by Jan Dunlap
“You have a tiger?” Alan asked.
“Yes!” I said in exasperation. “Kami has a wildlife sanctuary. She has a tiger named Nigel.” I looked pointedly at Kami. “And that’s why someone’s been wrecking your fence and trying to let Nigel loose, isn’t it? Someone wants to prevent the eco-community from getting the zoning changed to allow them to build the project because that same someone desperately wants the ATV park to go in there instead. Could that someone be Ben?”
She shook her head in denial. “He wouldn’t do that. Kill Jack, I mean.”
“But he might sabotage your fence?”
Kami didn’t respond.
“Or maybe he’d ask someone to do it for him? Someone from the ATV lobby?”
Someone like Mac Ack? I knew for a fact that the Ackermans had checked in ahead of me on Friday. I’d seen Tom briefly before hitting the sack and he’d given me a rundown on the birders attending the weekend. So if Mac had a little errand to run late Friday night for Big Ben, who was to know?
An awful scenario started to form in my head.
“What if Ben asked someone to pull the fence Friday night, Jack caught the guy in the act after he left Kami’s place, and the guy shot Jack in a panic?”
Kami’s face went white.
“Maybe you should sit down,” Alan said, reaching for her arm as she seemed to wobble on her feet.
“That bastard!” she cried, flinging off Alan’s arm. “That lying, cheating scum of the earth!”
I missed the next few names she came up with because my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and saw Lily’s name.
No way was I answering it. Instead, I handed the phone to Alan. “You talk to her. I can only deal with one screaming female at a time.”
“Hi, sweetheart,” he said after he flipped the phone open. “Yes, he’s right here, but he’s got his hands full … birding.”
I rolled my eyes at him, and he walked away from me to finish his conversation with my sister. I looked back at Kami, who was transitioning from cursing Ben to plotting her revenge.
“I don’t care if the sheriff does throw me in jail for Billy’s murder, I’m going to tell her everything. How Ben has funneled money. How he wants my land. How he’s in bed with the ATV lobby. How he met with Billy at Mystery Cave on Friday. How he got my darts! I am going to ruin that lying bastard!”
“Go for it,” I cheered her on, grateful to see that she was making a quick recovery from her meltdown. In counseling circles, we call it “making an action plan,” and it’s a first step towards dealing constructively with the irritating agent. Of course, the action plans I usually see developing don’t include drawing and quartering ex-lovers or ruining the career of the local mayor, but I’m always open to new ideas. The day you stop learning is the day you die, right?
Speaking of which, I had another question for Kami.
“Amidst all this other stuff that you’re figuring out about Big Ben,” I interrupted her ongoing tirade, “did he ever happen to mention that he and Jack wanted to kill me?”
Kami gave me an incredulous look. “What?”
I told her about the note that Shana had found, written in Jack’s handwriting, and that we’d realized it had come from Big Ben’s coat.
Kami rubbed her hand over her eyes. “I never heard a word about you, Bob. Not until Eddie told me he’d run into you yesterday afternoon. As for the note, I think I saw Jack jot something down on a piece of paper while we were talking late Friday night about the odds of the eco project succeeding. But I can’t imagine it was a death threat, or that Jack saw Ben after he left my place. Then again,” she added, her features darkening, “there are obviously a lot of things I never could have imagined, aren’t there? It seems my little gift of precognition is vastly overrated.”
Alan returned my phone to me. “Lily’s happy … for now. But if I don’t bring you home by noon tomorrow, we are both in very deep yogurt with your sister.”
“Thanks, Alan. You’re still my best friend, you know. Even if you are making the mistake of the century by marrying Lily.” My eyes drifted towards the old covered wagon and its drape of yellow tape.
And then I had one of those stabs of realization that came zipping right out of my left brain.
Or maybe it’s the right.
Wherever it came from, I realized with a jolt that there was a big flaw in my imagined scenario of Jack surprising his killer.
Jack wasn’t found dead in the meadow with the downed fencing. He was sitting right there behind the covered wagon. If he’d been shot in the meadow, how had his killer moved him here without smearing blood all over Jack’s body, not to mention driving Jack’s car here? As I recalled, Jack’s bullet holes had actually looked rather neat, and his clothes were blood-soaked only around those holes, which meant Jack had been killed right here, not in the meadow and then transported.
Jack had come here for a reason before he was killed. Since we didn’t have after-midnight owling on the agenda for the birding trip, I had to assume he had another compelling reason to visit Green Hills camp in the pre-dawn hours.
I knew it in my gut: Jack came here to meet someone.
Someone he knew.
I turned back to Kami to share my revelation with her, but I was too late.
The pixie had disappeared.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Where’d she go?” I asked Alan. He shrugged in reply. “She was right here a minute ago. Then poof! She’s gone. Pretty spooky, if you ask me.” He pulled his hat from his head and tapped it twice against his leg. “And I’m not so sure the lady doesn’t have a couple of little-bitty screws loose, Bob. I mean, come on! She thinks she can pick up ‘impressions’ from places, and she lives with a tiger.”
“To each her own,” I muttered. Frankly, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Kami Marsden myself. The woman was undoubtedly elusive and eccentric, but I didn’t get the sense she was a killer or a liar. Big Ben, on the other hand, seemed to be fitting the bill for both.
“If I were the mayor, I’d stay far away from Kami,” Alan commented. “Like they say, ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ And that woman is past scorned, if you ask me.”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” I said. “Not only does she have the rage to fuel a full-scale campaign to trash Big Ben, but she also has plenty of circumstantial evidence that links him to Billy’s murder, and maybe even to Jack’s death, too.”
Which meant that the sheriff would have to reconsider her conclusion that Billy had killed Jack. Or at least, that Billy had acted alone. Combined with Shana’s protest that Billy didn’t even know how to use a gun, it seemed to me that naming Billy as the killer was looking more premature than ever.
Rushed, even.
Can you spell “cover-up”?
We started up the slope past the wagon and headed for the parking lot where we’d left Alan’s car. I could hear an Indigo Bunting and a Mourning Dove calling from beyond the lot, where the trees crowded in around the gravel area. On a normal weekend, the youth camp would have been a great spot for birding with all its different habitat areas: meadow, old-wood forest, stream, and wetlands. This weekend, though, it had proven to be a spot for murder and mystery.
Yup, you never know what you’re going to get on a birding weekend.
Just as we stepped into the lot, a boy hopped out of the driver’s seat of the car parked next to Alan’s. I could have sworn he looked familiar, but there was no way one of my students from Savage was going to turn up here in Fillmore County on a Sunday morning.
“Excuse me,” the boy said, “aren’t you Bob White?”
I looked him over. He was probably about sixteen and maybe all of five feet tall.
“Yes.”
He stuck his hand out to shake mine. “I’m Skip Swenson, and I’d like to interview you.”
Alan turned to me with a smile. “Your reputation precedes you, White-man.”
“The question is which reputation
,” I replied, dreading the answer. I took the boy’s hand and gave it a brief shake. “Interview me about what?”
“About the murder of Jack O’Keefe,” he announced, puffing up a bit like a male bird on display for a female. It didn’t make him any taller, though. Or older. Or more commanding.
Skip Swenson was just a kid.
“And why is that?” I prodded.
“I saw you in the diner with Mrs. O’Keefe last night, and then on the nine o’clock news. I want to be a journalist, and I thought if I could land an exclusive interview with you, maybe it would get me an internship this summer with a TV crew.”
That explained where I’d seen Skip before—he’d been one of the kids working at the A&W the previous evening. No surprise that he’d noticed Shana, since he was alive and breathing. The fact that he’d also noted who her companions were, though, was a little more impressive—Skip was obviously an observant young man. That’s always a good skill in a high school student. I probably spend half the time in my counseling office at Savage High School telling kids to pay attention to what’s going on in the front of the classroom instead of what’s on their phone’s text message window. Realizing that Skip had also taken his observation and turned it into a possible job opportunity bumped my estimation of him to even a notch higher. The kid was smart, and he had nerve.
Too bad he was wasting it on me.
“No comment,” I told him.
“How did you find us?” Alan asked.
Yeah, that was a good question. I gave Skip a stern glance. “Are you stalking me?”
“No!” he cried in alarm, raising his hands to his shoulders.
“You can put your hands down, Skip. This isn’t a stick-up.”
The boy blushed a bright crimson and dropped his hands. “I know that,” he mumbled.
I couldn’t help myself. I was starting to like Skip. He may have been intruding into my life, but he was doing it so awkwardly that it made me smile. “So how did you know I would be here?”
He glanced up at me from under a long fringe of blond hair. He had that bowl cut thing going on with his mop of hair, like his mom had simply placed a bowl over his head and trimmed right around it. I guessed that Skip was definitely not the school GQ icon.
“This morning I drove over to the hotel to see if I could talk with you, and just when I got there, I saw you getting in the car with your friend.” Skip pointed to Alan. “Then I followed you guys here, but I didn’t turn in to the parking lot right behind you. I didn’t want you to ‘make’ me, you know?”
“Make you?” Alan asked.
“Yeah, like on the cop shows. Identify the car following you. I wanted to see where you were going, then I doubled back and parked here after you had gone. I figured I’d catch you when you got back.”
“Good thinking,” I said. I glanced at Alan. “We didn’t ‘make’ you at all, Skip.”
He seemed to puff up a little again.
“So what kind of interview were you thinking about?”
Skip’s face lit up. “Oh, man, that would be so great if you would let me ask you a few questions! I’ve even got a minicam in my car to film you.”
“Bob,” Alan warned.
“It’s all right,” I reassured him. I nodded at Skip. “Let’s see what you’ve got, Jimmy Olsen.”
“It’s Skip,” he corrected me. “Skip Swenson.”
“I know. I was making a joke,” I explained. “Jimmy Olsen, cub reporter, like with Superman and Lois Lane? Mr. White, the editor of the Daily Planet?
Skip just stared at me. He didn’t get it.
“Never mind. Get the camera.”
Alan snickered beside me.
Our eager journalist-to-be pulled his car door open and grabbed a small video camera off the passenger seat. “Could you hold it for me while I interview Mr. White?” he asked Alan.
“Sure. Show me how to run it. My name’s Alan Thunderhawk, by the way.” He paused for a beat. “Jimmy.”
“It’s Skip,” he said again. I noted a hint of irritation in his voice. He was probably thinking that not only were Alan and I old guys, but hard-of-hearing as well. He gave Alan a few brief instructions, then came to stand next to me. A little more puffing, and he was ready to go. “Roll it,” he told Alan.
“I’m here with Bob White, the mystery man who’s been at the side of Shana O’Keefe since her husband’s murder yesterday morning. Can you tell us, Mr. White, what your involvement is with Mrs. O’Keefe?”
“We’re old friends, Skip,” I told him, feeling relieved to have the chance to set the record straight. “Mrs. O’Keefe and I used to go birding together almost twenty years ago when I was about your age. I’m here this weekend because I was birding with her husband Jack’s weekend birding group. In the light of what’s happened, I know she appreciates having friends around her during this awful ordeal.”
Skip brushed his bangs out of his eyes and crossed his arms over his thin chest. “And how is she reacting to the very real possibility that not only her husband has met his death this weekend, but that Bobwhite might also be killed in the process?”
Say what?
Actually, for a moment or two, or three, I couldn’t say a thing. My heart felt like it had slammed into my chest.
“What did you say?” Alan asked, lowering the camera.
“Keep it rolling, Mr. Thunderhawk,” Skip motioned with his hand for Alan to raise the camera back up again.
I put my hand on Skip’s shoulder and locked my eyes on his. “What are you talking about?” I carefully enunciated each word.
Skip looked confused, and his eyes darted from mine to Alan’s face and back again to mine. “The eco-community,” he said. “I’m asking if Mrs. O’Keefe is upset that the eco-community might lose its battle with the zoning council because of Mr. O’Keefe’s murder.”
“No,” Alan corrected him. “You said something about killing Bob White.”
“That’s right,” Skip agreed. “Bobwhite is the name of the eco-community.” He paused for a minute, checking out the dumbfounded expressions on Alan’s and my faces. “You didn’t know that?”
I walked over to lean against Alan’s car. I rubbed my hand over my chin, aware of a huge wave of relief washing over me even as I was busy mentally reassembling what had happened since I’d found Jack’s body yesterday morning. Jack’s note wasn’t about me. It was about the eco-community’s possible fate if the zoning didn’t get approved. I wasn’t on somebody’s hit list.
Good to know.
Really good to know.
But before I could enjoy the full range of that feeling, a little fact jumped front and center into my consciousness to spoil the moment.
Someone had still cut my brake line and put Bernie into the hospital. Not what I would call a random act of the universe.
Around me, birds were singing. Automatically, I began to list their names in my head: Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Blue Jay, Eastern Phoebe.
“You didn’t know that,” Skip said, only this time it was a statement of fact, not a question. “Oh, I get it! You thought I was saying that you were getting killed, Mr. White. Bobwhite. Bob White. Got it. What I was talking about was the eco-community. The project’s called ‘Bobwhite Acres.’ And the trail park the ATV lobby wants to build instead is called ‘Ride on the Wild Side.’ It’s supposed to be huge and generate a whole lot of income for the county.”
“Yeah, I think I heard that,” I responded half-heartedly. “I’m just having a … moment … of … mental reconfiguration here, Skip.”
Our cub reporter brushed his bangs out of his eyes again and gave me a careful once-over.
“Is there something else going on here?” he asked.
“Hey, Skip, I think we’re done filming for now,” Alan piped up. “Maybe we can do some more later.” He handed the camera back to the boy and then came to lean against the car next to me.
“The news is both good and bad, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yeah,” I
agreed.
“Can I talk to you later, Mr. White?” Skip asked. “Maybe I can do a written interview and email it to a station?”
“Sounds like a plan, Skip,” I said, but without much enthusiasm.
He climbed into his car and left the lot.
“What are you thinking?” Alan asked.
I looked up into the trees that rimmed the parking area. “Oh, that I’m glad Jack and Ben weren’t plotting my murder. Wondering who is. And why.”
Alan took off his hat and wiped his arm across his forehead. “We’re going to find out, Bob. You and me. And then we’ll put the son-of-a-bitch in jail.”
Alan suddenly went tense beside me.
“Did you hear that?” he whispered.
“What?”
“That bird call. It sounded like ‘pee-oo-wee.’ Is that what a Pewee sounds like?”
I stared at Alan, then tuned my ears to listen for the bird.
I didn’t hear anything.
“Funny, Alan,” I said, shaking my head. “Nice try, but no cigar.”
“No, wait. Just be quiet,” Alan insisted.
I listened again.
And then it came. The clear song of the Eastern Wood-Pewee.
“I’ll be damned,” I said in total amazement. “You got the bird, Alan.”
He grinned at me.
“And you’re going to get a fiancée.”
I looked at him blankly.
“Our bet? You said if I found the Pewee, you’d ask Luce to marry you.”
I felt the blood drain from my head.
“I did say that, didn’t I?”
“Yes, White-man, you did.”
Holy crap.
“Which gives us one more reason to find your car saboteur and get him put away as quickly as possible,” Alan continued. “We don’t want to keep Luce waiting any longer than she has to for you to put that diamond on her finger now, do we, White-man? Hey, maybe we could have a quadruple-ring ceremony. You know, we could all get married at the same time? Two-for-one? I bet it would save us a bundle on the reception, at least.”
I could barely hear what Alan was saying over the roaring in my ears.
No, not roaring. Ringing.