Summer of the Spotted Owl

by Melanie Jackson

  “As long as they’re not endangered fish,” Madge said. But I didn’t think she meant it as a joke, and, sure enough, neither of them laughed.

  “You should check your facts,” Pantelli whispered.

  “Jack knows his facts,” I whispered back, offended.

  “Your fax, Dinah.” With a chocolaty forefinger, Pantelli pointed to the Urstads’ nearby fax machine. A sheet of paper lay in the receiving tray.

  A familiar sheet of paper, since it bore my handwriting. My agonized memo to Jack, to be exact.

  It had been faxed back from soac headquarters with brisk, angry capital letters scribbled on top of my message:

  LAY OFF WITH THE FAXES, DINAH. WE’RE BUSY AROUND HERE. — JACK

  Chapter Twelve

  A Little Too Pretty in Pink

  By the next morning, Madge demanded to know why I was being so quiet. “Not that it isn’t refreshing, but it’s not like you,” she said, plopping beside me on the sofa.

  I passed her the offending fax, all the while continuing to play Deathstalkers on the Urstads’ laptop. Bam! Blast! I exploded an entire planet. Chunks of rock whirled around the screen.

  Madge read Jack’s scrawled reply, then my original message — and erupted in a snort of laughter.

  “Fine,” I said, hurt, and resumed blowing up planets.

  Madge instinctively drew back as a large rock chunk hurtled toward her. “Look, I’ll speak to Jack. He’s just stressed about this new bylaw — afraid it’s too good to be true. Even though we read through the bylaw again, and we can’t for the life of us see any loopholes.

  “Plus, he’s been so busy! I’ve barely seen him myself in the past day or so, what with all his soac meetings.”

  She paused to stare at the computer. “Just how many of these games have you downloaded on the Urstads’ laptop?” She peered at the screen, which admittedly was crammed with Deathstalkers icons.

  “It’s okay. I got rid of some of their stuff that was taking up memory.”

  “Er, Dinah —”

  Toot, toot! The sound of a car horn interrupted her. We got up to stare out the window. Zoë Klapper, in a bright pink sundress, waved at us from her pink convertible.

  “So much pink,” murmured Madge.

  My sister loathed pink. It was the one color she refused to paint with — or, heaven forbid, wear.

  “It’s Zoë Klapper, and she’s a person, not a crayon,” I informed my sister. Sometimes I wished Madge would be a little less artistic, a little more normal.

  I then clutched my hair — which, one day when I was older, I might dye pink just to annoy Madge. “How could I have forgotten?” I moaned. “Today’s the seventeenth. The day of the hang-gliding festival.”

  “Dinah, you’re being a drama queen.” Madge went out to the front porch with me following, hands still clutching my hair. It was the only productive thing I could think of to do, in the circumstances.

  “You hadn’t forgotten the festival, had you?” Zoë called cheerily, daring my dark mood to vanish.

  It didn’t vanish, but it did slump grudgingly off to one side. I wouldn’t mind going to the festival, at that. “I’m just confirming with my sister,” I called back.

  I pulled the free-pass-for-two, now rather crumpled, from my pocket and showed it to Madge. I could tell by her face that she was dubious about letting me go off with Zoë on my own. The rule was, yes, I was twelve now, but I had to have a friend accompany me on trips of any distance.

  “I guess I could phone Pantelli about going,” I said. “Though I’m pretty sure his aunt is taking him to Whistler for the day. And Talbot’s in the city, babysitting.”

  Madge glanced back into the house. I knew she was thinking about the mural that she couldn’t quite get started and that she ought to be working on.

  Then her dubious look changed into a smile. “You shall go to the ball, Cinderella. Or to the hang-gliding festival, at any rate. I shall accompany you myself.”

  I treated her to a slack-jawed gaze. Madge — doing something with me? Voluntarily? Holy Toledo!

  “How nice that you’re joining us,” Zoë twinkled at Madge, who climbed into the front beside her. From the back, I could appreciate the difference in their heights. Madge’s auburn head topped Zoë’s pink-sun-visored one by almost a foot.

  “Such an awful lot of pink,” Madge observed to Zoë in return.

  Zoë offered us packages of fat, strawberry-iced cupcakes. Madge, busy fastening a creamy satin scarf around her hair, shook her head. Fearing my sister would make a scornful remark, I jabbered loudly, “Nice day, eh what?” and grabbed a cupcake out of sheer nervousness. If only there’d be some distraction to prevent Madge from speaking. A thunderstorm, maybe. Or an earthquake. Wasn’t Vancouver due for the Big One? What was taking it so long?

  And then there was a distraction, though not the meteorological kind.

  Bald Guy sprinted along the sidewalk toward us. “You! ” he yelled, pointing at me. “This time I’ve got you, Dinah Galloway.”

  He reached across the rumble seat, his fingers stretching toward me —

  Madge screamed. I mashed the cupcake in his face. With a crank of gears, Zoë lurched her tiny pink convertible away from the curb, spun it in a U-turn and zoomed toward Capilano Road.

  Bald Guy, sporting the cupcake on his nose, shouted, “I’m warning you, this is your last chance, Dinah!”

  We roared away. I stared back at the rapidly diminishing figure. I’ve seen you before, I thought suddenly. Not here in North Van. Somewhere else. In my own neighborhood?

  Bald Guy was so far behind now that only the bright pink of his cupcake-covered nose was visible. Ah, I decided. He reminds me of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. That’s it.

  Or was it?

  All the way up the tram, Zoë fussed over me. “Imagine a nice little girl like you bothered by a stalker,” she tutted and gave me a bar of Turkish delight in a pink wrapper.

  I managed a weak smile. I was feeling ill with all the sweets Zoë was pressing on me. When she wasn’t looking, I crammed the Turkish delight into a back pocket. My side pockets were already bulging with raspberry creams.

  Waddling off the tram, I heaved in gulp after gulp of pure, fresh air. This earned me an odd glance from Madge—and from a group of binocular-bearing German tourists who got off with us.

  “I’m not one to suffer in silence,” I explained, but they were now training their binoculars on the sky.

  Row after row of hang gliders were gusting down from the peak. The riders kept close enough so that each row, with its different-colored glider wings, formed a rainbow.

  “Vunderbar!” exclaimed a stout female tourist in khaki shorts and shirt. She had three pairs of binoculars slung around her neck, not to mention a cell phone and camera, each in a case attached to a leather strap. She switched from one pair of binoculars to the other to try and obtain the best view.

  “Horrible,” I said, clutching my stomach. Zoë and her oversupply of sweets were enough to put anyone on a solid diet of broccoli.

  The khaki-outfitted tourist frowned at me. “How can you say that about such magnificent hang gliding? So young and yet so jaded,” she sighed.

  She pulled off one pair of binoculars. “Here. Enjoy an up-close view—and try not to be so bitter about life.” The woman muttered to a friend about how video games and other gizmos had spoiled simple pleasures for today’s youth.

  I uttered a mega-belch, after which I felt a bit better. I focused on the hang gliders. Down they soared, in a blaze of brilliant colors against the flawless blue sky. They swept over the shimmering green of the mountainside, and down, down farther, toward the playing field along Capilano Road.

  The glider riders looked so in control of themselves, yet at the same time so free of everything. Hey! That was how I felt when I sang. Now I understood why Itchy loved hang gliding. Why he was upset about his dad wanting him to chuck it. If somebody tried to stop me from singing, I’d— well, I’d just die,
that’s what.

  I used the binoculars to begin microscopic inspections of the people around me. In a way, this was just as interesting.

  Whoa. A field of khaki. That was the stout German tourist. I shifted the binoculars. There was Madge, a little away from the tourist, her pretty face a study in concentration as she drew in the pocket sketchbook that she carried everywhere.

  I shifted the binoculars again. A patch of pink cloth. Ah, that would be Zoë.

  Wait—not just pink. I focused the binoculars. Something on the pink cloth. Was that what I thought it was? Was it? If so, I’d made some very wrong assumptions. Which meant…

  I lowered the binoculars, frowning. My idea was so astonishing I couldn’t quite put it into words yet.

  With a jolt, I realized Zoë was looking right at me over her doll-like smile. She fished yet another cupcake from her bag.

  Suddenly I knew it wasn’t Glinda the Good Witch whom Zoë reminded me of. Glinda didn’t ply kids with sweets.

  Nope, it was the Snow Queen in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The one who’d led Edmund off, fattening him up all the while so he’d be too sluggish to bother her when she set about her evil deeds.

  “Dinah, when we get back, I’m confiscating your copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” Madge told me. “You’ve obviously read it one too many times.”

  Zoë had ushered us to a picnic table abloom with pink crêpe paper. She’d instructed us to stay put while she fetched lunch for us. Not that I could have moved, I was so crammed with sweets. Then, spike heels sinking awkwardly into the grass with each step, Zoë had headed over to the massive refreshment tent.

  Madge continued, “Aside from her yucky color preferences, Zoë doesn’t strike me as evil, Dinah. I’m sure she means well.”

  “I have suspicions about Zoë,” I said ominously.

  “Based on what?”

  But I didn’t want to say, not yet. I had to check my suspicions—about what I’d glimpsed on Zoë’s jacket— with Pantelli.

  I turned to the khaki-outfitted tourist, who was about to bite into a huge, mustard-brimming hot dog. “Ma’am, could I please borrow your cell phone?”

  “You young people. Can you not keep away from gizmos for a moment?” The woman flapped a hand at the hang gliders. In her indignation, she gripped the hot dog extra hard with her other hand. Drops of mustard flew. Madge and I ducked to avoid being pelted.

  Still, the woman handed over her cell phone. I punched in Pantelli’s aunt’s number. With a sniff, Mrs. Audia said she supposed I couldn’t do any injury to Pantelli over the phone. She put him on.

  “That day at the hatchery,” I said, “you were inspecting trees and shrubs with your magnifying glass. Then you moved the magnifying glass to Zoë Klapper.”

  “Who?”

  “This isn’t an owl audition, Pantelli. The lady in pink. Remember? And I made fun of you for not being able to look at anything without a magnifying glass shoved up against your eyeballs. But you saw something on her clothes, didn’t you?”

  “Yup,” said Pantelli promptly. “I saw—”

  A huge round of applause from the crowd for the hang gliders prevented me from hearing him. I got him to speak louder. We shouted back and forth for a while, until establishing that we’d seen the same thing on Zoë’s clothes.

  And no, it wasn’t dandruff.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Woods Are Lovely,

  Dark and Deep—and Dangerous

  Along line of people trailed crookedly from the refreshment tent. Their heads were all tipped back, watching the hang gliders.

  “Good. They won’t notice if I slip by under their noses,”

  I said. “There are advantages to being short, though I hate to admit it.”

  Madge was sketching a hang glider. “How can you think of eating when Zoë has stuffed you full of sweets?” she demanded.

  “I’m not thinking of food,” I said. “I have to talk to Zoë.”

  Madge tossed back her burnished red waves. “Just don’t accept any more carbohydrates from the woman,” she instructed and doodled goggles onto the glider rider in her sketch.

  I waddled under people’s noses and into the tent. Actually a few people noticed and did object, but mildly. That’s another advantage to being short. When you butt in, people assume you’re looking for your mother.

  After the bright sun, the tent seemed dim. It didn’t help that scarves of smoke were twisting all around from the barbecues, where High Spirits Hang Gliding staff were roasting hot dogs. My eyes stung. I blinked and saw that one of the staffers was Itchy.

  I shoved past people teetering under plates loaded with fat hot dogs in fluffy white buns and mountains of potato salad. “Itchy, where’s Zoë?”

  Itchy put down his spatula and began to scratch furiously. “She’s gone, Dinah. It’s too late. There’s nothing you can do.”

  “Gone where? What are you talking about?”

  Itchy wagged his head unhappily. “It’s just business, Dinah. That’s all it ever was. They wanted to sign the deal before the nineteenth, and now they have.” He turned his wrist to check his watch. “Well, they soon will have.” He inserted a finger under the watchband and scratched.

  The nineteenth. The council meeting, where the new spotted owl bylaw would be approved.

  “What deal, and why does it have to be signed before the meeting?” I asked Itchy.

  A loud, insincere laugh burst from his dad. Councillor Cordes, a tall, white, chef’s hat wobbling on his head, elbowed Itchy aside to bark at me.

  “My, my, aren’t we the serious type. Meetings and deals, indeed! What’s a little girl like you frettin’ about stuff like that for?”

  With a spatula, he flipped a hot dog into a bun and dumped it on a plate, which he then brandished at me. Even if I’d been hungry, I wouldn’t have wanted the hot dog. He’d flipped it right out of the package, uncooked. He was nervous about something.

  “Where’s Zoë?”

  The councillor’s round, red face swam in the barbecue smoke. “Zoë?” He glanced over his shoulder. “She’s around somewhere. Have some potato salad,” he said, dumping a small mountain on the plate.

  Well, if there was one thing I knew how to do, it was make a scene. “WHERE IS ZOË?” I demanded.

  The crowd in the tent lapsed into an awed silence. It was so quiet you could hear chickadees chirping.

  Which, in fact, was where Councillor Cordes appeared to be glancing. Either Zoë was behind the tent, or the councillor had a really bad twitch.

  He shoved the plate into my hands. Glaring at him, I marched out the back of the tent.

  Behind me, people started talking again. A man piped up, “Er—Councillor. Do you mind if I have my hot dog cooked?”

  Just outside the tent flaps, I passed Itchy. His itchiness had got so bad he’d abandoned his barbecuing duties to devote himself entirely to scratching.

  Chickadees were chirping in a patch of woods just up from the tent. I glimpsed a flash of pink among the trees. Zoë, I thought.

  Before I could confront her, though, I had to ditch this plate of food. I veered over to a garbage can.

  “Dee dee,” went the chickadees.

  “Di. Di.”

  Whoa. That was one chickadee that’d got its lyrics wrong.

  Then, zooming through the clumps of hot-dog eaters like a quarterback—Bald Guy. “Di!” he exclaimed. Some chickadee.

  “Oh, no,” I said, retreating.

  “Oh, yes.” He had an eager, almost feverish look about him. Also some remaining crumbs and icing from the cupcake I’d lobbed.

  “I’m going to have it out with Zoë,” I informed him, scowling. “You do know Zoë, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, but you can’t talk to her now.” Bald Guy advanced.

  We were both distracted by loud scratching nearby. It was Itchy, regarding us unhappily as he scraped his arms.

  “That scratching you do,” Bald Guy said, “is it,
like, a hobby?”

  “This is no time to discuss skin conditions,” I informed Bald Guy. “I’m going to find out what Zoë is up to—and Rowena too, with her brassbound trunk.”

  That got him. He blanched. “Y-you know about that?” he gasped.

  “Of course I do,” I lied briskly. “And soon the whole world will too.” Huh! I thought. Maybe Pantelli was right.

  Maybe the trunk was full of national security secrets.

  “You can’t tell anyone,” Bald Guy gulped. “I’ll be ruined—all my plans…”

  He paced toward me, slowly, heavily, like Frankenstein. “You—just—can’t—”

  I’d had enough of this. Raising the overloaded plate of potato salad, I smashed it against his face.

  And ran.

  The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

  That was another of the maternal unit’s favorite quotations. Whenever we went to Stanley Park for a picnic, Mother would grow dreamy-eyed in the silence of the ancient Douglas firs. She’d murmur lines from “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” (Not that we Galloways actually picnicked on snowy evenings.)

  Stepping into these woods, I escaped the applause and whoo-whooing of the crowd. Stillness surrounded me.

  Though just a Robert Frost minute now. Amid the stillness, a faint crackle of a twig. And there was that flash of pink again—

  Zoë materialized round an aspen. “There you are,” she beamed, with her very lipsticked doll-like smile. Her real mouth might not have been beaming for all I could tell.

  I stomped toward her. I wasn’t afraid of anyone my height. “You have dog hair all over your clothes,” I said accusingly. “Norman isn’t a little boy. He’s a poodle. You’re Rowena’s secret buyer.”

  Zoë gave her tinkling laugh—the one that reminded me of carnival music. Cheap and not quite real, I thought.

  “No law against buying someone’s house,” Zoë pointed out, still amused. “And did we ever keep trying: different realtors, higher offers…

  “Then, finally, we lit upon the one thing that would force Rowena to move. A threat to her precious cats!” Zoë’s voice rose to a high, scornful pitch—and all at once I knew she was the anonymous phone caller and tipster. Anonymity, the favorite ploy of sneaks.