Owl Be Home for Christmas

by Donna Andrews

  “I tried, you know.”

  I nodded. Unfortunately, he hadn’t involved me or Mother or any other well-organized person in his initial planning, and therefore didn’t realize that the date he’d originally picked had conflicted with Rosh Hashanah. By the time half a dozen potential attendees had pointed this out to him, there weren’t many other weekends available. Of course, this weekend had conflicted with a family reunion that Trevor Ponsonby-West, Grandfather’s assistant, had been planning for three years, which was how I’d ended up running the conference. With luck the whole process of rescheduling had been painful enough that he’d remember to ask us the next time he decided to throw a conference. Maybe he’d even listen to our suggestion to hold it someplace warm next time.

  “And there was a reason I decided to hold this conference here in Caerphilly,” Grandfather said, as if reading my thoughts.

  “You mean apart from the fact that having it here meant you wouldn’t have to travel in the middle of the winter, and you’d have an excuse to stay here in the Inn in great luxury, and you could draft all your family and friends and the entire Caerphilly College biology department to run it for you?” I asked.

  “I could have had it in the Pacific Northwest,” he went on, ignoring me. “That would have been a lot more convenient for the Japanese and the Australians. Better weather, too. But I was hoping if I had it on the East Coast, all these idiots who are busy feuding over what to do about the spotted and barred owls would stay put on the West Coast.”

  “I thought you invited them,” I said.

  “I did. Had to. Wouldn’t have been polite to leave them out. But I didn’t expect very many of them to come. And I certainly didn’t expect them to bring their wretched squabbles here.”

  “Just what’s your take on the issue, anyway?” I asked. “You’ve been uncharacteristically reserved on the subject—maybe a good thing, since you’re playing host to all of them. But what do you think—shoot the barred owls, or let nature take its course?”

  “I think before we go around shooting a whole bunch of healthy predators we should spend a little effort trying to figure out if there’s a nonlethal method of encouraging them to go back to their original habitat. A habitat that’s under increasing pressure itself, you know. The barred owls might be invasive on the West Coast, but here on the East Coast they’re being displaced in many areas by the great horned owls.”

  I had a brief vision of the various owls as aggressive warring tribes, ceaselessly invading each other’s territories, like so many feathered Genghis Khans. “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” I muttered.

  “What’s that?”

  “So you’re in favor of trying to find a compromise,” I said aloud.

  “I’m in favor of trying to find a less drastic and bloodthirsty solution to the problem.” He sighed. “The whole thing is particularly ironic considering how closely related the two species are. They can actually interbreed, you know.”

  “Barred and spotted owls?”

  “Yes.” He chuckled. “And unlike many hybrids, the offspring are fertile.”

  “So they could eventually become one species.”

  “It’s possible,” he said. “Or what’s left of the spotted owls could just be absorbed into the barred owl population. No one knows what’s going to happen.”

  He fell silent as if pondering deeply over the unsettled fate of the barred and spotted owls.

  “So what do they call them?” I asked after a few moments.

  “Call what?”

  “The hybrids of the barred and spotted owls? Sparred owls? Botted owls?”

  “I don’t actually know.” He frowned. Grandfather didn’t like to be asked questions when he didn’t know the answers.

  “I bet they’re still arguing about it,” I said. “I bet before the conference is over, we’ll have three or four of them throwing things at each other. ‘Sparred owls!’ ‘No, botted owls!’ Good thing Horace is here in case we need him to break it up.”

  “I think you have our number,” Grandfather said with a chuckle. “I’m going to put my feet up for a half hour or so before my next panel. Call me if you need me.”

  “I’ll try not to,” I said. “If the SPOOR folks are still rehearsing in your cottage, tell them to go next door to the Madison or the Washington.”

  “Rehearsing?”

  Oh, dear. SPOOR—Stop Poisoning Our Owls and Raptors—was a local bird conservation group. They were famous—or maybe infamous—for dressing up in rather ridiculous bird costumes and performing humorous conservation-themed skits or musical numbers. In honor of the season, at tonight’s banquet they were planning to do a few Christmas carol parodies filled with owl puns: “O Owly Night.” “What Owl Is This?” “Owl Be Home for Christmas.” And maybe one or two others that I’d blotted out of my memory. Dad’s idea, but I could have sworn he’d gotten Grandfather’s assent.

  “They’re singing some Christmas carols at the banquet, remember?”

  “Of course I remember. Are you saying they actually rehearse for these shindigs? I always assumed they just got up on stage and made it up as they went along.”

  Having seen SPOOR in action, I could understand why he thought that.

  “For you, they’re rehearsing,” I said. “By the way, I thought Dr. Lindquist was on Dr. Frogmore’s side.”

  “No one’s on Frogmore’s side,” Grandfather said. “With the possible exception of Ned Czerny, and he’s soft in the head.”

  “On the plight of the spotted owl,” I explained. “I could have sworn they were both in favor of shooting the invading barred owls.”

  “Oh, yes.” Grandfather nodded briskly. “Nils is in favor of barred owl removal. Must drive him bonkers to have Frogmore ostensibly on his side.”

  “Ostensibly?”

  “Nils’s theory is that Frogmore’s secretly in favor of just letting the barred owls take over,” Grandfather explained. “But that Frogmore also realizes that if he’s for it, a lot of people will take the other side, just to be contrary. So he goes around supporting barred owl removal—but in such a pig-headed, over-the-top way that it makes the whole proposal look bad. Like his idea of paying exorbitant bounties for barred owl carcasses—will that result in a controlled, orderly removal of barred owls from the spotted owls’ territory? Or will it turn into open season on anything that vaguely resembles a barred owl?”

  “Including the few remaining spotted owls.”

  “Exactly. Bad idea. Frogmore goes around spouting off stuff like that and it taints the whole barred owl removal camp by association.”

  “So Dr. Lindquist and the other sane barred owl removalists hate him because he makes them look bad, and the anti-removalists hate him because they think he’s a heartless monster who wants to slaughter vast quantities of their beloved owls.”

  “Pretty much.” He nodded. “Whole field would be a lot more congenial if he were out of it.”

  “So if he gets the crazy idea to go on an owling expedition in the middle of the blizzard, I should let him do it for the good of the whole field?”

  Grandfather grinned at the idea, then his face grew serious and he shook his head.

  “No, you should tackle the bastard and drag him back inside,” he said. “Because if one of our own, even Frogmore, got lost in a blizzard, a lot of good people would risk their lives trying to save him. And now I’m going to take my nap.”

  Although it wasn’t five minutes before I got a text from him. I wondered, not for the first time, if I should be grateful to the boys for having taught him how to text or worried that they had created a monster.

  Chapter 9

  “Have you fed Percival?” Grandfather’s text read.

  I took a deep calming breath. Percival was a great horned owl—the one owl officially authorized to be in the hotel. We were keeping him well out of sight to avoid complaints from ornithophobes like Mrs. Ackley. Or for that matter, from the various scientists who were still sulking because we’d c
onfiscated the various owls they’d brought along for what they no doubt thought were good reasons.

  Grandfather had originally planned to use Percival as part of a demonstration on the medical issues involved in owl rehabilitation, given by the vet who tended all the exotic animals at his zoo. But Dr. Clarence Rutledge, the vet, was snowed in by now, with not only his own pets but also any patients staying at the Caerphilly Animal Hospital who could not easily go home and the entire current population of the Caerphilly Animal Shelter. We’d canceled the demonstration, and Percival had been demoted from program participant to non-paying guest. Grandfather had wanted to keep him in one of the cottages, but I’d vetoed that, so Ekaterina had found a place for us to hide his enormous cage in a well-heated and -ventilated hotel storage room. But surely Grandfather had tasked someone with feeding him.

  “Was I supposed to?” I texted back.

  “No, I was supposed to, but I keep getting interrupted.”

  I sighed.

  “I’m not doing mice,” I replied. “I’ll give him some crickets. That should hold him till you have time.”

  “Fine.”

  So I headed for the storage room. In good weather it would have been only a five-minute walk from the cottages down to the side door nearest the storage room. Given the snowstorm, getting there right now required taking an elevator down to the basement, using the key card Ekaterina had given me for getting into staff-only locations, and following a series of long, dimly lit, utilitarian corridors that snaked their way beneath the hotel. The basement was the one part of the Inn that Ekaterina had not yet brought into line with her high standards of efficiency and order, probably because doing so would mean a lot of expensive remodeling, and she hadn’t yet convinced the owners it would be worth doing. In the long run, my money was on Ekaterina, but for now the basement still revealed the fact that the Inn had been added on to half a dozen times over the century or so of its existence. My path wound past the food storage rooms, the staff locker rooms, the immense laundry rooms, and other unidentified but doubtless useful areas. I finally arrived at the wider area at the end of the corridor from which a battered, unmarked door opened into a huge warehouse-like space.

  Rather a creepy space. A lot of it was filled with furniture and decorations that were coming or going. Old furniture that hadn’t yet been hauled away for sale, donation, or disposal. Repairable bits of current furniture awaiting the next visit of the furniture doctor. Brand-new duplicates of many of the current standard items, all ready and waiting to be deployed within minutes if something dire happened in one of the rooms. Seasonal items, like the patio tables and umbrellas. Two or three flatbed dollies big enough to haul any large items of furniture—or Percival’s cage, when I’d had to bring it down here. A collection of vacuum cleaners—new ones ready to be put in service when the current ones began to wear out, and malfunctioning ones that could be scavenged for parts. It was a lot better organized than it had been before Ekaterina had taken over as manager, but even she was finding it took time to figure out what could go and what needed to stay.

  Percival’s enormous cage stood in the middle of an open space to the right of the door. He was facing away from the door, but when I came in he swiveled his head 180 degrees to look back at me and blinked sleepily.

  “Hey, Perce,” I said. “Cricket time.”

  He came to attention when I went over to the collection of terrariums and cages where his meals lived. I tried to not even see the cage of mice. If he’d been a reptile, and willing to eat frozen mice, I might have obliged. But owls, I’d been told, only ate live prey. Not happening today. I peered into the other crates—aha. Plenty of crickets. I opened a little door in the side of the cricket cage, shook out a cricket, and quickly snagged him with the ice tongs I’d brought down after the last time I’d done this. It’s not as if I couldn’t pick up a live cricket if I had to, but if I didn’t have to …

  Percival flapped his wings—you could see that the injured one wasn’t quite healed yet, but he looked a lot better than the first time I’d seen him.

  “Knock your socks off,” I said, and flicked the cricket at his head.

  He caught it very neatly, swallowed it whole, and looked expectantly at me.

  I continued tossing crickets at him until he began to seem less keen.

  “That will have to do you for now,” I said. “I’ll send Dad or Horace down later to do the mice.”

  He rustled his wings, settled down on his perch, pulled his head closer to his body, and closed his eyes.

  “Merry Christmas, Perce,” I said.

  I heard rustling somewhere nearby and jumped slightly. Percival opened one eye, decided it was nothing interesting, and closed the eye again.

  “Not mice, then, I hope.” At least not any mice other than the ones sleeping in their cage. Although it would be a miracle if the storage room didn’t have mice of its own. I’d suggested to Ekaterina that we turn Percival loose in here for a while, just to make sure, but she hadn’t been thrilled by the idea. I suspected Grandfather had been doing it anyway when he came down here, letting Percival take short hops to test his almost-healed wings. What Ekaterina didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

  The rustle came again, but this time I could tell it was outside the storage room. I made sure Percival’s water supply was full and left.

  And immediately spotted someone at the other end of the hall.

  “Hello?”

  The figure turned and I recognized Mr. Ackley.

  “Thank God,” he said. “I thought I heard a noise down this hall. Do you know the way out of here?”

  “Yes,” I said. “What are you doing down here, anyway?”

  “Long story,” he said.

  “Long way back to civilization.” I reached the part of the hall where he was standing. “We’ve got time.”

  “Don’t tell my wife,” he said. “I was looking for someplace to smoke a cigarette. I’ve technically quit, you understand. But sometimes when things get stressful I backslide a little. Just one. Two at the most. Helps the nerves. And this whole storm thing has been stressful.”

  “Not a smoking zone down here.” I set off along the route that would eventually lead to the elevator.

  “Didn’t figure it was,” he grumbled as he fell into step beside me. “I was trying to find the loading dock. Figured smoking there would be okay. Couldn’t find it on the main floor, so I thought maybe it was down here.”

  “It’s on the main floor,” I said. “But they’ve rolled the security door down, so even if you found your way there it probably didn’t look like a loading dock. And you couldn’t smoke there if the door’s not open.”

  “Figures.”

  “If you can’t do without a smoke, go out the front door,” I said. “Technically the hotel has a rule that you have to go to the gazebo to smoke, but I doubt if they’ve bothered to shovel a path to it, and I can’t imagine anyone would care or even notice you smoking out front in this weather, as long as you bring the butts back inside and throw them away discreetly.”

  “Tried that,” he said “Took about thirty seconds before I came back inside to look for a warmer option. And to top it all off I dropped my cigarettes somewhere down here. Got turned around looking for them. You haven’t seen them by any chance? Almost full pack of Marlboro Reds?”

  I shook my head.

  “And I bet the hotel gift shop doesn’t sell tobacco products.” No, thanks to Ekaterina’s disapproval, it didn’t. “Guess I’ll have to wait for my nicotine fix till the storm breaks.”

  I was glad to note that he sounded reasonably philosophical about this.

  “How’d you get down here, anyway?” I said.

  “Found a door propped open. Thought I’d had a bit of luck, but pretty soon I figured out all the doors down here were locked. Except for a couple that led outside, into the snow, and that wasn’t happening. Couldn’t even figure out which door I’d come in by—I guess someone noticed it was propped open an
d shut it. This is a staff-only place, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Then I’m going to file a complaint about the staff member who ran away instead of helping me.”

  “Staff member?” Running away didn’t sound like something any of the Inn’s staff ever did. “Are you sure it was a staff member? Did you see them well enough to give a description?”

  “No. They were at the other end of a long corridor, and the lights were so dim all I saw was a figure. I shouted for help and whoever it was ran away. I assumed it had to be a staff member, with everything around here locked up.”

  “Maybe it was someone else who’d gotten in through the same propped-open door you used,” I pointed out. “In which case they might have run away because they thought you were a staff member about to catch them trespassing.”

  “Never thought of that. How much longer is it going to take to get out of this maze?”

  “Almost there.” I pointed ahead. “There’s the freight elevator.”

  “Good. My wife will be frantic. She’s got no one to talk to but me. No one sane. Just who are these people, anyway? The ones having the meeting here at the Inn.”

  “Ornithologists.” Noticing his blank look, I added, “They study birds—specifically owls, in the case of the ones at this conference.”

  “The things some people get paid to do.” From his grumpy look, I gathered he didn’t think much of ornithology as a profession. I tried to think of another topic for conversation, but most of the topics that ran through my brain had something to do with the conference, so I was relieved when we reached the elevator and I could see him safely back to the parts of the hotel where guests were supposed to be lurking.

  And I reminded myself that I should cut him some slack. He had a reason to be grumpy, given that he and his wife might not make it home to spend Christmas with their family. Never mind that theirs was an utterly predictable plight. How had they ignored the massive media coverage of the approaching storm, complete with stern warnings that if you wanted to be someplace for Christmas you might want to get there by December 20?