by Jan Dunlap
She shot another bleak glance at Red as our waitress retreated to the kitchen with a fresh pile of brunch orders. Her gaze lingered on Red’s back a moment, and then she took another deep breath, which seemed to help her regain some of her composure.
“The truth,” she continued slowly, choosing her words carefully, “is that Sonny made a lot of enemies over the years with his environmental advocacy. And Red made such a big deal about the turbines at lunch yesterday, she might as well have announced it over a public address system that Sonny was going to be … personally responsible … for the loss of hundreds of jobs in the Minnesota energy industry. As far as I’m concerned, Red painted a target on my husband, and somebody jumped at the opportunity to kill him before he put more people out of work.”
I glanced again at the policemen, who were both devouring their weekend specials. Neither one seemed particularly interested in what Mrs. Delite had to say.
“So he was murdered? You know that for a fact?”
“No confirmation on that,” Kurt said around a mouthful of his breakfast potatoes. “But Mrs. Delite here says her husband had no pre-existing health issues, so the medical examiner will be doing an autopsy. At this point, all we know for sure is that you found a dead man.”
He paused.
“A dead man who was an acquaintance of yours,” he added.
“That looks pretty lousy, doesn’t it?” I asked, already knowing what he’d say.
Unfortunately, I’d found enough bodies in my life to know that having a relationship with the deceased was definitely not a point in your favor when you were the one to find the body. Maybe I was going to have to make that a condition of acquaintance when I met someone: Hello, I’m Bob White, but I can only become your friend if you promise I won’t find you dead.
“Not in your case,” Kurt replied, swallowing a mouthful of coffee. “You’ve got a reputation with the local police departments for being a body-finder. Nobody takes you seriously as a suspect. You’re a high school counselor, for crying out loud.”
I didn’t know if I should be relieved.
Or insulted.
Counseling drama queens may not be the most glamorous job in the world, I know, but I take a lot of pride in what I do. Shepherding kids through the teen years is no piece of cake. I deal with dysfunctional families, suicidal teenagers, bullies, and world-class slackers. At a minimum, I deserve some respect for my dedicated efforts in molding young people into mostly law-abiding, albeit often unemployed, members of society. And combat pay for chaperoning dances wouldn’t be completely out of line, either.
“Remind me to call you for a character reference after my boss goes ballistic when he hears about this,” I said. “I think he’s convinced himself that I’m a walking public relations disaster just waiting to implode at Savage High School.”
“What makes you so sure that Lenzen is even going to hear about this little encounter of yours?” Rick asked, coming up behind me and clapping me on the shoulder. “It’s not like your name will be released to the media, Bob.”
I turned and gave him a glare.
“Who needs the media when I have you?” I said.
He started to protest, but I cut him off.
“Don’t even imagine that I don’t know that every time I’ve been connected to a murder case, you’ve been the one to leak it to Mr. Lenzen, Stud,” I said. “I know you. You can’t wait to see his reaction, knowing that I’m the one who’s going to be bearing the brunt of his righteous mortification, not to mention his tedious and long-winded reprimands.”
Rick tried hard to hide his grin.
“Hey, I’m just a humble government employee doing my sworn duty to protect and defend,” he insisted. “I figure I’m performing a public service. If Lenzen goes into cardiac arrest at the news, he’ll have a first responder right there, and I can save taxpayers the cost of an ambulance.”
“You are so full of it,” Kurt commented. “You have the biggest mouth on the entire Minnesota police force, Rick.”
“Thank you, Officer,” I said, giving Kurt a brief nod.
“Not always,” Rick amended. He gave me a sly smile. “Case in point: I have yet to divulge to anyone the true identity of Savage High’s own Bonecrusher.”
I blinked.
“That’s right, Bob,” he said. “I know something you don’t know, and I’m not telling.”
Great. Rick and Mr. Lenzen could start a club—Secret Keepers. Maybe they could get a young adult book series out of it, like The Babysitters, or Sweet Valley High. They could call it Savage Secrets.
Although that sounded more like a bodice-ripper. Somehow, I couldn’t quite picture Mr. Lenzen bare-chested any more than I could imagine him wrestling in a full leotard as the Bonecrusher. Besides, he’d have to hold a spear or a sword to pose for a romance novel cover, and knowing Mr. Lenzen, he’d probably insist on holding a detention pass.
“You know who the Crusher is?” I asked, stunned. “You scum. You sat right next to me at the back-to-school meeting and listened to me and Alan guess all day long, and you didn’t tell us?”
He held up his right hand. “I’m sworn to protect and defend, remember?”
“Protect what? A celebrity’s identity? You don’t think a professional wrestler can protect or defend himself? Hello, Stud, the guy probably outweighs you by sixty pounds of muscle.”
A mental picture of Boo Metternick, Savage High School’s new physics teacher and my personal pick for the mysterious Bonecrusher, popped into my head. He had to have at least a half-foot of height over Rick and a good sixty pounds, all of it hard muscle. I knew if I were in the market for a bodyguard, I’d go with Boo long before I’d choose Rick.
Then again, I could be wrong.
Alan was convinced that Paul Brand, our new art teacher, was the former Bonecrusher. Slim and quiet, Paul didn’t interact much with the other teachers, so no one knew much about him yet, except that he had been an especially talented hockey player in college. Rumor had it that he had actually played a year or two in the National Hockey League, but quit the ice after getting his nose repeatedly broken. Alan’s theory was that Paul put his quick reflexes and lean muscles to work as the Bonecrusher and kept himself masked so his old teammates couldn’t recognize him and razz him about defecting to professional wrestling.
Alan was so sure of his theory, he bet me ten dollars that Paul was the Bonecrusher. Given that the remaining five new staff members were either women or men who were too old to be the former wrestler, I’d taken his wager, fairly confident that I had the winner in Boo.
The idea that Rick had known all along, but kept his mouth shut, was not making him my favorite school police officer at the moment.
He held up his hands in defense.
“Truth be told, I didn’t know at the faculty meeting,” he confessed. “It was only my superior powers of detection that revealed it to me after that point in time.”
Officer Kurt gagged on his coffee.
I rolled my eyes.
“All right, all right,” Rick surrendered. “I overheard Lenzen on the phone with one of his Missota Conference buddies. They were talking about the high schools hosting wrestling tournaments in the next year, and he let it slip that the Crusher was teaching at Savage.”
I gave Rick an expectant look. “And?”
“And what?” He gave me his best imitation of innocence.
I briefly wondered if Officer Kurt would slap the cuffs on me for assaulting a policeman if I smacked Rick up along the side his head. Kurt did have a stun gun with him, after all.
Now there was an idea. Maybe he’d let me borrow it to use on Rick.
“And the real Crusher is …” I led, waiting for Rick to follow.
“My lips are sealed,” he said, miming zipping his lips shut and tossing away the key.
“For crying out loud,” I groaned.
“Although,” he said, “I might be persuaded to share that bit of information with you in return for your
assistance in finding a certain bird—a Ferruginous Hawk, to be exact—out in Stevens County this Thursday. Since it’ll be Fall Break at the high school, we’ve got the day off, and I figured this would be my best chance to get one for my life list, especially since there have been almost daily postings of people seeing it out there in the last week. What do you say?”
I’d say that it takes a birder to know exactly how to bait another birder, and Rick knew that a Ferruginous Hawk was just about the biggest piece of bait he could offer me this time of the year.
After all, I’d been following those postings as avidly as he had.
Especially since I’d never gotten one of the big hawks on my own life list.
Not that I hadn’t tried, but every time I’d heard about a Ferruginous Hawk being spotted, it was long gone by the time I arrived wherever it had been sighted, which was typically in a north-south corridor a little inside the western state line of Minnesota. Stevens County was in the middle of that corridor. The fact that there had been even a handful of reports of the hawk—or was it more than one individual?—in Stevens in the past week was not only a most unusual and irregular occurrence, but it was a clear indication that the raptors were on the move.
The reality was that Ferruginous Hawks, which are more common out west in the Dakotas, make very limited excursions into Minnesota, and even when someone does spot one of the hawks on our side of the border, it never hangs around. That means you can’t chase it and re-find it, like you can go after certain warblers or ducks or cranes that might spend a few days in Minnesota during migration. As a result, Ferruginous Hawks are one of the most difficult species to see in the state.
Let me make that an even more accurate statement: while the Ferruginous Hawk is seen in the state each year, it is most often the case that one bird is seen by one observer, once a year. The thought that several sightings had recently occurred was almost mind-boggling.
Which, of course, only made me more anxious to see one.
If the truth be told, as Rick had just put it, I’d mentioned to Luce on our way to the Arboretum this morning that I was thinking about driving to Stevens on Thursday. She’d be busy all day with an annual banquet event at Maple Leaf, the conference center where she worked, so I’d be flying solo.
Or, at least, that had been the plan.
“I don’t know, Rick,” I sighed. “Seems to me that if you were really a good friend of mine, you’d have dished up the Crusher’s identity without me having to ask. Instead, you’re using it as leverage for a birding trip.”
“Oh, are you going with Bobby on Thursday?”
My wife’s hand slipped into mine as she joined me by the table.
“I always feel bad when I can’t go with him,” she added, “and I know he really wants that Ferruginous Hawk. He’s been checking the list serve first thing when he gets up in the morning, and the last thing before he gets in bed at night.”
Rick grinned. “Busted, buddy.”
“I was going to ask you along, anyway,” I improvised. “You have skills that are crucial to me, Stud: you know where all the speed traps are on Interstate 94.”
“That’s where they want to put up those wind farms,” Red said, returning to the table and catching the last bit of our conversation. “West of 94 towards Morris. Isn’t that right, Prudence?”
This time, instead of looking bleak, though, Prudence’s face filled with a dark fury.
Uh, oh. Grieving wife goes crazy again. Better have that stun gun ready, Officer Kurt.
“Sonny should still be alive,” Prudence said through gritted teeth, her eyes pinned on Red.
“Geez,” I whispered to Red. “If looks could kill, you’d be dead on the floor.”
“No kidding,” she whispered back. “I could be your second body of the day, Bob, and it’s not even two o’clock yet. Who would have thought that Sunday brunch could be so dangerous?”
“Not me,” I said. “But I never thought birding was dangerous either, and look at me now—I’ve got a reputation for finding bodies along with birds.”
“Lucky you,” Rick chimed in.
Yeah, lucky me.
Not.
Chapter Four
Lucky, however, was exactly what I felt when I walked into the counseling department reception area at Savage High School on Monday morning: the line of usual suspects was only two students long, and Mr. Lenzen wasn’t bringing up the rear. My weekend escapade was still under wraps … for the moment.
“Hey, Sara and Vicky,” I greeted the girls waiting beside my office door. “What’s up?”
“I’ve got a kid for the day,” Sara Schiller said, pointing her chin at the five-pound sack of flour she cradled in her left arm. “I’m not supposed to leave it unattended for a minute, or I get an F for the assignment. How stupid is that? It’s a bag of flour! I can’t believe I let you talk me into taking this dumb child development class. The new teacher is a pain in the rear.”
“Gee, Sara,” I sympathized as I unlocked my office door and flipped on the light switch. “Why don’t you tell me how you really feel about this class?”
She gave me a blank look.
“I thought I just did.”
Clearly, Sara’s ability to discern my incredibly witty sarcasm was not her strong suit.
When it came to insulting her teachers in the middle of lectures and skipping classes, however, she was a virtuoso. Just last Thursday, she’d gotten halfway to Milwaukee before our attendance office ascertained that she was, indeed, missing from school, and the only way we knew for sure she was truant was because I got a call from a Wisconsin state patrolman who had pulled her over for tailgating him.
She may have been a mistress of deception, but no one could accuse Sara Schiller of being the smartest kid on the block, that was for sure.
“I’ve got one, too,” Vicky Coen said, turning her hip towards me.
Sure enough, there was a five-pound bag of flour riding on the low-slung waist of her jeans, protectively secured there by some kind of make-shift sling she’d draped across her chest.
“I named mine,” she said. “It’s Zoey.”
“That is so stupid,” Sara told her as the girls followed me into my office. “It’s just a bag of flour, Vicky. No joke, Mr. White, I really hate this teacher.”
“You mean Ms. Knorsen?” I asked.
Sara rolled her eyes. “Yes, I mean Ms. Knorsen. She’s my teacher for the child development class that you forced me to take.”
Not surprisingly, Sara’s memory wasn’t exactly accurate. By the time she came to me to change her class schedule for the third time in the first week of the school year, there were only two courses left that still had open seats: advanced calculus or child development. Suffice it to say that Sara wasn’t a math prodigy, which had narrowed her options down to the child development class. I’d felt a little badly about turning Sara loose on a new faculty member, but after getting to know Gina Knorsen during our back-to-school workshop, I was pretty confident that if anyone could handle Sara Schiller, it would be our newest Family and Consumer Science teacher. With five years of inner-city classroom experience behind her, Ms. Knorsen knew all the tricks in a delinquent’s book, which meant she was going to be the one teacher Sara couldn’t manipulate.
I could hardly wait for their first classroom confrontation. The very thought of it gave me goosebumps of anticipation.
“So you have to do me this favor, Mr. White,” Sara continued. “I have to meet with Officer Cook about my truancy last week, and no way am I walking into his office with a bag of flour. Vicky can’t help me because she’s already got her own baby to take care of. So you have to watch my sack of flour while I talk to Officer Cook because you’re the reason I’m in this stupid class.”
I dropped my briefcase behind my desk and looked from Sara to Vicky.
“You can’t handle twins?”
“Ms. Knorsen said we can’t babysit for each other,” Sara informed me. “Please, Mr. White, I r
eally don’t want an F in this class.”
That was a first. From what I’d seen of Sara in the last two years, she always wanted an F in class. Maybe Ms. Knorsen was already working a little turn-around magic on my perennial problem child.
Given my own less-than-stellar track record with straightening Sara out, it would be awfully nice if someone could.
But babysitting a bag of flour?
As I studied the girls’ earnest faces, I had a sudden recall of Baby Lou’s soft weight in my arms at the Arboretum. I had to admit that there was something infinitely sweet about a little person tucked so trustingly against your body. Granted, Sara was talking about a bag of flour, but nevertheless, I could feel my tender new-uncle feelings beginning to kick in.
“I just have to keep it with me, right?”
Yes, it was true. If I hadn’t already been the biggest sap in the world, I sure was now.
Sara’s face lit up.
“Oh, Mr. White, thank you, thank you! Now I don’t have to feel so dumb when I talk to Officer Cook. I promise I’ll do everything he says and get back here as soon as I can. Thank you!”
She dumped the bag unceremoniously on one of my two visitor chairs, grabbed Vicky’s arm and disappeared out the door.
I realized I didn’t know what time she had her appointment with Rick.
I looked at the bag of flour on the chair and sat down behind my desk.
“I think I’m an idiot,” I told my new baby.
“I know you’re an idiot,” Rick said from where he was leaning into my open doorway.
“Please tell me you have a meeting with Sara Schiller first thing this morning,” I said to him.
“Sorry, buddy. No can do. Why would I be talking to Sara Schiller?”
I dropped my head to my desk.
The Mistress of Deception had struck again.
“Hey, you’ve got somebody’s baby in here,” Rick said.
I lifted my head and saw him picking up the bag of flour.
“Gina told me about this assignment last week,” Rick told me. “She said I could be the child protection officer, and if I see any abandoned babies, I should pick them up and bring them to her right away. I was kind of hoping I’d find one at the end of the day, though, so I could take it over to her townhouse to return it to her.”