The Money Bird (An Animals in Focus Mystery)

by Boneham, Sheila Webster

  I didn’t want to trudge through the brush to cross the island—too many burrs and a lot more biting insects in the center—so I took the longer path along the shore. I had tramped around this place enough to know that there was a stretch of lower-growing vegetation a five-minute walk to the east, so that’s where I was headed. I would cut inland to Tom’s parrot-watching post from there.

  It didn’t take long until I was dripping again, and it wasn’t lake water. Hope Tom hasn’t drunk all the water, I thought, my mouth feeling sticky and dry in the evening heat. The island was usually cooler than the mainland, but now it seemed warmer. For a moment I considered stripping down to my undies and going for a swim, but what would be the point? I’d sweat up again as soon as I got back with the program. I kept walking.

  I could hear dogs barking again, but wasn’t sure they were mine. Mine? The thought surprised me, but I realized that I was indeed starting to think of Drake as my dog. Our dog. Not just his dog. I wondered whether Tom thought of Jay and Leo as our dog and cat. Maybe I’d ask him. Maybe not. From where I stood, I couldn’t see the x-pen anymore. I was about to backtrack for a look, but they weren’t barking, so I went on. I could always go back to stay with the dogs after I checked in with Tom. Besides, George would be back soon.

  The island had a slight elevation gain from shore to sycamore, and I had reached the area where the taller leg-grabbing grasses and weeds gave way to low-growing varieties. I turned inland and looked in the direction of the fallen trunk where we had sat earlier that afternoon, and where we had left Tom watching the parrot. There was no sign of him, but if he was sitting on the ground, that made sense. I glanced at the sycamore. The birdcage still hung from the branch, empty as before. I scanned the branches above the one supporting the cage, but saw no parrot. Had he gotten scared, or bored, or hungry, and flown off ? Then a movement caught my eye, and I shifted my focus to a scarlet figure hunched on the end of the branch from which the cage was suspended. He’d moved down. Our luck is changing, I thought, and smiled.

  If I walked directly to where I expected Tom to be, I would have to pass almost under the cage, and I was afraid that would drive the parrot away. I’ll just have to deal with the burrs, I thought, and took a detour away from the sycamore and through thicker, taller brush. Finally I reached the log.

  No sign of Tom. I couldn’t imagine why he would leave his post. If the parrot went for the food in the cage, Tom needed to pull the door shut. He wouldn’t miss the chance, I was sure. Not after sitting out here all afternoon. I looked around, but everything was quiet. I stepped up close to the tree trunk and took inventory. The canvas bag that George had used to carry his parrot-catching kit was there, as were a couple of empty water bottles. I sat down on the log to think. A deep-voiced dog started to bark. Drake? That seemed out of character, so maybe it wasn’t him at all. Sound can be deceptive out in the country, especially over water.

  When I swung my legs over the log and turned to face the other direction, I noticed a path through the brush. It was not a worn walking trail, but a line of broken vegetation, as if something had been dragged through the grass and flowers. The barking had stopped again, and everything else seemed to go still as well. All I could hear was a faint buzzing of insects. Heat, moisture, bugs, clear sky. All the parts were assembled for a peaceful, lazy summer evening, and yet something about it felt wrong.

  Was that there earlier? I wondered, staring at the disrupted vegetation before me. I didn’t think so. Had Tom walked through there? Follow, came a voice from somewhere inside me, and I felt a tiny tremor under my sternum. I didn’t like the feeling at all, but I slowly slid off the log and stepped toward the brush. As I got closer, it became clear that vegetation had been crushed under a weight, as if someone had walked through here very recently. Deer, maybe? I stopped to orient myself, and realized that if I walked from where

  I stood straight through to the lake, I’d reach the water in about ten yards. It had to be the shortest path to the water. Maybe the doe and fawn had swum across from the other side.

  Follow.

  I took a couple of steps into the brush. The path zigged to the left for a few feet, then zagged to the right. And then, when I made the second turn, my heart jumped into my mouth. A baseball bat lay half hidden, as if someone had dropped it, and the path beyond widened, vegetation flattened to form a path about eighteen inches wide. And there was something else, something that wrapped a piano wire of fear around my throat and stifled the scream that tried to rise from my throat.

  fifty-four

  The bat was lightweight, and small. A child’s bat, I thought, as I stepped over it and leaned to pick up the object that had stopped my breathing. It was a shoe, and not a child’s. A man’s shoe. Tom’s. The lace was still tied. A green stain ran from the back of the heel down to the sole, where it feathered out and died, as if the back of the shoe had been dragged through the grass top first. I looked at the flattened vegetation leading down the shallow slope and considered the shoe again. As if he were dragged and his shoe pulled off, I thought.

  The garrote that had tightened around my throat at the sight of that shoe slipped down to my heart. I started to follow the trail of crushed plants, then backtracked and picked up the bat. It was small, but better than nothing. I walked fast but didn’t run. I knew I needed to hurry for Tom’s sake, but I didn’t want to give myself away by making a lot of noise, which was almost inevitable with all the dry sticks in this area.

  After about a minute, the path turned forty-five degrees to the left, and it made another similar turn soon after that. The slope toward the water was a bit steeper here, and covered with scrub willow that blocked my view. I couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead of me, although the drag path was still easy to follow as it wound through the trees. Finally I reached the break between willow and grass and had a clear view to the water.

  The first thing that caught my eye was across the water on the mainland. The x-pen. As if on cue at my arrival, the panel nearest the water tipped over and the whole affair flipped on its face and went flat. As it did, the solar sheet whooshed into the air, and Drake shot out from between the prone panels and made for the lake like a furred cannonball.

  My brain registered everything, and what must have been only a few seconds of elapsed time seemed like long minutes. My eyes tracked Drake’s trajectory and landed on a glittering wake, its leading point aimed to my right. The light shifted, and I saw the swimmer. Jay. He must have jumped out of the x-pen. He was a strong swimmer and was coming fast, and even from this distance I could see that he was hell-bent on whatever he was after.

  I tracked to the right. My heart skipped again and then went into overdrive. I dropped the bat and started to run.

  A tall figure in a blue shirt and a baseball cap was dragging Tom, who was clearly unconscious, into the water. But he’s supposed to be in custody, I thought. Or getting bailed out. What is he doing here? And why did they let him go? Why? Why?

  Running has never been my strong suit. I run for exercise, but it’s a jogging sort of run. Slow. I’m not a sprinter. As I angled down the slope toward the beach, my legs seemed to be wrapped in chains. It was like one of those dreams in which your feet are mired in goo, except that I was awake. My legs just couldn’t move fast enough.

  Tom was in the water, not moving, his assailant dragging him deeper and deeper. I could see that they were both soaking wet now, Tom floating still but seeming to ride lower in the water as his clothing took on weight. The blue shirt on his assailant was wet halfway up the torso, then to the shoulders, swimming, pulling Tom into deeper water. Letting him go.

  “No!” I didn’t know I had screamed until I heard the sound of my own voice. I wasn’t fast enough. I wasn’t going to make it.

  The figure in the blue shirt was waist deep now. Thigh deep. Knees. Coming out of the lake. I didn’t care, couldn’t look anywhere but at the figure floating on the dark water. Tom.

  He moved. Rolled. I saw his fac
e come out of the water, I was sure I did, but the next time I looked he was still again. Floating.

  I registered movement in my peripheral vision. Both sides. Something moving toward Tom offshore. And something to my right, coming my way. I hit the water at a run, felt the soft ooze of the lake’s floor give way beneath my shoes and slide my feet out from under me. Left alone, I could have righted myself, but something hit me from behind, across the small of my back. The muck beneath me threw my feet away, and I fell into the shallow water.

  I pulled my knees under me, slipping against the gooey bottom but finding a purchase and pushing myself almost upright. I took a step, seeking water deep enough to hold me, deep enough to let me swim, but something caught my hair and the back of my shirt and pulled me onto my back. I tried to sit up, but hands shoved against my shoulders and forced me under the shallow water. My hair was glued across my eyes. I couldn’t see, so I sent my hand straight up, coming close to a direct hit. I felt the heel of my hand strike bone and thought I heard a gasp.

  My experience with animals sometimes comes through at odd times, and this was one of the oddest. As I fought, I flashed on the principle of zero resistance. If you try to push a dog’s rear end down into a sit, he pushes back. But if you entice him to raise his head for a treat or a toy, his butt naturally goes down. I didn’t intend to give my attacker a treat, but maybe I could use lack of resistance as a weapon. Don’t the martial arts use the attacker’s weight and momentum against him? I wasn’t trained, but still, maybe I could make the principle work.

  Hands grabbed my shoulders. I sucked in as much air as I could, knowing I was going under again. The hands shoved me down, and the force of the action knocked some of the air out of my lungs. My hair drifted away from my eyes and I looked up at my attacker and tried for another punch to the face, but my arms were too short to make contact. Thumbs dug under my collarbone and fingernails pressed into the tops of my shoulders. The pain almost knocked the rest of the air out of me, but I held on. I dug my heels into the slippery mud beneath me and pushed. My feet slipped away from me, but I got just enough traction to scoot my body a few inches, and that was enough to make blue shirt slip and fall toward me. I rolled with the pressure of the extra weight and got loose. Frantic, I splashed a couple of strokes and then stood up. The water was only halfway up my calves, and I was facing away from the island, toward Tom. He was floating on his back, but didn’t seem to be doing anything else.

  I started to move toward him, but instinct made me turn around. Through the entire encounter, I had Rich Campbell’s face in my mind, but that was not the face that glared back at me now, and they were not Campbell’s hands that held a huge piece of driftwood like a baseball bat and started to swing it at my head.

  The water in front of me exploded and the figure in the blue shirt pinwheeled, hand releasing the stick, legs bowled out from under the body by seventy pounds of muscle, heart, and black fur. Drake. Tom always said that for a Lab, life is a contact sport, and I guess that applied to defensive maneuvers, too. Drake wheeled around and came back. I grabbed one of the blue-shirted wrists and told Drake, “Take it!” He closed his mouth over the wrist, and I said, “Hold it!” Then I turned to drag Tom out of the water.

  I was too late.

  fifty-five

  “Janet! Tom!”

  At least three voices were yelling our names. I looked down the beach, toward the source of the noise. George was running, flanked by detectives Jo Stevens and Homer Hutchinson. Persephone Swann, her blue shirt ripped and her baseball cap gone, sat very still in the shallow water, her arm held in Drake’s soft but inescapable grip. He would hold on until Tom or I told him to let go, and every time Persephone tried to move, I could see Drake tighten his hold.

  I sat on the beach with Tom’s head in my lap. Jay was pressed against Tom’s other side, his chin on Tom’s chest and worry bright in his eyes. Tom smiled at me and said, “Thought at first that I’d died and gone to the arms of an angel, but I don’t think I’d have such a blazing headache if that were the case.”

  “Don’t even joke about it,” I said, working harder than I wanted to admit not to dissolve into hysterics.

  “Janet!” It was Hutchinson. He was standing in the water next to Persephone and Drake. He had one of Persephone’s wrists in his handcuffs, and he said, “How do I get the other wrist away from the dog?”

  “Drake, out!” I said.

  He spat Persephone’s wrist from his mouth and wheeled toward us all in one motion. In typical Labrador fashion, he slid into us, throwing sand into my hair, and started licking Tom’s face and whining. Jay had jumped out of the way when he saw Drake coming, and now the two of them seemed ready to play wrestle-and-belly-rubs with Tom the way they did at home.

  “Guys! Settle!” I said. It took two more commands to get them to listen, but they finally lay down, each being sure to keep at least one paw in contact with Tom.

  George and Jo knelt beside us.

  “Jeez, man, are you okay?” asked George.

  “I will be, thanks to nurse Janet.” Tom squeezed my hand and turned to me. “So let me get this straight. Jay, who is by rights not a water dog, dragged me out of the lake, and Drake, who is a water dog and not a protection dog, tackled Persephone and held her for the police?”

  “That’s about it,” I said. I looked at Jo and asked, “She’s Campbell’s girlfriend, right? That’s what Giselle told me.”

  “Was. I suspect the relationship is probably over.” Jo had a funny little smile on her face.

  “Why is that?” asked George.

  “Campbell asked for a deal. He gave her up.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, enjoying the warmth of Tom’s hand in mine more than I ever had before.

  “They’ve been pals for years, it seems. Met in the East. New Canaan, Connecticut.” I remembered Giselle saying that Persephone had lived on the East Coast for years, in “New something. “He’s a liar and a thief, but it seems Persephone is the killer.”

  “She killed Anderson?” I asked, and turned to glare at Persephone.

  “So Campbell says. He claims to have evidence. And he says Anderson wasn’t the first.” Jo looked at Tom. “Might not have been the last, but thank God …” She stopped mid-sentence, but touched Tom’s arm, then went on. “Anyway, seems Rich had an old girlfriend …”

  “Liesl,” said George.

  “Right. Liesl Burkhardt. Apparently they’d had a bad breakup, and he wanted to see her, tell her he was sorry, make amends.” George snorted, and Jo looked at him with an eyebrow raised, then continued. “That’s his story, anyway. So Persephone found out he had been to see Liesl, and went off the deep end. Or actually knocked Liesl off the deep end. Slipped her a Mickey and threw her into a lake on Cape Cod.”

  Tom wriggled himself into a sitting position.

  “You sure you should be moving?” asked Jo. “We’ve called for an ambulance to take you out of here.”

  “Nah, it’s just a bump.” He reached up and rubbed the back of his head.

  “With a baseball bat!” My voice cracked at the end.

  “Cancel the ambulance,” said Tom.

  I nodded at Jo. “I’ll drive him to the hospital and hit him again if he doesn’t let them look him over. Just help me get him out of here.” I changed the subject. “The smuggling? Was that why Moneypenny brought him here?”

  “We’re still looking into it, but I don’t think Moneypenny knew about the smuggling or the endangered birds,” said Jo. “I think he really wanted to run an educational aviary and a bird rescue, and hired the wrong guy.” She paused. “Turns out he’s had a few other odd schemes, maybe shady, maybe not. Real name is Willard.”

  “Floyd Willard,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yeah,” said Jo. “You knew that?”

  “Not until now, but it explains where Mrs. Willard’s money came from, and a few other things.” Jo looked mystified. “Tell you later,” I said.

  Tom sai
d, “Okay, George, if you get the boats, Nurse Janet will drag me along in a minute.”

  But George was pointing toward the sycamore and already walking that way.

  “Perfect!” I said, and started to laugh. The parrot was in the cage. I couldn’t see details at that distance, but his scarlet plumage was like a flashing light through the bars. As we watched, George pulled on the light line and the cage door closed.

  George turned toward us, a huge grin on his face. He said, “I’ll bring the bass boat right here. We’ll get you and the parrot out first, then come back for the rest. He looked at Persephone and added, “I think she should sit here wet and miserable for a while.” Persephone scowled, but said nothing. George walked off, and Jo joined Hutchinson where he stood watching Persephone.

  Tom and I wrapped each other up in a hug to end all hugs, bolstered by a wet dog on each side. I don’t know how long it lasted. Maybe a year. My doubts about how to proceed weren’t all gone, but the fear that danced among them had drifted away across the surface of the lake. A veil of mauve and peach glowed on the horizon and dragged a fringe of color over the lake as the summer began to slip away. It promised to be a long, warm autumn.

  the end

  about the author

  Sheila Webster Boneham has been writing professionally for three decades, and writes in several genres. She has taught writing at universities in the U.S. and abroad, and occasionally teaches writing workshops. In the past fifteen years, Sheila has published seventeen nonfiction books, six of which have won major awards. A longtime participant in canine sports, therapy, and other activities, Sheila is also an avid amateur photographer and painter. When she isn’t pursuing creative activities or playing with animals, Sheila can be found walking the beach or salt marsh near her home in North Carolina. You can reach her through her website at www.sheilaboneham.com.