A Murder of Crows

by Jan Dunlap

  The finch cocked its head.

  “I know, I know. I’m just a high school counselor, for crying out loud. Geez, everybody’s a critic.”

  From inside the house, I could hear the crinkling noise of butcher paper being unwrapped from what would soon become our dinner. My mouth began to water in response. Just the thought of Luce’s fresh salmon had me salivating like one of Pavlov’s dogs. I followed my wife inside to where she was standing by the counter, already measuring ingredients into a bowl for homemade biscuits.

  “Why in the world would Red want to hurt herself?” Luce posed the question when she saw me.

  She’d been thinking it over, too, which didn’t surprise me in the least. In the year since our wedding, I’d learned a secret about my bride. Luce was as stubborn as I was when it came to solving a puzzle. If I was a Sherlock Holmes, she was my Dr. Watson.

  “Because she wanted more days off than Chef Tom would give her,” I said in exasperation. “I have no idea! I just think it’s too coincidental that the one time Red might have key information for a murder investigation, she’s suddenly memory-less.”

  Luce stopped blending milk into the mixture.

  “It’s a murder now?”

  I’d forgotten she didn’t know.

  “Rick was in my office this morning when he got a call,” I explained. “Sonny was poisoned. The medical examiner found traces of hemlock in his stomach. In lieu of any evidence that he committed suicide, they’re treating it as a homicide.”

  “Oh, my,” she breathed, staring into the bowl of dough. “What about an accidental death? Maybe Sonny mistakenly ate … no,” she declared, affirming my own opinion. “No way. Sonny was an expert woodsman. He couldn’t have mistakenly ingested hemlock.”

  She went back to stirring the biscuits, but I could tell from the tilt of her head that she was still mulling it over. I may not be a mind-reader like Luce, but I do know body language, and body language doesn’t lie.

  Sure enough, a moment later, she added, “Wild ginseng does look an awful lot like water hemlock. If you were harvesting your own ingredients for brewing a natural tea, I guess it could be possible that …”

  “You’d pick poisonous water hemlock by mistake? Remind me not to drink any loose leaf ginseng tea the next time someone offers it to me,” I told her. “For that matter, I don’t think I want to drink any more ginseng tea, period.”

  Luce dumped the dough onto the floured kitchen counter and patted it out with her fingers into an oval shape.

  “I’m just saying it could happen,” she insisted. “I know Sonny was into natural foods. Maybe he routinely harvested his own tea leaves. Lots of people hunt for edible mushrooms and roots these days to use in their diets.”

  I suddenly remembered Red reassuring Mrs. Delite that her meal was all organic. Maybe Luce was onto something here. Maybe Sonny’s death was just a terrible mistake—he’d taken an early morning stroll, picked some leaves and thrown them into his morning cup of tea, thinking he was going to savor some wild ginseng.

  “But what about the scarecrow get-up he was wearing?” I wondered aloud. “You’re the one who thought that was a clear indicator of foul play,” I reminded her.

  She looked me up and down.

  “Maybe I spoke out of turn,” she said.

  I glanced down at my weathered blue jeans and my favorite flannel shirt that I’d worn to work. Stick an old hat on me, and I could be Sonny’s fashion double.

  “Okay, so maybe the clothes aren’t a dead giveaway.”

  Luce groaned.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean that intentionally,” I tried to apologize. “It was a slip of the tongue. Bad Bob! Bad Bob!” I reprimanded myself.

  Luce laughed and cut the dough into biscuits.

  I watched my wife’s expert chef’s hands smoothly transfer the biscuits onto a waiting cookie sheet. She could probably do it in her sleep, I realized. Had Sonny likewise been on automatic early Sunday as he strolled the Arboretum and unthinkingly tossed in a deadly leaf to steep in his morning tea?

  Stranger things had happened, I supposed, though at the moment I honestly couldn’t think of any.

  “I think you should call Rick and tell him about the ginseng,” I told Luce. “You might be able to save the local detectives a lot of trouble for nothing.” I watched her pop the tray of biscuits into the oven. “And maybe you’re right—I am too suspicious.”

  Luce cleaned her work area and put away the bag of flour. “By the way, thanks for picking up flour. I forgot to put it on the grocery list when I shopped yesterday afternoon, and I know how you love those buttermilk biscuits with salmon.”

  “What flour?” I asked.

  “The bag of flour I found in the front hallway when I came in. To be honest, I was surprised you’d thought to stop at the store and pick it up. I didn’t know you were aware we were out of it.”

  The bag of flour.

  Goldie.

  Oh, crap.

  I looked into the oven where the biscuits were already rising into fluffy magnificence.

  “That’s somebody’s baby in there,” I said, not sure if I should laugh out loud or pound my head against the kitchen wall.

  “Say again?” Luce asked.

  I pointed at the oven, a smile pulling at the corners of my mouth.

  “That bag of flour was Sara Schiller’s child development class ‘baby.’ I was babysitting it for her today, and I had to bring it home overnight.”

  Luce looked from me to the oven, then back to me.

  “Well, that settles that question,” she said. “Once we have kids, I’m sure not leaving them alone with you at home.”

  Chapter Six

  I made a quick detour on my way into work on Tuesday morning and pulled into the Stop ‘n’ Go gas station two blocks from the high school. I grabbed the first bag of flour I could find and went to pay at the register.

  “Morning, Bob,” said a voice behind me.

  I turned to find Paul Brand, our new art teacher, holding a steaming cup of coffee in one hand as he dug in his pocket with the other.

  “Hi, Paul,” I replied. I nodded at his large cup. “You’re a wise man. The java here is far superior to what we get in the teacher’s lounge.”

  I paid the young man behind the cash register, and waited for Paul to do likewise.

  “So how are you adjusting to life at Savage High?” I asked him. “Are the students treating you okay?”

  “They’re good kids,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee.

  I waited a beat for him to say something more, but he didn’t. I fished through my memory to see what tidbit I could retrieve about him to continue the conversation, but came up empty. I really didn’t know anything about him, other than he was our new art teacher and had played hockey.

  And Alan thought he was the Bonecrusher.

  I studied Paul while he dropped his change in his pocket. Only an inch or two shorter than I was, he was broader through the shoulders and slimmer at his waist. I tried to visualize him in a black mask and leotard, which was a little tough at the moment, since he was wearing a mustard-colored cotton V-necked sweater over an open collared shirt, his sleeves rolled neatly up to his elbows. Even though I could see the definition of muscles in his biceps, with his wavy jet black hair and chiseled cheekbones, he looked more like a GQ model than a former wrestling star.

  Except for his broken nose. That was definitely not GQ.

  I propped my bag of flour against my hip and abruptly realized that I was staring at Paul’s crooked nose.

  “It looks a lot better now than it did when it happened,” he informed me. “Fortunately, I have a very high pain threshold.”

  “Sorry,” I apologized. “I didn’t mean to stare. Still, that must have hurt,” I added. “Hockey?”

  “State tournament, my senior year of high school,” he said. “My mother cried all the way to the emergency room. I figured I was just paying my dues as a hockey player. Believe me, I’ve taken
worse hits.”

  The way he said it made me think about Alan’s insistence that Paul was the Most Likely Faculty Member to Be the Bonecrusher in our bet. Did Alan know more about Paul than he had shared with me? I always made a point of being on good terms with all of the teachers at Savage, but that didn’t necessarily mean I had access to the same grapevine of information that teachers seemed to share amongst themselves. Before I could ask Paul to elaborate, though, he abruptly changed the subject.

  “You’re the counselor for students in the last part of the alphabet, right?”

  “I am.”

  “I’ve got some real issues with a student named Sara Schiller,” he said. “She’s cutting my class on a regular basis. Last week we started a scrapbooking project, and she has yet to even get started.”

  “Scrapbooking? You mean like photo albums?”

  “It’s a lot more than that,” he corrected me. “It’s actually an art form that goes back to the fifteenth century in England. It’s the creative selection and preservation of personal and family history through the use of photographs, literature and artwork. Most of the students really enjoy the embellishment techniques I teach them.”

  Embellishment?

  Embellishment?

  Heck, I was still grappling with the photo album as art concept.

  Paul checked the time on his watch. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “Would you talk with Sara, please?”

  “I will,” I assured him, following him out the door to where I had parked in front of the store. I shifted my newly-purchased bag of flour into the crook of my arm and watched him walk towards the rows of gas pumps. While he wasn’t the biggest guy I’d ever seen, he carried himself with a certain swagger that reminded me of my brother-in-law, back when Alan and I were in college together. Alan had been, and still was, a talented athlete. Judging from his easy gait, it looked like Paul was in that same club.

  Savage’s new art teacher also carried something else, I noticed.

  Slung over Paul’s left shoulder was a satchel bursting at the seams with art equipment. I could see the tips of paintbrushes and the edges of drawing pads poking out … just above the silhouette of what looked suspiciously like two Greco-Roman wrestlers silkscreened on the satchel.

  Paul Brand had an interest in wrestling.

  Shoot. Had I bet on the wrong teacher?

  Could the intimidating Bonecrusher have turned into a scrapbooking art teacher?

  Not in my universe.

  Then again, I was a birder who found dead bodies.

  Go figure.

  I popped the lock on my SUV and laid the bag of flour on the back seat. Whether he was the Bonecrusher or not, I was glad I’d run into Paul and that he’d given me the heads-up about Sara’s absences. As soon as I saw my favorite delinquent, she was going to not only get her baby back, but she was also going to get another lecture about skipping school.

  Not that I had any illusions that one more lecture would make a difference. Sara was a habitual truant. With two workaholic parents who seemed to show little interest in her, I was fairly certain that her school-skipping behavior was a desperate plea for attention. In that sense, Sara was a wild success, because she got my attention all the time.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t do jack for her visibility with her parents—from what I could tell, they hardly noticed they even had a child, which just encouraged Sara’s own irresponsibility and acting out even more. From years of being a school counselor, I knew that I could talk until I was all shades of blue in the face, but if a kid wanted to keep doing something, she’d do it … until the stakes got high enough to make her pause and hopefully make changes.

  In my experience, that frequently meant that the stakes had to entail a close encounter with either the police or the Grim Reaper, or in some cases, both.

  Seeing as Sara had already added the Wisconsin highway patrol to her list of acquaintances, I wondered what kind of near-death experience it would take to make her change her delinquent ways.

  A vision of Sonny Delite, sprawled dead in the woods, popped into my head.

  Yup. That would certainly cause a change in a person’s behavior—being dead. The downside was that it would also change everything else about the person. Permanently.

  I thought again about Luce’s theory. Could Sonny’s death have been the result of a fatal mistake in a natural diet? The absence of any suicide evidence had caused the police to label it murder, but I seriously doubted that organic tea fans routinely left notes stating that in case they were found dead, the investigators should know they had picked their own tea leaves that morning.

  My, what a pleasant way to start another day of counseling high school students. Some people repeated affirmations or listened to music. I pictured dead bodies.

  I pulled into my usual parking space behind the gym and turned off the engine. As I opened the car door and stepped out, a perfect V of Canada Geese flew overhead, heading south.

  In another month, we could be looking at highs in the teens for temperatures. We’d already had one hard freeze, and the Farmers’ Almanac was predicting another long, frigid winter. Last week, Mr. Lenzen had even posted his annual ridiculous list of energy-saving tips in the teachers’ lounge in hopes of miraculously lowering the school’s heating bills.

  Somehow I doubted that putting up posters of tropical destinations was really going to make a difference in how students and teachers perceived the chill factor in a freezing classroom. I knew from my own cubbyhole-of-an-office experience that when your fingers got too cold to feel a pen in their grip, not even the memory of a hundred-degree day in July was enough to get the blood pumping again. If Mr. Lenzen was really serious about reducing energy bills, he should have pushed harder to get one of those wind turbines that the Savage school district installed last spring near the middle school.

  I’d forgotten about the wind turbines.

  A year ago, the School Board had asked for input from the schools in the district about where the turbines should go. It was part of a project with the local utilities company, as I recalled—something about ensuring compliance with the Minnesota state law that required electrical utilities to provide twenty-five percent of their total electricity sales from renewable sources by the year 2025. I think there had been some debate about the turbines functioning in sub-zero weather, but the turbine manufacturer assured everyone it wasn’t an issue and swore that the schools wouldn’t get stuck without power in the middle of winter.

  Of course, if I was representing a multimillion-dollar project that was dependent on turbines, I’d probably say the same thing, especially if I was staring at a government deadline for developing alternative sources. What utility company wouldn’t be eager to tap into wind power first and then work out the kinks in the technology as it developed? Being the first kid on the block—or in this case, the first turbine on the block—could only be good for business.

  Which would also make it understandable that those same energy companies wouldn’t appreciate Sonny’s vehement protests against their wind farm plans in Stevens County.

  Renewable sources versus conservation.

  Weren’t those two supposed to be on the same side?

  I wanted to believe that, but anyone who read the news in Minnesota would find out differently.

  The LeSuer/Henderson Recovery Zone utility battle had ended years ago, but another environmental debate was now raging in Goodhue County, east of Savage, between a proposed wind farm project and federal and state wildlife officials, not to mention local residents and conservation advocates. The issue was what would happen to the eagles—nesting and migrating Bald Eagles, as well as visiting Golden Eagles—that used the proposed site, once the wind farm was up and running. With fifty turbines planned for the farm, everyone knew that some eagles would be killed by the big blades of the wind towers—eagles that were protected by federal law.

  Consequently, every interest group involved was trying to come up with a way to combine
land use and energy development with environmental responsibility, but, as usual, sometimes the strategies got ugly. I’d even heard that the wind company was accusing local residents of deliberately luring more eagles into the area to pad the numbers of potential bird deaths from the turbines. At the same time, the developer’s plans to remove nearby habitat in order to keep the birds and other wildlife away from the deadly turbines was getting a thumbs-down from state and federal officials. While putting distance between the towers and nests would save some birds, land-clearing would only displace the other critters in the area.

  Basically, what used to be simple utilitarian decisions about land use had become intricate balancing acts of a multitude of interest groups and subgroups. Depending on where in the state a piece of property was located, a real estate transaction could come under the scrutiny of a dozen agencies, not to mention public discussion and debate.

  And Sonny Delite had often been smack in the middle of a lot of those discussions, according to his wife, verbally slugging it out with the opposition, giving utility groups and project developers a painful, and often embarrassing, black eye.

  If Sonny was repeatedly going to step into the ring with big bucks energy providers, maybe he should have taken a page from the Bonecrusher’s book by wearing a mask and remaining anonymous. That way, if someone had decided to go after Sonny looking for payback, he’d still be looking.

  And Sonny wouldn’t be dead.

  In that case, I’d say anonymity was a huge advantage.

  “Mr. White!”

  Sadly enough, I wasn’t acquainted with that particular advantage in my own line of work. I turned to find Sara Schiller, Goldie’s missing mom, weaving her way through a row of parked cars towards me.

  “Where’s my baby?” she asked.

  I pointed at the bag of flour laying on the back seat. Sara peered through the car window.

  “That’s not safe,” she informed me. “You have to use a carseat with a baby. Just like you have to plug your electric outlets with covers and make sure kids don’t eat poisonous plants at the playground. We had a whole unit on child safety last week. It’s a good thing you don’t have any kids, Mr. White. Ms. Knorsen would flunk you in a minute for not using a carseat.”