Die, Die Birdie

by J. R. Ripley

  “I didn’t even have a change of clothes.” Dwayne pouted. “Not a toothbrush. Nuthin.”

  Huh? “Excuse me?”

  “I wasn’t expecting to spend the night, just get in, get out.”

  Now I understood. That explained the rumpled blue shirt and trousers. He’d been wearing the same outfit last night. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m sure none of us wanted last night to end the way it did.” Certainly not the dead guy taking up floor space in my upstairs storeroom. “So you’re not from around here.”

  “Live in Huntersville.”

  I knew Huntersville. It’s a little north of Charlotte. “I’m sure the police will let you leave soon.”

  “My supervisor was none too happy. I’m supposed to make a run to Myrtle Beach today.” He twisted the band of his watch around his left wrist. “Now I’m stuck here.”

  I grabbed the bill the waitress had dropped between us and opened my wallet. She had charged us each the guest rate. I wasn’t about to correct her. I was sort of a guest of a guest, after all. What did it matter that I was paying? Besides, I’d hardly eaten a thing. “What do you say I take care of this and then you follow me over to Birds and Bees?”

  I slid a twenty atop the check and signaled for our waitress. “I’ll even help you unload the truck. As a matter of fact, I’ve got a couple of friends there now who will be glad to pitch in too.”

  Glad might not be the exact term to use in Kimberly’s case, but she’d help. She’d grouse, but she’d help. Mom would pitch in without question. Though her health isn’t the best and I didn’t want her overexerting.

  Dwayne headed for the door and I followed after him like a young doe. “Sorry,” he said, stamping his feet outside. “But I’ve got to be at the police station at ten.”

  My heart sank. I couldn’t let Dwayne leave Ruby Lake with my desperately needed stock still packed away in his truck. Not to mention Kim would never let me live the defeat down. “Great,” I said. “I’ll head over to Birds and Bees now, and we’ll be all set to help you unload when you get there.”

  “I don’t know . . .” Dwayne rubbed his thumb and forefinger along the underside of his chin. “After what happened last night . . .”

  I clapped him on the shoulder. “Not to worry. I promise.” I held up my free hand. “Nothing like that’s going to happen today. Besides,” I said, “I called your office this morning. The impression I got was that they were expecting you to complete yesterday’s delivery today.” I mean, I’d only talked to an answering machine, but Dwayne didn’t need to know that.

  “Well . . .”

  “Terrific,” I said, without giving Dwayne a chance to back out. “You go down to the station, make your statement to the police, and we’ll see you soon.”

  Back at the store, I gave Kimberly and my mother the good news.

  “Perfect,” replied Kim. Her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows. She was distributing bird-themed greeting cards along a tiny shelf in front of the register. They were the creation of a local watercolorist.

  Mom handed her another card from a box on the floor. She looked troubled.

  Kim blew a strand of hair from her eyes. “Now do you want to hear the bad news?”

  6

  Kim glanced at my mother, then said, “Matt Kowalski.” “Matt Kowalski. Wow.” I cocked my head to the left. “That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.” And could die happy if I never heard it again.

  Kim smiled but it wasn’t a happy smile. “Well, you better get used to hearing it because I have a feeling you’re going to be hearing a lot more of it.”

  “Why?” I said, planting my hands on my hips. “What’s that jerk done now?”

  Mom gasped and brought her fingers to her lips. “Amy!”

  “What?!” I demanded. “What is wrong with you two? What’s going on?” I glared at Kim, then Mom. Neither spoke. “Somebody tell me what’s going on here!”

  Esther Pilaster bounded down the back stairs. She was grinning ear to ear. She was either feeling smugly triumphant or she’d found the bottle of Jack Daniel’s I keep in the cupboard above the fridge. “It doesn’t look good for you now, does it?” She tugged down the sleeves of her baggy navy sweater, first one sleeve, then the other.

  I lowered my eyes at her. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on here? Or do I have to raise your rent?”

  “Hey,” she blurted. “You can’t do that! I have a lease.” She marched up to Kim. “You didn’t tell her yet?” There was mischief in the Pester’s eyes.

  I pushed between them. “Tell me what?”

  “About Matt Kowalski.” Her eyes twinkled malevolently.

  “They mentioned his name,” I said, sternly looking from Mom to Kim and back again. “They just won’t tell me what he’s done.”

  Esther cackled. “What he’s done is get himself killed.”

  “What?” I cried.

  “In your storeroom!” Esther’s eyes rose to the ceiling.

  “What?” I cried again, higher-pitched this time. I’m versatile that way. “You’re telling me the dead man last night was Matthew Kowalski?” I shook my head, trying to remove the words I’d heard. “No. No, that can’t be.” I turned to Kim and Mom for support. For comfort. Neither provided any. Kim busied herself with the greeting cards. Mom wrung her hands.

  “Come on, guys. It just can’t be.” I forced a smile. I wondered at what precise moment Birds & Bees had become Little Shop of Horrors.

  “We all know what Matt Kowalski looks like. The man who was murdered had black hair. Matt’s a blond. And with all the time he spent out of doors hunting and fishing,” I argued, “he was a very sun-bleached blond.” I could have added “and drinking.” Matt liked his beer.

  Mom and Kim silently nodded their heads.

  “The man upstairs was thin.” The Matthew Kowalski I knew had always been a good sixty pounds overweight. Most of it beer gut—and he was still in high school at the time. It was no wonder it had taken him two years to finish the twelfth grade. He liked to drink his lunches.

  More bobbing of heads.

  “It wasn’t him,” I said forcefully.

  “It was him all right,” Esther was only too happy to reply.

  “The police called while you were out,” Kim said.

  Mom nodded. “They identified him through his fingerprints.”

  “They say he was even wearing blue contact lenses.” Kim wrung her hands.

  “It seems he didn’t want anybody to recognize him,” added my mother. I remembered that Matt’s real eye color was green. I recalled how the dead man’s eyes seemed to be looking at me. I wouldn’t have thought it could get any spookier than that, but now they were telling me the dead man was a man from my past?

  My heart thumped in my chest. I think it would have fallen to my feet if it were physically possible. Fortunately, my knotted intestines obstructed its fall. “No,” I said. I felt myself visibly blanching. “It can’t be.” I looked to Mom for support. Good old Mom. She’d supported me through thick and thin. Through my awkward teenage years. Through my first kiss and my first breakup.

  Her brow rose. “Sorry, dear. I’m afraid there is no doubt.”

  Great. A lifetime history of support out the window like so much dirty dishwater. This didn’t bode well.

  No doubt Matt Kowalski being the dead man was going to prove troublesome for me.

  For all of us.

  The door banged open and Dwayne Rogers stood in the open doorway dripping water and mud. When had it started raining? “Dwayne!” I said. “You’re early. I wasn’t expecting you until later.” Truth be told, I wasn’t certain he’d even show up. But I was sure glad he had.

  I frowned at his muddy boots. He’d already left footprints all over the all-weather lovebirds doormat that I’d ordered special for the entrance. The two lovebirds even chirp adorably when stepped on. Though I really liked the mat, Kim worried that the constantly cooing lovebirds would soon become annoying. I disagreed and t
old her she was just sensitive because her own love life seemed to be in the doldrums.

  Then again, she could take solace in the fact that my love life was in the very same position as hers and could keep hers company on these cold, end-of-winter nights.

  Dwayne shrugged his burly shoulders, sending a light rainfall from his jacket to the original hardwood floors. The guy seemed to create his own weather. “The police let me go pretty quick. Chief Kennedy said he all but had the case wrapped up and didn’t need much help from me anyways.”

  I shivered, more from this latest bit of news than the mess the trucker was making of my reasonably clean floors. There had been a fair amount of black fingerprinting powder on most of the horizontal surfaces, but Mom and Kim seemed to have done a good job of wiping most of it away. “How about if you meet me around back?”

  “Sure thing,” the deliveryman said amiably. He seemed in a much better mood now that he could get on with his job. He turned for the door.

  “Wait,” my mother said. Her index finger bounced over her lower lip. “Dwayne Rogers.” He narrowed his eyes. “Aren’t you Chris and Alexandra Rogers’s boy?”

  Dwayne grinned. “Mrs. Simms. Is that you?”

  I did a double take. Mom knew my Cole’s Trucking deliveryman? The guy who said he was from Huntersville? Wait, he said he lived in Huntersville.

  “Wow.” Dwayne scratched the top of his head. “Sure has been a long time.”

  Mom beamed. “It’s good to see you again, Dwayne.”

  “So,” I said, “you two know one another?”

  Mom smiled. “Dwayne was one of my students.” She thought a moment. “Ninth grade, wasn’t it?”

  Dwayne nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  She patted his arm. “And tell me, how is your uncle?”

  Dwayne shook his head. “Not so good. But I do what I can for him. Stop in and visit whenever I’m in town.”

  Mom turned to the rest of us. “Dwayne’s parents died when he was only seven. His uncle raised him, the poor dear.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t stay with him last night,” I couldn’t help saying.

  Dwayne blinked at me. “It was late. The company put me up in the motel. I didn’t want to disturb him.”

  Mom shot me a look to let me know I’d spoken out of turn. Mom is a guardian of the social graces. I am not. Dwayne left to pull the truck around.

  “I’m glad to see he’s doing well,” Mom said as we watched the big semi round the corner to the alley. Esther had followed him out the door and taken cover under the bus shelter up the street.

  “I’d better go unlock the back door so we can finally get those goods unloaded and on the shelves.”

  Kim snatched a towel from under the counter. “You go ahead, Amy. I’ll wipe up this mess at the door and join you.”

  I glanced outdoors. “I hope nothing gets ruined in this rain.”

  “Don’t worry,” assured Dwayne, “I’ve got plastic tarps in the truck to cover the pallets.” He headed out to his truck and climbed up into the cab.

  “Who knows?” I said to Mom. “With luck, we just might be able to open tomorrow after all.”

  “Count on it!” Kim shouted encouragingly. “Lucky is my middle name!”

  Unfortunately, my middle name isn’t Lucky, it’s Hester—after my mother’s mother, Sarah Hester Hopkins. It could have been worse, my middle name could have been Sarah.

  And yes, that was Chief Jerry Kennedy standing there at my back door, rain dripping from his wide-brimmed brown hat, looking all ugly eyed and official.

  Dwayne hovered behind him, looking unsure of what to do.

  7

  And yes, I was under arrest.

  Again.

  Okay, so maybe technically I hadn’t been under arrest last night when I’d been escorted to the police station and maybe I hadn’t technically been read my Miranda rights yet. But there was no doubt about it this time.

  I was in trouble.

  “Look, Jerry,” I said from my chair. I was both tired and angry and in no mood to call this former high school loser chief. “Just because I once chased Matt out of my house with a baseball bat and across the lawn to his car does not mean that I smashed his head in with a birdfeeder hook. Besides, that was something like fifteen years ago.”

  I paused for a gulp of stale air. “More.” I folded my arms over my chest. I wasn’t good at doing math in my head. Especially when upset and facing the firing squad. Well, okay, so maybe it was premature to start worrying about the firing squad, but I knew trouble when I was looking at it.

  And Chief Jerry Kennedy was IT.

  He’d been holding a grudge ever since eleventh grade when we’d gone out on a date that I regretted almost before it had started and refused to let him get to second base. The only reason he’d even made it to first base was because he grabbed me before I had a chance to react. Giving me a hard time now was probably his puerile way of exacting revenge.

  The chief tilted back in his chair, the heels of his boots smooshing the papers on his desk. “Yeah, I know, I know. And you had a lousy batting average.” His eyes hardened. “But all it took to kill Matt was one solid blow.” He shrugged. “Maybe two or three. Haven’t got the results from the coroner yet.”

  “Good luck with that,” I said. The coroner in Ruby Lake is about ninety years old. It probably takes him an hour simply to tie his shoes. And that was after first spending another hour trying to remember where he’d last put them after taking them off. How long would he need to discover the exact cause of death of Matthew Kowalski?

  “Tell me again,” the chief began, his voice tired, “when was the last time you saw Matt Kowalski?”

  I groaned. “Like I told you the first hundred times, I don’t know when I last saw Matt.” I pressed my hands against his desktop. “Matt Kowalski isn’t exactly the kind of guy a girl keeps a record of in her diary.” My hand flew through the air. I paused, took a deep breath of calming air, and tried one last time. “Look, Jerry—Chief Kennedy—Matt and I went our separate ways after high school. Heck, I was away at college for four years, then worked in Chapel Hill, and only moved back to town in the last few months.”

  He blinked but said nothing, so I continued. “The last I heard, and I don’t even remember when, was that Matt Kowalski had moved away from Ruby Lake.” I shook my head as if sifting through the data banks for a small memory. “South Carolina, I think.” I shrugged. “I could be wrong.” After a pause, I added, “I didn’t really care, you know?”

  Jerry’s hands were tucked behind his head. “I don’t know, Amy. What do you want me to do? All signs point to you.” He shook his head like this whole thing was my fault.

  “I want you to let me go and start looking for Matt Kowalski’s real killer!”

  I jumped from my chair and Officer Sutton leapt up and dogged me. I turned on him. “Really?” I said indignantly. “You have to stick to me? Even here? Inside the police station?” I locked my hands on my hips. “What are you afraid I’m going to do?”

  Officer Sutton looked nervously at Chief Kennedy but kept his mouth shut.

  I snorted. “Are you afraid I’m going to steal your gun, hotwire a car, and make a break for the border?”

  Officer Dan Sutton’s right hand went protectively to the holster locked to his side.

  I rolled my eyes. “Oh brother . . .” I sank back into my chair before the trigger-happy cop took a potshot at me.

  We all turned to look when the front door to the police station opened. It was Mom’s friend, Ben Harlan. I hadn’t been too happy to see him last night, but right now he was looking just as good as Santa Claus, or Robert Redford in his prime.

  He unbuttoned his long beige trench coat and hung it over the hook at the door. “Ms. Simms, Chief.” Mr. Harlan ran a slim hand through his silver locks and ambled over to Jerry’s desk. Ben Harlan turned his smile on me. That smile must have charmed the ladies in his youth—probably still did for the over-fifty crowd. “They
treating you all right, Ms. Simms?”

  I nodded. “They haven’t resorted to sticking needles under my fingernails, beating me with a roll of nickels, or waterboarding yet.”

  Chief Kennedy shot me a dirty look. Good grief. The man acted so high school.

  I made a face back when the lawyer wasn’t looking.

  Ben Harlan pulled a chair up to the chief’s desk and sat. “A bit premature to be charging my client with murder, don’t you think?”

  Chief Kennedy fell forward and, I swear, I felt the floor shake. Maybe the man ought to jump on a treadmill once in a while. “I didn’t charge her with murder. That’s not my job. You know that, Ben.” He made a face at me again. “I simply asked Ms. Simms to come down to the station and answer a few more questions.”

  Mr. Harlan’s bushy brows shot up. “And has she answered your questions satisfactorily?”

  “Answered them, yes,” replied Chief Kennedy. He glared at me. “Satisfactorily, no.” He grabbed a packet of papers and banged them on the desktop. “Her fingerprints are all over the murder weapon.”

  I rose. “My fingerprints are all over everything in my store—that birdfeeder hook and every other one included!”

  “The only fingerprints we found on that thing,” boomed Jerry Kennedy, “were yours and yours alone!”

  Mr. Harper waved me back down. The door flew open once again. It had stopped raining and the sun was peeking out from behind the gray clouds scuttling slowly past from the east.

  The tall man at the door was ruggedly handsome despite the conservative charcoal suit that he filled to perfection. He was clean shaven and his blue eyes sparkled even from across the room. He wiped his feet at the door, though the condition this place was in, there was no need. He looked over at Ben Harlan and smiled warmly. “Sorry it took so long, Dad.” He unbuttoned his overcoat. “I had to wait for the school bus.”

  Dad? Sure, and he probably stopped to let the baby duckies cross the road too. I self-consciously ran a hand quickly through my straggly hair. Rain was my hair’s natural enemy. That and cheap shampoo from the dollar store.