NO ORDINARY OWL

by Lauraine Snelling

  “Esther.”

  “What?”

  “You know what…You’re avoiding my question.”

  “Oh.” Where was Toby? Always underfoot, why would he pick today to hole up in his room?

  “Moving! Moving! Esther is home! Hooray for Esther!”

  Flinching a little at her brother’s volume and high-piercing singsong, she said, “Because.”

  “Because why, Esther?” Her mother sounded a little puzzled, mixed with a lot of impatient.

  Esther drew in a deep breath. Maybe her other brother would at last come and create some distraction. Glancing hopefully over at the hall, she didn’t respond. If she said she didn’t want the girls to be around Siddy, her mother would be hurt, and that would hurt Esther. So far, Siddy had pulled his rare silent act around them. Once he got comfortable with them…If she said yes to her mom’s idea, her life as she knew it would be over. The girls would be happy she was leaving town with her crazy brother.

  Silence filled the room while she struggled with no good options.

  In a low voice, she said, “Because Siddy will yell something about us moving.”

  From down the hall, they heard, “Moving! Moving! Moving!”

  Tipping her head toward her mother, Esther held out her hands as if to say, “See?”

  Her mother uncrossed her legs and sat up straight.

  Uh-oh.

  “Moving! Moving! Moving!”

  Esther shook her head.

  “Esther Hannah Martin, when exactly are you going to tell your best friends in the whole world that you are moving at the end of this school year?”

  Since her mother had used all of her names, Esther knew exactly what her mother thought about her not telling the Squad. If indeed they were her best friends, she thought, her mouth turning down. Maybe not, if Melissa had anything to say about it.

  When would she tell them? If she waited much longer to answer her mother, she would get in trouble for not obeying.

  Finally, a thought struck her, and she blurted, “The day we release the owls.” The end of everything.

  As soon as the words came out, the urgency rose so quickly to bring final evidence to Byron and the sheriff before the birds were released, she had to clamp her lips shut. Her mother would not understand. Finding the person who zapped Bubo and the other owl had been the first most important thing on the planet. Now that the Awful Person turned out to be the chicken farmer, the Squad needed more proof. Once they found it, then, forever after, to whatever terrible place Esther had to move, she would know she’d been the best Squader she could have been.

  The girls would know it.

  So would Melissa.

  Siddy came thudding down the hall, and Esther allowed herself to be dragged to his room where she once again read another Hey, Imogene! book. In her head, while Imogene shouted “There’s no messing with Imogene!” and finding the bad guys, Esther was plotting her own Imogene moves.

  It was time for something her mother called drastic.

  Chapter 16

  Things Drag

  Drastic” took loads longer than Esther imagined.

  On Saturday, the girls returned to the estate for Sunny and Vee’s meal preparation. To entertain herself during that time, Esther unearthed Toby’s slingshot to see if she could get Howard to run for special bird nuggets, after which the girls fully intended to coax Byron to leak further information about the chicken farmer that they could use to find evidence.

  Instead, after Sunny, Vee, and Byron had cleaned and sanitized their hands, Byron seemed quite taken with the slingshot delivery.

  “That might be brilliant to use for the owls. They would see the food move through air. Might help their instincts.” He urged Esther to keep working with the buzzard so Byron could see the benefits.

  Moments later, Esther was pouting. “I want Howard to run up and catch the nuggets, not wait until they’re lying on the ground and then eat them. How’s he going to get exercise that way?”

  “Esther, Howard eats dead things. He’s not much of a border collie.” Byron’s eyes glinted with humor. Their pinecone defense of him had thawed him considerably. He took them with him to a field way behind the right side of the mansion and released and recalled the peregrine falcon.

  “They are beautiful.” Aneta’s head was tipped up, watching the falcon soar in the noonday sun. “The owls are so different, but also beautiful.”

  “Yes, and the owl talons have two thousand pounds of pressure per square inch to crush their prey after swooping down from the sky,” Byron said.

  “We get it, Byron. We can’t make them pets,” Vee said.

  All eyes were on the clear sky to watch the incoming of the falcon. All eyes but Esther’s. People, we’re on a mission here. With her fists on her hips, she blurted, “Why does that chicken farmer not like you?”

  Byron hesitated, then pulled his hand through his wispy hair. Esther didn’t think he was going to answer. Then he said, “He started losing chickens, parts of chickens, finding pellets.”

  “But why blame you? There must be hawks and other raptors around.” Vee eyed the falcon with a smile as it landed on Byron’s outstretched, gloved arm.

  “Timing, I must think,” Byron said. “He said right after Beverly did her first show at the community center with birds of prey it started happening.” He shrugged. “Before that, he didn’t know I was here.”

  “I have another question, as long as we’re asking questions,” Sunny said as the group headed back to the estate where Beverly had promised scones for a snack. She had learned the girls weren’t much on tea. “How did you hurt your face?”

  “Took you a long time to ask that one!” he said with a grin.

  “You’ve probably noticed this, but the S.A.V.E. Squad is very polite,” Esther informed him.

  He laughed hard at this, then sobered as he told the story in quick strokes. He had been an off-duty firefighter in another part of Oregon and encountered a fire at a wild-horse facility. Before help arrived, he had saved all but two of the horses, yet he had been burned badly in the face and hands. His throat had been burned inside, too.

  So that’s why he sounds like he’s whispering! Esther listened closely as he continued. “My sister flew in from England to help me recover. She likes it here.”

  “Who started it? The fire, I mean?” Vee liked to know whose fault it was when stuff happened.

  His light eyes moved from Squader to Squader. “Kids.”

  Esther spoke up. “That’s why you hated us at first. ’Cause we’re kids.”

  He spread out his hands in apology. “I thought you were all the same. These kids were part of some group who thought wild horses in corrals was a terrible thing. Silly barnies. The horses were starving, had been abandoned in a national forest. They were part of an adoption program.”

  By the end of that day, while the girls were pleased Byron no longer considered them trouble and they’d learned the story of his face, they had learned nothing that would help them with their case. Aneta said their only consolation was that the chicken farmer must know they were on to him and maybe wouldn’t cause trouble.

  “But how will we get more evidence unless he does something?” Esther complained, grumbling about the delay to the final project of the S.A.V.E. Squad. And her part in it.

  School started up again, and for the rest of the week, just like Esther feared, the Squad saw little of each other, limited to video conferencing and e-mails due to differing school, church, family activities, and homework. It’s already beginning. Esther moped at her house and actually told Siddy to “shut up” during one of his Hey, Imogene! yells and promptly lost her computer privileges until Saturday. Her stomach hurt a lot—that bitterness was twisting terribly. She wanted to cry but wouldn’t let herself. It was all about this final project.

  When the Squad finally regrouped at the estate the following Monday, Byron was engrossed in repairing a long rip in a screen in one of the flight cages.

&
nbsp; “Silly bird must have gotten dancing around inside and let a talon go wild,” he said, shaking his head.

  Esther looked at the rip and then stepped forward to inspect the lock. Straightening, she turned an I-told-you-so face to the Squad. She suspected sabotage. Now maybe the rest of the Squad would see how they needed to ramp up their investigation and do something. Do what, Esther had no idea, but something drastic. The next step for that Awful Person might just be the carriage house where Bubo and his buddy were stashed.

  Sunny, Vee, and Aneta crowded around the rip and took turns noting the scratches on the lock.

  “Want to see how Beverly taught me to sew a screen?” he asked.

  “Sew a screen like a dress?” Aneta wrinkled her brow.

  “More like making a potholder, I should think,” Byron replied. “Esther, be a love and run into the carriage house—quietly—and bring me a roll of wire in the basket near the door. Mind the birds.”

  Esther hurried away, cautiously rolled the heavy door aside, and flipped on the first bank of lights. The basket sat right where Byron said it would be—close enough to snatch, close the door, and run back to the others. She scooped up the roll of wire, and as she straightened, her gaze fell on the draped owl cage. Bubo and buddy.

  What harm would it do to take a little peek at them? To see them without having to look through a TV screen. She would be so very careful, holding back just a teensy bit of the canvas to see them in person—er, in owl. Surely they couldn’t imprint on such a tiny glimpse.

  Tiptoeing over to Bubo and his buddy’s cage, Esther hesitated before lifting her hand toward the canvas. Her hand dangled inches from her goal. She would be the first of the Squad to see the owls up close, see their cute round yellow eyes that sometimes looked like they were cross-eyed.

  Then her hand dropped to her side.

  No.

  Seeing them without the Squad was not right. Even if the whole Squad never got to look at them, she wasn’t going to see them without the girls. Besides, she’d been told not to by Byron, and he knew best. How could she pray and ask the Lord to help her with stuff she didn’t know if she wasn’t going to play fair with what she did know? The tightness in her stomach relaxed more than it had in several days.

  Now she really wanted to cry.

  About everything.

  Turning with the coil of wire in her hand, she walked softly toward the door, her head down. Moving was going to be so hard. She just wanted to solve this last case with the girls.

  A quiet “ahem” broke into her sad thoughts. Flinging up her head, she saw Byron standing in the doorway, hands jammed in his work-pant pockets. What had he seen? Did he think she’d peeked at the owls?

  “I—I…” She didn’t get any further.

  He made a little bow. “Well done, my girl. Nothing like being told not to—makes a chap want to ever so much.”

  “You saw—”

  “The whole struggle.” As they walked back to the girls who were mending the rip, Byron asked her, “What made you stop and not break my rule? You couldn’t know I was there.”

  Esther shrugged. “I remembered Whose I was. I just forgot for a minute.”

  Chapter 17

  The Gear for Drastic

  Great news, Esther!” On the phone after school on Monday, Vee’s voice rippled with excitement.

  Esther’s heart yanked itself up from the bottom where it had been flopping around since getting in trouble at home. Had Vee come up with an idea to get the final evidence to convince Byron? Esther hadn’t yet done a single huge thing for the girls to remember her by. Only loser stuff like being a bad tree climber and throwing up instead of helping feed the owls. Like that was how she wanted them to remember her.

  “Esther, you still there?”

  “What’s great?” Esther asked.

  “Bill is letting us into his garage to open the boxes from his old jobs!”

  That was it? Poking around in a garage? Esther stood up from the couch and with the phone to her ear walked to the sliding door and the back porch. Her two brothers were running around the yard pointing their light sabers at each other. Whatever Toby yelled, Siddy found sounds and phrases in them that he was pleased to repeat at the top of his lungs.

  The Squad needed to be at Beake Man’s poking around for clues. Boxes in a garage? Sounds like a trick to work. Her thoughts wound up like her class’s gerbil when he got going on his wheel. It wasn’t only a trick, it was stupid.

  Half an hour later, Esther’s opinion hadn’t changed. The girls had converged on the detached garage that was larger than the house. Before Vee’s mom had married Bill, he had built the house and the garage. You sure could tell he liked garages better. Maybe because it was easier to pile boxes higher.

  If Sunny’s uncle Dave’s kitchen had seemed like tall stacks of boxes, they were shrimps compared to the tall shelves with stacks of boxes on them. Sunny danced around Bill in her excitement. Aneta’s eyes danced, and Vee looked proud of her stepdad. All for a dumb garage with boxes, while clues lay waiting somewhere on the Beakes’ property.

  “You guys, don’t you think we should head on over to the Beakes’ place instead? I mean, it’s stopped raining for a bit. We could look for clues.” She edged toward the side door, looking over her shoulder, stopping before rounding the corner of another set of steel shelves.

  Pausing in another circuit around Bill, Sunny shook her head. “That’s the trouble with this project. There just aren’t any clues!” She flung out her arms. “For pizza sake, I want to have fun today!”

  “There might be a treasure in one of these boxes.” Aneta headed for a metal box with straps around it. “You never know.”

  Vee poked Bill. “Okay, which box can we open first?” Waving to Esther, she continued, “C’mon, Esther! We’ll go over later,” then turned her back to better listen to Bill explain that he wanted them to have some fun since the owl project was going kind of rough.

  You can say that again. Esther, lingering alone by the corner of the shelves, felt the hard pinch of bitterness. When she had chosen not to look at the owls, the knot had eased, but the feeling hadn’t lasted. The Squad didn’t care about the owls, about Esther leaving, about the Squad at all. A quiet voice inside mentioned that the girls didn’t know she was leaving, didn’t know why she was so desperate to solve the case. Esther ignored the voice. Her hurt was growing stronger, and it wasn’t fair to try to stop it. She turned to go. She’d go alone. She’d find the clue, solve the mystery, and Beake Man would be so grateful he’d let her—and only her—launch the second owl back to freedom.

  “Guys! Look!”

  Esther whirled at the high-pitched excitement in Sunny’s voice. The redhead, her curls bouncing every which way, was holding up a—a what?—high over her head like a trophy.

  “What—what is it?” Aneta walked around Sunny, her head tipped to the side.

  Bill folded his arms over his chest, grinned, then said to Vee, “Do you know what it is?”

  Vee came in close, looked at what was in Sunny’s hand, and bent over, rummaging through what remained in the steel box. “Goggles!” she said, straightening with her arms full of straps and vacant black eyepieces. “But what kind?” She turned to Bill. “Spill, Bill. Just what kind of jobs did you do?”

  Bill laughed the infectious laugh that made the girls—with the exception of Esther—laugh in return. “Are you telling me a squad like the S.A.V.E. Squad doesn’t know what these are? Nobody knows?”

  A chuckle slowly buzzed its way up through the tension in Esther. She headed toward the group. She knew what they were because she’d done a report for school and had found it on the Internet. Not only did she know what they were, but she knew how to use them for the drastic thing the Squad needed to do to get the final evidence on that Awful Person.

  “Hurry,” Esther tossed the words over her shoulder, hitching her pace to a trot. She’d laid down her bike on the front lawn of the estate and was now beat feeting it to the
front door. An impatient glance showed the rest of the Squad close behind, but not close enough. Now that they had the night-vision goggles from one of Bill’s boxes, they had to somehow get permission to stay until after dark to practice. Then, other nights, to stand guard. Time was running out.

  It was Monday. Surely the owls would be released soon, and then nobody but her would care. And she wasn’t convinced that Melissa had lost interest in the Squad, even though she no longer helped with the birds. What if she already talked to the girls about taking Esther’s place and the girls hadn’t told her?

  School would be over the second week of June, and then Esther’s life would be over. No more Squad, no more adventures, no more—her throat tightened—friends.

  “Hurry!” she repeated, pounding the lion’s head knocker.

  “I don’t know why you are so grumbly these days.” Sunny arrived, standing next to her and throwing an arm around Esther. “We’re here.”

  Yeah, but for how long?

  Vee and Aneta joined them. The door opened. Beverly Beake smiled at them, opening the door all the way. “Do come in, girls. Lovely to see you, as always.” She pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Byron is out puttering around in the back somewhere.”

  They passed through the foyer, with the dining room and sitting room on either side. They passed the kitchen and the breakfasting room, stepped out the french doors, and were surprised to see Byron patching another flight-pen screen. The girls shot a look at each other and hastened to him.

  “Sabotage?” Esther asked, knowing it was. She thought of the goggles they had brought. No practice run. The Squad had to prowl tonight because the chicken farmer had struck again. Maybe they’d even catch him tonight, but only if they persuaded their parents and the Beakes to allow them to remain on the estate.

  His lips pressed in a fine line, Byron nodded. “Blighters.”

  “Blighters,” Aneta repeated. “Blighters. Blighters are not good people?”

  “People doing bad things.” He was distracted, working on the patch.