The Boreal Owl Murder

by Jan Dunlap

  “No way, White-man,” he replied. “When was the last time you were alone in a room with twenty-nine high school students?”

  I balled up my napkin and threw it at him.

  “Okay. Real story. When I went to work in Seattle after we graduated from college, I was doing grassroots organization. Not quite the same thing as being an environmental activist. I wasn’t out on a little boat on the open sea trying to stop whaling ships or chaining myself to the fences around nuclear plants. My job was much less dramatic or camera-worthy. I worked at teaching citizens to form groups to address specific issues. Sometimes they were neighborhood groups, sometimes they were bigger. I helped them define priorities, develop strategies for reaching goals. Anyway, it was just after the ‘war in the woods’, and some people were still a mite testy.”

  “War in the woods?”

  Alan smiled. “Do the words ‘Northern Spotted Owl’ mean anything to you?”

  Of course, they did. In the late 1980s, conservationists became alarmed at the decreasing population of the Northern Spotted Owl in the Pacific Northwest. Since the owls only breed and raise their young in extensive areas of old-growth forest, the blame for the decrease naturally fell on the logging industry for clearing large tracts of woods. The resulting controversy over habitat had not only touched off a firestorm of debate and confrontation between environmentalists, the timber industry, and the government, but it had also launched the media on a feeding frenzy of all things ecological.

  In June 1990, after about four years of negotiation, litigation, and prime-time exposure, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service declared the Northern Spotted Owl an endangered subspecies. The Pacific Northwest logging industry was ordered to keep their hands (and saws) off at least forty percent of the old-growth forest within a 1.3-mile radius of any spotted owl nest or owl activity.

  The loggers weren’t happy. The industry suffered loss of revenue and loss of jobs. Whole towns slipped into poverty. Some of the interactions between timber companies and environmental activists got really ugly; ecoterrorism made the owl its poster child. It was another four years after that before the Northwest Forest Plan was formulated and, supposedly, ended the owl battles. In reality, the war in the woods had just gone underground. Today, years later, the main players were still tap-dancing around the status of the Northern Spotted Owl.

  “I met all kinds of people as an organizer,” Alan went on. “Most of them were good folks, reasonable people, who wanted to make real improvements in their communities. But invariably, you ran into someone who was … passionate … about a cause.”

  “Passionate,” I repeated. “Or … unpredictable?”

  “That, too,” Alan agreed. “One night after a meeting—we were organizing for a river clean-up, I think it was—this guy comes up to me and starts talking about his experience as an activist. I think he wanted me to know that he wasn’t some novice who would shy away from hard work and refuse to take any risks. He told me he’d been involved with some high-profile campaigns, including protests and actions at paper mills to eliminate discharges that were poisonous to the environment. Apparently, though he didn’t come right out and say it, he had also helped spike trees during the war in the woods.”

  “Spike trees?”

  “Very nasty business.”

  Alan picked up Jason’s deer hooves that had apparently taken up residence on my desk, since Jason hadn’t returned for them. “Are you using antlers in all of your decorating these days?”

  “Just hooves,” I said. “What about the spikes?”

  “To keep loggers from cutting trees near the owls, certain individuals pounded big metal spikes into the trees at random locations. They’d pound them in so deep you could hardly see them. Then when the loggers tried to cut the tree, their chainsaws hit the embedded spikes, which snapped the saws.” He put the hooves back on my desk. “When the saw snapped, it could whip back and hit the logger. People got hurt. One guy got killed that way.”

  For a minute or so, neither of us said anything. I thought about good intentions gone awry and how only a few bad apples can, unfortunately, appear to spoil the whole bushel.

  “Mr. White?”

  I looked up to see Lindsay standing in my doorway. Her eyes were filled with tears.

  “My cue to leave,” Alan said, grabbing his gym bag and coffee cup. “Don’t want to keep my first hour waiting. Far be it for me to deny them their beauty sleep. If I don’t see you before you leave,” he said from the doorway, “be careful.”

  His eyes focused sharply on mine. “I mean that, Bob. Be careful.”

  And I hadn’t even told him about my personal death threat yet.

  Alan left, and I waved Lindsay into the room.

  “Lindsay,” I said. “You want to tell me about it?”

  “Oh, Mr. White,” she sobbed. “It’s not at all what Kim thinks. She thinks she knows what’s going on, but she’s wrong. I’m not flirting with Brad. It’s like that’s what’s in her head, and so that’s what she sees. But it’s not that way.”

  “Lindsay,” I said again. “Could you put that in plain English for me?”

  She grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on my desk and blew her nose.

  Waiting for her to get control of herself, I handed her some more while she continued to cry.

  Finally, I just handed her the whole box.

  “I’m not after Brad,” she blubbered. “Kim has already made up her mind about what’s going on, and so everything that happens she makes fit with what she thinks, but it’s not the truth!”

  Sometimes, in the midst of all their teenage angst and drama, high schoolers actually do see things clearly.

  I looked at Lindsay and smiled. “You know, Lindsay, that’s a very common human failing. We all do it at times. We see what we want to see, or what we expect to see. It’s a rare person who can look at the world and see what’s really there, instead of making the world fit what she’s already decided should be there.”

  Lindsay looked at me like I had just landed from another planet and spoke an unintelligible language. Nice try, I told myself, but no cigar.

  “Okay, Lindsay,” I sighed. “Want to tell me about it?”

  She sure did.

  After about forty minutes and half a box of tissues, she went to class, and I thanked God I wasn’t a high school kid. I checked my voice mail, since I’d put everything through while I talked with Lindsay. There was one call. It was from Knott.

  “Weirdest thing,” his message ran. “We did a more exhaustive search around the area where you discovered Rahr’s body, and you’ll never guess what we found. Trees with spikes in them. What do you make of that?”

  Tree spikes. I’ll be damned.

  “As for Stan Miller, he continues to not exist. Not a trace. That’s making me real nervous because it means he’s using a false identity, and that means trouble. And, while I’ve got you on the phone, Bob, why the hell didn’t you tell me you talked with Rahr the night before he was murdered?”

  Make that double-damned.

  I’d been afraid that little detail might come up.

  I replaced the receiver in its cradle and stared at it. I had a feeling that the next time I talked with Knott, it wasn’t going to be pretty. The phone rang.

  I was afraid to pick it up. It might be Knott.

  It rang again.

  For crying out loud, I couldn’t be afraid to answer my own phone, could I?

  “Bob White,” I answered it.

  Fortunately, it wasn’t Knott.

  Unfortunately, it was someone else. A someone else with a deep voice I didn’t recognize who said, “Stay home. We’re not kidding.”

  But before I could thank the caller for that succinct clarification, the line went dead.

  It hadn’t been Stan. After speaking with him—sort of—on Saturday night and Monday afternoon, I was familiar enough with his voice to know it hadn’t been him. So that was a good thing. At least Lily’s new beau wa
sn’t into making threatening phone calls in addition to writing threatening notes and not existing. Great! Now I could have something positive to say about him when my folks asked me about him. “Yup, he’s really scary and he hates my guts, but he does not make threatening phone calls. What a gem, huh?”

  Of course, that also meant one of two things: one—either my bird feeder note wasn’t from Stan at all, but instead was from the anonymous caller, or two—Stan and the caller were working together. The caller did say “we.” But if Stan hadn’t penned the note, then someone else had, and if that were the case, then I had to conclude that the note and the phone call were connected, which meant that at least two people—the “we” in question—I couldn’t identify were trying to keep me away from the owls.

  Bottom line: regardless of whether or not Stan was involved, I was now the subject of a group project.

  And that begged the question: What’s the assignment?

  Chapter Nine

  By Wednesday afternoon, I was beginning to think I might have made a mistake by bargaining with Mr. Lenzen to use my personal days. Maybe I should have taken the suspension, after all. And thanked him, too.

  Kim had followed Lindsay in my office, and by the end of the day, I’d seen them both three times—twice individually and the third time, together. Talk about drama. I had a headache that wouldn’t quit, and my semester’s supply of tissue boxes was decimated. I thought if I had to be a sympathetic listener for one more minute, I would probably rip my counseling license from the wall and gleefully feed it to the paper shredder tucked under my desk.

  Which wouldn’t work, anyway.

  The shredder, I mean. It had been broken for months. But even if it did work, shredding my license wouldn’t stop me from being a counselor. Because even when the students made me crazy, there really wasn’t anywhere else I’d rather be working. Despite the drama, I love the job. And when I love something, I can’t give it up.

  Like birding. Even when I’ve gotten anonymous letters and phone calls telling me to quit.

  In between the soggy acts of the Kim and Lindsay show, I’d been playing telephone tag with Knott, and it was almost three-thirty in the afternoon before we finally connected. I told him what Alan had told me about the war in the woods and spiked trees. He said they’d also found a rather large hammer in a melting puddle of snow at the base of one of the trees and were hoping to get some fingerprints, though he thought the possibility of being that lucky was pretty slim. I apologized for not telling him about my phone conversation with Rahr and promised to answer all his questions when I got to Duluth the next day.

  “They better be good answers,” he warned me. “You held back on me, Bob. That doesn’t make me real happy.” I could hear his chair squeaking. “You got a day off?”

  “Yeah. It’s in lieu of an official suspension by my assistant principal. I guess I’m a public relations liability at the moment.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because a certain detective called to verify my whereabouts last Friday and apparently used the words ‘murder’ and ‘suspect’ in the same sentence, which gave my boss a minor stroke, which he took out on me in the form of a suspension, which I managed to reduce to a ‘pending’ suspension.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” He paused. “Do you get paid during a suspension?”

  “Some, I think.”

  “But you’d rather not have to find out, I’m guessing?”

  “That’s right. So I’m taking tomorrow and Friday as personal days off to come up to Duluth to redeem myself with both you and my boss, except he doesn’t know that, yet. I’m counting on the influence of that same detective to make sure I’m back at my desk on Monday.”

  “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” Knott must have been tilting back in his chair, because I could hear more squeaking over the phone line. “It’s a deal. Can you make it here by lunch tomorrow?”

  We made plans to meet at Grandma’s down by the harbor at noon. I figured I’d get an early start and swing by the university mid-morning to see if Ellis was back. If he was, I could talk with him and kill two birds with one stone (not one of my favorite metaphors, I have to admit, but effective, nonetheless): interview him for the MOU owl study and pick up whatever information I could pass along to Knott. I told the detective my agenda, and for a moment, just as I was about to hang up, I considered telling Knott about the note and the phone call, but decided to wait for tomorrow’s lunch. Instead, I asked him for a favor.

  “Don’t tell anyone I’m coming to town, okay?” I said. I guessed by the silence over the line that he was wondering about the reason behind my request, so I offered him a half-truth as explanation. “I want to outmaneuver a birding rival. He thinks I’m not heading north till Friday, and I don’t want to take a chance that somehow he might find out otherwise.”

  “Oh, I get it,” he answered. “One of those friendly birding competition things you told me about, right? My lips are sealed, Bob.” He paused. “As long as it really is a friendly little competition. Because the more I’m learning about Rahr’s world—the politics of academia, the S.O.B. people, even the DNR—the more I’m beginning to question if all these bird-loving people are tucked into one big happy nest, if you know what I mean.”

  I had to admit, I had my doubts sometimes, too. Why did something as simple as protecting the natural world seem to end up so often as a major production with a whole cast of heroes and villains, not to mention a thousand supporting players?

  “I think you ought to watch your back, Bob,” Knott added. “That’s all I’m saying. Friendly competition or not. I already have one birding-related crime to solve. I really don’t want another one.”

  Neither did I. But until I knew for sure what Stan was—or wasn’t—involved with, I also couldn’t gauge the seriousness of my anonymous note and call. If Scary Stan was just playing a mind game with me, I wasn’t going to call in the police. On the other hand, if I found out that Stan was guilty of anything other than dating my sister, then I would definitely cry “wolf!” loud and clear and welcome the police into my life. The last thing I needed was to be hunting for owls while someone else was hunting for me.

  I packed up my briefcase, straightened my desk and turned off the lights.

  “I’ll be back,” I told my chair, then locked the door and left.

  Minutes later, I pulled into Lily’s parking lot, in hopes she’d be around so I could get a phone number for Very Nice Trees, since I’d told her I’d check out the supplier on my next trip north. I also needed to pick up some suet. But, it remained to be seen if she would even speak to me after the little scene with Stan the other afternoon. I spotted her behind some statuary in the showroom and walked over, but I made sure I stayed out of her kick range.

  “I need the number for Very Nice Trees,” I said. “I’m going to be in Two Harbors this weekend, so I thought I’d do that look-see thing for you we talked about.”

  As I expected, she didn’t smother me with any sisterly affection. She gave me a “Die, you scum” look that I remembered well from our childhood, then turned her back on me to go to her office. A moment later, she was holding out an invoice to me. “It’s on here.”

  “Look, Lily,” I said, taking the sheet of paper. “About the other day, I’m sorry about my overreacting to Stan. I—”

  “Was an idiot,” she finished for me. “I don’t know why you have to go ballistic every time I date a guy. Stan is a very nice man. Not the greatest conversationalist, I’ll admit, but he certainly knows his stuff when it comes to accounting. He’s been helping me with my taxes for this year, and so far, he’s saving me a ton of money, Bobby. Although he does seem a little concerned about the profitability margin I posted from those Christmas trees.”

  She pointed at the invoice in my hand.

  “I called them yesterday to get directions for you, but I got their answering machine instead. But there was a message on the machine.”

  Her pupils dilated
and her breathing accelerated. A red flush began to creep up her neck.

  “They’ve got an absolutely unbelievable deal on ladyslippers for next month. You won’t believe this.”

  Now, we may have our differences, but I know my sister. There are only two things that consistently turn Lily White pink: 1) the prospect of big profit, and 2) tickets to Minnesota Wild hockey games.

  But the Wild wasn’t playing tonight, which meant only one thing.

  Lily was seeing big dollar signs.

  “Ladyslippers are pricey little flowers,” she said, excitement rising in her voice. “They usually sell for $150 to $200 retail, so I don’t include them in too many landscape plans. Plus, they’re hard to get. But Mrs. Anderson would really like a big garden of them in that landscape I’m working on. I told her it might not happen. But now, Very Nice Trees is offering them wholesale at $100 a plant, which means I can make a big chunk of profit.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Did you say ‘per plant’?”

  Lily was grinning. “Yup.”

  “And just how many plants go in a big garden for Mrs. Anderson?”

  Lily was practically choking on her grin. “One hundred!” she finally managed to spit out. “I can make $5,000 on ladyslippers for one yard alone—and that’s selling at the low retail price. If I charge her $200 per plant, I can make—”

  “Ten thousand.” I did the math again just to be sure I had it right. Both Lily and her supplier, Very Nice Trees, stood to make ten thousand bucks each from this one transaction alone. And if Very Nice Trees had lots more ladyslippers to sell, they were going to make a bundle. I wondered just how many ladyslippers they had in stock. I couldn’t imagine their costs were that much—you just needed the right growing conditions. Like the conditions up north. Find the right spot, grow the flowers and bring home the money. In this case, a lot of money.

  Maybe, I thought, I should consider growing flowers—expensive flowers. Like ladyslippers. I could tell Mr. Lenzen to take my job and …

  I folded the invoice into my wallet. Lily was almost bouncing off the walls. But then I remembered she’d said ladyslippers were usually hard to get.