Summer of the Spotted Owl

by Melanie Jackson

  A Dinah Galloway Mystery

  The Summer of

  the Spotted Owl

  Melanie Jackson

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Copyright © 2005 Melanie Jackson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Jackson, Melanie, 1956-

  The summer of the spotted owl / Melanie Jackson.

  (A Dinah Galloway mystery)

  Electronic Monograph

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 9781551437859(pdf) -- ISBN 9781554695430 (epub)

  I. Title. II. Series: Jackson, Melanie, 1956-

  Dinah Galloway mystery.

  PS8569.A265S84 2005 jC813’.6 C2005-905796-3

  First Published in the United States, 2005

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2005934042

  Summary: Amateur sleuth, enthusiastic gourmand and budding songstress Dinah Galloway is back, this time on the trail of a greedy developer.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council.

  Cover design by Lynn O’Rourke and John van der Woude

  Spotted Owl photo credit: Jared Hobbs

  In Canada:

  Orca Book Publishers

  PO Box 5626, Station B

  Victoria, BC Canada

  V8R 6S4

  In the United States:

  Orca Book Publishers

  PO Box 468

  Custer, WA USA

  98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  08 07 06 05 • 4 3 2 1

  During the editing of this book, The Globe and Mail reported on the almost certain demise of the spotted owl in British Columbia (“Hope is fading for BC’s spotted owls,” June 6, 2005). But fading hope is better than none. If we try, we can still save the spotted owl. Don’t believe in “too late.” Believe in now. Contact the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, www.wildernesscommittee.org, or other environmental groups.

  To those of you who do try,

  Dinah and I dedicate this book.

  My thanks to Andy Miller, biologist with the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, for providing the spotted owl information that appears in these pages. Any mistakes are my own.

  My thanks also to my late dad, Bernard Chandler, who gave me good grammar, good humor and lots of his own personal Canterbury tales.

  —Melanie Jackson

  Contents

  Prologue: High Flight

  1 It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s a – Hang Glider?

  2 Save the Spotted Owl!

  3 Rowena Pickles and One Very Disappointed Reporter

  4 A Spotted Visitor, and then a Bald One

  5 Up, Up and Away With Itchy

  6 Sylvester’s Spirits Get Dampened

  7 Fishy Business at the Salmon Hatchery

  8 Grimm Developments in the Forest

  9 The Disappearing –But Always Resourceful –Talbot

  10 The Quay to a Disastrous Lunch

  11 You Mean Trespassing Is Illegal?

  12 A Little Too Pretty in Pink

  13 The Woods Are Lovely, Dark and Deep—and Dangerous

  14 A Real Cliffhanger

  15 It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s—Dinah?!

  16 Madge Gets Her Mural Right

  Prologue

  High Flight

  Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

  Of sun-split clouds…

  — RCAF pilot John Gillespie McGee

  Mother likes telling me to look up, up. Sometimes she says it so I won’t stare at my feet when walking.

  “But if I step on a crack, you’ll break your back,” I object.

  This prospect fails to worry Mother. She’s the dreamy type, her mind on books. “Bad for your posture, Dinah.”

  On hearing this, my older sister Madge, slim and glamorous, with lupine blue eyes and creamy skin, will give a satisfied toss of her burnished red hair. Madge’s posture is coat-hanger perfect.

  Sometimes Mother’s told me to look up, up in a different sense. Like seven years ago, after my dad crashed his car into a tree and died instantly. Dad was an alcoholic, see. He’d had way too much that night. “Things will get better, Dinah,” Mother assured me afterward, though none too chipper herself. “Just look up, up and see the bright day around you, full of possibilities.”

  There’s a lot to see where we live, on the Grandview hill in East Vancouver. We can look right across Burrard Inlet to the deep blue Coast Mountains. Okay, so in the rain they’re not deep blue. They’re more the color of my cat Wilfred’s tinned food when he hasn’t eaten it all day. Gray and yucky.

  My dad liked to look up, up. His telescope still stands in Mother’s bedroom, pointing at the mountains. “See the hang gliders, Dinah,” he’d say and lift me. I’d squint way over to Grouse Mountain. On sunny days, against the shining blue of Grouse, I could make out the vivid hang gliders as they sailed down, sometimes with one person clutching the metal bar, sometimes with two. To me the swooping gliders were like wide, happy grins.

  Dad looked for the possibilities in each day, bright or rainy. Except for his own possibilities. He didn’t notice them, which was maybe his problem. He saw mine, though. He was the one who encouraged me to sing.

  I have this loud, belting-out voice. Pudgy, red-haired and bespectacled, I’d sing as Dad bashed out notes on our ancient, out-of-tune piano. He taught me to sing with feeling, which he said was just as important as volume. “Try this one, Dinah,” he’d say and launch me on “Sweet Sue”—

  Every star above,

  Knows the one I love,

  Sweet Sue, just you!

  “Sweet Sue” was his favorite song, probably because Mother’s name is Suzanne.

  “That’s my girl,” Dad would say. “Hey, I bet the hang gliders on Grouse heard you that time!”

  Now I’m twelve and a half and tall enough to squint through the telescope on my own. Actually, let’s not bring up the subject of height: At five feet plus a smidgen, I’m shorter than all my friends and still waiting for that elusive growth spurt Mother and Madge assure me will occur. R-i-i-i-g-h-ht.

  Anyway, I still like looking up, up at the hang gliders, and they still remind me of grins. But I never thought I, the notoriously unathletic Dinah Galloway, would ever have anything to do with hang gliding. Not until the summer of the spotted owl. The summer Madge and I house-sat in North Vancouver …

  Chapter One

  It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane,

  It’s a – Hang Glider?

  Madge was doing more than house-sitting. The owners, who were off fishing in the Okanagan Valley, had hired Madge to paint a mural. “Something for our family room,” Mrs. Urstad had instructed Madge. “Something bright, because it gets so gloomy up here in the rainy North Shore forests.”

  A former neighbor of ours, Mrs. Urstad had always admired Madge’s paintings. My sister was a pretty good artist, I had to admit: She mixed colors into vivid shades, then swirled the shades into gorgeous scenes. The funny thing was the scenes were ordinary, everyday ones, like maybe a park bench with flowers growing around it, or a cherry tree blooming beside a Dumpster. Madge made the ordinary look extraordinary. She’d loved art from the first day she could clutc
h a crayon. In September she’d be starting at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design on Granville Island.

  So there we were for the month of July in this big, sprawling house with Grouse Mountain looming in front of us, and deep, dark Capilano Canyon just beyond the back garden.

  I have to say that the garden was immaculate. Gardeners showed up every few days to prune bushes so that not a stray leaf stuck out and to shave the grass right down to a nub. This was one tidy neighborhood — I noticed this because our own garden, in East Vancouver, was more the jungle variety.

  Since arriving I’d spent most of my time in the Urstads’ pool, floating about on an inflatable turtle.

  Though when Madge’s fiancé, Jack French, visited, he made me give up the turtle in favor of practicing swimming. Jack was the annoying athletic type.

  Luckily Jack was too busy these days to nag me much. He had a summer job as the coordinator of a student group working to save spotted owls.

  The spotted owl, as Jack explained to me, is an endangered species. Only a couple of dozen or so remain in southern British Columbia. Nowhere else in Canada, even. But once these fluffy, round-faced birds numbered in the thousands.

  That was before seventy percent of their habitat got logged. As in, wiped out. Like Jack says, there’s planned logging and then there’s planless logging. The spotted owl has fallen victim to a whole lot of planless, not to mention thoughtless, logging.

  This was all part of the speech Jack gave at spotted owl rallies. My future brother-in-law is a natural activist, which means he’s the type who gets involved in trying to solve society’s problems. Like, really gets involved, as opposed to sitting around on his rump saying what a shame it is about this or that, as most people do.

  Jack says the other part of being an activist is that a lot of people regard you as a pest. The previous summer, when Jack headed up an anti-smoking group, a bunch of tobacco-company types were mighty ticked off at him.

  If you compliment Jack on his activism, he’ll just shrug and say he owes it to the world. For example, to the teachers who helped him through tough times when he was younger, after his mom died of cancer. Activism is his return favor, he says.

  Annoying athletic tendencies aside, Jack, who has sandy hair and humorous gray eyes, is probably the nicest, most honest person I know. He says his hero is the late us senator Robert F. Kennedy, who never gave up imagining the way things should be and demanding, “Why not?”

  At rallies that summer, Jack talked about how loggers and developers could so easily work with environmentalists when planning new neighborhoods.

  “Why shouldn’t we all work together?” Jack would ask the crowd. “Why not?”

  And I’d think of Mother telling me to look up, up to the bright days full of possibilities. Why shouldn’t spotted owls have the same possibility-filled days as I did? Why not?

  “Bombs away!” I yelled.

  It was shortly after our arrival at the Urstads’ house. Having tucked back my favorite—a banana peanut butter and honey sandwich—for lunch, I returned to the pool and settled back on my inflatable turtle. I had some spotted owl information from Jack to read up on, but I’d do it later. This was hang-glider-watching time.

  I’d never been so close to them before. They sailed right over the Urstads’ house, their giant, wing-like shadows cooling me as they passed, and landed in a field a few blocks south.

  On this day I got the idea of yelling “Bombs away!” at the hang gliders. It seemed very witty to me. Usually there were two passengers per hang glider, what you call riding in tandem: an instructor and a student. Sometimes the people grinned and yelled back; sometimes they looked rather disapproving. In my opinion, I was adding memorably to their whole Grouse Mountain experience.

  Madge appeared at the French doors. She was in her paint smock and was carrying a brush and palate shiny with different colors. Madge stepped out on the deck.

  “Dinah, what’s all this yelling?” she demanded. “Mother said you could stay at the Urstads’ with me if you were well-behaved. As in, quiet.”

  I rolled off the turtle into the water, creating as big a splash as I could. Hopefully some of the drops would reach Madge. She looked like she needed cooling off. “I’m enriching the lives of others,” I explained, coming up for air.

  Madge was a blurry inkblot through my wet glasses and clip-on sunshades. I grinned. I knew Madge wasn’t going to phone Mother and complain about me. Mother had just started a job as a librarian with the Vancouver Public Library, and we both wanted her to have a month off from kid-raising while she got used to it. At middle age, she was kind of nervous about re-entering the workforce.

  Also, our absence would allow Mother some time with this guy she’d been seeing, Jon Horowitz. Mother had met Jon the year before while he was directing me in a musical-play version of the classic mystery novel The Moonstone.

  Personally I thought my presence could only help a budding romance. You know, the fun third person who makes a relationship perfect. But when I pointed this out, Madge put on a weary, grown-up look and sighed.

  Now a fresh weary sigh gusted over the flagstone deck to me. “Dinah, if you could please cut the volume down by a few decibels …”

  She went back inside. I grinned smugly. I viewed all comments about my loudness, whether favorable or not, as compliments. Some people were ace hockey players, some people sewed exquisitely — I belted out. It was just what I did.

  A shadow dipped over the tall, thick privet hedge bordering the Urstads’ huge garden. Another hang glider! Paddling the inflatable turtle over to the poolside, I grabbed a towel and wiped off my glasses and clip-ons. Then I sat up on the turtle, ready to welcome the glider riders with a softer “Bombs away!” that wouldn’t bother Madge.

  Except that there was just one rider this time. An inept rider, apparently. He had plunged his bright red hang glider lower over the Urstads’ garden than any of the previous gliders I’d seen. So low that the wing-like shadow inked over the entire deck and pool.

  “Whoa,” I said. The rider, furiously wrenching at the hang glider’s metal bar, resembled a giant insect with his bubble-shaped helmet, goggly sunglasses and skinny, black-bodysuited legs fluttering behind. He was zooming in a steep diagonal line from hedge-top to pool …

  “I’ve heard of dropping in on people, but this is ridiculous,” I yelled. Tipping myself off the turtle, I thrashed to the pool’s edge with wild, uncoordinated strokes that Jack definitely would not have approved of.

  The rider shouted angrily, “What’re you doing there, you stupid kid — watch out!”

  I was stupid? He was the one crashing into the Urstads’ pool.

  Granted, this was no time for sarcastic comebacks on my part. I was already running for the French doors.

  With a whoosh, the hang glider descended. Cr-r-a-a-ck! The shimmering red wings struck the sides of the pool and bent back, like a flower folding its petals.

  The glider rider himself smacked the pool. Tidal-wave-like splashes shot up around him.

  “Madge!” I bellowed. What if the rider hadn’t survived his crash landing? I hurried back over the now-sodden deck to peer under the broken glider wings.

  Luckily for the rider, he’d plunged into the deep end. He lurched from the water, gasping, and climbed the ladder.

  “Are you okay?” I asked before turning to yell again. “Madge!” I padded close to the glider rider to squint at him for broken bones or other injuries.

  “Get away!” He flapped long, skinny hands at me. In his goggles, I saw myself reflected: a short, chubby pre-teen with chin-length red hair plastered to the sides of her head.

  “Have you ever thought of taking lessons?” I inquired helpfully. “You missed the landing field by several blocks.”

  The glider rider reached a skinny hand up and scratched vigorously inside the neck of his bodysuit. “Just my luck,” he complained in a high, peevish voice that was almost as raspy as the sound of his scratching. “A pi
nt-sized busybody.” Scratch, scratch.

  “That must be some itch,” I remarked, ignoring the insult to my height.

  The French doors slid open. “Dinah?” Madge emerged.

  Itchy gawked. Males usually did at the sight of my sister, even when, as now, she was in a rumpled smock and had a green splotch of paint on her nose.

  Madge gave a shriek. “What’s happened to the pool?”

  “Let’s just say we’re not in the presence of the world’s most gifted pilot,” I said.

  Itchy’s hand rose to scrabble through his carrot-colored hair. Scr-r-ratch! His thin lips, which were all we could see of his face, parted to bleat, “Listen, I try to stay out of trouble. It’s not my fault.”

  Shaking his head mournfully, Itchy lifted a spinach-like object off his foot.

  “Hey — that’s my inflatable turtle!” I objected.

  Or what was left of my turtle. Itchy’s foot had punctured it.

  I thought he’d hand the wrecked turtle back to me. Instead, clutching it, Itchy sprinted away from us. He plunged over the edge of the Urstads’ garden and down the steep canyon slope. For some moments afterward, the sound of crackling branches and painful yelps echoed back to us.

  Chapter Two

  Save the Spotted Owl!

  When Jack arrived, we were so anxious to show him the hang glider that we practically dragged him out of his ancient jeep. “Puh-leeze. Have mercy,” begged Madge’s sandy-haired, freckle-faced fiancé.

  We knew he was referring to the jeep, not himself. Jack was very fond of this tattered, battered vehicle. Maybe because he’d been able to coax it across the country from Toronto last summer, when he’d moved in with his sister— another neighbor of ours — and into our lives as well.

  Somehow Jack kept the jeep going with frequent oil changes and yards and yards of duct tape to hold the door, windows and canvas roof in place. There was an alarming ripping sound now from the driver’s door as we hauled him out by the elbows. Time for yet more duct tape.