by J. R. Ripley
I’d gotten the idea for the tours after attending a recent birding expo. Birding and other nature and wildlife tours seemed to be all the rage, as evidenced by the number of vendors at the expo and the numbers of people visiting their booths.
Truth be told, it was one of my fellow exhibitors who had suggested I consider branching out into the tour biz myself. I’d hesitated, but with her encouragement and the further encouragement of others at the store, including Derek, I’d finally not only gotten on board with the idea, I’d become excited.
Our inaugural tour, Birding the Carolina Coast with Birds & Bees, was only six weeks away.
“We’ve got a full house.” Esther flipped through the registration forms one last time.
“I thought we had one spot left?” I raised the bottle of Riesling and refilled our glasses.
“Gertie took it.” Esther didn’t sound happy about it. Gertie Hammer was Esther’s sister. The fact that they were sisters had remained hidden from me for quite some time. I still found it difficult to believe.
As for their relationship, Esther said it was complicated. Then again, practically everything that had anything at all to do with Esther was complicated.
And that was putting it mildly.
“Does she understand that she’s going to have to ride in the van with the rest of us?” Kim giggled. “And spend nearly every waking hour for four days with us?”
Kim had a point. Birds & Bees was renting a fifteen-seat passenger van. Kim was going to drive it. I’d follow in the Kia, which would also hold the bulk of our luggage and birding gear.
We’d be eating meals together, staying in the same small beachside inn, going on birding walks—all as a group. Gertie wasn’t much for socializing, and she wasn’t a fan of mine. I had bought this big, old house from her and paid way too much money for it. Of course, I had only myself to blame for that.
Myself and my eagerness to return to Ruby Lake and open a business near my family and friends, and far from the man who had broken my heart.
Later, Gertie Hammer had tried to buy the place back for her own greedy purposes. Failing that, she’d tried to have me evicted via a push to have my property taken through a public-domain action instigated by her, the mayor, and several sleazy businessmen.
Fortunately, she had failed in the attempt.
Still later, Gertie had quietly been responsible for saving one of Ruby Lake’s oldest and best-loved attractions, Christmas House Village.
Go figure.
Sometimes I got the feeling she was just messing with me.
Throughout all this, Esther had lived on my second floor, and I’d had no idea the two crazy ladies were sisters.
In retrospect, why hadn’t I known?
“Gertie wants to go on a birding tour?” I fingered one of the full-color brochures we’d had printed as I mulled over the news.
“Maybe she thinks we’re going bird hunting and wants some feathers for a hat.” Kim giggled again. In her defense, she was on her third glass of Riesling. Or was it her fourth?
“The point is,” Esther said, “I’ve got her bank check right here.” She waved a green check in front of my nose. “The full amount, too, not just a deposit. And,” she added, tucking the check into her purse so she could deposit it at the bank the next day, “I told her no refunds.”
“Smart.” As much as I had reservations about the prospect of spending four days with Gertie and Esther, I knew that Gertie’s check was good. The woman was so closefisted, she made Scrooge McDuck look like a spendthrift. Plus, she’d paid in full.
The Disney-anthropomorphized Pekin duck had been a personal favorite growing up. A presage of the bird lady I’d become?
Watching McDuck cartoons as a girl, I had dreamed of having a rich uncle like Scrooge to shower me with love and presents. What I’d gotten was Esther the Pester, a deep-pocketed woman of intrigue, mystery, and the uncanny ability to push every one of my buttons at once.
They do say to be careful what you wish for…
“I like the sound of that.” Kim raised her glass, and she and Esther shared a toast.
I was beginning to think I’d better make some whole wheat toast and get it down Kim’s throat. She was going to need something to soak up all that alcohol. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like something to eat?” I asked her.
“No, thanks.” Kim hiccoughed. “Dan’s picking me up here for dinner in a little while. I don’t want to spoil my appetite.”
There was a knock on the apartment door.
Kim jumped up. “That must be him now.”
She pulled open the door. Dan stood sheepishly on the doormat. Close beside him, stood Paula d’Abbo.
“Uh-oh,” I whispered for Esther’s ears only. I grabbed the wine bottle. It was empty, but I stuck it in the refrigerator before Kim came for it with the intent to cause bodily harm.
Remarkably, she did neither. “Hi, Dan. Hello, Paula.” She daintily kissed Paula on the cheek and Dan on the lips.
Esther and I shared a look that said we’d talk later.
Dan was wearing his best suit, dark blue, with a pale gray and pink striped tie. Paula might have been wearing her worst navy dress, but she still looked stunning.
Speaking of stunning, Kim’s laissez-faire attitude was the most stunning thing going at the moment.
“Come on in. I’ll grab my coat.” Kim waved for Paula to go first.
I held my breath. Would she clobber the poor woman from behind?
Would Dan dare arrest her for the crime?
“Can I get either of you a drink?” I offered when I realized nothing bad was going to happen.
Was Kim waiting to ambush her enemy? Take her by surprise?
Esther was the first to reply. “I’ll take one.” She moved to the kitchen cabinet that held the wine bottles and deftly opened a fresh liter. She refilled her glass.
“Nothing for us. We have a reservation at Lake House,” Dan answered.
Lake House was a romantic, upscale restaurant in the Ruby Lake Marina. Probably the most romantic spot in town for dining.
“What’s all this?” asked Paula. She picked up a brochure outlining our upcoming Carolina coast birding trip.
I explained how we’d soon be offering birding trips. “That’s the plan, anyway. We’ll see how the first one goes and if we turn a profit.”
“We’d better.” Esther sat at the table and scowled.
“We will. According to the spirits,” Kim began, “new ventures will be successful, remember?”
“Spirits?” Paula asked.
“Don’t ask,” I replied.
Kim ignored me. “The Ouija.”
She pointed to the sofa where a Ouija board and planchette rested on the sagging cushion. The open box it had come in was on the floor, out of sight. Kim had dug the game up from her guest-bedroom closet. I couldn’t believe the thing hadn’t been donated or trashed by now.
Dan paled. “That’s not Yvonne Rice’s spirit board, is it?”
“No. Kim brought it. It’s our old board from when we were kids.” I wagged my head at her. “I still can’t believe you kept the silly thing all these years.”
Kim shrugged into her coat. “You never know when talking to the spirits is going to come in handy.”
“I just hope they’re right this time.” As for spirits, Kim had been drinking most of hers. I hoped she wasn’t bottling things up emotionally and saving them for a veritable volcano that would erupt at Lake House.
Kim moved to the door. I locked my fingers over her shoulder. “A word before you go, please.”
“Um, I guess so.”
I pulled Kim into my bedroom and eased the door shut.
“What’s with you?” I demanded.
“What’s with me?” Kim threw back. “What’s with you? You said you wanted a
word with me.”
“Why are you being so nice to Paula?”
Kim planted her hands on her hips. “Let me get this straight, you want me to apologize for being nice?”
“Don’t give me that. The last I heard, and that was yesterday, you hated the evil trollop, wanted her dead and then expelled to the gulags until, as you so colorfully put it, she turned into a hellish hag with wrinkled flesh and sagging boobs.”
Kim flecked an imaginary speck from her black and white houndstooth coat. “That was yesterday. I’m over it.”
I narrowed my eyes suspiciously. “Over it? That is so, so un-Kim-like.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean. Dan and Paula are friends. Nothing more.”
“Sure,” I replied, “I know that. But you?”
Kim sniffed. “If you must know, the spirits told me not to worry. We do have a reservation to keep.” She made a show of looking at her watch.
“The spirits?”
“That’s right,” Kim said rather haughtily.
“Might those spirits be speaking to you via the Ouija board?” If so, the only fingers moving that board had been her own. Didn’t she realize that?
She didn’t deign to reply to the question. “According to the spirits, Paula and Dan are nothing more than good friends. More like brother and sister, really. And—”
Kim turned to see that the door was closed. “And the spirits tell me that Dan is going to ask me to marry him.”
On that jaw-dropping remark, my best friend yanked open the bedroom door and rejoined the others, who had all gathered around Esther at the kitchen table.
My head was pounding. I helped myself to the wine.
“Ready?” Dan asked Kim.
She said she was.
“Great. It’s been a long day,” Dan said wearily. “I requested a table near the fireplace. There’s nothing I’d like better than to unwind with a cold drink, a fine meal, and some fine company.” He placed his arm around Kim’s waist.
Kim turned and stuck her tongue out at me.
I wished them a pleasant evening and prayed there would be no burning logs being flung across the restaurant.
“Poor Dan,” Paula rubbed the back of Dan’s neck.
I saw Kim flinch, but a smile soon masked any other emotion she was feeling.
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Didn’t you hear?” Paula replied. “There was an accidental death out in the country, and Dan and Larry spent hours at the scene. Then Chief Kennedy had them filling out endless piles of paperwork at HQ for hours.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
“Me, too.” Kim’s hand went to the nape of Dan’s neck and remained there possessively.
“Who was it? Anybody we know?”
“What did you say his name was, Dan? Gar something?”
Dan nodded. “Gar Samuelson.”
I sucked in a breath. “Gar Samuelson? From Webber’s Pond?”
“That’s right.”
I leaned against the counter. “What-what happened?”
“He drowned. Apparently, his wheelchair malfunctioned or something, and he fell in. A neighbor found him this morning.” Dan looked at the clock on the wall. “Hey, we’re going to be late.”
I locked the door behind them and leaned against it for support.
“What’s wrong with you?” Esther brought her glass to her lips. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I hadn’t seen a ghost, but I had definitely felt one. He had run his ghostly fingers over my bones and whispered in my ear.
I am murdered, he said.
16
I do not like coincidences. Gar’s drowning at Webber’s Pond seemed too suspicious to have been a fluke. Especially when a woman had been shot dead in the vicinity a short while ago.
I tossed and turned all night. In the morning, it was no use. My curiosity had gotten the best of me.
I had to learn what was going on.
And who was behind it.
I drove to Webber’s Pond. There was no sign of Murray, but smoke drifted lazily from his chimney toward the lowering sky. In her side yard, Madeline Bell leaned against the handle of a rake. I waved and continued to Ross Barnswallow’s cabin.
His home was the same basic shape as the others, built for function more than style. Unlike the others, however, with their lacquered wood doors, his front door was painted bright red, though the paint was chipped and smudged with dirt and grease.
A small green rowboat was covered by a tin awning at the edge of the pond.
I knocked. Somewhere a dog barked.
Finally, a face, moving too quickly for me to see more than a glimpse, peered out from between the white curtains, then was gone. I heard a few muffled words inside.
A moment later, there came the sound of a lock turning, and Ross Barnswallow opened his door. Out came Ross, followed by an Irish setter. One of them smelled of tobacco and beer.
I was guessing it was Ross. His eyes were bloodshot, and his hair needed combing. He looked like he needed a bath. A red-and-black-checked lumberjack shirt hung over a pair of baggy jeans with scuffed knees. His feet were housed in thick wool stockings. “What do you want?”
“Is this Pep?” The Irish setter wagged its tail and nuzzled its nose against my leg. I scratched him behind the ears.
“That’s right. I’m keeping an eye on him.” Ross chuckled, a guttural sound like gas escaping from a crack in granite.
“That’s nice.”
“You could say we’re keeping an eye on each other. Isn’t that right, boy?” Ross slapped his thigh, and Pep retreated to his side.
“I heard about Mr. Samuelson.” I shifted my gaze out across the pond to Gar Samuelson’s cabin. Ragged gray clouds crowded around as if drawn to the scene. Was it my imagination, or did Gar’s cabin appear lonely and abandoned?
Ross joined me on the porch, moving silently in his stocking feet. “I was the one who found him, you know.”
I returned my attention to Ross. I could smell beer on his breath. It was barely noon, but who was I to judge? “No, I didn’t know that.”
I’d been meaning to ambush Kim and see if she’d gotten any further details of the accident—if it was an accident. I had my doubts and wasn’t going to accept that verdict until it had come down officially. Preferably from someone higher up the food chain than Jerry Kennedy.
I had called Lance at the Weekender before departing Birds & Bees. He told me that the police were treating the incident as an accidental death. “I heard his wheelchair malfunctioned.”
“Mmm.” Ross rubbed his whiskers. He grabbed a maroon cap from a hook just inside the door. A pair of dirty boots rested at the side of the door. He picked them up, banged the heels together to shake the mud loose, and then hastily laced them.
I followed him. We were heading toward the still waters of the pond. “What happened exactly?”
“I found him out there.” Ross pointed in the general vicinity of Gar Samuelson’s cabin and dock. “Gar was floating out in the pond.”
He coughed. “The police found his wheelchair at the bottom at the end of his dock. In the muck.”
“So he really did drown then.” I watched a lone mallard scoot along the weedy shoreline.
“That’s what the police say.”
“Do they say when exactly?”
“Not that they told me. They spent hours out here, too. Tromping all around the place. Chief Kennedy drove all over in his car. Look at those tire tracks,” Ross complained, pointing to rows of deep tracks like wounds in the grass. “It’s gonna take years for the traces of his disrespect for the land to disappear. Longer if I don’t get some soil to fill them in.”
He cursed. “And that’s going to take money I don’t have and labor hours I don’t
feel like spending.”
“Maybe you could ask the town to take care of it?”
Ross laughed.
I thought the idea was pretty funny, too, now that I’d said it out loud. The Parks and Recreation Department had limited funding and limited personnel. They focused most of their energies on the places most visited by tourists.
No surprise there.
“Had you talked to Gar recently?”
Ross dug his toe into the moist red earth before answering. “Not so much. Just to say hello. Nothing special. We weren’t close.”
“Did he seem okay to you?”
Deep lines formed in Ross’s forehead. “Okay, how?”
“I don’t know, worried? Upset?” Like guilty over having killed Yvonne?
“You think he killed himself?” Ross shook his head. “That doesn’t sound like Gar. You never know, though.” He threw a stick, and Pep bolted after it. A moment later, Pep and stick were back. Barnswallow pried the crooked stick from the dog’s mouth and threw it again, farther this time.
“If he had shot Yvonne, he might have had a guilty conscience.”
“Why would old Gar shoot her?”
“I heard he wasn’t exactly the neighborly sort.”
That made Ross laugh. “None of us here are. I guess that’s why we live out here. Not in town.”
“Is that why you moved to Webber’s Pond?”
Ross shambled over the uneven ground and adjusted the canvas covering his rowboat. “It works for me.”
“When did you discover Gar?”
“Why do you want to know? The man’s dead. End of story.”
I stared him down.
“Fine. I heard a dog barking in the night.” This time he took the stick from the dog’s mouth and tossed it to the center of the pond. Pep bounced along the shore as if unsure what to do next.
“Pep does that sometimes, so I didn’t pay much attention. Then when I heard the dog still barking yesterday morning, I got curious. I went to look, and there he was. Floating like that.”
Ross’s words struck me as false or maybe only well-rehearsed. Was that because he had rehearsed his words, or was it merely because he’d thought it over in his mind and had to tell the same tale to the police?