Flight of the Sparrows

by Annie Jones

  “I’m glad to know you didn’t lie there in the open, afraid and in pain.” Kate took her hand.

  “Me? Oh no.” She enveloped Kate’s hand in both of hers, giving rather than needing to receive assurance. “I taught high school for more than forty years, dear. I don’t shake easily. Though having those EMTs treat me as if I were a frail, confused old lady did wound my pride a bit.”

  The vital-as-ever woman pursed her lips and turned her head as if needing a moment to gather her composure. She patted the back of her hair, then her hand froze, and she rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “I think I lost my new scarf in all the drama of it.”

  Kate smiled. “We can get you a new scarf.”

  “Well, that may be so, but you can’t get the air back into my hair.” She pushed down on the bouffant that had all but lost every ounce of its bounce. “Tell me that bump on the head didn’t destroy my pretty new hairdo.”

  “You look beautiful,” Kate assured her.

  The nurse agreed as she came in to take Bonnie to the room where she would stay the night for observation. “Now, if you had come in asking questions like that, I would have known you were a woman in her right mind,” she teased before adding, “Not everyone around here is in on the hunt for those rare sparrows...you know, those umbies. We don’t all speak the language.”

  “If you’d like to know more about them, I’d be happy to tell you everything I know,” Bonnie volunteered.

  Kate gave the nurse a sly smile. “One lesson at a time, Bonnie. Why don’t you tell me what you learned in all of this?”

  “I’m more convinced than ever that those flocks are missing for a reason. Kate, I didn’t simply stumble in a wooded glen or trip over a stick or stub my toe on a rock.” Bonnie grabbed Kate by the wrist. “Whatever is going on, whatever has caused the birds to disappear, it’s not a natural phenomenon. Somebody around Best Acres is up to no good.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  A little while later, Kate and Paul got into his truck and started toward the place where Bonnie had left her Volkswagen. Kate used the time it took to get there to tell to Paul what Bonnie had told her.

  “Bonnie said she had spent an hour or so documenting every bird she came across, and she had been pretty optimistic because she’d had to use more than one page in her notebook to do it.”

  Paul nodded, listening intently.

  “At one point, she saw a small flock of white-crowned sparrows winging overhead, and before she got hurt, she thinks she might have seen an umber-throated sparrow.” She gave her husband a sweet smile. “And though Bonnie didn’t mention it, I will. I think that goes a long way toward supporting your theory that there are birds all around. Bonnie wants to see them so badly that when they don’t appear, she frets that things have gone awry.”

  “But?” He guided the truck from the parking lot into the shade of the tall trees that arced over the quiet street.

  “I didn’t say ‘but.’” A lone yellow leaf fell on the windshield.

  “I know you, Katie, darling.” Paul stole a look her way. “I could practically see the gears churning in your mind from the minute you came out of Bonnie’s room. There’s no way you think this is as simple as a matter of poor timing and unrealistic expectations.”

  “You’re right, of course.” She watched the buildings of Pine Ridge slipping by as they made their way out of town. “I can’t dismiss the fact that Bonnie said she tripped over a booby trap. She said there was heavy-duty fishing line, the kind she thinks they use for ocean fishing, tied ankle height between two trees.”

  “Tied? Not just snagged between two trees?”

  “So she said. The trees were too far apart for it to have just gotten wrapped around the trunks. Besides, why would there be ocean-fishing line in a wooded part of rural Tennessee? It didn’t come undone when she fell. It snapped.” Kate made a motion with her hands like that of a thread breaking.

  “So she thinks there might be evidence still there? The broken fishing line tied firmly around tree trunks?”

  “That’s something she wants us to check on when we get her car. Unfortunately, when she started following the umbie and got away from the road, she stopped paying attention to where she was walking.”

  “So how will we find it again?”

  “Well, she may or may not have lost her scarf nearby.” Kate thought that of all the circumstances she’d mulled over, finding one trap with a scarf nearby was by far the best-case scenario. But she owed it to Paul to tell him the worst case she had imagined. “But if a person would go to the trouble of setting up something like that with the intent to do harm, or to deter people from looking around, it’s unlikely they’d only set one trap.”

  “If that’s true, Kate, perhaps we should involve Deputy Spencer or Sheriff Roberts.”

  “And tell them what? That a retired English literature teacher from Texas who was looking for an umbie thinks she fell over fishing line strung up by a mystery person who may have made entire flocks of birds disappear?” Kate rubbed her temple. “I think for Bonnie’s sake, we should look around first, and then if what we find is even a little worrying, we’ll make a call to Skip Spencer.”

  “And what if we don’t find any evidence of Bonnie’s claims?”

  Kate didn’t have an answer. But she couldn’t imagine that she could just give up.

  They drove along the curving road. In the past few days, the leaves had begun to change more and more, aided by the chilly September mornings. It was midafternoon now and had become quite warm. The sun glinted down through the canopy of leaves overhead, creating a dappling of light and shadow that suited Kate’s mood perfectly.

  They came up on Best Acres. The gate, with the new sign clearly posted, was closed. The barns looked shut tight, though Kate couldn’t see whether either building had a padlock on the door. The house was dark, but Artie’s truck sat in the drive.

  “Bonnie’s car should be around the next curve.” Kate pointed ahead. “She said— Watch out!”

  Kate made a grab for the dashboard to brace herself as Paul veered hard to the left to get out of the way of a white van barreling toward them.

  The driver of the van laid on his horn.

  Paul swerved off the road, then onto it again before pulling to the side directly across from Bonnie’s small automobile and coming to a stop. “Are you all right, Kate?”

  She nodded, breathless.

  “I don’t know what was wrong with that guy—”

  “Dud.” Even without his orange hat and sunglasses, Kate immediately recognized the van and the man with the carefully styled haircut.

  “What?”

  “Dud Howell was the guy,” she told him. “That was Dud and Charlene Howell’s van.”

  “Are you sure?” He twisted around in the seat to look behind them.

  Kate did the same, expecting to see only flying leaves or a curl of gray exhaust smoke in the wake of the van. To her amazement, though, the van sat stopped in the middle of the road not far from where they had run Paul off the road. Even more astonishing, Dud and Charlene had climbed out of the parked vehicle and had begun running toward them.

  Paul met them by getting out of the car and stepping out into the road.

  Kate got out and stood in the space between the passenger seat and the open door.

  “We’re so glad to see you,” Charlene called out to Kate as she and Dud reached Paul’s side. “Are you all right? I know that near miss gave me a start.”

  “We’re fine.” Kate included Paul with a backward glance.

  Dud shook his head. “These windin’, narrow country roads ain’t built for speed. I didn’t expect to meet up with anyone out here, so when Charlene told me we needed to get movin’, I took off. Then I saw y’all comin’ the other direction, and I overcorrected.”

  Charlene thrust her hand out to Paul and, between gulping in air, managed to say, “Hey, there, I’m Charlene Howell. This is my husband, Dud.”

  “Paul Hanlon.�
�� He took her hand and shook it. The second she let go, Dud grabbed his hand, leaving Paul looking like a puzzled politician working a reception line.

  Charlene, dressed in red jeans and one of the T-shirts she had been admiring in the Mercantile, came around the car to speak directly to Kate. For a supposedly outdoorsy type of person, she seemed strangely unaccustomed to physical exertion.

  She pushed her usually well-kempt hair off her face and had to gulp in some air before she spoke. “We ran into Bonnie this morning as she was getting out of her car. She saw an umbie and took off. Then we thought we heard her calling for help a while later while we were...uh...bird-watching. But we can’t find her anywhere.”

  Kate noticed her hesitation in explaining what they’d been doing and wondered if they’d really been bird-watching. Dud took a few steps forward, and Kate looked down, noticing his brown leather shoes. They looked expensive, not exactly made for hiking or other bird-watching activities. He motioned with his head to the spindly bushes and saplings that lined the road.

  “We gave it a good twenty minutes retracing her path, systematically going back and forth in a sweep of the area, and calling out for her,” Dud said.

  “Her car was unlocked, and all her stuff was in it, but she wasn’t close by. That just didn’t seem right,” Charlene added breathlessly.

  Dud started talking without giving Kate a chance to break in. “Charlene wanted to stay and keep looking, but was afraid Bonnie needed help.”

  Paul was still flexing his hand after Dud had let go of it. “Bonnie’s fine, but she might not have been.”

  Dud, still wearing the borrowed overalls for yet another day, frowned. “What do you mean? What happened?”

  Kate explained about the accident and the hospital, and finally about their plan to try to locate the fishing line Bonnie had tripped over.

  “Easy enough to do,” Dud told them. “We’ll just retrace her steps.”

  “How could we possibly know where she’d been walking?” Kate squinted at the land all around them.

  Beyond the thicket of brush, acres of tall grass stretched out toward a stand of dense, tall trees. It hadn’t rained in more than a week, so the feisty little teacher wouldn’t have left any footprints.

  “I could be wrong, but it looked like somebody made a path through the tall grass using a walking stick.” Dud pointed to the land on the other side of Bonnie’s parked car.

  Kate couldn’t see what he was talking about, but it did make sense that Bonnie would have used whatever kind of stick she could find to help her make her way back to the car after she hurt her ankle.

  “If you think you can take us back over whatever ground Bonnie might have covered, I’d like to try,” Kate told him.

  Paul agreed, and Dud parked his van before they all headed into the brush. Soon they stood in the field, scanning to try to decide where to go next.

  “That way.” Dud pointed. “Grass looks bent down, and there’s some small trees close enough to have a line tied between them and keep it taut.” He turned and indicated the other direction. “The trees over that way are too far apart. The line would sag. Least I think so.”

  Paul nodded.

  Kate squinted at the horizon. Bonnie had said the trees weren’t close together, but then again, in the heat of the moment, she might have made an incorrect assumption. Bonnie had been following birds. Birds would be drawn to trees. And what Dud had said about the line not working if it was tied too far apart made sense.

  It all fit, but Kate wished she had more than just Dud’s hunch. She raised her eyes to the sky. The whole time they had been out there, she hadn’t seen a single bird, which gave the surroundings an eerie, lonely feeling.

  Then a flicker of color caught her eye. Twenty feet away from their group, a bird flew by, headed in the direction Dud had indicated. At first she thought it might be a female cardinal, but the underside was too pale and the coloring was more rust colored than red.

  “Like burnt umber,” she whispered to herself. She strode up to Paul and took his arm. “Let’s go that way.”

  Her heartbeat actually picked up. She started off.

  “I think we should stick close to one another.” Charlene put her hand on Kate’s arm to hold her back. “That way if anyone trips over something, the others can keep them from falling and getting hurt.”

  “That makes sense,” Paul said. “Bonnie is in the hospital, after all. And just because she found a trap between two trees, that doesn’t mean there won’t be other kinds of setups out here.”

  They walked side by side, with probably an arm’s length between them across the flat area.

  Kate wanted to run. She wanted to follow that bird.

  Charlene carried on a lively chatter the whole way, but Dud trudged along, his head down.

  Paul picked up a fallen branch and broke off the leaves and twigs. He swept it along from side to side in front of him as he strode purposefully in front of the group.

  Dud paused to watch him but didn’t follow suit until Charlene gave him a wifely “Why didn’t you think of that?” jab in the ribs with her elbow. Then he snapped to attention, snatched up the first stick he came across, and began stripping off the leaves.

  But before he could get the job done, a tangle of long, dark threads fluttering in the breeze caught Kate’s keen eye. “Those are the same color as Bonnie’s scarf!”

  “Where?” Paul came to her. With his eyes narrowed and the impromptu walking stick grasped lengthwise in his hand, he looked ready to charge in and take the lead in handling whatever came their way.

  Kate pointed to the base of one of four young tulip poplars with trunks not much thicker than a man’s leg.

  “I see it. You stay here. The more people poking around there, the more chance of disturbing any evidence or getting caught in another booby trap.” He headed down the gentle slope toward the trees.

  Dud and Charlene joined Kate to watch. Paul honed in on the snarl of threads. The autumn wind made the threads wave like a flag from a sapling that looked broken in half. Paul had to tug and work to free the tattered bits of scarf.

  Charlene and Dud both shifted their feet in the grass. Dud craned his neck to see, while Charlene started pacing, intently staring at the ground.

  When Paul jerked the threads free at last, Kate couldn’t help noticing the jagged edges along the break of the slender, cracked tree. She wondered if that had happened when Bonnie fell. Bonnie had described her fall but never mentioned breaking a tree.

  Paul balled up the threads in one hand, then beckoned to the group with the other. “I don’t see any fishing line around here. Might as well come down and have a look to see if any of you can find it.”

  Kate, Dud, and Charlene made their way to the small stand of poplars. When they reached them and Paul, Kate scanned the grass at the base of the trees but found nothing.

  “I suppose it would be hard to find a strand of nearly invisible fishing line out here, wouldn’t it?” Kate crouched and ran her fingers along a tuft of dried grass at the base of one of the trees.

  Paul used the stick he had picked up to comb through the area near where he had plucked the scarf threads from the broken tree.

  Kate looked at the tree. “Bonnie said she fell between two trees that weren’t close together. That sapling and this tree”—Kate skimmed her hand over the rugged bark of the tree she had just knelt beside—“fit that description. So where is the fishing line?”

  Dud took a sideways step. “Well, a few threads from a torn scarf wouldn’t necessarily be right where Mrs. Mulgrew fell, now would it?”

  Kate frowned and looked at the tree near her again, then at a tree about five feet away, further down the hill. She might see the rest of the scarf and need to search for the trap somewhere else. “Bonnie said the trees weren’t close together, but it doesn’t make sense to string a line on a downward slope like—”

  “I found it!” Charlene’s cry cut Kate off.

  Everyone’s he
ad turned to where the petite brunette was stopped and bent at the waist.

  “Here’s a piece of it tied to this trunk.” Charlene reached downward and brought her hand back up. Even though she had her fingers pinched together, Kate couldn’t see anything in them. “And I bet if we follow the general direction this was lying in, we’ll find...bingo!”

  She pointed to another tree.

  “It’s broken, but here’s the other end, still knotted tight.” Paul went down on one knee and put his hands low on the medium-sized trunk, then he looked from it to the other end that Charlene had in her hand. “I thought Bonnie said they weren’t close together.”

  Kate stepped up so that she stood between the two trees, and from that vantage point, she wouldn’t have described them as close. However, looking at Paul and Dud Howell standing next to the trees, she could understand that they would think of the trunks, spaced a little wider than the two of them standing an arm’s length apart, as close.

  “I guess it’s a matter of perspective,” she told her husband as she came to his side and knelt to look at the line tied around the tree. “For example, Bonnie thought this trap was clearly set with the intention of hurting someone, but I just can’t see how that would happen. I mean, I know she sprained her ankle in the fall, but it’s a piece of fishing line between two trees in the countryside. That doesn’t seem like a very realistic plan to intentionally hurt somebody.”

  Paul looked at the layout, then tipped his head back to look up the length of the tree. “I almost feel like I should see a string of tin cans or a bucket of water, anything that might make noise or create a reaction when set off.”

  “Yes...” Kate looked up but didn’t see anything either. “Like it’s a trip line, an alarm system, not a trap.”

  “You can call it a matter of perspective, but in the end, someone did get hurt.” Charlene shook her head. “We can’t lose sight of that, not with so many folks coming here in a few days. I think it’s despicable myself and can’t help but wonder who’d do a thing like that—set a trap like this out here in the middle of nowhere.”