Flight of the Sparrows

by Annie Jones

  “So you did this just to ruin the Sparrowpalooza Weekend?” Bonnie asked.

  He glared at them and said nothing.

  Kate shook her head. “I think you did this because you know what that’s like. You know what it’s like when people get out of their usual element. Even though they don’t mean to do harm, they trample on a lot more than land. They trample on feelings. You know what it’s like when people put their own plans ahead of what’s right or best for others.”

  She was thinking of the broken engagement, and by the way Artie’s expression softened, just a little, she knew she wasn’t far off the mark.

  And when Artie spoke, his voice was a little less harsh. “That was a bit philosophical, Mrs. Hanlon. But if you’re askin’ if that was part of why it meant so much to me, then, yes, that’s so. But I was also talkin’ about what people’ll do when they lay eyes on them two pairs of umber-throated sparrows.”

  “Were you trying to protect them from being trapped and put into captivity?” Kate asked.

  “Two pairs?” Bonnie asked, speaking at the same time as Kate.

  “Two pairs this year,” he confirmed to Bonnie before turning to Kate. “And, yes, I think protectin’ them sparrows is a good thing. People see a chance to make a name for themselves, or to further their own cause, or even make a buck off of some of God’s helpless creatures. Well, some of ’em’ll do it. But that ain’t the only reason.”

  “Oh?” Kate folded her arms.

  “If people come ’round here and get pictures of ’em durin’ this weekend deal, next thing you know, they’ll be talkin’ about it on the Internet. Then more people’ll come ’round to see for themselves, and each time they’ll care more about what they want and not about the creatures that live here.”

  Bonnie took a small step forward. “On the other hand, knowing there are rare birds out here, don’t you think people might take extra care to accommodate them?”

  “Accommodate the umbies?” He shook his head, then held out his hand. “But what about the other birds?”

  Kate and Bonnie grew quiet.

  Though Kate realized it had been going on the whole time, she now tuned in to the sounds of birds gathering in the trees around them. She gazed up into the branches. Here and there she saw a flicker of color: the blue and black of a blue jay, the grayish brown of the mourning doves, and the bright red of a male cardinal.

  “Look at ’em. Don’t they deserve every bit as much care as a rare or exotic breed?”

  Kate looked into Artie’s eyes and knew he was talking about more than just birds. Just as she had noted before, his ability to identify with the birds, who had only the Lord to meet their needs, sprang from his personal experience.

  “This feeding schedule and training of birds certainly was a lot to go through,” she said quietly. “How long have you been doing it?”

  “Just over three weeks. Was in the library the day after I saw the first umbie, readin’ through a book I found there...”

  “We found where you’d turned the corner of the page down.” Bonnie gave him a bit of a scolding look, the kind she might have given a student whom she knew could do better.

  Artie shook his head. “Page? I didn’t turn down no page. I was raised better’n that.”

  Of course he was, Kate realized. “And you didn’t make the black smudges on the back cover either, did you?”

  “What black smudges?” He scowled.

  Kate glanced at Bonnie, then back at Artie. “You didn’t set those booby traps either, did you?”

  “I already told you I didn’t do that,” he practically snarled.

  “Well, the one I tripped over was right over there.” Bonnie pointed toward the place where she had hurt herself.

  “I’d like to see that for myself,” he said.

  Kate held up her hands, wanting to diffuse the situation a little. “I’ll show him, Bonnie.” She looked around them at the trees filled with waiting birds. “Why don’t you stay here, sit quietly, and see what birds come out to feed?”

  Bonnie readily agreed.

  Kate and Artie headed toward the area where she’d found the trap. Kate didn’t know what Artie thought he’d find there, but she knew what she was looking for: the thread. The one thing that would string everything together and give them the answers to what had been happening in the area around Best Acres.

  She had found a bit of it in discovering that Artie was behind the missing birds. But what about the trap? That wasn’t something they could just let slide. Hundreds of people would be out in the countryside on Saturday, if not before. If somebody was up to no good, they had to find out who it was and put a stop to it.

  “Do you see anything yet?” Artie called out to her as they kicked through the tall grass and fallen leaves at the base of a tree.

  “No fishing line, but I think I just discovered a great big ol’ piece of the puzzle.” Kate bent down and reached for the bright green and orange foil packet, then remembering the black smudge, looked around for a stick to pick it up. Her eyes fell on a dowel rod, the kind Dot had used to make the traps, the kind she’d complained had been taken, she thought, by animals. And wrapped around that dowel were more of the torn strips from Bonnie’s scarf.

  Kate used the dowel to pick up the seed packet.

  Artie stopped in his tracks and frowned. “That’s the kinda seeds I feed Bebe, the Nanday conure. How’d that get out here?”

  “Are you sure you didn’t drop it?” Kate asked. She had her suspicions where it had come from, but she had to be positive before she took action.

  “If I did, I woulda picked it right back up again.”

  “Of course.” He would, Kate knew it now. But someone else they had seen with those packets might not have been so conscientious. Or perhaps he had wanted to implicate Artie in setting the booby trap.

  That kind of person wouldn’t think anything of breaking a sapling, either, in order to tear a scarf to look like it had been snagged there. That scarf would serve as a proverbial red flag to find a nearly invisible broken thread tied around a trunk in an area full of trees. The culprit hadn’t counted on the scarf blowing away or all the stray threads leading Kate right to him and his partner in crime.

  Kate gripped the dowel in her hands. Charlene and Dud Howell had seen Dot in the field, but they didn’t say when. It could have been much earlier, but maybe Charlene didn’t bring it up until it suited her needs. And in spite of Charlene’s claims to the contrary, Kate realized now that she and Dud had probably turned Dot in to the animal-control authorities. They just didn’t do it right away. They must have let Dot be until they wanted her out of the way, or until they decided it would be another way to throw suspicion on Artie.

  “Artie, I have to ask you one more question: you didn’t turn Dot Bagley in for harboring too many stray cats without a permit, did you?” Kate asked.

  “What?” He scowled. “No. Believe it or not, Mrs. Hanlon, I got a special ’preciation for people who care about cats.”

  Kate smiled and nodded. But that only left her with more questions. Why had the Howells done all this? “Mr. Best, you said that people might get some money or further their own cause by trapping the umber-throated sparrows?”

  “I reckon, though I think it’d take a huge effort, lots of people—scientist types, environmental specialists, that kinda thing—to pull it off. And even then, the money would come from fundin’ it, not from the birds themselves.” He shrugged. “Not a lot of money in wild birds, I’d say, not like the Amazona ochrocephala auropalliata.”

  Kate pictured the exotic birds she’d admired in Artie’s home. “Captain Crackers?”

  “Sapphire and Bluebelle,” he corrected. “Those can sell for as high as twenty thousand apiece.”

  A sickly feeling sank to the pit of Kate’s stomach. Dud and Charlene weren’t interested in the umbies at all. That’s why they were leaving today, before the big event. They had their eyes on another kind of prize. It all fit now, and it d
idn’t make a pretty picture.

  “Artie, we have to get back to your house now!”

  “Why?” he asked as he followed her toward the tree line where Kate headed to get Bonnie.

  “All this time, Bonnie and I have been worried about what happened to the missing wild birds, while the real threat was right under our noses—or more precisely, right under your roof!”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Kate briefly filled Bonnie in. “Artie will take his truck over his land the way he came, and we’ll go along the road and up the drive the way we normally would. That way if Charlene and Dud are on their way here or are leaving, we’ll see them.” Kate helped Bonnie get back to her car.

  Though Kate had wanted to jump in the truck and go with Artie, she didn’t think it wise to leave Bonnie there in the field.

  “You never did feel completely at ease with Charlene and Dud, did you?” Bonnie soldiered along, not letting her bum ankle slow them down.

  “Their story never quite came together.” Kate thought back to that very first day when the Howells had slipped out of the Country Diner. “Dud had hesitated once when he said they came from South Carolina, and so did Charlene. Their Southern accents seemed all wrong too. And their clothes were all wrong right down to Dud wearing his nice shoes, too nice for bird-watching. We saw them at Artie’s and in town, but never ran into them bird-watching. Besides, if they came from someplace that close to Copper Mill, they’d have known that evenings in September could turn cool, and Dud would have brought some warm clothes.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “Though that might have been a ruse to get a pair of Artie’s overalls for Dud. The parrots like to grab the straps,” Kate explained.

  “How would Dud know that?”

  “They’d made appointments to come see Artie before we ever got involved. Those parrots are his pride and joy, and if the Howells showed an interest in them, they surely would have gotten the same tour I did.”

  They moved through the trees and trudged on, Bonnie still poking the ground ahead of her with her cane as they approached the spot where she had sprained her ankle. “Do you have any reason to think they’ll be at Artie’s?”

  “Well, Charlene said they planned to leave today. They’d also know that Artie would be out of the house at specific times of the day, and if they looked at his appointment book, they’d have seen that no one was coming by for a tour.” Kate held a branch back to make way for Bonnie.

  They passed the broken sapling and headed for the car.

  Kate got the keys ready in her hand. “I think that explains why the Howells went to so much trouble to keep us suspicious of Artie, why they turned Dot in, and why, according to what Lucas told Paul, Joanie’s Ark got a second complaint, this one from a woman, trying to make sure Lucas didn’t fly over Best Acres.”

  “Well, if my concern over the missing bird flocks around Best Acres made things more difficult for them, I’m certainly glad of that,” Bonnie said.

  “I think it did. So did Artie’s new policy about making appointments. I suspect we’ll find that because of us, they’ve had to make a lot of adjustments to their plan on the fly.”

  “And that means they were more likely to make mistakes.” Bonnie tsk-tsked as she hobbled along.

  “But it also allowed them to be more creative. We brought up the missing birds, and they probably talked to Artie about it. If he confided in them, they would have known about the library book. So one of them smudged up the pages with Artie’s birdseed.”

  “Which they used to cast doubt on poor Artie.”

  Kate’s mind was racing as they reached the road. “Then they turned Dot Bagley in for collecting cats, but not until they’d taken some of her dowels and line. They needed to keep the suspicion focused on Artie, and they probably didn’t like the idea of someone roaming around out here who might be able to place them at Artie’s house at certain times.”

  “Dud and Charlene set the booby trap, didn’t they?” Bonnie extended her hand toward the car door and wobbled slightly.

  “Yes.” Kate moved ahead of her and opened the door. “You saw the system Artie had to let his rehabilitated birds into the aviary. If he had set a booby trap, it would have been more complex than a fishing line. They just used pieces from one of Dot’s traps. But then the simplicity of it also leads me to believe that Charlene and Dud never expected anyone to actually get hurt on their trap. They must have wanted to make it look like something Artie would have made. Something we’d find as we poked around bird-watching.”

  “But what would that accomplish other than making Artie look guilty?”

  “They probably expected us to find it and call the sheriff. That would have kept Artie away from the house, giving them time to smuggle the blue-mutation Amazons out of there.”

  Bonnie lowered herself into the passenger seat, looked up, and asked. “How can you be so sure they’re after the parrots?”

  “Both Charlene and Dud have tiny scars on their hands, which means they’ve had some bird bites in the past and recently. Plus, Artie told us the day he introduced them that they’d met online with people discussing exotic birds, remember?”

  “No,” Bonnie confessed. “Which is why you’re so much better at this than I am.”

  “Then Dud always had the exotic sunflower seeds with him. I saw Artie use them to quiet Bebe down. Also, every time we were out here and ran into Charlene and Dud, they’d been inside Artie’s house, but the birds weren’t squawking.” Kate tucked Bonnie’s cane in alongside her friend and shut the door.

  When she’d made her way to the driver’s seat, she continued. “But when I came to the door, the birds made a lot of noise. Same when Artie showed them to me. They didn’t stop until Bebe quieted down. The Howells must have been going inside and immediately making sure Bebe got fed the seeds to keep him from screeching.”

  “Why didn’t they just take the birds then?”

  “I’d guess because most of those times they had their names down in the appointment book. The one time they didn’t, I was there looking for Artie.”

  “Should I call Livvy?” Bonnie began to root around in her purse for her cell phone.

  “Not just yet. Let’s see if Dud and Charlene are at Artie’s or if they’ve already been there. If they have, and the parrots are gone, we’ll call the sheriff. Maybe he can catch them before they get too far out of town.” Kate maintained the speed limit, though she really wished she could go faster.

  “But what if they’re dangerous?” Bonnie pulled the phone out and held her thumb over the button that would dial Livvy’s number.

  Kate had considered that. “If they were willing to go that far, they’d have just shown up unexpectedly, hit Artie over the head, or worse, and taken the birds.” She leaned over the steering wheel. As soon as they cleared the curve, she would be able to see if the Howells’ van was at the house. “No, even as I’ve pieced things together this much, there’s still a lot that doesn’t fit about those two.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like they never touched all that money Artie has in his donation box. And they tipped LuAnne really well. They seemed like genuinely nice people. Charlene, particularly.”

  They rounded the bend, and Artie’s house and barns came into view. There, sitting in front of the house, was the van. If the Howells had been paying attention, they would have known that Artie had left quite a while ago. They’d have acted quickly, taken what they wanted, and have been gone by now. Unless they’d run into trouble or were having second thoughts.

  “Maybe they’re crooks, but just not very good at it,” Bonnie suggested.

  Kate pulled the car into Artie’s drive, relieved that Charlene and Dud hadn’t gotten away with the parrots already.

  Bonnie held her phone in both hands in her lap, ready to call and report to Livvy what was happening. “I just have a hard time picturing Charlene and Dud as exotic-bird smugglers.”

  “As Christians, we don’t
want to rush to judgment. There’s more to their story. I think we’re about to learn the rest of it any minute now.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Kate got out of the car as quietly as possible.

  Artie, who had parked fairly far back in the drive and walked up, motioned for her to come to the door, then pointed upward to let her know the culprits were upstairs.

  “Awful quiet up there,” he whispered as Kate and Bonnie reached his side.

  “Of course it is. Dud’s wearing your overalls and feeding Bebe the sunflower seeds to keep the birds quiet.”

  Artie frowned as they crept quietly into the house.

  She could tell he wanted to go charging up to take care of his little buddies.

  Suddenly a series of flapping and squawking sounds rang out from upstairs.

  “Do you want to go up there and just get this over with?” Kate asked, seeing the tension building in the man’s expression and posture.

  “I don’t think we should.” Artie took a step toward the staircase, then jammed his hands in his pockets and held his ground. “Unless we catch ’em actually bringin’ the birds down from their room, they can just say they were up there lookin’ at ’em. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve found someone in my house thinkin’ that it was open to the public.”

  Another round of bird protests sounded through the house, followed by Dud muttering mild curses and Charlene saying, “If we’re gonna do this, we should just do it.”

  If they were going to do this. Were they having second thoughts? Kate started to say something to Artie, but he spoke before she could.

  “They better not hurt my birds,” he muttered.

  Kate’s own heart was pounding. She wasn’t sure what Artie would say or do when he saw the couple who had betrayed his friendship trying to make off with his beloved birds. She felt sure that the Howells would pose no real threat to them, but she hadn’t considered that the Howells might pose a danger to the birds.

  “Maybe I should go up there, Artie. I think I can probably talk to—”