The Good, the Bad, and the Emus Read online

  “That should work very nicely,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “So is there anything else you want to do while we’re here?” I asked. “Visit the police station, perhaps?”

  “I’d rather save that until we have your grandfather officially on board with the expansion,” Stanley said. “I have a feeling Dr. Blake has connections that will make it a lot harder for the Riverton police to stonewall me.”

  “Checking back files of the local paper, if they still have one?”

  “The Riverton Record, and I already did,” he said. “Hang on a sec and I’ll show you.”

  When he stopped at the next stop sign, he reached into the backseat and retrieved a manila folder.

  “Here,” he said, handing it to me. “You can check it out. If it’s okay with you, I’m going to take the long way home. Scope out the countryside a little. And I can think better when I’m driving on a sane road instead of an interstate.”

  “Fine by me,” I said. I was already delving into the file.

  It was mainly printouts from microfilm. They were fuzzy and hard to read, so I merely leafed through, saving the close study for later, when it was less apt to make me carsick. The articles were in chronological order, and most were merely passing mentions of Annabel, Cordelia, and other members of their family. I found the obituaries of Cordelia’s and Annabel’s parents. Apparently Cordelia’s mother—my great-grandmother—was a member of the National Genealogical Society. Might there be family trees going back even farther? Another thing we could hope to get from Annabel eventually. A notice of the widowed Cordelia’s return from Richmond to Riverton to live with her cousin. By this time, she seemed to have been using her married name, and Delia rather than her full name, I noticed with a frown. I liked Cordelia better.

  After that the file contained mostly passing mentions of their attendance at parties or Cordelia’s participation in the Garden Club. In the last few years, she’d been active in the campaign to set up some kind of bird refuge somewhere in the mountains outside town. I wasn’t quite sure I understood the need for a refuge. From what I could see, the whole area was a bird refuge. Apart from the songbirds that swarmed Annabel’s feeders, I’d spotted quail, pheasants, and even a wild turkey. But there was probably some good ornithological reason for the refuge. Perhaps the local hunters were a little too zealous, and Cordelia felt the need to provide some protection for the local ducks, geese, partridge, grouse, quail, wild turkey, and—

  “Whoa!” Stanley slammed on the brakes and the papers went flying onto the floor. “Did you see that?”

  “See what?” I glanced up but all I saw was the two-lane road, stretching downhill in front of us, and the trees pressing close to it on either side.

  Stanley was staring at the woods to the right of the road.

  “Something ran across the road,” he said. “You didn’t see it?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was studying the file you gave me. Could it have been a deer?”

  “No.” He was shaking his head slowly. “Actually, it looked like a small ostrich. I didn’t realize we had ostriches in Virginia.”

  “I’m pretty sure we don’t,” I said. “Not in the wild, anyway. Not in any part of the U.S.”

  “It looked smaller than I’d imagine an ostrich to be,” he said. “Do we have anything that lives in Virginia that looks like an ostrich, only slightly smaller?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said. “But you can ask Grandfather over dinner.”

  Chapter 7

  “No,” Grandfather said. “You couldn’t possibly have seen a wild ostrich here in Virginia. There are no living species of ratites native to North America.”

  “Ratites, I assume, is the scientific name for ostriches?” I put in from my end of my parents’ picnic table.

  “For the taxonomic order that includes ostriches.” Grandfather licked the butter from his fingers and went on, using the corn cob he’d just finished gnawing as a pointer. “None native to North America, and there’s only scant, unreliable evidence to indicate we ever had any. You have the ostrich in Africa. At nine feet or so, the largest extant ratite.”

  “I don’t think what I saw was quite that tall,” Stanley said, helping himself to more green beans.

  “Then in Australia you have the emus, about six feet, and the cassowaries, a little smaller, but not to be trifled with, because of their razor-sharp talons.”

  “Either one sounds more the size of what I saw,” Stanley said. “Although I can’t speak to the presence or absence of talons.”

  “South America has several species of rhea, four or five feet tall.” Grandfather was drowning a buttermilk biscuit in butter. “Though before you ask, no, I doubt if they ever stray this far north. And then in New Zealand there are the kiwis, which are pretty much the size of a chicken. Well, bigger than those,” he added, waving a bit dismissively at one of the sleek bantam whatzits that had wandered away from Mother’s elegantly decorated chicken coop. “The size of a normal chicken. But none of them would be running around wild here in Virginia.”

  “Are you missing any ratites from your zoo?” Rob asked, his words slightly garbled by the rib bone he was gnawing.

  “No.” Grandfather shook his head. “I was showing them to the boys about an hour ago. Was there a zoo in the town where you saw it? They could have escaped from some other zoo.”

  “There’s barely even a town,” Stanley said. “Definitely no zoo.”

  “Where was it you thought you saw this ostrich?” Grandfather asked.

  “Or emu,” Stanley said. “Out near Riverton.”

  “Riverton?” Grandfather frowned as if the name rang a bell.

  “That’s in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, isn’t it?” Dad asked. “Were you out there on your case?”

  “Actually, I was,” Stanley said. “On Dr. Blake’s case.”

  “My case?” Grandfather sat up, looking alert. “You were out there on my case? Why didn’t you say so earlier?”

  “Because it was dinnertime when we got here,” I said. “And Mother always disapproves of talking business over dinner.”

  “Thank you, dear,” Mother said.

  There was also the fact that Grandfather had been a little testy when we first arrived, probably because he’d just spent several hours patiently answering questions from the boys, and we’d decided to wait until the meal had mellowed him. He was incredibly spry for a man in his nineties, but neither his legs nor his patience could take too much of the boys all at once.

  “What’s the case?” Dad asked.

  “I hired him to see if he could find any trace of your mother,” Grandfather said. “What were you doing up in Riverton?”

  “That’s where Cordelia lived for the last twenty or so years of her life.”

  “Lived?” Grandfather said. “Past tense? She’s dead?”

  Stanley nodded.

  That news cast a predictable pall on the gathering, and we all fell silent. No doubt the rest of the family were thinking the same gloomy thoughts that had come to me when I’d first learned that I’d lost my grandmother before ever having the chance to meet her. Stanley glanced around and evidently decided to give everyone some time to digest the news. He applied himself to the last bits of his meal.

  Either everyone had finished eating or no one quite felt comfortable asking for seconds on potato salad quite so soon after hearing such bad news. The silence might have dragged on quite a bit longer if we hadn’t been startled out of it by sudden shrieks of alarm from the boys. They had been over by the chicken coop, throwing small handfuls of grain at the bantams, while Natalie hovered over them like a protective mother crow. One of the bantams had begun chasing the boys and pecking at their ankles. Natalie rescued them handily enough but Spike, our eight-and-a-half-pound furball, who had appointed himself the boys’ canine guardian angel, had counterattacked, and we all dashed over to save the chickens from Spike or possibly Spike from the chickens. By the time we’d separated all t
he combatants and soothed everyone’s ruffled feathers and feelings, the mood at the table had lightened a bit.

  “Well, it’s sad,” Grandfather said. “But not surprising when you come to think of it. Slip of a girl like that—you can’t expect her to last as long as a tough old goat like me.”

  “She lasted just fine until this past December,” Stanley said. “And she didn’t just fade away or anything of the sort—she was killed by a fire, and it may have been murder.”

  “Murder!” Dad looked stricken. I felt guilty. He’d been so excited at the idea of helping Stanley with a case. And few things excited him more than the notion of getting involved in a real-life murder investigation. But if the victim was his own mother …

  “According to her cousin,” Stanley said. He quickly sketched in what we’d learned about Cordelia’s death from Annabel and the Riverton Record.

  “What did the local police have to say?” Grandfather asked.

  “I haven’t talked to them yet,” Stanley said. “It seemed to go a little beyond the original scope of the case, and I wanted to make sure you were comfortable with my taking it in this direction.”

  Grandfather was frowning, but before he could open his mouth, Dad spoke up.

  “Comfortable with it! We insist on it!” Dad pounded his fist on the table.

  “Yeah,” my brother, Rob, said, through a mouthful of watermelon. “You think we want someone to get away with knocking off my grandmother?”

  “I agree,” I said. “And Stanley can probably also find out a lot of information about Cordelia. Her cousin Annabel is reclusive, but she knows a lot about Cordelia’s life, and she’s very interested in helping us solve the case.”

  Stanley and I had agreed that it was better not to come right out and say that she was holding her information hostage to our solving the murder. That was the sort of thing that would set Grandfather off.

  “Just think,” I went on. “Photos. Journals. Home movies. Genealogy files—apparently Cordelia’s mother was interested in that.”

  “Fabulous!” Dad looked a little less lugubrious.

  “Well,” Grandfather said. “It’s not exactly what I would have hoped you’d be finding. But it does sound like the reasonable thing to do.”

  “Awesome,” Rob said.

  “And you know, the more I think of it, the madder I get,” Grandfather went on. “She survives all this time, and just as I was about to reunite her with her family, some miscreant kills her? Unacceptable.”

  Even better. A riled-up Grandfather would be more than a match for any opposition the local police tried to put in Stanley’s way.

  “So I should accept Annabel’s request that we investigate Cordelia’s death as a possible homicide?” Stanley asked.

  “Absolutely!” Grandfather pounded the picnic table by way of emphasis.

  “I’ll head back down in the morning.”

  “It might take me a day or two to get things organized to join you,” Grandfather said.

  “Join me?” Stanley looked taken aback. As well he might. The investigation was clearly going to be a delicate mission. Grandfather had many sterling qualities, but subtlety, tact, and diplomacy were not among them.

  “I think maybe Stanley can probably handle this better alone,” I said. “He already knows it’s going to be difficult dealing with the local police. I’m not even sure he would have needed me at all, except that my face seems to reassure people who knew Cordelia.”

  “And you think I’m going to barge in like a bull in a china shop,” Grandfather said. “Don’t worry. I have the perfect cover story for being there.”

  “Do tell,” Stanley said, his voice sounding faint with dismay.

  “I knew there was something familiar about the name Riverton,” Grandfather went on. “It’s near Biscuit Mountain, isn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not yet that familiar with the local geography,” Stanley said. “What’s the significance of Biscuit Mountain?”

  “They’ve got a feral emu problem down there,” Grandfather said. “And possibly feral ostriches as well, though most of the sightings have been of emus.”

  “I thought you said there couldn’t be any ostriches or emus down there.” Stanley sounded cross, and I didn’t blame him.

  “I said there couldn’t be any wild ones,” Grandfather said. “Feral is a different matter.”

  “A wild animal is one that has never been domesticated,” I explained. “Feral means it was domesticated, but has gone back to the wild.”

  “There used to be a place up in the mountains near Riverton called the Biscuit Mountain Ostrich and Emu Ranch,” Grandfather said. “Some aging hippie decided it would be an easy way to earn a living, so he bought a lot of pasture land and turned the birds out on it. Only emus, apparently, in spite of the name. I suppose he never got around to the ostriches.”

  “It was a big thing in the nineties,” Dad said. “Ostrich and emu ranches were springing up all over.”

  “What do they raise them for?” Stanley asked.

  “Meat, leather, feathers, and with emus, the emu oil,” Dad said.

  “The Australian aborigines used emu oil along with eucalyptus oil in all their traditional remedies,” Rose Noire put in. “It’s supposed to have healing properties for wounds and arthritic joints.”

  “You use the stuff in all those herbal balms you sell?” Grandfather often pretended to make fun of Rose Noire’s passion for all things New Age, but I’d noticed that he’d started experimenting with some of her essential oils to enhance the well-being of some of his zoo animals. And he did suffer from arthritis.

  “Oh, no!” Rose Noire said. “I think you have to kill the emu to get it. Everything I use is natural, organic, and vegetarian.”

  “I have yet to see any really reliable studies that prove the benefits,” Dad said. “And—”

  “Whether or not it works miracles for arthritis and wounds, the emu oil didn’t do much for the owner of the ranch.” Grandfather was definitely getting better at herding family conversations back on track, or at least in the direction he wanted them to go. “He went bust, and couldn’t get anyone to buy his stock, so he just turned them loose.”

  “And they survived?” Dad asked. “Astonishing.”

  “Well, we have no idea how well they’re surviving,” Grandfather said. “It’s possible that they’re hanging on, but not thriving, in which case we need to rescue them and rehome them in a place that can give them proper care.”

  “And if they’re doing just fine on their own?” Stanley asked.

  “Then they’re probably having a detrimental effect on the native ecosystem, in which case we need to capture them and confine them in a place that can care for them without damaging the environment.”

  “Like the Willner Wildlife Sanctuary?” Dad suggested.

  “Precisely my idea,” Grandfather said.

  “Are you just going to show up at the sanctuary with an as-yet-undetermined number of ostriches and emus?” I asked. “Or are you going to give Caroline Willner a heads up on what you’re up to?”

  “I plan to invite her to join the expedition,” Grandfather said. “She’ll love it.”

  He and Dad immediately began making elaborate plans, as if Riverton were half a continent away instead of forty minutes’ drive. For some unfathomable reason they decided it would be more effective to camp out there for however long the ratite roundup would take, rather than sensibly coming home to sleep in their beds every night.

  I borrowed Stanley’s folder again and began reading some of the articles in it while he picked at his homemade organic strawberry ice cream.

  “Well, at least I know I’m not going crazy,” he said. “I did see an ostrich cross the road. Or possibly an emu.”

  “Let me just call the SPOOR members,” Dad was saying. “They’ll all want to get in on this.”

  “What is SPOOR?” Stanley asked me.

  “The Society to Preserve Our Owls and Raptors,”
I said. “A local bird conservation and appreciation group.”

  “Ah,” he said, nodding. “That makes sense. Are there many of them?”

  “Several dozen,” I said.

  “Oh, dear. I wasn’t hoping for quite this much enthusiasm.”

  “Well, it will probably please Annabel,” I said. “Because the whole feral emu thing explains why she and Cordelia were trying to start a bird sanctuary there. Have you read this?” I held up one of the articles from the folder.

  “I confess, as yet I’ve only skimmed all those articles,” he said. “It’s always been one of my least favorite parts of the job, wading through page after page of fuzzy fine print. I was planning to study them this evening. What did you find?”

  “Cordelia was heading up a campaign,” I said. “She and some other locals were trying to raise enough money to buy the former ostrich and emu ranch and set it up as a sanctuary for the abandoned birds.”

  I passed over the article. Stanley studied it for a few moments. Then he lifted his head, gazed at my Grandfather, and spoke up.

  “Dr. Blake,” he said. “Just how did you happen to find out about the feral emus in Riverton?” he asked.

  “Someone from down there contacted me,” he said. “Asked for my help dealing with the problem.”

  “Recently?” I asked.

  “A few months back,” Grandfather said.

  “Was it a Mrs. Mason who contacted you?” I asked. The article listed Delia Mason as the leader of the project.

  “No,” Grandfather said. “It was a Miss somebody. With a Civil War name.”

  “Civil War name?” Stanley looked at me for a translation.

  “You mean something like Grant or Lincoln or Jackson?” I asked Grandfather.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Can’t remember which one.”