Murder With Puffins

by Donna Andrews

  We had nearly finished and were looking forward to resting when Mother suddenly appeared on the upstairs landing, her hair falling down her back. She was wringing her hands, looking fit to give a bang-up performance of Ophelia’s mad scene.

  “Have you seen your father?” she demanded.

  “Not since this morning,” I said.

  “Don’t worry, Margaret,” Mrs. Fenniman said. “He’ll be fine.”

  “Where’s Phoebe?” Mother asked.

  “Up at the village,” I lied, not wanting Mother to start worrying about Aunt Phoebe, too.

  “You go back to your nap,” Mrs. Fenniman put in. “She’ll be back anytime now, and James, too.”

  “What if something has happened to him?”

  “What could happen to him?” Michael asked.

  “He said he was going to go out to Green Point and watch the hurricane hit the island,” Mother said. “I told Phoebe not to let him go, and now she’s gone, too.”

  “Oh Lord. I thought he was kidding about that,” I said.

  “You should know your father by now,” Mother said pointedly.

  “Well, at least he didn’t go off with your aunt Phoebe to tackle Victor Resnick,” Michael put in.

  So much for not worrying Mother.

  “Victor Resnick?” Mother repeated. “Is he on the island?”

  “Yes, why wouldn’t he be?” I asked. “He owns a house here.”

  “Oh dear,” Mother said. “Your father doesn’t know Resnick is here, does he?”

  “Of course he knows, Mother,” I said. “We all heard it from the Dickermans last night.”

  “Oh dear me,” Mother said. She drifted down the stairs, looking preoccupied.

  “Where did you say Phoebe was?” Mrs. Fenniman asked.

  “Probably up at Victor Resnick’s house, giving him a good thrashing,” I said.

  “I’m sure your father is doing no such thing,” Mother said. “That’s absolute nonsense.”

  She strode out into the kitchen, leaving the swinging door flapping wildly.

  “Not Dad—Aunt Phoebe,” I called after her. “Why on earth would Dad want to thrash Victor Resnick?”

  “Well, he’s a birder, too, isn’t he?” Michael said. “Probably upset about what everyone thinks Resnick’s doing to the birds.”

  “Birds! Don’t be silly,” Mrs. Fenniman said with a cackle. “The green-eyed monster, more likely.”

  “Green-eyed monster?” Michael and I said in unison.

  “They were quite an item, your mother and Victor Resnick,” Mrs. Fenniman said. “Of course, that was a few years ago, before she met your dad.”

  “Over forty years ago, if it was before she met Dad,” I said. “What makes you think Dad would still be jealous of Victor Resnick after all this time?”

  “Quite a famous man, Victor Resnick,” Mrs. Fenniman said. “Bound to make a man a little nervous, his wife’s old beau showing up like this. And still single.”

  With that, she disappeared into the kitchen.

  “He didn’t show up; Mother and Dad did,” I said as the door swung to again.

  I heard a smothered chuckle from Michael, who sat there as calmly as you please, flipping through one of the old family photo album. Men.

  “Very funny,” I said. “You don’t really think Dad is off confronting Victor Resnick, do you?”

  As if in answer, Michael held out a photo album, pointing to one of the pictures. I glanced down and saw Mother, posing arm in arm with a tall, gawky young man who looked dreadfully familiar. Something about the hawklike nose and the pugnacious expression. I flipped the page. And the page after that. Picture after picture of Mother with the same young man. In several, they were affectionately entwined in a manner that wasn’t particularly shocking today but probably was back then. Particularly since the fashions and the ages of some of the younger cousins showed that Mother wasn’t more than fourteen or fifteen. In one photo, he held a sketch pad and Mother had assumed an exaggerated cheesecake pose.

  “Resnick.” I said. “Damn.”

  The kitchen door swung open again.

  “Meg, go and find your father at once!” Mother said. “Make sure he doesn’t do anything foolish.”

  “Mother, he’s probably just gone to Green Point to watch the hurricane hit the island,” I said.

  Mother looked at me in silence for a moment.

  “Anything foolish,” she repeated, and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Mrs. Fenniman stuck her head out a few seconds later.

  “Keep your eye out for Phoebe, too,” she said. “She ought not to be out in this weather. Hurricane’s moving again.”

  “Is it going to hit the island?” Michael asked.

  “No, but it’s going to come close enough to make things pretty nasty,” Mrs. Fenniman said. “Don’t forget your knapsacks; you may need some of that gear out there!”

  With that, she popped back into the kitchen.

  Michael and I looked at each other. For a moment, I could see a look of utter exhaustion on his face, and I felt a sudden surge of anger. Why on earth couldn’t my family behave like sensible human beings for once? Then his face relaxed into a tired smile and he reached down to pick up his knapsack.

  “Well, no one ever called life dull with your dad around,” he said, turning to open the door. “Once more into the breach, my friends.”

  I sighed, picked up my own knapsack, and followed him out.

  “So where do we go first?” he asked. “Green Point or Resnick’s house?”

  “It’s the same general direction,” I said.

  We hurried through the village, asking passing birders if they’d seen Dad. No one had. We peered into the dimly lit general store and saw Jeb Barnes had apparently just arrived back. He was shedding his wet wraps by the stove.

  “Have you seen my dad?” I asked.

  “No, nor your aunt Phoebe, neither,” he said. “I thought you said she’d gone up to Resnick’s.”

  “She did.”

  “Well, she’d left by the time we got there, and he wasn’t too happy to see us, either,” Jeb said. “Mad as a wet hen about something, so we didn’t stay long.”

  The electric lights flickered on and off again.

  “Jim’s not having much luck with that thing today, is he?” one of the locals said.

  “Too much rain,” Jeb said. “He might as well give up till the storm’s past. Go ahead and light some more of those oil lamps, will you?”

  “Come on,” I said to Michael. “I guess we’ll have to look for Dad by ourselves. Before he breaks his neck or something.”

  The men huddled by the stove looked uncomfortable, but none of them volunteered to help. I stomped outside. The rain was growing worse by the minute. The birders had all gone somewhere to roost, and the only local we saw as we passed through town was Fred Dickerman, trying to ease his truck out of a mud hole in the road. We gave him a wide berth and squelched up the road in the same direction we’d last seen Aunt Phoebe hiking.

  “We’re not really going back to Resnick’s, are we?” Michael asked.

  “We can claim we’ve come to rescue him from Aunt Phoebe,” I said. “And we’ll try to detour around the edge of his property.”

  Michael still looked dubious. I wasn’t sure which prospect worried him more, meeting Resnick again or taking another of my detours.

  The closer we got to Victor Resnick’s house, the more anxious I felt. Michael reacted the same way, although since he didn’t know the local landmarks, this meant he’d been in a constant state of anxiety since about five minutes after we left the village.

  “Are we getting close to that lunatic’s property line?” he kept asking.

  “Yes,” I said finally. “We’ll start our detour in a few minutes. I just want to go a little farther up this path. There’s a lookout point where we can see quite a way down the shore.”

  “Damn!”

  I whirled, to see Michael sprawled facedown in the mu
d.

  “Michael! What’s wrong?”

  “Tripped over another of these damned water pipes,” he said. “Why don’t they bury the damned things where they’ll be out of the way?”

  “Well, for one thing, half the places the pipes run don’t have enough topsoil to bury a matchstick, much less one of these pipes,” I said, pausing in the path to get my breath. “And for another, they take the pipes up in the fall to prevent them from freezing. They’d have a hard time doing that if they buried them.”

  “Take them up?” he echoed. “What do they do for water in the winter?”

  “Use cisterns,” I said. “And practice rigorous water conservation.”

  “When in the fall?” he asked. “They’re not going to take them up while we’re here, are they?”

  “Not unless there’s a freeze predicted,” I said. “Make sure you didn’t disconnect the pipe you tripped over, by the way.”

  “Right,” he said. “You go on; I’ll catch up in a second.”

  As Michael bent over to examine the pipe, still shaking his head in disbelief, I trudged up the path until I emerged from the trees into the open and could see along the shore to the end of the point of land on which Resnick’s house and studio stood. I was hoping to see Dad, alive and well and ready to come back to the house to dry off and warm up.

  Instead, I saw a dead body.

  CHAPTER 11

  From Puffin to Eternity

  The body lay facedown in a shallow, rocky pool, but my money wasn’t on drowning as the cause of death.

  “Michael,” I yelled. “Could you come up here a second?”

  I stood looking down the slope at the tidal pool where the body floated. I was shivering, from nerves as much as the cold rain, as Michael scrambled out to the cliff’s edge and stood beside me.

  “Meg, maybe we should just go back to the house,” he said, his voice raised to be heard over the wind and surf. “Your father’s probably back there by now; I’m sure he was only kidding about wanting to stand on Green Point and watch the hurricane hit the island.”

  “I’m sure he wasn’t, but never mind that now,” I said. “Look down there.”

  “Oh my God,” Michael said. He tried to pull me away so I couldn’t see the body. “It’s not him, is it?”

  “You mean Dad? Heavens no! Look at all that hair.”

  “You’re right,” Michael said. “Sorry. I panicked for a second. So who is he?”

  “I think it’s Resnick.”

  Michael craned his head to look at the body from another angle.

  “I think you’re right. Well, that’s a relief, for us at least.”

  “Not much of a relief, considering he was almost certainly murdered.”

  “Murdered! What makes you think that? I mean, why not drowned?”

  “Look at that gash on the back of his head.”

  Michael peered through the rain.

  “Oh,” he said. “Not so much of a relief after all, I suppose; and before you say anything, I only meant a relief because it wasn’t your dad. I didn’t mean I was glad Resnick was dead or anything like that.”

  “Although I have a feeling a lot of people will be, even if they don’t admit it.”

  We just stood there for a moment, staring at the body.

  “We’d better go and tell somebody,” Michael said. “The helpful Constable Barnes, I suppose.”

  “We’d better haul the body up first,” I said with a shudder.

  “We can’t; we’d be disturbing a crime scene,” Michael protested.

  “I think the storm’s going to do more than disturb the crime scene by the time we could get down to the village, much less bring anyone back. If we don’t haul him up, he’s going to wash out to sea.”

  As if to emphasize my point, the crest of a particularly big wave washed over the rocks into the tidal pool. The body rocked slightly, and the right arm moved back and forth, as if Resnick were waving to us.

  “See, the tide’s rising,” I said. “We’d better hurry.”

  “Right,” Michael said. He took a deep breath and then began easing himself over the side of the ledge, feeling for a foothold on the rocky slope.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Not your fault,” he replied, looking up with a reassuring smile.

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “I got us into this. Coming here was my idea. Some romantic getaway.”

  “Well, you never promised me a tropical paradise.”

  He gave me a hand over the edge of the cliff, and I began carefully following him down the slope. It wasn’t all that steep; if there had been solid ground at the bottom, I’d have just slid and slithered down in a hurry. But considering what waited below—a dead body and a rapidly rising ocean—I very definitely didn’t want to lose my footing.

  “Getting him up again is going to be a real headache,” Michael said, looking around. “I don’t suppose there’s another way back.”

  “There’s a path that goes back toward Resnick’s house,” I said. “But I don’t think the tide’s low enough.”

  “You’re sure?” Michael said. “Where is it? Maybe we can pick a time between waves.”

  I pointed to the narrow path hugging the side of the cliff. As we studied it, a wave sloshed over the path, stranding a wire-mesh lobster trap. A few seconds later, a larger wave broke over the path, crushing the trap against the side of the cliff and sucking the fragments back as it retreated.

  “Okay, I guess the cliff’s it,” Michael said. He looked up at the cliff, frowning, and then back at the body. Water sloshed over our feet.

  “Hang on a second,” I said, pulling the knapsack off my shoulders. “I never thought I’d give Dad the satisfaction of hearing this, but for once this damned hiking emergency kit of his will come in handy.”

  I dug through the contents of the pack, passing up a hefty first-aid kit, a large bottle of SP35 sunscreen, plastic bottles of water and Gatorade, several packages of freeze-dried food, and a flare gun that probably dated from the Korean War. Sure enough, there at the bottom of the pack I found a long length of slender nylon rope.

  “We can tie this to him and haul him up,” I said. “There should be another rope in your pack, if we need it.”

  “He’ll get a little battered,” Michael observed.

  “I think he’s past caring.”

  “Yes, but it will complicate the autopsy, won’t it?”

  “Good point. We can hoist him up over these,” I said, pointing a little to the right, where the cliff overhung the beginning of the submerged path. “We can keep him away from the cliff until the very top.”

  “I’ll bundle him up,” Michael said, taking off his parka and spreading it out on the rocks. “You find something up there to tie the other end of the rope to.”

  “Right,” I said. But before I started scrambling back up the slope, I paused, took a breath, and tried to look around very methodically and fix the scene in my mind.

  In the sunlight, the rocky shoreline would have looked rugged and picturesque, but in the gloomy half-light, I could think only what a bleak and cheerless place it was to die all alone.

  Well, not quite all alone. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the sudden bright flash as a beam of sunlight broke through the clouds and reflected off the lenses of a pair of binoculars. Somewhere, farther up the slope, birders were watching. I only hoped they had been watching long enough to see that Resnick had been dead when we found him. Awkward if they’d only seen us messing around with a dead body.

  “Meg? Is something wrong?”

  “No,” I said. “Just looking around to see if there’s anything unusual we should report to the police. I mean, you’re probably right about this being a crime scene. Want me to help you pull him out?”

  “It’s okay,” Michael said. “I can manage.”

  He didn’t sound too happy about it, but if he wanted to play strong, protective male, I didn’t plan to argue. It was one thing to talk about corpses and au
topsies around the dinner table when Dad went off on one of his true-crime tangents and quite another to haul a body out of the briny deep.

  Michael frowned down at the corpse.

  “Michael, I’m—” I stopped myself. He looked up and raised an eyebrow. I couldn’t help smiling; I loved the way he did that.

  “Having promised that I wouldn’t apologize for anything that went wrong,” I said, “I’m trying very hard to think of anything else to say right now.”

  He chuckled.

  “I was just thinking what great research material this is for my acting,” he said. “I had a part in a TV show once where I had to discover a murder victim. Had a tough time making it authentic, given the fact I’d never even seen a dead body. But since I’ve met you, I’ve seen more stiffs than a mafioso in training.”

  “Is that a good thing?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s useful.”

  With that, he bent down and began pulling at Resnick’s body. I coiled the rope over my shoulder, replaced the pack on my back, and headed toward the cliff.

  As I reached for the first rock in my climb, I saw a piece of paper fluttering on the ground at my feet. I stooped to pick it up. Force of habit—growing up with Dad, you tended to think the eleventh and twelfth commandments were “Thou shalt not litter” and “I don’t care if you didn’t put it there; pick it up anyway; it won’t kill you to bend over.”

  I found myself staring at a familiar piece of paper; the map on which Dad had scoped out the best place on the island to watch the hurricane. It was soggy and some of the ink had smeared, but I recognized Dad’s printing instantly. His handwriting achieved a degree of artistic illegibility that made him the envy of less accomplished physicians, but his printing was precise, elegant, more readable than most typefaces—and absolutely distinctive. I’d figured out the real scoop on Santa Claus one year when I realized that the note thanking me for the milk and cookies was in Dad’s inimitable printing.

  Oh damn, I thought. If anyone else found this, and figured out it belonged to Dad—and anyone who’d ever seen his printing would figure it out in a heartbeat …