Meg Langslow 17 - The Good, the Bad, and the Emus

by Donna Andrews

  “I figured it would be something like that,” I said. “Thanks.”

  On my way out, the dispatcher looked up from a phone call long enough to shove a bottle of cold water into my hands.

  “You drink that down,” she ordered. “Don’t want to see you hauled off to the hospital over in the county. They’re full up with heatstroke cases already.”

  I didn’t need to be told twice.

  Chapter 16

  Sipping my cold water, I made my way back to the car. What next? I cruised down the street, checking out the businesses on either side. A few, like the police station, had their doors propped open. One or two seemed to have generators running. Most were closed.

  I had a table full of books waiting for me at the library, so I headed there. But there was only one car in its parking lot, and a sign in the front door: CLOSED.

  I was turning to go when the door popped open.

  “Sorry!” Anne, the librarian, had opened the door and stepped out. “We’re closed because of the power outage.” She was wearing an LED headlight, similar to the ones Miss Annabel and the chief had, and thoughtfully flicked it off rather than shining it in my face.

  “I know,” I said. I’d already figured out that the power outage explained why downtown was so moribund. Even more moribund than usual. Though I should probably still keep an eye out for those mutant cockroaches. “Just figuring out what to do with myself instead of the research I was planning.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’d let you in to work by a window, but I’m only staying a few minutes myself, to make sure everything’s secure. We’re in for a heat wave starting today. Temperatures predicted to be in the high nineties, heat index of a hundred and ten, so in an hour or so this place will be an oven.”

  “I knew Miss Annabel had lost power,” I said. “But I didn’t know till I came into town that it was so widespread. Is the whole town affected?”

  “Half the state is affected!” She sounded remarkably cheerful about it. Or perhaps she was one of those people who found some consolation in being the first to know and share the latest bad news. Of course, she was an improvement over the chief, who probably knew all of this and hadn’t said a word about it. Or maybe the chief didn’t care about the power situation beyond the borders of Riverton.

  “Any prediction on when we’ll get power back?” I asked.

  “Not a word.” Her expression turned grim. “That was one huge storm system last night—there’s hundreds of thousands of people in the dark, all the way from Northern Virginia down to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. They say they’re still assessing the damage and calling in crews from other regions. I’ve heard that before. Usually means we’re in for a long wait. We were out for three weeks with Hurricane Isabel and again with Irene.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  “Look, if there’s anything you particularly need looked up, let me know,” she said. “I can’t do anything online or with microfiche until the power comes back, but I can haul a few books home and do research where it’s a few degrees cooler. And if my sister down in Richmond gets power back before we do, I might go down and stay with her, and I’ll just be twiddling my thumbs.”

  I thought about it for a few moments and decided to trust her. She was a fan of Grandfather’s. And a librarian.

  “Any chance you could do some research on whether anyone here in Riverton has a particular reason to hate my grandfather?” I asked.

  “You mean like antienvironmental nutcases?” she said.

  “Or people whose business or political plans he’s thwarted,” I said. “Or people he’s embarrassed. Or fired. Or whatever. He makes a lot of enemies.”

  “Yes, but he does a lot of good along with it,” she said. “I’ll see what I can turn up.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “And don’t tell anyone.”

  “Right,” she said. “Because I don’t want to get the next bottle of poisoned alcohol. Although according to our local EMTs, the poor man who drank the Scotch is going to pull through, largely due to your father’s figuring out so quickly what was wrong with him.”

  I nodded.

  “And look on the bright side,” she said. “Now you’re free to join in the emu roundup! How’s it going, anyway? Have they got many birds?”

  “I was up there this morning for a while,” I said. “And when I left, they hadn’t started any actual rounding up. Nothing much can happen until they locate the birds.”

  “They’re not still hanging around Pudding Mountain?”

  “Pudding Mountain?” I echoed. “Is that different from Biscuit Mountain?”

  “Completely different,” she said. “It’s where the ladies used to feed the emus.”

  “You mean Miss Annabel and Ms. Delia?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Only in the winter, when they thought the birds might have trouble foraging. A couple of times a week Ms. Delia would have Thor Larsen borrow his uncle’s truck, load up with grain at the feed store, and haul it up to where the emus hung out.”

  “Did Miss Annabel keep it up after Ms. Delia’s death?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Though poor Thor had to do it all by himself, since Miss Annabel doesn’t go out.”

  I wondered, briefly, if Miss Annabel had forgotten to mention this or if she’d deliberately withheld the information to make things harder for Grandfather.

  “Where can I find Thor?” I asked aloud.

  “He’s working for the summer down at his uncle’s car repair shop,” she said. “Larsen’s Auto Shop. It’s on the north side, about two blocks out.”

  I’d already figured out that was how Rivertonians gave directions. The only two roads in town that were more than a block long met up and circumscribed what locals rather inaccurately called the town square, a small circular grassy space large enough for four benches at the base of the statue of an obscure Civil War general. Locals could say “two blocks north” or “about half a mile out to the east” and everyone knew they meant from the town square along the one road that went in that direction.

  I thanked Anne, left the library—itself “a block south” in local parlance—and paused at the door of my car. The shop was only three blocks away. I felt guilty not walking such a short distance. But if I could arrange for Thor to take a break from his work to show me the location of the emus, it would help to have my car ready and waiting.

  And besides, at least my car had air conditioning.

  Larsen’s was busy, with mechanics working in all three indoor bays and quite a few vehicles parked on the grounds, presumably awaiting either a mechanic’s attention or their owners’ return. Mostly pickups, which seemed to be the local norm. But the place was a lot quieter than most repair shops I’d ever visited. It took me a few moments to realize that none of the mechanics were using power tools.

  “That’s it,” one of them snapped, tossing a wrench on the floor with a loud clatter. “Nothing more I can do without juice. Is anyone working on the damned generator?”

  I walked into the small office, and found a man I assumed to be Mr. Larsen himself talking on the phone. He was burly and his face almost completely covered with a wiry red beard. He held up a finger to acknowledge my arrival and indicate that he’d be a minute. I nodded and parked myself on the available customer seating—a couch that appeared to have been constructed by chopping off the rear end of a vintage car and inserting the matching rear car seat in the space once occupied by the trunk. The car seat was black leather, the car body fire-engine red, and the effect was oddly elegant, making the utilitarian clutter of the paper- and part-filled office seem shabbier by contrast. And it was surprisingly comfortable.

  I deduced from Mr. Larsen’s side of the conversation that he was negotiating to get a part for his silent generator from a junkyard some half an hour’s drive away.

  “I’ll send Thor down to get it,” he said. “Thanks.”

  With that he hung up and looked up at me.

  “Oh, dear,” I said. “I could
n’t help but overhear that you’re sending Thor on an errand, and I was hoping to hire him.”

  “Hire him?” Larsen looked puzzled. “You need something repaired?”

  “I wanted to hire him to take me out to find the emus,” I said. “I understand he might know where they hang out.”

  Larsen smiled, and leaned back in his chair.

  “You must be with that bunch camping in back of Miss Lee’s,” he said. “With that TV zoologist. He can’t find them himself?”

  “He can, and will eventually if there are any left to be found,” I said. “But it would save a lot of time if we knew where to start. And Thor used to take Ms. Delia Mason up to feed them. I figured maybe it would work better if we started where they were fed a few months ago rather than where they lived several years back. But if you’re sending him to fetch a part—”

  “I can send someone else.” Larsen turned around to a window in the back of his office, where a view of the busy interior of the garage was visible. He lifted the window sash with one hand and leaned slightly toward it.

  “Thor!” he shouted. “In here!”

  A tall, gangling teenager with a protuberant Adam’s apple and a scruffy mop of rusty red hair hustled into the room. Larsen jerked his thumb at me.

  “Lady wants your game tracking skills,” he said, with a chuckle.

  Thor turned to me with a polite but puzzled frown.

  “It’s a pretty long time till hunting season, you know,” he said. “Or are you a photographer or something?”

  His expression clearly said that I didn’t look like a hunter.

  “I’m looking for emus,” I said.

  A pained look crossed his face.

  “Finding them could be pretty impossible,” he said. “And I’m not sure why you’d want to. Couple of people around town have tried eating them, and they say the meat’s kind of tough and stringy.”

  “We don’t want to eat them,” I said. “We want to rescue them. I’m with Dr. Blake’s expedition.”

  “Oh, well, that’s different,” he said. “If my uncle doesn’t need me for a while…”

  “Go on.” The elder Larsen waved his hand genially, granting permission. “I’ll send Virgil down to Winchester for the part for the generator. Until he gets back, there’s not much you can do around here.”

  “My car’s outside,” I said.

  “No offense,” Thor said. “But there isn’t a paved road up there, so unless your car has four-wheel drive…”

  “Take the truck.” Mr. Larsen tossed over a set of keys as he opened the window into the garage again. “Virgil! Get in here!”

  Within a few minutes Thor and I were on our way. At his suggestion, we stopped by the feed store for a few bags of the grain mix the ladies were in the habit of hauling out to the emus in wintertime. Then we headed back into town, rounded the statue in the center, and took the road that went by the library.

  “So where are we going?” I asked. “Unless my mental map of the town is completely backward, we’re heading south, rather than north, where the emu ranch used to be.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “When Mr. Eaton first turned the emus loose, they pretty much hung around the ranch. But then this guy who had the nearest farm started taking potshots at them ’cause they were scaring his cows and eating his crops.”

  “Was that true?” I asked. “Or was it just an excuse for taking potshots at the emus?”

  “It was pretty much true,” he said. “But it wasn’t their fault! No one was feeding them anymore, and—”

  “Hey, I’m on the emus’ side, remember?” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Anyway, Ms. Delia said we needed to lure them away to a safer place. We started leaving feed out for them near the farm, then we gradually moved it farther and farther away till we had them trained to get fed over on Pudding Mountain. Which is completely on the opposite side of town from the ranch, so we figured they’d be a lot safer there.”

  Biscuit Mountain and now Pudding Mountain. I wondered if perhaps whatever early explorer had named the geological features surrounding Riverton had been low on provisions at the time.

  “No trigger-happy farmers near Pudding Mountain?” I asked.

  “Not many,” he said. “Most of it’s inside the national park, so there’s no hunting allowed. And the Park Service is pretty keen on enforcing that.”

  “And how does the Park Service feel about their land becoming an unofficial emu refuge?”

  “Probably not too happy.” Thor chuckled and shook his head. “But the idea wasn’t for them to live there forever. Just to keep them from getting shot till we could get the wildlife sanctuary set up where the ranch used to be.”

  “You stopped feeding them at the end of the winter?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “So would they be down in the national park now or would they tend to drift back toward town where they could nibble on vegetable gardens?”

  He shrugged.

  “Ms. Delia says they’ll travel a long way for food,” he said. “Which explains why even when we were feeding them, we’d hear about sightings miles away. But not many sightings over on Biscuit Mountain.”

  Which could mean the emus weren’t returning to Biscuit Mountain, or perhaps those with an inclination to return to Biscuit Mountain fell victim to the trigger-happy farmer and were never sighted again.

  “So south it is,” I said. “Lead on, Macduff.”

  “It’s Larsen, actually,” he said. Evidently Macbeth wasn’t on the syllabus at Riverton High School.

  Thor was fairly taciturn on the first part of our drive. After he responded to my first couple of remarks with monosyllables, I decided to give up. Let the generation gap stand. I tried to enjoy the scenery as rolling fields gave way to steeper and steeper hills.

  But as we were winding along a narrow road up the side of something that had definitely begun to earn the word “mountain” instead of “hill,” Thor suddenly spoke up.

  “Look,” he said. “Do you think you could talk to Miss Annabel for me?”

  “About what?”

  “Tell her I didn’t do anything to the generator.”

  “I think she knows that, Thor,” I said.

  “I don’t think she believes it,” he said. “I did ask her and Ms. Delia to let me work on it a few times. Okay, lots of times. I guess I bugged them a lot about it, but I was pretty sure I could make it work better.”

  “How?”

  “Well, the problem was—wait.” He looked me and frowned. “Do you want the technical explanation? Because my dad says I have an annoying tendency to lecture people on stuff like that. Mechanical and engineering stuff. I’d be happy to tell you exactly, but maybe you’d rather have the nontechnical explanation.”

  “Let’s start with the nontechnical stuff,” I said. “What did you tell the ladies was wrong with it?”

  “It was too noisy, and using too much fuel,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I could have fixed it—my dad’s generator at home had the same problem, and I fixed it. It’s running fine now. And I could have installed an on/off switch in the house, so they didn’t have to go out in the cold. But the ladies never wanted me to do it—I think they were a little worried that I’d mess it up or hurt myself.”

  “Or maybe they didn’t mind it being a little noisy, since Mr. Weaver bore the main brunt of that.”

  “Yeah.” He grinned and chuckled softly. “That idea occurred to me, too. But the point is, I knew I could fix it—but I knew better than to do it without their permission. Can you tell Miss Annabel that?”

  “You can’t tell her yourself?”

  “I would if I could, but she won’t see me.” He looked hurt. “I can understand that she doesn’t need me so much anymore—it’s not like she ever goes anywhere that she’d need me to drive her, like I did Ms. Delia. But I’d just like to talk to her. Give her my condolences. Tell her in person that I didn’t do anything to the generator.”

  “Sh
e’s hired my PI friend to try to prove that Theo Weaver killed her cousin,” I said. “Do you really think she’d do that if she thought Ms. Delia’s death was caused by something you did to the generator?”

  He looked surprised, and almost cheerful.

  “That’s good,” he said. “It’d be nice to know she doesn’t blame me.” His face fell again. “Still, I wish she’d talk to me. I used to like driving Ms. Delia around, and then coming back and listening to her tell Miss Annabel everything we’d seen and done. And they’d serve me cookies, and we’d talk. It was like they were actually interested in hearing what I thought about stuff, instead of telling me to shut up like most grownups. I liked them. They were nice ladies. Well, Miss Annabel is and Ms. Delia was.”

  “I’ll see if I can bring the subject up,” I said.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  We fell silent again. I wasn’t sure what Thor was thinking, but I was struggling with a sudden feeling of resentment against him. He’d known my grandmother. They’d been friends. And I’d never get to meet her.

  And it wasn’t his fault. Instead of resenting him, I should work on getting to know him. He was another source of information about Cordelia.

  Although not, I suspected, the information I most wanted to know.

  A little while later, Thor slowed down in front of a faded sign announcing that we were entering the Pudding Mountain National Park. A weathered split-rail fence ran along the road, no doubt to mark the boundaries of the park. A narrow, badly rutted dirt road led through the opening in the fence.

  “Hang onto your hat,” Thor said, as he pulled onto the road.

  We jounced and bounced along through the woods—and rather steeply uphill—for about three miles. Neither of us spoke. Thor seemed to be concentrating on avoiding the worst of the ruts, and I was afraid if I opened my mouth, a sudden jolt might cause me to bite my tongue off. Thor finally pulled to a stop when we reached a small clearing on the bank of a stream. The road forded the stream and continued, still uphill.