough to hurt the dogs. Or worse. Then I thought of something. “George! Your laptop!”
He gestured toward the interior of the car. “Under the seat.”
“What do you think he was after?” I asked.
“
If
it was Rich …,” said George.
I cut him off. “Of course it was him. Who else?”
“Houses do get robbed.” He didn’t sound convinced.
The handset rang as I was about to reply.
“Janet?” It was Jo Stevens.
I admitted that it was I.
“Where’s your phone? I keep getting your voice mail.” She sounded angry and relieved all at once. After I explained, and confirmed that we were not inside Tom’s house, even though I had answered his phone, she said she was tied up but that two patrol cars were on their way and that her partner would be there as well.
“They’re here,” I said. Two cruisers with their lights spinning were half a block away, and behind them I saw a black Taurus that I figured was Hutch.
“And Drake?” asked Jo.
“He wasn’t here,” I said, and heard a sigh from the handset.
“I’m sending a car to your place.”
“Okay.” That sent a tremor through my skull. “Jo, have them check on Goldie. I’ll call her now.”
“Will do …”
“Janet, your friend, Anderson,” she paused. “You were right. We don’t have the full report, but preliminary shows it was no accident.”
My face went cold and I leaned against the van to keep my balance. “He didn’t drown?”
“He probably did. But someone cracked his skull first.”
I forced myself to swallow the bile that shot into my throat.
“What’s the code for your house? So my guys can get in.” Jo’s voice sounded like it was far away, but her words registered and I gave her the code to my new locks.
“I’ll call you later.”
“Jo, wait,” I said, regaining my balance. “It had to be that creep Rich Campbell, you know, from Treasures on Earth. Moneypenny’s henchman.”
“Some of it, maybe. What time did you leave Tom’s place?” That seemed like an odd question, but I told her we had an early lunch and left around noon. She said, “Wasn’t him then.”
“What?”
“He was picked up at a rest area in Delaware County a little while ago,” she said.
So this was random?
I wondered? Or if not random, at least not related to our amateur detecting? “Picked up?” I asked.
George mouthed questions at me. Who? What? I signaled him to wait, but he wasn’t nearly as responsive to hand gestures as Jay is, so I turned away to hear what Jo had to say. A truck bearing the Northern Indiana Public Service Company logo pulled up behind the cruisers.
“I can’t say much, but a wildlife dog indicated him in the rest area,” said Jo, and I could hear the satisfaction in her voice.
Wildlife dog. That had to be Lennen, the Lab I met at my vet’s office. He was the only wildlife detection dog I knew of in the area, and one of very few in the whole country.
A young man with NIPSCO emblazoned across the back of his jumpsuit got out of the truck, jogged across the lawn, and entered the house.
“Did he have a bird on him?” I asked.
“Let me talk to George,” she said.
“Wha …,” I started to protest, then realized that George’s status
vis-à-vis
wildlife smuggling might allow her to tell him what she couldn’t tell me. I handed him the phone and waited. When he hung up he started to tell me, but I said, “Hang on. Let me give Goldie a heads up.” She answered on the first ring, and was as cheerful as ever and didn’t see any reason for a visit from the police, but she said she’d humor me.
When I had finished, George said, “The dog indicated on Rich’s vehicle. That gave them cause to search it, and the dog indicated the back seat. The bench had been modified, hollowed out, and there were two birds inside. She said parrots. I’d have to see them …”
He cut it off as Hutchinson came out of the house and straight to us. The man was never long on social graces, so I was surprised when he nodded at me and said, “Janet. You okay? And the dogs?” He stopped for a nanosecond, then walked to the back of the van, where I heard him say, “Oh, Jay, glad to see you’re safe and sound. How’s my sweet boy?” I walked around to the back and found him sticking his thick fingers as far as he could through the bars of the crate. Drake squooshed the side of his head into the bars of his crate and Hutch gave the black dog’s ear a scratch and said, “Yeah, yeah, you too, you too,” in the semi-baby talk that some people use with animals. I made myself not laugh in case Hutchinson took it badly, but it would have been a “hope for the human species” laugh if it had come out.
“Listen, can we go?” asked George. “We’ve been gone a while and, well, our bird …”
Hutchinson pulled his hands away from the dogs and said, “Yeah, sure, don’t see why not.” He looked at the mobile handset in my hand. “That belong here?”
“Oh, right.” I handed it over. “It won’t do me any good at the lake, huh?” George gave Hutchinson his number since my phone was useless, and Hutch turned back toward the house. I stopped
him.
“Hutch, have you looked into Regis Moneypenny? I mean, he
must be part of this.”
“Can’t say.”
“Can’t say because you don’t know, or can’t say because you’re not allowed to?” I asked.
“Yep.” Hutchinson’s eyebrows had risen just about to his hairline and he was staring into my eyes.
“Okay. You have. And he is?”
Hutch just stared at me in reply.
“So, if you don’t think Moneypenny is involved, just shake your head. I mean, should I be watching out for him at the lake?” I remembered my uneasiness on the island earlier, the feeling that someone was watching Tom and me on our walk.
A couple of deer
, my non-paranoid hemisphere reminded me. But something still bothered me about that section of fence where the brush thinned out. It felt like a conduit for evil.
“Won’t be there,” he said, starting to turn away again but still talking. “He’s in Muncie posting Campbell’s bail. I spoke to the jail down there on my way here and he had just arrived.”
I did some quick calculations and figured it would be close, but Campbell could have made it to the rest area north of Muncie after he attacked my van. Perhaps I associated the open stretch of fence with Anderson’s death. It seemed likely that Rich Campbell had come into Heron Acres that way. He could leave Treasures on Earth from the back of their property without being seen and, assuming he had a boat of some sort, he could cross the narrow stretch of lake without being seen from most of Heron Acres.
George interrupted my thoughts. “At least we’ll have the place to ourselves. That should make it easier to catch ourselves a Carmine Parrot.” I was too distracted to remember to keep George away from the back of the van, and when I closed the back hatch, he said, “Janet! What happened here?”
“Oh my! Someone must have backed into it.” As soon as I said it, I knew how dumb it was. How could I not have seen the damage earlier? George gave me a look and seemed to be about to speak, but he didn’t. We climbed into the van and headed back to the peace and quiet of Twisted Lake.
fifty-three
The sky was a
clear, hot, August blue and the air was still as death
in town, but when we stepped out of the van at Heron Acres, we entered
a different world. A sweet breeze blew from the lake, the glare of urban concrete was miles behind us, and the air smelled of lake water and grass rather than petroleum fumes. Closing my eyes, I
took a deep breath. That calmed me, but when I opened my eyes and looked across the field to the water, Anderson Billings came to mind. He died violently in this peaceful place, as creatures who live here do every day. Perhaps the Buddha was right. All is illusion.
Don’t go all philosopher now, Janet
, said a little voice, merging into a very real voice that was speaking to me.
“Janet, where do you want this pen?”
I shook off my complex feelings and helped George tote the x-pen to a nice spot in the shade, back twenty feet or so from the beach. Just beyond, a kayak lay on the grass. I walked over and took a look. “You go ahead and take the boat,” I told George. “I’ll let the boys play a bit, then take the kayak over.”
“I thought you left your kayak on the island?” asked George.
“This one must belong to Collin, or one of his relatives. Mine is on the island. But they won’t mind, I’m sure.”
George started to move toward the boat but stopped and pulled his phone from his pocket and looked at it. He pushed a button, then said, “Aw, crap.” He shook the phone and tried again, then started walking around. “Lost the signal.”
“Something important?” I asked.
“Maybe? There’s a text from the cop, what’s his name? Hutch? Said ‘need to talk, call me.’” George kept walking this way and that. “This happen a lot out here?”
“Yeah, it does, actually. Sometimes I can’t get a signal at all, other times it’s fine. Weird.” I tossed him my keys. “Here, take my van and drive back to that little store on the corner where we turn. You can get a signal there.”
“Listen, as long as I’m going … Are you hungry? I’ll grab something for all of us. I meant to do that, but the mess at Tom’s place distracted me.”
I looked at my watch. It was after seven, a long time since lunch, and once George planted the thought, I realized I was famished. We walked back to the van and opened the back. Jay and Drake spilled out of their crates, barking with glee. Neither of them is a big mouth, but they were excited and feeding off one another, and apparently it was all too much to contain without making some noise. “Okay, okay,
shhhhhh
.”
I tapped on the passenger window to ask George to bring me a candy bar, too, and by the time I turned back around, Jay was racing around with a humongous stick in his mouth and Drake had scared up an abandoned tennis ball. To their credit, although they both love to swim, they had resisted temptation and stayed within about ten yards of me. “Okay, guys, lets go,” I said. As soon as I pointed toward the lake, they were off, and by the time I got to the beach, they were both soaking wet and giving me the big-eyed “Throw it! Throw it!” look.
Which I did, for about ten minutes. Between tosses I looked toward the island, but there was nothing to see. The fallen log that had become our observation post was on the far side of the big old sycamore, and even if he were standing up, I didn’t think I’d be able to spot Tom. I wondered if by chance the prodigal parrot had gone after the food in the cage. If not, it could be a very long evening. The mosquitoes and gnats were bad enough out there in daylight, I thought, and absolutely vicious at dusk. I wondered whether I had enough diluted skin softener left in my van for the three of us. Great stuff for fending off bugs. Then I remembered that George had taken the van.
I was not looking forward to telling Tom about his house, but at least Campbell was out of commission for the time being, and Moneypenny wasn’t around. I pulled my cell phone out to see whether it might have come out of its coma so I could call Tom and tell him I was on my way back out, assuming he had any reception on the island. Sometimes I long for the days when we didn’t expect to be able to reach people at all times. Expectations are so easily dashed.
The dogs seemed to be winding down, so I walked them back to the x-pen, filled their water bowl from the jug I’d brought, and locked them in. I draped my solar sheet over part of the pen, reflector side facing west to deflect the setting sun. Then I fastened their crate fans to the side of the pen and turned them on. With the breeze off the lake plus the fans, and the double shade of trees and solar sheet, they would be fine for a little while.
“Good boys,” I said. “Take a nap.” Drake set about tanking up from the water bowl but Jay was standing still, ears erect and gaze focused on the island. He let out a low
bfff
. “Hear Tom out there, Bubby? Is he talking to that silly bird?” Jay glanced at me and wagged his nub. “You’ll see him in a little while. Lie down now. I’ll be back.” He sank slowly to the ground, his attention still on the island. He looked like a punk rocker with his wet hair sticking out in crazy directions. I started to walk away, but turned back when he let out a loud
yip
. “Quiet, Bubby, I’ll be back in a little while.”
I figured I’d paddle out there and see what was happening with our little lost bird. If Tom wanted a break, I could spell him. Either way, one of us could come back and stay with the dogs for a while, and if it got late I could take them home and come back. I heard Jay whine behind me, but he didn’t bark any more, so I kept going.
The breeze had died, leaving the surface of the lake level except where the kayak cut a path and left its small wake. An engine of some sort was running in the far distance, but other than that, the murmur of water against paddle and hull, and a background buzz of insects, all was quiet. The sun was about halfway between zenith and horizon, so not so tough an opponent as it had been a couple of hours earlier, but the humidity made up for it. I was dripping by the time I reached the island and dragged the kayak out of the water, so I took a moment to wet my face and arms before turning toward the old sycamore.
Jay started to bark again. I turned to holler at him in time to see Drake stand up and join in. Nice duet, I thought, Jay’s occasionally squeaky tenor and Drake’s bellowing baritone. “Jay! Drake! Quiet!” I yelled, feeling like a bit of an idiot since I couldn’t reinforce the command, or reward compliance, from that distance. I felt the breeze in my face and was surprised that my voice had carried across the lake, but apparently it had. Both dogs were quiet, though their postures said they were still watching. They’d settle down when I got out of sight, I thought.
I didn’t want to trudge through the brush to cross the island—too many burrs and a lot more biting insects in the center—so I took the longer path along the shore. I had tramped around this place enough to know that there was a stretch of lower-growing vegetation a five-minute walk to the east, so that’s where I was headed. I would cut inland to Tom’s parrot-watching post from there.
It didn’t take long until I was dripping again, and it wasn’t lake water.
Hope Tom hasn’t drunk all the water
, I thought, my mouth feeling sticky and dry in the evening heat. The island was usually cooler than the mainland, but now it seemed warmer. For a moment I considered stripping down to my undies and going for a swim, but what would be the point? I’d sweat up again as soon as I got back with the program. I kept walking.
I could hear dogs barking again, but wasn’t sure they were mine.
Mine?
The thought surprised me, but I realized that I was indeed starting to think of Drake as my dog. Our dog. Not just
his
dog. I wondered whether Tom thought of Jay and Leo as
our
dog and cat. Maybe I’d ask him.
Maybe not.
From where I stood, I couldn’t see the x-pen anymore. I was about to backtrack for a look, but they weren’t barking, so I went on. I could always go back to stay with the dogs after I checked in with Tom. Besides, George would be back soon.
The island had a slight elevation gain from shore to sycamore, and I had reached the area where the taller leg-grabbing grasses and weeds gave way to low-growing varieties. I turned inland and looked in the direction of the fallen trunk where we had sat earlier that afternoon, and where we had left Tom watching the parrot. There was no sign of him, but if he was sitting on the ground, that made sense. I glanced at the sycamore. The birdcage still hung from the branch, empty as before. I scanned the branches above the one supporting the cage, but saw no parrot. Had he gotten scared, or bored, or hungry, and flown off ? Then a movement caught my eye, and I shifted my focus to a scarlet figure hunched on the end of the branch from which the cage was suspended. He’d moved down.
Our luck is changing
, I thought, and smiled.
If I walked directly to where I expected Tom to be, I would have to pass almost under the cage, and I was afraid that would drive the parrot away.
I’ll just have to deal with the burrs
, I thought, and took a detour away from the sycamore and through thicker, taller brush. Finally I reached the log.
No sign of Tom. I couldn’t imagine why he would leave his post. If the parrot went for the food in the cage, Tom needed to pull the door shut. He wouldn’t miss the chance, I was sure. Not after sitting out here all afternoon. I looked around, but everything was quiet. I stepped up close to the tree trunk and took inventory. The canvas bag that George had used to carry his parrot-catching kit was there, as were a couple of empty water bottles. I sat down on the log to think. A deep-voiced dog started to bark. Drake? That seemed out of character, so maybe it wasn’t him at all. Sound can be deceptive out in the country, especially over water.
When I swung my legs over the log and turned to face the other direction, I noticed a path through the brush. It was not a worn walking trail, but a line of broken vegetation, as if something had been dragged through the grass and flowers. The barking had stopped again, and everything else seemed to go still as well. All I could hear was a faint buzzing of insects. Heat, moisture, bugs, clear sky. All the parts were assembled for a peaceful, lazy summer evening, and yet something about it felt wrong.
Was that there earlier?
I wondered, staring at the disrupted vegetation before me. I didn’t think so. Had Tom walked through there?
Follow,
came a voice from somewhere inside me, and I felt a tiny tremor under my sternum. I didn’t like the feeling at all, but I slowly slid off the log and stepped toward the brush. As I got closer, it became clear that vegetation had been crushed under a weight, as if someone had walked through here very recently.
Deer, maybe?
I stopped to orient myself, and realized that if I walked from where
I stood straight through to the lake, I’d reach the water in about ten yards. It had to be the shortest path to the water. Maybe the doe and fawn had swum across from the other side.
Follow.
I took a couple of steps into the brush. The path zigged to the left for a few feet, then zagged to the right. And then, when I made the second turn, my heart jumped into my mouth. A baseball bat lay half hidden, as if someone had dropped it, and the path beyond widened, vegetation flattened to form a path about eighteen inches wide. And there was something else, something that wrapped a piano wire of fear around my throat and stifled the scream that tried to rise from my throat.
fifty-four
The bat was lightweight,
and small. A child’s bat, I thought, as I stepped over it and leaned to pick up the object that had stopped my breathing. It was a shoe, and not a child’s. A man’s shoe. Tom’s. The lace was still tied. A green stain ran from the back of the heel down to the sole, where it feathered out and died, as if the back of the shoe had been dragged through the grass top first. I looked at the flattened vegetation leading down the shallow slope and considered the shoe again.
As if he were dragged and his shoe pulled off
, I thought.
The garrote that had tightened around my throat at the sight of that shoe slipped down to my heart. I started to follow the trail of crushed plants, then backtracked and picked up the bat. It was small, but better than nothing. I walked fast but didn’t run. I knew I needed to hurry for Tom’s sake, but I didn’t want to give myself away by making a lot of noise, which was almost inevitable with all the dry sticks in this area.
After about a minute, the path turned forty-five degrees to the left, and it made another similar turn soon after that. The slope toward the water was a bit steeper here, and covered with scrub willow that blocked my view. I couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead of me, although the drag path was still easy to follow as it wound through the trees. Finally I reached the break between willow and grass and had a clear view to the water.
The first thing that caught my eye was across the water on the mainland. The x-pen. As if on cue at my arrival, the panel nearest the water tipped over and the whole affair flipped on its face and went flat. As it did, the solar sheet whooshed into the air, and Drake shot out from between the prone panels and made for the lake like a furred cannonball.
My brain registered everything, and what must have been only a few seconds of elapsed time seemed like long minutes. My eyes tracked Drake’s trajectory and landed on a glittering wake, its leading point aimed to my right. The light shifted, and I saw the swimmer. Jay. He must have jumped out of the x-pen. He was a strong swimmer and was coming fast, and even from this distance I could see that he was hell-bent on whatever he was after.
I tracked to the right. My heart skipped again and then went into
overdrive. I dropped the bat and started to run.
A tall figure in a blue shirt and a baseball cap was dragging Tom, who was clearly unconscious, into the water.
But he’s supposed to be in custody
, I thought.
Or getting bailed out. What is he doing here? And why did they let him go? Why? Why?
Running has never been my strong suit. I run for exercise, but it’s a jogging sort of run. Slow. I’m not a sprinter. As I angled down the slope toward the beach, my legs seemed to be wrapped in chains. It was like one of those dreams in which your feet are mired in goo, except that I was awake. My legs just couldn’t move fast enough.
Tom was in the water, not moving, his assailant dragging him deeper and deeper. I could see that they were both soaking wet now, Tom floating still but seeming to ride lower in the water as his clothing took on weight. The blue shirt on his assailant was wet halfway up the torso, then to the shoulders, swimming, pulling Tom into deeper water. Letting him go.
“
No
!” I didn’t know I had screamed until I heard the sound of my own voice. I wasn’t fast enough. I wasn’t going to make it.
The figure in the blue shirt was waist deep now. Thigh deep. Knees. Coming out of the lake. I didn’t care, couldn’t look anywhere but at the figure floating on the dark water. Tom.
He moved. Rolled. I saw his face come out of the water, I was sure I did, but the next time I looked he was still again. Floating.
I registered movement in my peripheral vision. Both sides. Some
thing moving toward Tom offshore. And something to my right, coming my way. I hit the water at a run, felt the soft ooze of the lake’s floor give way beneath my shoes and slide my feet out from under me. Left alone, I could have righted myself, but something hit me from behind, across the small of my back. The muck beneath me threw my feet away, and I fell into the shallow water.
I pulled my knees under me, slipping against the gooey bottom but finding a purchase and pushing myself almost upright. I took a step, seeking water deep enough to hold me, deep enough to let me swim, but something caught my hair and the back of my shirt and pulled me onto my back. I tried to sit up, but hands shoved against my shoulders and forced me under the shallow water. My hair was glued across my eyes. I couldn’t see, so I sent my hand straight up, coming close to a direct hit. I felt the heel of my hand strike bone and thought I heard a gasp.
My experience with animals sometimes comes through at odd times, and this was one of the oddest. As I fought, I flashed on the principle of zero resistance. If you try to push a dog’s rear end down into a sit, he pushes back. But if you entice him to raise his head for a treat or a toy, his butt naturally goes down. I didn’t intend to give my attacker a treat, but maybe I could use lack of resistance as a weapon. Don’t the martial arts use the attacker’s weight and momentum against him? I wasn’t trained, but still, maybe I could make the principle work.
Hands grabbed my shoulders. I sucked in as much air as I could, knowing I was going under again. The hands shoved me down, and the force of the action knocked some of the air out of my lungs. My hair drifted away from my eyes and I looked up at my attacker and tried for another punch to the face, but my arms were too short to make contact. Thumbs dug under my collarbone and fingernails pressed into the tops of my shoulders. The pain almost knocked the rest of the air out of me, but I held on. I dug my heels into the slippery mud beneath me and pushed. My feet slipped away from me, but I got just enough traction to scoot my body a few inches, and that was enough to make blue shirt slip and fall toward me. I rolled with the pressure of the extra weight and got loose. Frantic, I splashed a couple of strokes and then stood up. The water was only halfway up my calves, and I was facing away from the island, toward Tom. He was floating on his back, but didn’t seem to be doing anything else.
I started to move toward him, but instinct made me turn around. Through the entire encounter, I had Rich Campbell’s face in my mind, but that was not the face that glared back at me now, and they were not Campbell’s hands that held a huge piece of driftwood like a baseball bat and started to swing it at my head.
The water in front of me exploded and the figure in the blue shirt pinwheeled, hand releasing the stick, legs bowled out from under the body by seventy pounds of muscle, heart, and black fur. Drake. Tom always said that for a Lab, life is a contact sport, and I guess that applied to defensive maneuvers, too. Drake wheeled around and came back. I grabbed one of the blue-shirted wrists and told Drake, “Take it!” He closed his mouth over the wrist, and I said, “Hold it!” Then I turned to drag Tom out of the water.
I was too late.
fifty-five
“Janet! Tom!”
At least three voices were yelling our names. I looked down the beach, toward the source of the noise. George was running, flanked by detectives Jo Stevens and Homer Hutchinson. Persephone Swann, her blue shirt ripped and her baseball cap gone, sat very still in the shallow water, her arm held in Drake’s soft but inescapable grip. He would hold on until Tom or I told him to let go, and every time Persephone tried to move, I could see Drake tighten his hold.
I sat on the beach with Tom’s head in my lap. Jay was pressed against Tom’s other side, his chin on Tom’s chest and worry bright in his eyes. Tom smiled at me and said, “Thought at first that I’d died and gone to the arms of an angel, but I don’t think I’d have such a blazing headache if that were the case.”
“Don’t even joke about it,” I said, working harder than I wanted to admit not to dissolve into hysterics.
“Janet!” It was Hutchinson. He was standing in the water next to Persephone and Drake. He had one of Persephone’s wrists in his handcuffs, and he said, “How do I get the other wrist away from the dog?”
“Drake, out!” I said.
He spat Persephone’s wrist from his mouth and wheeled toward us all in one motion. In typical Labrador fashion, he slid into us, throwing sand into my hair, and started licking Tom’s face and whining. Jay had jumped out of the way when he saw Drake coming, and now the two of them seemed ready to play wrestle-and-belly-rubs with Tom the way they did at home.
“Guys! Settle!” I said. It took two more commands to get them to listen, but they finally lay down, each being sure to keep at least one paw in contact with Tom.
George and Jo knelt beside us.
“Jeez, man, are you okay?” asked George.
“I will be, thanks to nurse Janet.” Tom squeezed my hand and turned to me. “So let me get this straight. Jay, who is by rights not a water dog, dragged me out of the lake, and Drake, who is a water dog and not a protection dog, tackled Persephone and held her for the police?”
“That’s about it,” I said. I looked at Jo and asked, “She’s Campbell’s girlfriend, right? That’s what Giselle told me.”
“Was. I suspect the relationship is probably over.” Jo had a funny little smile on her face.
“Why is that?” asked George.
“Campbell asked for a deal. He gave her up.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, enjoying the warmth of Tom’s hand in mine more than I ever had before.
“They’ve been pals for years, it seems. Met in the East. New Canaan, Connecticut.” I remembered Giselle saying that Persephone had lived on the East Coast for years, in “New something. “He’s a liar and a thief, but it seems Persephone is the killer.”
“She killed Anderson?” I asked, and turned to glare at Persephone.
“So Campbell says. He claims to have evidence. And he says Anderson wasn’t the first.” Jo looked at Tom. “Might not have been the last, but thank God …” She stopped mid-sentence, but touched Tom’s arm, then went on. “Anyway, seems Rich had an old girlfriend …”
“Liesl,” said George.
“Right. Liesl Burkhardt. Apparently they’d had a bad breakup, and he wanted to see her, tell her he was sorry, make amends.” George snorted, and Jo looked at him with an eyebrow raised, then continued. “That’s his story, anyway. So Persephone found out he had been to see Liesl, and went off the deep end. Or actually knocked Liesl off the deep end. Slipped her a Mickey and threw her into a lake on Cape Cod.”
Tom wriggled himself into a sitting position.
“You sure you should be moving?” asked Jo. “We’ve called for an ambulance to take you out of here.”
“Nah, it’s just a bump.” He reached up and rubbed the back of his head.
“With a baseball bat!” My voice cracked at the end.
“Cancel the ambulance,” said Tom.
I nodded at Jo. “I’ll drive him to the hospital and hit him again if he doesn’t let them look him over. Just help me get him out of here.” I changed the subject. “The smuggling? Was that why Moneypenny brought him here?”
“We’re still looking into it, but I don’t think Moneypenny knew about the smuggling or the endangered birds,” said Jo. “I think he really wanted to run an educational aviary and a bird rescue, and hired the wrong guy.” She paused. “Turns out he’s had a few other odd schemes, maybe shady, maybe not. Real name is Willard.”
“Floyd Willard,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah,” said Jo. “You knew that?”
“Not until now, but it explains where Mrs. Willard’s money came from, and a few other things.” Jo looked mystified. “Tell you later,” I said.
Tom said, “Okay, George, if you get the boats, Nurse Janet will drag me along in a minute.”
But George was pointing toward the sycamore and already walking that way.
“Perfect!” I said, and started to laugh. The parrot was in the cage. I couldn’t see details at that distance, but his scarlet plumage was like a flashing light through the bars. As we watched, George pulled on the light line and the cage door closed.
George turned toward us, a huge grin on his face. He said, “I’ll bring the bass boat right here. We’ll get you and the parrot out first, then come back for the rest. He looked at Persephone and added, “I think she should sit here wet and miserable for a while.” Persephone scowled, but said nothing. George walked off, and Jo joined Hutchinson where he stood watching Persephone.
Tom and I wrapped each other up in a hug to end all hugs, bolstered by a wet dog on each side. I don’t know how long it lasted. Maybe a year. My doubts about how to proceed weren’t all gone, but the fear that danced among them had drifted away across the surface of the lake. A veil of mauve and peach glowed on the horizon and dragged a fringe of color over the lake as the summer began to slip away. It promised to be a long, warm autumn.
