Murder With Puffins (22 page)

"Well, this one obviously wasn't in any shape to make the trip," I said. "Where was it anyway?"

"Down by Victor Resnick's house," she said. "Near that tidal pool you found him in. The poor thing was probably his last victim."

"And when did you find it?"

"An hour ago," she said.

"An hour ago?" I echoed. Something about this didn't make sense. "Would you mind showing us where?"

"Not at all," said Mrs. Peabody. To my relief, she whisked the dead puffin out from under my nose and began striding toward the porch steps. "It's about time somebody did something about this! Clearly the local authorities aren't going to take any action!"

I looked around for Rob, but he had fled, and Mrs. Peabody was rapidly disappearing.

"Arg!" I exclaimed, taking the end of Spike's leash. "Come on, you little monster."

He followed me, barking with glee. As I expected, I had to pick him up and carry him after about fifteen feet--although, to his credit, he managed to pick up a remarkable amount of new mud during his short time on the ground.

To my dismay, other birders began following Mrs. Peabody as she strode through town. I suppose, given the weather, there wasn't all that much else for them to do, since most of the birds remained sensibly out of the rain. We had collected fourteen or fifteen stragglers by the time we reached Resnick's house. Mrs. Peabody led us past the house and down to the tidal pool, along the path the rising tide had prevented Michael and me from using yesterday.

"Right there," she said, pointing to a large flat rock. "It was lying right there."

"Lying how?" I asked.

"I'll show you," she said, reaching for her knapsack. For a second, I thought she was about to shed her knapsack and arrange herself on the rock in the place of the dead puffin. But instead, she pulled out a camera.

"I took pictures of the body," she said.

"The puffin's body, you mean?" I asked.

"Well, of course," she said. "What other body could I mean?"

"Victor Resnick's?" Michael suggested.

"Him," she said, shrugging. "Why would I bother? Here, I'll show you."

"Great," I said as she held out her camera. "We can have the film developed."

"You don't need to develop any film," Mrs. Peabody said with a scornful look. "This is a
digital
camera. Here."

She pressed a switch on the camera, looked at it for a few seconds, then turned it so we could see. The back of the camera had a little display screen, on which I could see a picture of a small evergreen tree.

"That's fantastic!" Michael said, looking over my shoulder. "You can see the pictures as soon as you take them! Does it use film?"

"No, it saves the pictures on a computer chip," Mrs. Peabody said.

"The things they do with computers these days," another birder said, shaking his head.

"And if you don't like what you've taken, you can erase mem and try again," Mrs. Peabody said.

"Amazing!" Michael said.

"How much does a thing like that run anyway?" another birder asked.

"Later, guys," I said. "I thought you said you had a picture of a puffin. That's not a puffin; it's a cedar."

"No, it's a wren," she said. "See there, he's roosting inside the cedar."

"If you say so," I said. "What about the puffin?"

"Just press this button," she said.

I put down Spike so I would have my hands free. He galloped off to bark at the waves, which were creeping closer and closer; we'd have to adjourn to the top of the hill soon. I took the small camera, pressed the button Mrs. Peabody had indicated, and waited for several seconds as another picture of the cedar tree scrolled onto the screen.

"Keep going," she said. "It's been an hour; I may have taken quite a few pictures."

I kept pressing the button and waited while several more pictures of the cedar loaded. These were followed by pictures of other shrubbery, presumably containing other wrens. Interspersed with the nature photos were occasional off-center shots of the sky or of Mrs. Peabody's muddy hiking boots, which I assumed she'd taken by mistake. Michael and several male birders looked over my shoulder, exclaiming at the high quality of the pictures, and Mrs. Peabody explained how she took the electronic pictures and e-mailed them to her sister in California.

Finally, a puffin appeared on the tiny screen. It lay on its back on the flat rock, with its toes pointing straight to the sky, its wings neatly folded by its side, and its feathers carefully groomed and reasonably clean. It looked a lot better in the photo than it did now that Mrs. Peabody had hauled it around for an hour. It looked as if it'd been laid out for viewing at a wake, and I didn't for a minute believe it had landed in that position by accident.

"There's something odd about this," I muttered, glancing from the puffin on the camera screen to the flat rock. I took off my knapsack, fished around in it, and pulled out a small pamphlet called
The Pocket Guide to Monhegan
.

"Was the puffin there when you found the body?" Mrs. Peabody asked.

"No," I said, still leafing through the guide.

"How can you be sure?" she insisted.

"Well, in the first place," I said, "that was the rock where we put Resnick's body after we hauled him out of the water; if the puffin had been there, we'd have stepped on it."

Several birders who were leaning against the rock shuffled a few feet away from it.

"And, in the second place, I took a good look around for clues, and I'd have noticed something as unusual as a dead puffin. In the third place, that rock's underwater at high tide, so even if it had been there yesterday when we found the body, it'd have washed away by this morning. The tide came in after we found Resnick's body, you know. This whole place was underwater between ten p.m. and two a.m."

I waved the pocket guide, held open to the page with this year's tide tables on it.

"That's true," a birder said.

"Perhaps it washed out to sea after the murder and then washed back in again this morning," Mrs. Peabody said.

"Does it look as if it was washed in?" I said, pointing at the little screen. "It looks as if someone posed it there. Deliberately. But why?"

"Maybe the murderer did it," Michael said. "To confuse us."

"He's wasting his time, then," I said. "We're already as confused as we're ever going to get; he should save it for the mainland cops."

"Maybe someone's trying to give us a subtle clue to the murder?" Michael said.

"Well, they're going to have to try a lot harder, and be a lot less subtle," I said.

"This is all very odd," Mrs. Peabody announced, frowning at Michael and me as if the whole mess were our fault and we should do something about it.

"And speaking of odd," I said. "There's something else rather odd about that puffin. Let me take a look at it."

"Yes, of course," Mrs. Peabody said. She tried to hand me the small carcass. Spike growled and leapt up, trying to attack it. I backed away, happy to settle for a visual inspection. Yes, there was definitely something unusual about the puffin.

"Strange," I said. "I wonder why anyone would bother to keep a dead puffin around all this time."

"I beg your pardon! I'm not keeping it around, as you put it," she said. "I only brought it along to show what that horrible man was doing."

"I didn't mean you," I said. "I meant whoever had it before you."

"No one had if before me. I found it today, not even an hour ago, right here on this rock."

She pounded the rock with one plump fist by way of emphasis.

"Well, you may have found it there, but I doubt if it died there; and it didn't die today, or yesterday, for that matter," I said. "That is not a recently deceased puffin."

"Nonsense, it's still quite fresh," Mrs. Peabody said, thrusting it under my nose by way of proof.

"Possibly," I said, backing away. "I suppose whoever put it there could have had it in his freezer for the last couple of months."

"In the freezer?" she said. "Whatever makes you think someone had that poor puffin in a freezer?"

The other birders were muttering, "The freezer?" and looking at me as if I'd announced my intention of serving them southern-fried puffin with a side of pickled puffins' feet.

"This puffin is wearing mating plumage, or whatever you call it," I said. "I mean, that is what the white face and those bright orange-and-yellow plates on the beak mean, isn't it? That when this puffin died, he was still looking for his soul mate? Unless I've completely misunderstood all the puffin lore everyone's babbled at me, he would have shed the white feathers and the pretty little plates by the end of the spring, right? So he must have died before that."

The birders looked at each other and then at the puffin.

"She's right," one of them murmured. "She's absolutely right."

"Do you mind if we keep your camera for a while?" I asked Mrs. Peabody.

"Not at all," she said. "Or if you want to come by the Island Inn, I can have my husband transfer the pictures onto diskettes for you."

"Thanks," I said. "We'll probably do that."

"I've got some digital pictures, too," another binoculars-toting man said, bounding up holding his camera. "I've got pictures of that lunatic shooting at you!"

"That has nothing to do with the murder!" Mrs. Peabody said, elbowing him aside.

"Well, neither does your puffin," said the second birder. I almost expected him to say, "So there!"

Michael tried to defuse the confrontation by taking the man's camera and exclaiming over the pictures, but the two birders were squaring off for a verbal donnybrook, when a voice rang out from above us.

"What's going on here?"

I glanced up and saw Jeb Barnes, hands on hips, stumbling down the last few feet of the path.

Inspired by the interest we had shown in the puffin, Mrs. Peabody strode over and, with a flourish, tried to present it to Jeb, who began backing up the path to escape her.

I flipped through Mrs. Peabody's pictures of the puffin again. The remaining birders, sensing that I wasn't going to do anything else amusing, followed Jeb and Mrs. Peabody.

"This puffin is evidence!" Mrs. Peabody shouted.

"Nonsense!" Jeb shouted back.

"Mind if I take a look at the puffin?" I asked, looking up at the two.

"No," Jeb said. "I mean yes. I'm impounding it. As… as… as a danger to public health."

With that, he snatched the puffin from Mrs. Peabody's hands and, holding it at arm's length, fled up the path.

Mrs. Peabody frowned.

"I think he's going to lock it up for the police," I said.

"Well, that's all right, then," Mrs. Peabody said.

"And you people stay away from the crime scene," Jeb called from the top of the cliff.

"Yes, we'd better get off the beach before the tide gets any higher," Michael suggested.

We stowed our two borrowed digital cameras safely in my knapsack and headed for the path.

"So, what has the defrosted puffin told you?" Michael said as we picked our way up the side of the cliff.

"Not a thing; he's keeping his beak shut," I said in a passable imitation of a thirties movie gangster. "But give me a few minutes alone with our feathered friend and I'll make him sing like a canary."

Well, Michael thought it was funny. Mrs. Peabody said, "Humph!" and strode off ahead of us.

"Seriously, I don't know if the puffin tells us anything useful," I said in a more normal tone. "So far, it's just another puzzle: Why would someone keep a dead puffin around for months, then leave it at the scene of a murder the day after the body was discovered? It makes no sense."

"Maybe it's symbolic," Michael suggested. "That he was killed to revenge his crimes against puffinkind?"

"Possibly, but it doesn't narrow down our suspect list," I complained.

"Maybe it does," Michael said. "Whoever left the puffin here has to be a local with a freezer to keep it in, right?"

"Not necessarily," I said. "One of the birders could have brought it over on the ferry. Can you swear there wasn't a cooler containing a dead puffin somewhere in that mountain of luggage on the dock when we arrived?"

"True," he said.

"And even if a local put the puffin there, we don't know for sure that the puffin has anything directly to do with the murder."

"What other reason could anyone have for putting it there?" Michael asked. "To throw us off the scent?"

"When we find whoever put it there, we'll ask," I said.

"When
you
find whoever put it there?" Jeb echoed from above. "I thought I told you to keep your nose out of this."

"Well, I assume when the police find out who put the puffin there, they'll let all of us know," I said as I reached the top of the path. "Surely there's no harm in being curious."

Michael chuckled.

"Well, at least Jeb's taken custody of the puffin," Michael said in an undertone.

"Even if he's only doing it because he thinks we want it," I answered. "Whereas the only one who really wants the damned thing is Spike."

"Speaking of Spike, where is he?"

"Oh damn," I said, turning around. "Still down by the rock, chasing the waves, I suppose. I'd better get him before the tide carries him away."

"I don't see him down there," Michael said, frowning.

"Oh bloody hell," I said. "Your mother will kill us if anything happens to him."

"Well, with any luck, she'll only kill Rob," Michael said. "But it would break her heart. Let's go down and look for him."

We called back Jeb Barnes and Mrs. Peabody, and the four of us scrambled around the area by the tidal pool, frantically calling Spike's name and looking in every crevice. The waves started to wash over the rocky, flat area, drenching us and narrowing our search with every passing minute.

"We'll have to give it up," Jeb said finally. "The tide'll cover the path in a minute."

"No, we have to find him!" I said.

"Meg, he's right," Michael said.

He half-dragged me up the path behind Jeb and Mrs. Peabody. We had to wait for a moment between waves to cross one spot, but we made it up to the top of the hill and stood looking down at the churning mass of water occupying the spot where we'd been standing--well, wading anyway--only a few minutes before.