Murder With Puffins ml-2

by Donna Andrews

  "He looks rather dashing in the uniform on the next page, too," Michael said. "World War One?"

  "Yes," Rob said, assuming a solemn air. "Poor Uncle Christopher!"

  "He never came back?" Michael said. Rob shook his head and sighed, as if the whole thing were a tragedy from which the family had never recovered.

  "Yes," I said. "Killed in a brawl in a French bordello, apparently; though they made up something else to tell his mother."

  Michael laughed, and Rob looked as insulted as if I'd impugned his character, instead of that of our late and little-lamented great-uncle. He pointedly buried his face in the album. Michael picked up another volume and began to flip through it.

  "Don't you enjoy the albums, too?" he asked. "Seeing your face through history and all that?"

  "I suppose I would, but apparently I look like Dad's side of the family," I said. "None of the pictures look much like me."

  I didn't mention the other reason: that looking in the albums usually triggered a temporary but acute resurgence of the inferiority complex I'd fought all my life. Far too many of my female ancestors had been tall, thin, aristocratic blondes, like Mother, and the albums contained far too many pictures of them surrounded by the swarms of beautiful, wealthy, and sometimes famous men who'd courted them.

  The album Michael had picked up, for instance. Looking over his shoulder, I could see that it held hundreds of photos from the late forties and early fifties, all neatly arranged and held in place with old-fashioned black paper photo corners. The early pictures, featuring the angelic preadolescent Mother, were bad enough. But looking at her at thirteen, when she'd already acquired a figure and a flock of admirers, I could feel myself fighting off those old feelings of inadequacy.

  It helps a little that none of the men were as gorgeous as Michael is, I thought, looking fondly at him and curling a little closer. And that many of them ought not to have allowed themselves to be photographed in swimsuits, although I suppose I was applying today's fitness standards to bodies not considered unattractive fifty years ago. Perhaps the kind of lean, tanned, muscular body modern women consider attractive in a man would have been a dead giveaway, back in those more class-conscious times, that its owner earned his living from some kind of badly paid manual labor.

  But still; seeing picture after picture of Mother surrounded by half a dozen obviously smitten men--well, it got depressing. And the occasional suitor whose face appeared a little too often, who always wangled a place right beside Mother in the group shots, who occasionally managed to ditch the crowd and have his picture taken with Mother, as a couple--for some reason, they made me anxious. I couldn't help wondering if but for some strange accident or other, she might have married one of them. And where would I be then?

  "I think some of them have fallen out," Michael said, coming to a page with several empty sets of corners.

  "More likely, they're pictures Mother considered unflattering," I said. The other nearby pictures were all of Mother posing in a two-piece bathing suit. While the suit looked demure enough by today's standards, I suspected that forty-odd years ago, it had been daring enough to give my grandfather conniption fits.

  We stayed up for a while, looking at the albums--at least Rob and Michael were looking, and I was half-dozing against Michael's shoulder. Even after Rob yawned his way upstairs with an album under his arm, Mrs. Fenniman and Aunt Phoebe kept bustling in and out of the living room at frequent intervals to make sure Michael and I weren't getting ill. Michael finally said good night. He found about a dozen excuses to pop back downstairs when everything seemed quiet, but we finally gave up trying to find a few moments alone together and said an awkward good night, with Mrs. Fenniman at our elbows, pressing cough lozenges into our hands.

  If I hadn't been doomed to spend the night on the sofa, I'd have felt very sorry for Michael. He was sharing with Rob what we referred to as "the children's room"--a former walk-in closet fitted with a set of rickety bunk beds half a foot too short for either of them. Far from ideal, but since no one could reasonably expect Aunt Phoebe or Mrs. Fenniman to scramble into an upper bunk, they were stuck with it.

  I made a bed for myself on the less lumpy of the two living room sofas. But I didn't get to sleep right away. Mrs. Fenniman and Aunt Phoebe continued their culinary efforts until well past midnight. Either they planned to invite the whole island over very soon or they expected to be stranded for a very long time. Both prospects appalled me.

  They kept trying to talk me into sleeping on a floor pallet in their room. Since Aunt Phoebe's snoring had helped inspire my flight from Yorktown, and Mrs. Fenniman was just as bad, I resisted their suggestions with every argument I could muster, including the pretense that I still felt dizzy from the ferry and didn't want to risk the stairs, which let me in for another round of foul-tasting herbal remedies.

  They finally tramped up to bed, still arguing about whether Hurricane Maude or Hurricane Ethel had been the most devastating storm to hit the island in previous years. After another hour or so of people stumbling in and out of the bathroom, dropping their flashlights, barking their shins on things, and swearing with varying degrees of verbal ingenuity, the house finally settled down and I dropped off to sleep.

  I'd probably gotten a whole hour's sleep by the time the Central Monhegan Power Company's generator started up again. And I'd have slept through that easily if Dad, while trying to turn his Wagner off, hadn't turned the CD player's volume dial the wrong way and cranked it up to the maximum.

  My second awakening of the morning was quieter, although no less nerve-racking. I woke up realizing that I needed to go to the bathroom. Luckily, before I leapt off the sofa, I noticed a small, warm weight lying on top of me. Spike.

  Because I'd once rescued him from dire peril, Spike had decided I was the one person in the world he liked, other than Mrs. Waterston. Unfortunately, since his memory was as bad as his temper, Spike periodically forgot who Mrs. Waterston and I were. Which made him more dangerous to us than to the people he didn't like. At least they could keep their distance. He was always trying to climb into our laps to be petted, which brought us within easy chewing distance when he suddenly decided to mistake us for the dreaded mail carrier.

  Mrs. Waterston took this a lot more philosophically than I did. Why couldn't Michael's mother have adopted a cat, for heaven's sake, instead of an overbred nine-pound dust mop?

  I knew from experience that Spike was a lot more likely to bite you if you woke him up suddenly than if you let him wake up at his own pace. And you learned to give him a wide berth for the first hour or two, until he'd had his walk and his breakfast.

  I lay there, growing increasingly uncomfortable as Spike slumbered, unbelievably loud snores issuing from his tiny pushed-in nose. Finally, around dawn, he heard Aunt Phoebe rattling pans in the kitchen and ran off to see if it was raining food in there.

  "You look tired," Michael said over breakfast.

  "'The Ride of the Valkyries' is not my idea of a lullaby," I said, frowning at Dad. "It's a wonder I have any hearing left, as loud as that damned thing was."

  "Remarkable speakers, aren't they?" Dad said.

  "Hurry up with breakfast," I whispered to Michael. "We need to talk."

  "Okay," Michael said--a little too loudly, for he found he'd agreed to a second helping of Mrs. Fenniman's undercooked grits.

  "Well, the damned storm's stalled again," Mrs. Fenniman announced.

  "Is the ferry running?" Rob asked.

  "I said stalled, not gone away," Mrs. Fenniman replied. "Just close enough to keep the ferry from running, but not close enough to bother us much. Not yet anyway. Looks like we'll have good weather for another day."

  I glanced out at the gray sky and the faint but steady drizzle. Yes, this would be Mrs. Fenniman's idea of good weather.

  Michael and I managed to escape the house without anyone else tagging along, although Dad insisted that we each shoulder a backpack filled with several pounds of survival gear that we migh
t need if we got lost for a few weeks. And Aunt Phoebe gave us a long list of errands she wanted us to run down in the village.

  "You'd think the village was in Siberia," I complained as we finally escaped down the lane. "It's not as if it would take them ten minutes to walk down here themselves."

  "If it keeps them happy," Michael said. He looked a lot more rested than I felt, and when he shook the water out of his hair, he resembled a hunk from a commercial for deodorant soap. I could feel my hair, initially frizzy from the damp, being matted down by the rain; no doubt I'd soon resemble a drowned rat.

  "How did you sleep?" I asked.

  "Your brother snores," he said.

  "So does Spike."

  "Spike doesn't talk in his sleep."

  "Did Rob say anything interesting?"

  "No, and if I hear another word about Lawyers from Hell…"

  "I'm really sorry," I said. "It's all my fault; I should never have suggested coming here."

  "Let's make a deal," Michael said. "I won't blame you for anything that goes wrong if you promise to stop apologizing for bringing me here. After all, if my damned car hadn't had those two flats, we might have spotted them before boarding the ferry the day before yesterday, and we could have changed our plans and found a bed-and-breakfast on the mainland."

  "It's a deal," I said.

  "So let's go down to the grocery store and see if they still have any of the things your aunt wants."

  "We should probably hit both grocery stores," I said as we squelched down the road.

  "Both grocery stores? How can an island this small possibly support two grocery stores?"

  "The two of them together are smaller than a Seven-Eleven back home. And they serve slightly different clientele. There's the upscale grocery store--in that salmon pink building with the turquoise trim," I said, pointing down the road. "Caters more to the artists and the summer people; probably does a lot less business this time of year. Sells Brie and whole-grain bread from an organic bakery on the mainland. Nice selection of wines. The place that looks like a bait shop is the other grocery. More like a general store, really. Bologna and Wonder Bread, and a good variety of beers. They do a lot more steady year-round business, I should think."

  "Let's start with the down-to-earth place," Michael said. "There's something obscenely decadent about eating Brie in the eye of a hurricane."

  Decadent or not, it sounded perfectly lovely to me, but Michael was obviously getting into the spirit of things, roughing it here on the island, so I didn't argue.

  "Actually, since we already have more food than we'll ever eat, I thought we could leave the grocery store till later." I said. "Maybe we should start with our other mission."

  "Other mission?"

  "Finding you a room of your own. One without a roommate."

  "One where I might possibly entertain a friend without being interrupted every five minutes to drink another cup of herbal tea?" he said, raising one eyebrow.

  "You've got the idea."

  "I like the way you think," he said.

  Chapter 5

  These Puffins Were Made for Walking

  We tried. We really did. The Monhegan House's three dozen rooms were filled with birders. The Island Inn was full, as well. Overflowing, in fact. I'd forgotten about the oversupply of birders.

  "We've called up everyone on the island, trying to find rooms for them all," the owner of the Island Inn explained. "We even have a bunch of birders camping out down in the church."

  "Well, so much for peace and quiet and privacy," Michael said. "I assume on an island this size, everyone has a pretty good idea who has a vacancy and who doesn't?"

  "On an island this size, everyone has a pretty good idea who's running low on corn flakes and toilet paper," I said. "I think we can take it as a given that there's no room at the inn. Any inn."

  So by 9:00 a.m.--an hour when I normally prefer to be fast asleep--we had already given up on our search. We sat for a few minutes on a soggy wooden swing on the front porch of the Island Inn and watched the pedestrians hiking up and down the streets. The rain had temporarily slacked off to a mere icy mist, and both birds and birders made the most of it. I only caught fleeting glimpses of the birds, but I was getting to know the plumage and feeding habits of the common New England bird-watcher pretty well.

  Actually, at first glance, it was hard to tell the locals from the bird-watchers. Everyone had some kind of waterproof footgear, with the unfortunate exception of Michael and me. Rain ponchos and down vests were commonplace.

  I wondered if it had occurred to any of them how many birds had given their all to fill those vests.

  But while most of the locals scurried about with canvas tote bags full of supplies and bits of lumber for boarding things up, the birders carried enough waterproof surveillance hardware to equip a squad of Navy SEALS. Binoculars, telescopes, cameras, tape recorders, video cameras--you name it, they had it.

  Every couple of minutes, a troop of birders would swarm up the steps of the inn and ask us where we'd been and what we'd seen and whether we'd spotted the kestrels up on Black Head yet. When we explained that we hadn't been anywhere or seen any birds and thought the kestrels up on Black Head had enough company already, they would look at us oddly and slip inside to refill their thermoses with hot coffee.

  "Apart from going back to the cottage and listening to more Wagner, what else is there to do on the island?" Michael asked.

  "We could stroll through the village and see the sights," I said.

  Just then, Fred Dickerman rattled by in his pickup truck, leaning on the horn, while a quartet of birders sprinted just ahead of his bumper. Monhegan has no sidewalks; any pedestrian walking in the road when a truck approached was expected to step aside to let the vehicle pass. Or jump aside, if the driver was Fred. Most truck drivers took it slowly when they went through the village, but Fred evidently enjoyed chivvying tourists into puddles and brier patches.

  "Reminds me of running before the bulls at Pamplona," Michael remarked as the birders finally reached a wide spot in the road and hurled themselves to safety.

  "Oh, have you actually done that?"

  "No, and I'm not about to start now," he said. "Doesn't look too restful, strolling through the village. Anything else?"

  "Mostly healthy, outdoorsy things like hiking around the circumference of the island."

  "All right, let's hike," Michael said, standing up and holding out his hand.

  "You've got to be kidding. In this weather?"

  "It's not actually raining now, and the weather's going to be a lot worse in a few hours," he said. "Let's go and see the sights before it gets bad."

  "You're serious, aren't you?"

  "Why not? At least once we've done it, when the birders ask us if we want to go to the South Pole with them to see the penguins, we can say, 'No thanks, we've already circumnavigated the island.' "

  "Okay," I said. "You're on."

  I could tell after the first fifteen minutes that circumnavigating the island was a lot less fun to do than to brag about afterward. But I wasn't about to confess that I couldn't handle it, so for the next hour or two, we squelched and slopped up and down the muddy parts of the trail and inched our way gingerly over the rain-slick rocky parts.

  And invariably, every time we paused, panting, to catch our breath, a covey of middle-aged or elderly birders would breeze past us.

  "I always thought bird-watching was a sedate pastime," Michael said as we took temporary refuge beneath a rocky outcropping that sheltered us from the worst of the drizzle. "These people could probably ace an Iron Man competition."

  "Yes. Stirs up all my deep-seated feelings of inadequacy," I said, panting slightly.

  "Oh, I don't know," Michael said, putting an arm around my waist. "You look pretty adequate to me."

  It wasn't exactly the tropical beach of my dreams, but this was the closest I'd gotten to being alone with Michael since we'd arrived on the island. I snuggled closer, and he bent
his head down toward mine. Then he froze.

  "Why are those people watching us through their binoculars?" he muttered.

  I followed the direction of his eye.

  "I think they're looking at that bird at our feet," I whispered back.

  "Why? Is that some kind of rare and exotic bird?"

  I glanced down. The bird was moderately large, light brown, with a black-and-white mask over its face. It had bits of red and yellow on its wings, and the end of its tail had been dipped in yellow.

  "How the devil should I know?" I said. "It looks like a paint-spattered female cardinal; cardinals certainly aren't rare."

  "Damn," Michael said, a little more loudly this time.

  The bird, whatever it was, took flight The three birders removed the binoculars from their eyes and stared at us accusingly.

  "That was a Bohemian waxwing," one of them said.

  "Did you get any photos?" the second asked.

  "No," said the third. "They frightened it off before I got the chance."

  "Oh, you mean that bird with the yellow-tipped tail?" I asked.

  The birders nodded and frowned at us. Madame Defarge looked more kindly on her victims.

  "We've seen them around here a lot," I said.

  "They're quite rare in this part of the continent," one of the birders replied.

  "Yes, that's what I was telling Michael," I said. "How rare to see so many Bohemian waxwings here. If you just stay quietly where you are, you'll probably see dozens."

  With that, Michael and I fled down the path, until we had rounded a corner and could collapse in gales of laughter.

  "Bohemian waxwings?" Michael spluttered. "That can't possibly be a real bird."

  "I'm sure it is," I said, peeping around the comer. The three birders had hunched down by the path and were on the alert, scanning the landscape through their binoculars, one looking left, one right, and the third straight out toward the ocean.

  "Come on," I said. "Let's get out of here, in case the Bohemian waxwing has flown the coop completely."