The Money Bird (An Animals in Focus Mystery)

by Boneham, Sheila Webster

  George grinned at us. “Once or twice.”

  I pulled my hand away and asked, “Okay, what now?”

  In answer, George pulled the fruit, seeds, and nuts from his tote bag and scattered an assortment on the floor of the birdcage. He pushed the cage door open as far as it would go, then grabbed the rope by the weighted end, pulled it taut, and continued to pull gently, making sure to keep the light line attached to the cage door loose. It wouldn’t do to pull the door closed before the parrot climbed in for the ride back down. The cage rose from the ground, swinging slightly and beginning a slow spin. George stopped pulling and steadied the cage. He waited to be sure it had lost its inclination to swing and spin, then resumed raising it slowly into the old sycamore.

  “He’s moving, George,” said Tom, pointing beyond the cage toward our parrot quarry. The bird had his wings open and was leaning forward as if to get a closer look at the topsy-turvy sight of a cage flying toward him.

  George looked toward the bird but kept his hand-over-hand rhythm steady on the rope. “I think we’re good. He’s just checking it out. He’s probably pretty hungry, and he’s been in captivity long enough to associate the cage with food.”

  I thought about my own routine of feeding my dog and cat in their crates, all the time at first, then sporadically to reinforce the idea that the crate is a good place. Probably worked for birds, too, I thought, even a wild-caught parrot if he’s hungry enough.

  “Okay, I think that will do it,” said George. The cage was hanging just below the branch that held the rope. Two other branches grew at nearly right angles but lower than that one, so the cage was effectively “in” the tree. “Let’s back off a bit. Now we wait.” George pulled a tent peg from the canvas bag and secured the rope to it. He picked up the light line and found the end of it. Careful not to tug the cage door closed, he walked as far from the base of the tree as the line allowed and sat on a fallen tree trunk. We followed.

  “Can we talk?” I whispered.

  “Softly, sure.”

  “Think this will work?” asked Tom.

  “Hope so. Other than darting him, which I don’t want to do, I don’t see any other way to catch him.” George leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees. “Might take a while, though. I’m sure he’s spooked by the death of his friend or mate, and whatever landed them out here in the first place.”

  “Not to mention being captured, whenever that was. I mean, he probably wasn’t bred in captivity, right?” I asked. It didn’t seem likely with such a rare parrot.

  “Oh, I’m sure he was poached from the wild. No telling how long ago or how old he was. Probably as a chick.”

  “You can buy parrots along the road in Mexico, Latin America, farther south,” said Tom. “Habitat loss and poaching are the biggest dangers to birds and lots of other animals. And plants. It all goes together.”

  “Right,” said George. “But the poaching problem isn’t fueled by local demand. The poachers just want to feed themselves and their kids. The real problem is the buyers here in the U.S., and in Europe and other well-heeled markets.”

  “Like Moneypenny and his minions.” My cheeks went red hot again as the rage I had managed to cool earlier in the kayak came back to the boil. The image of that bizarre pistol fist flashed behind my eyes. I like to think that I’m not a violent person, but as I thought of baby birds pulled from nests, and adult birds netted or killed, and of Anderson Billings and Liesl Burkhardt’s untimely deaths, and of that pistol fist raised to threaten me, I had a sweet little daydream of smashing that threatening hand with that swinging baseball bat.

  fifty

  I sat watching the parrot in the tree while the parrot appeared to watch the cage that hung fifteen feet beneath him, and Tom watched me. I fought the urge to look at him. He would see right through me, see the anger racing like blood under my skin, and I couldn’t trust myself not to tell him what Rich Campbell had done. The last thing I wanted was to say anything that would prompt Tom to confront the guy. Someone would get hurt.

  “What’s got you all wound up?” said Tom.

  “Nothing. Well, you know, this poaching and shipping birds and all. It’s horrifying.” I gestured toward the frightened, hungry bird in the sycamore. “I’m angry for that guy. And his dead mate.”

  Tom and George were both staring at me by that time, so I decided to try to shift conversation to something more uplifting. Maybe my cheeks would cool down before all the skin peeled off them.

  “So, George, what made you become a bird guy?”

  George chuckled. “Pretty sure I was hatched fully fledged as a bird guy. Can’t remember a time I wasn’t fascinated by birds.” He shifted his position on the log and gestured toward our parrot. “Look.”

  The bird was sliding sideways along the branch, his head cocked as if to see the cage better.

  “This is good, right?”

  “Yep, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. I doubt he’ll go in this quickly.” The bird stopped and George relaxed again, although he never took his eyes off the parrot. “I actually started college as pre-law. Went all the way through my undergrad years thinking I’d be a lawyer.”

  My behind, especially the bitten part, was unhappy about the rough bark we were sitting on, so I checked the ground for poison ivy, stinging nettles, and ants, found it clear, and sat down where I could lean back against the fallen trunk. Tom shifted so that he was straddling me. As he massaged my shoulders and neck, he said, “Ah, the lure of money, right? I started out in pre-med.”

  “Yep. Then I got an internship with a law firm. It was supposed to last the whole summer. I lasted four days and knew it wasn’t for me. I spent the rest of the summer slinging burgers, and it took me an extra year to make up science deficiencies to get into a master’s program in biology, but I’ve never looked back.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “How could you?” asked George.

  “No, I didn’t know you started in pre-med, Tom.”

  He shook my shoulders gently and said, “Janet, I confess, I’ve held a few things back. Have to retain some mysterious allure, don’t I?”

  That made me smile. Tom was one of the most open people I’d ever met. For me that was his allure. Part of it, anyway. I had enough of men with secrets a long time ago.

  Conversation petered out after that and, other than the occasional comment from one of us, we sat in silence for the next hour. I may even have dozed off. When I snapped to, my first thought was for the parrot. He was hunkered down on his branch, possibly sleeping. Then I checked Tom’s watch and figured we still had a few hours until sunset. It could be a long evening, and I needed a break.

  “Will it bother him,” I gestured toward our feathered friend, “if I get up and walk around a bit?”

  “I doubt it,” said George.

  “Want company?” asked Tom.

  I covered my hesitation with the clumsiness of getting up with a half-numb fanny. “Sure,” I said, although I was anything but sure. Not that I didn’t want to be with Tom. I just didn’t want to slip and tell him about the assault on my van. Not until we got home, or at least away from here and Treasures on Earth. Even better, not until I’d spoken to Jo Stevens and the police had Mister Baseball Bat in custody. I decided I’d just have to try for a poker face.

  We moved carefully until we were at some distance from the old sycamore, then walked more freely. Tom took my hand and I braced for more questions, but none came.

  “I hope this works,” I said.

  “Yeah, me too. But George said on the way out here that it might take a couple of days.”

  “That bird has to be starving by now. I mean, what do parrots eat? There can’t be much out here for him, right?” I thought about the birds

  I photograph in Indiana and what they eat. Some do eat fruit, but I didn’t think there would be much available on the island. “Maybe some chokecherries,” I said, thinking out loud.

  “There isn’t much, p
robably. He might not recognize some of it as food, either.” Tom paused. “Must be eating something, though. I don’t think he could go this long without eating.”

  I hadn’t been paying attention to where we were headed, and realized that we had made our way to the shore closest to Treasures on Earth. As we strolled along the edge of the water, I couldn’t help looking across to the fence that separated the two properties. Tom stopped and looked in the same direction and said, “That might be a way in.”

  “Obviously he came in that way.”

  “No, I mean a way into their place from here.”

  Mr. “Let the Police Handle It” wanted to sneak into Moneypenny’s private property for a look around? I couldn’t believe it.

  “If my sense of geography is accurate, that,” he pointed at the section of fence directly opposite us, “would lead into the back of the property. Seems likely that anything funny that’s going on would be out back somewhere, doesn’t it?” An edge of excitement colored Tom’s voice now.

  “Not a good idea,” I said.

  He looked at me, one eyebrow at attention. “What’s this? Caution from the intrepid photographic investigator?”

  “Stop it!” You stop it, Janet, I thought, realizing how dumb it was to be annoyed when he was right on target. “Just, you know, I think it would be dangerous.”

  “Probably.”

  “Really, Tom. I don’t think they play fair over there. I think … I know they killed Anderson. Not they. Someone. Campbell.” My voice broke, and I wasn’t sure which emotion had the upper hand, fear, anger, or grief. “George said it, you know. Rich Campbell is dangerous.”

  “Glad you realize that.”

  “He probably killed his girlfriend, too. Liesl.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I had forgotten that Tom didn’t know about Liesl’s death. “She drowned.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Duh! Google, Tom. I looked her up. She drowned in a pond on Cape Cod, in cold weather. It makes no more sense than Anderson’s death.” The longer I spoke, the more solidly my thoughts congealed. “Don’t you think that’s a huge coincidence?”

  Something moved in the underbrush beyond the fence on the mainland. I grabbed Tom’s arm and pointed toward the swaying shrubs. I didn’t speak and wasn’t at all sure I could have if I’d tried. We were out of baseball bat range, but I wanted nothing more than to take off running and screaming to the other side of the island.

  Then I noticed that Tom was smiling. He whispered, “Stand still.”

  The brush wriggled a bit more, and a doe and fawn stepped into the open, nibbling as they walked. The fawn still had faint spots on his back, but they were fading. As they stepped fully into the light, the doe froze for a moment, her head turned slightly to give her a better view. I felt the little tingle I always get when I know that an animal sees me, not in some abstract way, but as another individual creature who has impinged on a universe where they didn’t know I existed. People, yes, but not me. I held my breath and listened to the pulse in my ears. The doe turned toward her fawn, arced her body around him, and they disappeared back into the brush.

  “Wow.”

  “Too bad you didn’t have your camera.”

  “No, sometimes it’s better this way,” I said. “They don’t see me when I have the camera. She saw me.” Tom never questioned what I meant. One more thing I love about him, I thought, as we walked back toward George and the feathered fugitive.

  fifty-one

  George was right where we left him, but the parrot had moved about six inches closer to the cage. I knew that because he had been sitting just to the right of a clump of wilted leaves earlier, and now he was to the left. As we crossed the field of coneflowers and Queen Anne’s lace, he unfolded his wings and flapped them two or three times, making Tom and me stop in our tracks. For a moment I thought our approach was about to spook him, but he relaxed and we rejoined George at the fallen tree.

  “I’m thinking we might need to up the ante,” said George. “I’m thinking tropical fruits that he might recognize.”

  I had been wanting to make a few calls anyway, so I offered to pick up the fruit at the same time. It turned out that George wanted to make some calls, too. We batted things around for a few minutes and finally decided that George and I would both go do what we needed to do and Tom would stay to watch the bird and, if the cage proved alluring enough, to spring the trap. We took the bass boat and left the kayak in case Tom needed to get off the island while we were gone. We left the remaining water with Tom, and I tossed him half a roll of fruit-flavored hard candies I had in my pocket.

  We approached my van from the front, so George didn’t see the damage. I wasn’t sure how he would react, but I figured that if he saw it, he would probably tell Tom about it when we got back. It would be better if neither of them knew about Campbell and his bat until we were home for the night. I made sure to park facing the store as well when we got there.

  The round trip took an hour and a half. I drove going in so that George could check for critical emails. We stopped at the grocery store at Coldwater and Dupont, where George grabbed a mango, a passion fruit, and some grapes.

  “I have no idea whether these will be more appealing than the current spread,” he said, “but it’s worth a shot.” I also checked the battery display, but they didn’t have the right one for my phone.

  8up the dogs. “I hate to leave them locked up so long, and there’s no reason they can’t have a swim,” I said. “They can stay in Tom’s x-pen while we go back out to the island, or I can just stay with them.”

  “Don’t have to convince me,” said George, a big grin on his face.

  We switched seats from Kroger’s to Tom’s house so that I could make a few calls. First, I tried my mom’s number, but she said she didn’t know a Janet and hung up on me. Twice. So I called Bill next. I told him we were coming to get the dogs and confirmed that he was going to see our mother that evening. He whined a little, but I heard Norm in the background say, “Oh, stop it. We’re going to see your mother and that’s all there is to it.” Thanks, Norm. I hated arguing with Bill about Mom, and I knew he was having trouble dealing with her loss of mental function, but so was I. Not for the first time, I was glad he had Norm—both for emotional support and for a kick in the pants when he needed one.

  Goldie was next on my list. Anyone watching my house would spot her sooner or later and realize she had been with me at Treasures on Earth, but I couldn’t tell Goldie I was worried about her. I asked about Leo instead. Worrying about my animals, I’ve learned, is always acceptable. Everything was fine.

  I thought about calling Sylvia Eckhorn to ask her what she had meant about being careful around Rich Campbell, but decided to wait until I had a little privacy. Besides, we had arrived at Bill and Norm’s. When we pulled into the driveway, Bill was in the garage trying to drag some shelving units away from the wall. George offered to help him, and I went inside to find Norm and the dogs. Jay and Drake made a half-hearted run at me, then spun back around and gave their full attention to “uncle” Norm, who was loading a plastic container with homemade dog biscuits. “It smells like ginger snaps in here,” I said, inhaling deeply.

  “I know, isn’t it yumscious?” asked Norm. He sealed the lid on the container, broke a biscuit in half, and told the dogs to sit “like gentlemen.” They both sat, raised their right paws, and crossed them over their left legs. Norm gave them their cookies and grinned at me. “See, I did too read that trick training book I borrowed from you.”

  “You guys crack me up,” I said, laughing. “All three of you.”

  “Did you catch that poor bird?” asked Norm, handing me the container of biscuits.

  “Not yet, but George thinks it’s a matter of time.” I peeled the corner of the lid open, inhaled the gingery fragrance, and whined, “You never bake cookies for me.”

  Norm shrugged. “Have one of those. Just oatmeal, ginger, applesauce,
and a smidge of honey.”

  “Really?” Even I could make those, if I had the recipe, I thought. Out loud I said, “I really hope we get him yet this afternoon.”

  “Oh, I know,” said Norm. He looked like he might cry. “I can’t stand to think of that little bird out there alone and scared and hungry. People are just terrible.”

  “Some are,” I agreed. “And then I meet someone like you, and my faith is restored.” I hugged him with my free arm. “I need to make a quick call.”

  Sylvia answered on the first ring.

  “Sitting by the phone, huh?” I asked.

  “As a matter of fact, I was just going to call you. I wanted to finish what I started last night.” I heard a kiddy song start up and then grow softer, as if she had either turned down the volume or walked away. The giggles in the background suggested the latter. “So, yeah, listen … I don’t want to go into a lot of detail, Janet. I mean, I can’t really. Just be careful about that guy, you know, the one who was at the retriever training session.”

  “That’s why I’m calling, Syl,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Look, don’t repeat this, not even to Tom. I could lose my job.” I heard a big sigh.

  “Your job?” I asked. Sylvia is an emergency-room nurse. “What are you talking about?”

  “Men who hurt their girlfriends and wives don’t care who they hurt. So be careful. And that’s all I’m going to say.”

  I decided not to probe any further. Sylvia obviously was uncomfortable about telling me, so I thanked her for the information and promised to watch myself. Rich Campbell’s violent streak wasn’t exactly news, but Sylvia didn’t know that. Having someone else verify it didn’t calm my fears, but did make me feel supported in an odd way.

  “No, wait, it’s not,” said Sylvia just as I was about to close my phone.