by Jan Dunlap
He tossed his hat on the bed. “Granted, that’s a pretty big ‘something special’ with two babies on the way, and the woman has the most amazing green eyes I’ve ever seen, but, Bob, are you sure you know what you’re doing here?”
I walked over to the room’s oversized window and looked out. It was a beautiful day. Heck, it was still morning. The sky was a bright blue, a pair of Mourning Doves were perched in a tree outside the window, and a Killdeer was lightly running along the edge of the parking lot.
Did I know what I was doing?
Yes.
And no.
I turned back to face Alan. “You know, eighteen years ago, I thought Shana was the most beautiful, desirable woman in the world. She was smart. She was funny. She loved birding. When I was with her, I felt like I was on top of the world. As far as I was concerned, she was perfect.” I shrugged my shoulders. “I was a kid.”
Alan nodded, but didn’t say anything.
“She’s still all those things, Alan, but I’m not that kid anymore. I’m not interested in any trips down memory lane because memories can’t come close to what I have with Luce now. No contest. There never was.”
Even as I said it out loud, I knew it was the truth. Seeing Shana again had been an unexpected jolt to my memory banks, but as soon as the dust had settled, as soon as I saw the look that passed between her and Jack in the hotel lobby the night I checked in, I knew exactly what I was seeing and what I wanted.
I saw the same electricity that arced between Luce and me every time we were together. And I knew I wanted it for the rest of my life, as soon as possible. If seeing Shana again made me regret anything, it was not being with Luce every moment I was breathing.
“Yeah, that’s what I figured,” Alan assured me. “You are just not that dumb, White-man. Any idiot can see that you and Luce belong together. Although, like I said, Shana does have the most amazing eyes I’ve ever seen. Really, really green. And she’s got that whole Earth Mother thing going on, too, with being pregnant. It kind of brings out the protective side of a guy, you know?”
“Hey!” I barked at him. “You’re marrying my sister. No looking at any other women. Pregnant or otherwise. I don’t want to have to kill you.”
He laughed and scraped his long black hair back from the sides of his face. “Are you kidding me? Your sister is all the woman I ever want to look at. Besides, she’d kill me long before you even got wind of it, anyway. Speaking of which,” he suddenly sobered, “what are you doing about this death threat?”
This was the “no” part of my answer to the “did I know what I was doing?” question. I opened my mouth to tell him I felt safe as long as I wasn’t walking alone in a state forest, when a screeching noise split the air.
A crash didn’t follow it.
But two loud gunshots did.
Chapter Twenty
Holy crap!” I shouted, diving for the worn brown carpeting on the floor of my hotel room.
Almost simultaneously, I heard Alan hit the floor on the other side of the bed.
“Are you all right?” I yelled.
“Stay down!” he yelled back.
“I’m not getting up to wave a red flag, if that’s what you’re worrying about.” I did, however, lift my head to see what damage had been done to the window.
None.
“What the hell?” I muttered, then slowly lifted my head and shoulders to carefully peer over the window sill.
There were no snipers posted in the parking lot. Of course, if there were really snipers, I probably wouldn’t be able to see them anyway. From what I understood of that particular line of work, one didn’t last long parading around in an open area with a rifle in your arms. Stealth was highly recommended as a character trait.
On the other hand, there was a jacked-up pickup truck parked at the far end of the lot. A couple of teenaged boys were sitting on the tailgate, laughing and pointing at the black rubber marks that now adorned the asphalt.
“Bob!” Alan yelled from his position on the floor. “What’s happening?”
“I think,” I said, “Mom and Dad went to church, and Junior’s joyriding with his buddy.”
“What?” Alan’s head and shoulders popped up on the other side of the bed.
“They weren’t gunshots, Alan. Just a truck backfiring. Maybe it’s a Sunday morning ritual here in Spring Valley. The parents do doughnuts after church, and the kids do donuts in empty parking lots.”
I stood up and brushed the carpet lint off my jeans.
“But you weren’t taking any chances, were you?” Alan pointed out, likewise standing up. “You heard the shots, and you thought it came from a gun. A gun aiming for you. This is serious shit here, Bob.”
I sat on the end of the bed and looked at him over my shoulder. “Yeah, I know. Actually, I figured that out when my car brakes went out this morning, and Bernie ended up with a ride in an ambulance.”
Alan sat down beside me.
“Someone wants to hurt me, and I don’t have the slightest idea who or why,” I admitted. “Yes, we have a note in Jack’s handwriting that suggests I be killed. But Jack’s dead, so he’s not the one who cut my brake line. Shana thinks that Ben had the note. So let’s pretend he cut my brake line as a favor to Jack. Why? I don’t have a clue. I’ve never done anything to Jack or Ben that I know of to warrant even a verbal reprimand, let alone their killing me. I never even met Ben till yesterday. So I keep ending up in the same spot with all this speculation: nowhere.”
“No,” Alan corrected me. “You do end up somewhere—totally paranoid.”
“Right,” I said, “and I hate it. The view sucks. That’s why I have to stick around, Alan. I have to find out why I’m someone’s target, and then I have to figure out who that someone is.”
“And somehow, this is all tied up with Jack and Shana,” Alan added.
“That’s my guess,” I said. “Nobody was gunning for me back home. I come down here to bird, and bam! I’m a target.”
“You must be trespassing, son,” Alan said in a fake Southern drawl.
“I gave that up years ago.”
That was the truth. Like almost every birder, I’d slipped around my share of fences and climbed over rails onto private property to chase down a bird, but I’d always been careful to leave nothing behind. No gum wrappers, water bottles, old tires, or cracked sinks. Actually, the only reason I’d finally sworn off doing that was the day a county sheriff met me back at my car after I’d been on a bird-finding mission behind an old sewage treatment plant. The plant’s gate had big “No Trespassing” signs on it. I pretended they didn’t apply to me. The sheriff thought otherwise and slapped me with a hefty citation. I would have thought he was being overly scrupulous, except for the fact that he’d already caught me there twice before and only given me warnings.
“You just don’t listen, do you?” he’d said as he handed me the ticket. “You need to respect boundaries, Mr. Birdman.”
Boundaries.
A couple of tumblers clicked into place in my head. I for sure hadn’t trespassed on anyone’s land, but there was something going on with boundaries in Fillmore County.
The boundary around Kami’s sanctuary: someone kept trying to tear it down. I’d seen the evidence.
The boundary between Jack and Chuck and Ben: money was messing with their relationships. Stan and Shana had the proof.
The legal boundaries at the heart of the eco-communities’ fight with the ATV lobbyists.
A chill ran up my spine. Thanks to my unplanned appearance on television last night, I’d been identified as a friend of Shana and Jack, the public face of the eco-communities. Had someone assumed I’d pick up where Jack left off in pushing for the rezoning and decided to cut me off at the pass—or rather send me off the bend in the road?
Quite a stretch, maybe?
Then again, it was awfully coincidental that the night after my television debut, my car’s brake lines were cut.
And—another chill ra
ced past the first one—that there was an ATV enthusiast right here at the hotel with us. One who, in fact, had a full set of mechanics tools with him in the parking lot last night. Now that I took a minute to think about the accident this morning, it suddenly seemed odd to me that Mac had so quickly known what had happened to my brakes.
“I think I’ve landed myself in the middle of a territorial dispute,” I told Alan.
“Dispute? Looks more like a war to me,” he said.
Shouting came from beyond my hotel room door.
“Sounds like one, too,” Alan added.
It only took me a split-second to recognize the voices outside the door.
Chuck was back, and he’d found Shana.
I yanked open the door to find the two of them yelling at each other just down the hall. Tom was there, too, trying to haul Chuck out of Shana’s face, but not making much progress from what I could see. Chuck was on a rant, and he wasn’t about to stop just because Tom was trying to run interference.
“You’re a man-eater, you know that?” Chuck shouted at Shana. “It’s what you do. Track down a rich old guy, turn on the charm and marry him. Then when you’re through, just get rid of him.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about!” Shana shouted back. “Get out, Chuck, and don’t even think of speaking to me until you come to your senses.”
“My senses? I’ll tell you what my senses are telling me. Men take one look at you and they’re falling at your feet. But if they’re not pulling the strings on the family fortune, you kick them away. You’ve got a history, here, Mrs. O’Keefe,” he practically snarled at her.
I grabbed Chuck’s other arm, the one Tom didn’t already have. “Okay, buddy, time to vacate,” I told him.
He tried to wrench his arm out of my grip. “You think you’re next, White? Sorry, buddy,” he mimicked me. “You’re not a money-bags. Shana only marries money. Don’t you, Mom?”
He glared at her, and I noticed that Alan had slipped himself slightly in front of Shana, using his body as a shield for her bulging tummy. I realized that Chuck was too far gone to appreciate the precariousness of his own situation—if I’d had Alan facing me down in a brawl, I would have turned tail and run. Alan may be an easy-going guy, but you get him angry, and those gym-trained muscles of his could do some real damage.
“Come on, Chuck,” I tried again, hoping to avoid having to make a second call for an ambulance in one morning.
“You don’t know, do you?” he suddenly spun his body towards me. “She’s got a history. Dad wasn’t the first. Ask her about her first husband. Rich old guy in Costa Rica. Ended up dead within a year. Guess who got the money?”
I glanced at Shana.
She blanched and reached out a hand to brace herself against the wall of the hallway.
“Out, O’Keefe!” Tom pulled on Chuck’s arm harder.
But Shana’s stepson wasn’t finished. “Yeah, White, that’s right. She got the family fortune. Nice work if you can get it, don’t you think? Oh, did I mention that the first husband was also shot? At close range? And nobody was ever arrested. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? You don’t see a pattern here, do you?”
I couldn’t help myself. My eyes sought out Shana’s. She was leaning heavily against the wall and Alan had his arm around her, folding her against his side.
Or at least he was trying to.
It’s kind of hard to fold in a pod of whales.
I turned back to Chuck. “You need to leave. Now.”
He finally managed to shake off both Tom’s and my hands. “All right. I’m going. For now. Besides, I see I upset the little woman. Excuse me—not so little anymore. Hey, Shana,” he called to her. “Whose kids are you carrying, anyway? Dad was no spring chicken, after all. Is it this White guy?”
I didn’t even think. My right fist shot out and slammed smack into Chuck’s cheekbone. Chuck’s head banged backward into the wall, and he went down like the proverbial sack of potatoes.
“Hash browns, anyone?” I asked, staring at an unconscious Chuck.
“I can’t believe you did that,” Alan said. He was staring at Chuck, too. “Nice right cross, White-man.”
“I want to take a swing at him, too,” Tom said. “Maybe I’ll wake him up just so I can hit him. Before you got out here, he was accusing Shana of going behind Jack’s back to audit the OK Industries’ books.”
“Somebody please call an ambulance,” Shana whispered.
All three of us turned in alarm. “Are you in labor?” we asked her in unison.
“No,” she sighed, color returning to her cheeks. “We just can’t leave Chuck laying here in the hall. No matter how much I’d like to.”
“Will he press charges?” Alan asked.
“He’ll probably try,” Shana guessed. “But I think Sheriff Paulsen has a soft spot for me, so maybe she’ll just make this go away. You guys take off. Go birding. I can handle this.”
“No way,” Tom told her. “I’m staying. You guys go,” he told me and Alan. “Find a rarity, Bob, and call us. We’ll meet you there.”
I started to protest about his driving Shana in his car, but he waved me off. “I’ll drive Shana’s car. No potholes. I promise.”
“Go, Bob,” Shana said.
I nodded and we left them in the hallway, Tom calling for an ambulance and Shana poking tentatively at Chuck’s side with her foot. Her stepson was right about one thing, I had to admit: Shana always had men falling at her feet.
Not quite so literally as Chuck, maybe, but fall they did. In fact, I couldn’t think of any man who wasn’t charmed by Shana. Tom already seemed well past “smitten,” and Alan had been prepared to play Sir Galahad. I’d seen Mac Ackerman sneak a few appraising looks her way during dinner last night, and the male deputies at the police station had fallen all over themselves to fetch water for her when we’d given statements yesterday morning.
Even Scary Stan was a member of the fan club.
Of course, they were old friends, Shana had said. I hadn’t known that. Then again, I hadn’t known her marriage to Jack wasn’t her first, either.
Come to think of it, Chuck had been a fountain of information before I knocked him out. I spun through the other things I’d just learned about Shana. One: Not only had she been previously married, but that husband had also been rich—and older—and likewise ended up with a bullet in his body. Two: When that husband died, Shana had inherited a Costa Rican fortune; widowed again, her net worth was probably going to double thanks to OK holdings.
Then I remembered something else I’d learned about Shana. Right before Alan showed up in the lobby, she told Tom and me that she and Jack had gone to a shooting range for some target practice.
Which meant that the lady knew her way around a gun.
As I walked out of the hotel with Alan, I wondered uneasily what else I didn’t know about Shana O’Keefe.
Chapter Twenty-One
So where are we headed, exactly?” Alan was behind the wheel of his Camry hybrid, heading north and east of Spring Valley. I wanted to have another go at the Green Hills youth camp where we’d found Jack’s body yesterday morning. The camp had a variety of habitats and I was pretty sure we could find an Eastern Phoebe and an Eastern Wood-Pewee somewhere on the property.
I also hoped that focusing on something other than Shana, Jack, Billy, and a death threat would give me the chance to clear my head so I could start thinking logically again. Nailing Chuck O’Keefe without a moment’s premeditation wasn’t exactly the kind of habit I wanted to … well … get in the habit of. I was a trained counselor, for crying out loud. I was the person who was supposed to take the objective perspective in emotionally charged situations. Punching someone out was not part of the protocol.
No matter how good it felt.
And, man, it had felt good.
Two swallows swept across the road ahead of us and I pointed them out to Alan. “Cliff Swallow and Barn Swallow.”
“How can you tell
the difference? They just look like little dark birds to me. Heck, even ‘swallow’ is way out of my league.”
I smiled and shook my head. “Listen and learn, oh mighty Hawk. One of the ways to identify birds is by their flight patterns. You see a big V of birds in the sky in the fall and you know they’re geese. You see a spiral of big white birds in the spring and you’re looking at American White Pelicans. You see sleek small birds diving and swooping over fields and you’ve got swallows.”
“The geese I can do,” Alan nodded in agreement. “And the pelicans—maybe. Guess I’d have to be looking up, huh?”
“Yeah, that would help.”
“So how can you tell one swallow from another then? It’s not like they’re flying slowly by, flashing their little birdie IDs at you.”
“It’s the flight profile, Alan,” I explained. “You’re right—they’re usually too fast to really note their markings. Instead, I look for the outline they make against the sky. Watch a minute—we’ll see more and I’ll show you what I mean.”
Sure enough, more swallows dipped over the farm fields beside the road as we drove. “Look at the tails,” I told Alan.
“Whoa! You’re right, they’ve got tails. I can see that.”
“Very funny. I mean look at the outline of the tails. The Barn Swallow has a deeply forked tail. The Cliff Swallow has a square tail. There must be a lot of old bridges and buildings in this part of the county, because that’s where Cliff Swallows nest.”
“Then why are they Cliff Swallows and not Bridge Swallows?”
“Because in a natural habitat, they prefer cliffs. But they’ve learned to be flexible, obviously. I guess they take advantage of what’s available.”
