Murder With Puffins Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER 1 - My Puffin Lies over the Ocean

  CHAPTER 2 - The Puffin Has Landed

  CHAPTER 3 - All My Puffins

  CHAPTER 4 - A Portrait of the Puffin as a Young Man

  CHAPTER 5 - These Puffins Were Made for Walkin’

  CHAPTER 6 - They Shoot Puffins, Don’t They?

  CHAPTER 7 - I Fought the Puffin and the Puffin Won

  CHAPTER 8 - The Little Puffin Around the Corner

  CHAPTER 9 - Twelve Angry Puffins

  CHAPTER 10 - The Puffin Before the Storm

  CHAPTER 11 - From Puffin to Eternity

  CHAPTER 12 - A Puffin Is Announced

  CHAPTER 13 - Zen and the Art of Puffin Maintenance

  CHAPTER 14 - A Long Day’s Journey into Puffins

  CHAPTER 15 - The Agony and the Puffin

  CHAPTER 16 - Travels with My Puffin

  CHAPTER 17 - The Return of the Prodigal Puffin

  CHAPTER 18 - East of Puffins

  CHAPTER 19 - Nude Puffin Descending a Staircase

  CHAPTER 20 - The Puffin Who Liked to Quote Kipling

  CHAPTER 21 - A Cat Among the Puffins

  CHAPTER 22 - Tell Me How Long the Puffin’s Been Gone

  CHAPTER 23 - Puffin, Come Home

  CHAPTER 24 - The Puffin Who Knew Too Much

  CHAPTER 25 - Puffin or Tiger?

  CHAPTER 26 - Round Up the Usual Puffins

  CHAPTER 27 - Touch Not the Puffin

  CHAPTER 28 - Anatomy of a Puffin

  CHAPTER 29 - I Am the Only Running Puffin

  CHAPTER 30 - The Scene of the Puffin

  CHAPTER 31 - Abandon Puffins, All Ye Who Enter Here

  CHAPTER 32 - Much Ado About Puffins

  CHAPTER 33 - Hair of the Puffin

  CHAPTER 34 - A Farewell to Puffins

  Other Meg Langslow Mysteries By Donna Andrews

  Praise

  GET A CLUE!

  Owls Well That Ends Well

  No Nest for the Wicket

  Revenge of the Wrought-Iron Flamingos

  We’ll Always Have Parrots

  Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon

  Copyright Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With thanks:

  • To Dad, for inspiring Meg’s dad.

  • To Mom, for being nothing whatsoever like Meg’s mother. (Well, except for the bit about the coconut.)

  • To Stuart and Elke, for holding your wedding on Monhegan.

  • To Monhegan and its residents—although a hurricane and a homicide must seem poor thanks for your hospitality.

  • To Ruth Cavin and the crew at St. Martin’s, and to Ellen Geiger of Curtis Brown, for helping steer me through the perils of publishing.

  • To my friends and family everywhere, including the Misfits, Queen Bees, Teafolk, Wombats, fellow writers, and fellow readers.

  CHAPTER 1

  My Puffin Lies over the Ocean

  “I see land ahead,” Michael said.

  “I’m sure they said that often aboard the original Flying Dutchman,” I replied, my eyes tightly shut.

  “No, really; I’m sure of it this time,” he insisted.

  I kept my eyes closed and didn’t relax my death grip on the rail while the ferry’s deck bucked and heaved beneath my feet. The rain and spray had soaked me to the bone, but I wasn’t going into the cabin unless the swells grew dangerous. Way too many seasick people inside. Of course, those of us on deck were seasick, too, but at least out here the wind kept the air fresh, if a little damp.

  “The next time I have an idea like this,” I mumbled, “just shoot me and get it over with.”

  “What was that?” Michael shouted over a gust of wind.

  “Never mind,” I shouted back.

  “I really do think that’s land ahead,” Michael repeated. “Honestly. I don’t think it’s another patch of fog.”

  I debated, briefly, whether to look. My seasickness seemed a little less intense if I kept my eyes closed. But if an end to our ordeal was in sight, I wanted to know about it. I opened one eye a crack and peered in the direction Michael pointed. To me, the vague shape ahead looked like the same ominous cloud bank we’d been staring at for hours. Maybe it made him feel better to think he saw land. Maybe he was trying to make me feel better.

  “That’s nice,” I croaked, and closed my eyes again, blotting out the gray sky, the gray sea, and the disturbing lack of any clear line of demarcation between the two. Not to mention the gray faces of the other passengers clinging to the rail.

  “We must be getting close,” Michael said, sounding less confident. “Monhegan’s only an hour off the coast in good weather, right?”

  I didn’t answer. Yes, normally it took only an hour by ferry to reach Monhegan, where we planned to stay in my aunt Phoebe’s summer cottage. But there was nothing normal about this trip. If Michael still believed we’d reach dry land soon, I wasn’t going to discourage him. Even though deep down I knew that we really had boarded the Flying Dutchman and were doomed to sail up and down the coast for all eternity, or at least until we ran out of fuel and had to be rescued by the Coast Guard.

  “Well, maybe not,” I heard Michael murmur.

  I pried my eyes open to check on him. He stared out over the water with a faint frown. I felt a twinge of jealousy. I probably looked as ghastly as I felt, but even in the throes of seasickness, Michael was gorgeous. A little paler than usual, and the hypnotically blue eyes were a bit bloodshot. But still, were I an artist, looking for just the right tall, dark, handsome cover model for a nautically themed romance, I’d look at Michael and shout, “Eureka!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said instead. “This was a bad idea.”

  “It’ll turn out all right,” he said with a smile. Only a faint ghost of his usual dazzling smile, but it made me feel better. “But next time we set out on an adventure, let’s remember to check the weather first, okay?”

  Well, that was encouraging. At least he was still talking about “next time.” And next time I took off on a trip with Michael, I promised myself, we’d go someplace warm and tropical, where the nearest large body of water was the hotel swimming pool. Not on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic—well, several miles off the coast of Maine anyway. Hurricane Gladys had now headed out to sea and now subsided to a mere tropical storm, but if I’d bothered to check the Weather Channel before Michael and I set out for our weekend getaway, I could have picked a more promising spot. In fact, I could probably have done better just by sticking a pin in a map.

  “It’s a deal,” I said, smiling back as well as I could. He put his hand on mine for a few seconds, until another wave hit the boat and he had to grab the rail again. But I felt better. Mentally anyway. Physically … well, I was trying to ignore another set of warning signals from my stomach.

  “Meg Langslow? Is that you?”

  I opened my eyes and turned, to see two figures standing to my left, both wrapped from head to toe in state-of-the-art rain gear. They looked like walking L. L. Bean catalogs and were probably toasty warm and reasonably dry underneath. I tried not to resent this.

  “Yes?” I said, peering through sheets of rain at the small portion of their faces visible under their hoods.

  “Meg, dear, don’t you remember us? It’s Winnie and Binkie!”

  “Winnie and Binkie?” Michael repeated.

  I finally placed the names. Mr. and Mrs. Winthrop Saltonstall Burnham, aka Winnie and Binkie, owned a cottage on Monhegan Island and were old family friends. Childhood friends of my grandparents, if memory served, which made them fairly ancient by now. And yet there they stood, two sturdy round figures in yellow slickers, seemingly undis
turbed by the driving rain, the frantic rocking of the boat, and the near–gale force winds.

  “Bracing, isn’t it?” Winnie said, throwing out his chest and taking a deep breath, which was at least one-quarter rain.

  “Don’t mind him, dear,” Binkie whispered, noticing my reaction. “Rough weather always makes him a little queasy, and he likes to put a brave front on it.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind the crossing,” Winnie said. “I’m just hoping the weather doesn’t spoil the bird-watching.”

  “Bird-watching?” Michael said. “You’re going out to Monhegan in the middle of a hurricane for bird-watching?”

  “Yes, aren’t you?” Winnie asked.

  “It’s been downgraded to a tropical storm,” Binkie said. “And this is the fall flyover season.”

  “Oh, of course,” I said.

  “The what?” Michael asked.

  “The fall flyover season,” Binkie explained. “Monhegan lies right in the path the birds take when they migrate north and south. There’s a short time every spring and fall when the bird-watching reaches its peak, and birders come here from all up and down the Eastern Seaboard.”

  “We have a cottage on the island,” Winnie said. “We’ve been bird-watching here for fifty-three years.” He and Binkie exchanged fond smiles.

  “But if you’re not here for the bird-watching, why are you going out to Monhegan?” Binkie asked.

  “We wanted to get away from things,” Michael put in. “Get some peace and quiet.”

  “Some what?” Winnie shouted over a gust of wind that had evidently carried away Michael’s words.

  “Peace and quiet!” Michael shouted back.

  “Oh.”

  They still looked at us with puzzled expressions. I sighed. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to try explaining.

  The trip had seemed so logical a few days ago. My romance with Michael had reached the point where we wanted to spend a little time alone together—okay, a lot of time—just at the point when neither of us had a place to call our own.

  As a bachelor professor of theater in a college town with a chronic housing shortage, Michael had lived in relative luxury for the last several years by renting houses from faculty members on sabbatical. This year, alas, his landlords had suddenly realized they couldn’t afford to spend a year in London—not with their seventh child on the way. They’d been very nice about letting Michael sleep on their sofa until something else turned up, but it was no place for the logical conclusion to a romantic candlelight dinner. We’d already ended enough dates watching Disney videos and dodging blobs of peanut butter.

  And I was temporarily homeless, as well. Subletting my cottage and ironworking studio for several months to a struggling sculptor had seemed like a good idea at the start of the summer. I’d known I would be down in my hometown of Yorktown, organizing three family weddings; and with my career as an ornamental blacksmith on hold, I could use the rent money.

  But when I tried to move back in, I couldn’t get rid of my tenant. He was in the middle of an important commission; he would ruin the whole piece if he had to move it; he needed just one more week to finish it. He’d been needing just one more week for the past six weeks.

  So I was still staying at my parents’ house. Mother and Dad weren’t there, of course; they were off in Europe on an extended second honeymoon. But the house was filled with elderly relatives. They’d come for the weddings and stayed on to watch the legal circus unfold as the county built its case against the murderer whose identity I’d managed (more or less accidentally) to uncover.

  That was another problem. I’d become notorious. I couldn’t go anywhere in Yorktown without people coming up to congratulate me for my brilliant detective work. More than one romantic candlelight dinner with Michael had been interrupted by people who insisted on shaking my hand, having their picture taken with me, buying us drinks, treating us to dinner—it was impossible.

  “Too bad we can’t just run away together to a desert island,” Michael said after one such interruption.

  Inspiration struck.

  “Actually, we can,” I said. “What are you doing next weekend?”

  “Running away to a desert island with you, evidently,” Michael said. “Did you have a particular island in mind?”

  “Monhegan!” I said.

  “Never heard of it. Where is it?”

  “Off the coast of Maine.”

  “Won’t that be cold this time of year?”

  “The cottage has a fireplace. And a gas heater.”

  “Cottage?”

  “Aunt Phoebe’s summer cottage. Actually, it’s an old house. And hardly anyone stays on the island after August; it’s too rugged.” Which meant we wouldn’t have half a hundred neighbors and relatives looking over our shoulders and reporting who said what to whom and how many bedrooms were occupied.

  “What about Aunt Phoebe?”

  “It’s a summer cottage, remember? Which she isn’t using, partly because summer’s over and partly because she’s having much more fun down here, waiting for the trial and keeping me awake with her snoring.”

  “And she won’t mind if you use her cottage?”

  “She wouldn’t mind if she knew, and she won’t have to know. Dad has a spare key. She’s always inviting us to go up anytime. We haven’t for years, but the whole family knows they have an open invitation.”

  “And how can we be sure the whole family won’t be there?”

  “In September? Like you said, it’s cold this time of year. Besides, most of the family finds it a little too Spartan for their tastes. Mother won’t go at all; she refuses to go anywhere that doesn’t even have electricity, much less ready access to a deli and a good hairdresser. Michael, this is not a tropical paradise. But it’s empty, it’s free, and there’s nobody else around for miles except for a few dozen locals who winter there.”

  “I’m sold,” he said. “I can’t skip Wednesday night’s faculty meeting, but I’ll get someone to cover my classes for the rest of the week, come by for you early Thursday morning, and we’ll drive up.”

  As I said, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Even the two flat tires that stranded us in a Motel Six near the New Jersey Turnpike for the first night of our getaway hadn’t dimmed our enthusiasm. But standing there on the deck of the ferry, I wasn’t sure any of that would make sense. I focused back on the present, where Winnie and Binkie were still patiently waiting for an answer. From the way they looked at us, they probably thought we were on the run from something.

  “Well, things were so hectic down in Yorktown, and I told Michael about what a great place Monhegan was for getting away from it all,” I said finally. “I didn’t really stop to think how far past the season it is.”

  “Yes, you’ve had quite a time,” Winnie said. “We had a note from your father when they were in Rome, and he mentioned your detective adventures. You’ll have to come over for dinner and tell us all about it.”

  Michael winced. I could almost hear his thoughts: So much for anonymity and privacy.

  “Yes, that’s a wonderful idea,” Binkie said. Then her smile suddenly vanished, and she flung her hand out to point over her husband’s shoulder.

  “Bird!” she cried.

  Winnie whirled, and they both produced gleaming high-tech waterproof binoculars from beneath their rain gear. They plastered themselves against the boat rail and locked their lenses on their distant prey. I couldn’t see a thing. I glanced at Michael. He shrugged.

  I had assumed that the other passengers clinging to the rail were seasick, like us, and either optimistically hoping the fresh air would make them feel better or pessimistically placing themselves where the weather could take care of the inevitable cleanup. But up and down the rail, a forest of binoculars appeared, all trained on the distant speck.

  “Only a common tern, I’m afraid,” Binkie said. “Still, would you like to see?”

  Under Binkie’s guidance, I managed to focus on a small black dot atop a d
istant buoy. Even with the binoculars, you could recognize the dot as a bird only if you already knew what it was.

  “Poor thing!” Binkie said “Imagine being out in weather like this!”

  I didn’t need to imagine; we were out in it.

  “Oh, there’s another tern at three o’clock!”

  Dozens of binoculars swerved with the uncanny accuracy of a precision drill team. Binkie redirected my binoculars to another, closer buoy. This one definitely had a morose bird perched on top. I deduced that terns must be closely related to seagulls; this looked like just another seagull to me. The buoy gave a lurch, and the tern had to flap its wings and scramble to keep its footing before hunching down again. It cocked its head and looked at the boat. In the binoculars, it seemed to stare directly at me. It shook its head, pulled it farther back between its shoulders, and looked so miserable and grumpy that I identified with it immediately.

  “Poor thing,” I said.

  “Oh, they’re fine,” Winnie said. “Coming back very well.”

  “Coming back from where?”

  “Extinction, dear,” Binkie said. “Things looked very bad for them at the beginning of the century, poor things, but we’ve managed to turn that around.”

  “We have several hundred nests on Egg Island, and, of course, nearly a dozen pair of puffins,” Winnie said. “If you get a chance, you should take the tour. The boat leaves from Monhegan and anchors off the island for several hours.”

  “In the spring, love,” Binkie said. “I imagine they stop running after Labor Day. The puffins would be mostly gone by now.”

  “True,” Winnie said. “But if there are still a few puffins there, perhaps we could arrange a special tour for Meg. If the weather lets up a bit,” he added, glancing up.

  I forced a smile and handed Binkie her binoculars. The weather would have to let up more than a bit before I’d set out from Monhegan again in a boat. But if by some misfortune Winnie and Binkie succeeded in convincing a suicidal boat captain to take them out puffin-watching, I’d find some excuse.