On the Run (23 page)

Faces in the shadows.

So where was I with all this? Cleverly outthinking the authorities with my deductions and connections, or muddling around in overcooked red herrings?

At dinner Abilene and I discussed this, to no conclusion, and then I remembered I had news about Mac’s coming arrival the following day. Her eyes lit up in a way that said teasing about a boyfriend was imminent, and I quickly derailed that by bringing up Deputy Hamilton’s solicitous good wishes about her health.

“It seemed like something more than professional interest,” I stated with the wide-eyed innocence only an LOL can produce.

Abilene blushed lightly, but then she tossed out an unconnected but startling bit of news of her own that instantly derailed me.

“I found an egg today.”

“An egg? An emu egg?”

“I’ve never seen one before, but it was in the emus’ pen, so that must be what it is.”

“What does it look like?”

“You’ll just have to come see. It’s . . . impressive.”

“Is one of the emu hens sitting on it?”

“No. I remember those people who raised them saying that the females don’t even sit on the eggs. The males do the sitting. I saw several of them looking it over, but no takers so far.” She gave me a sideways look. “We could . . . you know . . . try to hatch it ourselves.”

“I’m not into sitting on eggs, emu or otherwise.”

She gave me an injured, this-is-not-a-joking-matter look and came up with a plan so quickly that I knew she’d spent some time concocting it.

“We could make a nest out of a towel or blanket, and I saw a heating pad in the bathroom closet that we could rig up to keep the egg warm.”

“Or we could make an omelet out of it.”

“Ivy!” she gasped, horrified.

“You eat eggs all the time,” I reminded her.

“This is different.”

Immediately after dinner, she led me out to see the egg. It wasn’t in a nest or even a depression in the ground, just lying under a tree in the wooded part of the pen. It looked enormous, about six or seven inches long, and it was green, a dark bluish-green.

“Are you sure it’s an emu egg?” I asked doubtfully. The emu flock had followed us, but none of them seemed interested in claiming the egg. They just wanted to peck at my watch and try to untie my shoelaces. “Maybe we’ll hatch it, and some Jurassic Park monster will leap out.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she scoffed, but she didn’t sound positive, and we were both still staring at the egg when a motor home pulled into the yard.

Mac!

I deserted Abilene and the egg and dashed out to meet him. He swung out of the motor home, hair still thick and silver, now with nicely trimmed beard to match. Belly still flat, knees still knobby in tan shorts, no perceptible glitch in his movements, although there was an Ace bandage wrapped around his wrist.

“I didn’t expect you until tomorrow!”

He grinned. “Maybe you’re so irresistible I couldn’t stay away a minute longer.”

“Maybe Hugo has an Oklahoma version of the Blarney stone, and you’ve made one too many visits to it.”

“You’re so cynical, Ivy Malone,” he chided.

“I don’t even have a peach cobbler made for you yet.”

“That’s okay, you look better than any peach cobbler.” He grinned again and held out his arms. I stepped into them. A very nice place to be.

But right in the midst of our big hug, I looked over his shoulder and there was Abilene hurrying toward the house, large green object cradled in her hands, her clutch on it suggesting this was a priceless treasure, her hurried gait suggesting the future of the emu species depended on getting this egg inside with all possible speed.

Hey, wait a minute. We haven’t actually decided we’re going to
do this hatching thing, and doing it in the house was never even
mentioned . . .

Mac turned around when I broke the hug, his expression puzzled until his gaze followed mine. “Who’s that? And what’s that thing she’s carrying?”

“That’s Abilene. It’s an emu egg.”

Then I had to explain about Abilene and who she was, and by that time the hug was forgotten and we were standing at the fence looking at the long-necked, heavy-bodied creatures. One of them tried to peck through the fence at the motorcycle tattoo on Mac’s arm. He jerked his arm back. A thought occurred to me.

“I hope it wasn’t an emu that attacked you?”

“No. It was a . . . yak.”

“A yak?”

“They’re kind of like oxen, only with long, shaggy hair. And big horns.”

“And this yak attacked you?”

“I don’t know that you’d call it an actual
attack
.” He sounded defensive. “I was with a tour group at an exotic animal farm. I was working on a magazine article, so I talked the guide into letting me inside the pen with the yak herd for some better photos. I guess they’re usually peaceful animals. But a bee stung one on the nose, and it kind of went berserk, and I was in the way.” He broke off and gingerly rubbed the area of his tailbone. “Anyway, it tossed me about ten feet, and I landed in an . . . awkward position.”

“I see.”

“Ivy Malone, you’re trying not to laugh,” he accused. “And you’re not doing a very good job of it.”

“I am not laughing! Why would I laugh?”

“You’re thinking,
Mac was attacked by a yak. A berserk yak
attacked Mac. Mac had a yak attack.
Tee-hee.”

“I never tee-hee,” I stated primly.

“Well, here’s something else to laugh about. Guess what I landed in?”

“A water trough?”

“I should be so lucky. With all these cow-like creatures around, I’m sure you can imagine what there were piles of all over the ground.”

Oh. “Look on the bright side. If you’d landed on a rock or stump you’d have been hurt much worse than landing in a pile of . . . soft stuff.”

“Still looking on the bright side of things, I see.” He sounded grumpy about it.

“I try.”

“I suppose there was a certain humor in it,” he muttered. “The local newspaper thought so. Unbeknownst to me, there was a reporter in the tour group, and, sure enough, he had his handy-dandy camera ready. They headlined the photo ‘Mac Encounters Yak.’ And there I was on the front page, with a very surprised look on my face as I sat sprawled in the pile of ‘soft stuff’ as you put it, with a yak staring at me.”

“You’re recovering from your injuries satisfactorily?” I managed more primness.

“The wrist doesn’t work quite right, but I don’t have any problem getting around. Though I’m probably not up to mountain climbing yet. It’s just that I can’t sit comfortably for any length of time. I have to go back for more X-rays next week. Just make me one promise, okay?”

“Which is?”

“No Mac yak attack jokes. Everyone in the RV park was having a heyday with them. There was even a knock-knock one going around.”

I crossed my heart. “Promise.” Though I had to admit I hadn’t promised not to snicker a bit to myself.
A Mac yak attack,
a yak attacked Mac. A berserk yak went on attack.
Say it five times, and it had a catchy rhythm. Music to hatch emus by?

By the time Mac and I got inside, Abilene had the egg snuggled into a matching blue-green bath towel in a box in the corner of her bedroom. She was trying to arrange the heating pad over it.

Mac jumped right in to help, rolling up more towels to keep the heating pad in a position so the egg would stay warm but not overheat.

“I think maybe it needs something that would imitate a heartbeat.” Abilene fussed with a fold in the towel. “Wouldn’t the little emu in its egg be able to feel a real emu’s heartbeat?”

Then they were off on a how-to-simulate-a-heartbeat discussion, and whether a lightbulb might work better than the heating pad. Me, I was just thinking, and finally asking, “What if the emu lays more eggs?”

I had visions of a row of big green eggs encased in bath-towel nests lining the wall from corner to corner, like some science-fiction nursery. Then another thought. “What happens if this thing actually hatches? How big will it be? Will it have to live right here in the bedroom?”

No one paid any attention to me or my concerns. “I still think it would make a nice omelet,” I muttered. “A nice,
big
omelet.”

“I wonder how long it takes an emu egg to hatch?” Mac asked.

Abilene didn’t ignore that as she did my omelet suggestion. “Yeah, we need to know, don’t we? You’d think the Northcutts would have some pamphlets or books or something about raising them.”

I remembered a book on the coffee table. The one under the blood-spattered note. Something about emus and survival.

I went downstairs to look. I couldn’t find the book, and I was feeling a little grumpy about the whole emu-egg thing anyway. Next thing, Abilene would probably be naming it. So by the time Abilene and Mac came down a few minutes later I had a peach cobbler started. Fresh peaches make the best cobbler, of course, but the Northcutts provided a plentiful choice in the canned variety: halves, slices, or chunks.

Abilene went outside, hoping for more eggs, I suspected. Mac brought his ergonomic chair in, and we caught up on events since we’d last seen each other at my niece’s in Arkansas. He told me about his grandchildren and where his travels had taken him, and I told him about the Northcutts, dead and alive, and my latest narrow escape from the Braxtons.

When the cobbler was done I called Abilene, and we sat out on the deck in the lovely evening dusk eating big dishes of cobbler and ice cream. I was relieved she hadn’t found more eggs. She went to bed fairly early, but Mac and I talked until late.

“I’m glad I didn’t wait until tomorrow to come,” he said when he finally picked up his chair to go.

“I am too.”

We smiled at each other, and I thought he was considering a good-night kiss, but about that time the phone rang. He raised his eyebrows.

“You have friends who call at midnight?”

“Calls for the Northcutts can come at any hour,” I explained.

So he settled for a smile and a squeeze on the shoulder instead of a kiss. I wavered between relief and disappointment as I went to answer the phone.

The man didn’t identify himself, but when I told him the Northcutts had recently passed away, he said, “But they were supposed to have a treatment to me by this weekend!” He sounded indignant, as if they had died purposely to circumvent this obligation.

“Treatment?” I repeated, puzzled. “What kind of treatment? Medical?”

He groaned, managing a groan-tone that insinuated if I were any dumber I wouldn’t have known how to pick up the phone.

“Whatever this treatment is, you’ll have to discuss it with their son.” I gave the man Frank’s number in Texas. “Have a nice day,” I added.

My acerbic tone apparently reminded him he wasn’t exactly putting on a good show of etiquette here, and he finally muttered, “Sorry to hear about the deaths,” before adding hopefully, “I don’t suppose you know anything about the treatment?”

“No, we don’t treat anything. We just hatch emu eggs with a heating pad,” I said and hung up. Let him figure that one out.

Next morning I fixed bacon, eggs, and biscuits for breakfast. Afterward we got Mac’s motor home hooked up with electricity, water, and septic system. It was a blue-sky day, with just a hint of fall coming. The kind of day that made me remember how school on opening day always smelled, that wonderful blend of chalk and floor polish and new shoes. Do schools still smell that way, or is that something that disappeared with the coming of backpacks and computers?

“This is a terrific place,” Mac enthused. “My grandkids would love it. I wish you could meet them.” He gave me what felt like a thoughtful inspection. “Sometimes it gets a little old being on the move alone all the time.”

“I think Frank plans to sell this place as soon as he can get the legal complications straightened out.”

“And look at that old barn!” Mac motioned off across the weedy field to the weathered barn, where a picturesque cupola and the weather vane of a prancing horse decorated the top ridge. “You know, I have some other old barn photos around somewhere. Maybe I could put them all together and get a magazine article out of it. Want to walk out there with me?”

Mac got his camera, and we started toward the barn. I hadn’t been out there before. The dry weeds were high except where the sofa had knocked them down when Frank dragged it to the burn pile, so we followed that easier path until I detoured sharply to miss the sofa.

“Let me guess,” Mac said. “The sofa where you found the bodies?”

“Their son, Frank, dragged it out here to get rid of it, but we can’t burn it until fire danger is over.”

“The police weren’t interested in it?”

“They’re convinced the Northcutts chose to commit suicide together.”

Mac gave me a speculative look. “But you’re not?”

I hadn’t mentioned those doubts earlier, but either Mac was shrewd and intuitive or I’m as easy to read as a large print edition of
Reader’s Digest
. “I’m not as convinced as they are,” I admitted. “But they’re the experts.”

We went on out to the barn. It was a wonderful old place. Sunlight shafting through cracks in the boards lit up a dance of dust motes, as if they were holding some private celebration. More sunlight through a hole in the roof spotlit a tangle of discarded harness on the dirt floor. Scents of dry earth and long ago animals mingled with a flutter of birds high in the eaves. We climbed up to the hay loft, where our feet raised dust and musty scents and bits of old hay.