Flight of the Sparrows

by Annie Jones

  Flight of the

  Sparrows

  Mystery

  and the Minister’s Wife

  Through the Fire

  A State of Grace

  Beauty Shop Tales

  A Test of Faith

  The Best Is Yet to Be

  Angels Undercover

  Into the Wilderness

  Where There’s a Will

  Dog Days

  The Missing Ingredient

  Open Arms

  A Token of Truth

  Who’s That Girl?

  For the Least of These

  A Matter of Trust

  Funny Money

  To Have and to Hold

  How the Heart Runs

  A Thousand Generations

  Home to Briar Mountain

  Flight of the Sparrows

  A Firm Foundation

  Off the Record

  A Distant Memory

  Tea and Sympathy

  The Master’s Hand

  Strangers in Their Midst

  Mystery and the Minister’s Wife is a registered trademark of Guideposts.

  Copyright © 2009 by Guideposts. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to the Rights & Permissions Department, Guideposts, 110 William Street, New York, New York 10038.

  The characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons or occurrences is coincidental.

  All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers.

  Guideposts.org

  (800) 932-2145

  Guideposts Books & Inspirational Media

  Cover design by Dugan Design Group

  Cover illustration by Dan Brown

  Interior design by Cris Kossow

  Typeset by Nancy Tardi

  Printed in the United States of America

  Chapter One

  After twenty minutes of sitting still, Kate Hanlon lowered her binoculars and finally moved her leg, hoping to ease the stiffness in her knee. As she idly shifted her position, a twig snapped, sounding so loud in the stillness of the Tennessee countryside that it startled her. She smiled at the petite older woman sitting on the log next to her.

  “It doesn’t surprise me that it’s so serene and quiet out here,” Bonnie Mulgrew said in a hushed voice. “But nothing prepared me for how silent and isolated it would feel.” Bonnie, Kate’s friend and former high-school English literature teacher, lifted her gaze to a clutch of trees in the distance. “It’s the silence that worries me. I can’t quite decide...” Bonnie paused.

  Kate had started the day excited to spend some time with her former teacher. A month earlier, Bonnie had called Kate from San Antonio about an event near Copper Mill that she’d seen on her Internet bird-watching message boards. Sparrowpalooza Weekend, sponsored by a local animal-rescue organization, Joanie’s Ark, had been hastily formed as a fund-raising event in hopes of cashing in on the reappearance of a rare pair of sparrows to the habitat between Copper Mill and Pine Ridge.

  Kate recalled reading about the umber-throated mountain sparrows the previous year when local enthusiasts had photographed the pair of nearly extinct birds, but she hadn’t kept up with the bird-watching buzz. Bonnie had decided to arrive in town a week ahead of the event, partly to have some time with Kate but also to get a jump on spotting those sparrows before the crowds rolled in.

  Bonnie waved a hand to get Kate’s attention. “Help me out here, Kate. Take a moment. Don’t move. Don’t even breathe,” she whispered. “Just listen.”

  Dressed in khaki pedal pushers, hiking boots, and a camouflage-patterned jacket over a T-shirt, Bonnie shooed a bug away from her dyed platinum-blonde hair and closed her eyes.

  Kate followed suit, lifting her face to the warm September sun and shutting her eyes. She could smell dry-ing autumn grass and the damp dirt. She held her breath, hoping that would lessen the distraction, and listened.

  The breeze ruffled the thick canopy of mostly green leaves overhead. She thought she heard a car’s engine in the distance, then nothing. “I’m not one hundred percent sure what I’m supposed to hear, Bonnie.”

  “The birds,” the older woman said softly.

  “I don’t hear any birds.” Kate kept her voice barely above a whisper.

  “Precisely!” Bonnie clapped her hands.

  Kate gasped at the sudden burst of noise and energy, then broke into a laugh. “So you had me hold my breath and listen for something you knew I wasn’t going to hear?”

  “That’s how you learn,” Bonnie said as she pushed up to her feet. She scooped up her black backpack from the ground and slung it over one shoulder. “Use all the tools in your toolbox, Kate. Your eyes, your ears, your nose, your common sense, your intuition, your reasoning power, your intellect—and it doesn’t hurt to throw a little education into the mix as well.”

  “All righty. Maybe we should educate ourselves now by trying a new spot.” Kate rose from the log seat and brushed as many bits of bark and leaves from her jeans as she could.

  Kate scanned the green hills, noticing that some of the trees were beginning to turn to autumn colors. She squinted in hopes of seeing the blue of a blue jay or the red of a cardinal, even the flutter of white and brown from an ordinary sparrow. Anything. But not a single bird caught her eye.

  She pushed back a drooping lock of her strawberry-blonde hair and turned back to Bonnie.

  The older woman said, “Should we hike to another spot, or should we get in my car and drive a ways for a completely different sampling?”

  Kate was up for anything. She’d always admired Bonnie and credited her teacher with encouraging her natural curiosity. They’d kept in touch mostly at class reunions back in Texas but had become good friends when they’d worked on a project some years back to collect and record their school’s history. Until then, Kate had thought of Mrs. Mulgrew as an “old lady,” when really, Bonnie was only in her late sixties.

  Kate shook her head at how each passing year pushed back the line in her mind between middle age and senior citizenship.

  “If we’d heard any birds, even in the distance, we might try walking, but I say drive. There are fewer birds here than there were in our spot earlier today.” Bonnie paused to tug a green notebook from her backpack, then slid a printed sheet of paper out of it.

  “So, do you think the drop in the bird count is confined to a small area?” Kate took a moment to look around them. She’d been especially careful to check for No Trespassing signs before they went walking out across anyone’s property.

  “Well, we haven’t had a very scientific approach, but it does seem like the more we head west”—Bonnie pointed in that direction—“the quieter it gets.”

  “Then we should head west,” Kate concluded, “to check out the theory that there are fewer birds out that way.”

  “But we have to be careful.” Bonnie inspected the paper she’d taken from her notebook. “I don’t have my official paperwork for the big event, but I did print this out from the Web site for Joanie’s Ark. They only had a crudely drawn map, but they made it very clear that people are supposed to avoid this big area here.”

  Kate leaned in to get a peek, but a gust of wind snatched the page from Bonnie’s fingers and sent it sailing. Kate lurched after it but winced as a twinge of pain shot through her body. She knelt down to rub her arthritic knee and shot a look at Bonnie. “
I had no idea bird-watching could be so hard on the body.”

  “I suppose this is where a tacky person might point out that when just sitting makes you sore, maybe the activity isn’t to blame.” Bonnie gave her a grin and a wink, then headed off to rescue the page, which had gotten snagged on a boulder jutting up from the side of a small hill.

  “Thank goodness you aren’t a tacky person, Bonnie.” Kate called after her. “Honestly, I think it’s the lack of activity that’s gotten to me today.”

  “I’d like to say that never happens to me, but—” Bonnie let out a sharp cry and tumbled to the ground.

  Kate bounded toward her friend, grabbing her arm to help her up and steady her on her feet. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Thanks. Just a misstep.” Bonnie retrieved the map, then froze with the paper in hand, staring straight ahead.

  Chapter Two

  Kate turned her head in the direction Bonnie was so pointedly focused on. “What is it? What do you see? One of the rare birds you came here to spot?”

  “Oh, it looks like a rare bird, all right. But not one I wanted to see. Or, more to the point, not the kind of rare bird we want seeing us.”

  Kate didn’t quite understand. She knelt beside Bonnie and peered through the low-hanging tree branches at the top of the ridge. An old, faded red pickup truck rumbled along a crude road in the field below.

  Bonnie leaned in close to Kate’s ear and whispered, “That’s the big tract of land where bird-watchers aren’t welcome. It belongs to someone named Artie Best, and it’s called Best Acres. The Joanie’s Ark Web site made it very clear we’re to keep our distance from it. They didn’t say why, exactly, but speculation on the Web is that the landowner is as disagreeable as the day is long.”

  Artie Best. Kate didn’t know him personally, though she’d certainly heard a few stories about the man people in town referred to as “the bird wrangler.” Not bad stories, really. At least not the kind you’d use to scare friends at a sleepover. But the tales weren’t exactly heartwarming either. Mostly they were about about how ornery and solitary Artie Best was, and that his past was a total mystery. That was the story Kate would have loved to hear.

  As it was, she did know two things for certain about Artie Best: first, that he lived in a large, old house in the middle of a huge stretch of land between Copper Mill and Pine Ridge, and second, that he loved birds. He took them in. He healed them. He protected them. He seemed to love birds much more than human beings.

  “Don’t worry, we’re not on his property. We’re just on the edge.” Kate didn’t know why she was whispering. Even if his truck hadn’t already bumped on out of sight, Artie Best could never have heard them hundreds of yards away on the ridge. She straightened up and, cupping Bonnie’s elbow to lend support, turned back toward the road where they had left Bonnie’s sunny yellow Volkswagen Beetle.

  Looking down from a stand of bushes to watch Artie Best driving his truck across his fields made Kate uncomfortable. She felt as if they were being rude or sneaky, as though they were spying on him. It was important to Kate to be a good neighbor to Artie, and having gotten so close to his private property without realizing it made her want to have a detailed map of the surrounding land before they went poking around any farther.

  “I didn’t realize we were so close to private land,” Kate said. “I think maybe we’d better call it a day, bird-watching-wise, until we get a better map.”

  “No problem,” Bonnie said. “It’s been a full day already. I’m hot and tired. I could do with a midafternoon snack. I always used to grab a bite to eat when school let out.”

  “I know just the place in Copper Mill,” Kate offered.

  “Sounds like a plan,” Bonnie said as they found level ground. She took a step toward the road, then looked back at where they’d spent an unproductive afternoon. “I need some time to process my concerns about the birds anyway. I can’t quite decide what to make of it.”

  “You sound awfully worried,” Kate noted as they made their way across a shallow, grassy drainage ditch. “Is it possible it’s just an unusually quiet day?”

  Bonnie moved to the back of her Beetle, chucked her backpack wearily into the trunk, and sighed. “Like I said before, quiet is normal. Silence isn’t. There’s something wrong out here, Kate. Something very wrong.”

  Kate could see that the wheels in Bonnie’s mind were turning. “Do you have any idea what?” Something was amiss in a place where, in just one week, crowds of bird-watchers were planning to gather. Knowing that tourism was important to Copper Mill, this was especially troubling to Kate.

  As they got into the car, Bonnie said, “There are lots of reasons why birds might abandon an area. Probably more than I can even list just off the top of my head.” Bonnie put her hand to her head, leaving a streak of dust in her bright blonde hair. “But I can tell you this for sure: When all the birds desert a place as thoroughly as they seem to have deserted this one, it’s never a good thing.”

  Chapter Three

  Bonnie drove slowly so they could continue to observe the surrounding countryside, trying to make some sense out of the absence of birds in some areas and not in others.

  “This time of year, there should be flocks of birds lining the telephone wires, flitting through the branches of the trees, swooping en masse overhead.” Bonnie took one hand off the steering wheel to make a gesture, mimicking the way the birds would dive and dip through the sky. “But they aren’t there. You saw me making notes of the flocks and solitary birds we sighted all along the way.”

  Kate nodded. “Your notes from this morning match what we’re seeing right now. But the closer we got to Best Acres, the fewer birds we saw, and now, driving away, we’re seeing more again.” She peered out the window as they got closer to Copper Mill. “It’s odd that the bird population around Best Acres would be so low. Best Acres is sort of an unofficial bird sanctuary around here. Locals know that they can drive up and honk, and Artie Best will usually come out and give them a tour. He’s the go-to guy for groups who want to learn more about birds in the area. My friend Livvy Jenner recently had him speak at the library.”

  Bonnie had slowed so much, apparently concentrating on Kate’s words, that they were hardly moving. “Why wouldn’t he want to participate in Sparrowpalooza, then?”

  Kate shook her head. “I’ve heard stories about him from people who’ve met him. He’s definitely a character. I’m sure that whatever his reasons are, they make sense to him, but I can’t imagine what they’d be.”

  Bonnie sighed and picked up her speed. “The worst part is that his land and the areas closest to it are speculated to be the best spots to get a gander at those umbies.”

  “Umbies?” Kate raised her hand to ask for clarification.

  “Yes, Mrs. Hanlon?” Bonnie’s eyes twinkled at the throwback to their one-time student-teacher relationship.

  “Old habits die hard.” Kate crinkled her nose and laughed softly as she lowered her hand. “You mean the umber-throated mountain sparrow?”

  Bonnie smiled. “Laypeople call it a bearded sparrow because the tuft of umber-colored feathers”—she wriggled her fingers just under her chin—“looks like a little rust-colored goatee. Avid birders have taken to calling it by the more affectionate name umbie.”

  “Umbie. I like that.” Kate smiled as they parked in front of the Country Diner.

  Kate could tell that Bonnie would enjoy everything about the diner by the smile on her face as soon as Kate escorted her through the door. The simple eatery—a gathering place where people shared everything from the latest news to a lunch of grilled cheese on rye—wasn’t very busy this time of day.

  Kate directed Bonnie to one of the blue vinyl booths along the wall, about halfway back.

  LuAnne Matthews, wearing a gold-colored polyester dress with a white apron, winked at Kate as she sidestepped to get her ample hips between two tables. “Be right with y’all, just as soon as I take care of Dot here.”


  LuAnne set her tray in front of a plump, pleasant-faced woman and unloaded a large slice of deep-dish apple pie, a coffee cup and saucer, and a pitcher of cream.

  Kate watched as Dot Bagley giggled, then dropped her napkin into her lap.

  “Your hair sure does look pretty today, Dot,” LuAnne commented as she poured coffee into her cup. “You just come from Betty’s Beauty Parlor?”

  Dot patted her stiffly styled gray hair with one hand. “Why, yes, I did. Thank you for noticing.”

  “That’s the second time in three days. You have some kind of big event comin’ up?” LuAnne asked.

  Kate wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but since they were right next to her, she couldn’t really help it.

  “No, no. Just been spending way more time than usual outside this week, and wouldn’t you know my hair paid the price for it?” Dot lifted her fork, then paused as LuAnne picked up the pitcher of cream and, as a courtesy, offered to pour some into the dark black liquid.

  “Oh no, I don’t want that in my coffee.” Dot touched LuAnne’s wrist lightly to stop her.

  “But you asked for cream.” LuAnne set the pitcher back on the tray and frowned.

  “Yes, but I’d like it in a take-out cup, if you don’t mind.” Dot gestured with her hand to indicate a small Styrofoam cup. “With a lid.”

  “You know you can buy cream by the pint at the store, don’t you?” LuAnne’s frown deepened, and her green eyes went a bit squinty behind her horn-rimmed glasses. Kate could tell she wasn’t quite sure what Dot wanted.

  “Yes, but I only had time to either have pie or go shopping, and I chose pie.”

  Dot sounded just a shade on the testy side. She must have realized it, though, because when she spoke to LuAnne again, her voice was much sweeter. Kate pegged it as what her grandmother would have called “sloppin’ sugar.”

  Kate watched Dot smile and say to LuAnne, almost poutylike, “I don’t mind paying extra for it. Just please can you keep it in the fridge until I’m ready to go? I appreciate it so much.”