Die Like an Eagle

by Donna Andrews

  I forced a smile, and remembered that it had been my idea to start the games an hour earlier. Of course, when I had suggested an 8:00 A.M. starting time, I had no idea I’d be up past midnight doing manual labor.

  “Mommy, where’s my baseball pants?” Josh asked.

  “I can’t find my belt,” Jamie countered.

  “Can I have French toast for breakfast?” Josh asked. “While you find my baseball pants?”

  “I don’t want French toast,” Jamie said. “And—”

  “Go downstairs and see what Rose Noire is fixing for breakfast.” Thank goodness for having a resident cousin who not only liked to cook but was an inveterately cheerful morning person. “If you do it nicely, you may ask her if she can fix French toast for those who want it and something else for those who don’t. But if she says she’s too busy, don’t whine. And while you do that I will look for all of your baseball gear.”

  The herd stampeded downstairs. While Michael donned his baseball clothes, I took a quick shower and got dressed in jeans and my Caerphilly Eagles t-shirt, all the while playing with my new favorite fantasy—that I could find a way to tag all the boys’ baseball gear the way Caroline had tagged Biff’s coat and car. In fact, not just their baseball gear—all of their possessions. I could see myself calling the number Caroline had given me and saying, “Hey, can you give me a location on Jamie’s right cleat? Great! How about Josh’s math homework?”

  Of course, that reminded me that I hadn’t checked up on Biff lately. I paused in the middle of searching a laundry basket and called the zoo’s security desk.

  “Hi, Meg,” said a cheerful young woman’s voice. “You want a location on those tags?”

  “Please.”

  “Just a sec.… Yes, they’re both down at Percy Pruitt Park.”

  “Great. I was wondering … do you keep historical data on where the tags have been?”

  “Of course,” she said. “That’s really the main purpose of the device—to study the animals’ movements.”

  “So you could tell me, for example, where the devices went when they left my house Thursday night?”

  “Of course. Here we go. They both went straight to Percy Pruitt field, and after half an hour there, to a location near the Clay County border.” She rattled off a set of coordinates, then translated them to a street address on the Clay Swamp Road. I recognized the address of Biff’s business. “Then yesterday they went to Percy Pruitt Park at seven forty-five a.m. After that they did quite a lot of wandering around yesterday—do you want the details?”

  “Maybe later,” I said. “Just let me know their present location.”

  “At Percy Pruitt Park,” she said. “Since about seven a.m. So what is this special project of Caroline’s? I’m assuming some kind of application of the device to companion animals instead of wildlife.”

  “Just out of curiosity, what makes you think that?”

  “Because whatever these critters are, they occasionally travel at speeds in excess of sixty miles an hour. I assume they’re traveling in someone’s car at those times, because if we have some kind of wildlife here in Caerphilly capable of that kind of speed, I think I’d have heard about it.”

  “Good deductions,” I said. “And thanks.”

  I’d let Caroline explain what her project was.

  And it was a relief that the tracking devices confirmed Biff’s alibi. Not that I’d really doubted it—after all, Aida and Vern were pretty reliable. But after seeing Biff’s place of business, it had occurred to me to wonder if he could possibly have sneaked out while they were at one end of his scrapyard. If both our local police and the tracking devices thought Biff had stayed put, then Biff was very well-alibied for the time of the murder. I decided that on the whole this was a relief. However much I might wish that we could figure out a way to disentangle Biff from our local baseball organization, I didn’t think the spectacle of having the league president arrested for murder was one we wanted to see.

  And it was also a relief since I wasn’t at all sure how the chief would feel if he found out about our belling the cat, as Caroline had called it. I needed to find out if what Caroline had done was legal, and if not, what kind of penalty she’d face if the chief found out about it. Fortunately, since the tracking device confirmed Vern’s and Aida’s evidence, this wasn’t quite as urgent as it would have been if it had contradicted them, but still … I had the sneaking feeling it was illegal.

  And that meant it could still come back to haunt us if an indiscreet zoo staff member gossiped about Caroline’s special project. Or if Biff found the device. Or what if some new crime occurred—say that break-in at Shiffley Construction Randall more than half expected—and the tracking devices recorded data that either cleared or implicated Biff.

  Festus. I could call him to tell him more about the Yoder farm, work the conversation around to the subject of Grandfather’s tracking devices, and jokingly ask what would happen if I decided to tag a few human beings with them.

  No, he’d see through that. Better to just ask him point-blank. I entered an item in my notebook to remind me to do that—but later, at what Mother would call a civilized time of day.

  I returned to emptying out the laundry basket and found Josh’s baseball socks near the bottom, rolled up in Jamie’s damp swimsuit. Jamie’s baseball pants were draped over the Ping-Pong table in the basement, and since there was a belt already threaded through the belt loops, I deduced that the belt Josh was carrying around actually belonged to Jamie. Although threading the belts through the loops was a major pain, in the interest of preserving harmony I removed the belt so I could pretend to have found it separately.

  A good thing we lived so close to the field, because otherwise I’m not sure we could possibly have been among the first there. Michael took the boys to the outfield and started a little fielding practice. I took a stroll around the field, nodding happily at the results of our night’s work.

  It looked good. Not perfect. There were still more dirt and weeds than grass in the outfield, but at least the weeds and grass were cropped close enough that it was hard to tell them apart. And they’d actually dug up all the grass and weeds that had sparsely dotted the infield and done a fabulous job of leveling and smoothing it. A lush grass infield would have been optimal, but for now, a neat, smooth dirt infield would do just fine. The bleachers and dugouts weren’t fancy, but they were structurally sound and as spruced up as they were going to get.

  As I watched, a Brown Construction truck turned into the parking lot—a flatbed truck with a battered, mud-colored porta-potty on the back. The truck rattled over to the end of the parking lot where Biff’s old porta-potty had stood and backed into position.

  “Oh, give us a break,” I muttered under my breath. “As if anyone with a sense of smell is going anywhere near that thing.”

  Biff was strolling over to meet the truck, and supervised as four of his workmen wrestled the porta-potty into place—not quite in the same place where the old one had been, but fifteen or twenty feet farther away from the field. It was as if even Biff realized that the odds of anyone using his porta-potty were low, but had brought it out to the field anyway as a gesture of defiance.

  Biff stood for a few moments, gazing at his porta-potty in what appeared to be satisfaction. Not a sentiment apt to be shared by many of those who came close to it—I noticed a couple of the workmen, now that they were out of Biff’s line of sight, were clowning around, holding their noses and pretending to be about to puke.

  Biff turned around to bark an order at them and they all scrambled back onto the truck and vamoosed. Biff began rambling around the field, inspecting everything we’d done the night before and shaking his head as if he found it all sadly unsatisfactory.

  Two women were waiting by the Snack Shack: the older woman in the sari who’d been at the Thursday night party—now identified as the elder Mrs. Patel, Sami Patel’s grandmother—and Rose Noire. Biff noticed them waiting, but he took his own sweet time
coming over to let them into the Snack Shack.

  In fact, he kept them waiting at the door of the Snack Shack while he opened up the supply shed and strolled inside.

  I could see Rose Noire taking some of the deep, calming breaths she was always telling me to try when things upset me.

  Then Biff stormed out of the shed.

  “Where the hell are my buns!” he shouted at the first person he saw—which unfortunately happened to be Mrs. Patel. She shrieked, whirled around, and ran away.

  I took off running toward the shed.

  “You big bully!” Rose Noire stepped into the space Mrs. Patel had vacated and shook her finger in Biff’s face.

  “We had a whole season’s supply of hot dog and hamburger buns in here,” Biff yelled.

  “I have no idea where they are, and neither does Mrs. Patel,” Rose Noire yelled back. “Now go over there and apologize to that poor woman!”

  Rose Noire was actually shaking her fist at him. Considering that Rose Noire regularly escorted even noxious insects like stinkbugs and cockroaches out into the yard and had been known to apologize to furniture when she bumped into it, Biff had achieved the near impossible feat of making her lose her temper.

  But before I could intervene, a tall man—probably a Shiffley—wearing a Caerphilly Flatworms t-shirt stepped to Rose Noire’s side and spoke up.

  “If you’re talking about those moldy old hot dog and hamburger buns on the top shelf, they had a 2013 expiration date,” he said. “I threw them out.”

  “And who the hell are you?” Biff snarled, turning to the new arrival.

  “Padgett Shiffley. County health inspector.” Padgett opened up his wallet and held it out, obviously to show Biff an official ID of some sort.

  Biff blinked for a few moments. Rose Noire stepped aside, though I noticed she was staying close enough to eavesdrop.

  “Well, who the hell left those there anyway?” Biff muttered.

  Padgett just stared impassively at him. Biff scowled fiercely and retreated.

  “Good riddance,” Padgett said.

  “Except we still need him to open the Snack Shack door,” Rose Noire said.

  “Blast the man.” Padgett took off after Biff.

  Seeing that Biff had gone, Mrs. Patel timidly returned to Rose Noire’s side. She looked anxious when Biff came storming back, waving his key ring.

  “Do I have to do everything around here?” he muttered.

  I could see Rose Noire pressing her lips together, as if fighting not to point out that she and Mrs. Patel were the ones who’d be doing the work, if only he’d let them get on with it.

  Biff unlocked the door, pulled it open, and was about to barge into the Snack Shack—no doubt to find something else to complain about.

  “Something else, Mr. Brown,” Padgett said.

  Frowning, Biff turned to face him. With his back turned, Mrs. Patel ducked under his arm and scurried past him into the Snack Shack. Biff turned and yelled at her to keep out. A sudden sharp thunk! rang out, and Mrs. Patel began screaming hysterically.

  Biff, who could see inside the door, turned pale, and his jaw fell in shock. Rose Noire, Padgett, and I leaped toward the door, shoving the frozen Biff aside.

  Mrs. Patel appeared unharmed, although she was curled in a ball in the far corner, screaming. Over her head, a foot-long machete blade was buried in the wall on our right, about five feet up from the ground. On a shelf on the opposite wall was a complicated metal gadget that looked like a cross between a crossbow and a giant mousetrap.

  “What the—” Padgett exclaimed.

  “A booby trap,” I said as I pulled out my phone. “I’m calling nine-one-one.”

  “You poor thing!” Rose Noire exclaimed, racing forward to comfort Mrs. Patel before I could shout out a warning about the possibility that there could be other booby traps. Fortunately there weren’t.

  The chief and several deputies were there in minutes. Rose Noire led Mrs. Patel away to the Eagles bleachers to be comforted by the rest of the team mothers and grandmothers.

  Not surprisingly, the chief declared our newly repainted Snack Shack a crime scene. I dispatched a brace of burly cousins with a truck to haul several of the folding tables from our house to the field.

  Biff stood rooted in place just outside the Snack Shack for fifteen or twenty minutes, staring through the doorway at the machete and muttering things like “that was meant for me,” and “I could have been killed.” After inspecting the machete and the device that had launched it, the chief went over to talk to him.

  “You see,” Biff said. “Someone is after me. I’m always the first one in the shack. If that woman hadn’t barged past me, I’d have been killed.”

  The chief just frowned and nodded. Biff did have a point. He was incredibly lucky that Mrs. Patel had barged past him. And we were all incredibly lucky that tiny little Mrs. Patel was on Snack Shack duty. If Rose Noire or I or any of the other team parents had walked into that booby trap, we might be dead by now.

  Eventually a couple of Stoat fathers came over and escorted Biff over to his team’s dugout. I felt bad for Biff. Not as bad as I felt for poor Mrs. Patel—but still, he’d had a shock.

  Dare we hope that he’d stay subdued once the game started? Probably not. Every time I glanced over at the Stoats’ dugout, he seemed more himself. Pity.

  The burly cousins returned with the tables and we set up a new outdoor Snack Shack about twenty feet from the old. Rose Noire recruited Janet Wong as a replacement for the still shaky Mrs. Patel, and the two of them began calmly selling chewing gum and bottles of water. Eagles fans in black and red dominated the crowd, but I could also see kids from other teams, especially the red-and-white uniforms of the Muckdogs and the River Rats in their yellow and gray, since they were playing right after the Eagles vs. Stoats game. And by the size of the crowd, I suspected half the town had come out to enjoy a day at the ballpark.

  Just before the game started, my cell phone rang. I looked down as I pulled it out and checked the caller ID. Festus Hollingsworth. Aha! My chance to ask my cousin about the tracking device. As I answered it, I looked around for someplace reasonably private to talk. About the only place in sight not packed with people was the far end of the clearing, beyond where Biff’s replacement porta-potty stood, so I headed that way.

  “Meg, thank you!” Festus said. “The Yoder farm is perfect!”

  “You’ve seen it already?”

  “Only your pictures and the county property records, but I can tell it’s exactly what I want, and although it’s not actually on the market yet, Mr. Yoder’s going to have to sell, which gives me the chance to make a deal with him. And you were absolutely right—Yoder’s been in litigation with the Brown Construction Company for five years now. Mr. Brown began a major renovation of the Yoder barn and then abandoned all work on it at a point when it was completely unusable. That hasn’t been Yoder’s only financial problem, but it’s probably the thing that drove him over the edge.”

  By this time I’d reached the general area of Biff’s porta-potty and taken my seat on a nearby fallen log. My retreat had the added advantage of letting me keep an eye on the Snack Shack, where the chief and Deputy Vern Shiffley stood, apparently watching Horace doing forensics on the booby trap.

  “Be nice to Mr. Yoder,” I said to Festus. “If he’s been in litigation with Biff for five years, he’s been through hell already.”

  “Don’t worry,” Festus said. “I have every intention of being nice to him, by which I assume you mean giving him a fair price for his farm. I don’t want every farmer in the county to hate me from the minute I arrive. Mr. Yoder is a very nice man, and I’m exactly what he’s been looking for—someone who can afford to buy his farm and has no intention of turning it into condominiums or a golf club or anything like that. In fact, when he asked me what I intended to do with the land, I told him that I didn’t intend to do anything except see if I could find someone to farm it for me. And he indicated he might be w
illing. And that’s perfect! I can look out my window and see cows and sheep and corn and whatever else farmers grow around here and not have to feed or plow anything myself.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “Assuming he’s still around to do the farming.”

  “He wants to stay around,” Festus said. “He’s got grandkids in the area.”

  “I’m sure he does,” I said. “But right now he’s definitely one of Chief Burke’s suspects in yesterday’s murder.” I explained about the uncanny resemblance between Biff and Shep and Mr. Yoder’s odd, surreptitious visit to Brown Construction. Festus remained quiet for a few long moments after I’d finished.

  “Troubling,” he said finally. “I can certainly testify that he’s angry enough at Mr. Brown.”

  “Angry enough to kill?” I asked.

  “Angry enough to be a suspect. If he gets arrested, let me know. I will find him a very good defense attorney. I don’t want to see anything get in the way of my—hmmm … buying the farm sounds a bit ominous. Purchasing it.”

  “Will do. By the way, in return for steering you to the farm, may I cadge a small bit of free legal advice. Not for me, actually.”

  “Absolutely.” Suddenly his voice had reverted to Festus Hollingsworth, Esquire.

  Chapter 19

  “Grandfather has a new toy,” I said. “His weasels have been regularly escaping from their habitat, so he’s attached tiny little geolocator tags to them. It not only helps him recapture them, but he can record data from the tags in his computers and use it to track the weasels’ movements and figure out how they’re escaping.”

  “I have a sinking feeling I know where this is going,” Festus said. “Please tell me your grandfather hasn’t decided to tag some human being whose whereabouts he wants to investigate.”

  “No, he hasn’t,” I said. “And I can’t imagine he ever would—when has Grandfather ever taken the slightest interest in the whereabouts of anything other than his beloved wildlife?”