by J. R. Ripley
August Mantooth leaned over and picked up a piece of lumber the size of a small baseball bat. “This?” He rotated the wood around in his hand.
I drew in a breath. A sharp two-inch nail protruded from one end of the board.
“What’s going on?” Aaron Maddley appeared suddenly, hammer in hand. He glanced at me and Miss Turner, then the director. “What are you doing with that thing?”
“Have you seen that before?” I asked, holding Ava Turner’s hand and looking up at Aaron.
He shrugged. “A scrap of wood, so what?”
“So somebody just hit Miss Turner with it,” August said, his teeth worrying his lower lip.
“What?” Aaron looked from the wood to me.
“She could have been killed,” I added. If that nail had connected with her skull, of that there was no doubt.
“I don’t know,” Aaron said slowly, stepping over me. “Looks to me like it might have fallen off this shelf.”
I frowned. There was a dusty pile of wood scraps laying haphazardly on an open shelf bracketed to the wall. In fact, there were several shelves littered with odds and ends that appeared to have been pack-ratted away until needed. If ever.
But how could a piece of wood falling off a shelf, even with the help of an invisible imp, hit the actress hard enough in the head to knock her down?
Mac MacDonald scurried over and lifted Miss Turner to her feet. “Miss Turner, are you all right? Shall I fetch a doctor? Let me take you to a doctor.”
She leaned against the mayor and batted her eyelashes. “I am feeling a bit woozy.”
T-Bone Crawford, the ex-con, appeared. He held a tall, clear glass of water, which he extended to the actress. She ignored him.
“She’s woozy, see?” Mayor MacDonald gingerly explored her scalp with his fingers.
The skeptic in me wondered if he was thinking about asking for her endorsement in his reelection campaign.
“Maybe we should call an ambulance,” Aaron said.
“I’ll take her to the medical center,” offered Cousin Riley, watching anxiously beside Rhonda, who was clutching a hairbrush. “It will be quicker.”
“Good idea,” Mac said. “I’m going, too.”
We all agreed that was the best plan of action, and Riley and the mayor led the actress away.
I rose and dusted myself off. I noticed Aaron hadn’t offered me his hand but rather had drifted away. Probably to go bang on something.
Dick Feller was whispering in low tones with Lou Ferris near the curtain pulleys. Dick was playing Foster Wilson, a hotel owner, in the musical. Dick’s real-life role is Ruby Lake Motor Inn’s front desk manager. Talk about typecasting.
August stood holding the deadly-looking scrap of lumber. He gave it a second look and reached his finger out toward the nail.
“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you.”
He raised his brow quizzically. “I do not plan to cut myself.”
I shook my head. “That’s not it,” I replied. “The police are going to want to see that. It’s evidence.”
His brows pinched together. “Evidence of what? You heard Mr. Maddley.”
“Attempted murder, of course.” I reached for the board. “I believe Mr. Maddley is very much mistaken.”
“Murder?” August gasped. He pulled his hand away. “Oh, no. That cannot be!”
I shrugged and reached once more. “But it is.”
The director shook his head so hard his whole body quivered. “No, no, no.” He dropped the board and grabbed my wrists. “Do you know what that would mean? Police. Investigations.” He inhaled sharply. “They might close down my show!” His eyes widened.
“Somebody just tried to kill your star. Don’t you think that’s more important? Besides, without Miss Turner, you don’t have a show.”
August frowned. “I’ll tell you what. Let’s keep this between us for now. You say murder, Mr. Maddley says accident. So who’s to say for certain?”
“I’m pretty sure—” The director didn’t give me a chance to finish my answer.
“If anything further untoward occurs, I will personally report it to the authorities.” He held out his hand. “Agreed?”
I hesitated. “Immediately?”
He nodded solemnly. “Immediately.”
Against my better judgment, we shook on it.
Not that it mattered.
Once on the street, I fished my phone from my purse and dialed Kim’s number. The sooner she came and got me, the better I’d feel.
No answer. Straight to voice mail. I glared at the phone. “Great.” Birds & Bees was approximately three miles away. While the walk might have done me good, I was in no mood for a crosstown hike. At least I’d chosen one-inch closed-toe heels instead of something more outrageous.
T-Bone Crawford, aka Charlie Davenport, came hurrying out the front door beside the ticket booth. There was a matte-black motorcycle helmet in his left hand.
“Mr. Crawford, right?” I stepped forward. He paused, looking past me, and nodded.
“That’s right. Thibodaux. Folks call me T-Bone.”
I’d been wondering about that. What sort of mother names her child T-Bone? I held out my hand. “I’m the other Amy. Amy Simms.”
Crawford winced as I felt my small hand being engulfed by his. “Sorry,” I joked. “I guess I don’t know my own strength.”
T-Bone Crawford fluttered his free hand. “It’s nothing,” he replied, emotionlessly. He picked at his opposite hand. “I must’ve picked up a splinter someplace.”
The ex-con turned abruptly and crossed the street. He threw his right leg over the seat of a big black and chrome Harley. Casting a quick last look at me, he started the bike’s engine and roared off.
It seemed I was anything but Miss Popularity today. First Aaron Maddley treated me with an icy demeanor, and now T-Bone Crawford had taken off without so much as a wave good-bye. I was beginning to wonder if it was me. Was it something I’d said, smelled like, or done?
As I started along the sidewalk, silently cursing the entire male species, Robert LaChance came hauling out of the TOTS parking lot in a flashy silver German convertible, rear wheels spinning. The car dealer slammed on the brakes when he saw me.
“Hey!” He bent over, and a moment later, the booming sounds of Taylor Swift faded. “Watch where you’re going, Simms!”
“You could have killed me,” I reprimanded him, looking down at the front bumper a mere foot from my thighs.
“Yeah, but I didn’t.”
I ignored the callous remark and started walking.
Robert honked and I spun around. “What?” I said. “You want to back up and try again?”
He grinned. “Are you planning on walking all the way to your shop?”
My jaw dropped. “I seem to have left my wings at home.”
“So you want a ride or what?” He gestured toward the empty passenger seat.
Robert LaChance was offering me a ride? What was the man up to?
“You want to make up your mind?” Robert’s fingertips played along the dash like a sandpiper running along the shoreline. “I haven’t got all day.”
I hurried to the passenger side and climbed in, sinking into the warm, luxurious Italian leather. “Nice car,” I remarked.
“Sell it to you for forty-five grand,” Robert said, shifting into gear and sliding out onto the road.
“Too rich for my blood,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow as he said, “Sell that place of yours and you’ll be able to afford a car like this and then some.”
I shifted my weight as he took the corner onto Lake Shore Drive much too quickly. He was a one-armed maniac behind the wheel. “What is it about my house that makes everybody want it so badly?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“What I mean,” I replied, fighting to keep flying hair from whipping my eyes, “is that you, the mayor, and Gertie Hammer are cooking up something.” I faced him head-on. “I want to know
what.”
“Like I said, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, really,” I said, as he pulled up outside my house, “then how come I got a letter from the town’s planning commission informing me that they propose to widen this intersection?” I pointed to the corner of my property. “And demolish my house through eminent domain?”
“Really?” Robert LaChance sounded anything but surprised. An actor he was not. It was probably best for everybody’s sake that he was no longer able to play the part of Frank Butler in Annie Get Your Gun. Probably the only good acting he did was when he tried to convince a prospective buyer how reliable one of his crummy used cars was.
“What do you know about T-Bone Crawford?” I asked, changing the subject. Maybe this he would answer.
“Crawford?” Robert shrugged. “Not much. He’s a decent auto mechanic. Why?”
“Just curious.” I reached for the door handle. “Wait? Does T-Bone work for you?”
Robert rubbed his fingers along his cast. “So what if he does?”
I took that for a yes. “So you know he’s an ex-con?”
“Is there a point to all these questions?” Robert taunted, without really answering once again.
I climbed out and slammed the car door.
Robert leaned toward me, his elbow on the car’s passenger-side window ledge. “Maybe you should think about selling the place, Simms. You know, I’ve got an empty space in a commercial property not a mile up the road that would be perfect for your little bird store. I’ll make you a good deal.”
“Thanks.” I yanked at my purse strap. “But I have no intention of moving.”
“Well, now.” Robert smiled evilly. “You might not have a say in the matter.”
I bit back every curse I could think of as Robert and his fancy foreign convertible sped away. Tiffany was lucky to be rid of the man.
5
“What’s in the box?” I asked.
My mother and Kim were sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the sales counter. Both Mom’s and Kim’s eyes were fixated on whatever was inside the cardboard box between them.
Whatever it was, it was making small scratching and thrashing sounds.
Mom signaled for me to keep my voice down. “I found it on the porch,” she said softly.
Kim looked up, then back down. “It’s a bird.”
I leaned over and peered inside. “A towhee, to be precise,” I said. “An eastern towhee.” I helped my mother to her feet.
“Thank you, Amy.” Mom suffers from muscular dystrophy. It had been getting worse for a while, but these days seemed to be in a holding pattern, thank goodness.
“What’s that?”
The three of us looked up. Esther Pilaster, or Esther the Pester, as I sometimes thought of her, trundled toward us from the back of the store. She was balancing a mug of coffee in one hand and a plate of cookies in the other. One of my throws was draped over her shoulders.
Esther is a renter I inherited with the house. She’d leased an apartment on the second floor from Gertie Hammer before the house was mine, and I’d been forced to continue the lease. I couldn’t wait until that lease came to an end and the woman found a new place to live. She treated my store like an extension of her living room, no matter how many times I asked her politely not to.
Case in point, now. Drinking the beverages and eating the cookies that I put out expressly for the customers.
“I thought you said this place was no pets?” Esther Pilaster barked.
“It is.” I eyed Esther carefully. I had my suspicions that the woman was keeping a cat. I’m allergic to cats. Seriously. I also suspected her of smoking in the apartment, though I had expressly forbidden it.
“Then what’s your mother doing with a pet bird?”
Esther’s a small, narrow-shouldered, elflike septuagenarian with a hawkish nose, sagging eyelids, and silvery hair normally pulled back tightly into a four-inch ponytail held in place with an elastic black velvet hair tie. She had gray-blue eyes, wispy white eyebrows, and uneven teeth. And no filter between her thoughts and her voice box.
“It is not a pet.” I lifted the box to the counter and ran my hand along the little bird’s tail. I turned to Kim. “You say you found it outside?” One of its wings seemed wrong somehow.
Kim rose and dusted herself off. “Your mom found it. I found Barbara on the floor with Sammy when I got back.”
“Sammy?”
“That’s his name,” said Mom.
My brows rose. “You named the bird Sammy?”
Mom pushed up her slender shoulders. “Why not?” She stroked the crown of the little bird’s head. “Besides, he reminds me a little of Sammy Davis Jr.”
I didn’t want to know how or why a towhee could remind my mom of Sammy Davis Jr., an entertainer and Rat Packer who had died when I was a little kid, so I went another way. “Because we can’t keep him is why not,” I said, studying the towhee more closely. “He looks like he’s been injured.”
“He doesn’t look like a Sammy,” Esther remarked, dropping a cookie crumb in the box.
I quickly pulled out the cookie. “Birds don’t eat cookies,” I said. And no, he didn’t look like a Sammy. He didn’t look like a Frank Sinatra or a Dean Martin either.
“How do you know? You didn’t give him a chance,” was Esther’s reply.
“They aren’t good for them.” I rolled my eyes. “See how his wing doesn’t fold back all the way?” I ran my fingernail lightly along its feathers.
“Yeah.” Kim leaned over me. “He definitely can’t fly. If it’s a he.” She twisted her head to look me in the eye. “Is it a he?”
“Yes, I think so.” The little towhee was about seven inches long, from its head to its long, rounded tail. The bird was smaller than a robin, larger than a sparrow—to which the towhee is related. Towhees are distinctive looking with warm, reddish-brown sides contrasting with their white chests and bellies.
“If I remember correctly”—I strolled to the bookshelves and extracted a copy of the Audubon field guide for Eastern Region birds—“the males are more of a black in color—along the tail, wings, head, neck . . .” I scanned the tome’s index, then turned to the eastern towhee page. “See?”
Mom and Kim nodded. Kim was holding the box. We looked from the book to the bird and back again.
“The females, like this one”—I tapped the opposite page—“are dark brown where the males are black.” I carefully replaced the book. It was store merchandise, after all. “I wonder who left him.”
“I think it was the children,” Mom said.
“Children?”
My mother nodded while she tugged at her fingers. “I saw two children, a boy and a girl, on the porch. I went out to see if I could help them, but they ran off before I arrived.” She glanced out the front window. “That was when I found the box at the door.”
“I saw them, too,” put in Esther. “From my window.” Esther’s window looks out over the front of the store. “Troublemakers, if you ask me.”
“What are you going to do with him?” asked Kim as we returned the cardboard box to the counter.
“Take him to the vet, I suppose.”
“I could take care of him,” Esther said unexpectedly.
I cocked my head. What was the Pester up to? “No, thank you, Esther. I’m sure this little guy will need some professional medical care.”
“Harrumph,” coughed Esther, spilling coffee on my throw. At least it washed away the clinging cookie crumbs. “I was only offering.”
Right, I thought. She probably wanted to feed the bird to the cat she was hiding up in her apartment. After fattening it up on cookies.
“There’s a vet three blocks away,” offered my mother. “You remember Dr. Buchman? We used to take Snowy to him.”
I smiled. I remembered our little bichon, Snowy—named after the dog in the Tintin books. “Doc Buchman’s still practicing?” The man had seemed so old when I was a teenager.
Mom explained that Dr. Buchman was working part-time. “His daughter, Jane, has joined the practice. She does most of the work now.”
I draped my arm over my mom’s shoulders. “Thanks for helping out. Why don’t you go rest for a while?”
Mom said she would. Much to my relief, she took Esther’s arm and asked her to help her up the stairs. My mother is extremely perspicacious and always looking out for me. We looked out for each other. Mom would probably have my soiled throw washed, folded, and fluffed by afternoon.
I grabbed a clean towel from the kitchen and laid it gently along the bottom of the box. The little towhee gave three high-pitched whistles and hopped atop the towel.
“Hold down the fort,” I said to Kim as she held the door while I maneuvered the box out to the van. “And thanks for coming to pick me back up at TOTS.”
Kim blushed. “Oops. I was supposed to do that, wasn’t I? Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I caught a ride with Robert LaChance.”
“Ugh. Now I’m really sorry.”
I laughed. “We had an interesting conversation.”
“About what?”
“About Birds and Bees.”
“You still think he and the mayor are trying to drive you out of business?”
“I’d bet my life on it,” I answered, shutting the van’s cargo doors.
Come to think of it, I realized as I drove off, that was, at least figuratively, exactly what I was doing.
* * *
Buchman’s Veterinary Medicine was located at the corner of a mostly residential street. If I remembered correctly, Mr. Buchman lived in the house next door.
A young girl in blue scrubs looked up from the desk, where she’d been staring at a computer screen. “Can I help you?”
I glanced around the waiting room. It seemed so much smaller than I remembered and poorly lit. A casually dressed middle-aged man sat on a bench. The collie at the other end of the orange leash he was holding eyed me eagerly.
I set the box down on the desk between the girl and myself. “I found this bird. Well, I didn’t find it exactly.” The towhee fluttered its wings, then settled into a corner of the box, staring up at me with striking red eyes. “I’m sure he’s injured.”
