Murder With Puffins

by Donna Andrews

  “Just what is a puffin anyway?” Michael asked.

  I winced. Dangerous question. The Burnhams and several nearby birders pulled out their field guides and began imparting puffin lore.

  If I’d been explaining, I’d have said to keep his eye out for a black-and-white bird about a foot high that looked like a small penguin wearing an enormous clown nose over his beak and bright orange stockings on his feet. The birders did a good job of describing the beak—a gray-and-yellow triangle with a wide red tip—but they went into too much detail on the chunky body, the stubby wings, the distinctive, clumsy flight, and the precise patterning of the black-and-white feathers. I doubt if Michael needed to know quite so much detail on how to tell immature puffins from other birds he’d never heard of, or if he cared in the slightest about puffins’ breeding and nesting habits. When Winnie and another birder began competing to see who could more accurately imitate the low, growling arr! that the usually silent puffins make when their nests are disturbed, I groaned in exasperation.

  “Don’t worry, dear,” Binkie said, patting me on the shoulder. “It always gets a little rough when we’re this close to the harbor.”

  “Close to the harbor?” I said. “You mean we’ll be landing soon?”

  “Thank God,” Michael muttered. I wasn’t sure whether the ocean or the bird lore made his exclamation so fervent.

  And sure enough, within minutes we saw the ferry dock. Quite a crowd of people stood on it with great mounds of luggage. More birders, I supposed, since at least half of them peered through the rain with binoculars. Like the birders on the boat, they scrutinized the gulls that wheeled overhead—hoping, I suppose, to spot a rare species of seagull. The two sets of birders also scanned one another. As we approached the dock, they began pointing, waving, and calling greetings.

  “Good Lord, Binkie, look who’s on the dock,” Winnie said. “Just beside the gift shop.”

  “Oh no, not Victor!” Binkie exclaimed. “How awful! I did so hope we’d seen the last of him.”

  “No such luck,” Winnie growled. “Turns up like a bad penny every few years. Wonder what the old ba—scoundrel’s up to this time.”

  “Never borrow trouble,” Binkie said. “We don’t know for sure that he’s up to anything.”

  “Like hell we don’t.”

  I peered at the dock, wondering who Victor was and how he could possibly have aroused this much animosity in the normally mild-mannered Burnhams. But without binoculars, I couldn’t see many details; if the docks held a sinister villain twirling his mustache or sporting cloven hooves, I couldn’t spot him.

  “Oh, look, Dr. and Mrs. Peabody,” Binkie said—no doubt to distract Winnie from his irritation with the nefarious Victor. “What rotten luck; they’re leaving just when we’re getting here.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Winnie replied, inspecting the Peabodys through his binoculars. “I overheard the captain speaking rather sharply to someone over the radio. Said he’d never have set out if they’d accurately predicted the size of the swells.”

  I was glad Winnie hadn’t mentioned this until after we could see the dock.

  “You think he’ll ride out the storm here, then?” Binkie asked.

  “If he has any sense,” Winnie replied.

  “Luck was certainly with you two,” Binkie said, turning to Michael and me. “You very nearly missed the boat!”

  The boat picked that moment to make a sudden free-fall drop into the trough of a wave.

  “Lucky us,” Michael muttered.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Puffin Has Landed

  “So this is Monhegan,” Michael said as he stood in the middle of the dock, inspecting the landscape.

  I was relieved to see that he looked better already. Entirely due to being back on dry land, I was sure. Certainly nothing about our surroundings would cheer anyone up. Did the Monhegan dock always look this seedy and rundown, I wondered? Or were the weather and my queasy stomach still coloring my view of things?

  After the boat docked, we had the usual mad scramble to sort out the enormous piles of luggage. Michael and I were luckier than most; the birders tended to favor battered rucksacks and ancient suitcases covered with peeling travel stickers from unpronounceable foreign birding meccas. Our more sedate urban luggage was comparatively easy to spot.

  “What next?” Michael asked when we had all our gear.

  “Next, we negotiate for someone to take our luggage to the cottage.”

  I pointed to the island’s half a dozen pickup trucks lined up, fender-to-fender, on the dock, with their tailgates open toward the arriving crowds. Beyond the trucks, a steep gravel road, already swarming with birders, led up toward the village proper.

  “The two hotels each have a pickup truck to take their guests’ baggage,” I said. “If you’re staying at a bed-and-breakfast or a cottage, you hire one of the freelance pickups to haul your stuff.”

  “Just our stuff?” Michael said. “What about us?”

  “We walk,” I said. “Unless you want us to get a reputation as lazy city folks.”

  Michael and I stood back, though, until the logjam of birders cleared. Which didn’t take long: As soon as the birders realized the ferry wasn’t going anywhere, they all panicked and scurried up the hill. Birders who had planned to leave set out to reclaim the rooms they had recently vacated before the newly arrived birders checked in. The new arrivals hurried after them to wave their confirmation letters and credit cards before their stranded colleagues established squatters’ rights.

  Within minutes, the dock lay deserted. The few travelers, like Winnie and Binkie, who owned cottages and didn’t have to worry about someone else displacing them had gone into the small shop at the foot of the hill to drink hot tea and catch up on the local gossip. Lucky that Michael and I weren’t staying in a hotel; I didn’t think I could have beaten even the oldest and most arthritic birder up the hill. We declined an invitation to join the Burnhams and found ourselves alone on the dock, surrounded by mountains of luggage higher than our heads.

  “Are they all just going to leave their luggage here?” Michael asked.

  “Why not?” I said. “Who would steal it, and where could they possibly hide it if they did? There’s no getting off the island until the ferry starts running again.”

  We found a truck with room for our larger bags, and paid the exorbitant hauling fee. Despite my warnings, Michael tried to talk the driver into giving us a ride.

  “No room,” said the driver. His broad face looked vaguely familiar. He was about my age, which meant if he was a local, I’d probably played with him as a child. Or, more likely, beaten the tar out of him for picking on my much younger brother, Rob, if my memories of some of the other children we’d played with on the island were accurate. His clothes smelled of cigarette smoke and beer, and he had a seedy, furtive air that made me wonder, just for a moment, if letting him have our baggage was really a good idea.

  “We could wait till you come back,” Michael said.

  “Not coming back,” the driver replied. “Not for a while anyway. You could walk there sooner.”

  “I’m not sure my friend is up to the walk,” Michael said, putting a protective arm around me.

  I did my best to look frail and in need of protection as the driver peered at me. I could tell I wasn’t succeeding. Which didn’t surprise me; when you’re nearly five foot nine, people tend to look at you and think, Sturdy. Unless you’re model-thin, which I’m not. Even with Michael looming half a foot taller beside me, I obviously didn’t look like the driver’s idea of a damsel in distress.

  “She’s getting over a broken ankle,” Michael said. “She’s not supposed to overdo it.”

  I switched from frail to suffering stoically. The driver still wasn’t fooled.

  “Only a quarter of a mile,” he said. “Ain’t even uphill most of the way.”

  With that, he jumped into the cab of the truck and gunned the engine.

  The truck
took off, spinning its wheels a little before the tires got enough traction to climb the steep slope up from the docks. Little blobs of mud spattered us.

  “Bloody little weasel,” I snapped. “Bad enough he wouldn’t give us a ride—”

  “Don’t worry,” Michael said, wiping a bit of mud out of his left eye. “It’ll wash off by the time we get to the cottage.”

  “Yes, it is beginning to drizzle a bit more heavily, isn’t it?”

  “We follow him?”

  I glanced over. Michael was staring up the hill.

  “Strange,” I said. “The hill didn’t seem as steep when I was a kid.”

  Michael chuckled.

  “I remember it always used to drive me crazy how long it took for us to get to the cottage from the docks.”

  “Oh great.”

  “But that was mostly because Dad insisted on stopping to talk to everyone along the way. We’d take two or three hours, sometimes. But really it’s only a fifteen-minute walk.”

  “The sooner we begin, the sooner we’ll get warm and dry,” Michael said, hoisting his carry-on bag to his shoulder. “Lead on, Macduff.”

  We trudged up the hill. Ahead of us, we could see the last two birders hiking stoutly toward the crest. The rest had no doubt reached their hotels or bed-and-breakfast lodgings long ago and were now watching whatever birders watch when the weather deprives them of their natural prey.

  At the crest of the hill, we turned right on the island’s main thoroughfare—another dirt and gravel road, but this one slightly better maintained. It wound through a seemingly haphazard scattering of buildings, most made of weather-beaten gray boards. I tried to see the place through a stranger’s eyes, and cringed. You forget little details over time, like how many yards contained untidy stacks of lobster traps in need of mending. Or how the utilitarian PVC pipes that brought water down from the central reservoir lined every road. I could see Michael darting glances around, and I suspected he was wondering why the devil we’d come all this way to such an unprepossessing place. The picturesque charm of the island definitely came across better on a sunny summer day than in the wake of a fall hurricane.

  The drizzle had escalated to a light shower by the time we turned down the lane to Aunt Phoebe’s cottage. About time; a little later and we’d have had to stumble along in the dark. Monhegan has no streetlights. And Aunt Phoebe thought repairing the ruts in her lane a citified affectation, which made finding your way in the dark a nightmare.

  Only it wasn’t dark. I could see light ahead of us—coming from the house. And was that music playing? I felt a twinge of panic. Surely Aunt Phoebe hadn’t rented it, had she? She was always so adamant about having it ready at any time the family wanted to use it.

  “Someone’s already here,” Michael said.

  “No one’s supposed to be,” I said. “Maybe it’s just the cleaners. I know Aunt Phoebe has someone local come in every two weeks or so to keep the place from getting too dirty.”

  A burst of laughter rang out from inside the cottage.

  “Wish I enjoyed cleaning that much,” Michael said. He shifted his carry-on bag from one shoulder to the other.

  I noticed that the rest of our luggage hadn’t arrived yet. Michael’s attempts to bribe the driver into giving us a ride had probably irritated him to the point that he’d make sure ours was the last off the truck. He might even pretend to forget about it until the morning, with our luck. I sighed.

  “Well, there’s no sense standing out here wondering,” I said. I marched up the steps, ready to deal with whatever the cottage contained—burglars? Squatters? Cleaners who had gotten into the bar and decided to hold an impromptu hurricane party?

  I squared my shoulders and knocked firmly on the door.

  CHAPTER 3

  All My Puffins

  No one answered. I waited briefly, then knocked again.

  Another burst of laughter greeted my knock.

  “What’s going on in there?” I called.

  Still no answer.

  “Well, here goes,” I said.

  I flung open the door.

  The cottage was empty. But someone, obviously, had been there, and not very long ago.

  “I guess someone was expecting us,” Michael said.

  Evidently—but who?

  We looked around. A fire crackled briskly in the fireplace. Enough candles burned in various parts of the room to cast a warm, romantic glow. Both sofas were piled high with down pillows and fuzzy afghans. Two teacups stood on the coffee table, and a hint of steam and a faint odor of jasmine indicated that the quilted cozy concealed a fresh pot of tea. A battery radio sat on the mantel; as we stood there gaping, a final burst of laughter signaled the end of a commercial and an announcer with a beautiful spun-silk baritone voice assured us that W something or other would now continue with its Friday-night light classical program. The strains of “The Blue Danube Waltz” filled the room.

  “Hello?” I called.

  I stepped inside. I could smell something cooking. Right now, my stomach objected strenuously to this, but, even so, I could tell that when I’d fully recovered from the ferry ride, whatever was going on in the kitchen would turn out to be intensely interesting. A bottle of champagne stood on the table, beads of sweat running down its sides, with a corkscrew and two glass flutes nearby.

  “You know, this is a lot less primitive than you described it,” Michael said, dropping his bags by the door. “In fact, now that we’re off the boat, I think I’m starting to like this place.”

  He looked around appreciatively. The place did look its best by candlelight. The living room was two stories high, with stairs curling around one wall, leading to a balconylike upper hall, off which the three bedrooms opened. Downstairs, under the bedrooms, were a large bathroom and a larger kitchen. I remembered the place as tiny and cramped—which it usually was in the summer, with every bedroom filled, a carpet of sleeping bags in the living room, and a typical hour-long wait to use the bathroom. But for two people looking for peace and quiet and a place to get away from it all, the cottage suddenly looked like a palace.

  “Let’s worry about the luggage later,” Michael said, sitting down on one of the sofas and patting the cushion beside him. I joined him, and for a few minutes we sat there in silence, enjoying the warmth, the music, the whole ambiance.

  Although I did wonder who had opened up the cottage and set everything up for us. Had Winnie and Binkie made a quick call from the gift shop and sent some helpful neighbor over? Or had Aunt Phoebe noticed the missing key, done a head count, and decided to arrange a lovely surprise? Whoever it was, they had my thanks. In my exhausted state, I kept remembering the version of “Beauty and the Beast” in which the disembodied hands set the table and served dinner, and I wondered if something similar had happened here.

  No matter, I thought, sinking back against Michael’s arm. This is heavenly.

  The door suddenly opened with a bang.

  “I’m back!” caroled a voice.

  Michael and I whirled about in astonishment.

  “Dad?” I said.

  My father stood in the doorway with a load of wood in his arms. Water flew everywhere as he shook himself like a dog.

  “Meg!” he cried. He dumped the wood on the hearth with a thump, then enfolded me in a soggy bear hug. “What a wonderful surprise!”

  “You think you’re surprised,” I muttered. “You have no idea.”

  “And Michael,” Dad added. “How grand! Margaret, come look; it’s Meg and Michael here to join us.”

  Mother appeared at the top of the stairway, delicately suppressing a yawn, carrying her embroidery and a European fashion magazine.

  “Meg, dear,” she cried. She floated gracefully down the stairs and bent over to kiss my cheek. “This is so nice! And how lovely to see you, Michael.”

  Not a single improbably blond hair had strayed out of place, and she looked, as usual, as if she could replace any of the models in the magazine on a moment�
��s notice.

  Just then, I heard a loud pop, and something whizzed past my nose and bounced off Michael’s chin.

  “Sorry about that, Michael,” Dad said, waggling the champagne bottle. “Nothing broken, I hope?”

  “No, I’m fine,” Michael said, rubbing his chin.

  “Here we go,” Dad said, handing Mother a glass of the champagne and taking a sip from his own glass. “Would you two like any?”

  “No thanks,” Michael and I chorused. I closed my eyes. I wasn’t quite ready to watch people eating and drinking.

  The door slammed open again.

  “Well, I see the ferry’s in,” said Aunt Phoebe, appearing in the doorway with a dripping canvas tote in each hand. “You’ve missed dinner, but there’s plenty of leftovers. Smithfield ham, potato salad—”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “Maybe later,” Michael added.

  “Hell, they just got off the ferry; they’re probably sick as dogs,” cackled Mother’s best friend, Mrs. Fenniman, appearing behind Aunt Phoebe with her own pair of tote bags. “Leave them in peace till their guts stop heaving.”

  Although Mrs. Fenniman was absolutely right, I wished she hadn’t emphasized the word heaving quite so forcefully. My stomach gave a queasy lurch, as if to say, Okay, time to pay attention to me.

  “Is the ferry going back tonight?” came a voice from above our heads. I looked up, to see my brother, Rob, standing on the upstairs landing, rubbing his eyes as if he’d just awakened.

  “My God,” I said. “Is everyone in Yorktown up here? Yikes!”

  I jumped as something cold and wet touched my ankle.

  “What the devil is Spike doing here?” Michael asked, looking down at the small black-and-white fur ball at my feet. Although Spike was Michael’s mother’s dog, he had never liked Michael. He looked up for a moment, curled his lip at Michael, and returned to his favorite pastime of licking me obsessively. He didn’t seem to mind the mud.

  “Your mother asked me to baby-sit him for the weekend,” Rob said. “And when I had to drive up here, there wasn’t anything I could do but bring him along. You want to take charge of him?”