To Kill a Hummingbird

by J. R. Ripley

  “What?” I watched as he pulled a carton of eggs out from the folds of his sweat shirt. He handed the carton to me. I opened it. Twelve perfectly lovely ovals. “Care to come by for breakfast? I make a mean omelet.”

  Derek looked at his watch. “I’ll bet. Sorry, but I can’t. I’m meeting Pack’s attorney first thing at the office, and I don’t want to go up smelling—” He stopped and plucked several bits of feather from his sleeves and pants. “Or looking like this.”

  “Good idea. You get going. We’ll cook these little jewels tomorrow. I’ll put the coop keys back in the kitchen and lock up.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. Now go.”

  He kissed me long and hard. “I told Pack we’d leave the house key back in the wishing well bucket.”

  I promised to return it right where I’d found it. “Now go already.” The sooner Pack was released on bail, the better. I did not want a repeat performance of getting up at four thirty and feeding chickens again tomorrow.

  I waited till Derek had gone up the long drive to his car and climbed in. He honked his horn twice, then stuck his arm out the window and waved goodbye.

  I headed back to the farmhouse, passing once more between the chinaberry trees. I stopped and picked up a berry. Birds loved them. I scooped up a handful and stuck them in my pocket for the birds back home. I knew Pack wouldn’t mind.

  I returned to the kitchen, where I’d left the lights on. I set the carton of eggs on the counter, pulled the coop key ring from my pocket, opened the drawer, and returned it to the glass dish.

  As I pulled out the key ring, a chinaberry fell from my pocket and rolled under the lip of the lower cabinet. I stooped to retrieve the tiny berry. The berries resemble a wrinkled, white marble. Studying the berry in my fingers, I recalled that, although birds loved the fruit, eating too many of them left them seemingly drunken.

  What I could not remember was why. I made a mental note to check one of my books when I got back to Birds & Bees; failing any useful information there, I’d check the internet.

  Hadn’t I read somewhere that the tree was poisonous to cats and dogs?

  Could that poison be the tetranortriterpenoid that Derek had mentioned? The two things did seem connected somehow in my brain.

  “Which once again leads us back to Pack Mulligan,” I muttered in frustration.

  I picked up my carton of eggs, shut off the kitchen light, and walked out through the parlor. A tattered paperback novel with its cover missing sat on a wing-backed chair. I picked it up. It was a Western romance novel with a Bookarama sticker on the back.

  It seemed that everything led to Pack.

  27

  At the front of the house, I turned off the shiny chandelier, locked the door and placed the key in the bucket of the wishing well. As I wound the bucket back down into the bowels of the well, I made a couple of wishes myself.

  I then returned to my van. I set the eggs carefully on the floor between the front seats and pulled out my cell phone. I couldn’t wait until I returned to the store. I wanted information now.

  Unfortunately, looking glumly at the bars—or lack of them—on my phone’s screen, I realized that information was not to be forthcoming. I returned my phone to my pocket and started the engine.

  Backing out of the long drive, I saw a white pickup truck leaving from Duvall’s Flower Farm, kicking up dust as it came slowly toward me. That meant the household was awake, up, and moving.

  As the pickup passed, I saw a stranger behind the wheel. The back of the truck was loaded with fresh-cut flowers. He was probably heading to the farmers market.

  And I was heading for the Duvall house. I pulled up to the long, single-story farmhouse and parked next to an old black Ford sedan. A half-filled tube birdfeeder hung from a lone oak out front. A blue jay and a young wren fought for position, though there was plenty of room for both—a metaphor for the relationship between the Duvalls and the Mulligans if ever there was one.

  By contrast with the farm I’d left, the Duvall homestead was well kept. The drive was lined with flowers. I parked on the gravel drive. As I turned off the ignition, exited the van, and started toward the white front door, I wondered, with Frank gone, how much family was left and whether that family would be interested in running the business. I knew next to nothing about Alice, his wife.

  I rang the bell.

  A sixtyish woman wearing a drab gray dress answered the door. “I’m sorry. We’re closed for business. Besides, we deal in wholesale only, except for the farmers’ market in town.”

  “Mrs. Duvall?”

  The woman nodded. “That’s me, Alice.” Her short brown hair was cut simply. She appeared haggard. A stroke of eye shadow heightened the shallow look of her dull blue eyes. She wore a half-apron decorated with peonies.

  “I’m Amy Simms from Birds and Bees in town. Your husband came to our last Birds and Brews event.”

  “My husband is dead. Didn’t you hear?” She dabbed at the corner of her left eye with a tissue.

  “Yes, of course. That’s why I came.” I couldn’t decide whether she sounded angry, sad, or both.

  “What do you want?” She twisted the hem of her apron in both hands.

  “I’m so sorry about your husband’s death. My mother and I wanted to pay our respects.” I peeked past her into the house. Little light shined into the space. The furniture was from the sixties, though well-polished and clean. The beige drapes hung limp, and I noticed dog hair along the edges.

  She looked past me. “Your mother? Where is she? I don’t see nobody but you.” She dabbed her eye once more with the tissue, then thrust it into a pocket in the folds of her skirt.

  “Mom couldn’t make it.”

  Mrs. Duvall’s lower lip turned down.

  “I brought you these.” I offered the tray of cupcakes from C is For Cupcakes, a small bakery on the square.

  “Thank you.” Frank’s widow took the plastic tray from my hands and reluctantly stepped aside. “You might as well come on in.” She waved me to the sofa and took a seat in a hard rocker near the bay window, setting the cupcakes next to a ball of navy blue yarn and a pair of knitting needles on the table beside her. She squeezed her knees together and clutched her hands in her lap. “Tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  She pried open the lid of the cupcake container and sniffed.

  “There’s strawberry with cream cheese frosting, cinnamon-pumpkin, and chocolate,” I explained. “I wasn’t sure what you liked.”

  She pulled out a strawberry one and slowly peeled back the wrapper. When she offered me the tray, I went for the cinnamon-pumpkin. I wasn’t particularly hungry but wanted to be sociable. “Thanks.” I took a bite.

  “He was poisoned, you know,” Mrs. Duvall said.

  “I know. I’m so sorry.” I was apologizing a lot, but I didn’t know what else to do or say.

  A palmetto bug the length of my little finger crawled out from the woodwork. The widow spotted it at the same time I did. She set her half-eaten cupcake on the table and snatched up a knitting needle. She leaned over and deftly skewered the insect before it even knew what hit it.

  I held my breath.

  Mrs. Duvall rotated the needle in her fingers. “Nasty bugs.” She pushed aside the curtain, cranked open the front window with her free hand, and scraped the palmetto bug off into the shrubbery. She closed the window, wiped the knitting needle with a tissue from her pocket, and placed it back on the side table. “I can’t stand them.”

  I did my best to ignore what I’d just seen and erase it from my short-term memory. “Can you tell me more about business your husband had with Professor Livingston?”

  Alice Duvall drew herself up. “Frank developed a new plant. We grow flowers, you know. He wanted that professor to go into business with him. I told him it was useless to even try, that he shouldn’t waste his time.” The knitting needles clicked in her hands. “But Frank loved to dream.”

  I nodded. Wh
at Alice Duvall said jibed with what I’d read in Frank’s letter to Mason. And I was pretty certain I’d seen the flower in Mason’s suitcase.

  Mrs. Duvall continued. “Frank was crossbreeding and doing Lord knows what out in the greenhouse. It was beyond me. But he never stopped. Finally, he told me he’d come up with a new varietal of cardinal flower that the hummingbirds just couldn’t get enough of. They fly all around that flower likes bees on honey. He said folks would pay big money for a flower like that.”

  She stood. “You want to see?”

  I jumped to my feet. “I’d love to.”

  I followed Alice Duvall around the side of the house to the back yard. A long greenhouse stood farther back. If I’d been alone, I would have taken a peek inside.

  In the distance was an expanse of flowers of all types. “Over here.” She led me along a gravel path to a large circle of bloodred flowers. Dozens of hummingbirds darted all around, as if they’d been drugged.

  “It’s amazing.” I watched in wonder.

  “I told you so. Frank named the flower Alice’s Hummingbird Heaven.”

  “That was very sweet.”

  She planted her hands on her hips. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to them now.” She turned her head, scanning the acres of flowers. “To all of this.”

  “Won’t you continue running Duvall’s Flower Farm?”

  “Frank was the businessman. I never had a head for it.”

  My heart went out to her. “Do you have any family, any children who can help? As I came in, I saw a gentleman driving away with flowers in the back of the truck.”

  “That was a hired hand. He’s going to run the stall this morning.” Alice Duvall shrugged ever so slightly. She shook her head. “We have a boy. He’s moved away to Raleigh. Said he wanted to live in the city. He’s coming home this weekend for the funeral.”

  I’d thought I wanted such a thing once myself—to move away to the big city. Now I was glad I had come back to Ruby Lake. “Will you sell? The flower farm could be quite valuable. You should try to find a buyer.”

  She eyed me silently for a moment. “I just don’t know. This place has been in the family for generations. It’s hard to let go.”

  “Like your neighbors, the Mulligans.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What do you know about the Mulligans?”

  “Nothing. I mean, only that the Mulligan farm is nearest yours. I used to play with a friend of mine, Mindy Foster. Her parents owned the place on the other side of the Mulligans.”

  Alice Duvall bobbed her chin. “I remember the Fosters. They’ve been gone a long time.” She plucked at a flower. “Good people.”

  “Do you believe he murdered the professor, too?”

  “Yep.”

  “Any idea why?”

  She waved her finger at me. “Because Pack was jealous. The Mulligans have always been jealous of the Duvalls. Pack knew all about Frank’s special flower. He knew we were going to be rich. It’s plain and simple,” she said. “He was jealous.”

  “How did Pack hear about it?”

  “Frank bragged about it one evening down at the farmers market. If you ask me, he’d had too much to drink. If he hadn’t told Pack, he’d still be alive. So would that professor.”

  “I barely know Pack Mulligan, but I find it hard to believe he could have done such a horrible thing.”

  “The Mulligans are nasty creatures, all of them that were ever born,” she spat. “Pack murdered my Frank.” She turned and started up the path. “Come on.”

  We left the hummingbirds and the flowers behind and walked back to the house. “I hear you were Professor Livingston’s friend, Ms. Simms, so you’ll pardon me for saying this but he was not a nice man.”

  She led me into the living room where I’d left my purse. She handed it to me by the strap. “Frank told me the professor demanded fifty percent. Fifty percent rights in the plant my husband spent years developing!” She waved to the front door. “All because he felt his name was worth that much.

  “Just a minute. I want to show you something.” She turned on her heel and disappeared into the next room. I watched as she snatched up a book from a side table near the mantel. She shoved the book toward me. “Read what it says. You just read what it says. The professor autographed Frank’s copy of his silly hummingbird book and made Frank pay for it. Full price, too!”

  When she wouldn’t stop prodding me with the book, I took it and opened the cover. Mason had written: To Our Good Fortune.

  I nodded. “I understand how you’re feeling, Mrs. Duvall. I’d be upset if my husband died, too.”

  “Are you married?”

  “No, I—”

  “Then you don’t understand. You can’t understand.”

  “I suppose not. But Mason didn’t kill your husband. He was murdered himself.”

  Mrs. Duvall’s face turned hard and ugly. “He may not have done the dirty deed with his own hand, but he’s responsible for my Frank’s death. Mark my word.”

  I tried to hand back the book.

  “Keep it,” she said.

  “Supposing Pack Mulligan didn’t poison your husband, who do you think might have done it, Mrs. Duvall?”

  “He did it,” the woman said with no doubt in her mind.

  “But if he didn’t?”

  She frowned at me as if the very idea of someone other than Pack murdering her husband was distasteful. “Then it had to be one of that professor’s friends, of course. Who else would want Frank dead?”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as that woman who was with him when he came to the house.”

  “Mason came here?”

  “The day before he died. Him and Frank had a business meeting. My husband didn’t like it that he brought that woman with him.”

  “What woman? Rose Smith from the bookstore?”

  Mrs. Duvall looked at me like I was crazy. “Of course not. Why would he bring her? No, he brought that woman who said she worked for him doing publicity.”

  “Cara Siskin?”

  “That sounds about right. Frank wasn’t happy. That flower was supposed to be a secret.” She shook her head side to side. “The professor shouldn’t have told anyone else about it. He gave his word.”

  “Ms. Siskin saw the flower, too?”

  “Of course, she did. The woman isn’t blind, you know.”

  “How did she react?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did she seem, I don’t know, excited or especially interested in the flower?”

  Mrs. Duvall looked at me with a pained expression. “I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t there. The four of them were out in the greenhouse.”

  “Wait.” I counted silently on my fingers. “You just said the four of them, but if it was Frank, Mason, and Cara, that’s three.”

  “The other woman was there, too.” She sounded fed up with my questions.

  “What other woman?”

  “That floozy from the radio station.”

  “Violet Wilcox?”

  “If you say so. I don’t like the way she looks or behaves.”

  “What was she doing here? Did she come with Mason or Cara?”

  “She came in a black van.”

  “And you didn’t hear what they talked about? Frank didn’t tell you afterward?”

  “Like I said, my husband handled the business. I was fixing lunch, which is what I’m fixing to do now.” The widow shooed me to the door and slammed it in my face.

  Lunch? It was far too early to be fixing anybody’s lunch. I’d been given the heave-ho.

  But there was one more thing I wanted to know. “What about the ten thousand dollars that was found in Frank’s dungarees the morning he was poisoned?” I shouted through the thick front door.

  I started to step down from the porch, thinking she had chosen to ignore me, when I heard the door being thrown open behind me. I turned around.

  Mrs. Duvall faced me. “I’m going to tell you what I told the police
. I don’t know where Frank got that money, and I don’t know what he was doing walking around with it.” She narrowed her eyes. “But I’ll tell you this—that money is mine, sure as there’s a sun in the sky. That money is mine.”

  She slammed the door once more.

  28

  “You just missed Greg Tuffnall.” Esther looked up from the crossword puzzle she was filling in at the sales counter. “You know he’s married, right?”

  I ignored whatever it was she was trying to intimate. “Tuff was here? What did he want?”

  “He telephoned. Said you should call him right back. He said it was urgent.”

  “If it’s so urgent, why didn’t he call me on my cell?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t have your number.”

  “You could have given it to him.”

  Esther blinked at me. “You want me to start giving strange men your cell phone number?”

  I didn’t have to think long. “No. Definitely not.”

  “I thought not.” Esther picked up her pencil and started filling in squares. “He wants you to call him back.” She pushed a slip of paper to the end of the counter. “I wrote Truckee’s number down.”

  “Okay, thanks.” I picked up the paper and slid behind the counter. I dialed Truckee’s from the store phone. I cupped my hand over the receiver as the phone at Truckee’s rang and said, “Don’t you have anything to do, Esther?”

  Esther didn’t even bother to look at me. “Nope.”

  I heard somebody pick up on the other end. “Hello, Tuff?”

  “This is Martha.”

  “Hello, Martha. It’s Amy Simms from Birds and Bees.” I rubbed the edge of the paper across my chin. “I had a message that Tuff called?”

  “That’s right. He’s kind of busy right now in the kitchen. One of the line cooks didn’t show up, and it’s breakfast rush. Truckers like to hit the road early.

  “But he said to tell you that Violet Wilcox from the radio station and that other woman who was working with your professor friend are here.”

  “They are?” I couldn’t keep the excitement from my voice.

  “Yep. I can see them myself at a table not twelve feet away.”