Murder With Puffins ml-2

by Donna Andrews

  "Now then, let's calm down," Binkie called out in a surprisingly penetrating voice. "Let's have a little order here!"

  The shouting died down, and the birders stood back as Binkie pushed her way to the front of the crowd.

  "One of you tell me what's going on here," Binkie ordered. "Just one!" she added as several birders began to speak.

  Mrs. Peabody stepped forward and pointed a quivering hand at Ken Takahashi.

  "He's the one!" she said.

  "What one?" I asked. "Do you mean you think he's the murderer?"

  "Well, that's for the police to find out, isn't it?" Mrs. Peabody said. "All I know is, he's the one pretending to be a birder."

  "Pretending to be a birder?" I said. I glanced at Takahashi, somewhat disappointed. I'd hoped the phony birder would turn out to be our missing biographer. Ken Takahashi seemed too down-to-earth to have written that much purple prose. Still, a way of testing the possibility occurred to me.

  "Walking around, pretending to be one of us, when he doesn't know a tern from a seagull," Mrs. Peabody said. "Probably in league with that lunatic who was trying to wipe out the bird population of the island."

  Considering what Takahashi and Resnick had planned for the island, she wasn't that far off the mark.

  "That's ridiculous," Takahashi said. He reached inside his coat, probably to pull out his business cards. "I'm--" "Mr. Takahashi!" I snapped. He froze. In fact, everybody froze. "Hold on a second," I told Mrs. Peabody, the ringleader.

  "If you don't mind…" I said to Binkie. She looked puzzled, but nodded.

  I handed Spike's leash to Michael, drew Takahashi aside, and spoke to him in an undertone.

  "Are you sure you want to tell them what you do? These are rabid environmentalists. They're very militant about development."

  Takahashi turned pale.

  "What am I supposed to tell them?" he asked.

  A thought struck me.

  "What do you know about the Unheralded Genius of the Down East Coast?" I asked, recalling the subtitle of Resnick's biography.

  "It's another of those birds, isn't it?" Takahashi said without enthusiasm.

  "'Who could have predicted this event, at once so joyous and so tragic?'" I quoted.

  "'Who can calculate the import this occurrence would present upon his life and art?'"

  Takahashi began edging away from me. Okay, so he wasn't the biographer. Just checking.

  "Inside joke," I said. "Just leave it to me."

  "What's going on anyway?" Mrs. Peabody asked, tapping her foot with impatience.

  As Takahashi continued to sidle farther away, I beckoned Mrs. Peabody to join me--which took her out of earshot of the other birders.

  "You can't reveal this to a soul," I said in a low voice.

  "No, of course not," she said eagerly.

  "Are you familiar with the Unheralded Genius of the Down East Coast?"I said.

  "No," Mrs. Peabody said, looking at Takahashi. "Is that him? What's he supposed to be a genius at?"

  Okay, so neither of the Peabodys was masquerading as James Jackson, either. It was worth a shot.

  "Well, I can't say too much--but would it surprise you to learn that a certain environmental organization had taken an interest in Victor Resnick's less savory activities?"

  Takahashi looked as if it would surprise the hell out of him, but he managed a feeble smile when Mrs. Peabody put on her reading glasses and inspected him at length.

  "Well, that's quite a different kettle of fish," she said finally. Takahashi must have passed muster; she grabbed his hand and shook it vigorously for several seconds. "Carry on, then!" she ordered before turning on her heel and beginning to shoo the other birders out of the room.

  "No, it's not what we thought," I heard her telling several people. "I can't talk now, but I'll tell you all about it later."

  So much for not telling a soul.

  "What am I supposed to do now?" Takahashi asked.

  "As little as possible, until the ferry comes," I suggested.

  "Right," Takahashi said, looking around nervously. "You really think one of them would harm me?"

  "I have no idea," I said. "But if I were you, I wouldn't take chances. For all we know, one of the birders could have knocked off Victor Resnick. If some kind of environmental vigilante is running around loose on the island, you don't want to make yourself the next target, do you?"

  "But what am I supposed to do if they ask me why I'm here?" Takahashi said, looking perplexed.

  "Tell them you're under orders not to reveal that information," Michael said.

  "Whose orders?" Takahashi persisted.

  "Mine," I said. "But don't tell them that, of course. Just say orders."

  "Right," Takahashi said.

  "And stop the masquerade; just carrying around a pair of binoculars isn't going to make anyone think you're a birder."

  "Binoculars? I don't even own binoculars."

  Well, that was odd. Had the birders imagined the binoculars, or was there another imposter masquerading as a birder?

  But before I could interrogate him further, Mrs. Peabody burst back into the room.

  "Is there something else wrong, Mrs. Peabody?" I asked.

  "There certainly is," she boomed. "Look at this!"

  She thrust something under my nose.

  For a split second, I wasn't sure what it was. And then I realized that it was a puffin. Not one of the plush stuffed puffins from Mamie Benton's shop. Right general size, shape, and color. But even a stuffed puffin left out overnight in the hurricane wouldn't be quite such a limp, bedraggled mess. This was the real thing. Or had been, when it was alive.

  "I thought the puffins were long gone by now," Michael said. "Out to sea for the winter or something."

  "Well, this one obviously wasn't in any shape to make the trip," I said. "Where was it anyway?"

  "Down by Victor Resnick's house," she said. "Near that tidal pool you found him in. The poor thing was probably his last victim."

  "And when did you find it?"

  "An hour ago," she said.

  "An hour ago?" I echoed. Something about this didn't make sense. "Would you mind showing us where?"

  "Not at all," said Mrs. Peabody. To my relief, she whisked the dead puffin out from under my nose and began striding toward the porch steps. "It's about time somebody did something about this! Clearly the local authorities aren't going to take any action!"

  I looked around for Rob, but he had fled, and Mrs. Peabody was rapidly disappearing.

  "Arg!" I exclaimed, taking the end of Spike's leash. "Come on, you little monster."

  He followed me, barking with glee. As I expected, I had to pick him up and carry him after about fifteen feet--although, to his credit, he managed to pick up a remarkable amount of new mud during his short time on the ground.

  To my dismay, other birders began following Mrs. Peabody as she strode through town. I suppose, given the weather, there wasn't all that much else for them to do, since most of the birds remained sensibly out of the rain. We had collected fourteen or fifteen stragglers by the time we reached Resnick's house. Mrs. Peabody led us past the house and down to the tidal pool, along the path the rising tide had prevented Michael and me from using yesterday.

  "Right there," she said, pointing to a large flat rock. "It was lying right there."

  "Lying how?" I asked.

  "I'll show you," she said, reaching for her knapsack. For a second, I thought she was about to shed her knapsack and arrange herself on the rock in the place of the dead puffin. But instead, she pulled out a camera.

  "I took pictures of the body," she said.

  "The puffin's body, you mean?" I asked.

  "Well, of course," she said. "What other body could I mean?"

  "Victor Resnick's?" Michael suggested.

  "Him," she said, shrugging. "Why would I bother? Here, I'll show you."

  "Great," I said as she held out her camera. "We can have the film developed."

&n
bsp; "You don't need to develop any film," Mrs. Peabody said with a scornful look. "This is a digital camera. Here."

  She pressed a switch on the camera, looked at it for a few seconds, then turned it so we could see. The back of the camera had a little display screen, on which I could see a picture of a small evergreen tree.

  "That's fantastic!" Michael said, looking over my shoulder. "You can see the pictures as soon as you take them! Does it use film?"

  "No, it saves the pictures on a computer chip," Mrs. Peabody said.

  "The things they do with computers these days," another birder said, shaking his head.

  "And if you don't like what you've taken, you can erase mem and try again," Mrs. Peabody said.

  "Amazing!" Michael said.

  "How much does a thing like that run anyway?" another birder asked.

  "Later, guys," I said. "I thought you said you had a picture of a puffin. That's not a puffin; it's a cedar."

  "No, it's a wren," she said. "See there, he's roosting inside the cedar."

  "If you say so," I said. "What about the puffin?"

  "Just press this button," she said.

  I put down Spike so I would have my hands free. He galloped off to bark at the waves, which were creeping closer and closer; we'd have to adjourn to the top of the hill soon. I took the small camera, pressed the button Mrs. Peabody had indicated, and waited for several seconds as another picture of the cedar tree scrolled onto the screen.

  "Keep going," she said. "It's been an hour; I may have taken quite a few pictures."

  I kept pressing the button and waited while several more pictures of the cedar loaded. These were followed by pictures of other shrubbery, presumably containing other wrens. Interspersed with the nature photos were occasional off-center shots of the sky or of Mrs. Peabody's muddy hiking boots, which I assumed she'd taken by mistake. Michael and several male birders looked over my shoulder, exclaiming at the high quality of the pictures, and Mrs. Peabody explained how she took the electronic pictures and e-mailed them to her sister in California.

  Finally, a puffin appeared on the tiny screen. It lay on its back on the flat rock, with its toes pointing straight to the sky, its wings neatly folded by its side, and its feathers carefully groomed and reasonably clean. It looked a lot better in the photo than it did now that Mrs. Peabody had hauled it around for an hour. It looked as if it'd been laid out for viewing at a wake, and I didn't for a minute believe it had landed in that position by accident.

  "There's something odd about this," I muttered, glancing from the puffin on the camera screen to the flat rock. I took off my knapsack, fished around in it, and pulled out a small pamphlet called The Pocket Guide to Monhegan.

  "Was the puffin there when you found the body?" Mrs. Peabody asked.

  "No," I said, still leafing through the guide.

  "How can you be sure?" she insisted.

  "Well, in the first place," I said, "that was the rock where we put Resnick's body after we hauled him out of the water; if the puffin had been there, we'd have stepped on it."

  Several birders who were leaning against the rock shuffled a few feet away from it.

  "And, in the second place, I took a good look around for clues, and I'd have noticed something as unusual as a dead puffin. In the third place, that rock's underwater at high tide, so even if it had been there yesterday when we found the body, it'd have washed away by this morning. The tide came in after we found Resnick's body, you know. This whole place was underwater between ten p.m. and two a.m."

  I waved the pocket guide, held open to the page with this year's tide tables on it.

  "That's true," a birder said.

  "Perhaps it washed out to sea after the murder and then washed back in again this morning," Mrs. Peabody said.

  "Does it look as if it was washed in?" I said, pointing at the little screen. "It looks as if someone posed it there. Deliberately. But why?"

  "Maybe the murderer did it," Michael said. "To confuse us."

  "He's wasting his time, then," I said. "We're already as confused as we're ever going to get; he should save it for the mainland cops."

  "Maybe someone's trying to give us a subtle clue to the murder?" Michael said.

  "Well, they're going to have to try a lot harder, and be a lot less subtle," I said.

  "This is all very odd," Mrs. Peabody announced, frowning at Michael and me as if the whole mess were our fault and we should do something about it.

  "And speaking of odd," I said. "There's something else rather odd about that puffin. Let me take a look at it."

  "Yes, of course," Mrs. Peabody said. She tried to hand me the small carcass. Spike growled and leapt up, trying to attack it. I backed away, happy to settle for a visual inspection. Yes, there was definitely something unusual about the puffin.

  "Strange," I said. "I wonder why anyone would bother to keep a dead puffin around all this time."

  "I beg your pardon! I'm not keeping it around, as you put it," she said. "I only brought it along to show what that horrible man was doing."

  "I didn't mean you," I said. "I meant whoever had it before you."

  "No one had if before me. I found it today, not even an hour ago, right here on this rock."

  She pounded the rock with one plump fist by way of emphasis.

  "Well, you may have found it there, but I doubt if it died there; and it didn't die today, or yesterday, for that matter," I said. "That is not a recently deceased puffin."

  "Nonsense, it's still quite fresh," Mrs. Peabody said, thrusting it under my nose by way of proof.

  "Possibly," I said, backing away. "I suppose whoever put it there could have had it in his freezer for the last couple of months."

  "In the freezer?" she said. "Whatever makes you think someone had that poor puffin in a freezer?"

  The other birders were muttering, "The freezer?" and looking at me as if I'd announced my intention of serving them southern-fried puffin with a side of pickled puffins' feet.

  "This puffin is wearing mating plumage, or whatever you call it," I said. "I mean, that is what the white face and those bright orange-and-yellow plates on the beak mean, isn't it? That when this puffin died, he was still looking for his soul mate? Unless I've completely misunderstood all the puffin lore everyone's babbled at me, he would have shed the white feathers and the pretty little plates by the end of the spring, right? So he must have died before that."

  The birders looked at each other and then at the puffin.

  "She's right," one of them murmured. "She's absolutely right."

  "Do you mind if we keep your camera for a while?" I asked Mrs. Peabody.

  "Not at all," she said. "Or if you want to come by the Island Inn, I can have my husband transfer the pictures onto diskettes for you."

  "Thanks," I said. "We'll probably do that."

  "I've got some digital pictures, too," another binoculars-toting man said, bounding up holding his camera. "I've got pictures of that lunatic shooting at you!"

  "That has nothing to do with the murder!" Mrs. Peabody said, elbowing him aside.

  "Well, neither does your puffin," said the second birder. I almost expected him to say, "So there!"

  Michael tried to defuse the confrontation by taking the man's camera and exclaiming over the pictures, but the two birders were squaring off for a verbal donnybrook, when a voice rang out from above us.

  "What's going on here?"

  I glanced up and saw Jeb Barnes, hands on hips, stumbling down the last few feet of the path.

  Inspired by the interest we had shown in the puffin, Mrs. Peabody strode over and, with a flourish, tried to present it to Jeb, who began backing up the path to escape her.

  I flipped through Mrs. Peabody's pictures of the puffin again. The remaining birders, sensing that I wasn't going to do anything else amusing, followed Jeb and Mrs. Peabody.

  "This puffin is evidence!" Mrs. Peabody shouted.

  "Nonsense!" Jeb shouted back.

  "Mind if I take
a look at the puffin?" I asked, looking up at the two.

  "No," Jeb said. "I mean yes. I'm impounding it. As… as… as a danger to public health."

  With that, he snatched the puffin from Mrs. Peabody's hands and, holding it at arm's length, fled up the path.

  Mrs. Peabody frowned.

  "I think he's going to lock it up for the police," I said.

  "Well, that's all right, then," Mrs. Peabody said.

  "And you people stay away from the crime scene," Jeb called from the top of the cliff.

  "Yes, we'd better get off the beach before the tide gets any higher," Michael suggested.

  We stowed our two borrowed digital cameras safely in my knapsack and headed for the path.

  "So, what has the defrosted puffin told you?" Michael said as we picked our way up the side of the cliff.

  "Not a thing; he's keeping his beak shut," I said in a passable imitation of a thirties movie gangster. "But give me a few minutes alone with our feathered friend and I'll make him sing like a canary."

  Well, Michael thought it was funny. Mrs. Peabody said, "Humph!" and strode off ahead of us.

  "Seriously, I don't know if the puffin tells us anything useful," I said in a more normal tone. "So far, it's just another puzzle: Why would someone keep a dead puffin around for months, then leave it at the scene of a murder the day after the body was discovered? It makes no sense."

  "Maybe it's symbolic," Michael suggested. "That he was killed to revenge his crimes against puffinkind?"

  "Possibly, but it doesn't narrow down our suspect list," I complained.

  "Maybe it does," Michael said. "Whoever left the puffin here has to be a local with a freezer to keep it in, right?"

  "Not necessarily," I said. "One of the birders could have brought it over on the ferry. Can you swear there wasn't a cooler containing a dead puffin somewhere in that mountain of luggage on the dock when we arrived?"

  "True," he said.

  "And even if a local put the puffin there, we don't know for sure that the puffin has anything directly to do with the murder."

  "What other reason could anyone have for putting it there?" Michael asked. "To throw us off the scent?"