“Sure. When I was a kid, a friend of mine got stoned and fell in the river. My mom’s boyfriend pulled him out and held him upside down to drain. Then he did the CPR thing. Kid was fine.”
“How old was he?”
“The kid? Fourteen or fifteen.”
“This was on the commune where you and your mother lived.”
“Yeah, before she moved to Jack’s farm, my step-dad. He was a pretty cool guy—Crow, the guy who did the rescue. He turned me on to snakes. He used to drop acid and play with his baby rattlesnake. He wouldn’t let me near it. But we found garter snakes in the meadow and a king snake once. He knew a lot about frogs and fish and stuff like that. I was really sorry when he left for Baja.”
I chewed on this. “That scene was about separating from regular society. Follow your own bliss and use a lot of drugs.”
Denny made a face. “Don’t go thinking it was like that hostile outfit we just left. Boss Tipton was totally autocratic and rageful. Strictly ego-driven. No one at Aquilegia Farm would have put up with him. They were all about therapeutic acceptance, but they knew when to tell someone to hit the road.”
I hadn’t heard Denny talk about his upbringing for a long time. It beat reliving the helplessness of sitting in the mud waiting for the Tiptons to grab me. I remembered something. “You saw that photographer? In the black jacket with the knit cap. He came back when the ambulance did and took a bunch of pictures. I bet he has a scanner and heard the 911 call. We might end up in the papers.” That could cost me professional points.
“Neal can’t harp on us for that. Not like we had a choice.”
True. The curator disapproved of his staff talking to the press without approval. But someone snapping our pictures while we performed CPR on a dying man wasn’t quite the same as an in-depth interview. It shouldn’t be a problem.
We pushed through the night without talking for a little time. The weather gods switched to hail mixed with rain, then shut everything off. In half a daze, I stared at the road. White dashes against wet dark asphalt were mesmerizing. The van hit a pothole, and I jerked awake. I stretched my back. “We’d better stop to eat and buy gas. Keep an eye out for a café or something.”
“Robby?”
“With my parents.”
After a silence, I said, “I wonder if he knew his daughter was shot. Does the mother know? Any of them?”
Wanda Tipton had lost a husband and a daughter. Her home was overrun with strangers. A lonely future lay ahead. Or maybe widowhood from the tyrannical Tipton was a net improvement. No, losing a child trumped everything. If Robby died, I would flat-out never recover.
Obsessing about ways my child might die was not what was needed. I diverted myself onto the Doberman. Maybe Ken from Animal Control would catch her tomorrow. I hoped the brothers wouldn’t get her back or any of the other dogs. I’d seen their dog food, and it was the cheapest available. The dog houses were a joke.
Here I was worrying about dogs when a girl lay dead.
Denny said, “I can’t believe no one noticed her for two days. Laying there half frozen all that time.”
So young…dead before she had any chance to dodge poverty and crime. I remembered peeking into what had to be her bedroom. Crumpled on the polyester bed cover was a picture torn from a magazine—William and Kate in their wedding finery. I guessed that cops had searched the room and pulled the photo of royalty out of a hiding place. Jerome would not have approved of a girl’s fascination with fame and glamour.
We ate at a pizza place in Battle Ground, my still-damp pants back on. Denny told me a great deal about a frog, Darwin’s frog. “The male has this hole below his tongue.”
“To his lungs. Birds have that.”
“No, not to his lungs. To his vocal sac. After the eggs hatch, he sucks the tadpoles inside the sac and keeps them there. When they metamorphose into little frogs, he coughs them out.”
“Is this relevant to tonight?” I asked. “Some analogy to Old Man Tipton? If so, I don’t get it.”
He ignored me, helped himself to a cherry tomato from my salad, and detoured onto turtles that never age. “There’s this rumor about alligator snappers. People catch them to eat and sometimes really big ones have a musket ball or stone spear tip in them. They might be hundreds of years old, way older than anyone thought they would live.”
“Just a rumor?”
“Yeah. I’ve tried to confirm it. No luck so far. But this one is true. Blandings turtles in Michigan: If they make it to adult size, the only thing that stops them is getting run over by a car. Or maybe a bear. Something with powerful jaws. They live forever and keep on reproducing, too. No senility at all.”
He was talking to keep from thinking. I let him ramble. It made me feel better, too. A good time to talk about Marcie? Not when I was this wrecked.
We pulled into the employee lot at the zoo about eight o’clock. I’d called the night guard, who met us and opened up the hospital. The quarantine room was nicely set up with perches, food, and water pans. Each bird flew a circuit of the room when I released it, then settled on a perch. They sat erect with their feathers sleeked down tight, holding themselves rigid and ready to bolt. I turned the lights out and left them with my fingers crossed, grateful that they had all survived the day.
Denny returned from checking on the tortoises.
“Everyone good?” I asked.
He shrugged. “For now. Tortoises die slow.”
“What are we going to do about the macaw pair?”
“Not our problem. We’ve dealt with enough Tipton crap, and I’m way behind here.”
“They’ll die unless we get them out of there. I’d rather give a wolverine an enema, but somebody’s got to do it.”
“Call Neal. He can send someone else out. Pete maybe. Or Arnie.”
I didn’t have Neal’s personal cell, but the night guard did. I stood in the hallway outside the quarantine room, leaning against the wall, and dialed while Denny and the night guard waited. Neal answered with a suspicious, “Yeah?”
I recapped the day—Amazon parrots loaded and now in quarantine, one murdered girl discovered, an attack by drug dealers, a dead patriarch. “We got out ahead of the ninja assassins,” I said, gallows humor to steady the hand that held the phone.
A silence. “For some reason, I believe all this.”
“The ninja assassins part isn’t really true.” I was too tired to stand up. I slid down to the floor and sat with my legs stuck out. My pants were still damp at the waist.
“You and Denny are in one piece?”
“Yeah.”
Denny squatted next to me so he could hear both sides of the conversation.
“The van?”
I assured Neal that the van was fine.
“You can give me the details tomorrow. Thanks for the update. Go home.”
Not so fast. “Somebody has to go back and get two macaws tomorrow.”
“Nope. Mission accomplished. The feds can deal.”
“We can’t trust the Tipton boys to feed them. The electrician shut the heat off at the barns, and he might shut it off at the house.” My heart sank at the thought, but my mouth kept on. “We have to go back.”
“I’ll call the feds. They can step up to this one.”
“Neal, you told them we’d take care of it. These are big, bad macaws, and we’re the experts. We just have to throw two birds in the van and get out.” A girl can dream.
A long pause. I could hear him moving around, pacing maybe. “Only if you have a police escort every single minute.”
“Absolutely.” No way was I doing this without backup. “I need someone to go with me.”
“Denny. Call me tomorrow as soon as you get back.”
***
The house I grew up in had never seemed
nicer. My parents trended toward comfortable and practical rather than elegant, a house full of places to set a coffee cup and turn on a reading light. My father’s sign painting magazines had a dedicated shelf within reach of his recliner. Often a gardening book lay on the kitchen counter, sometimes held open with a muddy hand trowel. Winter was a frustrating time for my mother, the season of not-gardening. In the living room, a handsome toy-box my father had constructed held educational toys guaranteed to produce a genius. My mother worked part-time as an elementary-school math specialist, and she knew her toys.
They both adored Robby, probably seeing him as a second chance to rear a child that would turn out the way they had expected back when I was two. My schedule required working weekends, when the day care center was closed. I was fortunate to have them take him on Saturdays and Sundays and the rare times, like tonight, when I worked late.
“You look so tired,” my mother said. “I saved you a lamb chop. How about a glass of wine?” Gray threaded through her hair and a wrinkle showed here and there, but she still seemed tireless, two women’s worth of energy in one short package. Tonight she wore her yellow sweatshirt with wildflowers, an old favorite.
My father was immersed in a basketball game, the reason my mother hadn’t seen the news and wasn’t full of alarm about the Tiptons. That would happen tomorrow.
“I wish I could. We stopped for pizza and I don’t dare drink when I’m this beat. Robby’s asleep? I’m sorry I’m so late.”
“He was fine. How did the animal rescue go?”
“We had a few setbacks. I have to go back tomorrow. I’ll give you the full story when I can think straight.” Telling her about a dead girl and failed CPR would keep me there all night.
“We’ll take Robby to the Children’s Museum this Saturday. That is, if it’s all right with you.”
“That would be awesome.”
My mother’s focus on toddler enrichment had my full support. Robby benefited and so did I, since that left her with less energy for nudging my life into shape.
My father was the calm center of our small family. He was tall and quiet. I inherited only the tall part, that and his dark hair. His hands were skilled and sure, trained by a lifetime as a sign painter and home handyman.
I climbed the stairs to my old room, where Robby was curled asleep around his stuffed armadillo. Seeing my child did much to set my world to rights again. He was an unlikely gift to my life, conceived by accident just before my husband Rick died. I inhaled his baby scent as I leaned over to pick him up.
I needed this day to come to an end, to go home. To sleep. But Robby woke up cross-wise and pitched a fit. I hugged him and explained and did my best, but he wanted…I couldn’t tell what he wanted, but being awakened was not it. Finally I gave up on sweet reason, wrestled him into the car seat, and waved good-bye to my parents, who stood watching my failings with concerned frowns.
Pete and Cheyenne’s car was in the driveway, but they were upstairs in their room. I lugged Robby up to his room and tucked him in. Thankfully, he collapsed back into slumber.
My dogs, Winnie and Range, were thrilled to have me back. Range was mostly black Lab, Winnie was part German shepherd. I sat on the floor and stroked the dogs, apologizing for coming home late again. They did their best to heal the day’s misery with doggy affection, and their best was quality work.
I was able to buy this house because of Rick’s life insurance, but that edge of discomfort had mostly worn off. Like my parents’ home, it smelled of good food—Pete’s spicy cooking—and the kitchen was neither beige nor worn out. The house still had some of the “new-on-the-market” glow from when I’d bought it two and a half years ago.
Why had the Tiptons lived in such a barren house? They must have had drug profits to spend.
I pushed away recollections of the Tiptons’ kitchen by calling Marcie, my best friend, for a quick check-in. She wanted to talk, but I was too exhausted. We settled for dinner on my next day off. I felt bad about that—she needed me and I’d made her wait. Denny had backed away from their three year relationship and she wasn’t taking it well.
A quick shower and I was in bed.
The deep comfort of domestic routine didn’t survive the darkness. In the quiet, unsettling images intruded and pushed sleep away—Liana’s pale, vacant face, Tipton’s collapsing body.
Tomorrow was a work day—insomnia was not an option.
Better to think about the birds I wanted for the new walk-through aviary featured in the zoo’s master plan. Lady Amherst pheasants with their green and blue backs and long barred tails. Temminck’s tragopan, a gorgeous red and orange pheasant. My hands on the warm bodies of parrots with broken feathers, the stab of blackberry thorns pulled aside to show a slender muzzle pressed to a bloody sweater.
I concentrated harder. Laughing thrushes in the bushes. Maybe Asian Fairy bluebirds, gorgeous. Green magpies, if Neal could find any. A wisp of detail intruded: My palms on Jerome Tipton’s chest had shoved on an expensive Filson jacket like the one my mother gave my father for Christmas. His sons’ jackets were cheap denim.
Demoiselle cranes. He’d worn a fancy watch, the kind with many buttons and functions. Red-breasted geese…sleep.
Chapter Six
Under thin wintery sunlight, the farm looked less desolate, transformed from squalid to merely rural. Clear sky equals cold in the Northwest in January. Frost outlined tall grass stalks along the road and rimmed the hog-wire around the vegetable garden.
I ran the van up to the house and shut it off. Denny and I emerged blinking in the unaccustomed light, grateful for air that wasn’t tainted with disinfectant fumes from decontaminating the van. The Tipton place and toxic air would be forever linked in my mind. We had a solemn agreement to get in and get out—load the macaws and split.
Mud crunched underfoot, icy on top and gooey underneath. Crème brûlée of muck. I grumbled to Denny, “If I had to live here, I’d order a truckload of fir bark on Day Two and make some decent paths.”
My arms ached from the night before. The black Boxer mix that had been so aggressive circled in a live trap under the eaves, barking dutifully at us. The Chow, still loose, loitered next to him and raised his nose to emit a woof now and then. No half-grown Doberman.
As the first order of business, we checked that The Law was on duty. We found Deputy Gettler amid a group standing in the dining room giving each other instructions about wrapping up the crime scene. When he confirmed that the Tipton brothers weren’t back in custody, I said, “We are not facing those guys again without serious firepower on our side. I left my nets in the parrot barn, so we need someone to go with us.”
Gettler seemed insulted that we asked for security he’d assumed he would provide. He led us outside. “You’re not supposed to park here. That’s why everyone else is parked by the gate.”
“We’re going to load the macaws,” I said. I pointed to the VW van. “You guys checked that out? The Tiptons might have left a gas receipt or something from where they picked up the parrots and tortoises.”
“We checked it.”
“What did you find?”
A shrug. “I wasn’t there.”
He led us across ice slicks to the closer barn, clouds of our breath drifting ahead, and removed the padlock from the hasp on the door. It was dark and cold inside. He flicked on a flashlight.
“Did a huge electric bill give them away?” I asked.
“Nope. Tom Tipton sold meth to the wrong guy. That’s what we came out for. The grass was a surprise.”
“Like the animals,” said Denny.
The deputy looked defensive. “We knew about the dogs, just not the rest. Not until we had a chance to look around.”
I’d left the nets leaning against the wall in the back room. Now they lay on the floor. The night before, Denny and I had been the last on
es out of the building. “Did you dump them here?”
Denny shook his head.
“Who’s been in here? I thought this was locked up at night.”
Gettler said, “Only one entry and you saw it was padlocked.”
I looked around the back room. “That bag of parrot food was moved. I didn’t leave it there.”
Denny shifted from foot to foot. “Who cares? Grab the nets and let’s go.”
I was just as eager to leave this place behind, but he wasn’t in charge, and I ignored him. Something had been bothering me for two days. “Only one exit,” I said to myself.
“Yeah. Maybe not the brightest plan,” the deputy agreed.
If I were growing dope in a barn, I’d have a back door as an escape hatch. We could spare five minutes to put that itch to rest. I looked around, remembering what I’d seen when the lights were on. No loft above. No possible place to hide. Experts had been over every square inch of the building.
The back room was better lit. Sun filtered through knot holes and narrow gaps between the boards. With no birds to distract me, I stopped and for the first time gave my attention to the room itself. The exterior wall that was part of the parrot cage was insulated and sheathed in plywood. But that was only two-thirds of the back wall. The rest was the only part of the barn not lined in fiberglass batts. Fir studs darkened by age supported the rough exterior boards, the barn as it was before the Tiptons tricked it out for their cash crop. I took a close look, finger tips exploring the boards. The deputy said, “Wasting your time. We checked.”
“Skip it. It doesn’t matter,” Denny said.
“Someone’s been in here messing around.” If the Tiptons were using this barn for shelter, I wanted to prove it. I wanted them caught. I wanted them to explain how Liana died and then tell the law who they got the parrots and tortoises from. A girl was dead, animals had suffered, and nobody shoves me in the mud without consequences.
It took more than a few minutes and Denny was about to mutiny. What I found was simple and well done. A section of wall framed by the old studs on all sides moved a tiny bit when I jiggled it with finger in a knothole. I finally lifted just right and the section disconnected from the wall and fell outside. Bright sun and cold air streamed into the back corner through a gap that would have been a tight fit for the heavy father. A hint of a path disappeared through the blackberry vines outside. Denny and the deputy stooped and followed me out. They stood aside so I could push the panel back in place. It was invisible from inside because the cut lines were all behind studs. It was barely visible from the outside. I said, “I bet the other barn has one of these, too.”
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