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

by Donna Andrews

  Grandfather was standing in the middle of the clearing, staring up into the sky with binoculars. I strolled over to stand beside him.

  “I’d have assumed up was the one direction we didn’t need to be scoping out,” I said. “Unless you think these emus have evolved here in the wild and regained the power of flight.”

  “Not very likely,” he said. “Their wings are less than a foot long—no way they could fly. The Andean condor weighs only half of what an emu does, and they need a wingspan of eight to ten feet to fly with. So extrapolating from that, unless the emus developed a wingspan of—”

  “I was kidding about the flying emus, you know,” I said. “But I did wonder why you’re staring up at the sky with your binoculars?”

  “Looking for our air support,” he said. “Aha! Here they come.”

  A large, rainbow-striped hot air balloon drifted into view. Grandfather waved vigorously at it. I could see tiny hands waving back from the balloon’s gondola.

  “So they’re going to drift around, hoping to spot the emus through the trees?” I asked.

  “They’re going to drift around using thermal imaging cameras to pinpoint the locations of the emus,” he said. “And when they do, they can radio the birds’ positions back to us. Caroline will be liaising with the horses, and your Dad with the bikers. They’re all carrying radios.”

  I wanted to ask how the balloonists were going to tell the emus from other thermal images on their scopes, such as deer, wild turkeys, and random human hikers. Probably best not to sound a discouraging note.

  For a while, the bikers and riders milled about while the balloon drifted around and radioed back reports to Grandfather. After forty-five minutes or so, Grandfather let out a whoop.

  “Emu sighting! Emu sighting!”

  The bikers and riders flipped a coin and the bikers won. They donned their helmets, and a couple of them pulled out GPS machines and entered the reported coordinates of the emus. Then they all sped off into the woods.

  Ten minutes later the balloon reported another sighting, and the equestrians galloped off in a slightly different direction.

  Doubtless everything was very lively for bike and horse riders, and even more for the film crews that were scrambling to keep up with them. But back here in the clearing with nothing to watch but Grandfather, Dad, and Caroline talking on their radios—and the ever-present volunteer guards hovering—the level of excitement dropped considerably. More of the locals began drifting away. The boys were getting restless, and after three games of Uno, they began to ask if they could go for another ride in Caroline’s caravan.

  “I have an idea,” Michael said. “Everybody into the van!”

  I didn’t ask what his idea was. I wasn’t even sure he had one. Maybe he was just getting us into motion and planning to think of an idea on the fly. I’d been known to do that when dealing with cranky, bored toddlers.

  But he definitely had a plan today. We took off down one of the faint dirt tracks that led out of the clearing and, after several minutes of rough uphill driving, we pulled into another small clearing.

  “Our official emu observation tower!” he exclaimed.

  It was actually a fire lookout tower. Either it had been abandoned or the danger of fire wasn’t high enough today to be worth staffing it. It looked sturdy enough, its metal was unrusted, and it was at least forty feet high and at the top of a sizable hill. We were at the foot of a steep gravel track leading up to it.

  “Castle!” Jamie exclaimed.

  “Space ship!” Josh countered.

  “I talked to one of the forest rangers yesterday,” Michael said as he downshifted and steered the Twinmobile toward the gravel road. “He said hikers are welcome to use it as long as it’s unmanned. And this particular tower has an excellent view of today’s search area.”

  “I’m glad someone has talked to the rangers,” I said. “I’ve been worried that Grandfather might be barging in with the bikes and horses and balloons without clearing any of it with them.”

  “He would have,” Michael said. “But Caroline had the same worry and contacted the local ranger station.”

  “Caroline is a wonder.”

  “And found that the park rangers were already aware of our mission and enthusiastic about getting rid of their unwanted ratite guests,” he went on. “Miss Annabel had already called to arrange everything.”

  “Miss Annabel is also growing on me,” I said. “If she’d just break down and talk about Cordelia—”

  “Give it time,” he said.

  I nodded. I realized I felt guilty about Annabel. More than once since learning about my grandmother’s death, I found myself wondering how different things would be if Annabel had been the one killed in the generator explosion. If I’d actually gotten to meet my grandmother. As I got to know Miss Annabel, and even to like her, in spite of her difficult and prickly personality, I was thinking that less. But still, I felt guilty that I’d thought it at all. Did it mean that subconsciously I was blaming Annabel for being alive? And wouldn’t it make more sense to blame my grandfather for waiting so long before hiring Stanley? Or even blame Cordelia herself for not getting in touch for more than half a century?

  Water under the bridge. Annabel might be a little eccentric, but she was intelligent, sensible, and admirably efficient. Maybe instead of regretting my lost chance of meeting Cordelia, I should focus on appreciating the cousin I had left. Not just as a doorway to Cordelia, but for her own sake.

  In fact, at the moment I liked Annabel a lot better than the elusive Cordelia.

  I was startled out of my reveries. The van had stopped. The boys erupted out of their car seats and dashed toward the tower.

  “Hey!” Michael called as he ran after them. “Last one to the top of the tower is a rotten egg!”

  Michael supervised the boys’ scramble up the stairway to the tower while Natalie and I, resigned to rotten egg status, followed more slowly with the picnic provisions and mats for the boys to nap on later.

  At the top of what felt like several hundred flights of stairs we entered the cabin atop the tower through a trapdoor in the floor. The cabin was only about ten feet square, but that was plenty of room for the five of us. And the windows were low enough for the boys to see through, but not so low that I’d worry about them falling out.

  “Look!” Michael pointed. “You can see the balloon!”

  He handed the boys their binoculars. Josh and Jamie alternated between waving at the balloon and watching it for a few minutes, while Natalie and I passed out fruit and juice boxes. Michael appeared to be scanning the hillsides below us, and I was pleased to see that there were stretches of meadow as well as woods, so we might actually see something after all. I even saw some of the horseback wranglers trotting through a clearing on the side of the next hill over, and closer at hand, we could not only see but hear a posse of bikers buzzing along a meadow. And what was that ahead of the bikers?

  “Look!” Michael called. “The bikers have found some emus!”

  We watched for the next several hours as both the crews of wranglers chased emus, cornered emus, and very occasionally captured them. The balloon drifted to and fro overhead, usually able to find a contrary breeze, but never quite managing to get into a useful position when there was actual spotting to be done. Eventually our tower became the expedition’s main emu-spotting post, to the boys’ great delight.

  Toward the late afternoon, when it became obvious from the boys’ steadily increasing crankiness that they were in dire need of naps that weren’t going to happen here in the tower, Michael and I packed them into the Twinmobile.

  “You stay here and keep spotting,” Michael said, over the shrieks of agony and outrage from the boys. “I’ll help Natalie put them down for their naps, and then she can watch them while I do a little more prep for my summer classes.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Still, I was relieved—though not surprised—when Caroline radioed to tell me that by th
e time they had passed her, the boys had already been asleep in their car seats.

  It was a long day, but a more successful one. The horse wranglers captured three emus, while the bike wranglers managed four. Around six o’clock, Grandfather called a halt so we could transport the emus we’d already captured back well before dark. And while sunset wasn’t for another two and a half hours, it had started getting dark in the long valleys on the eastern side of Pudding Mountain.

  When we arrived at camp, the wranglers managed a smooth transfer of the emus into the holding pen. Grandfather and Clarence banded the birds for identification purposes and Thor provisionally identified them by name.

  “Of course, Ms. Delia would have known for sure,” he said, with a sigh. “She was amazing.”

  Grandfather harrumphed at that.

  “But I’m pretty sure we have Edwin Way Teale, Claire Boothe Luce, Lucy Maud Montgomery, John Quincy Adams, John Wilkes Booth, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and Agnes de Mille.” He pointed out the emus in question, and Caroline noted the names next to their banding numbers.

  “This is helpful,” Caroline said. “Of course, I’m not sure how we’ll ever tell when we’ve got them all.”

  “She had an inventory of all the birds,” Thor said.

  “Who?” Grandfather snapped to attention.

  “Ms. Delia,” Thor said. “I suppose it’s possible that Miss Annabel still has her inventory. You’d only be missing the data on chicks born since her death, and they’d probably still be hanging with their parents a lot.”

  Grandfather frowned. He looked at the holding pen, with its pitiful flock of emus. Then he stared at me.

  “Meg,” he said. “You get on with the old lady. Get me that inventory.”

  “Do I hear a magic word?” I asked.

  “Hmph!” he said, and stalked off.

  “Just for that you’re going to have to wait till after dinner,” I called after him.

  I only said it to be contrary, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth I realized how tired I was. Badgering Miss Annabel could wait. I headed back to the tent. Michael was outside in a folding canvas chair reading his textbook and making notes.

  “They’re asleep,” he stage whispered.

  I peeked in to see Josh and Jamie sprawled on the air mattresses in our tent, dead to the world.

  I claimed the other folding canvas chair and plopped in it. I intended to take out my notebook and find something useful I could do, but apparently I dozed off, because the next thing I knew, Michael was shaking my shoulder.

  “Someone here to see you,” he said. And then he ducked into the tent.

  It was Anne Murphy, the librarian.

  “I went up to D.C. today,” she said. “Did some research on that question you asked me about.”

  “Please don’t tell me you went all that way just to do research for me,” I said.

  “I didn’t,” she said. “I went all that way to spend the day in air conditioning. I just used your research as an excuse.”

  “Then I’m delighted to have given you an excuse,” I said.

  “And I may have found something interesting,” she said.

  I sat up straighter in my lawn chair. Anne sat down in the chair Michael had vacated, donned a pair of reading glasses, and took a sheaf of papers from her tote bag.

  “Are you familiar with an expedition your grandfather undertook about two years ago to the southwest tip of Virginia?” she asked. “When he stopped a company from building a mine that would have destroyed the habitat of a very rare and newly discovered toad?”

  “The Toad Wars,” I said. “That’s what the brigade members call it. I didn’t go along on that one, but I’ve heard about it.”

  “The company that was trying to build the mine was called Amazonite Unlimited.” She glanced down at the papers in her hand. “A name that would lead you to believe that they were planning to dig up amazonite—a green-colored form of feldspar whose main commercial use is in making inexpensive jewelry.”

  She looked over the top of her reading glasses at me as if this was a cue.

  “But since they put up a hell of a fight to keep Grandfather from derailing their plans, I assume they were planning to mine something a lot more lucrative than amazonite,” I said.

  “Exactly,” she said. “They were planning on extracting natural gas using hydraulic fracturing—better known as fracking, of course.”

  “Aha,” I said. “Grandfather’s not very keen on fracking.”

  “Many people aren’t,” she said. “It’s controversial, but potentially quite lucrative for the company that’s doing it. And while your grandfather wasn’t alone in his opposition to what Amazonite Unlimited was going to do, he was their most visible opponent. Instrumental in uncovering and publicizing their plans and organizing the opposition that helped stop them.”

  “So Amazonite Unlimited wouldn’t be terribly fond of Grandfather,” I said.

  “Amazonite Unlimited no longer exists,” Anne said. “And its owners lost a pretty penny on the project.”

  “So they blame Grandfather for going broke,” I said.

  “They’re not just broke,” Anne said. “They’re so deep in debt they may never dig their way out, and on top of that they’re getting sued right and left by people they promised the moon to when they were trying to get their fracking operation set up. So no, I don’t think they’re very fond of your Grandfather right now. Caroline Willner told me that Dr. Blake has been getting death threats lately.”

  “He always gets death threats,” I said. “He has a knack for rubbing people the wrong way.”

  “More death threats than usual, according to Caroline,” Anne said. “And I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the owners of Amazonite Unlimited were responsible for the uptick.”

  “And do any of those owners live here?” I asked.

  “Amazonite Unlimited was a wholly owned subsidiary of a company called Smedlock Mining,” she said. “And—”

  “Theo Weaver is on their board of directors,” I finished for her.

  “Yes.” She nodded.

  “Which means Theo Weaver would have a reason to hate Grandfather,” I said. “And I can understand why. To listen to Grandfather, you’d think mining was up there with the seven deadly sins. But we need minerals. Even Rose Noire’s healing crystals have to be mined somewhere. As long as mine owners do everything they can to protect the environment—”

  “You’re talking about responsible mine owners,” Anne said. “Not the Smedlocks. I’ve done the research. This is a company that would be solvent and maybe even thriving if they’d made a reasonable investment in pollution controls and worker safety. I found an article that quotes one of them as saying that the EPA fines and court judgments are about to bankrupt them, and he’s probably right, but they earned each and every one of those fines and judgments. Not that they’ve paid most of the fines and judgments. They’d rather spend the money on fast cars and such.”

  “And one of their allies lives right here in Riverton.”

  We both fell silent as I pondered the implications.

  “Of course, it might be just a coincidence,” she said.

  “I’m not a big believer in coincidences,” I said. “We should tell Chief Heedles about this.”

  “I agree,” she said. “I’m going to drop by the station and try to see her. If you run into her first, fill her in, will you?”

  “Roger.”

  “I should be going,” she said. “I need to feed the dogs.”

  We both pried ourselves out of our lawn chairs and shook hands.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Just look after that grandfather of yours.”

  She trotted off. I pondered her information. And then I stuck my head inside the tent. Michael was curled up with the boys, reading his textbook.

  “I’m going to go over to see Miss Annabel for a few minutes,” I whispered. “I’ll be back in time for dinner.”

 
He nodded and blew me a kiss.

  I hurried through the camp. It was a lot more crowded than it had been earlier, and there was a big crowd around the fence. By this time I recognized most of the volunteers, even if I didn’t know their names, and these were not familiar faces.

  I spotted Jim Williams by the fence and went over to ask him what was going on.

  “Your grandfather invited the whole town to dinner,” Williams said.

  “Oh, great,” I said. “If whoever tried to poison him wasn’t already in camp, I’m sure they’ll show up for this.”

  Williams shook his head as if he understood my sense of frustration.

  I thought Miss Annabel and I were probably on good enough terms that I could have knocked on her kitchen door, but given the presence of so many possible onlookers from town, I decided to keep things formal and go around to the front door.

  She opened it before I had finished climbing the porch steps.

  “What’s he up to now?” she asked. “Your grandfather, that is. I assume that mob is his doing.”

  “Cookout for the locals,” I said.

  “So he can show off the fact that he caught a few emus?”

  I nodded.

  “Hmph!” She sounded remarkably like Grandfather when she snorted like that. I suspected she wouldn’t appreciate it if I told her that. “Well, what can I do for you?”

  “Anne Murphy from the library came up with an interesting bit of information about Theo Weaver,” I said. “Interesting and potentially useful, and I thought I’d share it.”

  I brought her up to speed on the Toad Wars expedition and Weaver’s connection with Grandfather’s vanquished opponents.

  “Interesting,” she said. “But I’m not sure I see how useful it is. There’s no connection between Cordelia and this Toad War thing.”

  “No, it’s not useful for solving Cordelia’s murder,” I said. “And incidentally, the police chief agrees with you that it was murder.”

  “Excellent!” she said. “I was hoping you’d win her over.”