Sacrifice of Buntings

by Goff, Christine

  “Chuck Knapp?”

  “The filmmaker.”

  Now Rachel knew who Becker had gone birding with, but she still didn’t know what their great discovery in the swamp was. She wondered if he’d told Sonja. “Did they find something out there?”

  “I’ve got no idea,” Sonja said. “Did I mention that Paul was an idiot? Given enough time, he probably would have flipped back. That was his nature, wishy-washy. But he ran out of time.”

  Rachel thought about that as the Lucy Bell lady at her feet delivered an excellent massage. Wishy-washy, Sonja had said. He would have flipped back, but he ran out of time. Maybe that was the point?

  “Speaking of backpedaling,” Sonja said. “This is not to say that Paul wasn’t excellent at the one thing he did well. Do you know he had spotted more birds than anyone in the history of the world? At that, he was supreme.” She took another swig from her sports bottle. “He was better than anyone. He was a hell of a lot better than that boss of his, that’s for sure. It’s just a very odd thing to be really good at, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been working hard to get better at it myself,” Rachel said. She watched as the Lucy Bell ladies rubbed cinnamon-scented foot cream into her feet and Sonja’s.

  “Of course you’d be one of them.” Sonja sounded tired. “I just don’t understand it. If you’ve seen one bird, you’ve seen them all. Oh, and Paul wasn’t half bad at golf, either. Another thing I don’t get. I guess if there’s a place in heaven for idiots there will be a golf course with lots of birds on it.”

  “I don’t get golf either,” Rachel admitted. And I don’t get you. Roger was an idiot, and Roger loved golf too. But if someone had killed Roger before she’d had a chance to divorce him, she’d still have been sorry. Wouldn’t she?

  “Don’t twitch,” Sonja’s Lucy Bell lady ordered. “You’re twitching.”

  “Well excuuuuse me,” Sonja replied.

  Rachel tried to relax. “I’ve heard Paul was working on a book. Do you think it will still be published?”

  “I’m thinking it ought to be published very soon,” Sonja said. “But here’s a case in point. Here is a perfect opportunity for some great publicity. But did he get the damn thing finished in time for it to be in print? Can you imagine what a signed copy would bring now?”

  Rachel drew in her breath. Any sympathy she might have felt for Becker’s widow evaporated.

  “Of course, he would have finished it if his department head hadn’t stolen his original research,” Sonja added. “The creep even stole the title. Luckily, you can’t copyright titles, so we’re using it anyway. A Sacrifice of Buntings. Doesn’t that sound more like a baseball book? Another sport I don’t get.”

  Rachel wanted to pop right out of her chair and e-mail Kirk. “Are you talking about Guy Saxby?”

  It had to be. That was the title of Saxby’s book.

  “The one and only,” Sonja said. “He even stole the title. Luckily you can’t copyright titles.” She repeated, word for word, what she’d just said, except this time she called it A Sacrifice of Buntings.

  “There you go!” chirped the redhead. “Now don’t put on your shoes for half an hour!”

  Rachel’s Lucy Bell lady patted her calf. Great, so now she was supposed to wander around the Nest barefoot, holding her hiking boots?

  “If you want something to do while you wait, we have a small display set up,” the Lucy Bell lady suggested. “Or you could get a facial! That will give you plenty of time for your polish to dry. Here’s a coupon!”

  Sonja had finally opened her eyes and was staring at her feet. “Good grief, she did it. She really did it. She painted my toenails black!”

  Rachel passed on the facial and vacated the chair for the next client. She weighed the risks of ruining her pedicure versus sharing her news and decided she could always repaint her toenails at a more propitious moment. Nobody was going to see her toes anyway.

  Under the glare of the Lucy Bell lady, she slipped on her socks and stuffed her feet into her boots while Sonja sacheted barefoot toward the ballroom. Rachel headed to the Nest and found Lark, Cecilia, and Dorothy admiring a Leica scope across from Beau and Reggie’s Birds of Prey exhibit.

  Rachel looked for blood on the floor, or any sign of what had happened there just a few hours ago, but the booth was whitewashed.

  “The show is starting in eight minutes,” Cecilia said. “We thought we’d catch it this time. We may not get another chance.”

  “Guy asked me to wait for him here. He had some business to attend to with Evan Kearns.”

  I’ll bet he did, thought Rachel.

  She signaled a huddle. “Paul Becker had changed his position on the land trade.”

  “So?” Dorothy said. “Lots of people change their minds about things. Besides, what’s it matter? He’s already dead.”

  “Except that it changes our suspect list,” Rachel said.

  Lark frowned. “How so?”

  “Because he was against the trade before, which is the premise we used when we started to list everyone. Now we need to look at people who might be against the trade and/or be angry because he switched sides.”

  “What would have changed his mind?” Dorothy asked. “He seemed dead set against it the other night. He said he’d always been against it.” Dorothy attempted to mimic Becker. “’While one area would be protected, the other area would lose its protection.’”

  “It must have to do with the mysterious treasure,” Cecilia said.

  “Or maybe he found out who was making the other offer to the Andersons, and it changed his mind,” Dorothy said. “Maybe what the developer plans to do to the swamp is worse than losing eighty acres of nesting habitat for the painted bunting on Hyde Island.”

  “Do you want some good news?” Rachel asked. “I think I know how to find out what Becker saw in that swamp. Sonja told me the name of the person he went birding with that day. He was with Chuck Knapp.”

  “The filmmaker?” Lark looked surprised. “That might explain why Knapp is now assigned to the Saturday-night keynote spot.”

  “And there’s one more thing.” Rachel glanced at Dorothy. “If Saxby is the Indiana Jones of the birding world, according to his wife, Paul Becker was the James Bond.”

  CHAPTER 9

  They needed to talk to Chuck Knapp.

  Rachel thought about it all through dinner on Tuesday night and considered bagging out on Wednesday’s Little St. Simons trip. She figured with most of the birders out in the field, it might be easier to corner him during the day. Provided he wasn’t out on a trip.

  Lark and Cecilia wouldn’t hear of it.

  “You can’t miss Little St. Simons, Rae,” Lark said. “I guarantee we’ll see more birds out there than anywhere else we go this trip.”

  “Besides,” Cecilia said, “the police are doing their job investigating this horrible crime. If Guy is innocent, they will clear him.”

  Rachel noticed her choice of words, but then Dorothy concurred, so Rachel set the alarm for 4:30 a.m.

  Little St. Simons was ten thousand acres of pristine barrier island accessible only by boat. It was exactly the same amount of land the Andersons had put up for trade, except Rachel couldn’t believe the swampland would measure up by comparison. Little St. Simons was one of those rare places on earth—secluded, unspoiled, and beautiful.

  The boat departed Hampton River Club Marina and churned its way through pristine marshland to Barge Landing. There the birdwatchers were loaded into the backs of two pickup trucks and ferried along a sandy road through live oaks draped in Spanish moss. Rachel sat on the tailgate, sandwiched between Lark and Dorothy, and imagined the land to be much like this when it was occupied by the Guale Indians. The only traces she could see of modern civilization were the small grouping of buildings that comprised Little St. Simons Lodge.

  According to the guidebooks, in the 1770s, a U.S. senator from South Carolina purchased six hundred acres of the island for a r
ice plantation. Eventually, he bought up the island, but when the end of the Civil War sent the plantation culture of Georgia’s sea islands into a tailspin, his family sold out to the Eagle Pencil Company, sight unseen. The pencil company’s plan was to harvest cedar trees for pencil production, but the trees proved too damaged by wind and salt to make quality pencils, so the owner of the company, Philip Berolzheimer, traveled to Little St. Simons to salvage his loss. Instead, hypnotized by the island’s beauty, he built a private hunting lodge, allowing only his family and closest friends from New York to visit.

  In 1979, Berolzheimer’s descendants opened the island to the public, but even then it was protected. The family served as stewards of the land, hiring educated staff to conduct tours, and thus limiting the impact of tourism. Little St. Simons truly was an island paradise.

  Rachel gaped at the scenery as they passed through a gnarled canopy of oaks, cedars, pines, and wild magnolias. Pine warblers flitted overhead—a stocky bird, olive with a yellow chest, it had two distinct wing bands. Tracking a flash of bright yellow, she spotted a prothonatory warbler, its golden head and chest easily discernable among the branches.

  “Listen,” said the trip leader.

  A clear whistle descended from the treetops, rising on the last note: teeew, teew, teeew, teew, tuwee.

  “That is a yellow-throated warbler.”

  “That would be a life bird for me,” Dorothy said.

  “I have it already,” Cecilia announced.

  “Then we’ll be tied up at six hundred and ten birds each.”

  “If you find it,” Cecilia said.

  It took Dorothy a minute and a half to locate the bird. Perched high in a tree, it belted out its song. “Right there.”

  Rachel studied the bird, and then a flash of blue moved through her peripheral vision. She searched the trees to the left and found a very small bird hidden in the branches. Blue-gray with white wing bars, it had limited yellow on its throat, pale eye crescents, and black- and rust-colored bands on its chest. “What bird is that?” She pointed to the upper branches. “About eleven o’clock in that oak tree. It’s fairly well-hidden in the branches and leaves.”

  Zz-zz-zzz-zzzeee-wup.

  “Good catch,” said the leader. “That’s a northern parula. They’re common in the summer here, but they like to stay hidden. Can someone get a scope on that bird for us?”

  Four people obliged, including Rachel, with Lark’s help.

  “That makes six hundred and eleven for me,” Dorothy crowed.

  Rachel wondered when this had become about listing. Before this trip, the sisters had always just been excited to see the birds. Now it seemed like a major competition.

  “It’s beautiful,” Rachel said. She tried snapping a picture, holding her digital camera to the scope’s eyepiece. Tomorrow she’d get a real lesson. “Anyone else care to look?”

  Several people stepped forward, and then Lark took a turn. Both Dorothy and Cecilia were too wrapped up writing in their field notebooks to take more than a quick peek.

  “On this trip, I’m going to pull ahead,” Dorothy said.

  “Oh my, Dot, I suppose we’ll just have to see about that.”

  The trucks moved on, snaking along a small creek and stopping beside a small pond.

  “What’s the name of this lake?” Lark asked.

  The guide looked at her funny. “Where are you from?”

  “Colorado.”

  “That explains it,” he said. “Around here, we call this a pond. East Myrtle Pond. There’s a bird tower you can climb over there. We’ll be looking for wading birds here. Egrets. Ibis. If you’re lucky, a roseate spoonbill.”

  “I don’t have that,” Cecilia said.

  “Me either,” Dorothy replied.

  They did get lucky. On the far side of the pond, three large pink birds swung their spatulated bills from side to side in the water.

  From the tower, they quickly added to their list: white ibis, glossy ibis, wood storks, great and snowy egrets. To the north, second-growth cypress served as a rookery. The trees were full of nesting birds—wood storks, yellow-crowned and black-crowned night herons, egrets, black vultures, and anhingas. Overhead an osprey streaked toward its nest, while a bald eagle made lazy circles in the sky.

  “Keep your eyes open,” instructed the guide. “You may see lots of other critters in here, like raccoons, opossums, and bobcats. It’s also prime habitat for alligators and snakes.”

  “What kind of snakes?” Rachel asked, unable to squelch her squeamishness.

  “Mostly cottonmouths and rattlesnakes.”

  After that, Rachel spent a lot more time watching where she stepped. She noticed Lark treading carefully too.

  After an hour, they loaded up the trucks, skirted the salt marshes, adding a reddish egret and small blue heron to their list, and then stormed the beach.

  The shorebirds were plentiful as well—Wilson’s plovers, piping plovers, American oystercatchers, black-necked stilts, American avocets, whimbrels, long-billed curlews, and red-knots galore.

  Little St. Simons had proved to be a birder’s paradise. As a group, the total field trip count was ninety-two species, of which Rachel counted sixty. Dorothy had seen all ninety-two, and Cecilia managed ninety. By the end, Dorothy stood one bird ahead on the life list.

  Rachel felt sad to leave. There was something spellbinding and slightly primitive about Little St. Simons and its miles of coastline. It made Hyde Island, even with its murder, seem positively civilized.

  Saxby was waiting for them back at the hotel, and while the others agreed to join him for dinner, Rachel begged off. She was tired, but, more important, she had an early-morning workshop the next day: digiscoping with Chuck Knapp.

  One of the things she remembered from her college news reporting class was it’s best to arm yourself with knowledge before an interview. If she planned on talking with Knapp the next day, she wanted to be prepared.

  First off, if Becker and Knapp had seen an interesting bird—one that would change their mind about the land swap—what could it have been?

  It couldn’t be any of the birds she had seen. Even the rare ones from the field trips were common enough to the area not to make news. Rachel surfed the Web, pored over her guidebooks, and found that several endangered birds made the swamp their habitat. Hadn’t Saxby said he’d spotted a nesting red-cockaded woodpecker in the area? Or what about something like the ivory-billed woodpecker? The bird was thought to be extinct until 2005, when it was spotted in an Arkansas swamp. Maybe Becker and Knapp had found one here. It was the same sort of habitat, and the bird used to live in this region.

  Of course, their “treasure” didn’t have to be a bird. Other animals, plenty of them, made the swamp their home: spiders, snakes, various kinds of biting flies. After reading about them, Rachel made a mental note to be sure to take the insect repellant on Friday. No way did she want to become a meal for the yellow flies.

  Becker’s book might have provided some insight. Too bad it hadn’t been published in time.

  Too bad he is dead.

  Exhausting her search on the creatures at the swamp, Rachel turned to researching Knapp. She read his bio in the program, read his bio on his Web site, but otherwise couldn’t dig up much more than the fact that he was both a wildlife filmmaker and photographer. Something she already knew.

  Rachel checked her e-mail and found a message waiting from Kirk.

  find out anything more on saxby? the birds are thriving here, but the species have changed some. sort of like what happens when there’s a wildfire. wish I was there. kirk

  Rachel pictured him in his khaki shorts and then replied:

  I’m not so sure. Paul Becker, one of the keynote speakers, was murdered. Dorothy and I were questioned. Saxby is the prime suspect. He obviously has something big to reveal, but he refuses to dish. Becker had something big up his sleeve too. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s one and the same. There’s a filmmaker named Chuck Knapp wh
o might know something. I’m going digiscoping with him tomorrow. I’ll be in touch.

  She paused, and then added:

  Thinking of you. Rachel

  She hit Send.

  The others came back from dinner with Saxby’s tales of the interrogation. The detective had grilled him relentlessly, convinced he had been there. Saxby had stuck to his guns and insisted he never made it inside the Nest. Finally, they had released him.

  “I told you, he didn’t do it,” Dorothy crowed.

  “He’s still their prime suspect,” Cecilia pointed out.

  “Thank you for your input,” snapped Dorothy.

  “Why?” Rachel asked. “If the guard turned him away, and they can’t prove he was there…”

  “The guard doesn’t remember talking to him,” explained Dorothy. “And we said he was there, or he was supposed to be there.”

  “The detective admitted to Guy”—Rachel noticed Lark used his first name—,“that the shots came from outside,” she continued. “He thinks the person arguing with Becker might have slipped out the doors and shot him back through the glass.”

  “That’s absurd,” Dorothy said. “We would have heard the door open.”

  “Maybe, or maybe not,” Rachel said. “That would have been about the time I bumped into that rack, and the scuffle came before the shot.”

  “He didn’t do it.” Dorothy’s voice verged on tears.

  Rachel patted the end of her bed. “Sit down. I’ve been doing some research.”

  She told them what little she had discovered and then asked them what they thought of her endangered species theory.

  “It makes sense,” Dorothy said quickly.

  Too quickly? Rachel wondered.

  “Oh my,” Cecilia said. “I think you girls are grasping at straws.”

  “Seriously, Ceese,” Dorothy said. “A find like the ivory-billed woodpecker would give someone lot of notoriety. Look at the man who found the one in Arkansas. If Knapp and Becker had one clearly on film—”