by Jan Dunlap
Quadruple-ring.
Something clicked together in my head then, and I forgot all about proposing to Luce.
“Not a quadruple-ring, Alan,” I said, the words tumbling out almost as rapidly as they were falling into place in my head. “A three-ring! A three-ring circus!”
“Please don’t even suggest that phrase to Lily,” Alan sternly warned me. “She’ll never forgive you if you refer to her wedding as a three-ring circus. Even if you’re right,” he added.
“I’m not talking about the wedding!” I almost shouted at him. “I just realized why the ATV lobby might want that particular piece of land desperately enough to kill the opposition,” I told Alan, pulling open the passenger door to his Camry. “Get in and drive. There’s another birding spot we’ve got to look at.”
“What do you mean? I got the Pewee, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did. But you didn’t get a Bobwhite, and that’s the reason I came to Fillmore this weekend in the first place. Jack promised us a Bobwhite, and I think I just figured out where at least one is. Drive, Alan.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Alan’s hybrid quietly came to life and rolled silently out of the Green Hills parking area. After about ten minutes, I noticed he kept looking in his rear-view mirror every few seconds. Since traffic was pretty non-existent on the county road, I finally craned my neck around to see what he was watching behind us.
Skip Swenson waved to me from behind the wheel of his car.
“Jimmy Olsen has us tagged,” Alan announced.
“I see that,” I said. “The kid is persistent, I have to give him credit for that.”
“And he’s obviously not worried about us ‘making’ him, either,” Alan added, sticking his hand out the window to wave back at Skip. “He must have been pulled off into one of those driveways I passed right when I exited the camp, and because there was so much forest and winding roads, I didn’t see him until now. He thinks you’re going to give him his shot at that internship, Bob.”
I leaned my arm on the open window frame and watched the forest turn into rolling hills. “Maybe I’ll do just that.”
“Uh oh,” he said. “I’m not sure I like the sound of that. You know something I don’t?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. That’s why I want to see the ATV track again.”
“I thought we were going Bobwhite hunting.”
“We are,” I assured him. “Turn left at the next road.”
While Alan drove, I reviewed the pieces of information that had just assembled themselves into a partial picture in my head. The land that Chuck owned abutted Kami’s land, making a big piece of real estate when combined—certainly large enough to accommodate both a manufacturing plant and a testing ground for ATVs. For whatever reasons—personal or professional—Chuck opposed the eco-community’s bid for his land, and was secretly funding the recreational lobbyists to block the development. Ben, the middle man for the funds, had, meanwhile, pressured Kami to withdraw her support for the eco-community project, which would presumably remove an obstacle for the lobbyists. Failing to get Kami’s compliance, though, Ben had—according to Kami—plotted to get control of her land by marrying her.
Yet that ploy hadn’t worked for Ben, either, nor did it explain why he would be so quick to identify Kami as a leading suspect in Jack’s death.
Unless he wanted Kami herself removed from the property and into a jail cell, leaving behind a choice piece of real estate already eyed by an ATV company, who would be happy to build next to a tract of land that was already popular with ATV riders.
And as for Nigel … that’s where the three-ring circus came in.
“Ride on the Wild Side,” Skip had said.
Couldn’t get much wilder than a full-grown tiger, could it? I happened to know from very recent experience what a rush of adrenaline one got when face to face with a cat that big. Combine that up-close thrill with a challenging trail, and I bet you’d have the entire American population of ATV riders flocking into town.
Talk about a cash cow.
Or cash tiger.
That was what Ben really wanted from Kami—her property and Nigel. For all I knew, maybe the mayor was even planning to bring in some other exotic animals to place along the ATV trail. If, as I suspected, Kami’s land sat next to the wasted prairie Tom and I had seen yesterday while looking for Bobwhites, then it would be a simple job for Ben to run that same ATV trail right along Kami’s property line. Nigel would hear the noise of the ATVs, come to investigate, and pace behind the electronic fence. Maybe he’d do some roaring, or sprint along the fence. I could imagine how that would play in marketing the ATV park—“Race with the tiger at Ride on the Wild Side!”
Poor Nigel. All Kami wanted to do was give the big cat a sanctuary, but Big Ben was ready to turn him into an ATV side-show.
For a price, of course. And according to Stan’s snooping, it was a pretty nice price sitting in that off-shore account that belonged to Big Ben. My guess was that the mayor had a back-room deal going with the ATV manufacturer to deliver both Kami’s property and Nigel for use in developing the biggest ATV manufacturing facility/recreational park imaginable.
“Pull in over there,” I instructed Alan as we approached the turn-off by the ruined grassland.
He put the car into park and stared out the front windshield. “There are Bobwhites here? You’re kidding me, right? This looks like the setting for a post-apocalypse movie, not a birdie heaven.”
I popped open the door and pointed towards some wire fencing stretched between trees about two hundred yards away on the edge of what was left of the prairie. “I saw that fencing yesterday when Tom and I were here, but it didn’t mean anything to me at the time. I want to see if it’s electrified.”
“Electrified?”
“Because if it is, I bet you dollars to doughnuts that it’s Kami’s fence, which means this is the piece of land that her sister owned. That Chuck now owns. That the ATV manufacturer wants. That Jack wanted to build the eco-community on.”
“This is the house that Jack built,” Alan recited. “This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built. This is the mouse that …”
I got out of the car and slammed the door behind me. “This is Bobwhite Acres, Alan. This is the Bobwhite that Jack was afraid that Ben was trying to kill.”
Alan came around the car to join me and surveyed the scarred acres in front of us. “I think he was too late. This land looks pretty dead already.”
“That’s why he wanted it,” I suddenly realized. “He wanted to use this property as a showcase for what the eco-community project could do: recover and revitalize ruined land. He knew this used to be a healthy habitat for all kinds of birds—including Bobwhites—and he had a vision to restore it. Maybe knowing it was his first wife’s land made it all the more critical to him that this was the spot the eco-project could salvage. Maybe that’s why he kept so much of it a secret from Shana, because he knew how she felt threatened by his memories of his first wife. Kami said that Shana seemed uncomfortable around her, so who knows?”
I scrambled down the little slope that led towards the old fencing. “I’ve got to see if it’s electric.”
“Mr. White!”
I turned to see Alan and Skip following me down the incline. I’d forgotten about our intrepid reporter tailing us.
“Mr. White, where are you going?”
“I’m taking a hike, Skip.” I got within five feet of the fence before I saw the little warning tag tacked on it that read “No trespassing. Electrified fence.”
I stooped and picked up a stick laying in the dirt by my feet and tossed it at the fence.
Nothing. No sizzle.
The fence was dead.
“This is the other side of Kami’s land,” I confirmed. “So this must be the property that her sister inherited and passed along to Chuck. The land everybody wants.” I turned around to face Skip and Alan who had come to a stop just behind me. “Am I right, Skip? Is this t
he site the eco-community wants for Bobwhite Acres? The same place the ATV company wants for its manufacturing facility and test site?”
Instead of answering me, though, Skip went white.
So did Alan.
Then I noticed they were both looking past my shoulder.
I spun around in time to see Nigel come sprinting out of the trees to make a flying leap towards us.
I raised my hand and shouted “Stop!”
The big cat fell to the ground in a heap just inside the fencing.
I turned back to look at Skip and Alan, neither of whom, of course, knew about Eddie’s electronic fence set inside the wire fencing perimeter. Their eyes were bugging out of their heads, their open mouths frozen in shock.
Alan was the first to recover and looked at me in awe. “Shit, White-man, I knew you were in tune with nature, but that was unbelievable.”
Skip, on the other hand, managed to get his mouth closed just before his eyes rolled back into his head and he toppled over in a dead faint.
“Too much excitement for the boy reporter,” Alan commented. “Maybe he should stick to restaurant reviews instead of investigative journalism.”
We both knelt in the dirt to lift Skip up to a sitting position while he regained consciousness.
“Skip!” I patted his cheeks briskly. “You with us?”
After a moment or two, his eyes focused on mine. “Did I just see what I thought I saw? You stopped a full-grown tiger with a hand signal?”
Alan’s gaze settled on my face, too. “Yeah, nature boy, tell us how you pulled that one off.”
“What can I say?” I grinned, shrugging my shoulders. “I’ve got skills.”
“Nobody has that kind of skill,” Alan pointed out. “Something else is going on here, and you’re not talking. Spill it, buddy.”
I helped Skip stand back up and pointed to the fence and the groggy tiger beyond it. “There’s an electronic fence inside the wire one. A friend of mine installed it for Kami to ensure Nigel doesn’t get loose. He crosses the line, he gets a zap strong enough to bring him down. It doesn’t last long and it doesn’t really hurt him. Mostly it protects him, because if he did get loose, no doubt someone would take aim at him and shoot to kill.”
A loud crack filled the air and a bullet hit the dirt in front of my feet. I immediately pushed Skip back down to the ground and covered his body with my own. Alan hit the dirt, too, rolling away from me towards a small dip in the earth.
“Don’t make a move!” a woman’s voice rang out.
I lifted my head very slowly to see Kami Marsden running towards me on the other side of the wire fencing.
She had a gun in one hand and a rifle in the other.
Which made me the proverbial sitting duck.
Quack.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
But since Kami didn’t immediately line me up in her sights, I figured I wasn’t duck stew just yet.
Instead, she tucked the gun in her shorts and aimed the rifle at Nigel. A dart zipped out of the barrel and imbedded itself in the big cat’s haunch.
“That should knock him out for a while,” Kami called to me. “The shock wears off pretty quick, and I want to be sure you all are gone before he wakes back up, or he’ll think you want to play a game of predator and prey with him. If he only sees me, he’ll follow me back to the house.”
I sat up in the dust and pulled Skip up, too. “But you’ve got your electronic fence to keep him in. It worked great. He got the buzz when he crossed the perimeter, didn’t he?”
Kami reached up and tugged the dead electric fencing down low enough to step over it so she could stand next to me. She held out her hand for me to see the small transmitter in it. “I used this, Bob. The remote. The electronic fence isn’t finished on this side of the property yet.”
I opened my mouth to comment, but nothing came out.
“The electronic fence isn’t working?” Skip asked, his eyes wide. “You mean, if you hadn’t used that remote control, the tiger would have landed on Mr. White here?”
Kami turned her pixie smile on the boy. “Maybe,” she said. “That would have been a surprise, huh?”
Holy shit.
I waited for my head to stop spinning and my lungs to drag in some air before I could ask Kami the next question. “If the electronic fence isn’t working on this side of your land, what is Nigel doing over here?”
Kami traced a small circle in the ground with the tip of the rifle and then glanced over at me. “Good question. Especially since he was securely contained this morning when I left for the youth camp. After I saw you there a little while ago, I came home to find his tracking signal was outside the electronic perimeter, so I hustled out here to locate him and herd him back home. Obviously,” she said, jamming the rifle into the ground, “someone’s messing with my fence.”
“While you were at the youth camp,” I added. “Someone who knew you weren’t home shut down your system.”
“That’s what I figured,” she agreed.
It suddenly dawned on me that Alan wasn’t participating in this conversation. I looked around for him, but couldn’t see him anywhere. “Alan?”
“I thought I saw him roll in that direction,” Kami said, pointing off to my left.
Skip and I stood up and walked towards the small dip in the ground.
Only now, the small dip wasn’t so small anymore.
Actually, it was more like a fissure. A fissure about five feet deep.
Alan was sitting at the bottom of it, his elbows propped against his knees. I squatted down on the edge of the rough earth and sent a little cascade of rocks skittering down to Alan.
“Weirdest thing,” he said. “I dove into that little dip and the whole thing gave way right under me.”
“Get him out,” Kami whispered urgently in my ear. “Alan, stand up slowly,” she told him.
Alan looked up at Kami, who had retreated a few steps back from the lip of the fissure. “This is karst country, isn’t it?”
She nodded.
“Karst?” I asked. “What’s karst?”
“It’s a region where the land has been shaped by layers of limestone that have been dissolved over the course of time,” Skip explained. “Underneath are caves. There’s a lot of karst country in Fillmore County. We learn about it in school,” he added.
“The little dip that was there when I hit the ground just sort of opened up beneath me,” Alan said. “I figure it might have been an old sinkhole that just gave way a little more.”
“I hope that’s all it was,” Kami said, continuing to wave Alan up out of the fissure. “Because if it wasn’t, it could mean you’re standing on top of a cavern roof that’s just about to collapse.”
Definitely not what I wanted to hear. How in the world was I going to explain to Lily that I lost her groom-to-be when he fell through a hole in a wasted prairie and ended up somewhere in the middle of the earth?
I reached my hand out to Alan. “Just put her there, buddy. No spelunking for you.”
He grasped my hand and braced his foot against the crumbly side of the hole while I tugged him up and over the rim. All four of us backed away from the edge of the fissure.
“Does that happen a lot around here?” Alan asked Kami. “Holes suddenly opening up?”
She shook her head. “Not that I’ve heard, but Jack had a theory that all the ATV traffic on this piece of land might be damaging more than just the earth’s surface right here. Depending on how many caverns are below us, and how extensive or fragile they are, the vibrations of the ATVs could be weakening those formations. It was one more reason we really want to reclaim this land for an eco-community—the surface development would actually help protect what’s underneath.”
“Well, duh!” Skip exclaimed.
The three of us turned to Jimmy Olsen.
“Duh what?” I asked.
“That’s the story I need to land my internship—how tigers are once again finding a home in southea
stern Minnesota, but this time, they’re involved in preservation, not predation!”
“Come again?” Alan asked.
I smacked my forehead with the heel of my hand. “The saber-tooth cat skull they found. It was in this area, a place called Tyson Spring Cave. It’s part of a huge network of underground caves in Fillmore County.”
“That’s right,” Kami said. “It was just a few years ago. A couple of cavers were exploring one of the streambeds that flowed through the caverns and stumbled on the skull. It brought a deluge of natural history buffs down here. I guess it really shook up everyone’s idea of what Minnesota was like thousands of years ago.”
Now that my memory had been jogged, I recalled reading several articles about the discovery in newspapers and the journal published by the state Department of Natural Resources. Since Minnesota had been mostly covered by glaciers in the last ice age, no one expected to find many traces of Pleistocene creatures like the extinct stag-moose or the saber-tooth cat—species which preferred drier, ice-less environments—in southeastern Minnesota. Yet bones of both were unearthed in Tyson Spring Cave after the cavers reported their find, which meant that even more ancient animal skeletons might be waiting for explorers deep in the limestone tunnels that riddled the county. As a birder who regularly sought out the unusual and rare when I indulged in my hobby, I could only imagine the excitement and thrill of paleontologists when an unexpected ice age animal artifact turned up in a place no one had thought to investigate.
Did paleontologists report their finds on a list serve the way birders did?
“Jenny and I were scuba-diving through flooded narrow crevices about a hundred feet below the surface of the earth when my headlamp happened to catch the glint of a prehistoric snail shell embedded in the wall. We think it’s a discus macclintocki, but I wasn’t able to get a photo of it. It should be there a while, maybe another couple thousand years, if you want to try and see it. The dive wasn’t too bad, unless you have trouble with the completely mind-bending darkness we had when my headlamp went out. Jenny only screamed for about two minutes, though. Good luck.”
