The Money Bird (An Animals in Focus Mystery)

by Boneham, Sheila Webster

  Tom signed into the Internet, and George pulled up the California Parrot Project and showed us a photo of his bird, at least for his doctoral research.

  Thank goodness for the scientific names, I thought. How else would anyone be sure they were talking about the same species?

  “So they’re in California?” I asked.

  “Not native. Introduced there. They’re established around L.A. and farther south. Other places, too. Hawaii. I’ve seen them in Florida. Texas.”

  “But they’re native to South America?” asked Tom.

  “Mexico. They’re native to the northeast coast, but are considered extinct in most of their native range. Like a lot of parrots. Loss of habitat is responsible for a lot. And the pet trade is a huge problem. They’re endangered, and their numbers are falling.”

  That numbing sense of loss was filling me up again, and I said, “That must be hard. Studying something that’s disappearing.”

  George looked at me, then down at his hands. He said, “There are times when I think about doing something else. But,” he looked at me, then at Tom, “maybe we can learn enough to save them, or maybe what we learn with one species will save another. I have to hold that hope, you know, or what’s the point?”

  Tom steered us back from the brink, back to the problem at hand. “So, George, I don’t think you finished the Rich Campbell story.”

  George cleared his throat. “Right. So Rich was there in Storrs when I got back from California.”

  “Storrs?” I asked.

  Both men answered, “University of Connecticut.”

  “So Rich was there, on the list to graduate, dissertation defense scheduled, even had a couple of job offers, as I recall. All sorts of buzz about his work. Groundbreaking field data on the New Britain Gray-headed Goshawk. First-ever field study of them.”

  Tom said, “New Britain. They found a new species of orchid there in 2011. Blooms for one night. First night-blooming orchid we know of.”

  “Yeah?” said George. “So, see, it can happen. New species, new sub-species.”

  “So I’m guessing that in Mr. Campbells’ case, something was amiss?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” said George, drawing out his words. “He hadn’t been there.”

  Tom and I blurted at the same instant, “What?” in my case and “Oh, man” in Tom’s, followed by, “How did it come out?”

  George chuckled. “Rich had a girlfriend. They lived together, had for a year before he left, and another year when he got back. M.A. student in linguistics. She was planning to surprise him with a trip to the Greek islands to celebrate his doctorate and his job offers. She needed his passport number to buy the tickets. I saw her a couple of days later, and she said she couldn’t find it at first. You know, she thought it would be in his desk or filing cabinet but she didn’t see it. She was getting desperate because she wanted the tickets to be a surprise, to give them to him at his defense party.”

  Suddenly I was flashing on my jerk of an ex-husband, and I could almost see what was coming. “He was playing around on her, wasn’t he?”

  George nodded. “He carried a sort of messenger bag around, you know, to the library, whatever. So she thought maybe it was in his bag, although carrying his passport around all the time didn’t make much sense.”

  Tom must have picked up on where my thoughts were going. He touched my arm and winked at me. Such a small gesture, such a humongous whoosh of good feelings.

  “So Liesl, his girlfriend, looked in the bag.” He looked thoughtful. “Liesl … Can’t remember her last name. Anyway, she didn’t find the passport, not then, but she found a photo.”

  “The other woman.” I said.

  “The other family,” said George. “Woman, two little boys. And Rich.”

  I gasped, and Tom said, “He was married?”

  “He was.”

  “I knew he was a creep.” That may have come out as a growl, because Jay and Drake both raised their heads to look at me.

  “What happened?” asked Tom.

  “Liesl was livid. But also very controlled. Smart, really. They had a joint bank account, for one thing, her only account. So she didn’t confront him right away.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I threw his stuff out on the lawn and changed the locks.” I realized as soon as the words were out that I was merging Campbell’s story with my memories of Chet.

  George turned a confused expression my way but Tom came to my rescue, saying “You probably would have.” He took my hand, laughed, and looked at George. “Janet is nothing if not direct.”

  George went back to his story. “She moved her money to a new account, and kept looking for his passport and ticket receipts. She never said so, but I think by then she was out for revenge.”

  “Did she get it?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah. She finally found his passport, along with the ticket stubs from his flights. You know, back in the days of actual tickets. He’d never been to New Guinea.”

  Now Tom sounded angry. “So he fabricated his field data.”

  “He did.”

  “So what happened?”

  “The ticket stubs showed a round trip to Lincoln, Nebraska. And I guess there was a note on the back of the photo. Something like, ‘The boys wanted you to have this, love’ whatever her name was.”

  “How did Liesl know it was current?” asked Tom.

  “Good question. I wondered that, too,” said George. “Liesl said he was wearing a shirt that she gave him for his birthday a couple weeks before he left.”

  “Nice.” Tom doesn’t often sound sarcastic, but he made up for a long dry spell in his delivery of that one word.

  “So Liesl had a place and a name.” I laughed out loud at that, although not without a pang for Rich Campbell’s wife.

  “She did. She actually found her, then decided it wasn’t up to her to shatter the woman’s life. She thought Rich should have to do that himself.”

  “And she told the university?” asked Tom.

  “Oh yeah. She waited until the day of his defense. Friend of mine was there in the department when it happened. He said Liesl showed up just as Rich and his committee members were getting ready to go in for the defense. She smiled at Rich and asked Alan Milcourt, the committee chair, for a word.” George sort of snorted and smiled. “I guess she finagled Milcourt to a spot where Rich could see them. Then she handed Rich’s passport to Milcourt, along with a copy of the photo, and copies of the ticket stubs.”

  I burst out laughing, then had a frightening thought. “Rich is a scary guy. At least he is now. Wasn’t she afraid he’d come after her? I mean, she just blew up his life.”

  “She left. She had already taken her share of the bank account, and I guess she went straight from the department to the airport. I actually ran into her a couple years later in New York. In transit at JFK, actually. She was teaching English in Kuwait, home for a couple of weeks.”

  “Did she tell his wife?” I asked.

  “Didn’t have to. His wife showed up unexpectedly the same day. To surprise him and celebrate his doctorate.”

  “Oh my,” I said. “Poor woman. I hope the little boys didn’t have to see whatever came next.”

  “Yeah, I guess the wife got to his place, you know, his and Liesl’s, shortly after Rich got there. My friend, the one who was in the department when Liesl showed up, followed Rich home. He didn’t know Liesl had left, and he was afraid for her.”

  “I would think so,” said Tom.

  “Burkhardt. That was it. Liesl Burkhardt. Anyway, it took Rich’s wife about half a second to realize that he had been living there with a woman. And of course Rich was in quite a state already. Milcourt and the committee were not gentle. The way I heard it, when his wife showed up at the apartment, Rich was ranting one minute and crying his eyes out the next, asking her to forgive him. My friend, Joe Doyle, said that Rich’s wife didn’t seem surprised. Said she calmly took off her wedding ring and walked into the bathroom, and then they
heard the toilet flush. When she came back, Joe said she looked at Rich and said, ‘You think your life just went down the crapper? Just wait,’ and then she walked out.”

  thirty-nine

  Tom wanted me to stay the night. “I’m worried about you being home alone, especially now,” he had said. “You can take off early in the morning. We’ll be up anyway. But that guy, that Rich Campbell, I don’t like it, Janet.”

  But I wanted to go home. I needed to run a load of laundry, which

  I hadn’t done in too long, and I didn’t want to have to rush home in the morning to get ready to meet Peg. Or, more to the point, to go to Treasures on Earth. I wanted to look reasonably put together for that. In a place full of coiffed and polished people, I knew I’d learn more if I seemed to fit in, or nearly so.

  “I won’t be alone,” I had told Tom. “I’ll have my bodyguards.” Meaning, of course, Jay and Leo. And then Jay and I went home. Leo met us at the door, twined around my legs and then Jay’s, and then curled up on the recliner in the living room, which is probably where he was when we arrived. I emptied my pockets, pulled off my jeans, tossed them into the hamper, and carried it to the laundry room. I started to turn the light on to walk through the kitchen but decided I should pull the blind down over the window on the back door first. I set the hamper inside the laundry room and looked out the window, my hand on the cord to drop the shade. My backyard was dark, but Goldie’s deck light was on, and the white and pale pink flowers she had planted around its edge seemed to emit a light of their own. They made me smile.

  I closed the shade and flipped the light on and was stuffing the last of the laundry into the washer when my phone rang. I nearly tripped over Jay when I turned to go to the kitchen. “Do you have to follow me everywhere, Bubby?” I asked him. He wagged his butt at me as I reached for the receiver. “Of course you do,” I said, stroking his cheek with my other hand. “You’re an Aussie.”

  Goldie had seen my light come on and wanted to know what was happening. I filled her in on the basics and declined an invitation for hot milk and spicy Mexican chocolate-and-cayenne cookies. “By the way, someone was there earlier this evening. He looked familiar but I can’t think where I’ve seen him. Maybe on TV. I think he might have been there at the lake with Tom.”

  My stomach nearly dropped on the floor. Rich Campbell? I couldn’t imagine who else “maybe from TV” might be looking for me, and the thought that he really might know where I lived propelled me across the room to check that the deadbolt was fastened. The phone cord stopped me halfway there. “Goldie, hang on,” I said, and set the receiver on the counter with a thunk. All the doors were locked. I would have armed the alarm that Tom thought I should have installed, if I had actually had it installed. For the first time, I wished I had done so. I closed the rest of my blinds and curtains, then picked up the phone again. “Okay.”

  “Something wrong?” Goldie asked.

  “No.”

  “Tell me.”

  “No, nothing.”

  “You shut your curtains. You checked your locks, didn’t you? Who was that man?”

  “What, I can’t shut my curtains?”

  “Janet, you never shut the curtains in your office. You’re afraid someone may look in. What’s going on?”

  I told her about creepy Rich Campbell. Not the whole story, just the part on the island. And I didn’t tell her he pretended to shoot me, just said he made a gesture.

  “He gave you the finger for being on the island? Your friend’s private island?”

  I left it at that. She wanted to know if there was any news about how Anderson Billings had died, and she wondered what was taking so long. “It’s not like they can just fart around forever to do the autopsy.”

  “Autopsy is done. But the lab results won’t be back for a while.” Which reminded me that I hadn’t heard anything about the funeral. “Goldie, do you have today’s paper?”

  “Right here.”

  I had her check the funeral notices, but there was no mention of Anderson. I’d have to remember to find out in the morning. I wasn’t keen on funerals, but felt I should be at that one.

  Just as we were wrapping up the conversation, Goldie said, “Come sleep over here, Janet. The boys can come with you.”

  “I’m fine here. Got all kinds of security, and I have the best watch cat in town.” I wasn’t kidding, either. Leo had shown his mettle when it mattered. “And you know Jay isn’t about to let anyone hurt me.”

  She wasn’t happy, but she let it go. She can’t exactly scold me for being stubborn, I thought, and smiled. It was getting late, but I couldn’t get Rich Campbell’s girlfriend Liesl out of my mind. What was her last name? Baker? Brubaker? I sat down at my computer, woke it up, and typed “Liesl” into the search engine, then stared at the screen. Burkhardt, that was it. You wouldn’t believe how many Liesl Burkhardts came up in my initial search. I added “Kuwait” to the terms, doubting that she would still be there but hoping that might narrow the field to a Liesl Burkhardt who had at one time taught English in Kuwait. Nothing. So I deleted “Kuwait” and typed in “University of Connecticut.” Bingo. I read the article, dated 1995, twice through.

  “We’re coming to visit,” I said when Goldie answered. I pulled a pair of shorts on, fastened Jay’s leash to his collar, shoved my keys and my cell phone into my pocket, lifted Leo out of the recliner, and moved the whole kit and caboodle to Goldie’s place, where I told her about the article I had just read.

  “She drowned. Goldie, she drowned in a lake in November.”

  “What a shame,” said Goldie.

  “Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

  Goldie shrugged, but her voice said she wasn’t so unfeeling. “People drown.”

  “How many people have you known who drowned, Goldie? And two people connected to this guy drown?” My pitch was rising so I reeled myself in a turn. “In strange circumstances, too.”

  Goldie nibbled a cookie and asked, “Where was this again? The girl, Lisa. And when?”

  “Liesl. Massachusetts. A pond on Cape Cod. In November.” Goldie’s cuckoo clock chirped midnight. I considered calling Tom despite the hour, but I knew he and George planned to get up at o-dark-thirty in hopes of seeing the parrot. George thought their chances were better if they were there shortly after sunrise, which was around six forty-five these days. Besides, how would it help for them to know about Liesl tonight?

  “You’re right. Makes no sense, unless she was suicidal. I mean, we don’t know much about her. That’s possible.”

  “But I knew Anderson, and he wasn’t suicidal,” I said.

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Sleep, I think. I have to be up early.” I told her what Peg and I were planning.

  “I’ll go with you. Been wanting to see what’s going on in there anyway.” For the first time in I couldn’t remember how long there was

  a fire in Goldie’s eye.

  “I only have two tickets to the exhibit,” I said.

  Goldie would not be deterred. “I’ll buy one at the door.”

  “Not sure you can do that.”

  “I’ll ask. Besides, they’re not going to turn away an old lady whose two friends have passes.” She laughed and said, “Don’t worry, I won’t wear my Land Trust T-shirt.” Leo waltzed back into the kitchen, apparently having completed his investigation of Goldie’s house. She picked him up and snuggled her face into his neck. “You going to sleep with me tonight, Mr. Leo?”

  “He doesn’t like to sleep in the bed.” I should know, I’ve been trying to get him to sleep in mine for the past two years. There’s nothing so soothing as a cat. Except a dog. Or one of each. Which reminded me—time to hit the sack.

  “Ha! Show’s how much you know!” said Goldie. “He always sleeps with me when he comes for a visit.” Which he had done a couple of times when I had to be out of town for a few days. I don’t like to leave him alone, even with food and extra litter boxes, so he goes to “Aunt Goldie’
s” or, the last time, to Tom’s place.

  “Fickle pickle,” I said, standing and running the backs of my fingers down Leo’s cheek and neck. “Okay, see you in the morning.” Jay was on his feet, sleepy looking but ready to follow wherever I led. I leaned down and hugged him. “At least one of you is loyal!”

  As I walked away I heard a thump behind me and Goldie said, “Janet.”

  I turned. Leo was following me and Jay, his eyes wide and very focused on me. “Aww, Leo mio.” Whether he understood my words, who knows? But I couldn’t help thinking he knew what they meant, and I felt a stab of remorse. The last thing I would ever do is saddle my animals with guilt. I scooped him up and he shoved his head into my chin. Ten minutes later I fell asleep in Goldie’s guest room with my dog pressed against my legs and my cat purring on the other pillow. Safe.

  forty

  I jolted wide awake in the morning, figuring I had overslept and cursing myself for setting my cell phone alarm incorrectly. Again. I always seem to miss some little detail and end up with p.m. where

  I want a.m. or Off where I want On. But when I flicked my phone on I saw that it wasn’t quite six a.m. I hadn’t planned to get up for another hour and even that wouldn’t give me my usual sleepy-bye quota, but after five minutes of trying to grab another hour, I got up. Leo was gone. I figured he had gone off to Goldie’s room. Jay stood on the bed, grinning and wriggling his fanny at me.

  “Okay, hang on, Bubby,” I said. When we emerged from our room a few minutes later, all was quiet, but Goldie’s bedroom door was open and her bed was made. I called, “Goldie?”

  No answer. I grabbed Jay’s leash from the kitchen table and opened the back door. Goldie was deadheading flowers by the light of a headlamp, dropping the cuttings into a little basket that I knew she would empty into her compost pile at the back of the yard. She looked up and smiled. “Morning, sleepy head.”

  “It’s barely six, Goldie. It’s not even light yet.”

  Jay ran to Goldie for a quick good-morning kiss, then went off to do what he needed to do. I kept an eye on him but didn’t need the baggy in my pocket yet.