A Murder of Crows

by Jan Dunlap

  My eyes skipped from one big man to the other.

  Noah looked pleased.

  Boo looked distressed.

  Everything I’d ever learned about body language was screaming at me that these guys were hiding something.

  I ran Noah’s remarks through my head again and could come up with only one reason why Gina Knorsen would find it funny that her old friend Boo Metternick had suggested someone else was the Bonecrusher.

  Because Boo was doing exactly what those former film studio workers in England had done in World War II: he was setting up a decoy. By insisting that Paul Brand was the logical choice for the former celebrity wrestler, Boo was running his own campaign of deception to distract anyone from finding out the real identity of the Bonecrusher.

  Boo absolutely knew who the real Bonecrusher was, despite his protest of innocence.

  And now, so did I.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I settled into my seat for the drive back home, still mulling over the events—and revelations—of the day in Spinit.

  Boo had decided to stay over at his folks’ place for the night, so I was flying solo in my cardinal-red SUV. Since his dad and mom had made a date to take Sara to a World War II memorabilia show in the Twin Cities on Saturday, Boo would catch a ride back to Savage with them. Sara, after Vern’s urging and a few phone calls, was able to get into an Open House overnight dorm session at the University of Minnesota in Morris nearby. Fired by the old veteran’s enthusiasm and his confidence in her future, Sara wanted to explore the history major that was offered at the campus.

  Like I already said, Vern Metternick was proving to be a much better college motivator than our Amazing Mr. Wist, our guest hypnotist.

  And we didn’t even have to convince Sara she was a chicken, either.

  As for Noah Knorsen—after he got cleaned up from his brawl with Boo and joined the rest of us at the dining table—I discovered that he and I had a lot in common when it came to older sisters. Like my own big sister, Lily, Noah’s big sister, Gina, had always assumed it was her job to keep him in line.

  “Tell him about the time she tied you up and tossed you in the bathtub,” Boo had said between bites of his hot ham and cheese sandwich.

  “And you,” he added sternly, pointing at Sara, seated next to his dad on the other side of the table, “have to promise you won’t tell her you know this story.”

  Sara, wide-eyed, crossed her heart. “She tied him up?”

  “With duct tape,” Noah said. “My dad had an evening meeting to go to, and as soon as he left, she tied me up and threw me in the tub so I wouldn’t bug her while she talked with some boyfriend on the phone. She said it was the only way she knew I wouldn’t get into any trouble.”

  Boo’s parents snickered.

  “But she thought she was being protective of you, right?” I said.

  “That’s what she says now,” he replied. “She wanted to be sure I didn’t stick a fork into an electric socket or something while she wasn’t looking, but I think it was a good excuse to make sure she knew exactly where I was and what I was doing.”

  He tried not to grin, but failed. “I had a habit of listening to her phone calls on the extension in the other room and then making comments during her conversations.”

  “Shame on you,” said Tillie, passing him a bowl of potato chips.

  “What’s an extension?” Sara asked Vern.

  “I’ll explain it later,” Vern said.

  “The truth,” Noah continued, “is that Gina and I can fight like cats and dogs, but she’d do anything to help me out when I really needed it.”

  I thought of my sister, Lily. People who didn’t know us well always said we got along about as well as oil and water, but that was only on the surface of our relationship. Once you got past the sibling rivalry piece, Lily and I were very fond of each other … in a resentful sort of way.

  Just kidding.

  The truth for us was similar to Gina and Noah’s relationship: when the chips were down, we were there for each other, no matter what.

  I almost swerved off the road.

  No matter what.

  A terrible scenario was forming in my head.

  How far would Gina really go for her little brother?

  She’d housed him in Henderson while he waited for the utility job that never materialized. She’d given up the job that she loved to move to the Twin Cities, just to provide him with better job opportunities. If he’d threated to kill Sonny Delite, would she commit murder herself to protect her brother from his own plan of revenge? Could she have listened to that message on her phone after Rick left her Saturday night and gone to meet Sonny after all, with the intention of poisoning him and removing him from her and Noah’s lives for good? Was that why she’d been so upset after talking with Noah at the Education Center on Sunday morning—because she’d killed Sonny, only to find Noah determined to leave the job he’d finally landed because of Sonny’s scheduled appearance there?

  No.

  No to all of the above, in fact.

  Not because I absolutely, completely, totally, indisputably, knew for sure that none of that was true, but because I wasn’t going to accuse another person of murder today. I’d already done that once, and look where it had got me. My sore arm was already showing a bruise.

  More to the point, I still didn’t have a clear lead on who killed Sonny Delite. I could think of plenty of motives, and it seemed like everyone who could possibly be a suspect would have had the opportunity, but I was no closer to identifying Sonny’s murderer than when I had gotten up this morning and stumbled into the kitchen to start my morning coffee.

  Boo, I was sure, was blameless when it came to Sonny’s death. Yes, he had a temper, and yes, he was strong enough to drag a dead body halfway across the Arb if need be, but if he’d gone to harvest hemlock with his pathetic knowledge of plants, he was just as likely to have picked any of a hundred weeds that grow along Minnesota ditches. As for a motive, Boo would have to have been a total idiot if he thought that killing the man who had wronged Gina would steer her into his arms. From what I had seen of Boo both in and outside of Savage High, “idiot” was not a description that fit him.

  Secretive, yes.

  Deceptive, yes.

  Strongest Man Alive?

  Apparently.

  But idiot?

  Not a chance.

  Noah, too, had appeared to have a strong motive, as well as the perfect opportunity, but his insistence of innocence had rung true when he’d told Boo that he’d never cause Gina grief over Sonny. Not only that, but after I had the chance to spend a little time with him over lunch, every counselor instinct I had agreed that Noah was not killer material. As for running into him at the Arb on Sunday morning so close to the scene of the crime, my best guess was that he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  It happens.

  I should know—I’m the one birder in the state of Minnesota who could start a list of the birds I found near dead bodies.

  And then there was Arlene and her plan to guarantee herself a lifetime income of hefty wind farm leasing payments. Without a doubt, the timing of Arlene’s attempt to blackmail Sonny seemed too coincidental to have nothing to do with his death, but I couldn’t find a connection that made any sense. Killing Sonny, or having him killed—she was in Spinit over the weekend, grounded by her truck repair—just didn’t make any sense at all. If he was going to be her goose that laid the golden nest egg, she sure wouldn’t have poisoned him before the nest egg got laid.

  I couldn’t claim any kind of familiarity with Arlene Weebler after my brief interaction with her at the Metternick farm, but even that short introduction to the woman had me agreeing with Vern’s assessment of her as a loose cannon. For all anyone knew, maybe Arlene decided that if she couldn’t get the leasing payments, she’d at least get revenge on the man who’d made a fool of her; from what I’d seen of Arlene, I wouldn’t put it past her to round up some long-distance
accomplices to help her get what she wanted.

  So, while I knew she herself hadn’t poured the poisoned tea for my old friend, until Sonny’s murderer was identified and arrested, I wasn’t going to eliminate Arlene Weebler from my personal list of suspects.

  And I hadn’t even gotten around to Red and Prudence Delite, yet.

  I shook my head in disgust.

  I needed distraction.

  I needed to clear my mind.

  I needed to do some more birding.

  I looked out my windshield and saw a large flock of crows heading towards the west.

  “Works for me,” I said, following their lead at the next intersection of county roads.

  I called up my mental map of Stevens County and got my bearings—no GPS required, thanks to the years I’d spent driving the back roads of Minnesota in search of birds. In another ten minutes, I’d be at the Alberta Marsh State Wildlife Management Area, home of Gorder Lake, or Frog Lake, as it was known in the 1964 Birding Almanac of Stevens County. Because the area was filled with wetlands, ponds and old farm ditches, the lake was one of the best spots in the state for certain water birds like Western Grebes. With a little luck, maybe I’d be able to add another rarity to my day’s count.

  “Eat your heart out, Rick,” I added, thinking of my laid-up buddy back in Savage. He’d been disappointed enough that he had to miss his chance at a Ferruginous Hawk for another year, but if I came home with a second score in the same day—make that a third, since I’d seen the Purple Sandpiper, too—he’d probably pull out his department-issued gun and shoot me.

  Like he wasn’t already in enough trouble with his boss for being a suspect in Sonny’s murder.

  I shook off the lingering frustration I felt after coming up to Spinit and finding nothing solid to help Rick out of his lousy situation. Gorder Lake was ahead of me, and it was time to focus on birds, not murder.

  Although I hadn’t seen it mentioned on the MOU list serve in the last week, the Alberta Marsh State WMA had become almost legendary over the years for the unusual birds that were sighted there, including Cinnamon Teal and Burrowing Owl. The most famous rare find in the area that I knew about, though, was the first Minnesota record of a Ruff. Almost fifty years ago, two birders from Duluth came to the spring meeting of the MOU at the university in Morris and went out birding, only to find the Ruff—it was originally called the Eurasian Ruff—in a slough on US 28 near Alberta. At the time, it was not only rare to see this international visitor inland, since it’s typically only found on the U.S. coast, but the sighting was a national record for so far north inland.

  Since then, Ruffs had made a few more random appearances in the state, but my chances of seeing one in October in Stevens County were about as good as the probability of Elvis making a comeback tour to Minneapolis, if you know what I mean: it wasn’t going to happen in my lifetime.

  Beyond that, I wouldn’t know.

  Geez, I’d never thought of that before. Do you get to go birding in heaven?

  I’d have to start a new list.

  I turned onto the road leading to Gorder Lake just as a Killdeer flew past the car. If it had had a brood this year it would have fledged months ago, so I wouldn’t be seeing its classic decoy behavior if I surprised one in the field. According to a friend of mine who worked at a wildlife rehab center, Killdeers showed up in the center on a fairly regular basis, not because they’re actually injured, but because they’re such great actors. To protect its young from an approaching predator, an adult Killdeer flopped around as if it has a broken wing, attempting to draw the danger away from the nest. Unfortunately, the adult was so convincing, that people who saw the bird but don’t know about its decoy act assumed the Killdeer needed help and captured it to bring it into a rehab center.

  Of course, that left the babies in the nest alone and defenseless, which was exactly what the Killdeer didn’t want. At some point in their future evolution, I assumed that Killdeers were going to have to rethink their deception/protection strategy, thanks to us kind-hearted, but ignorant, humans.

  I parked the car and paused.

  Thinking about the Killdeer had jostled an idea loose in my head.

  The Killdeer acted as a decoy, and it deliberately attempted to draw attention away from its nest to keep its young hidden and undetected.

  Just like Boo Metternick had attempted to divert attention away from himself and his past history as a circus performer, along with the question of the Bonecrusher’s real identity.

  Boo had fooled me on both counts. I never would have imagined him touring the country as the Strongest Man Alive, and he’d just about had me convinced that Savage’s new art teacher Paul Brand was the Crusher. The ten dollars I bet Alan had already begun to sprout wings to fly right into his billfold.

  Distraction and deception worked, and not just for the former film studio artists of the Allied forces during World War II.

  So now I needed to ask myself: Was Sonny’s killer using a similar strategy of misdirection to keep himself—or herself—safe from a murder rap?

  I groaned.

  Using that approach, I might as well start from scratch, since every person even remotely connected to Sonny’s murder seemed to be pointing the finger at someone else for something. I figured Gina had picked the hemlock for the poisoned tea; Gina thought her brother Noah might be capable of murder; Noah said that Boo, “of all people” should know that he, Noah, could keep a secret (which secret, I still didn’t know); Boo accused Noah of lying; and Vern and Tillie Metternick blamed Arlene Weebler for trying to dishonestly lock up a wind farm land lease by seducing Sonny Delite in the bed of her pink pickup.

  If I thought back to Sunday morning at Millie’s, I could name even more people blaming others: Alan noted that Sonny had made plenty of enemies in the utilities community; Prudence claimed that Red had painted a virtual target on Sonny; Rick’s police buddies admitted he’d told them to arrest me; and Rick himself fingered Mr. Lenzen as the one who let the cat out of the bag about the new celebrity wrestler incognito on the Savage High School faculty.

  I’d even gotten in on the name-blaming game, too: I blamed Rick for squealing on me to Mr. Lenzen every time I was involved in a murder case.

  Obviously, we were all guilty of something.

  Which also made it obvious that I needed more to distract myself from a certain birder’s mysterious death than a short hour or so of looking for shorebirds at Gorder Lake.

  What I needed was for someone to put a name to Sonny’s killer, and the sooner that happened, the better.

  Determined to shut it all out of my head, I grabbed my binoculars from under my seat and hopped out of the car. The sun was bright, the air clear, the water calm. In the distance, the prairie rolled west, studded with small groves of trees and more wetlands.

  In front of me, the surface of the lake was dotted with ducks and geese. Northern Shovelers and Mallards dabbled along the shallows, while a handful of Redheads and a raft of Ruddy Ducks floated out in the deeper parts of the lake where they could dive for food. A large flock of Snow Geese dominated one side of the lake, and it was there that I trained my binos to see if I could pick out a Ross’s Goose among them.

  Not that a Ross’s Goose would be a real find, since they’re rare but regular in Minnesota, showing up sporadically in specific types of habitat, and often with a flock of Snow Geese. I just liked finding them since it was a test of my identification skills. To the untrained eye, a Ross’s Goose looks almost exactly like a Snow Goose, except that the Ross’s is slightly smaller. The real key to differentiating between the two is the bill: the larger goose’s is a bit heavier and longer than the Ross’s, and it sports a distinctive dark “grin” patch. Without that tell-tale clue, the Ross’s Goose can easily pass for a Snow Goose, especially at a distance. I focused my binos and looked at the individual geese on the outer edges of the floating flock.

  Bingo.

  Dipping its slightly smaller head into the water with ex
actly the same motion of its larger companions, a Ross’s Goose was idly paddling between two Snow Geese, its dull pink, stubby bill lacking a grin patch, a clear verification of what I suspected from its size. As I dropped my binos back to my chest, I caught a sparkling glint of reflection from back in the trees to my left.

  I wasn’t alone at Gorder Lake.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I froze for only a moment before I felt a sharp pain in my right shoulder. Spinning around, I came face-to-face with …

  “White.”

  Scary Stan, my birding archrival and barely articulate sometimes-friend.

  “What did you shoot at my shoulder?” I asked him.

  Stan had been a covert government agent in his earlier years, and now, along with his day job as an accountant, he occasionally field-tested hunting equipment. My sister, Lily, once referred to him as a grown man playing at being Robin Hood.

  Maybe I would have called him that, too, if he wasn’t holding a small tube in his fingers that looked very much like a dart launcher. I immediately clapped my hand over my shoulder where I’d felt the momentary sting.

  “You are going to tell me it wasn’t a poison dart, aren’t you?”

  “If you say so,” he replied in his usual limited conversational mode.

  “I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’ but if I go into convulsions and die,” I tried to think of the worst possible thing I could threaten him with, “you’re going to have to answer to Lily.”

  Stan blanched. He’d had a very short-lived relationship with my sister before she was married, but it had been long enough for him to learn that nobody crossed Lily White and survived—intact—to tell the tale.

  “You won’t die,” he said. “Yet.”

  “Thank you very much, Stan. I appreciate the clarification.” I pointed to the gadget in his hand. “What is that?”