The Bear in a Muddy Tutu
Page 23
Getting the car turned around, the sheriff headed back toward the bridge, noticing the mound of fresh earth at the base of the short span for the first time. There was a cross made from whitewashed wood planted at one end, some wild flowers strewn loosely over the sun-baked mud.
Sometimes trouble comes and finds you, Sheriff Jaroslaw thought, watching the traveling circus getting smaller in his rearview mirror.
Chapter 43
“Morgan flew away.” Jennifer Freeman read the simple caption at the bottom of the picture, while sitting on her daughter’s bed, the sheet of white paper with a drawing and message resting on her lap.
Jennifer didn’t at first recognize it as something Morgan could have made. The fine strokes of the pencil drawing included intricate details much further beyond what Jennifer imagined her daughter capable of producing. She at first mistook it for a photograph of a small bird trailing below and behind a large flock, perhaps trying to catch up. The large flock was unusual, even a little crazy, because each bird appeared to be a different species.
Morgan’s mother studied the picture as if trying to find Waldo, or some clue. But there were no apparent patterns, except for one thing: there was one bird at the front of the large flock that appeared to be the same kind of bird as the one giving chase.
“Morgan flew away.” Jennifer reread the caption and then pulled her eyes away from the elaborate piece of artwork. Something was wrong in this room, she thought. Something was different.
“I can see the paint.” Morgan had wallpapered every square inch of her room with her nutty bird drawings, in some spots three layers deep, but now there were blank spaces of light blue paint among the dizzying array. And just as her eyes had searched the drawing on her lap for clues, she now tried to make some sense of the missing artwork from the walls.
Morgan had read the story about Michael Dupont to her mother over a hurried breakfast the morning after the newspaper landed at her feet. The man was described as the great benefactor behind the bird sanctuary project being dedicated this coming Saturday. But Jennifer hadn’t listened to her daughter. It was all just more of her obsession, her nonsense, and she was tired of telling her to stop. Jennifer had tuned it all out, concentrating instead on buttering her waffles and trying to decide whether she should finish off an old project or get started on the new client’s designs.
It got worse and worse with this kid. Each day, Morgan became more and more like her ridiculous father. Being married to Lennon had been torture, a punishment for being young, stupid, and careless with her diaphragm. Jennifer had rebelled against her own father, a driven salesman who had provided every opportunity for her and her brother and sister, and she’d made some bad choices. She’d let her guard down and fallen for the tall, frumpy journalism major. She’d paid for the mistake for too long. Stupid. Dumb. And she’d thrown away six critical years of her life and was left with a kid who brooded like her father and was just as embarrassing half the time.
Jennifer had turned her back on her father, only to be welcomed into the clan of the wretched, backwoods hippies who were Lennon’s parents. It was no wonder her ex-husband had no ambition, having been raised like an animal by potheads. Jennifer had turned up pregnant and too blinded by stupid love to do the right thing and end the pregnancy.
Not that she regretted having Morgan. Jennifer looked back down at the meticulously drawn birds on the sheet of paper. It was perfectly clear to her that this was completely her ex-husband’s fault. She loved Morgan with all her heart, but there was no doubt of the genetic influence of her father. And, of course, his disgusting parents who had shoveled a path to an icy cold outhouse behind their log home. An outhouse!
It was on that first and only visit to the Catskills home of Lennon’s parents that she’d probably been impregnated. She’d left her diaphragm back at her apartment, and the relationship was still new enough that she let him have intercourse with her just about every night. Jennifer’s skin crawled at the memory of the tiny room, with cheap wood paneling and bed springs so creaky she kept trying to make him slow down, stop making it bounce so noisily. But for whatever reason, she found him loveable at the time, a stray mutt in the rain. She wanted to please him, so she tolerated the bad smells and the dirty sheets. Back at his own cluttered apartment, she tried to be nice to his roommate, another journalism major with an equally bleak future.
“The mistakes we make.” Jennifer scanned the walls decorated by her befuddling daughter. “She talks to birds and they talk back to her.”
Every one of these drawings was going in the trash. First thing tomorrow, she was making an appointment with a full-blown psychiatrist. This baloney was going to end once and for all, Jennifer decided. That’s it. You may think it’s cool to grow up acting like a strange little outsider, getting picked on by those horrible, nasty kids, but I have news for you. Your days acting like a loner drama queen are over. Done. Your time for brooding about your worthless father is over. Period.
Jennifer once again looked down at the drawing, and it made her furious. She crumpled the paper with an angry sigh, balling it as tightly as it would go, then rose from the bed and stalked out of the ungrateful brat’s room. On her way to the kitchen trash, she paused at the phone hung from the wall next to the refrigerator, briefly contemplating calling the police to report her missing daughter.
“Morgan flew away.” Jennifer opened the lid of the trash can and tossed in the wadded-up picture.
Chapter 44
Pete Singe was used to things flying out of nowhere, hitting him like a freight train. Being left gasping for breath and near death. Heck, the seventh time he’d been struck by lightning there wasn’t even a cloud in the sky, or at least any that he remembered. One second he was running his push mower across his tiny backyard, the next second he was laying right down in the grass clippings, eye to eye with the nozzle of his garden hose, his hair all crackling and smoldering. Luckily, he’d had the presence of mind to reach for the nozzle and put himself out.
Five men sat at the card table in the center of the new building, watching Lennon Bagg’s yellow pencil slowly begin to roll toward the edge, while trying to come up with at least one good idea on how to save their circus.
“The big rigs are in mighty bad shape, Billy Wayne,” Happy the mechanic said, as ten eyes watched the pencil drop off the side, bounce surprisingly high off its eraser, then begin rolling again toward the window with the air conditioner. “The salt air is a killer, you know. A real killer.”
The three-page cease-and-desist letter made very little sense to the men. It was written by a lawyer with bullshit, mumbo jumbo jargon that didn’t mean shit in the first place, Singe had decided. Criminal negligence for possessing protected wildlife? Did it mean the zonkey? Or the lion that’d been trying to cough up the same lung for two years? Maybe the toothless bear the shithead kid had run down?
“We’re a goddamn circus,” Singe told the other four. “This is just their way of showin’ us the door.”
“We can fight it,” Bagg said. “Hire a lawyer, right?”
“Building code violations,” Warden Flint said. “Health code violations. Which of you boys happened to get a building permit for this fine leanin’ tower of shitstorm?”
“What if it’s a house of worship?” Bill Wayne was exasperated and already near defeat.
“You sayin’ maybe Jesus H. Christ went up to the court house with his building plans and twenty seven dollars?” Flint was hungover and his mood was as dark as it ever really got. “If that’s the case, then all this mopin’ around is for nuthin’, praise the Lord. Hell, Moses himself gave that hacking lion its rabies shot, am I right? Nothing to fucking worry about, no sir. You left your balls hanging out and some asshole grabbed hold.”
“He was just asking,” Bagg said. “You have any ideas?”
“Well, I have an idea,” said Flint. “I have an idea that I’m about to get shit-canned along with the rest of you sorry bastards.”
“Who owns the island?” Singe asked. “Is it state property?”
“State property ends back on the other side of the bridge,” Flint said.
“You pulled me out of the canal the day we met,” Billy Wayne said.
“Don’t mean I ain’t responsible for patrolling down here, and the waterways are all my responsibility.”
“How do we find the owner?” Singe asked.
“How the fuck do I know?” Flint rubbed his temples with sharp knuckles.
“It’s public record,” said Bagg.
“What are you thinkin’, Bagg?” Singe watched Bagg stoop to retrieve his pencil and then rush for the door. “Bagg?”
* * *
“Lilly?” Bagg barked into his cell phone. “Lilly, I need your help with a property deed and any information you can get on a property owner.”
Lilly’s voice was far away, almost lost in the crackle and sizzle of the poor cell connection; barely one out of five bars showed on the small screen indicator.
“Bagg, I’m a style writer, what do I know about deeds?”
“Lilly, it’s life or death. It’s a couple of phone calls from the press, is all. Then search the database for news items.”
“Who do you want me to call?”
“Start with the Ocean County Courthouse, in Toms River. Then the assessor, or maybe the clerk’s office. Try asking for the registrar of deeds. I’m not sure, Lilly, but we need to know the owner of Fish Head Island, which is at the end of Great Bay Boulevard.”
“Fish Head Island? Life or death? I have a deadline coming up.”
“It’s my life.” And Bagg really meant it. He had walked with the phone toward his tent, his home for over a month now. “And if you can get a name, please just run it through Google as well as the Associated Press for any recent news hits.”
“You’ll be at this number if I find anything?”
“Yes. Thanks. I’ll be waiting to hear.”
“Oh, and Bagg?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry about your daughter.”
“I know, Lilly.” Bagg snapped the phone shut.
Chapter 45
“He’s some sort of big time bird freak.” Lilly began giving the rundown to Bagg over the phone, about an hour later. “Got a pencil?”
“Yeah, go ahead.” Bagg cradled the phone with his shoulder and dug out his reporter’s notebook and pencil. He sat down on the front step of the new building, the four men behind the door waiting on the news in the chill of the air-conditioning. “Tell me everything.”
“Okay, so his name’s Michael Dupont, twenty-nine, from Charleston, South Carolina. Made a boatload of money designing video games, then sold his company to Sony for the tidy little sum of fifty-eight million dollars in January of nineteen ninety-eight.”
“Wait, that would have made him twenty?”
“Um, no, looks like he was still a teenager when he deposited the check.” Bagg could hear Lilly’s fingernails clicking away at her keyboard.
“And the birds?”
“Oh, yeah, there are a whole bunch of Google hits on him for buying up land along the East coast. Mostly wetlands, and all are empty spaces.”
“For the birds? He’s some sort of conservationist?”
“He’s given big checks to the Audubon Society, the Save the Migratory Birds Society, Project Puffin, and about three dozen other groups.”
“The other groups all involve birds?” Bagg pictured the slaughtered seagulls the boys with the stolen pellet guns had left for Flint to secretly bury.
“Hold on.” There was more clicking. “There’s a group called the Out of Africa Project that might be something else. And there’s a couple names of what sound like small town zoos. That any help?”
“Yeah, Lilly.” Bagg was a little hopeful, weighing the possibility of whether a sick lion and exotic zonkey would merit much sympathy from a philanthropic bird lover.
“He’s been buying the land to set aside as bird sanctuaries.”
“Fish Head Island is a bird sanctuary.” It wasn’t a question. The guy bought this muddy stretch of land to set aside for the birds.
“I suppose, but it’s just a speck on the map, and there were no press releases. It’s only listed in the tax office as a property transfer. I found ten or eleven just like it without looking too hard. Guy must have a couple of realtors keeping an eye on properties, snapping them up when they hit the market.”
“You have a current home address for him?”
“Yes, but he’s probably not home. There’s an AP wire story saying that this Saturday he’s at a ribbon-cutting for a bird sanctuary he funded in Bermuda. Says the Governor will be accepting a generous endowment for future care on behalf of Queen Elizabeth II, in someplace called Tucker’s Town.”
“You’re sure it’s this Saturday?”
“That’s what it says.”
“How far from the airport?”
“Hold on.” There was more rapid-fire, fingernail on keyboard clicking. “Quick cab ride.”
“One more favor?”
“You want me to book you a plane ticket?”
“Two, Lilly, make it two tickets.”
Chapter 46
“You understand the risk involved in traveling to the Bermuda Triangle seated next to a man who is one bolt shy of being struck by lightning thirteen times?” Pete Singe asked Bagg. The stewardess was finishing her preflight safety speech, as a video version also concluded on the small screen on the back of each headrest.
“I’m not big on flying.” Bagg pulled the nylon seat belt as tightly as it would go, triple-checking that his tray was as upright as it could possibly be and making sure his cell phone was not going to ring and cause the plane to explode.
“I read that on average a plane like this gets hit by lightning once a year,” Singe added. After a couple of years living and working so close to a guy with a mortal fear of lifting his head three inches off the ground, Singe apparently didn’t see any problem needling his friend with a simple case of aviatophobia. People with a fear of flying had it easy, he told Bagg, what with all the buses and trains. Bagg’s phobia was a little like complaining about your hiccups to someone who’d just fallen into a shark tank.
“And you only get hit about once every four years?” Bagg twisted the knob for air but accidentally pressed the button for the stewardess.
“Yeah, give or take. I suppose it means I’m about due.” Singe looked around the cabin roof as if deciding where the lightning would come from, as the captain released the brakes and backed the plane up.
“I don’t feel so good.”
“Yeah, last time I was on a plane was the trip back from the Honduras cave.” Singe removed his baseball and tilted the top of his head to show Bagg the scar. “It’s like lightning has a mind of its own.”
Bagg was wearing fresh clothes he’d grabbed from his apartment while sneaking in for his passport. Lilly couldn’t find any active warrants for him, nor any mention of a police officer having been assaulted by a camera-wielding newspaper reporter. Not a thing inside had changed, other than the mold growing on dirty dishes. Cops had not searched his apartment and had not violated his daughter’s room. It was stuffy and the trash stunk. Otherwise, it was as if he’d just walked back in from a shift at the paper.
He’d taken a risk, with the chance some neighbor was holding a business card handed out by a detective, with instructions to call if they saw the dangerous guy from next door coming around. And being tossed in jail would have ended any last ditch attempt at saving the circus. But he trusted Lilly’s thoroughness and absolutely had to have his passport.
The plan had sounded slightly more feasible while sitting around an old, beaten-up card table with a group of men eager to say how perfect it all sounded. But here, on an Embraer 190, with its unique “double-bubble” design and single-class configuration of one hundred seats, the plan seemed utterly impossible. Bagg stuck the airplane brochure back into the pouch by his knee
s, knowing they were going to crash into the side of a mountain and that memorizing the nearest exit was pointless. To convince a twenty-something multimillionaire that a broken-down collection of sickly animals and even more sickly humans would be appropriate caretakers for Fish Head Island seemed ludicrous in the crisp light of the airplane’s cabin.
“We have almost three thousand dollars left to offer him,” Billy Wayne had said. There on the card table, Bagg briefly tried to imagine what three grand would look like stacked next to fifty-eight million.
“I read the chances of a plane crashing after being struck by lightning is less than one in a hundred thousand,” Singe said, as the engines roared, pushing the vibrating aircraft down the rubber-streaked runway.
“So it’s possible.” Bagg gripped the armrests as the plane rose and banked into the clear morning air, a sliver of moon still visible off to the west. Bagg’s knuckles were still white as the plane began to level. From the brochure, Bagg knew the plane could go over five hundred miles per hour but hoped there wouldn’t be any need for such a rush. The plane could cruise at over forty thousand feet, but he prayed they’d stay closer to the ground.
“Notice how empty the plane is?” Singe lifted himself by the chair in front to scan the cabin. The plane was maybe one third full, probably just the people who absolutely had to get home, or flew enough to believe the old saying about how much more dangerous it was to ride in a car.
“So?”
“It’s probably the weather,” Singe said, and despite Bagg’s churning stomach and clogged ears, he detected something weirdly disturbing in his friend’s voice. Was it hope? “The forecast was calling for a pretty bad storm on the islands.”