The Boreal Owl Murder (11 page)

I packed up my briefcase, straightened my desk and turned off the lights.

“I’ll be back,” I told my chair, then locked the door and left.

Minutes later, I pulled into Lily’s parking lot, in hopes she’d be around so I could get a phone number for Very Nice Trees, since I’d told her I’d check out the supplier on my next trip north. I also needed to pick up some suet. But, it remained to be seen if she would even speak to me after the little scene with Stan the other afternoon. I spotted her behind some statuary in the showroom and walked over, but I made sure I stayed out of her kick range.

“I need the number for Very Nice Trees,” I said. “I’m going to be in Two Harbors this weekend, so I thought I’d do that look-see thing for you we talked about.”

As I expected, she didn’t smother me with any sisterly affection. She gave me a “Die, you scum” look that I remembered well from our childhood, then turned her back on me to go to her office. A moment later, she was holding out an invoice to me. “It’s on here.”

“Look, Lily,” I said, taking the sheet of paper. “About the other day, I’m sorry about my overreacting to Stan. I—”

“Was an idiot,” she finished for me. “I don’t know why you have to go ballistic every time I date a guy. Stan is a very nice man. Not the greatest conversationalist, I’ll admit, but he certainly knows his stuff when it comes to accounting. He’s been helping me with my taxes for this year, and so far, he’s saving me a ton of money, Bobby. Although he does seem a little concerned about the profitability margin I posted from those Christmas trees.”

She pointed at the invoice in my hand.

“I called them yesterday to get directions for you, but I got their answering machine instead. But there was a message on the machine.”

Her pupils dilated and her breathing accelerated. A red flush began to creep up her neck.

“They’ve got an absolutely unbelievable deal on ladyslippers for next month. You won’t believe this.”

Now, we may have our differences, but I know my sister. There are only two things that consistently turn Lily White pink: 1) the prospect of big profit, and 2) tickets to Minnesota Wild hockey games.

But the Wild wasn’t playing tonight, which meant only one thing.

Lily was seeing big dollar signs.

“Ladyslippers are pricey little flowers,” she said, excitement rising in her voice. “They usually sell for $150 to $200 retail, so I don’t include them in too many landscape plans. Plus, they’re hard to get. But Mrs. Anderson would really like a big garden of them in that landscape I’m working on. I told her it might not happen. But now, Very Nice Trees is offering them wholesale at $100 a plant, which means I can make a big chunk of profit.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Did you say ‘per plant’?”

Lily was grinning. “Yup.”

“And just how many plants go in a big garden for Mrs. Anderson?”

Lily was practically choking on her grin. “One hundred!” she finally managed to spit out. “I can make $5,000 on ladyslippers for one yard alone—and that’s selling at the low retail price. If I charge her $200 per plant, I can make—”

“Ten thousand.” I did the math again just to be sure I had it right. Both Lily and her supplier, Very Nice Trees, stood to make ten thousand bucks each from this one transaction alone. And if Very Nice Trees had lots more ladyslippers to sell, they were going to make a bundle. I wondered just how many ladyslippers they had in stock. I couldn’t imagine their costs were that much—you just needed the right growing conditions. Like the conditions up north. Find the right spot, grow the flowers and bring home the money. In this case, a
lot
of money.

Maybe, I thought, I should consider growing flowers—expensive flowers. Like ladyslippers. I could tell Mr. Lenzen to take my job and …

I folded the invoice into my wallet. Lily was almost bouncing off the walls. But then I remembered she’d said ladyslippers were usually hard to get.

“So, how come these people are swimming in ladyslippers?” I asked her. “You just said quantities of them weren’t exactly easy to dig up.”

Lily rolled her eyes. “Ha ha,” she said.

“What?” I said. “What did I say?”

“‘Dig up,’” she replied. “Not easy to ‘dig up.’ Cheap landscaping humor, Bobby.”

She stopped the bouncing thing and started chewing on her lip. “I know. Usually growers have very limited supplies. The availability of so many plants—expensive plants—bothers me a little. A lot, actually.”

She leaned against the statuary.

“I tried calling Very Nice Trees a couple more times yesterday, but never got anything but the answering machine. When I did business with them at Christmas, I didn’t have any problems. The trees were beautiful, fresh and priced great. It was a small lot like any small supplier might provide. Nothing odd, there. The trees were perfect. I even called the Better Business Bureau just to be sure there haven’t been any complaints about them.”

“And?” I asked.

“Nothing. No complaints.”

She turned in her chair, looked out her window and sighed.

“But then when Stan noted my profit from the trees, it got me thinking about it, again. I keep imagining those pickup trucks you see every spring cruising new neighborhoods with a load full of trees for sale at low, low prices. I always think they’re stolen merchandise because reputable growers don’t sell out of the back of a truck like that.” She chewed her lip again. “One hundred ladyslippers? Nobody has that many.”

Lily turned her grey eyes up to mine. “I’d love that big chunk of change, Bobby, you know that. But I’m an honest businesswoman, and I’m not naïve. And I’m …” she winced, hesitant to say it, “… feeling … not quite right about Very Nice Trees.”

“Feeling?” I placed my hand over my heart in shock. “You? Feeling? You, the Mistress of Humiliation?”

I held up my hand to stop her as she started to open her mouth. “I’ll see what I can find out, shrimp. If something’s not nice at Very Nice Trees, you’ll be the first to know.” I paid her for my suet and headed for the sewage ponds.

Another blast of winter was rolling in when I parked the SUV. The water chopped on the ponds. I pulled my parka hood up over my head, hunching my shoulders against a growing wind chill. The goose and Canvasback were gone, as I expected. I hoped they were hitting nicer weather than I was getting.

When I got home, I put the new blocks of suet in the feeders on the deck. Almost as soon as I shut the sliding glass doors, a male Pileated Woodpecker flew in and perched on the suet, chipping away bits for his dinner. I watched for a minute as he hammered and stopped, hammered and stopped.

Was that what it had been like for Rahr? Someone hammering his head against a tree until he lost consciousness?

This was really getting to be lousy, I thought. I couldn’t even watch birds at my feeder without thinking of a murder. I turned around and headed for the kitchen.

Something hot and filling sounded good for dinner, so I browned a pound of hamburger, tossed in a can of corn and a can of tomato soup. Mulligan stew, my mom always called it. True, it couldn’t hold a candle to what Luce could do in the kitchen, but without Luce in the kitchen, it was a reasonable alternative. I wasn’t completely without cooking skills, after all.

I was, however, without Luce.

For a couple minutes, I thought about how nice it would be to have her here tonight. A cold wind outside, a fire in the fireplace, snuggled up together planning a weekend of birding.

Which reminded me—I needed to check the weather to make sure I’d be driving to Duluth tomorrow. If a blizzard was on the radar, I wouldn’t be going anywhere. I turned on the television and stretched out on the sofa.

Imagine my surprise when John Knott appeared on the screen, talking with reporters.

“We have no suspects at this time,” Knott was saying as the snowflakes fell between him and the microphone held in front of his face. “But we are actively pursuing leads.”

The blonde woman holding the mike moved closer to him. “Is it true you suspect involvement on the part of the activist group Save Our Boreals?”

“No comment at this time.”

Knott’s face was immediately replaced with the face of the station anchorman.

“Earlier today, we spoke exclusively with Margaret Montgomery, Director of Save Our Boreals, the environmental activist organization headquartered in Duluth,” the anchorman reported.

The face on the screen changed again. I almost shot off the sofa.

It was my mom.

I looked again.

No, it wasn’t.

It was, however, someone who could have passed for her twin. There was the same wavy chestnut-colored hair cut in the same style as my mom. There were my mom’s big blue eyes and high cheekbones. The woman on the screen even had my mom’s red reading glasses in her hand.

But this was not my mom.

This was Margaret Montgomery, director of S.O.B.

“We were shocked to learn of the sudden death of Dr. Rahr,” Montgomery told the reporter. “He was a dedicated researcher and good friend of our organization. Our prayers and sympathy go to his wife and family.”

“Are you aware that Save Our Boreals has been mentioned as possibly suspect in Dr. Rahr’s death?” the reporter asked.

“Yes, I am aware of that,” Montgomery
said, cool and relaxed in front of the cameras. She obviously had had plenty of experience with the media. She looked directly at the interviewer, and her body language shouted confident, concerned and respectful. I know all about body language. Another skill courtesy of graduate school.

“Unfortunately, environmental activist organizations are often scrutinized more intensely than other groups in a situation like this for two reasons.” Montgomery held up two slender fingers to count off. “One: people are suspicious of us because of the negative publicity environmentalists have often unjustly—or not—received in the past, and two: finding a scapegoat is always a temptation. I can tell you without reservation that the membership of Save Our Boreals is made up of very fine individuals who care deeply about our natural world and those who work so hard to preserve it. I can’t imagine any hard feelings between anyone in our organization and Dr. Rahr.”

Pretty speech. Although she obviously hadn’t read the letter that Rahr’s wife had passed along to Knott—threatening someone wasn’t what I’d call characteristic of a warm, fuzzy relationship. Of course, if she had a leash on some loonies up in the woods, I don’t expect she’d be sharing that with a television reporter and the rest of the viewing audience, either.

“When you say ‘negative publicity,’” the reporter pressed, “are you referring to the confrontation last spring between S.O.B. and the DNR over the Boreal Owls’ breeding grounds?”

Montgomery smiled. Damn! It was even my mom’s smile. Did my mom have an identical twin from whom she was separated at birth, and we never knew about it?

What else was my mom hiding from us?

I bet it was about Lily. Finally. Confirmation.

Lily wasn’t really my sister.

Okay, so maybe we looked like twins for a while there, and we both have the same cleft in our chins like our dad, and the same hair, and the same eyes, and the same irrational fear of falling up—rather than down—stairs, but other than that, we don’t resemble each other at all.

Besides, she was always mean to me when we were growing up.

Heck, she was still mean to me. Today I had had to pay for my own suet, even after I apologized for what I had said about Stan.

Montgomery was still talking, and I caught the last thing she said.

“… As my years of experience as both a lobbyist and organizer in this arena have taught me, it’s that the best solutions—and resolutions—only come about when all the parties involved make honest disclosures and seek consensus for the good of the human and natural communities alike.”

Well, duh. That was a real eye-opener. Montgomery sure had the publicity-release fluff stuff down pat. But that was her job. She was an experienced lobbyist. It certainly explained her professional presence on-camera. I wondered what other environmental groups she had worked with.

The weather was next. No blizzards on the way. A warm front moving in. Nice weekend for northern Minnesota.

I picked up the phone to call Mike. I hadn’t talked with him since I dropped him off on Sunday morning.

“Do you want to try for the Boreal again this weekend?” I asked. “I know it’s short notice, but I’m going up tomorrow, and you could meet me in Two Harbors on Saturday.”

“I can’t. I’d like to, but if I’m gone another weekend this month, Maryann is going to kill me. It’s Colleen’s eleventh birthday, and we’ve got ten giggling girls coming over Friday night for a sleepover party.”

“Take them owling,” I suggested.

Mike started laughing.

“I’m serious,” I said. “They get to be out at night, in the dark, sneaking around. Little girls would love it.”

“Bob,” Mike said, “Little girls love giggling. They make way too much noise for owls. Believe me, owls aren’t going to hang around a bunch of giggling girls.”

Just for a moment, I felt something catch, then slip away in my mind.

Something about noise and owls.

I shook my head, but couldn’t get it back.

“Bob? You there?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just spacing out. Sorry.” I remembered the other reason I had called Mike. “I need a favor.”

I explained to him how I wanted to check out Very Nice Trees for Lily when I went up to Two Harbors. “But all I’ve got is a box number. Could you call someone at the post office up there and get me a street address?”

“Bob, Bob, Bob,” Mike said. “People have box numbers for a reason. One reason is privacy. You’re asking me to call another post office to get information for you that isn’t public?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t you think that’s presuming on our friendship?”

“No.”

“Good. I don’t either. I’ll get back to you as soon as I get it. But it might take a couple days.”

“Whatever you can do, Mike. I’ll be at the same hotel where we always stay in Duluth. Just leave a message if I’m not in. You’re the best, buddy.”