Never Murder a Birder

by Edie Claire

  “I suppose it’s standard procedure when a body is found in a public place like that,” Sue answered. “After all, if nobody was with him, they can’t be certain of what he died from until they’ve done an autopsy.”

  Bonnie harrumphed. “Well, I suppose that makes sense.”

  Leigh relaxed a little. But not much. Bonnie’s suspicions hit too close to home. More than one townsperson had recounted that before the body of Ted Sullivan washed up on the sand, there hadn’t been a murder in Port Mesten in nearly a decade. Now, within one week, she knew that there had been two.

  Statistically speaking, what were the odds of two such homicides not being connected?

  Leigh tried hard not to think about it. She didn’t need to think about it.

  She was not involved.

  Chapter 11

  “Are you ready for your walk?” Leigh asked.

  Snowbell replied by leaping into her snazzy pink and black stroller the second Leigh had popped it fully open. However, after a quick turn around and a derisive flick of her fluffy white tail, the cat promptly leapt back out again.

  “What?” Leigh asked, baffled. She looked into the carriage area of the ridiculously plush pet stroller, which had large netted windows for airy viewing, as well as a removable plastic overlay for inclement weather. “Oh,” she remembered suddenly. “Right.” She dug into the storage compartment underneath and pulled out a waterproof pad, then spread it out in the buggy. “Now, your highness?”

  Snowbell hopped obligingly back in the stroller, sat up straight, and curled her tail primly around her bottom. Ready.

  Leigh rolled her eyes as she zipped the cat inside. In explaining why the stroller should always be lined with a pad, Joyce had merely said, “Snowbell doesn’t like the other kitties.” Why Snowbell herself cared whether she sat on a waterproof liner was an open question.

  Leigh moved the stroller to the doorway of the RV, stepped around it and outside, and then lifted it down the steps as she had been instructed. Joyce had insisted that Snowbell never be carried outside in anyone’s arms, but should be secured in the stroller first. When Leigh had asked why, she’d gotten the same oblique explanation she’d received about the pad.

  She locked the door of the motorhome and headed out. It was midafternoon, and although there had been no heavy rain since early morning, the sky was still gray and cloudy. It seemed that everyone who lived in the Mesten Grande, however, felt a sudden need to experience the great outdoors. No doubt this was because a half-dozen law enforcement types had descended on Stanley’s motorhome and had been streaming in and out of it for the better part of an hour, occasionally carrying boxes or bags.

  Or so Leigh had been told. Bev had texted during her nap to inform her of the development. Leigh did not consider the deceased’s affairs to be any of her business, officially. However, she had promised Joyce she would walk the cat every day.

  She pushed the stroller down the lane and around a bend without incident. She was wearing the floppy hat and scarf, but had left the sunglasses behind. Bonnie had been right about the Jackie Onassis look; wearing shades on a cloudy day only made her look more conspicuous. The half disguise wouldn’t fool any of the birdwatchers who had been with her this morning, but it should sufficiently mask her identity as far as any stray Finneys were concerned. She didn’t know where Stanley’s RV was parked, but everyone’s attention seemed to be focused in the same general direction, and that was where Leigh steered the stroller. Because… well, because Snowbell liked people.

  She wound around another curve and saw several official-looking vehicles blocking the street ahead. “Leigh!” Bonnie’s husky voice called earnestly. “Over here!”

  Bonnie, Sue, and several men were clustered on a patio near a red painted sign that read, “Hank and Bonnie Gresham, Edmond, Oklahoma.” Leigh studied the assembled men of potential husband-age, wondering who went with whom, but since the men were deeply absorbed in their own conversation, no introductions were made. “Have you heard the latest?” Bonnie stage-whispered conspiratorially.

  Leigh braced herself. She moved closer. “I’m not sure. I’ve been taking a nap.”

  “It’s only a rumor!” Sue interjected critically.

  Bonnie, who was seated in a patio chair that seemed dangerously flimsy for a woman of her size, looked at her friend with a melodramatic expression. “Think what you like, Little Miss Sunshine, but I heard that the police as much as confirmed it.” She turned back to Leigh. “Word has it that Stanley’s death wasn’t an accident. They say he was strangled to death.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Sue snapped.

  Leigh hesitated. For the information to leak this fast, it almost had to have come from the police. “But why?” she demurred.

  “Why indeed,” asked one of the men Leigh didn’t know. “Stanley wouldn’t hurt a fly. You ask me, between him and that other one, we got a serial killer on our hands.”

  Another of the men made a rude sound, apparently in objection.

  “Well, why else is anybody going to strangle a guy like that?” the first man defended. “He was, what? Seventy? It’s not like some thug would have to kill him to get his wallet!”

  “I’m sure he wasn’t strangled,” Sue said flatly. She was standing up, but not standing still. She kept shifting her weight from one foot to another and twitching her arms. Even when her words made her seem at ease, the woman was jumpy as — ironically — a sparrow.

  “I heard he was strangled with his own binoculars!” the first man lamented. Much speculation followed, but Bonnie soon quelled the debate. “No way. That didn’t happen, because Stanley didn’t wear a neck strap,” she said decisively. “He was a bino bra guy. Must have had a pinched nerve in his neck or something.”

  “What’s a bino bra?” one of the men asked.

  “Shoulder harness,” another answered. The new speaker was a particularly hefty soul who occupied another too-flimsy lawn chair. He was holding a cigar in one hand and a beer in the other, and he sported a gray beard so long its tip rested on a roll of his belly fat. “I’ve got one of ’em, but I don’t like it. Gives you man-boobs.”

  Bonnie scoffed. “Well, something does.” She tossed her head in the man’s direction. “My husband Hank. Hank, this is Leigh.”

  Leigh nodded. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Hey, you saw the body, didn’t you?” Hank demanded hotly. “What did it look like? Was he strangled with something?”

  “And yes, he’s always this charming,” Bonnie added sarcastically.

  Everyone’s eyes had turned to Leigh. In her mind she could see again the harness-like straps twisted across Stanley’s torso. She could see more than that. But she didn’t want to. She made a split-second decision. “I can’t say,” she lied. “I really didn’t see much.”

  Sue jumped to her defense. “Walter Kreger’s the one you should be asking.”

  Hank scoffed. “He’s not saying much of anything, I heard.”

  “Wait! Isn’t he a doctor or something?” another man asked.

  Snowbell chose that moment to mew. Her voice was well-mannered, but her displeasure was clear.

  “Well, I should keep moving. Snowbell’s word is law, you know,” Leigh explained, delighted with her charge’s timing. She said goodbye, escaped without further introductions, and set off in the opposite direction from the roadblock.

  The winding streets with their angled slots for the variously sized RVs offered more yard space per resident than most RV parks, but everything was still so close together that it was difficult not to eavesdrop on each and every passing patio conversation. Leigh not only kept hearing the “M” word as she walked, but the term “serial killer” kept popping up as well. Some people were so disturbed they were considering leaving Port Mesten. Apparently, at least one couple had already checked out of the park.

  Concerned, Leigh rolled Snowbell onto the narrow asphalt path that led through the community greenspace, then stopped at Bev and Hap’s pati
o. No one was at home, but in the park office building next door she could hear Bev talking on the phone. It sounded like the poor woman was dealing with a second early checkout.

  Snowbell politely mewed another complaint.

  “Yes, dear,” Leigh agreed, pushing the stroller again. She could hear the conversation on the next patio before the people came into view.

  “Do you really think that’s a possibility?” a woman asked, her voice full of fear.

  “Of course!” a man insisted. “It’s the only thing that makes sense!”

  Leigh recognized the voices of a Canadian couple who had been with them on the bird walk this morning. She remembered that they were longtime snowbirds in Port Mesten, but she couldn’t recall their names or much else about them.

  “Walter said Stanley had been dead ‘a couple hours,’” the man continued. “Well, it makes perfect sense that he went out at dawn then, like he usually does. And you know where he goes. He likes to be up in that observation tower so he can keep an eye on the skies all around, as well as the wetland. You can see part of the beach road from there, too. So there’s no telling what he could have seen. But I bet you anything, somebody else saw him.”

  “Oh, but it’s such an awful thought!” the woman cried.

  Leigh stopped moving. The man’s words struck a piercing chord in her brain. Of course. Stanley had been awake and looking through his binoculars at a time when most people were at home and sound asleep. Someone quite far from that observation tower could have thought their actions were invisible, only to look up and see the silhouette of a man. A man with greatly magnified vision.

  “But what could he have seen?” the woman asked. “I mean, nothing ever happens in Port Mesten!”

  The man let out a scoff. “Didn’t they just find another body a couple days ago?”

  Leigh’s feet started moving again. It was bad enough imagining that Stanley had met his end for doing something as harmless as birdwatching alone on a peaceful, rainy, quiet morning in the wetlands. Connecting his murder with that of Ted Sullivan and whatever the hell was going on with the weirdo Finney sibs really was too vile to contemplate.

  She approached the couple’s patio at a normal walking pace. She knew they would recognize her from this morning, but with luck they wouldn’t assume she’d overheard anything. They would just say hello and change the subject. She pushed the stroller ahead of her, and as the patio came into view Snowbell leapt up onto all four paws. The couple were sitting on a rocker loveseat; a fat brown tabby was curled up on the woman’s lap.

  None of the three people got a chance to say anything. Snowbell went — to choose a singular word — nuclear. The fluffy ball of white exploded into hisses, growls, and screams, and the stroller rocked violently as the cat tore up, down, and around the netting like a crazed hamster inside an exercise ball.

  “Snowbell!” Leigh cried. Was she having a seizure?

  “Oh, not again!” the woman said with a laugh, getting to her feet with the tabby in her arms. “Take her away, Leigh! Nothing else will help!” She turned her back so that her own cat wasn’t as visible, but the tabby’s back paws and tail still hung languidly out past the woman’s side. Whatever was going on with Snowbell, the tabby obviously didn’t give a damn.

  Leigh said no more, but followed instructions and got moving. “Calm down, Snowbell!” she chided as she jogged away with the stroller. “That mean, horrible cat’s all gone now, okay? Sheesh!”

  Snowbell performed a few more full revolutions inside the carriage before her head appeared in the window, looking back the way they had come. She was panting.

  “Really, he’s gone,” Leigh assured. “Would I lie? I mean, about this, anyway?”

  Snowbell stared out the rear window until they left the greenspace altogether and returned to their own street. Then the cat returned to her original spot in the front of the carriage, curled her tail around her bottom, and began to daintily lick a front paw.

  Leigh groaned. She hurried back home, keeping her eyes downcast in an effort to avoid any further “friendly” conversation with her new neighbors. She didn’t see Warren sitting outside until she reached their patio herself. “Oh!” she said with surprise. “You’re back early!”

  Her husband rose. He tried to smile at her, but his effort was half-hearted. Probably because he knew he had zero chance of fooling her when his forehead was covered with stress creases.

  “What’s wrong?” Leigh asked warily. “I thought you had another full day at the office today.”

  “I have a full day’s work to do,” he answered. “But the woman I was working with had another meeting all afternoon, so I decided to finish up here.”

  Leigh didn’t buy it. The motorhome was nice, but its design was hardly optimal for spreading out paperwork. “Keep going,” she said warily.

  “Can we talk inside?” he replied.

  Leigh had no argument with that. Warren helped her carry the cat stroller back up the steps, and as she leaned down to unzip the top she realized exactly why Joyce had insisted on the waterproof liners.

  “Lovely,” Warren remarked as Leigh rolled up the soiled pad and stuffed it into the covered trash bin. Snowbell, who had leapt from the stroller immediately, was now contentedly grooming herself in the center of their king-sized bed.

  “Snowbell doesn’t like the other kitties,” Leigh parroted. She collapsed the stroller, returned it to its storage compartment underneath the RV, then shut the door behind her. “Now, I repeat. Why did you come home early? For real this time, please.”

  Warren’s brown eyes bore into hers. “I was worried about you.”

  “Why?” Leigh asked, feeling suddenly indignant. No way did he know about this morning already. Her name wouldn’t be in any news reports in Corpus Christi and she was the only person in Port Mesten who knew his cell number.

  He blew out a breath. “Allison sent me a text. She fired it off the second she got home from school today.”

  Leigh was confused. Allison couldn’t possibly know anything. “Why was she texting you? I told her I’d let her know if I needed any more research on the Finneys.”

  “Yes, well, she said she was really bored last night. And she figured you probably weren’t telling her the whole story about why you were asking. So she kept digging into the family, and of course it didn’t take her long to pull up the story about the body of the Finney Enterprises CFO washing up on the beach in Port Mesten.”

  Leigh realized, grimly, that Warren was worried about something else entirely. “That whole business happened before we even got here,” she said defensively.

  A smile tugged at Warren’s lips. “She’s aware of the timing, I’m sure. But under the circumstances, she decided to make up a complete dossier on the family. She planned to surprise you with it later today, but she ran into a few things she didn’t understand, and she forwarded the links to me. They were financial stories about the family business.”

  Leigh frowned. She’d been trying very hard to stay out of this mess. How dare her own husband and daughter act like she was already in it? “So?” she demanded.

  Warren shook his head. “I haven’t had a chance to look into it yet. But after skimming the articles, I can tell you that the public face of what’s been going on with the family company doesn’t jibe at all with what Hap’s been telling us. To hear the media tell it, ever since Bruce Finney took over for his father, business has been booming.”

  Despite herself, Leigh raised an eyebrow. “Hap said Bruce was an idiot. He said they were all idiots. How could the business be doing better? Particularly if the four of them don’t get along?”

  Warren shrugged. “A valid question. I thought I’d look into it if I finished up early enough tonight. But when I got here and stepped out of the car, the first thing I heard was how another body had been found at the nature preserve. And how it was a man who lived in this park. And how the rumor was that he had been strangled.”

  He had the gall to look
at her expectantly.

  “Is that all you heard?” she prompted.

  “Yes,” he replied, still studying her.

  Leigh’s face felt hot. She crossed her arms over her chest. “So why are you looking at me like that?”

  His brown eyes smiled at her, even as his expression remained sober. He said nothing.

  Seconds ticked by.

  Leigh uncrossed her arms and threw her hands to the side. “For your information, I was not the first person to find his body!” she informed resentfully. “I was the second person, by a solid two and a half seconds, and I am considering that progress. So don’t go bursting my bubble!”

  Warren stepped forward and folded her in his arms. Leigh appreciated the gesture despite her pride, and she leaned into his chest with a sigh.

  “Sorry,” he said simply.

  “It’s whatever,” she replied glumly. “But otherwise, I am not involved. You hear that? I am on vacation.”

  Warren was silent for several beats. “Okay.”

  A knock sounded on the door.

  Chapter 12

  “Sorry to barge in on y’all like this,” Hap apologized as the three of them seated themselves at the motorhome’s expandable dining table. “But I thought this was a conversation best had in private.” He squirmed uncomfortably in his chair, and Leigh found herself doing the same.

  What now?

  “I had a little talk with Sharonna today,” Hap began, not helping Leigh’s nerves in the slightest. “Several, actually. The whole situation with her snooping in a guest’s room isn’t acceptable, whether you’re willing to file charges or not, and it can’t happen again. So I decided I’d try to get to the bottom of it. But with Sharonna that’s not easy, and I’m not sure I understand a damn thing more now than I did when I woke up this morning. But what she told me, I figure you two have a right to know.”