A Birder's Guide to Murder

by J. R. Ripley

  Why was she looking at me when she said that?

  “Move him?”

  “You know, hide the body.”

  My mouth flew open but words refused to spill out. Not surprising because my brain had gone into lockdown.

  “Sometimes you are completely useless.” Esther planted her fists on her knobby hips as she looked at the fresh corpse. “Looks like the work of the Osprey.”

  I knew Esther was no bird expert but still, an osprey? “Osprey? Nonsense.” I found my voice if not my sanity. “An osprey couldn’t do that. The man’s throat has been slashed. With that.” I pointed to the knife jutting pointy end up in the toilet bowl.

  Esther nodded. “That’s the MO of the Osprey, all right.”

  My stomach lurched. “Uh, Esther.” I pointed at the murder weapon. “Is that the knife you were using to slice the bird bars?” I recognized the nick on the handle, like someone had dropped it in a garbage disposal.

  “Guess so.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I borrowed it from the bagel stand in the food court.”

  I frowned. “Do they know you borrowed it?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What is it doing here? More to the point, what is it doing there?” Who tries to flush a knife down a toilet? I’d had enough and said so. “I’ve seen enough. Let’s go.”

  Esther followed me out of the bathroom. It hadn’t been designed to hold three people even if one of the three was dead.

  I plucked the feather from Esther’s hair.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” Her hand flew to her head.

  “This is evidence, Esther.”

  She snatched it back. Sometimes her reflexes were scary fast. Fast enough to bash a so-called “pain in the patooty” on the noggin and then slash his neck?

  “You can’t do that.” I reached for her hand. “That feather is evidence. You must turn it over to the police.”

  “Not a chance.” Esther backed up to the wall. “Not yet, anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I need time to think. We have to figure this out first. Our killer probably hit him over here by the door. See that?”

  There was a purplish spot behind the door.

  “That’s blood. Hit him. Dragged him to the toilet. Then slit his throat.”

  “Esther,” I pleaded. “You are not making sense.”

  Esther the Pester had once accused me of murder. To be honest, she had seen me standing over a dead man with a bloody bird feeder hook in my hand. Still, I had been offended at the time. I had always hoped to turn the tables on her.

  Now that I had, it wasn’t half as satisfying as I had dreamed it would be.

  In fact, it wasn’t satisfying at all.

  “None of this makes sense,” Esther replied. “And I don’t like it.” She carefully placed the feather inside the pocket of her apron. “I don’t like it at all.”

  “You can’t do that,” I protested for the umpteenth time.

  “Trust me.”

  Trust her? I hadn’t trusted Esther since the day I’d met her.

  Next, Esther bent and scooped up the flyer she had used. She balled it up and tossed it to me. “Put that in your purse,” she ordered. “We’ll get rid of it later.”

  “Why don’t I just throw it in the trash can?” There was one beside the sofa, another in the bathroom.

  “Not here.” Esther was adamant. “Fingerprints.”

  “Okay.” My fingers shook as I dropped the crumpled flyer in my purse.

  Esther extracted a lace-edged hankie from the folds of her dress. She used it to wipe the light switch inside the bathroom and the door knob.

  “Esther, would you mind telling me—”

  “Check outside and see if the coast is clear.” Esther peered through the blinds and muttered something unintelligible.

  I eased the door open a crack and looked down the hall. “Silent as a tomb.” Poor choice of words.

  “Good.” Esther gave me a soft shove. “Let’s go.”

  “Not until you tell me what’s going on.” I planted my feet and pushed back.

  Esther snarled at me. “Not now, Amy.”

  “But Esther.”

  Esther pushed me through the doorway. The Pester was stronger than she looked. “I said not now.” Using the same hankie she’d used on the bathroom light switch, she rubbed all trace of fingerprints from the exterior door knob too.

  “Esther, the killer’s fingerprints could have been on that knob.”

  “I doubt it,” was her reply. “But ours? Definitely.”

  Esther grabbed my arm and started pulling me down the hall. “I told you I don’t do Philadelphia,” Esther repeated. “But would you listen?” Her head shook side to side. “No, none of you would listen. Now look what you’ve gotten us into.”

  “What I’ve gotten us into!” I found myself shouting, then lowered my voice to a whisper as we scurried down one hall then up another. “What I’ve gotten us into? I didn’t murder anyone.”

  I suddenly came to a halt, forcing Esther to do the same. “Did you?”

  “Of course, not.” She thrust out her hands, her bony wrists extending past the sleeves of her dress. “Do these look like the hands of a killer?”

  I grabbed Esther’s hand. “Is—is that blood?” I whispered. There were dark red, almost black stains under the tips of her fingernails.

  “Huh?” Esther pulled her hand away and held her curled fingers under her nose. “I must have cut myself shaving.” Esther shoved her hand in one of the hidden pockets of her dress.

  “Cut yourself shaving?”

  “Shh.” Esther cocked her head in the direction of two women moving into an office a dozen yards up the hall. “Let’s go this way.”

  Before I could complain that she was about to set off an emergency alarm, Esther pushed her hands and hip against the metal bar of an exterior door that read Fire Exit Only.

  There was a flash of light followed by a rush of cool air. We had come out on the side of the Expo Center, a sea of blacktop covered with a school of cars.

  Surprisingly, no alarms went off.

  “How did you know the alarm wouldn’t go off?”

  The door slammed tight behind us.

  “You ask too many questions.”

  “That’s because you do too many puzzling things,” I retorted. Curious faces peered at us out the tall narrow window of an expo office.

  A minute later, we arrived at the Expo Center’s front entrance. Everything appeared normal—well, except Esther. People were calmly going about their business. Which I assumed did not include murder for all but one of the attendees.

  “Esther, did you see anyone? Anyone else at all?”

  “Just a dead guy.”

  “I mean besides JJ Fuller.”

  “I’m telling you. The dead guy.”

  I clamped my hands over her scrawny shoulders. “Esther, you aren’t making any sense.”

  She pushed my hands away. “Yes, I am. I’m making perfect sense. I saw a guy. He looked dead.”

  Before I could open my mouth to complain that she was talking about Fuller again she pinched my mouth shut. “Ouch.”

  “Let me finish.”

  I glared at her but kept my jaw firmly clenched. That pinch hurt.

  “There was this guy. I saw him sort of stumbling along in the hallway.”

  “A dead guy?”

  “That’s right. Baggy gray trousers, a long-sleeved gray cotton shirt that was too big for him.” Esther waved to a passing taxi. “Anyway, he must have heard me coming because he turned and looked over his shoulder. That’s when I noticed he looked dead. He had a limp.”

  “I’d limp too, if I was dead. At the very least.”

  The cab hurled to th
e curb. The cabbie lowered his window. “Where to?”

  Esther opened the back door and climbed in. I had no choice but to follow. “Just drive,” she instructed the cabbie.

  The taxi was warm, humid and smelled of tandoori chicken. Our driver, a dark-skinned, heavily bearded fellow in sunglasses with a red and black Ukraine Soccer Club hat steered for the main road.

  I leaned toward Esther. “About this dead guy—”

  Esther held up a finger and looked pointedly at the driver.

  He was busy and happy. The meter was running with no particular destination in sight and somebody was crooning through the taxi speakers in a language that might have been Ukrainian, Russian or even Venusian.

  I thought I understood the sentiment but the tune’s lyrics could have been calling for a revolution rather than a kiss. The music was interrupted only sporadically by the crackling of the driver’s connection to his dispatcher.

  Satisfied, Esther whispered, “His hair was all gray and tangled. His face was ashen and his eyes were pink.”

  I pushed my hands through my hair. It was either that or start pulling it out. And I didn’t think I had any to spare. “Esther,” I began, as the cab lurched over a speedbump and out into traffic, “I don’t know who or what you saw but what, if anything, does it have to do with—”

  I stole a look at the driver who sat directly in front of me. “You know what.”

  “That’s hard to say,” Esther admitted. “But he looked like he’d seen a ghost.”

  “A minute ago you practically said he was a ghost.”

  “I think he was in that room.”

  “The one where we saw the…”

  “Yep.”

  “You think he’s the person responsible for, uh…” Trying to have a conversation about a dead body in the back of a taxi with the driver a foot in front of us was absurd. “I think we should continue this conversation back at the hotel.”

  Esther chewed her lip. “I have a better idea.”

  “I rather doubt it.”

  Esther leaned toward the front seat and tapped our driver on the shoulder. He jerked, sending the taxi veering wildly to the right. There was a screech of brakes, both ours and those of the two cars on the right we almost slammed into.

  Our driver was the jumpy sort.

  Neither he nor Esther seemed to mind our near-death experience. The two drivers shooting us hand signs that I was sure they did not teach in any American Sign Language course seemed to have taken umbrage, however.

  I ducked my head and waved an apology.

  “Take us to Laurel Hill,” Esther ordered.

  The driver glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “Laurel Hill?”

  Esther nodded.

  “You got it.”

  “What’s Laurel Hill?”

  “A cemetery.”

  5

  “A cemetery?” I was sorry I had asked.

  We drove southeast, the skyscrapers of Philadelphia growing taller until we were in the midst of them.

  The car stopped outside the cemetery entrance. Esther hopped out quickly. “Pay the nice man.”

  I staggered out my side and paid the nice man a not very nice lump of money. He was gone before I could request a receipt for tax purposes.

  The historic cemetery sat along the scenic Schuylkill River. I’d been hoping to see it, just not from between rows of ancient tombstones.

  A massive white building in the Roman Doric style, with four columns on each side, created an imposing entrance. I barely had time to read the plaque at the street as Esther moved through the tall archway in the center of the building, grabbed a map and unfolded it. All I caught was that the cemetery had been founded in 1836 by a Scotsman.

  Esther studied the map then thrust it in her pocket. I stuck to her side as we snaked our way quietly past one remarkable ancient headstone after the other.

  To maintain my sanity, I did some birdwatching. I spotted a hairy woodpecker, a northern flicker, a white-breasted nuthatch and a Carolina wren that made me homesick. “I wish I’d brought my binoculars.”

  Esther paid me no attention.

  Near the river’s edge, we came to a halt beside a fairly unremarkable stone, pressed closely between two taller ones. A simple cross decorated the weathered granite grave.

  The sky had grown overcast. The greenish waters of the Schuylkill moved sluggishly. The sounds of the river mingled with the rasp of Esther’s heavy breathing.

  Esther ran her fingers along the stone cross.

  “Who was Martin Ritter?” I read the name on the tombstone. “Ex-husband?” I joked.

  I sat to give my feet a rest. I had one eye on the grave, the other on a pair of purplish European starlings crisscrossing the river. Mr. Ritter had been dead about forty years.

  “Ex-lover,” Esther answered.

  If I had been standing I would have tipped over. While I did have hopes for a relationship between Floyd and Esther, I never thought I would hear the word Esther and ex-lover in the same sentence.

  “I-I’m sorry,” I said, regretting my insensitivity. Once again, I realized just how much I did not know about my tenant and business partner.

  “Hand me my apron, would you, Amy?” Esther sounded different from her usual ornery self. I detected a weary sadness, perhaps even a broken heart.

  My purse lay on the ground beside me. I unclasped it and pulled out her apron. She had given it to me in the taxi. I stood and handed it to her.

  Esther carefully extracted the osprey feather from the pocket and held it by the tip of its quill.

  I held my tongue, fascinated, as Esther hitched up her dress and knelt to the close-cropped grass. Dropping to one knee, she ran her tongue over her pale pink lips. Whispering some words I could not catch, she planted the osprey feather in the ground at the foot of Martin Ritter’s gravestone.

  Mission accomplished, Esther extended her hand toward me. I helped her to her feet.

  “Esther,” I said, emotions tugging at my heart, “please, help me to understand what’s going on.” First, she had led me to a dead body, then she’d stolen possible evidence from the crime scene. Finally, she had planted that evidence at a grave—the grave of an ex-lover, no less.

  Esther narrowed her eyes, studying the scattered people wandering the cemetery. “We have to go.”

  “But, Esther—”

  She silenced me with a shake of the head. “We have to go. He won’t come if we’re here. If we’re watching.”

  “Huh?” I peered around. “Watching what? Who won’t come?”

  “Marty,” she whispered.

  “Marty?” Nothing Esther was saying or doing was making any sense at all. “Who the devil is Marty?”

  I followed her eyes to the grave marker. “Oh. Marty.” Martin Ritter. I fell silent. Whatever was going on was well beyond my comprehension.

  Do ghosts appear in the daytime? What was I thinking? There was no such thing as ghosts.

  Walking arm in arm, we left the cemetery.

  My cellphone jangled as we sat on a bench beside the Schuylkill River Trail. People moved past us in both directions. It all seemed so normal.

  “It’s Derek,” I announced, looking at the screen as the ringing went on and on.

  “Aren’t you going to answer it?” Esther was short-tempered and snappish.

  I quickly answered. “Derek, hi.”

  “Amy, where are you? I’ve been trying to reach you. Me, Floyd and Karl have been looking everywhere. Where did you disappear to?”

  “That’s a long story.” I sighed.

  “Really? Wait till I tell you what’s happening here at the birding expo.”

  “Oh?” I braced myself. I was no mind reader but I knew what Derek was about to say.

  “They found the guest of honor dead. The police
aren’t saying much but the whispers I’ve been hearing say it was murder.”

  “Do—do they have any suspects?” I squeaked. Like a little old lady and the scared to death owner of a store for bird lovers?

  “Rumor has it that they’ve arrested his wife.”

  “Thank goodness.”

  “What?”

  “I mean. That’s too bad. I mean—” What did I mean?

  Derek cut me off. “I think I know what you mean. Murder is never fun but it’s good to know the police have the perp in custody.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I meant.” Close enough.

  “You’re lucky you weren’t around when it happened. Who knew a birding expo could be dangerous? I’m glad you are safe.” Derek was talking a mile a minute. “What about Esther? Have you seen her? The guys and I can’t find her anywhere.”

  “She is here with me.”

  There was silence on the other end. “Where is here exactly?”

  “Hold on a sec.” I muffled the phone with my palm. “Derek wants to know where we are, Esther. What should I tell him?”

  Esther blinked at me. “Tell him we’re at the cemetery. You want to sit here all day?” She rose, rubbed her rump and sat again. “This bench is hard.”

  “Don’t you think he’s going to want to know why we’re at a cemetery?”

  “Tell him we’re window shopping.”

  I pulled my hand away from the speaker. “Derek? We’re at Laurel Hill.”

  “Who is Laurel Hill?”

  “It’s not a who. I mean, she’s not a who. She’s a cemetery. That is, it is a cemetery.”

  “A cemetery?” Floyd was making noises in the background as Derek conveyed my words to him.

  “Ask her what she’s doing in a cemetery,” Floyd urged.

  Derek came back on the line. “Floyd wants to know—”

  “I heard him,” I interrupted. “Tell Floyd everything is fine. Esther and I only came to—”

  I muted the phone once again and turned to Esther. “Derek and Floyd want to know what we’re doing at a cemetery. What do I tell them, Esther? I cannot tell them we’re shopping for our graves.”

  Esther extended her hand palm up. “Give me the phone.”

  I did.

  Esther put my phone to her mouth. “I’m tired and I’m hungry. Come get us.” She hit the red button ending the call and handed me back the phone. “He’ll be right here.”