The Money Bird (An Animals in Focus Mystery)

by Boneham, Sheila Webster

  “Tiffany dear, don’t do that.” True to form, her mother again made no move to restrain the child, and her voice was too tentative to have any effect. I thought back to my own mom, who in better days had brooked no nonsense from me or my brother, Bill, especially in public—clearly a different breed of mother from Mrs. Willard.

  The oblivious child was on tippy toes, reaching a hand above her head and into the drawer. I half hoped she’d accidentally jab herself with a syringe full of anaesthetic, although the possibility was remote since I knew from my tour of the clinic that they don’t keep syringes or drugs in the exam rooms. So, for the second time in five minutes, I gripped Tiffany’s chunky arm and pulled her away from trouble. Or so I thought.

  ten

  Trouble seems to be my new middle name. Not that I cause it. I just find it lately. I mean, how many photographers find blood-stained bags in idyllic settings or uncontrolled children in veterinary clinics? I was wondering whether I should switch my photographic specialty from living things to, oh, say, architecture when Dr. Joiner’s voice brought me back to the moment.

  “Is it broken?”

  Tiffany dear had yanked the drawer far enough out of its slot that it stuck when I tried to push it in. “I think just off track.” I released Tiffany’s arm and tried to give her the glare my mom used to use to scare the bejeepers out of me and Bill. Either I wasn’t as terrifying as Mom or Tiffany was gutsier than I was as a kid, because she glared right back at me. I was reluctant to turn my back on her—an instinct that turned out to be sound—but someone had to, so I squatted to examine the bottom of the injured storage unit. I pushed up on the handle and jiggled the drawer to the right, felt it fall back into the track, and tested it. “All better.”

  Tiffany stood against the wall, kicking the new paint with her heel. The hostile glare had been replaced by a chilling gaze that bespoke more plotting than an Agatha Christie collection. I thought the leash should be on Tiffany rather than Hummer, but knew that it would be every inch as ineffectual as it was with the pup as long as Mrs. Willard held its other end. In any case, the child’s mother hadn’t said a word as her daughter terrorized the exam room, and in the aftermath she looked calm as a sleeping dog. I wanted some of whatever she was taking.

  “Well, then, let’s have a look at this puppy.” Dr. Joiner talked a little too fast and smiled a little too cheerfully.

  I unsnapped Hummer’s leash and handed it to his owner. As I hoisted him onto the exam table, I checked the whereabouts of the demon child. She was still busy planting black scuff marks on the wall to my left.

  Dr. Joiner pronounced Hummer’s heart and lungs healthy, gave him his shots, and began to trim his nails. He wriggled and squirmed, alternating between licking Dr. Joiner’s face and trying to eat the clippers, so I encircled him with my arms to immobilize him, or at least slow him down. Unfortunately, holding him still made me a sitting duck.

  Come to think of it, I wish I had been sitting. As it happened, I was on my feet and leaning forward against the table to hold the puppy for his pedicure. Mrs. Willard sat on the bench, still filing her own broken nail and smiling like the Mona Lisa. And for a brief instant I had no idea where Tiffany dear had gotten to. Then, in the time it took to clip one puppy nail, little hands shot up under my smock, latched onto the top of my easy-waist pants—both pairs—and slid them down to my ankles.

  “Owww!” A sharp pain shot from my butt to my brain. I didn’t immediately recognize the sensation, but quickly realized it was caused by enamel penetrating flesh.

  “Wha …?” Dr. Joiner stepped back from the table, startled.

  “She bit me!”

  The vet glanced at Hummer’s distinctly male abdomen and looked confused. I pushed the puppy toward her, determined to free my hands so I could swat my assailant.

  Mrs. Willard stood at the end of the table, nail file in hand, staring at Hummer. “He bit you?” She turned enormous contact-turquoise eyes on me.

  “Not your dog!” I growled, craning my neck over my shoulder and running a hand over my complaining behind. “Your kid!”

  Tiffany dear was backed up to the wall again, grinning at me. For an instant, I could have sworn I saw long fangs dripping gore. I looked at my hand and showed the smear of red across my palm to Dr. Joiner. She scooped the bewildered looking Hummer into one arm and opened the door to the back room with the other. “We need some help here. Now!”

  I realized with horror that the only one who could be in the back room was Dr. Douglas. And before I could react to the thought, there he was.

  Dr. Joiner shoved Hummer into her husband’s arms and pushed the two of them toward the door to the waiting room. “Janet’s been bitten.” She grabbed Tiffany’s hand and hauled her away from the wall and toward her mother. “Paul, please keep the Willards out front for a few minutes.” To Vampira’s mother she said, “Make your daughter sit down and stay put.”

  Mrs. Willard gaped at the blood on my hand and, for the first time, came to life. “Oh my God!” She pulled her daughter to her. “She could get sick!” At first I thought she was concerned for me. Bites of any kind are dangerous, and a friend who runs a preschool had once told me that human bites that break the skin often result in horrifying infections.

  “I think I’m o …,” I started to say, but Mrs. Willard cut me off.

  “Have you been tested?” It was becoming clear that Tiffany got her weapons-grade screech from her mother. “Oh my God, Tiffany!”

  “Tested?” I asked.

  Dr. Joiner put a hand on Mrs. Willard’s shoulder and aimed her toward the door. “Your daughter just bit this woman and injured her. You could show a little concern for Janet.”

  Dr. Douglas seemed to be trying to catch up on the situation. “You got bitten?” He looked doubtfully at the puppy slurping happily at his chin. As he walked past the examining table, I bent over to pull my pants up under my almost-long-enough smock, confusing him even more.

  “The dog didn’t bite her,” said Dr. Joiner, “but watch out for the kid.” She gave her now-grinning partner a final nudge and pulled the door shut.

  “Okay, let me see.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine. She broke the skin. Let me see.”

  “No, rea …”

  She crossed her arms, cocked a hip, and waited, her green eyes daring me to object again. With a sigh, I pulled my pants back down to my knees and leaned forward against the steel tabletop.

  “Wow. That’s bigger than I expected.”

  “Hey!”

  “The bite. It needs a stitch or two, and antibiotics.”

  “Can’t you just clean it and stick a bandage on it?”

  She stood up and reached for some Betadine and a cotton pad. “I’ll clean it and tape a pad to it, and then you’re going to the ER.”

  “No!”

  “Don’t argue, Janet. I can’t treat you, and you know as well as I do that you don’t screw around with bites.” The muscles around my eyes and in my fanny flinched as Dr. Joiner dabbed at the wound. She taped a gauze pad bigger than some bikinis to me and signaled me to pull my pants up. “I should fire you, you know.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. How dare you flash my husband?”

  “Well, if you remember, I was shanghaied for this duty. You can’t fire a slave.”

  “Listen, we’ll pay for everything. Get HIV and hepatitis tests while you’re there. Wouldn’t be surprised if the Willards raise a fuss.”

  “But she bit me!”

  “Just trying to be proactive.”

  “Wow,” I said, looking at my blood-stained hand. “Just wow.”

  “I know.” She sighed. “I’ll have Peg drive you. Nancy will be in soon and she can get the phone.”

  “But …”

  Dr. Joiner signaled “stop” with her hand. “The only butt I’m interested in at the moment is yours. Get it taken care of.”

  eleven

  Peg laughed all the way to
Parkview Hospital. Or most of the way. She paused for a moment of outrage when I told her how Tiffany dear had ripped the poster and jammed the drawer, but my painful humiliation at the hands and jaws of Mrs. Willard’s demon spawn sent her into whoops of laughter.

  “I’m not laughing at you, you know,” she gasped between giggling sprees. “But you have to admit it’s pretty funny. Not that a kid who bites is funny, but …”

  I gave her a dirty look but she was watching the road and missed it, so I complained out loud. “It hurts like hell. That kid is headed for big trouble if you ask me.” My body listed toward the passenger window to spare my damaged cheek.

  “Yeah, they better wash her mouth out with soap so she doesn’t get sick.” She wiped at her eye.

  “Yuk yuk.” I thought about Dr. Joiner’s instructions. “Did Kerry tell you I need HIV and hepatitis tests?”

  Peg nodded, then grinned. “No wonder Dr. Douglas had that funny grin on his face when he came out!”

  “Great. I suppose this will be the topic of many a tasteless comment every time I come in for the next few months.”

  “Oh, more like years. You’ll be …” The rest of the sentence disappeared in an incoherent squeal that turned into more giggles. Peg finally got a grip and repeated in a voice two octaves too high, “You’re gonna be the butt of a lot of jokes.”

  I scowled out the window.

  Peg recovered some control and, aside from her periodic giggle, we rode in silence until I said, more or less to myself, “Treasures on Earth.”

  “Huh?”

  “Treasures on Earth Spiritual Renewal Center. Mrs. Willard’s pendant. It’s their logo.”

  “Never heard of it. But I think Mrs. Willard’s husband is a minister of some sort.” She seemed to be pondering something. “Wonder how a minister’s wife affords those clothes.”

  Mrs. Willard didn’t strike me as a seeker after spiritual enlightenment, but her duds certainly fit with the cars I had seen in the parking lot at the Center. I started to ask Peg what else she knew about the Willards, but the throbbing in my backside distracted me. “Why do these things always happen when my doctor’s office is closed?”

  “Same reason these things always happen to people’s pets when we’re closed.”

  Same reason we find suspicious items in the middle of nowhere during dog training sessions, I thought.

  Peg braked in front of the ER entrance.

  I winced as I straightened out of the car. A security guard young enough to have a scattering of pimples across his cheeks hustled up to the car. “Do you need a wheelchair, ma’am?”

  I wanted to slap him. When did I become a ma’am? “Thanks, but definitely not.” The last thing I wanted to do was sit down again, which of course is what the clerk told me to do while I gave her my information. Peg hustled in from parking the car and explained that she would be paying on behalf of the clinic.

  “What species of animal bit you?” The clerk’s hands hovered over her keyboard. Her short green nails matched the beads at the ends of hundreds of tiny braids hanging from neat cornrows, and her name tag dubbed her LaFawn.

  “Homo sapiens.”

  She started to type, apparently on autopilot, and then stared at me as the information sank in.

  “A person bit you?”

  “Yes.”

  She gaped at me. “Why?”

  “Because I’m so sweet?” I shrugged, and sighed. “Because she’s a little brat.”

  LaFawn snorted and her beads clacked as she shook her head in disgust. “What did her mama do?”

  “Not much. She was injured earlier.” LaFawn’s eyebrows rose. “Broke a nail.”

  Another snort, then back to work. “Where were you bitten?”

  “All Paws Veterinary Clinic.”

  She looked at me as if I had a brain injury. “Where on your body?”

  “Oh.” My hand went involuntarily to my left buttock. “My butt.” I could tell she was trying hard to suppress the grin that played along the edges of her glossy red lips. “Go ahead and laugh at me. Everyone else has.”

  LaFawn leaned across her desk, a conspiratorial smile lighting her face. “I got bit in the butt once.” Pregnant pause. “By a skeeter.” LaFawn and Peg cracked up. I gave the clerk my best dirty look and she adjusted herself in her chair, cleared her throat, and wriggled her fingers in preparation. “Okay then! Are you taking any medications?” And so on.

  LaFawn directed us to follow the blue line down the hall and around the corner to where we would find a waiting area. She tried to insist that I occupy a wheelchair for the journey, but I was more insistent that I wasn’t interested in sitting down just yet, and off we went, one of us limping and the other still grinning her face off. A whirl of color flew into my peripheral vision as we passed another long corridor labeled Nuclear Medicine, and I turned to see a figure in white slacks and a loose-fitting tunic striped lemon, lime, and strawberry. What stopped me mid-stride was a vision of silver braids looped over the woman’s crown, but the vision disappeared through a doorway before I could call her name.

  Goldie.

  My feet seemed to take root as I stood at the intersection of the hallways. A series of images slid through my mind and suddenly took on a meaning I had pushed away for months, although I had suspected that something was off. I flashed on Goldie buying mountains of vitamins and herbals at the co-op last spring. Saw palmetto. Green tea. Cat’s claw. Goldie looking thin and pale. Tired, though she tried to hide it. What was it Tom wanted to tell me? He had left shortly after Goldie arrived the night before, saying he’d stop by late this afternoon after he showed Detective Jo where we’d found the bag at Heron Acres.

  “Janet?” Peg had stopped and turned toward me, and all the jokes had abandoned her. “What’s wrong? Are you faint?”

  The warmth of her hands on my arms unfroze my feet, and I let her steer me into the waiting room, but I still refused to sit. I fished my cell phone out of my purse, but the battery was dead. “Give me your cell.” She handed it over and I tried Tom’s office, cell, and home numbers, and left “call me’s” with Peg’s number on all three. I figured I would update the message as soon as I was near a working phone of my own.

  The image of Goldie walking into that room wouldn’t get out of my head, and within minutes I had assured myself that nothing was wrong. She was probably there for a mammogram. She was fanatical about getting them, on time, once a year. And since spring she’d been slathering on high-test sun screen whenever she was out, so no wonder she looked pale compared to past summers. As for the supplements, she’d been into herbal therapies for forty years. I told myself she’d just been stocking up.

  Peg leafed through every year-old magazine in the waiting room and gently relieved one of a recipe. I paced the floor and had put in several miles by the time someone could see me eighty minutes later. The nurse got me into a gown and situated face down on the exam table. I thought I’d be relieved to get the ordeal over with, but when the doctor walked into the room and I heard his name, I wished I had simply treated my injury with copious amounts of alcohol, taken internally.

  twelve

  “You know how sometimes something you once wanted finally shows up at the worst possible moment?” I was sprawled on my stomach, a position I seemed to be assuming a lot lately. At least I was on my own bed and fully clothed this time. I was nose to nose with Jay, holding the phone with one hand and popping chocolate chips into my mouth with the other. In deference to my current weight-loss attempt I had stripped my cupboards of junk food, but twenty minutes of scrounging had turned up half a bag of these little darlings.

  Goldie was still ranting about “some people’s children” and I wasn’t sure she’d heard me, but I plowed on.

  “So there I was, in one of those stylish hospital gowns, belly down on an exam table with goose bumps all over my bare behind ’cause it was freezing in there, and in walks the doctor.”

  “I bet it wasn’t a woman, huh?”


  “Oh no.”

  “Probably not a kindly old fart either, huh?”

  “In your dreams.”

  “Greek god?”

  “Close.”

  “So, tell me.”

  “Neil Young.”

  “The singer?”

  “High school heartthrob.”

  “Ohmygod! Neil the Hunk?” I had mentioned my girlhood lust for Neil to Goldie before. “He’s a doctor?” She squealed the last two words.

  “That, or he just plays one in the emergency room.”

  Goldie seemed to have caught Peg’s laughing disease, so I fiddled with Jay’s ear until the hooting on the other end of the line subsided.

  “So, Goldie, what were you doing at Parkview?”

  Silence.

  “Goldie?”

  “Oh, sorry, I’m making tea, trying to reach the oolong at the back of the cupboard.”

  Uh huh. “So, Parkview?”

  “Just some routine blood work. Annual physical, all that jazz.”

  Something was very wrong here, and although the frightened mortal part of me didn’t want to know what it was, the friend part of me did. “Goldie …”

  She cut me off. “So tell me more. You’ve wanted Neil Young’s paws on your bare tush since you were sixteen. What an opportunity!”

  “Goldie …” I thought of pressing for more information. Then I decided maybe the phone wasn’t the best medium for such a conversation and shifted back to my own story for the moment. “I haven’t exactly been holding a torch for him all these years.”

  Jay inched forward, pointing his twitching nose toward the diminishing pile of chocolate chips and flicking his gaze back and forth between them and me.

  “You can’t have chocolate.” I snarfed the last few chips to save him from possible poisoning. Theobromine, a chemical found in chocolate, is toxic for dogs. It’s the one reason I might hesitate to become fully canine, given the chance.

  “Why can’t I have chocolate?” Goldie sounded confused.