The Real MacAw (2 page)

“You were trying to break into the barn, I suppose.” They all looked a little startled at what I assumed was a correct guess. “We keep it locked, since all my expensive blacksmithing equipment is out there. But I might be persuaded to unlock it, if somebody could just tell me what the hell is going on.”

They all exchanged looks. One of the beagles Dad was still holding began peeing on him. He rushed to deposit the offender on a nest of newspapers in a corner.

I fixed my gaze on Grandfather.

“It’s all Parker’s fault,” he said. “If he’d showed up on time, we never would have come here. I’m going to call him again.”

As if that had explained everything, he stumped over to our living room phone.

“Want to use this?” My father held out his beloved iPhone.

“No, I want a real phone,” Grandfather said. He began dialing a number from memory.

I looked at Clarence.

“It’s a matter of life or death!” he exclaimed. He clasped his hands as if pleading for mercy, clenching them so hard that the tattooed ferrets on his burly forearms writhed.

I looked at Dad. The weather was mild, not warm, and yet his bald head glistened. Nerves, probably. A trickle of sweat began running down his face, and he dabbed at it absentmindedly with the puppy.

“Just why is our living room filled with dogs, cats, puppies, kittens, hamsters, guinea pigs, and parrots?”

“Only the one parrot,” he said. “A macaw, actually—very interesting species.”

“Hiya, babe!” the macaw said.

“Whatever,” I said. “Why are they here?”

“It’s because of that new county manager,” Dad said.

“Horrible man,” Clarence muttered.

“You mean Terence Mann?” I asked.

“Dammit, Parker, answer your bloody phone!” Grandfather snarled into the receiver.

“Hey, Clarence!” My brother, Rob, bounced into the room. “There’s a window open on the second story of the barn! So if you can help me haul the ladder over, we can— Oh. Hi, Meg.”

“Hi,” I said. “What’s your version?”

“My version?” Rob looked guilty for a moment. He fiddled with the black knit cap that concealed his shaggy blond hair, then his face cleared. “I was helping Dad and Granddad.”

“Helping them do what?”

“Foil the new county manager,” Dad repeated. “That Mann fellow. He’s cutting the budget right and left.”

“Probably because the town of Caerphilly will go bankrupt if he doesn’t,” I said.

“And most of his cuts we can understand, no matter how much we hate them,” Clarence said. “Cutting back on the library hours.”

“And the free clinic hours,” Dad added.

“Postponing the teachers’ raises,” Rob said.

“But then he decided that the town animal shelter was too expensive,” Grandfather said. “So he said the town could no longer afford for it to be a no-kill shelter.”

“Can he do that?” I asked.

“Well, in the long run, probably not,” Clarence said. “Public opinion is against it, about four to one. But we were afraid that some of the animals might be harmed before we could convince him to reverse his policy.”

“So you adopted all of the animals from the shelter?” I asked.

“No, actually we burgled the place and stole them,” Rob said.

“Wonderful,” I said. “Our living room isn’t just filled with animals. It’s filled with stolen animals.”

“Rescued animals,” Grandfather said.

A burglary. Well, at least that explained why all four of them were dressed completely in black. Individually, none of them looked particularly odd, but anyone who saw the four of them skulking about together in their inky garb would be instantly suspicious.

“Did you really think you could get away with it?” I asked aloud.

“We don’t care if we get away with it,” Grandfather said, striking his noblest pose.

“Once the animals are safely out of his clutches, we don’t care what happens to us,” Dad said, following suit.

“And we knew Mann would quickly figure out that prosecuting us wouldn’t do him much good in the eyes of the public,” the more practical Clarence added.

I looked around. Okay, the animals were refugees. They might have been saved from an untimely death. Of course, that didn’t make it any less annoying to see them lying on, shedding on, and in a few cases, chewing or peeing on our rugs and furniture. At least, thanks to the child gates we’d recently put up in all the doorways in case the boys started crawling early, the livestock weren’t free to roam the whole house.

“The problem is that they’re not safely out of his clutches,” I said. “What now? Were you planning on hiding them in our barn until you change the county manager’s mind?”

“We weren’t going to bring them here at all.” Dad plopped down on the sofa with a sigh. The Afghan hound scrambled over to put its head in his lap. The patch of upholstery it had vacated was covered with so much shed fur that it looked like tweed. “We’d arranged to have them taken to new permanent or foster homes outside the county,” Dad went on.

“Outside the state, in fact,” Grandfather said. “Parker Blair made the arrangements.”

“He has that big truck he uses to make deliveries from his furniture store,” Dad explained.

“We were going to meet Parker at midnight down by the haunted graveyard, load all the animals on his truck, and there you have it!” Rob exclaimed. “Like
The Great Escape,
with poodles.”

“Unfortunately, Parker hasn’t shown up,” Grandfather said. “I’ve been leaving messages for nearly two hours now. Not sure what the holdup is, but as soon as he gets here, we can load the animals and have them out of your hair. But in the meantime—”

“Shhh!” Clarence hissed. He was peering out one of our front windows. “It’s the cops!”

Everyone froze—even the animals, who seemed to sense danger.

I strolled over to the window and looked out.

“It’s only Chief Burke,” I said.

“Oh, no!” Dad wailed.

“We’re lost,” Clarence muttered.

“Get rid of him,” my grandfather said.

The chief was getting out of his car. I hadn’t heard a siren, but I could see that he had the little portable flashing light stuck on his dashboard.

“If he were just calling to see the babies, maybe I could.” I glanced at my watch. “But the chief doesn’t usually make social calls at two thirty in the morning.”

“Then stall him while we move the animals,” Dad said.

“Move them how?” Clarence asked. “All the pickups are out front where he’s probably already seen them.”

“Put the animals in the barn till Parker gets here,” my grandfather said. “I’ll call him again.”

He grabbed our phone and began dialing. Dad leaped off the sofa, picked up a puppy in one hand, and grabbed the macaw’s cage with the other.

“All gone!” the bird trilled.

“I wish,” Clarence muttered.

The windows were cracked slightly, to let in a little of the mild April air—or possibly to prevent the smell of the animals from becoming overwhelming. I could hear the staccato sounds the chief’s shoes made on our front walk.

“There is no way in the world I can stall the chief while you move all these animals to the barn,” I said. “And even if I could, do you think they’d go quietly?”

As if to prove my point, one of the dogs uttered a mournful howl, and several others whimpered in sympathy. I even heard a faint bark from the porch.

“Besides,” I added, “the chief has probably already spotted the dog you left outside.”

“What dog?” Dad asked.

“I thought they were all accounted for.” Clarence was fishing in his pockets for something. “We have an inventory.”

“Dammit, Parker, pick up!” Grandfather muttered.

The dog on the porch barked again.

“Just let me handle it,” I said. “The chief’s an animal lover. He probably won’t approve of your methods, but I’m sure he shares your concerns. Let me assess what kind of a mood he’s in. Maybe we can work something out.”

Clarence and my father looked at each other, then back at me.

“What else can we do?” Dad said.

The dog outside barked.

The doorbell rang.

Upstairs, Josh erupted into howls.

“Damn,” I said, pausing halfway to the door. “I was trying to let Michael sleep.”

“I’ll take care of the baby,” Clarence said, bolting for the stairs. “You deal with the chief.”

“Why doesn’t the bastard answer his phone?” Grandfather growled.

“Hiya, babe!” the macaw said.

“Put a lid on him,” I said to Dad, as I turned back to the door.

He scrambled to pull a tarp over the cage.

Upstairs, Jamie joined the concert.

“I’ve got it,” Michael called from upstairs.

“I’m almost there,” Clarence called, from halfway up the stairs.

I opened the door. The dog outside barked again, but I pretended not to hear him and didn’t look around to see where he was.

“Good morning, Chief,” I said. “What are you doing up at this hour, and more important, what can we do for you?”

The chief held up a cell phone. I looked at it for a moment.

The cell phone barked. Clearly it belonged to a dog lover. No one else would choose such an annoying custom ring tone.

“I’m investigating a murder,” Chief Burke said. “And I came over to ask why for the last couple of hours, you’ve been trying to call the dead guy’s cell phone.”

Chapter 2

I closed my eyes and counted to ten. Tried to, anyway.

Upstairs, the babies were wailing, and Michael had begun reciting “The Hunting of the Snark” to them. I hoped his trained actor’s voice would have its usual calming effect.

“Ms. Langslow?” the chief said.

Ms. Langslow. As if I didn’t already know this wasn’t a social call. These days, the chief usually just called me Meg. Reverting to formality was his way of signaling that he was on a case.

Spike had begun to bark, and the dogs downstairs joined in, accompanied by frantic shushing noises.

“Dammit!” I heard my grandfather say. “Pick up, you damned fool.”

I heard an unearthly howl and opened my eyes to see what had caused it. A gray tabby cat streaked out of the living room and toward the kitchen, caterwauling all the way, with two beagles in pursuit and Rob bringing up the rear, hissing, “Shh! Stop that! Come back here!”

The cell phone barked again.

I took a deep breath.

“It’s Parker Blair, isn’t it?” I asked. “Your murder victim with the barking cell phone.”

“How do you know Parker?” the chief asked.

“I don’t,” I said. “Grandfather’s the one who’s been trying to call him. Though I have no idea how he could have been calling from our phone for two hours. I thought he just got here.”

“I beg your pardon,” the chief said. “You’re correct. The calls were originally coming from Dr. Blake’s cell phone. Apparently he switched to your home phone approximately twenty minutes ago. That’s when we headed over here.”

“Makes sense. I’ll let Grandfather explain.” The nosy part of my brain noted that the crime scene must be no more than twenty minutes’ drive away and began trying to figure out where it was. I tried to squelch those thoughts. Odds were I’d find out soon enough. I stepped aside and gestured for the chief to enter.

I also squelched a pang of guilt at betraying the animal rescuers. This was a murder. Grandfather and his accomplices couldn’t very well expect me to lie to the chief in the middle of a homicide investigation.

Maybe the chief would be too busy solving Parker’s murder to worry about their raid on the animal shelter. Or if not, at least it sounded as if they’d all been trooping around together for the last several hours, and would be alibied for the murder. Not that I suspected them of murdering their wayward getaway driver but the chief couldn’t be expected to share my confidence in them.

I followed the chief into the living room, where my grandfather was still muttering at the phone.

Grandfather looked up to see the chief holding the cell phone. It barked again.

“That’s Parker’s phone,” Grandfather said. “How did you get his phone? Is he under arrest?”

“No,” the chief said. “He’s dead.”

Grandfather slowly hung up the phone. His face fell, and for a moment he looked every one of his ninety-some years. The chief turned Parker’s cell phone off and put it into an evidence bag. Grandfather heaved himself up and glared back at the chair he’d been sitting in. I’d had to negotiate with Mother for weeks when she decorated the living room, but except for that one chair, every piece of furniture was either comfortable or practical or both. I’d only allowed her to get away with the small, elegant, backbreaking side chair by the phone because I figured it would discourage visitors from settling in for long, leisurely calls.

“What the hell happened to Parker?” Grandfather sat on the sofa and thumped the Afghan hound on the rump a couple of times. “The fellow wasn’t even forty. Healthy as a horse. Did he wreck that damned truck?”

The chief was stripping off the gloves he’d been wearing to handle the phone. He stuffed them into his pocket as he took a few steps toward the front door.

“Sammy!” he shouted.

“Yes, sir!” Heavy footsteps raced up our walk and clomped across the front porch. Deputy Sammy Wendell appeared in the foyer. Unlike the chief, who appeared perfectly normal and wide awake, Sammy had clearly been roused from a sound sleep and hadn’t yet combed his hair, which was sticking out in all directions.

“Ms. Langslow,” the chief said. “I gather you and Mr. Waterston have been home with the babies?”

I nodded.

“And your grandfather and his party arrived about twenty minutes ago?”

“No idea,” I said. “We were all either asleep or upstairs feeding the kids with the white noise machine on. It was about fifteen or twenty minutes ago that the racket from the animals got loud enough for me to hear it.”

“Who else is here?”

“Well, apart from Rob, I expect Dad is out in the barn,” I said. “Clarence Rutledge is upstairs helping Michael with the babies. My cousin, Rose Noire, and our houseguest, Timmy Walker, are upstairs asleep, unless the noise woke them. That’s all I know about.”

I was assuming, of course, that “who else” didn’t include four-legged visitors.