Gone Gull

by Donna Andrews

  The other teacher who’d left her studio unlocked was Peggy, who was in her first week here. I left a note for her, too, but a kinder one, and added an item in my notebook to explain more carefully why locking up was required, and to remind everyone about the windows.

  By the time the movie was over, I had crossed a dozen items off my to-do list and was reasonably sure all the studios were secure, which left me in a better mood to enjoy what had become Biscuit Mountain’s evening ritual. Michael had two dozen children in his class—about a third of them here with parents who were also taking classes, while the rest stayed in the campground under the watchful eyes of several counselors. Every night at around nine we brought all the children to the terrace, served hot chocolate, and allowed everyone to make s’mores on the half dozen fire pits that dotted the area. Josh and Jamie, now in their second week at Biscuit Mountain, considered themselves master s’more makers, and were giving lessons to some of the newcomers. All of the parents—and for that matter, nearly all of the adults staying here—joined in the fun. Sometimes we had sing-alongs or told ghost stories, but many nights, like tonight, we just gathered, talked quietly, and decompressed from the busy day. Eventually the parents would lead their children away, the counselors would shepherd their charges down to their tents, and even the unencumbered adults usually turned in early to recharge for the day ahead—and to make sure they got up in good time for Marty’s excellent breakfast.

  As I sipped my hot chocolate, I could feel the tension gradually leaving my system. In spite of the efforts of the vandal—or vandals, if Cordelia was right—Biscuit Mountain was basically a good place. A safe place. A place full of people who cared enough about some craft or art to spend a week of their lives learning it. Or, in the case of my fellow instructors, to spend much of their lives practicing and teaching it. After the first few incidents I’d been a little nervous about whether the center was a safe place for the boys to stay, but Michael had convinced me I was overreacting. The boys would never be out of either his sight or Eric’s, and anyway, the targets were Cordelia and the center, not the boys. And if we took the boys away, we’d have to go with them, leaving my grandmother that much less protected.

  Here around the fire pit my confidence returned. I’d talk Cordelia into installing the security cameras. With their help, we’d catch whoever was trying to hurt the center. Cordelia wouldn’t lose her investment—wouldn’t have to sell to the developer or anyone else. And Biscuit Mountain would return to being the safe, serene place it was supposed to be.

  By eleven, the boys and Eric had retired to the caravan and Michael and I were in our tent. We talked quietly, catching up on each other’s day, and eavesdropped on Eric as he settled the boys in for the night.

  For a little while we heard residual giggles from the direction of the caravan, or occasionally the telltale sounds of minor combat being rapidly squelched. I reminded myself that Eric was a wonderful babysitter—calm, patient, with enough sense of humor to put up with the boys’ antics and enough common sense and authority to shut them down when they started to go too far. Still, I knew I’d find it hard to sleep until the faint sounds from the caravan died out.

  “Right about now I’m regretting that we gave up the hotel room,” Michael murmured.

  “Missing that nice comfy mattress?” I whispered back. “And the ceiling fan? Or is it having a bathroom a few steps away you regret?”

  “Actually I’m mainly regretting the lock on the door that would keep people from barging in. Kind of limits what we can do with an otherwise quiet, romantic, kid-free evening.”

  “I think it’s getting pretty quiet out there. Late enough that we could take our chances and live dangerously. After all, if anyone wants to find us—”

  “Meg!” came a shout from somewhere outside. “Michael! Where the blazes are you?”

  “If anyone wants to find us, they’ll just wander around bellowing our names,” Michael said, with a sigh. “Like that.”

  Chapter 6

  “Meg!” came another bellow

  “It’s Grandfather,” I said. “We should see what’s wrong.”

  “And if nothing’s wrong, we can shush him before he wakes the boys.”

  I crawled out of the tent, stood up, and tried to figure out from which direction the sound had come.

  “I am not going owling again tonight.” Michael stood up beside me and turned on his giant flashlight. “I don’t care what kind of rare mountain owls he’s found this time.”

  “Meg! Michael!”

  “Shut up,” someone shouted from the direction of the camping area. “Some of us are trying to sleep out here.”

  I switched on my own flashlight and stumbled in the direction of Grandfather’s voice. I found him standing beside the main driveway, halfway between us and the campground. He was just taking a deep breath in preparation for yelling again when I reached him.

  “Meg—”

  “Shh!” I hissed at him. “You’re waking everyone up.”

  “I had to find you.” His voice was overloud, as usual.

  “Shh!” “Shut up!” “Quiet out there!” various people shouted from their tents.

  “Let’s go inside.” I grabbed his arm and steered him toward the front porch. “We’ll wake fewer people there.”

  We strode into the great room with Michael trailing behind us.

  “Now what’s so important that you’re running around bellowing your head off at … whatever very late hour it is right now?”

  “A little before midnight,” Michael put in.

  “I need to find that wretched painter.”

  “His name’s Edward Prine,” I said.

  “Well, I know that,” Grandfather said. “He’s not in his studio. I got his cell phone number from the faculty roster, and I’ve been calling it, but he’s not answering.”

  “It’s nearly midnight,” I said. “He probably turned his phone off so he could get some sleep. Even if he hasn’t, considering how rude you were to him all day today, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s ignoring your calls.”

  “But this is important!”

  “Class starts again at eight a.m., you know. For both of you. For that matter, you should be able to catch him at breakfast.”

  “This can’t wait till morning! It could be an emergency! I have to talk to him!”

  “About what?”

  “This!” He thrust several folded sheets of paper at me. I opened them up and found I was holding three pictures of a gull. Not particularly good shots—one was fuzzy, and one was crooked, and the third, though the best of the lot, wouldn’t have passed muster for a minute with Baptiste, who regularly did photo shoots for Nature and National Geographic.

  “You’re having a gull emergency?” I asked.

  “That’s not just any gull,” Grandfather said. “They’re Ord’s gulls.”

  “Who is Ord, and why does he get to have gulls?” I asked. “I thought it was against the law to own wild animals unless you’re a certified wildlife rehabilitator.”

  “They don’t belong to him.” Grandfather’s exasperation was making him louder, so I held my finger to my lips in a shushing motion. “They’re named after him,” he went on in an infinitesimally softer tone. “George Ord. Early naturalist. Bitter enemy of Audubon. Supporter of Audubon’s rival, Alexander Wilson—after Wilson’s death, Ord finished the last couple of volumes of his American Ornithology. He also—”

  “Okay, important bird guy, and the namesake of the gull in these pictures, and I assume these are the papers Prine dumped on the table at dinnertime. The ones he thinks prove he didn’t conflate two different gulls in his paintings. What’s so important that you need to talk to Prine about them in the middle of the night?”

  “Ord’s gull was thought to have gone extinct decades ago,” he said. “But unless these photos are some kind of clever fake, he’s got pictures of them. I need to find out where these were taken. Given the fact that no one has seen an Ord’s gull sinc
e the 1920s, the only reasonable explanation is that a small pocket of them survived here, in this isolated part of the Appalachians—perhaps near a mountain lake. They’ll need to be protected! And he’s the only one who knows where they might be.”

  Should I ask if it was even feasible to have gulls living here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge? Probably not, unless I wanted a long lecture about the breeding and nesting habits of every species of gull on the planet.

  “Okay,” I said aloud. “We’ll find Prine and make him take you to the gulls—in the morning. If they weren’t extinct yesterday, it’s unlikely that they’ll disappear in the next few hours.”

  From the expression on his face, I suspected he was about to argue with me.

  “And may I point out that if you’d looked at these pictures when Prine first gave them to you, maybe we could have found your gulls already. But no, you had to pretend to ignore them, just to spite him. Prine just might be the only person here almost as stubborn as you—what if all this calling and yelling to find him makes him mad and he refuses to tell you where he took these photos?”

  “How could he?” Grandfather asked. “This is an important scientific issue!”

  “And Prine’s a painter, not a scientist. He doesn’t give a hoot whether or not Ord’s gull is extinct; he only cares that it makes a pretty picture. If he ran across that new species of slug you discovered a couple of years ago, do you think he’d have painted a picture of it, or just stomped on it?”

  “Barbarian!” Grandfather shuddered. “Yes, that sounds just like him.”

  “So I’ll tackle him about this,” I said. “Let me keep the photos. First thing in the morning I’ll hunt him down.”

  “All right. But don’t let him give you the runaround.”

  With that, Grandfather stomped upstairs.

  “He’s going to wake everyone on his hallway,” Michael muttered.

  “At least they won’t mistake him for a burglar,” I said.

  “Let’s get back to the tent—morning will come all too soon.”

  “You go,” I said. “And make sure Grandfather didn’t give the boys nightmares. I’m going to check something first.”

  I did another quick pass through the studio wing, making sure all the doors were still shut. And after I’d rattled the doorknob of Prine’s studio, I knocked.

  “Mr. Prine?” I called. “Are you in there?”

  No answer. If I’d had my master key, I’d have checked inside, but it was back in the tent, in my tote bag, so I put my ear to the door. I didn’t hear anyone moving around. I knocked again.

  “Mr. Prine?”

  No answer. I had a hard time imagining Prine crouching in his studio, waiting for me to leave. If someone knocked and he didn’t feel like answering, he’d just bellow “Go away!” So I gave up and went back to the tent.

  Chapter 7

  Tuesday

  Considering that I’d probably been one of the last people at Biscuit Mountain to fall asleep, it seemed particularly unfair that I was also one of the first to wake up. It wasn’t even six o’clock when the first rays of sunshine found their way through the tent’s ventilation window. Only a few of them, and they were softly filtered by the mosquito netting, but they were definitely there. I could have gotten up and closed the flap that normally kept out the early morning sun, but I was already awake.

  I lay quietly for a little while, listening for sounds of human activity, but apart from Michael’s gentle, not-quite-snores, nothing competed with the racket the birds were making. Somehow the sounds of humans waking up would have been more soothing in my present mood.

  “I give up,” I muttered. I grabbed my toiletry bag and some clean clothes and left the tent.

  Eric and the boys were still asleep in the caravan. I saw no signs of life out in the main campgrounds. Of course, what you got on Biscuit Mountain was camping lite, with indoor plumbing and catered meals, so anyone who woke up early wouldn’t have to bother with camp stoves for their morning coffee—they could head for the main building as I was doing.

  Coffee first or shower? I debated as strolled up the path.

  But when I arrived at the great room, I realized that both would need to wait—I wouldn’t enjoy either until I’d checked all the rooms for vandalism.

  Glancing down the hall, I could see that the door to Prine’s studio was open. Which didn’t necessarily mean the vandal had struck there. Prine was an insomniac and given to painting at odd hours. He could have gone in to paint after I’d locked up, or come down early. It occurred to me—not for the first time—that if I were the vandal, I might try to convince people I was an insomniac who liked to paint in the middle of the night, which would make Prine our prime suspect in the vandalism.

  I started with the nearest studio—Valerian’s leatherworking studio. It was still locked, but I opened and inspected it anyway, because for all we knew the vandal could have acquired a key. Everything looked much the same as it had when I’d checked at bedtime. No sign of trouble in Gillian’s pottery studio, or in Amanda’s fiber arts room.

  Maybe this will be my lucky day, I thought, as I locked the door to Amanda’s studio and headed for the open door to Prine’s. Maybe I’ll find him there already so busily painting that he doesn’t snarl at me when I walk in. Or staring moodily at his canvas and lost to the world. And if I start talking to him, maybe, instead of bellowing at me or hitting on me, he’ll be delighted to tell me all about his gull pictures. Even if he was his usual unpleasant self, I hoped he was in there, because if the vandal had targeted his studio, I’d be in for a difficult morning, even without the added challenge of getting him to reveal the whereabouts of the Ord’s gull.

  I paused just outside the studio to put a calm, pleasant look on my face. Then I threw my shoulders back, mentally braced myself, and strode in.

  At first I thought that the vandal had struck again, and the same way, with red paint. Odd, since so far all the pranks had been unique—but of all the craftspeople affected, Prine had been the angriest—maybe the vandal wanted an instant replay of Prine’s volcanic rage when he’d discovered the paint all over his studio and his ruined canvas.

  But a step or two later I realized that there wasn’t as much red paint, and it wasn’t bright red—more of a dark reddish brown.

  Then I spotted the feet.

  I closed my eyes and took a couple of the deep, calming breaths Rose Noire always recommended at times of stress. Then I opened them again and resolved to be calm and practical.

  The feet belonged to Edward Prine, who was lying half on his side in the middle of the room, surrounded by overturned easels. A knife handle protruded from his back. And I didn’t have to get much closer to tell that he was probably dead. His eyes were open and unfocused.

  Still, while pulling out my cell phone and dialing 911, I crossed what I now realized was a blood-spattered stretch of floor to check him for a pulse. I didn’t find one, and his skin was cold.

  “This is nine-one-one,” a voice on my phone said. “What is your emergency?”

  “I’d like to report a murder.” As I spoke, I took a few steps away from Prine’s body. And then a few more, so I could stand in the doorway and head off anyone who might have decided to get in a little early morning painting. Getting farther from the body was an added benefit.

  I told the 911 dispatcher my name, my location. No, I didn’t think I was in any danger. Yes, I was pretty sure the victim was dead.

  “I can get a doctor to come in and double check,” I said.

  “Hold the phone for a moment,” the dispatcher said. “Chief Heedles would like to speak to you.”

  And then, almost immediately, a familiar voice was on the line.

  “Meg, are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine.” A few minutes ago that would have been a lie, but it helped to have something practical to do—calling 911 and guarding the scene. Still, I felt better hearing her voice. Chief Mo Heedles and I had met a few years earl
ier, when I’d come to town with Grandfather and some of his allies to locate a flock of feral emus and ended up finding my long-lost Grandmother Cordelia.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Hey, I’m a doctor’s daughter,” I said. “I can handle a little blood.” Of course, this was more than a little. I focused back on the phone.

  “There’s blood, then? Are you sure he’s dead?”

  “Pretty sure, but if you like I can get Dad in to second-guess me.”

  “Probably a good idea,” she said. “And you can tell your dad that if he likes, he can stay to assist our local medical examiner.” In other words, I should remind him that this isn’t his case. “Do you have an identification on the deceased?”

  “Edward Prine,” I said. “A painter who’s teaching here at the craft center.”

  “Is he famous?” she asked. “Can’t say I’ve ever heard of him, but I’m a Philistine when it comes to art—am I going to have to worry about crowd control on top of a murder investigation?”

  I found myself taking a few more steps away from Prine before I answered. Silly, because he couldn’t hear me, but then if he were alive, the answer I was about to make would wound him.

  “No,” I said quietly. “He’s not famous. If he were a famous painter, he wouldn’t be teaching here.”

  “So I’ll still get reporters, but only the ones who want to cover a juicy murder, not People and The Washington Post.”

  Was it my imagination or did she sound a little disappointed?

  “Well, cheer up,” I said. “Grandfather’s here. Reporters know he’s always good for an outrageous quote.”

  “He’s not involved, is he?”