Never Murder a Birder

by Edie Claire

  “The shame was in the woman’s murder, not how nature dealt with its consequences,” Sue said practically. “Please, take a seat up front, Leigh. Bev wanted you to be handy.”

  Leigh hesitated. She had tried to contact Bev this morning, but her cousin-in-law hadn’t answered and Hap would say only that they’d both been very busy. He explained that he couldn’t talk where he was at that moment, but that everything would be explained at the meeting.

  Warren led his wife, her feet dragging, to two open seats in the front row. “More air circulation up here,” he purported. The room was filling in fast, and although the crowd was not as large as that at the original gathering, the showing was impressive for a meeting called on a Saturday morning with only a few hours’ notice.

  Bev soon emerged from a crowd of birders in the kitchen. She gestured for everyone to sit down and for Sue and Bev to close — and presumably to guard — both doors. The windows were already shut and the blinds pulled. “Thank you for coming,” Bev announced, her booming voice and commanding presence once again belying the short, stout frame and apple-pie face that would otherwise scream “pushover.”

  “It’s been an eventful night, folks,” Bev began. “A lot has happened, both good and bad. The first thing I’ll tell you, for the tourists and snowbirds who aren’t connected to the local gossip that’s been lighting up the phone lines all night, is that as of this morning, all four of the Finney siblings are in official police custody.”

  A cheer went up in the room. Leigh sucked in a breath and looked at Warren. “So fast?” she mouthed. No wonder the investigator had looked so happy last night. The Rangers must already have been in the process of getting the warrants. But for what, exactly?

  The noise level in the room rose as multiple people called out similar questions.

  Bev shushed everyone with a gesture. “There are a million rumors flying around, but I’ll tell you what we’re pretty sure of. Neighbors over at the Finney mansion — where Bruce lives — say the Rangers showed up en masse over there in the middle of the night. They seemed to be searching all over, but apparently they concentrated a lot of attention on the boathouse, and they ended up hauling one boat away altogether.”

  “They dumped that body in the ocean!” someone shouted. “The one that washed up on the beach!”

  Bev nodded. “Seems like a darn good possibility, doesn’t it? At about the same time, two Rangers showed up over at the Silver King and left with Sharonna Finney in the back seat. Russell was staying in a condo not far from the mansion, and they picked him up there. And we have it on good authority that Janelle was arrested at her place in Corpus Christi.”

  Another cheer broke out. “They were the ones that murdered Stanley too, then!”

  “I bet they were all guilty, one way or another!”

  “And we got ’em!”

  “We did it!”

  “That’ll teach people not to mess with a birder!”

  Bev waited a moment before reining in the levity. “I happen to know that our ‘random observations’ were helpful to the Rangers on several key points,” she said with a sly smile. “So yes, y’all deserve a lot of credit. There are a whole lot of questions still to be answered about exactly who did what to whom, but I think we can all rest easy knowing that Stanley’s killer is behind bars now. And hopefully, he and/or she will be staying there a good, long while!”

  The next round of applause, Bev cut off short. “But I’m afraid our job isn’t quite done,” she announced, her face turning grim. “Because I haven’t got to the bad news yet.”

  Leigh turned to Warren, her face a question mark. He responded to her in kind. She was not the slightest bit interested in hearing any bad news. If the Finneys were in custody and the Rangers were on the case, what else was there to say? It was more than she could have hoped for! As far as she was concerned, the Harmons could now be officially excused. They still had their Saturday play day left, and she intended to make the most of it. After all, she was on vacation.

  “Now, this gets a little complicated, so bear with me,” Bev began.

  Leigh looked around like a caged animal, but neither of the exits were close to her chair, and she didn’t fancy being tackled by Sue, much less Bonnie, if she attempted a premature escape.

  “We believe that the reason behind all this mayhem is the Finney Enterprises fortune,” Bev continued. “As some of you know, Cortland Finney was a dear friend of mine and Hap’s, but there’s no love lost between us and those no-good kids of his, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. A lot of evidence out there is pointing to the same picture, and it’s this: after Cort died, the kids got into some illegal shenanigans with their parents’ business. And when it looked like the law was about to catch up with them, they decided to sell out, split the cash four ways, and skip town. We don’t know how Ted Sullivan the CFO was mixed up in all that, but we do know he wound up dead and that the Rangers think the Finneys killed him. Next thing that happens is that a fancy diamond trader from New York City comes down to Port Mesten — and she winds up dead, too.”

  The crowd began to buzz with hushed murmuring. Clearly, not everyone had heard this part of the story.

  “That’s right,” Bev asserted. “Her name was Eva Menlin, and she came down here to make a special delivery. She came to deliver the Finney children their inheritance cashed out in diamonds, so they could escape the law and keep their money by sneaking it out of the country.”

  “Diamonds!” a woman in the back shouted, standing up. “That’s crazy! It sounds like some corny spy movie!”

  “You’re telling me,” Bev agreed. “But it’s real, Mary Lou. Uncut diamonds are as good as cash, but they’re small enough to hide in a pocket and you can take them on a plane and sell them anywhere in the world.”

  A few people swore under their breath, but one man called out impatiently, “So what’s the bad news? What do I care about the Finneys’ fortune, so long as Stanley’s killers are brought to justice? We’re here to make the outdoors safe for birders!”

  “I second that!”

  Bev’s stony scowl silenced the dissenters in a heartbeat. “Keep your knickers on, Wes! I’m getting to that part!” She paused a moment. It was a pause that Leigh suspected would have been shorter had Bev been more fond of the man complaining, but he had annoyed everyone the previous day by “gripping off” about seeing a white-tailed kite no one else saw — a major birding faux pas.

  “Here’s the deal,” Bev continued. “We don’t know where the diamonds that Eva brought with her are now. The Rangers may have them. Or the Finneys may have hidden them somewhere. But there are two facts that disturb us greatly, and they should disturb anybody who cares about the birdlife of Port Mesten.”

  Leigh raised an eyebrow. She hadn’t given much thought to where Eva’s diamonds had ended up, and she didn’t particularly care. But she did wonder what birds had to do with it.

  “Fact number one,” Bev began, ticking on her fingers. “None of the Finneys did skip town, and the diamond trader has been dead since at least Wednesday. If they got the diamonds from her before killing her, what have they been doing since? Why hang around town waiting to get arrested for three murders and their illegal business dealings?”

  “That makes no sense,” someone grumbled.

  “Exactly,” Bev agreed. “Fact number two: Somebody dropped Eva Menlin’s body in the water, then made the fatal mistake of murdering an innocent birder, early Thursday morning. Thursday night, somebody was wandering around those same wetlands in the very area where Stanley was chased and killed. Sandy and Raymond saw the tracks at dawn on Friday, and they were fresh since the rain at midnight. That means somebody — and they say it was somebody with big feet — was snooping around in the dark that night. There was nearly a full moon, but it was cloudy. Now, I ask you. Why?”

  The room went quiet.

  A sinking, slippery feeling oozed about Leigh’s insides. Footprints. The timing of them was odd, wasn�
��t it? Of course, any ghoulish bystander could be curious to go and see where the murder had occurred. That explanation wasn’t insane. It wasn’t even all that unlikely.

  But until now, Leigh hadn’t realized there was another option.

  “You think that somebody lost the diamonds!” a woman screeched in a high soprano. She was sitting directly behind Warren, and Leigh felt him wince.

  “Shush!” Bev said sternly. “We can’t let anyone overhear!”

  “Oh, my God!” a man exclaimed. “It could have happened! If the murderer had the diamonds in a pocket, and then chased Stanley across the mud flats, and they struggled…”

  “Indeed,” Bev replied. “He or she might not have noticed the diamonds were missing until after they’d fled the scene. And once daylight broke, they could hardly go running around searching in full view of everyone — with poor Stanley’s body lying right there.”

  “Why, I’d call the police if I saw anyone running around off the boardwalk out there, whether I knew about Stanley or not!” another woman said indignantly. “They’d be pestering the birds and damaging fragile habitat!”

  “Yes,” Bev said heavily. “They would.”

  “Well, do you think they found the diamonds?” someone else called out.

  As Bev paused and cleared her throat, Leigh made a note of how gifted the woman was at creating anticipation. The temperature in the room started to climb dramatically.

  “There’s been no official word on that,” Bev answered in a quiet voice.

  “Oh, but they must have!”

  “I certainly hope so!”

  “Well, the Finneys are all in custody now, aren’t they?”

  “Like that matters!” a woman said frantically, popping out of her seat. “Can you imagine what would happen if they didn’t find the diamonds? And if word got out?”

  A man stood up too. “Oh, good Lord! It would be a free-for-all!”

  The room exploded into anxious chatter, which Bev let flow for a while before reining in her audience again. “As far as Hap and I know, no one else has put all these facts together but us,” she emphasized. “Because no one but our group here and the Rangers know about those footprints — and we were the ones who alerted the Rangers. But that doesn’t mean it won’t get out. By now everyone in Port Mesten knows Eva was a diamond trader, and today it’ll spread all over creation that the Finneys have been arrested. As famous as the family is, reporters all over the country are going to be asking why, and soon. So I’m afraid that it’s not a matter of if this is all going to come out, my friends. It’s only a matter of when. We don’t know for a fact that no one else saw those footprints. We can’t even be sure the police themselves won’t leak something. God knows the locals have leaked enough already!”

  “Oh, but the herons!” Sue said miserably. “If people are tromping around all over the wetlands, the birds will leave and not come back!”

  “It’ll be a disaster area!” Bonnie wailed. “People’ll be jumping in their pickups all the way to Dallas and driving down with buckets and shovels and the forks off their kitchen tables! And never mind where the murder actually happened, either. Folks’ll be tearing up every inch of that preserve as sure as if it was bulldozed!”

  “Oh, but they can’t!”

  “The birds! The preserve will be ruined forever!”

  “We can’t let that happen!”

  “What can we do?”

  Bev shushed the crowd with a dramatic waving motion. “What can we do?” she asked. “That’s why we’re here right now! We have to think, and we have to think fast. Because once a mania like this starts, no one is going to be able to stop it. Let’s not fool ourselves! No fence, certainly no yellow tape… the lure of millions in diamonds will sure as shootin’ turn our bird-watching mecca into Texas’ next gold rush!”

  “NO!”

  “That’s terrible!”

  “Criminal!”

  “We have to stop it before it starts!”

  “Wait, did you say ‘millions?’”

  “Shut up, Wes!”

  “Now just hold on a minute here,” a relatively calm voice demanded. Leigh recognized Walter, the pathologist, standing up two rows behind her. “For all we know, the murderer found the diamonds already. Maybe he’s got them stashed somewhere. Or maybe the Rangers have already recovered them. Before we go into a full-out panic, it seems like we should make sure there’s something to panic about.”

  “I agree with you,” Bev said quickly. “But let me finish, because there’s more. It makes sense that if the diamonds were easy to find, like just lying in a bag or an envelope right out on top of the sand somewhere, then the murderer would have found them Thursday night, right?”

  “We still don’t know that he didn’t,” Walter persisted.

  “Yes, we do,” Bev retorted. “Because our dawn patrol this morning reported a boatload of fresh footprints in the very same spot — made just last night.”

  Leigh drew in a sharp breath. Warren looked over at her with an equally surprised expression.

  “Sandy and Raymond have been out again themselves, and they’ve verified it,” Bev continued. “The prints are the same big ol’ boots as before, there’s just more than twice as many of them. So whoever was out searching Thursday night almost certainly was back at it again on Friday.”

  “The sky was clear last night,” a woman remarked hopefully. “There was a nice moon. Maybe they did find what they were looking for.”

  “But if they found the diamonds, why didn’t they skip town before they could get arrested?” another woman argued.

  “Yeah, why did they go back home and go to bed?”

  “If the Rangers had the diamonds, would they tell us?”

  “The Rangers won’t confirm or deny whether anybody has any diamonds,” Bev answered. “But you have to figure that if they did recover them, there’d be no reason they wouldn’t want to crow about it. No, Hap and I have given this a lot of thought.”

  She paused for effect, then continued methodically. “It seems to us like if you lose something, and then you go back and retrace your steps and you can’t find it, that means one of two things. Number one: somebody else took it. Or number two: it’s dropped out of sight. And our money’s on number two. Think about it. Whatever little pouch or envelope those stones might have been in would have gotten waterlogged right quick. Whether it was dropped in the water or not, the way it rained afterward, it could have gotten washed into a gulley or settled down into the silt. And God forbid, if whatever the diamonds were in got opened up and they spilled out, nobody’d ever find all of them.”

  The room broke out in groans and sighs.

  “So as much as we’d like to hope otherwise,” Bev concluded, “we believe that those diamonds are lost somewhere in the preserve. And the story will get out, folks, sooner or later. You and I can’t control either of those things. The question for us is: how can we protect the birds?”

  Leigh startled a little. That particular question had hardly been uppermost on her mind. Nor had it been what she’d expected to hear. Maybe Bev and Hap were honest enough to have no interest in hunting for the diamonds themselves, but what made them think that an entire roomful of people, many of whom they barely knew, would feel the same? She looked at Warren and saw his brow furrowed with thought. Hap was sitting in a corner of the room behind Bev, looking equally thoughtful.

  “Maybe we could get some kind of legal protection on the preserve?” a women suggested. “So the local police could throw people out?”

  “We should contact the Audubon society. I bet they could help us.”

  “And the Sierra Club! They have a legal team.”

  “There has to be a way!”

  Leigh cocked an eyebrow, amazed. She would have been less surprised by a stampede on the door. But evidently, Bev was right about the primary concern of at least some of her fellow birders. Leigh’s mind wandered as the calm, intense discussion continued. Big footprints. She tried to
picture Bruce, or Russell, splashing around in the sand and the mud in the wee hours of the morning. The murderer would have to carry some kind of flashlight. He would be angry at his own clumsiness in losing the diamonds. And terribly worried about being seen. Again. Had he not already murdered one person who had accidentally witnessed something he shouldn’t have? He would not want to do it again.

  But hadn’t Bruce and Russell both approached her just yesterday — talking about her having something they both wanted — after the first set of footprints were made?

  They had.

  Leigh regrouped. She tried to overcome her own sexist assumptions. There was nothing stopping Sharonna or Janelle from tromping around in oversized rain boots, was there? And how did she know that one or the other wasn’t trained in jiu jitsu or something? Perhaps Janelle’s performance at the laundromat had been some carefully calculated act. Or maybe harmlessly nutty Sharonna was actually criminally insane Sharonna?

  Leigh dropped her face in her hands and found both slick with sweat. The room was a sauna again. She was sympathetic to Bev and the others; really, she was. But at this particular moment, she could muster only so much concern for a hypothetically endangered bird habitat. All she wanted was to get the hell out of here and take her husband for a walk on the beach.

  The Finneys had all been arrested. Nothing else mattered.

  “You okay?” Warren whispered, pulling one hand away from her face.

  Leigh nodded and smiled at him, but felt like both were a lie. Something was still bothering her. Something she almost remembered, but not quite. Something about the footprints. And possibly… the airport. Something that made her nervous.

  She told herself to cut it out. The Finneys were in jail. She should be celebrating and forgetting, not looking for unsettling vagaries to dwell on.

  “Let’s skip out as soon as there’s a lull,” she whispered back. “We have a date today. All day today.”

  He smiled and caressed her shoulder.

  I am on vacation, she told herself firmly, determined to revive her earlier optimism. And I am no longer involved!