by J. R. Ripley
Rat-a-tat-tat-brrr! My heart skipped a beat.
The smaller man stooped and lifted the other man, pushing him up. The larger man put up no struggle. Was he unconscious? Was he dead?
A moment later, the smaller man heaved. His victim fell silently, tumbling like a sack filled with wet straw, from the upstairs window to the ground below. If he wasn’t dead before, he most certainly was now.
I gasped. The startled red-bellied woodpecker took flight. I ran to the phone.
2
“What on earth?” my mother exclaimed as I came running into Wthe kitchen.
“Phone!” I cried. “Where’s the phone?”
Mom set the coffee carafe back on the warming plate. “Right here.” She lifted the portable phone from the base on the corner of the counter and handed it to me.
The landline doubled as the Birds & Bees business line. I punched in 911 and reported what I’d seen. Mom looked at me gape-jawed.
I dropped the phone on the counter and pressed my face against the cool window. The rain was letting up. If I turned my head just right, I could make out the McKutcheon house from this vantage.
Mom poured two cups of coffee and handed one to me. She cinched her robe around her waist, sat and motioned for me to do the same. “You saw some man throw another man out a window?” There was shock, surprise, and maybe a smidgen of disbelief in her voice.
My hand trembled as I lifted the cup to my lips and sipped. “Yes. I mean, at first I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. But it was definitely a couple of people fighting.” I took a steadying drink. The coffee was black and unsweetened but I didn’t mind for a change.
Mom broke off a piece of her breakfast cookie. “At the McKutcheon house? Across the lake?”
I nodded and glanced out the window. How long would it take the police to reach the house?
“I thought the old place was empty,” Mom said. “What were you doing looking at the McKutcheon house?”
I turned back to my mother. I felt terrible to be causing her any concern or alarm. Mom’s got muscular dystrophy and, though it is still very manageable, I was concerned for her health and didn’t want to say or do anything that might cause her undue stress.
Unfortunately, in practice, I seemed to be doing the opposite despite my good intentions. “I’m sure it’s nothing.” I patted Mom’s hand. “Jerry will get it all sorted out.” Jerry Kennedy was Ruby Lake’s chief of police. I didn’t exactly have the highest opinion of him, but then, his opinion of me wasn’t exactly the stuff upon which friendships are formed.
I explained to Mom how I had picked up the binoculars to watch our resident alarm clock, then happened to be perusing Ruby Lake for further bird sightings. I kept a chalkboard behind the counter in the store where I and anyone else could post local bird sightings on a weekly basis.
“Ah, Drummy.” Mom smiled. Drummy was the name we’d given to what we had come to think of as our woodpecker. After all, if he was going to come around every morning, noon, and night giving us a solo drum performance, he might as well have a name.
Curses are much more personal if you can attach a name to them.
Mom slid the package of breakfast cookies my way. She’d begun eating one of the prepackaged oatmeal raisin cookies each morning with her coffee since discovering them in the cereal aisle in the market a month ago.
I declined. “I don’t think I could eat a thing.” My stomach was churning. I thrummed my fingers against the kitchen table as I glanced at the clock on the wall. “How long do you think before we hear something?”
“You need to be patient, Amy.” Mom is a retired high school teacher and still knows how to talk to me, when necessary, like I’m a troubled teenaged student in need of a calming, steadying, grown-up influence, instead of the mature thirty-four-year-old woman my driver’s license claims I am. Dad passed away a while back and Mom and I shared the third-floor apartment above Birds & Bees. “I’m sure Jerry will call us the minute he has the situation under control.”
I stood and began pacing. “I don’t think I can stand to wait.”
Mom grinned. “I can call Anita if you like.” Anita Brown is one of my mother’s best friends, pinochle partner and, more importantly in this case, part-time dispatcher for the Ruby Lake Police Department. If anybody else knew what was happening, Anita would.
The doorbell interrupted my answer. I opened the door. “Esther?” Esther Pilaster, or “Esther the Pester” and “Esther Pester” as I sometimes interchangeably referred to her, was a tenant of mine. She came with the house when I bought it and, until her lease was up, I was stuck with her. Her apartment was on the second floor of Birds & Bees.
“You’ve got company,” snapped Esther. Esther is a long-in-the-tooth spinster in her seventies. Narrow shoulders only barely supported the flowery dress she wore. She’s a small woman with a hawkish nose, sagging eyelids, and silver ponytail. Wispy white eyebrows topped off a pair of rheumy gray-blue eyes that looked at me funny. “Hey! What’s that? Kittens?”
“What?”
She pointed a crooked finger at my pajama top. “Your jammies are covered in kittens.” She squinted at me. “I thought you said you didn’t like cats?”
I tugged at my pjs and blushed. “I’m allergic to cats, Esther. I never said I didn’t like them.”
Footsteps pounded up the steps. “What the devil is going on up here?” Chief Kennedy’s head appeared at the top of the stairs. His cap was damp and dripping.
“Jerry—Chief Kennedy.” I pulled my collar closed.
He took off his cap and thumped it against the side of his thigh. “If you’re not coming down, I’m coming up.” The chief pushed past me and Esther and into my apartment. “You got coffee?”
“Please”—I cleared my throat—“come on in,” I said, hoping the sarcasm wasn’t too heavily laced. I wanted to learn what he’d discovered at the McKutcheon house, so this wasn’t the time to start sparring with the man.
“Thank you, Esther,” I said, turning to my renter. “Shouldn’t you be prepping the store for opening? Thank you.” I shut the door on her before she could object.
Not only was I stuck with Esther the Pester as a tenant, I was now stuck with her as an employee of Birds & Bees. That was Mom’s fault. Mom figured I needed more help around the store, as if she and my best friend, Kim Christy, weren’t enough assistance.
To tell the truth, Mom was right. Somehow, I seemed to be spending as much time out of Birds & Bees as I did within. Mom had made the executive decision to hire Esther part-time. As much as it irritated me, it made sense. And, so far, Esther had been a pretty decent employee. Sales were up. I was pretty sure that was because customers were afraid of her. But, hey, a sale’s a sale.
“Dammit, Mrs. Simms,” I heard Jerry say as I crossed the living room to the kitchen, “I mean, no disrespect, but that daughter of yours is daft as a brush and half as useful!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I shot back, feeling my pulse quicken. Jerry has a way of making my blood boil faster than most—dropping me in a cauldron of boiling oil wouldn’t heat me up any faster than Jerry did. “Name calling? That’s the thanks I get for reporting a crime?”
Jerry snorted. “Crime?” His two-tone brown uniform was sodden, especially around the shoulders and cuffs. He’d left a trail of wet footprints across the floor. That meant there’d be mopping in my future today. Oh, joy.
Mom handed Jerry a steaming coffee mug. “Drink this. You’ll feel better.” Mom had been one of Jerry’s teachers in high school. Neither of us would have suspected he’d grow up to be Ruby Lake’s chief of police one day. Personally, I wasn’t so sure Jerry would ever grow up mentally.
“The only crime is that you wasted a perfectly good morning sending me out on a wild goose chase, Amy Simms!”
I threw out my chest. “Wild goose chase? That’s what you call reporting a murder, Jerry?”
Jerry twisted one of the kitchen chairs around and threw himself down in it ba
ckwards. He thumped his mug against the table. “There is no crime, Simms.”
Mom slid the plate of cellophane-wrapped breakfast cookies the chief’s way. She’s become a real proponent of them. Jerry wasted no time peeling one out of its wrapper and wolfing it down.
He slapped at his trousers. “My squad car’s filthy. I’m filthy. It’s storming out, in case you didn’t realize. And it’s a dirt road out around the lake to the McKutcheon homestead.”
Mom took a seat and said calmly, “Tell us what you found, Jerry.”
Jerry huffed. “The place is a hostel of some sort.”
“Hostile?” I jumped in. “You see? I told you there was something nefarious going on over there.”
“I didn’t say they were hostile.” The chief growled. “I said they’re running a hostel. H-O-S-T-E-L. All sorts of foreigners and such running around over there.”
“You mean like a bed and breakfast?” Mom inquired.
Jerry shrugged. “Young fellow at the door called it a hostel, so hostel it is. Guster McKutcheon is running it. He wasn’t home.”
“Guster McKutcheon,” Mom said thoughtfully. “I’m not sure I remember him. Who were his folks?”
“I’ve no idea,” answered Chief Kennedy. “Apparently he works out at the diner. Nobody at the house knew anything about a murder. And there was no body!”
“But—”
Jerry’s hand chopped through the air between us. “Not on the ground, not in the house, not in the air circling the property like a freaking pigeon! Do you have any idea how big a fool you made me look, Amy?”
I was pretty sure Jerry didn’t need my help in that department but knew better than to say so. Mom shot me a warning look just in case. “I know what I saw, Jerry.”
“Maybe you were hallucinating.” He stuck his nose in my face. “Your eyes are red. Are you hung over?”
“Of course, not!” I backed away. I may have had the teeniest bit too much to drink last night and I may have had a teeny bit too little sleep but still, I knew what saw.
Jerry leaned across the table toward me. “Explain to me how you happened to see anything at all?” He shook his arm at the window. “The McKutcheon place must be a mile away from here.”
I looked at my mother for support. “We were bird watching,” Mom said.
“Bird watching!” Jerry chuckled. “Lord, I had no idea what this town was getting into when you came back and opened that silly store of yours.” I refrained from protesting because no good could come of it.
He thumped his fist and the table jumped an inch. “Sorry, Mrs. Simms,” the chief said, grabbing a paper napkin from the vintage brass holder on the table and wiping up the few drops of coffee that had spilled from his cup. He squinted at my mother. “Do you mean you saw this so-called murder, too?”
Oh, sure, if my mother, his former history teacher, says she saw a murder, he’d be all over that.
“Actually, no,” admitted Mom. “You see, Amy was holding the binoculars.” Oh, well. She’d tried.
Jerry nodded as if everything was now clear as day, though not this rainy morning.
“Then what was that I saw being tossed down if not a man?”
“Junk,” replied Jerry Kennedy. “Plain and simple. Nothing but junk. At the time of your so-called fight, a couple of the youngsters were cleaning out that upstairs room the fastest way possible—tossing garbage out the window. The roof’s got a leak and water was getting in. Same thing in the barn. Several others were out there in the barn covering some boxes of supplies with plastic.
“There was a whole pile of trash on the ground outside the window when I arrived. Bits of furniture, piles of newspapers, clothes and,” he screwed up his eyes at me, “even an old dressmaker dummy.”
“But, I saw—”
Jerry interrupted. “The kid at the house explained that the room had been used to store all kinds of stuff. They’re turning the room back into a bedroom.”
He turned to my mother as if she was the only one even worth trying to explain anything to. “You should see the place, Mrs. Simms. There are a bunch of young foreigners staying there. Some of them barely spoke English.”
Mom rose and started a fresh pot of coffee. “I had no idea one of the McKutcheons had come back to town. It will be nice to see the house come alive again.”
“Come alive?” I couldn’t help quipping. “Mom, somebody only this morning got defenestrated there.”
Jerry looked nonplussed.
“It means thrown out a window, Jerry,” I filled in.
Jerry’s only reply was an eye roll.
“Look, I don’t know what you saw.” Jerry stood and shoved a couple packs of breakfast cookies in his trousers. I waited eagerly for Mom to berate him, but she didn’t. She’s way too nice to the man.
“Maybe you saw a big old bird,” Jerry said. “Maybe you saw the wind shaking the branches.” He wiggled his arms for effect. “It was storming out pretty good. Hell, maybe you saw the widow in the lake!”
Everyone in town knew the story of the widow in the lake. The story goes that she’d drowned herself after her husband was murdered by marauders around the time of the Civil War. She’d laid a curse on the men and they had died one by one, each death more hideous than the previous.
After the last man died, she walked into the lake and disappeared. Some say she still rises from the center of the lake once a year, on the anniversary of her husband’s death. Today was not that day. I pursed my lips. At least, I didn’t think today was the day.
“All I do know is that you did not see one man throw another man out that window.” Chief Kennedy was pointing across Ruby Lake at the McKutcheon house. He headed for the apartment door and threw it open. “Nice jammies, by the way!”
My cheeks burned as I slammed the door and turned the lock in case Jerry decided to come back. Mom offered me a third cup of coffee and I didn’t refuse it. I carried my steaming mug to the kitchen window and looked out. The sky was brightening now. In a couple of hours, we might actually get some sunshine.
“Maybe Jerry’s right,” Mom said, coming up behind me. “Maybe your eyes were playing tricks on you. It was early. You were tired. The storm.”
I exhaled deeply, turned, and smiled. “You know, I hate it when you’re right.”
“I know.”
“And I doubly hate to even think that Jerry Kennedy could be right.”
Mom chuckled. “You don’t have to tell me that, Amy. How was your date last night?”
“Great.” I couldn’t resist smiling at the memory. “How was yours?” I knew she’d had a date of her own with Ben Harlan last night. It was a little funny and maybe a little weird that she happened to be dating Ben and I happened to be dating his son.
Mom deftly evaded the question and fingered my lapel. “Shouldn’t you be getting dressed and down to the store? I hate to think of Esther being stuck down there opening up all alone.”
I handed Mom my mug. Thoughts of Esther running around the store unsupervised took precedence over nearly everything else, including dating gossip. “Me too.” Who knew what trouble the Pester might get into?
I took a quick shower, then brushed my teeth and hair—puzzling at the frazzled brown-haired, blue-eyed woman in the mirror as I did so. Were Jerry and Mom right? Had my imagination run away with me? I threw on a comfortable pair of slacks and a red Birds & Bees logoed polo shirt.
Before leaving the bedroom, I picked up the binoculars from the bed where I’d dropped them in my hurry to telephone the police. I retrained them on the house across the lake. There was nothing out of the ordinary going on. A couple of lights were on upstairs and down. The rain had diminished to nothing more than a fine drizzle that created a gloomy pall over the lake.
Somewhere deep in those waters, the bones of the widow in the lake were said to be stirring restlessly. I could picture her white skeleton rolling along the lake floor in search of a peace that would never come.
The storm had quieted,
the wind had died. As I laid the binocs back atop the dresser, I couldn’t help wondering if someone else had died this morning too.
3
“Amy, dear, before you go, I was hoping we could have a little talk.” Mom sat in the big chair next to the sofa, a copy of the Ruby Lake Weekender, our town’s small local paper, in her lap. She was still in her robe. Mom had been letting her unnaturally blonde hair grow out. Soon it would be a similar shade of chestnut to my own hair. I could see a lot of myself in her as she reverted to her natural color.
“Can it wait, Mom?” I said. “Esther’s probably opened by now. Plus, there’s a delivery truck due.”
Mom opened her mouth, tapped the thin newspaper against her leg. There’s not a lot of news in Ruby Lake—not that that’s a bad thing. “Of course, dear. I’ll be down a little later myself.”
“Tell me, do you believe in this whole widow in the lake thing that Jerry was blathering about?”
Mom shook her head. “A town like Ruby Lake has a lot of local stories. I’m not that familiar with this one though the story has cropped up now and again.” She pointed a finger at me. “I’m a historian, remember, so I believe in facts, not fairy tales. If I’m remembering correctly, anecdotal evidence does suggest that a crime was committed, a woman’s husband brutally murdered.
“Perhaps she even committed suicide afterward. I doubt we’ll ever know the entire story. There was no one around to tweet then or post the news on Facebook or some blog.” Mom leaned forward. “Why? You didn’t see the widow in the lake too, did you?”
“No!” Thank heavens.
“Then I’d worry about the lady running around downstairs in Birds and Bees and not the widow in the lake,” Mom said with a big grin.
Esther. “Thanks.” I planted a kiss on her warm cheek and headed downstairs.
There’s a small kitchenette and seating area where customers can have a drink or a snack and peruse some of the bird literature, books, and magazines I keep available on a built-in wooden bookshelf between a pair of rocking chairs. I found Esther hovering over the kitchen sink. She’d added a green Birds & Bees logoed apron to her ensemble.