Summer of the Spotted Owl
A Dinah Galloway Mystery
The Summer of
the Spotted Owl
Melanie Jackson
O
RCA
B
OOK
P
UBLISHERS
Copyright © 2005 Melanie Jackson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Jackson, Melanie, 1956-
The summer of the spotted owl / Melanie Jackson.
(A Dinah Galloway mystery)
Electronic Monograph
Issued also in print format.
ISBN
9781551437859
(pdf)
--
ISBN
9781554695430
(epub)
I. Title. II. Series: Jackson, Melanie, 1956-
Dinah Galloway mystery.
PS8569.A265S84 2005Â Â Â Â jC813'.6 Â Â Â Â C2005-905796-3
First Published in the United States, 2005
Library of Congress Control Number: 2005934042
Summary:
Amateur sleuth, enthusiastic gourmand and budding songstress Dinah Galloway is back, this time on the trail of a greedy developer.
Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council.
Cover design by Lynn O'Rourke and John van der Woude
Spotted Owl photo credit: Jared Hobbs
In Canada:
Orca Book Publishers
PO Box 5626, Station B
Victoria, BC Canada
V8R 6S4
In the United States:
Orca Book Publishers
PO Box 468
Custer, WA USA
98240-0468
www.orcabook.com
08 07 06 05 ⢠4 3 2 1
During the editing of this book,
The Globe
and Mail
reported on the almost certain demise of the spotted owl in British Columbia (“Hope is fading for BC's spotted owls,” June 6, 2005). But fading hope is better than none. If we try, we can still save the spotted owl. Don't believe in “too late.” Believe in now. Contact the Western Canada Wilderness Committee,
www.wildernesscommittee.org
, or other environmental groups.
To those of you who do try,
Dinah and I dedicate this book.
My thanks to Andy Miller, biologist with the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, for providing the spotted owl information that appears in these pages. Any mistakes are my own.
My thanks also to my late dad, Bernard Chandler, who gave me good grammar, good humor and lots of his own personal Canterbury tales.
â
Melanie Jackson
Contents
1 It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's a â Hang Glider?
3 Rowena Pickles and One Very Disappointed Reporter
4 A Spotted Visitor, and then a Bald One
6 Sylvester's Spirits Get Dampened
7 Fishy Business at the Salmon Hatchery
8 Grimm Developments in the Forest
9 The Disappearing âBut Always Resourceful âTalbot
10 The Quay to a Disastrous Lunch
11 You Mean Trespassing Is Illegal?
12 A Little Too Pretty in Pink
13 The Woods Are Lovely, Dark and Deepâand Dangerous
15 It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It'sâDinah?!
Sunward I've climbed,
and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split cloudsâ¦
â R
CAF
pilot John Gillespie McGee
M
other likes telling me to look up, up. Sometimes she says it so I won't stare at my feet when walking.
“But if I step on a crack, you'll break your back,” I object.
This prospect fails to worry Mother. She's the dreamy type, her mind on books. “Bad for your posture, Dinah.”
On hearing this, my older sister Madge, slim and glamorous, with lupine blue eyes and creamy skin, will give a satisfied toss of her burnished red hair. Madge's posture is coat-hanger perfect.
Sometimes Mother's told me to look up, up in a different sense. Like seven years ago, after my dad crashed his car into a tree and died instantly. Dad was an alcoholic, see. He'd had way too much that night. “Things will get better, Dinah,” Mother assured me afterward, though none too chipper herself. “Just look up, up and see the bright day around you, full of possibilities.”
There's a lot to see where we live, on the Grandview hill in East Vancouver. We can look right across Burrard Inlet to the deep blue Coast Mountains. Okay, so in the rain they're not deep blue. They're more the color of my cat Wilfred's tinned food when he hasn't eaten it all day. Gray and yucky.
My dad liked to look up, up. His telescope still stands in Mother's bedroom, pointing at the mountains. “See the hang gliders, Dinah,” he'd say and lift me. I'd squint way over to Grouse Mountain. On sunny days, against the shining blue of Grouse, I could make out the vivid hang gliders as they sailed down, sometimes with one person clutching the metal bar, sometimes with two. To me the swooping gliders were like wide, happy grins.
Dad looked for the possibilities in each day, bright or rainy. Except for his own possibilities. He didn't notice them, which was maybe his problem. He saw mine, though. He was the one who encouraged me to sing.
I have this loud, belting-out voice. Pudgy, red-haired and bespectacled, I'd sing as Dad bashed out notes on our ancient, out-of-tune piano. He taught me to sing with feeling, which he said was just as important as volume. “Try this one, Dinah,” he'd say and launch me on “Sweet Sue”â
Every star above,
Knows the one I love,
Sweet Sue, just you!
“Sweet Sue” was his favorite song, probably because Mother's name is Suzanne.
“That's my girl,” Dad would say. “Hey, I bet the hang gliders on Grouse heard you that time!”
Now I'm twelve and a half and tall enough to squint through the telescope on my own. Actually, let's not bring up the subject of height: At five feet plus a smidgen, I'm shorter than all my friends and still waiting for that elusive growth spurt Mother and Madge assure me will occur. R-i-i-i-g-h-ht.
Anyway, I still like looking up, up at the hang gliders, and they still remind me of grins. But I never thought I, the notoriously unathletic Dinah Galloway, would ever have anything to do with hang gliding. Not until the summer of the spotted owl. The summer Madge and I house-sat in North Vancouver â¦
Chapter One
It's a Bird, It's a Plane,
It's a â Hang Glider?
M
adge was doing more than house-sitting. The owners, who were off fishing in the Okanagan Valley, had hired Madge to paint a mural. “Something for our family room,” Mrs. Urstad had instructed Madge. “Something bright, because it gets so gloomy up here in the rainy North Shore forests.”
A former neighbor of ours, Mrs. Urstad had always admired Madge's paintings. My sister was a pretty good artist, I had to admit: She mixed colors into vivid shades, then swirled the shades into gorgeous scenes. The funny thing was the scenes were ordinary, everyday ones, like maybe a park bench with flowers growing around it, or a cherry tree blooming beside a Dumpster. Madge made the ordinary look extraordinary. She'd loved art from the first day she could clutch a crayon. In September she'd be starting at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design on Granville Island.
So there we were for the month of July in this big, sprawling house with Grouse Mountain looming in front of us, and deep, dark Capilano Canyon just beyond the back garden.
I have to say that the garden was immaculate. Gardeners showed up every few days to prune bushes so that not a stray leaf stuck out and to shave the grass right down to a nub. This was one tidy neighborhood â I noticed this because our own garden, in East Vancouver, was more the jungle variety.
Since arriving I'd spent most of my time in the Urstads' pool, floating about on an inflatable turtle.
Though when Madge's fiancé, Jack French, visited, he made me give up the turtle in favor of practicing swimming. Jack was the annoying athletic type.
Luckily Jack was too busy these days to nag me much. He had a summer job as the coordinator of a student group working to save spotted owls.
The spotted owl, as Jack explained to me, is an endangered species. Only a couple of dozen or so remain in southern British Columbia. Nowhere else in Canada, even. But once these fluffy, round-faced birds numbered in the thousands.
That was before seventy percent of their habitat got logged. As in, wiped out. Like Jack says, there's planned logging and then there's planless logging. The spotted owl has fallen victim to a whole lot of planless, not to mention thoughtless, logging.
This was all part of the speech Jack gave at spotted owl rallies. My future brother-in-law is a natural activist, which means he's the type who gets involved in trying to solve society's problems. Like,
really
gets involved, as opposed to sitting around on his rump saying what a shame it is about this or that, as most people do.
Jack says the other part of being an activist is that a lot of people regard you as a pest. The previous summer, when Jack headed up an anti-smoking group, a bunch of tobacco-company types were mighty ticked off at him.
If you compliment Jack on his activism, he'll just shrug and say he owes it to the world. For example, to the teachers who helped him through tough times when he was younger, after his mom died of cancer. Activism is his return favor, he says.
Annoying athletic tendencies aside, Jack, who has sandy hair and humorous gray eyes, is probably the nicest, most honest person I know. He says his hero is the late us senator Robert F. Kennedy, who never gave up imagining the way things should be and demanding, “Why not?”
At rallies that summer, Jack talked about how loggers and developers could so easily work with environmentalists when planning new neighborhoods.
“Why shouldn't we all work together?” Jack would ask the crowd. “Why not?”
And I'd think of Mother telling me to look up, up to the bright days full of possibilities. Why shouldn't spotted owls have the same possibility-filled days as I did? Why not?
“Bombs away!”
I yelled.
It was shortly after our arrival at the Urstads' house. Having tucked back my favoriteâa banana peanut butter and honey sandwichâfor lunch, I returned to the pool and settled back on my inflatable turtle. I had some spotted owl information from Jack to read up on, but I'd do it later. This was hang-glider-watching time.
I'd never been so close to them before. They sailed right over the Urstads' house, their giant, wing-like shadows cooling me as they passed, and landed in a field a few blocks south.
On this day I got the idea of yelling “Bombs away!” at the hang gliders. It seemed very witty to me. Usually there were two passengers per hang glider, what you call riding in tandem: an instructor and a student. Sometimes the people grinned and yelled back; sometimes they looked rather disapproving. In my opinion, I was adding memorably to their whole Grouse Mountain experience.
Madge appeared at the French doors. She was in her paint smock and was carrying a brush and palate shiny with different colors. Madge stepped out on the deck.
“Dinah, what's all this yelling?” she demanded. “Mother said you could stay at the Urstads' with me if you were well-behaved. As in,
quiet
.”
I rolled off the turtle into the water, creating as big a splash as I could. Hopefully some of the drops would reach Madge. She looked like she needed cooling off. “I'm enriching the lives of others,” I explained, coming up for air.
Madge was a blurry inkblot through my wet glasses and clip-on sunshades. I grinned. I knew Madge wasn't going to phone Mother and complain about me. Mother had just started a job as a librarian with the Vancouver Public Library, and we both wanted her to have a month off from kid-raising while she got used to it. At middle age, she was kind of nervous about re-entering the workforce.
Also, our absence would allow Mother some time with this guy she'd been seeing, Jon Horowitz. Mother had met Jon the year before while he was directing me in a musical-play version of the classic mystery novel
The Moonstone
.
Personally I thought my presence could only help a budding romance. You know, the fun third person who makes a relationship perfect. But when I pointed this out, Madge put on a weary, grown-up look and sighed.