The Money Bird (An Animals in Focus Mystery) (3 page)
Read The Money Bird (An Animals in Focus Mystery) Online
Authors: Sheila Webster Boneham
Tags: #Fiction, #mystery, #cozy, #mystery novel, #mystery fiction, #novel, #animals, #soft-boiled, #dog show, #dogs
“Can’t think of anyone better to play with than my dog, actually. What are you doing here, Neil?”
And how the heck did you know to find me here? Did I mention Dog Dayz?
I couldn’t remember.
“I was out this way and thought I’d stop in and see what you’re up to.” He intercepted a long white hair that was floating toward his navy T-shirt and shot Jay an accusatory look, which prompted Bad Janet to whisper an idea in my ear. I resisted the urge to listen to her.
“Come over here and sit down for a minute,” I said, and led him to the chairs along the wall. I sat next to him and Jay immediately moved in sideways against both our knees.
Neil scooted his chair back as far as he could and brushed the dog hair off his navy pants.
“Oh, sorry about the hair. He’s shedding.”
“Clearly.” Neil’s mouth smiled at me, but his eyes still didn’t join in. “Have to admit, she has a pretty coat. It shimmers.”
The words were barely out of Neil’s mouth when Jay went into a full-body shake, sending a fine cloud of white and silver hairs flying.
Neil jumped up and started madly whacking at his thighs and knees, a horrified look on his face. I had to laugh, but said at the same time, “Oh, jeez, sorry! That’s one of his tricks.”
Neil gaped at me.
“‘Shimmer,’” I whispered, then in a normal voice, “is his cue to shake. I don’t think anyone has ever given that command by accident before.”
“So it’s my fault.” For a guy who didn’t much like dogs, he growled quite well.
“I didn’t say that.” I laughed, glancing past Neil to where Tom stood
in the far practice ring with Drake. He smiled at me. I smiled back, then returned my focus to Neil. “I don’t think doggy environments are really your thing, Neil.”
“I think not.” He finally stopped picking dog hair off his clothes and looked at me. “I was going to ask you out for dessert or something, but …” He didn’t say I was a mess in so many words, but I thought I’d help him out.
“I actually have plans, but thanks anyway.”
Looking relieved, Neil said goodnight and left.
Probably the last you’ll see of him
, I thought, not unhappily.
“Want to go out for dessert?” Tom stepped up from behind me, and Drake bumped my knee with his nose.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m a mess.”
“You are?” He grinned at me. “Makes us a matched set.”
I agreed to meet him at Bob Evans for berry cobbler
á la mode
.
twenty
Thursday morning came very
early. After the berry cobbler the night before, Jay and I ended up at Tom’s house, so I had to get up early to race home, feed Leo and Jay, shower, change, grab my camera, and get to the vet clinic. I wasn’t exactly punching a clock there, mind you, but Dr. Kerry had told me they had some interesting clients coming in early. First on the schedule was a twenty-two-pound Giant Flemish rabbit who, at that weight, was a giant even for the breed. After that she had a dog coming in that she thought I would find interesting, although she didn’t give me any particulars.
My phone rang just as I pulled into the vet clinic parking lot.
“Hi, Bill.”
“Hi, Sis. What’s up?”
“I’m just about to start a photo shoot for that article about the vet. Can we meet later? Lunch maybe?”
“Can’t do lunch. What’s up? Norm thought it sounded important. Something wrong with Mom?”
“No, nothing new with her really, but it is important.” I got out of the car and grabbed my camera bag. “Bill, really, I can’t get into it now. You don’t have any time today?”
He heaved a big dramatic Bill sigh. “I could meet you on my way. Eleven forty-five? Downtown?”
“I can do that.” I stopped outside the door to finish the conversation. “Where’s your lunch?”
“Parkview Field.”
“You’re having lunch at the ball park?” Bill is not a hotdogs and peanuts kind of guy.
“New client. Big one. So yes, I’m having lunch at the ballpark.”
We settled on the Botanical Conservatory, which is both right next to the ballpark and one of my favorite places. I figured that if I left the clinic at eleven fifteen, I’d just have time to dash home, grab the paperwork on Mom’s house, and find a parking place. I turned my phone off, stuck it in my camera bag, and went in.
I found Dr. Kerry in the back room. She was leaning over a big book that lay open on an exam table. Judging by how high she jumped when I said hello, she was so focused on her reading that she didn’t hear me come in.
“Sorry.”
“Eh, no problem.”
“Must be a good book.”
“Just brushing up on my leporids.”
“Rabbits.”
Kerry’s eyebrows shot up. “Very good.”
I didn’t tell her it was a wild guess based on knowing she had a rabbit coming in.
A young man I hadn’t seen before came in from the lobby with a folder in his hand and said, “Your first patient is here.” He wore blue scrubs, a badge that said “Brian,” and a look of astonishment. “It’s the biggest bunny I’ve ever seen!”
Kerry slapped the book shut and laughed. “He’s the biggest bunny anyone’s ever seen.” She introduced us, told Brian he could get things ready for the next client, and headed for the exam room with me in tow.
It was the biggest bunny I had ever seen. His head was as big as Jay’s and his ears were nearly as long as my forearm. Dr. Kerry held the backs of her fingers in front of the creature’s nose and cooed “Hello, Van Dyke” as he sniffed and then rubbed his cheek against her hand. Van Dyke’s owner was a forty-ish man with, appropriately, a Van Dyke beard.
“Janet MacPhail, meet Peter Wills.” Then she explained what I was doing there and asked if it would be okay to photograph Van Dyke.
“Oh, my, Van Dyke!” Peter clapped his hands and the rabbit turned to look at him, nose twitching. “You’ll be famous!”
The rest of the visit was uneventful and Van Dyke cooperated all the way, especially when Dr. Kerry produced a small carrot from her pocket.
After Van Dyke, we saw a pair of tuxedo cats, sixteen-year-old brothers adopted as kittens from the shelter and still looking spry, and a black tri-colored Aussie puppy in to get his second round of puppy shots and to make me go completely gaga. A lovely morning of routine visits and puppy breath.
“Okay, the next client is the dog I think you’ll find interesting,” said Kerry. “He’s a wildlife detection dog.”
For an instant that baffled me, since most dogs seem to detect wildlife with no trouble at all. Then her meaning hit me. “You mean like a drug detection dog, but for smuggled wildlife?”
“Yep.” She moved to the sink and scrubbed for the umpteenth time that morning. That was one of the reasons I used this clinic. They are fastidious about cleanliness.
“In Fort Wayne?”
“Yep.” She dried her hands, tossed the paper towel in the trash, and turned toward me. “They’ve actually intercepted several smugglers in the past few months, here in Allen, as well as Marion and Delaware counties.” She was describing a series of counties that coincided with Interstate 69, the fastest route between Indianapolis and the Canadian border.
“What are they smuggling?”
“Monkeys. Reptiles. Birds. Occasionally other things. Mostly trop
ical,
many endangered. Come on.” She headed down toward the exam
room. “It’s horrible. You wouldn’t believe how they pack the animals to hide them.” I already knew more than I wanted to know, although I didn’t like to think about it. I couldn’t, in fact, without
fighting back tears. Fortunately we reached the exam room door
before my mind could dredge up too many articles I had read and photos I had seen. “Anyway,” said Kerry, reaching for the doorknob, “Lennen has led to a number of intercepts.”
Lennen stood to greet us, tail banging against the base of the exam table and a big Labrador grin on his face. His handler also stood and offered her hand. “Di Holman. Dr. Kerry tells me you’re a photographer.”
“Janet MacPhail. And yes. Working on a ‘day in the life’ photo essay. Okay if I photograph Lennen’s exam?”
She hesitated. “You can take the photos. I’ll remove his working ID. No photos of me, and no names. Not even Lennen’s. And no mention of his job. Just generic chocolate Lab.”
I looked the question at her and waited.
“For his safety. He’s one of very few dogs who do this job, and he’s damn good at it. He’s cost the smugglers a few bucks and he’s only been working about nine months.” She reached down and scratched the base of the dog’s tail. “I’ll know it’s him in the pictures. That’s enough.” She smiled at her dog, then looked at me. “Dr. Kerry told you what he does?”
“Briefly. He detects wildlife being smuggled in?”
“Right.”
“I thought that activity was all through tropical ports. Don’t most of the birds come from the tropics?” The long red feather in the bag that Drake found fluttered into my mind. I had never thought that it came from a local game bird. Maybe a parrot, or some other exotic bird. But that didn’t explain what it was doing in a canvas bag, on a tiny island in a private lake.
“… so they’re trying new routes, including the Great Lakes.” I had tuned out most of what Di said and didn’t want to look like a complete birdbrain, so I didn’t ask her to repeat the rest. I considered mentioning the bag and feather but decided to wait and talk to Detective Jo Stevens.
Lennen, it turned out, had cut his foot on some broken glass, and a sliver of it was stuck in his pad. While Dr. Kerry pulled it out and cleaned the wound, Lennen smooched with Brian, the vet tech who was holding him. I took photos and Di talked about some of the animals Lennen had rescued. “It’s barbaric, the way these sleazebags try to conceal the animals, and sometimes so stupid it would be funny, if not for the cruelty involved.”
“I read about some guy who tried to bring a baby gibbon through customs under his sweatshirt,” I said. “It was clinging around his waist as it would to its mother.” There had been a photo on a website I’d discovered while looking up something else.
“Right. Lennen indicated a woman about a month ago. I wasn’t even on duty, and we stopped at a rest stop on the highway. He goes where I go, and we were in the ladies’ room. He just insisted the woman had something in a cosmetic case she was carrying, so I detained her, got the state police to come, and they searched her.”
“And?” Kerry had finished with Lennen and gave her full attention to his handler.
“So, inside the case was a paper bag with thirteen hair curlers. And inside each curler was a live Guyanese finch.”
“Seriously?” I asked, knowing as I said it how dumb it sounded.
“They sell for anywhere from three hundred to a thousand dollars or more.”
“But curlers?” I couldn’t imagine stuffing a little bird into a plastic tube.
“Right.” Di said as she and Kerry lifted Lennen off the table and Di put his official collar back on. “The plastic is more rigid, so more protective, than toilet paper rollers, which a lot of the lowlifes use. And they don’t set off metal detectors.”
Kerry spat out a string of interesting names for the smugglers, then asked, “What happened to the birds?”
“
The live ones were h
eld for evidence at a private, legal aviary in I
ndianapolis. Three had died. Once the trial is over, the survivors wil
l be returned to Guyana, quarantined, and released. Assuming there are any survivors.”
“What?” Kerry and I both blurted.
“Finches live, what, Doc, nine or ten years? Legal wrangling could take a couple of years. And who knows how old the birds were when caught. Just sayin’.”
Just when I thought things couldn’t get any more depressing, Peg came in to say a dog that had been hit by a car was on its way in. Di and Lennen left, and Brian and Dr. Kerry went into high gear preparing the surgical area. They were all set when the distraught driver arrived with the dog. “I didn’t see him, he just ran out from between parked cars, going like hell, I didn’t see him, will he be okay, I was only going twenty-five, he doesn’t even have a tag or collar.” She stopped to take a breath and, as soon as the little dog was out of her arms and in Brian’s, she burst into tears. Peg, the receptionist, took charge of the driver and I followed Brian to the surgical area where they were already setting up for x-rays.
I stayed out of the way but managed to get a few shots. While Dr. Kerry waited for the radiographs she examined the dog, who was now panting heavily but remaining calm. He whimpered softly when Kerry touched his thigh. “Broken, I think.” She kept one hand lightly on the dog’s shoulder. “Janet, could you get me the microchip scanner from that drawer. Let’s see if this little guy is chipped.” He was, and Kerry asked me to take the scanner to Peg and have her look up the dog’s microchip identification and, if possible, notify the owner.
When I returned, the dog had been anesthetized and his back leg shaved from hip to hock, the joint above the foot. I took more photos as Kerry set the leg. “You don’t wait to be sure the owner will pay for this?” I asked.
Dr. Kerry gave me a look that suggested I’d lost my mind. “Why would I leave an animal in pain?” I didn’t have an answer for that. “We hope they pay, but the dog comes first.” She rubbed her nose against her arm. “Why does my nose always itch when my hands are busy? Anyway, this doesn’t look too bad. Clean break, not displaced. He’s going to be a sore little puppy from the bruising, but I think he’ll be fine.”
Peg appeared in the doorway. “Dog’s name is Mike. Owner’s on his way. Said the plumber accidentally let the dog out. How is he? The guy is frantic. Asked me to call him back.” Kerry filled her in.
By the time I left, the owner was pacing the lobby waiting for Mike to be completely out of the anesthesia and the driver who hit him had calmed down. She had offered to pay the bill. The owner said no, but after considerable discussion he agreed to let her pay half, which I figured was good therapy for her.
twenty-one
Bill was waiting for
me in the lobby of the Botanical Conservatory, although I didn’t see him at first. He was partially hidden by a
flock of some fifty plastic flamingos and a humongous multi—
colored beach ball.
“What’s all this?” I asked as I wove through the plastic birds.
“‘Beach Days.’ More inside.” He started to laugh. “Remember when we stuck fifty of these guys in the yard for Mom’s fiftieth birthday?”
We reminisced for a few minutes about happier times with our
mother, and then Bill checked the time and asked me what was going
on. I told him about my conversation with Mom about the house, and felt a sad little twinge as I watched him fight to keep the emotions off his face when I said she had given it to me.
“Here.” I handed him the envelope I had brought.
“What’s this?”
“I know you love that old house. You helped put in those gardens and you helped Dad finish the basement. To me, it’s just a house. Lots of memories, sure, but I like the house I’m in. Better yard for the dogs. So it’s all yours.”
Bill stared at me as if I were speaking Martian.
“Mom gave me a quit-claim making the house mine, and I want you to have Norm draw up another for me to sign. If you want it, it’s all yours.”
“Janet …” Bill cleared his throat.
“If you don’t want to live there, you could rent it out, or you can sell it. Whatever you like.”
My brother is a sweet guy, but he’s not a hugger. At least I haven’t seen him hug anyone except Norm in years. Imagine my surprise when Bill stood, pulled me to my feet, and wrapped me up in a big bear hug. I tried to hug back, but he had pinned my arms to my sides, so I just stood there for a couple of minutes with my nose pressed into his fine summer-wool jacket and the faint scent of his oh-de-so-subtle cologne swirling around my nostrils.
I meant to go home after my meeting with Bill, but my emotions were running wild, and as I drove east on Coliseum I had an overpowering urge to see Tom. I parked, all the while trying to convince myself that I was there to talk about the strange happenings at Twisted Lake. Nothing more. A little internal jab to the conscience made me give that up, though, and as I scurried up the sidewalk to the building’s entrance I admitted to myself that I wanted to see him and hear him and breathe him in.
When I turned down the social sciences corridor, I could hear Tom’s voice from several doors down, and he did not sound happy. “I’ve been bringing him in here for years, John. He barks less than you do, he’s a registered therapy dog, and my students come to see him more than to see me.”
“He’s a therapy dog?”
I hung back just outside the door to Tom’s office.
“Yes, he is. Tested and registered with the largest therapy organization in the country.”
Whoever was in there with Tom sort of harumphed, and said, “What do
you
need a therapy dog for?”
There was a moment’s hesitation, and then Tom said, “John, did you know that it’s illegal under the Americans with Disabilities Act to ask a person why they need a service animal?”
A short, balding man backed out Tom’s door, so I tried to look as if I had just arrived. He glanced at me, then said to Tom, “You should have said he was certified to begin with. We could have avoided all this.” And then he was gone.
I stepped into the doorway. Tom was petting Drake, who was lying
in front of the file cabinet on a plaid doggy bed. “That
man
is certifiable, doncha think?”
“What exactly
do
you need a service dog for, Professor Saunders?”
Tom looked up at me and his expression changed from royally annoyed to surprised and delighted. “Hey, it’s my favorite photographer!” He stood and gave me a hug. “I need him to help me meet women. Regular chick magnet, you know?”
“Good for you. What was that all about?”
“I didn’t say he was a service dog. I said therapy. Not my fault if that pompous a …, uh, administrator doesn’t know the difference.” Yet another reason I’m nuts about this guy. “Come on, let’s go outside. Drake could use a little walk.”
“Can’t stay long. I was just driving by.”
Tom pulled the door shut behind us and waggled his eyebrows at me. “Ah, the old ‘I was just in the neighborhood’ ploy.”
We walked across the parking lot to the grassy bank of the St. Joseph River and I told him about my encounters with Mom and Bill. He asked how my morning session at the vet clinic went, and that led us to Lennen and wildlife smuggling. “I can’t help thinking there’s more to that red feather than we know,” I said.
“Have you heard the news about Anderson?”
I stopped and took Tom by the arm. “What?”
“I heard it on the radio. He drowned.”
“No he didn’t.”
Tom looked at me, questions all over his face. “Janet?”
“It doesn’t make sense.” My cheeks were burning and I wasn’t sure whether it was the August heat, my anger, or a hot flash. I pointed to a big maple a few yards off the path. “I need to stop a minute.”
“You’re flushed,” Tom said, looking at me even as we headed for the patch of shade. “You really okay?”
It seemed about twenty degrees cooler under the tree. I leaned back
against the trunk and gazed at Tom for a moment without speaking. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped my sweaty face, and waited.
I told him about the message Anderson had left me Tuesday. “He had already been to the lake, Tom. He was back in his car, leaving. Not arriving.
Leaving
.”
“Maybe he went back for another look?” Ever the voice of reason, but he didn’t sound convinced either.
“He had already loaded his canoe onto his roof, or whatever. He was on his way. Said he’d be on Coliseum in half an hour.”
Tom tilted his head back and looked into the maple’s wide arms.
“He didn’t go back out on the water, Tom.” Then I remembered something Jo Stevens had said. “They found his camera in his car, Tom. He wouldn’t have gone back to the island without his camera.”
Tom told Drake to lie down, then tried to put his arms around me. I pushed him away, then stood very still, eyes squeezed shut, listening to the blood in my ears beat like bass drums. I thought the top of my head might blow off as rage thick as magma bubbled up inside me. I have no idea how long I stood like that. Everything else had stopped, and I was mildly surprised when I opened my eyes and saw Tom watching me. I don’t know how he managed it, but he looked concerned and angry and thoughtful all at the same time.
“It’s all connected. Somehow, it’s all connected.”
“Maybe.” Tom looked thoughtful. “I bet a bird guy could identify that feather, or get close anyway.”
“A ‘bird guy’?”
He grinned and squeezed my hand. “Yeah, you know, like I’m a plant guy, and you’re sort of a dog-hair-and-pixels guy. Bird guy. Ornithologist.”
“Is there anyone here?” I asked, tilting my head toward the buildings of the Indiana-Purdue Fort Wayne campus.
“No, but let me ask around. There has to be someone at one of the main campuses.” Meaning Indiana University in Bloomington, or Purdue in West Lafayette. By then we were almost back to the building. Tom ran the tips of his fingers along my cheek. “You okay?”
“Not exactly.” I pushed my fury and grief out of my throat. “Anderson was a really nice young man. I want whoever did this held accountable.”
“Janet, let the police do their job.”
“Right.”
“Janet! Don’t do anything reckless. I don’t know what I’d do …”
I didn’t realize what he’d said, or started to say, until I was almost home. For the moment I was just too angry about Anderson Billings to pay attention.
twenty-two
The light was flashing
on my answering machine when I got home. It was Neil, and he began by saying he had left a message on my cell, but wanted to be sure I got it. I scratched Leo’s chin while the message continued. It didn’t make much sense. “It was great to see you last night.”
No it wasn’t,
I thought.
You hated being in a building full of dogs and
, I smiled at the memory of Jay “shimmering” all over Neil’s pants,
dog hair.
When the message finished, I hit “Erase” and headed out the back door with my critters, thinking about the rest of the message. Neil hoped he could see me again soon. “How about a walk on the River Greenway or something when the heat breaks,” he’d said, “say around seven? You could bring your dog if you want.” That made me laugh out loud.
As if I’d go for a walk on the Greenway with you and without Jay, you boob.
I picked up the hose, turned on the water, headed for my thirsty flowers, and forgot all about Neil Young and his hifalutin message.
As I watched puddles form where the water was slow to soak into the
ground, I could almost see Twisted Lake. I needed to get out to that island. Of course, whatever Anderson saw might be long gone by
now. Or maybe he didn’t see anything. But what did he mean, “There’s a bird”? There are lots of birds out there. And then I thought of the red feather in the bag that Drake found. Long red feather. Persephone Swann’s beautiful parrot had long red feathers like t
hat.
Mayhem in the yard derailed my train of thought. Leo had initiated a game of “ambush the dog” and Jay obliged by running from him, then turning the tables and chasing Leo into shrubs. And my flower beds. “Hey guys! Outta the flowers!” I had just finished watering the last of the pots when a flash of neon pink caught my eye from across the fence. It was Goldie, kneeling on a pad in the herb garden on the far side of her yard. Her “witch’s garden,” to be precise. She had put it in last spring, and it was filling in nicely three months later. I was surprised that she hadn’t come over to say hello. It wasn’t like Goldie to ignore us.
I shut off the water and went out my gate and in through hers. I called her name as I approached but she had her back to me and didn’t respond. Odd, I thought. Is she losing her hearing? I didn’t want to startle her so I arced around and entered her peripheral vision from the side.
“Oh! Janet!” Goldie jumped, then laid a hand over her chest.
“Sorry!”
“No, no!” She reached for her ears and pulled out a pair of ear buds. I could just hear a gravely voice coming from them.
“Dylan?” I asked.
Goldie grinned at me. “Leonard Cohen.” She pulled an MP3 player from her pocket, turned it off, and returned it with the buds. “See, I’ve joined the twenty-first century.” She stood up and pushed the sleeves of her faded blue shirt to her elbows.
Leo wandered over, and Goldie plucked a bit of catnip from the garden and tossed it on the ground. A hint of its minty scent mingled with the mix of bergamot, sage, and thyme already held in the humid garden air. We left Leo to his ecstasy, and Goldie went to the fence and said hello to Jay.
“Have a few minutes, Goldie?” I asked, thinking maybe I could finally pin her down on whatever was going on with her health.
“Sure. What’s up?”
“Say, I made some lemonade last night. Let’s go sit with Jay and have some.”
She looked a little suspicious, but agreed. When we had settled into my Adirondack chairs and spent a few minutes on small talk, I said, “Goldie, really, you have to tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“I saw you at the hospital. Nuclear medicine? And all those supplements you’ve been buying for months? And you’ve lost weight, and …” I set my glass down hard enough to splash lemonade onto the tangerine tabletop and was surprised to find I was angry.
“Don’t be angry.” Goldie reached out and touched my forearm.
“Why not?” I glared at her. “You told Tom.”
She looked surprised. “What are we talking about? Told Tom what?”
“At the co-op. He said he saw you there, that you two had a talk.”
“Oh.” She did a little hand-washing motion. “That.”
“So?”
“I’m fine. Now I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not.” I felt my eyes fill with tears, and then I felt a warm furry chin on my lap. Goldie isn’t the only one of my friends who is psychic. Jay is, too, and always there when I need him. I stroked the top of his head and looked at Goldie. “You’ve been saying that all summer. Stop dodging me. Whatever it is, just tell me, damn it.”
“Okay. I had a scare. A big one. Had a funny mammogram last spring. In May. But …”
“May,” I said, my voice flat with disappointment.
“Right. And I had to have another, and then other tests, you know, and it’s gone on more or less all summer.”
“And?” By then my anger was giving way to the fear that had been lurking behind it all along. She started to speak, but I cut her off. “And what? Goldie, you’ve lost weight and …”
“I know.” Now Goldie looked a bit angry. “Look, you’re not the only one that was scared, Janet. And it’s my life. My body. Private.”
I gaped at her. “Private? Goldie, I’m your friend. Your, I don’t know, your more than friend. I should have been there for you.”
“But Janet, you were.” Her face settled back into its usual gentle calm. “Look, I always knew you were there. You, and Tom, too.” She leaned toward me. “You and Tom.”
“But …”
“You and Tom, Janet. Stop fighting it.”
“Don’t change the subject. So what about now?” I wanted her to say it straight out, either way.
“I’m fine. You saw me at the hospital for the final consultation. All clear. Well, almost. I have to go for some final blood work, but that’s it. Much ado about nothing.”
“But the supplements? Your weight?”
“All coincidence, I guess. Okay, not all. I did up my antioxidants. Just, you know …,” she hesitated. “I was scared.”
“When do you go for the blood work?”
“Tomorrow. No biggie, I just need to pop into the lab at Parkview.”
“I’ll drive you,” I said. She seemed ready to argue, but stopped and nodded. “But you look so thin, Goldie.”
“Oh, that. I decided to go off wheat for a while to see if I felt better. Lost twenty pounds.” She gave me a devilish grin. “Maybe you should give it a try.”
“Thanks a lot.” And to my horror I burst into tears.
“Oh my, Janet! I’m sorry, I was teasing!”
“No, no, not that.” It wasn’t her suggestion that I could lose a few pounds that tipped me over the edge. It was an overwhelming wave of relief and anger and loss. Goldie was okay. Anderson was dead. And it was Goldie’s turn to listen as I told her about Anderson, his message, and my certainty that he had been murdered.
twenty-three
Friday morning I was
up way too early after a long Thursday and another restless night. It was the last day of my week-long photo shoot with Dr. Kerry Joiner, and she started surgeries at seven-thirty. I wanted a few shots to round out my photo essay, so I was there, at least in body. Kerry was in surgery for two hours, then had a series of routine appointments. Two kittens, a Pug puppy, three Labs, and a guinea pig later, I had photos of one and all. No one snarled or snapped. Even my bitten behind had no complaints.
I left the clinic a few minutes before eleven, but even so, by the time I got to my car, my stomach was disturbing my peaceful day with loud growls. I’d had to scramble to get to the clinic on time and had made do with an apple for breakfast, so I was famished and I knew exactly what I wanted to eat, and who I wanted for company. I hit Tom’s quick-dial number.
“Can’t wait to see me, huh?” he answered, chuckling. The night before we had seen one another at agility practice, and Tom had asked me for “a real Friday night date with all the trimmings.” At first I thought he meant our usual walk with the dogs followed by take-out and beer in the backyard, but he clarified. Dinner, movie, nightcap, the works. I was equal parts excited and terrified, his “expand the family” comment still bouncing around my brain. The last thing I wanted was to lose Tom. The second-to-the-last-thing I wanted was for him to do something silly like propose. At least I didn’t think I wanted that.
“You’re actually an afterthought.”
“I’m crushed.”
“I’m starving. I thought first of grilled cheese and tomato at the Firefly. Then I thought of you.”
“Ah, hard to compete with that.” I told him I also wanted to talk to him about some things.
“You’re snooping around again, aren’t you?”
“Not snooping. Thinking.”
Thinking about snooping.
He met me at the Firefly, and once I had several bites of the best grilled-cheese-and-tomato known to humanity, I told him what I was thinking. “Anderson saw something out on the island that had to do with birds, and I think parrots are tied somehow to Treasures on Earth or Regis Moneypenny.” I reminded him about Persephone Swann’s beautiful if badly named bird Ava, and Giselle’s comment about becoming a “guardian” to “sort of foster” birds for Moneypenny’s organization. “Anderson said ‘there’s a bird,’ which didn’t make sense to me because the place is full of birds. That’s why I told him about it in the first place,” I said. “But if he meant a strange bird, an exotic bird …”
“That would make more sense,” Tom agreed.
“Remember that dog I told you about, the wildlife smuggling dog?” I asked.
Tom had just taken a bite of his sandwich so he nodded, cheese ecstasy lighting up his face. He swallowed and said, “Detection. He’s a detection dog, not a smuggling dog.”
“Thanks, Professor.”
He grinned and popped the last bite of sandwich.
“Tom, what if they’re smuggling parrots? Rare parrots? Expensive parrots?”
He wiped his mouth and said, “Possible, I guess. But why let anyone know about the birds? I mean, besides potential buyers?”
“I don’t know.” I thought about what little I did know. “I’m not sure they mean to let people know anything except that they foster them and find them homes. Persephone was none too happy that I took photos. Made me delete them.”
“Too bad. We could have tracked down her bird’s species.”
I grinned at him.
He grinned back. “You kept some.”
“Just one. But it’s a good shot.” Then a conversation with Neil Young sprang into my consciousness. “Oh, my God, Tom. I completely forgot. Neil said he has a bird, but then changed the subject.”
“Neil? Oh, the pretty doctor?” Tom’s tone took me by surprise, but when our eyes met he just grinned at me and said, “Man doesn’t like dog hair much, does he?”
“You saw that?” I chuckled, and started to remind him that Neil was just someone I knew in high school, but Tom interrupted. “So, he has a bird?”
“I, uh, yes. A parrot. But that’s all he told me. Come to think of it, he changed the subject when I asked about it.”
“People usually like to talk about their pets.”
“But these people don’t. Maybe they’re not supposed to, but
they’re people, so they slip up. Maybe Moneypenny is using his
followers to hold his birds pending sale.” Goldie’s comments about Treasures on Earth’s building permits came flooding back. “Tom! They’re planning an aviary! We’re definitely on to something. I need to call Jo.”
“Speaking of calls, I have a call in to someone at Cornell vet school. Send me the photo and I’ll send it after I hear back. I bet he can identify the bird, or knows who can.” He stood and put a twenty on the table. “I have a departmental meeting so gotta run.” He started to leave, but turned back and said, “We should send a picture of the feather, too. Maybe Jo would let you photograph it. You do need to call her. But Janet,” he took my hand and looked into my eyes. “please let the police do this. If you’re right, if these people did kill Anderson, they’re dangerous.”
I agreed, but fell a bit shy of a promise.
When I got home, a florist delivery truck was just pulling out of my driveway. “Great,” I mumbled, “another bouquet.” I parked in the
driveway and retrieved a stunning arrangement of orange and blue
gladioli from the porch. It was from Bill. The note attached said, “The door is always open,” and a house key was tied to the card with a blue satin ribbon.
As soon as I had let Jay out, found a place for the glads, and changed the water in my other three bouquets, I left a message for Detective Jo Stevens to call me, and then called Goldie. I grabbed my keys and bag and met her in the driveway.
twenty-four
“I just don’t understand
why you’re fighting it,” said Goldie. We weren’t exactly discussing my relationship with Tom. She was discussing it, and I was listening. “Look how well you two get along.”
I pulled into the Parkview Hospital parking garage entrance and pulled a ticket from the machine.
“Not to mention how hot he is.” She tried to elbow my ribs, but couldn’t quite make it with her shoulder belt fastened. “You know, Janet,” she suddenly sounded thoughtful, and I feared something philosophical might be coming, but then she said, “I don’t believe I ever saw a photo of good ol’ what’s his name.”
“Who?” I found a space across from the entrance, so we continued the conversation on our way to the lab.
“Chet. I have no idea what he looked like.”
Like a jerk
. “He was pretty good looking. That was part of the problem.” I laughed, although I was wondering why the mention of his name still made me want to kick something. “That, and his unwillingness to take a job that didn’t fit his elevated self-image. And there was the gambling, of course.”
“What kind of good looking?”
“Who cares, Goldie?” I asked, but she apparently really wanted to know. “Okay, I don’t know, sort of dark and handsome good looking. Think, I don’t know, young Tom Cruise-ish.”
“Whereas now we have mature Harrison Ford-ish.” She opened the door to the lab and ushered me in. “Progress!”
“Why are you asking about Chet, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” said Goldie as we reached the door to the lab. “He just popped into my head.”
We were in and out in ten minutes, a medical miracle of sorts. As I approached the kiosk at the parking garage exit, I noticed a set of big green fuzzy dice in the window facing us. I pulled up and handed my ticket to the attendant, a slightly scruffy guy with a gray comb-over and an impressive beer belly. He checked the voucher stamp and said, “Thank you. Have a nice day.” In the half-second between the end of his “day” and my car’s response to my foot on the gas, we made eye contact. Twenty feet later, I stopped before turning onto Randallia and burst into screamy laughter.
“What’s going on?” asked Goldie, looking around for the joke.
“Goldie! Do you know who that was?”
“Who
who
was?”
“Chet! That was Chet!”
She whipped around in her seat as I pulled onto the street. “Go back! Janet, go back, I didn’t get a good look.”
I pulled over to the curb and put the car in park, and Goldie and I laughed until we had tears running down our face.
“Nice career move, Chet,” I said. “Oh, jeez, I have to call Bill. He’ll love this!”
“Do you think he recognized you?”
I shrugged. “I barely recognized him. It didn’t click until we were moving again.” I fished a tissue out of my tote bag and wiped my eyes. “Oh, man, that was great.”
Laughter really must be therapeutic because I felt better than I had in days. We were both still grinning when we parted ways at home, and I spent a few happy minutes throwing a ball and running around like a nut with Jay. Then I went in. I still had a couple of hours before I needed to get ready for my dinner date, so I linked my camera to my computer and began downloading photos.
I’d been at it for about half an hour when Leo strolled in, hopped onto my desk, and yawned at me. Mid-cat-smooch I sat straight up and swore. I’d forgotten all about getting Bill’s kayak, and I was planning to go to Twisted Lake the next morning with Tom. Partly it was a snooping around mission, and partly a training session. Several members of Tom’s retriever training club would be there. I could take some photos, and check out the island with lots of people and dogs around for safety. If I had a way to cross the channel.
“Come on, Jay,” I said, grabbing my keys and his leash. “Car ride!” You’d think from his bouncing around that he never got to go anywhere.
Norm was mowing the lawn when I pulled up in front of their place. He waved, then disappeared around the side of the house. I found my darling brother in the garage, overhead door up, clearing shelves of old paint cans and loading them into boxes.
“Hi, Bill. What’s all this?”
“Taking these to the toxic county dump. County toxic dump. Whatever.” I must have looked perplexed, because he said, “We have a realtor coming Wednesday to put the house on the market. We’re moving to the new place, you know, the old place, as soon as we can get in there and do a few things.” He sat down on a box. “What’s up?”
“Thanks for the flowers. They’re gorgeous.”
Bill mock saluted. “Here for the kayak?” He studied my face for a moment. “What canary did you eat?” He reacted to my story about seeing Chet pretty much the way I did, and we had the best mutual laugh-fest we’d had in years. When we finally settled back down, Bill said, “Okay, then, the kayak!”
We decided I should take Norm’s, which was small enough to maneuver into my van if I folded the crate down and Jay rode loose. I prefer to have him in his crate in case of accident, but it was a short drive so I figured it wouldn’t hurt for once. When the kayak was loaded, Bill gave me a hug. It was getting to be a habit. “Careful out there.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Not worried about you. That’s an expensive kayak.”
I smiled all the way home, thinking it was nice to see Bill so happy. When I got there I had just enough time to take Jay for a short walk before I needed to tidy myself up, and that gave me a chance to call Giselle. I wanted to find out more about the Treasures on Earth bird fostering program, and Giselle might be my best source. Hell, she might be my only source, since I wasn’t inclined to cultivate Neil Young any further. Giselle agreed to meet me for coffee on Sunday.
When we got back home I fed Jay and Leo and was just about to take a shower when the doorbell rang. “Crappola,” I said, pulling my T-shirt back on. As I reached for the doorknob, I glanced out the front window. “Oh no,” I whispered, then to Jay I said, “Down.” He lay down and watched the door, eyes sparkling with anticipation. You’d think they were delivering dog food. When I thought about it, I realized that a dog-food delivery would make me happier, too.
But no, it was not a dog-food delivery truck in my driveway. It
was a florist’s delivery truck. I pasted a happy look on my face. It
was not, after all, the delivery man’s fault that I already had four bouquets in my house and didn’t need another.
Bouquet number five was gorgeous, if redundant. The sweet fragrance of the pink roses was intoxicating. Jay and I retreated to the kitchen and I set the bouquet on the table and reached for the card. “Hope this makes you as happy as you make me. Love you. See you tonight! Tom.”
“Where am I going to put this one, Bubby?” Jay wriggled his nub and grinned. “Okay, no room in here. How about the living room?” I cleared a space on top of an end table, inhaled the intoxicating scent once more, and headed back to the bathroom with Jay at my side. I sat down on the edge of the tub and took Jay’s head in my hands. “What am I going to do, Jay-jay? Tom wants to expand his family. You want to live with Drake?”
At the sound of his buddy’s name, Jay whirled and raced to the living room. No doubt he’d be watching out the window until his friend, and mine, arrived.
twenty-five
“Holy mackerel! That’s a
lot of flowers!”
Tom stood in the doorway between the kitchen and living room looking from one bouquet to another. The one from Goldie was on the kitchen table. The other four were scattered around the living room. Shadetree Retirement Home bloomed from the table behind the couch and the one from the vet clinic sat on the coffee table. Bill’s and Tom’s bouquets flanked the couch, one on each end table. “I don’t have any more horizontal surfaces in the public part of the house, so I hope that’s it for a while.”
“If I’d known, I’d have sent chocolates instead.”
The instant our eyes met we both burst into laughter. It was the kind
that won’t stop, and we ended up sprawled side by side on the couch, the dogs half in our laps, Leo leaning toward us from the armrest, tears running down our cheeks. My ribs were beginning to complain about all the crazy laugh-fests, but the rest of me was glad for the chances to purge other emotions, at least for a little while. When the hysteria had run its course, I pulled myself up and my skirt down and scurried off to repair my hair and makeup. We told the doggy and kitty boys to be good, locked the doors, and left.
Maybe the laughter had cleared my brain, because I managed to keep all the crazy goings-on of the week in a shadowy corner of my mind through dinner. By the time we left the restaurant, the sun had set, the temperature had dropped, and we were both much more relaxed. Tom checked his watch and said, “We should get going if we’re going to make the movie.”
“Why don’t we just go for a walk? It’s so nice out now. We can see movies in January.”
Tom draped his arm over my shoulder and steered me down the sidewalk. “Works for me.” There was an oldies concert in Headwaters Park, so we wandered around the well-lighted, well-populated area for about half an hour, then Tom guided us to a bench from which we could hear the band and watch kids splashing in the fountain.
“They’re playing our music.” They had just wrapped up a Credence medley and were slowing it down with Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco.”
“Goldie’s music,” I said, and he smiled. “I talked to her today. Finally got it out of her. I still don’t understand why she didn’t want me to know she was having all those tests, but at least it was a false alarm.”
When I felt him straighten his back, I knew the truth and felt the blood drain from my cheeks.
“She lied to me,” I said as much to myself as to Tom. My voice was steady in spite of my roiling emotions.
Tom held my hand in both of his and said, quietly, “She doesn’t want you to worry. But yes, I guess she lied. She had surgery in June …”
“Surgery! She had surgery and didn’t let me help her?” I pulled my hand away and started to get up, but Tom put a hand on my shoulder and I stayed in place. “June … She told me she went on a retreat.”
“Janet, none of this is about you.”
“Wha …” I felt as if he’d slapped me, and shrugged his arm off my shoulder. He grabbed my hand before I could get up and held on tight.
“I don’t mean it that way. I mean that Goldie is … was … ill, and her decisions about how to manage her illness and her life are hers. She feels pretty strongly about her privacy in this.”
Anger gave way to hurt feelings. I was ashamed of them, but there they were. I said, whining more than I liked, “But she told you.”
“Only because I saw what she was buying, all the supplements. I saw that the day last May when you introduced us at the Co-op, and again when I ran into her there last Saturday.” I realized that Tom, an ethnobotanist, would have known the significance of the supplements as soon as he saw them piled in Goldie’s cart. He knew his herbals.
“Why didn’t you …”
“I was going to tell you on Sunday, remember? But then Goldie showed up. I left hoping she might tell you then.”
I fished a tissue from my purse and wiped my eyes and nose. “So tell me now.”
“They caught it early and it looks like they got it all. She wasn’t lying about that part, she is fine. Or will be. At least that’s how it looks.”
“Or so she says.”
Tom squeezed my hand and chuckled. “So she says, but I think she told me the truth once she got going.”
I couldn’t believe my probably best friend hadn’t told me her life was in danger. “But …”
“Really, Janet, she didn’t want you to worry. She told me that you didn’t need to know she was sick to be there for her, because you are always there for her, and that she would tell you when she was either cured or incapacitated.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
Tom went on, “She’s okay with whatever comes, you know.” He pulled me into a hug and whispered in my ear, “You have to trust her with this.”
I don’t think of myself as spiritual, although something in me moves
when I look into my dog’s or cat’s eyes or when I watch a sunrise. But Tom has worked with shamans, and that’s how he often refers to Goldie, and something in the warm night air wrapped itself around me, and I knew he was right. I had to trust her with this.
I leaned into Tom and felt the steady rhythm of his breathing for a few minutes, then said, “I need to walk it off.” We took the trail around the park along the river, walking in silence at first. Then I asked, “What do you think is going on with Treasures on Earth and their parrots?”
“It’s odd, that’s for sure. I can’t imagine they’re into avian worship. Maybe a sort of ‘practice,’ as in Buddhism? Maybe they do good by fostering homeless birds?”
“I have a bad feeling about it. There’s a lot of money in tropical birds.” I had known that for years, and in light of all that had happened, I’d been reading up a bit on the Internet. I told Tom about a few recent cases involving exotic birds brought into the U.S., then asked, “Did you find your bird guy?” Tom had said that he would check around for an ornithologist who might identify the feather in the bag Drake pulled out of Twisted Lake.
By that time we had circled the park and were back at Tom’s car. As he unlocked my door, he said, “Sort of. Ornithologist at Cornell gave me the name of a parrot specialist at Florida State, so I have a call in to him. Never guess his name.”
“Nope, I never will.”
“You’re no fun.”
“Oh, gee, okay, how about Robin?”
Tom grinned. “Not bad. But no. George Crane.” He chuckled, then said, “I actually knew a guy named Bass. Fish guy.”
“Well,” I said, sensing a contest coming on, “I once met an emergency vet named Bassett.”
Tom grinned. “I’m hoping to hear back from Dr. Crane on Monday.” When he’d settled into the driver’s seat he leaned over and kissed me, then said, “And that’s enough of all that for the rest of the night, my love.” Then he pulled something out of his pocket. “I was going to do this in a more romantic setting, but it’s burning a hole in my pocket,” he laughed, and pressed a small black velvet-covered box into my hands.
Oh shit
. An almost irresistible urge to bolt swallowed me up, but I closed my eyes and held my breath for a few seconds. Tom had been talking about expanding his family. Was this his way of proposing? My thoughts were racing around like a flock of flighty sheep, and that image led naturally to Jay and our sporadic adventures in herding, and that led to a vision of Tom sitting on his couch reading with his dog snuggled under one arm and mine under the other. And that, I thought, was a lovely image.
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
I opened my eyes and opened the box.
twenty-six
Saturday morning we loaded
the kayak onto Tom’s van and the dogs into crates in the back and were on our way to Twisted Lake by six thirty. There was a nice breeze but something about the texture of the early sunlight promised serious heat later in the day, so it was good to work the dogs early. A few of Tom’s retriever-training friends would be there with their dogs, and Jay would likely be the token herding dog.
We stopped for a traffic light and Tom glanced at me. “So really, you like it? You can exchange …”
“I
love
it!” I patted the pendant that lay an inch above my sternum. It was a gold disc, about an inch and a half across, with an Australian Shepherd moving in profile at a trot. “You must be psychic. I’ve wanted a nice Aussie necklace ever since I got Jay.”
“Yeah?” He smiled and drove on. “Glad you like it. Never know about women.”
I snorted, and thought about my mixed emotions ever since I opened that box and realized that he was not proposing. How could I feel disappointed when I had been telling myself I didn’t want him to up the relationship ante?
Tom went on. “As I started to say the other night, Drake and I are tired of living alone …”
It’s scary how often the man does that. And now that he had misdirected me with the necklace, he really
was
going to propose. I closed my eyes and held my breath, trying to figure out what I was going to say.
“… so I’m going to start looking for a puppy this week.”
My whole body relaxed and I started to laugh.
“What’s funny about that?” Tom looked at me as if I’d lost my mind, which I very nearly had, and then looked back at the road.
“No, not funny. It’s great! A puppy! Perfect.”
We talked puppies the rest of the way to the lake. When we got there, Collin Lahmeyer was already there, along with three other local members of the Northern Indiana Hunting Retriever Club. This was an unofficial session, and Collin had invited just a handful of dogs and handlers. Tom had told me that everyone here had a dog entered in the test the following week. Besides Drake, there was one more Lab, a yellow bitch named Annie, plus a Flat-coated Retriever and a Golden Retriever I’d never seen before, and Eleanor, a Golden I did know from training at Dog Dayz. As I expected, Jay was the token herding dog, but Collin had told me to bring him along for a swim. Besides, like most Aussies, he’s up to just about any sport you ask him to try, and he was a terrific retriever in water and on land.
“Do I have time to go to the island now, before the dogs are out there?”
“Don’t see why not,” Collin wiped his sunglasses and put them on. “Dogs won’t be out there anyway. We’re working water and upland retrieves, so no reason to have them on the island at all. Help yourself.”
I
can
manage the kayak myself, but not gracefully, so I let the men use the advantage of several extra inches of height to lift it off the car for me and told them that I could take it from there. I got Jay out of his crate and switched his nice collar with license, I.D., rabies, and microchip tags for an old ratty one with just an I.D. I keep that one for wet, muddy outings. “Let’s go, Bubby,” I said, and Jay executed several vertical bounces to look me in the eye.
It took me longer to lug the kayak to the shore and get in it, which I don’t do gracefully, than to paddle to the island. I offered Jay a ride, but as usual he preferred to swim alongside. He shook himself on the island’s grassy bank while I hauled the kayak out of the water, and we set off to explore.
The island was three or four amoeba-shaped acres in size. Toward the middle, a small rise in the ground pretended to be a hill but didn’t quite make it. There was only one real tree standing, a ghostly old sycamore that from a distance appeared to be dead. Up close, I could see that a few branches had live leaves, but the tree probably wasn’t long for this world. Most of the ground was covered with thick brush and skinny saplings, thigh-high grasses and wildflowers. Everything had that beat-up look of late summer, except for the purple asters and ironweed and gold-petaled black-eyed Susans. A few saplings, mostly maples as far as I could tell, were taking hold, but only a couple of them even reached my chin. The remains of several good-sized trees lay rotting among the herbaceous plants. Something must have happened out here to strip the place of trees. Wind? A tornado? It wouldn’t have been recently. I made a mental note to ask Collin.
I looked back at the main shore, trying to locate the spot where I had stood with my camera the previous Sunday. If I could see where
I was when Drake swam out here, I might be able to figure out
where
he found the bag, or the general area at least. I knew I had
been about halfway between the l
ittle peninsula where Collin had stood with his shotgun and the short beach where Tom had waited with Drake. And I knew I had been near a beech
tree, because I had used its smooth trunk to block the sun for some shots.
I spotted the tree on the shore opposite me and thought about Drake’s trajectory through the water and then on the island. Jay was rustling around in the brush, lifting his head every minute or so to check my whereabouts. I walked to a spot by the water that seemed about right for Drake’s line of travel the previous week, and I thought about how he had all but disappeared into the grass and weeds. Slowly I made my way in that general direction.
My nose was starting to run, probably from mold spores on the rotting vegetation, and I reached into my pocket for a tissue. My fingers found something else, and I pulled out a business card. Anderson Billings’ business card. I must have worn these jeans to the final meeting of my photography class. I flashed on an image of Anderson handing me his card when I asked where I could see more of his photos, and that numbing sense of loss wrapped itself around me again. I was getting very tired of losing friends.
I looked at the image on the card, a bluebird in flight, and reached
for my cell phone. What had Anderson said? “There’s a bird?” Some
thing like that. I pulled up his voice message and listened again,
focusing on the important parts. “Janet, something funny is going on out here. On the little island, I mean. I went over there, spent maybe twenty minutes … I’m leaving here now, … but I could swing by your place or, you know, somewhere we could meet in, say, half an hour?”
I stopped the recording and thought about his words as I walked, making my way west between the tangled vegetation and the water. Anderson must have been on his way if he wanted to meet me in thirty minutes. So how could he have drowned? And why were he and his canoe found in the lake while his camera was in his car? It just made no sense. I realized that Detective Jo Stevens hadn’t returned my call, and I hadn’t tried to reach her again. I needed to do that when I finished here.
I played the message again and focused on the next part. “I’ll try you again when I get to Coliseum.” Meaning Coliseum Boulevard. “Janet, there’s a bird …” Did I hear a thump this time? I played it again, but I couldn’t be sure. Why was the message cut off like that? I wondered, and then my own reveries were cut off when Jay began a deep rumbling growl.
twenty-seven
Jay stood in an
area of low grass between me and a stand of wild roses. He had drawn himself up tall and rigid and a deep low growl filled the air around us. His eyes were locked onto the far bank of the lake, or perhaps the fence just beyond it that separated Heron Acres from the Treasures on Earth Spiritual Renewal Center spread. Jay took several steps forward and growled again. His hair stood out all over his body as if he’d taken on an electrical charge.
I walked to my dog and knelt beside him. “What is it, Bubby?” He turned his head and slurped my face, then turned back to whatever he saw or heard, his nose raised slightly and twitching. A shiver went up my arms, but I said, “Whatever it is, it’s a long way away, right, Bub?” I was talking to myself as much as to my dog, but I scratched behind his ear, then stood up and continued walking. Jay came with me and I asked him, “What did you see? A fox or something?” He stayed between me and the lake, glancing across the water every few seconds, but finally dropped his guard a few minutes later. I didn’t realize how tense my own shoulders were until Jay went back to sniffing around the brush and my muscles relaxed.
We made our way slowly around the perimeter of the island, zigzagging between the low grass along the shoreline and the shrubs, grasses, and weeds toward the interior. There were remarkably few signs of human visitors—an old blue sweatshirt, a couple of empty beer bottles, a broken fishing pole. Jay chased up a rabbit. First I wondered how in the world it got out there, and then I hoped it wasn’t alone.
Alone isn’t good. Alone is lonely.
Just as I was feeling very sorry for the rabbit, I caught myself and squeezed out a different line of thought.
Alone is independent. Alone is free.
I watched Jay nosing through some tangled bittersweet vines and said out loud, “I’m not alone.” Jay raised his head and looked at me, tongue hanging out the side of his mouth. “I have you and Leo.”
A shotgun blast made me jump, even though I knew they were using blanks for the training session. It was followed by a loud squawk that seemed to come from the old sycamore on the island. Crow? It didn’t sound like a crow. I couldn’t see anything at that distance. I couldn’t see the mainland where the dogs and their handlers were, either. Too much island in the way and even without trees, the shrubs and lower-growing plants blocked my view.
Jay went back to his exploration, and I continued walking. More blasts followed at irregular intervals, but I didn’t hear any more squawks, just the occasional tweet of a sparrow and the complaints of a very vocal blue jay. My own blue Jay and I walked on until I could finally see the action. A dog was swimming away from the shore, a wake fanning out behind, but the shadows cast by the trees offshore made it impossible to see who it was. It took me a moment, but I finally spotted the training bumper bobbing in the murky water. Jay saw it, too, and made a move to go after it. “Jay, down,” I said. He hesitated, but lay down and watched. As the dog emerged from the shadows, the sun hit her golden head and I was pretty sure it was sweet Eleanor, the Golden Retriever I knew from doggy school. She snatched her “bird” and turned back toward the far shore.
I squinted into the sun and looked at the staging area for the practice retrieves. Something was going on over there. I tried to make out what all the movement was behind Rhonda Lake, Eleanor’s owner. There seemed to be two people, one of them with a television camera on his shoulder, trying to get close to the water. Then a man intercepted them, arms outstretched to form a barricade to keep them from getting too close to Rhonda and her dog’s landing spot. Collin Lahmeyer. His long-legged stride was impossible to mistake. I wondered what that was all about, but turned my attention back to Eleanor for the moment. She was a strong swimmer, and she burst out of the water and shook herself. “Look at her shimmer,” I said to no one in particular, and then I started to laugh at the memory of Jay “shimmering” his lovely white hair all over Neil Young’s expensive dark slacks.
We were in sight of the kayak when Jay let out a yip and dove into a stand of Queen Anne’s lace and asters, his nub wagging a hundred miles an hour. I started to follow, caught my foot in a tangle of bindweed vines, and stumbled forward several giant steps, dragging the broken vine behind me. “Shit!” I reached down to unwrap the vine from my foot and snatched my hand back, swearing again. My shoelace was covered with burrs. They weren’t yet dried to the razor sharpness they would take on later in the fall, but they were nasty enough.
Jay barked again. “Quiet!” I said, looking up from the tangle around my feet to see what he was up to. He’s not a silly barker, and I’ve learned to pay attention when he sounds off. He let out a muffled brffff and turned to look at me, as if to say, “That wasn’t a bark, okay?” and then he stuck his head back into the brush and began pulling at something.
“Hang on,” I said, and bent to unwind the rest of the bindweed from my foot. Jay looked at me and whined, which I understood to mean, “But really, you gotta see this!”
When I was free, I stepped more carefully through the nest of intertwined vines and tall grass, mumbling, “Better not be a dead rodent.” Jay has a knack for finding dead squirrels and chipmunks, the rottener, the better. But when I reached my dog and looked at the ground in front of him, I sucked in my breath.
A pile of crimson feathers with a few turquoise ones mixed in lay at the base of a wild rose bush. What made me hold the air in my lungs was that most of the feathers were still attached to a body. A lifeless eye gazed back at me. The short crimson feathers on the bird’s head stood out in haphazard directions, rather like a punk rocker with a red hot dye job. The beak hung slightly open, as if its owner had been surprised by death. A curved beak. Parrot. I thought of Ava, Persephone Swann’s lovely bird. But this was not, I thought, the same species. Despite having half its breast gone, I could see that it had been a slightly smaller bird, and I didn’t recall Ava, or whatever he was called now, having yellow feathers in his tail, nor the stunning splashes of turquoise on his back that this little creature had.
Jay made a move toward the bird but I blocked him with my arm
and whispered, “Down.” He sank to the ground beside me, head thrust
forward and nose twitching. I fished a plastic bag out of my pocket, inserted my hand, and started to reach for the bird when another squawk assaulted my ear drums. “What the …?”
I stood and scanned the island, trying to locate the source of the racket. I’m not a real birder, but I do photograph enough birds and other critters in the wild to be familiar with most of the local voices, and this did not sound like any I knew. In fact, if I had to guess, I’d
say it sounded like a parrot.
That’s just nuts,
I thought, and then glanced
at the little body at my feet.
Parrots?
As I continued to scan the island, and particularly the old sycamore, I fast forwarded through the past week.
Parrots
, I thought again, but this time I wasn’t asking. Something weird was going on involving parrots. First, the red feather in the bag that Drake found on the island.
This
island. Then there was Ava, Persephone Swann’s lovely “Amazon parrot,” which I had yet to identify more precisely. And Giselle’s comment about becoming a “parrot guardian,” which I took to mean foster home. Was Regis Moneypenny running a parrot rescue program though Treasures on Earth? The conversation with Di Holman about her dog Lennen’s discoveries of smuggled birds ran through my mind. Persephone’s insistence that I not photograph her parrot. Anderson Billings’ message had said, “Janet, there’s a bird …,” followed by that thump and then a terrible silence.
A flick of red against the sky pulled me out of my dark thoughts and I watched a bird fly toward me from the sycamore. Details and color were lost to the bright cloud behind it, but it seemed to be about the size of a crow with a longer tail. As it closed on us, the colors blossomed. This was no crow. It was a parrot, vivid scarlet with flashes of gold and turquoise. It flew directly over us, low enough that I could hear air moving through its flight feathers, then circled out over the water and back to the semi-cover of the tree. “Janet, there’s a bird …” Had this been what Anderson meant? A parrot?
I looked at the dead bird again and decided to leave it where it was for Jo Stevens. To make it easier to find, I tied my plastic bag to a chin-high clump of ironweed to my right and another to a shrub to my left.
What if something messes with it?
There were plenty of crows and other scavengers on the island that might be tempted. At first I couldn’t think of anything to cover it up without messing up the site, but then the image of an old sweatshirt came back to me. I thought it was pretty close to where I’d left the kayak. I pulled my phone from my pocket and dialed Jo’s number while I ran for the sweatshirt, Jay bouncing at my side. The call hadn’t gone through by the time I got to the shirt, and I checked my phone. No bars. “Crap!” I shoved it back in my pocket, grabbed the shirt, and scurried back to the dead parrot. I debated for a moment, then decided that draping the shirt over the body wouldn’t hurt much and might keep scavengers away for a few hours. Before I did that, I took a couple of photos with my cell.
Better than nothing
, I thought. I covered the bird, weighting the shirt edges with rocks.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Time to get off this island and get some help, Bub.”
twenty-eight
The training session had
wrapped up by the time Jay and I got back to the mainland, where wet-and-muddy owners were throwing sticks and balls for their wet-and-muddy dogs to retrieve. Jay flicked his gaze from them to me to them and whined. “Go,” I said, gesturing toward the furry mayhem, and he was off. I pulled Bill’s kayak well out of the water and joined Tom and Rhonda and a woman I didn’t recognize.
“This is my frie … whoa!” Rhonda lurched into me as two dripping Golden Retrievers tugging at opposite ends of a float toy ran into the backs of her knees. “Hey, you two!”
The dogs stopped cavorting and looked at her, still holding onto the toy. The other woman took the middle of the length of rope between the two plastic end grips in her hand and said “Out” very softly. The dogs let go, attesting to the many hours of training they’d had. Every muscle in their bodies spoke to their hope that she’d fling the thing back into the water so they could do it all again.
“Who’s this handsome guy?” I asked, looking at the Golden I didn’t know.
“This is Pilot,” the woman said, wiping her hand on her jeans and holding it out to me. “Stephanie.”
“Janet.”
She turned back to the dogs and pitched the toy into the water, and they were off.
Rhonda joined in. “We’ve been planning a visit for ages and finally have a good excuse.” She went on to explain that they had met at the Golden Retriever National Specialty Show a couple of years earlier and had stayed in touch ever since. Now Stephanie and Pilot were visiting for a few days before all four of them headed off together for this year’s Nationals in St. Louis.
“Oh, so you don’t live here?” I asked.
“New Jersey.”
We chatted another minute or so, but I was antsy to tell Tom about the parrots, so I excused myself as soon as was marginally polite. As I walked toward Tom I pulled my phone out and dialed Jo Stevens’ number again, expecting to get her voice mail. When she answered in person, I stopped walking and told her what I’d seen. She said she’d be there in half an hour and asked whether there was a boat available to get to the island. I told her yes, hoping Collin’s boat was still there but figuring Jo could take the kayak and I could swim if necessary.
When I told Tom I’d found a dead parrot and had seen a live one on the island, he stopped mid-stick-toss and stared at me. Jay bounced up and down as if to say, “Throw it! Throw it!” and Drake sidled over and whacked his tail over and over into the side of my knee.
“Don’t Labs have nerves in their tails?” I asked, moving away from Drake and rubbing my knee joint. “Jeez, it’s like a billy club!” I took the sticks from Tom’s hands and threw them into the lake for Jay and Drake, then said, “You think that feather, you know, in the bag, you think that might have come from the dead bird?”
“Wow.”
“Is that yes?”
“Did you have your camera with you?” Tom asked.
“In the car. But look at this.” I flipped my phone open and showed
him the pictures I had taken of the dead bird. They were dark and grainy, but he could see enough.
“Get your camera. Take some decent photos of those birds and we can send them to the guy in Florida.” He called the dogs to him. “In fact, we can probably I.D. them ourselves from photos and confirm with him.”
He walked with me to the road and pulled his x-pen out of his van while I got my camera. “We’ll put the dogs in here and take Collin’s boat to the island.”
“Collin’s boat is here?”
“Yeah.” He gestured toward the bank, but I couldn’t see anything but grass and weeds from where we stood.
“We should wait for Jo.”
“She can use your kayak, or I’ll come back for her with the bass boat.” He set the x-pen up in the shade, filled a water bowl and set it inside, ushered the dogs through the parted sections, and clipped it closed. Jay and Drake sprawled in the grass, dripping and grinning as only tired, mucky dogs can.
I checked my watch. “Tom, it’s been twenty minutes since I called. She’ll be here before we even get to the island. Let’s just wait for her.”
He started to say something, then shifted his gaze from me to something behind me. “Yeah, she will.”
I turned.
“Hiya.” Jo wore tan chinos and a short-sleeved white shirt. Her clothing did not say “cop,” but something about her screamed, “Do not mess with me.” When she reached us, she pulled her sunglasses off and wiped them, then gestured behind her. “Hutch’ll catch up. He’s changing his shoes.” Hutch was Deputy Homer Hutchinson, Jo’s partner. Jo put her glasses back on and grinned at me, “He’s upgrading his wardrobe and doesn’t want to go wading in his new shoes.”
We resumed walking and the boat came into sight. “How many of us can that boat take?” I asked, eyeing a not huge rowboat pulled half out of the water and tied by a very long line to a small pin oak. I didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll meet you there,” I said, and headed down the beach to the kayak. The Goldens were still playing, and Pilot ran to me with two tennis balls sticking out of his mouth, did a little happy dance, and ran toward the water with Eleanor in hot pursuit.
I got to the island before Tom and the two detectives, so I checked
my camera settings and scanned the old sycamore for signs of the parrot, using the telephoto lens for a closer look. At first, I saw nothing. Then a flash of scarlet caught my eye, but I lost it as quickly as I’d seen it and had to pan back and forth very slowly a few times before I found it again. And there he, or she, was. Definitely a parrot, and almost as definitely the one I had seen earlier. How many parrots could there be on this little lake island in northern Indiana? Then again, I’d seen or heard about more parrots in northern Indiana in the past few days than I would have thought possible, so who knew? I brought the image in as close as I could and took several shots, then shifted my position and took a few more. The landing party had arrived and were tramping toward me, so I recapped my lens and made a mental note to try to get closer to the tree after the others left.
twenty-nine
The makeshift cover I’d
made with the old sweatshirt was still in place, and when I pulled the shirt away, the dead parrot didn’t appear to have been touched or moved.
“Where’d that shirt come from?” asked Hutch.
“Oh, uh, over there somewhere.” I gestured vaguely.
He and Jo exchanged a look I couldn’t read and Hutchinson pulled a plastic bag from his fanny pack and put the shirt in it, then wrote something on the bag.
“Never occurred to me that it was connected.” I was mildly embarrassed, although I wasn’t sure why I should be. “Uh, there were, are, a couple of empty bottles over there where the shirt was. I did think it odd …” I looked at Jo but she seemed more interested in the dead bird than in my thoughts. “I could probably find them if you think they’re, you know, if you want me to.”
“You think this is the bird that feather came from?” Jo looked at Tom.
“No idea. I’m a plant guy.” He grinned, but she didn’t get the joke,
so he told her about the parrot specialist in Florida. “Hoping he’ll call
here, or there will be a message from him when I get home.”
“Janet, can you get some photos before we move this bird?” She laid a ballpoint pen near the bird for scale.
I set the date marker to “on” and took several close-ups, then moved away to get a view of the area where I had found the bird. I was walking back toward them when that now-familiar sky-ripping squawk rang out from the lone island tree. We all turned that way. The little parrot was in full view, standing far out on a branch. As if in slow motion he unfolded his wings and glided into open air, seeming to move slowly at first, then swooping our way like a scarlet missile.
He rocketed toward Tom and Jo where they hovered over the little body
on the ground. They both raised their arms and ducked, but he cleared
them by ten or twelve feet, then disappeared toward Moneypenny’s place.
“Holy …,” said Jo.
“Wow!” said Tom.
“Holy wow is right,” I said, still staring after the bird.
“Is it attacking?” asked Hutch.
Jo looked at the bird at her feet and said, “If I had to guess, I’d say it’s protecting a friend.”
“Guess I won’t be getting any more shots of him, or her, today,” I said, and explained that I had hoped to take some photos for identification purposes.
Jo and Hutch pondered the best way to pick up the corpse, which wasn’t in great shape, and Tom and I set out to look for the beer bottles.
“Don’t touch them,” Jo reminded us. Or me, probably.
I more or less remembered where I had landed the kayak on my earlier trip, so we started there and walked in the direction Jay and I had taken. Although I wanted to find the bottles, I couldn’t help watching the sky and checking the tree every minute or so. A movement on the shore toward Treasures on Earth caught my eye, but Tom distracted me with a “There they are!” and when I turned to look across the water again, whatever it was had vanished.
“What?” Tom asked.
“Thought I saw something. I think Jo was right.”
“Widowed bird?” he asked.
I looked at him to see if he was trying to be funny, but knew right away that he wasn’t. “Something like that.” I heaved a big sigh, then turned toward the beer bottles and took a few photos, figuring Jo was going to want them.
“Nice out here,” said Tom, looking around. “I wonder what happened to the trees.”
“I don’t know. Storm? Tornado?”
He gestured toward a big trunk partially hidden in the tall grass. “Not that one.”
He was right. I hadn’t noticed before, but the tree had been cut down, not broken. I started to say something when Tom jerked his head around and signaled me to be quiet. He was staring across the water toward the fence that separated Heron Acres from Treasures on Earth. Moneypenny’s place.
“What?” I whispered.
Softly he said, “I thought I saw someone over there. I heard voices.”
“Not Jo and Hutchinson?” I asked, nodding toward the two detectives, who were crunching their way toward us through a pile of dry sticks.
“Maybe. But I’m sure I saw someone.”
“So?” Hutch was swatting bugs away with one hand and picking little green burrs off his slacks with the other. “Can we just do this and get back to civilization?”
Tom led them to the bottles. When I said I had already taken pictures, Hutch turned a plastic bag inside out, picked up a bottle, and pulled the plastic up around it. The maneuver was so familiar in an earthier, doggier context that the image of it broke through my tension and I started to laugh.
“What?” Hutch wiped at his face with his arm.
“Nothing.” I stopped myself, but then he did it again with the other bottle and my lips blew an involuntary raspberry that morphed into one of those squeal-laughs. Even as I cracked up, I knew I was laughing harder than I should be but I couldn’t stop myself, and then Tom watched Hutchinson finish bagging the second bottle and he started to laugh. Before long we were completely out of control, and the two detectives were staring at us as if we might need straight jackets. When we finally seemed to be recovering our senses, Jo looked at Hutch and they shrugged at each other, and it took everything I had not to relapse into more squealing and giggling.
Hutch slapped at his own cheek and said, “I’m outta here.”
Tom mock punched my arm and then led Jo and Hutch back to the boat. Hutch stooped to pick something up on the shore—the dead bird, I supposed—and I turned back to the kayak. As I started to push off, something made me turn to look again at a stand of shrubs near the old sycamore. The sun was in my eyes and at first I didn’t know what I was looking at, but then I made out a man standing just in front of the shrubs. A big man, with light-colored hair lifting in the breeze—blonde, or maybe gray. I sat very still as the kayak drifted into the lake, paddle poised but quiet in my hands. I felt a chill in my cheeks and relief that I was on the lake and putting deep water between him and me.
I tried to call to Tom and the others, but couldn’t make my voice work. In any case, they were out of sight and probably wouldn’t hear me. I dipped my paddle into the lake and turned the kayak away from the island, away from the man in the shadows. I kept paddling, gaining some speed, then turned for another look. He stood in the open now, in the light. As I watched, he raised his hands and held them as if he were holding something. I saw his finger move up, down, up, and I got it. An imaginary camera. I went back to paddling, then looked one last time. Another gesture. He held his hand up, index finger pointed at me, and his thumb flicked down and up. Then he raised his finger to his lips and pursed them as if blowing.
My first instinct was to get out of there as quickly as I could, but that impulse immediately gave way to rage. Not stupid rage. Not the kind that would have sent me back to the island to find out what the hell was wrong with the guy. I have been known to do reckless things like that, but something about the guy’s body language scared the recklessness out of me. I pulled my camera from where I had stashed it in the cockpit and slipped the strap around my neck. I knew the jerk wasn’t going to pose for me and I wouldn’t have time for manual settings, so I flipped on the auto setting for athletic action, hoping the camera would do the work for me. I dipped my paddle just enough to turn the kayak parallel to the shore and laid it across the cockpit. He was still there, closer now to the water, and he seemed to be dragging something behind him. A rubber raft, maybe? I raised the camera and clicked off a series of shots. The first couple caught him full on, but his reaction time was fast and he turned away, arm up to hide his face. “Too late, you son of a bitch,” I said. I stowed my camera again and then I got out of there as quickly as I could.
thirty
Jo and Hutch had
almost reached their car when I caught up with them. After my adrenaline-driven paddle back from the island and run across the field to catch up, I could hardly speak, but I finally managed to tell them about the man on the island and his bizarre gestures. I’d had the presence of mind to grab my camera, and I showed them the images, but they were too small for any detail other than his general build and clothing, and the fact that I had not imagined him. As I told the story, though, I started to feel a little silly, and said, “Maybe he was just trying to be funny?”
Jo gave me her “have you lost your mind” look and gestured at my camera. “Email those to me as soon as you get home.” She was already moving back toward the boat. Hutch was ahead of her and looked like he was planning to rip the guy’s head off if he caught up with him. Hutch and I had not gotten off to a great start, but he had
grown very fond of Jay and I was sure he’d shoot anyone who threat
ened a hair on his furry body. Jo stopped, turned toward me, and said, “Go home, Janet. Now.” She turned and ran after her partner,
phone to her ear, but paused and said something to Tom as she passed
him.
I bent over with my hands on my knees, still catching my breath and wondering if I was going to be sick. It seemed as if I stood that way for an hour, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds before I felt Tom’s hands on my shoulders.
“Janet?”
“Okay. I’m okay.” I collected my camera from where I had set it on the grass and stood up. “Just that post-adrenaline barfy feeling.”
“What the hell?” Tom asked. “Jo told me to take you home. What happened?” I told him, and he started to turn toward the lake, as if to follow the deputies.
“Tom, Jo told me to go home.” I knew she was concerned for my safety, but I didn’t want to admit that out loud. Instead, I said, “I took some photos of the guy. She wants me to send them to her.”
Tom turned toward me, hesitated a moment, then said, “Okay, let’s go.” Ten minutes later we had the kayak, x-pen, and dogs loaded. I took a last look across the field and lake but other than the bass boat resting on the island’s shore, I couldn’t see any activity out there. Jo and Hutch must have walked to the far side, beyond the sprawl of bushes.
By the time we turned onto Coldwater Road and headed toward town, the nausea had passed. It was replaced by a more considered fear, and various parts of my body began to tremble, first my stomach, then my hands, then my lower lip.
Aw, shit, Janet, don’t start crying,
I thought. If I were honest I’d have to admit that I felt safer with Tom there beside me, but I didn’t see any need to say so, especially with tears. I tried to force myself to breathe deeply, but my stupid nose sniffed without my wanting it to.
Tom reached over and took my hand but remained quiet for a few minutes. Then he asked, “What else happened out there?”
I had told him a man was out there, but had not told him about the pistol gesture. I finished up the story just as we turned onto Coliseum. “I think you should stay with me until Jo finds that guy.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t think you should be home, especially alone. Come to my house.”
I made a rude noise. “He was just a nut.”
“My point exactly.”
“I need to go see Mom. Haven’t been there since Tuesday.”
“Love to see your mom.”
“I need to change.”
He squeezed my hand and turned his gaze from the road ahead for a quick ogle. “Don’t change, Janet. You’re perfect as you are.” I made another rude noise and he checked out my mucky clothes and grinned. “Okay, on second thought …”
My focus was drifting, and unlike my camera lens, my brain isn’t easy to twist into clarity. It works at times more like a fast-motion auto setting, readjusting constantly, but it’s not nearly so clever as my camera at keeping a single subject in focus. This was one of those times, and my thoughts hiphopped back and forth from my mother’s losing battle with Alzheimer’s to the weirdo on the island to Anderson Billings’ odd message to the pleasure of watching a group of frolicking dogs to the weirdness of seeing parrots by a lake in northern Indiana.
“I think I need Ritalin or something.”
“Why is that?”
“What the hell do you think is going on out there?”
Tom chuckled. “Wow. Can’t even focus on not being able to focus, huh?”
“It’s all interconnected. I’m sure of it now. What the heck could Moneypenny’s group be up to? I mean, parrots?” We had just pulled into my driveway. “We’ll have to leave the dogs here while we visit Mom. Too hot in the car.”
Tom was shaking his head before I finished the question. “We don’t know who that creep was or what he might know about you, so I think my place is a better bet.” He parked in the shade, rolled down all the windows, popped the back of his van open, and opened his door. “Let’s just grab what you need to take the boys to my place. They’ll be safer, and you can clean up there.”
My thoughts kept bouncing around while I grabbed some clean clothes and my laptop, and took five minutes to refresh the water in the five vases and remove a few droopy blossoms. When we were back in the car I said, “If someone is out to get me and knows that much, then they know about you, too.”
Tom frowned. “Maybe.”
“I’m not leaving Leo here alone.”
“Of course not!” Tom’s a big fan of my brave little cat.
“Let’s leave the three musketeers with Bill and Norm while we visit Mom. If it isn’t safe enough for me … Unless you don’t want to g …” He held up a hand and stopped me before I finished the last word.
I made the call and Norm was delighted to have “the boys” for a couple of hours. I ran back in and got Leo, and to sweeten the deal, we swung by the Cookie Cottage and got a mixed box. Norm was a sucker for the animals, and Bill was a sucker for cookies. It runs in the family, but I managed to control my white-chocolate-macadamia lust, breaking off a smallish piece and giving the rest of the yummilicious thing to Tom.
thirty-one
Shadetree Retirement Home looked
like I remembered Elmhurst High School on prom night. The lobby was decked out with crepe paper streamers and helium balloons, and big band music filled the air.
“Wow!” I said as we approached the door to the dining cum recreational event room. The music was much louder here, and, it turned out, was live. The singer appeared to be about sixteen, but he was doing a reasonable cover of the old Bing Crosby classic, “Swinging on a Star.” I knew it from
Going My Way
, one of my mother’s favorite old movies. The crepe-paper-and-balloon theme was repeated here, with strings of tiny white lights making everything sparkle, including more than one pair of elderly eyes. Several couples were dancing, while others occupied chairs and a few wheelchairs around the perimeter of the room. One or two appeared to be asleep. A long table held finger food and a punch bowl.
Jade Templeton waved and grinned from the row of chairs to my right, where she was talking to a resident who didn’t seem to be as happy as the others were. I looked around for my mother and finally spotted her on the far side of the room, dancing with a white-haired man in white slacks and shirt and a startling purple jacket. I elbowed Tom and pointed, and he grinned.
The band struck up a new number, an instrumental, and Tom leaned toward my ear and said, “In the Mood.”
I couldn’t stifle a giggle. “Not here, Tom. I mean, most of them won’t remember by tomorrow, but still …”