The Good, the Bad, and the Emus Page 8

  As Grandfather continued to dispense emu lore, I sat back and studied the crowd. I recognized half-a-dozen people from Mother’s side of my family. Not surprising; many of my relatives had been involved in environmental and animal welfare projects long before Grandfather had come into our lives, and they’d thrown themselves into his expeditions with enthusiasm. I was a little surprised to see Seth Early, the sheep farmer who lived across the road from us, sitting at a table with Lad, his rescued border collie, at his feet. I wouldn’t have thought Seth cared for any animals apart from Lad and his prize Lincoln sheep. But perhaps it wasn’t the emus that had enticed him but the presence of Rose Noire—he was among the legions of men apparently smitten with her.

  My friend Crystal, from the hospital—also a longtime SPOOR member—timidly raised her hand.

  “Is this roundup going to be dangerous, Dr. Blake?”

  Grandfather beamed. Clearly she had just asked his favorite question. Was she a plant or had she come up with it on her own?

  “Dangerous? Of course!” he boomed. “Emus are as tall as we are, with a kick like a mule—and unlike mules, they also have sharp claws. I’ve seen them gut a man in seconds. Moreover—”

  Just then a middle-aged man seated a few rows in front of me shrieked and keeled over, splashing several nearby spectators with the contents of his coffee mug. I could see Dad running from the front of the tent, pushing his way through the people clustered around the fallen man. Maybe the man was only panicking at the thought of encountering a rogue emu, but I hadn’t liked the sound of that shriek, so I pulled out my cell phone and dialed 9-1-1.

  “It’s Fred,” someone said. “He’s having convulsions!”

  Dad and Crystal and several other volunteers who presumably also had medical training had reached the patient, though their efforts were slightly hampered by the onlookers. Someone should make them move back. When I finished calling the ambulance—

  “Move back, everyone! Move back, now!” Sherry apparently had the same thought.

  The Riverton emergency dispatcher answered.

  “We need an ambulance out in the field behind Miss Annabel Lee’s house,” I said.

  “Where the bird people are camping?” the dispatcher asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “One of our volunteers has collapsed and is having convulsions.”

  “I think Fred’s been poisoned,” Dad said over his shoulder.

  “The doctor on hand thinks he might have been poisoned,” I relayed.

  “Let me talk to them.” Crystal rushed up to me and took the phone.

  I let her have my phone and hovered nearby to reclaim it when she was finished. And wondered if maybe someone should mention to the dispatcher that poison was a hobby of Dad’s, and that he had been known to be just a little too eager to diagnose it.

  “Nothing to see here! Let’s clear out!” Sherry was still trying to shoo people away, not entirely successfully. Did the rest of the brigade find her as annoying as I did? But I decided to cut her some slack. She kept turning to stare at Fred and then jerking her head away. She was obviously quite shaken by what was happening.

  “Let’s give him air, folks!” Grandfather shouted. “The food trucks will be serving in a few minutes. Clear the mess tent! Today’s lunch will be a picnic.”

  At Grandfather’s urging, the crowds left. I hoped not too many of them had heard Dad’s comment about the possibility of poison, or lunch could be something of a bust, even though the coffee hadn’t come from the newly arrived food trucks.

  One of the volunteers scurried in with an armload of medical equipment—from Dad’s tent, I assumed.

  I heard a siren in the distance. I glanced back at the patient in time to see him vomiting copiously.

  “Excellent!” Dad exclaimed. He was hooking up an IV. From his triumphant expression, I deduced that vomiting was something he’d been trying to bring about, not a sign that his patient was deteriorating.

  Crystal handed me my phone and rushed back to her patient. I decided to make sure someone was clearing a path for the medics. I headed toward the sound of the ambulances.

  Just outside the tent, I ran into a woman who was scrubbing at her blouse with a paper towel. Scrubbing what looked like coffee stains.

  “Well, at least I wasn’t scalded,” she muttered when she saw me looking at her stains.

  “Were you sitting next to Fred?” I asked.

  “Just in front of him,” she said. “He’s not usually this bad.”

  “What do you mean, not usually this bad?” I asked. “You mean he’s had convulsions at brigade outings before?”

  “No, that’s new,” she said. “I mean he usually gets a little tiddly around the campfire in the evening, but not this early, and not like this. Do you think it’s DTs?”

  “You think he’s drunk?”

  “I think he’s been drinking,” she said. “More Scotch than coffee in that cup of his. Smell this.” She held out the paper towel. I took a hesitant sniff and detected a faint odor of coffee overlaid with a much stronger smell of Scotch.

  “I should go and change,” she said. “And find a plastic bag to stow this blouse in, or my tent will smell like a distillery for the rest of the week.”

  “How about if I take it off your hands for the time being?” I asked. “If Dad is right and Fred was poisoned, your blouse could be evidence. We should turn it over to the police.”

  “Poisoned?” She pulled the blouse away from her body as if afraid the poison would seep into her skin. Which some poisons could do, of course. “In the coffee?”

  “No idea,” I said. “Dad can’t necessarily be sure it’s poison at this point. But since your blouse is saturated with the coffee Fred was drinking just before his collapse—”

  “My tent’s this way. Let me find something else to put on and you can keep the blouse.” She set off at a fast pace.

  I followed her to her tent and stored her blouse in another of Annabel’s paper bags. And then I went back to the mess tent and spotted a coffee mug that had fallen on the ground near where Dad and his crew were working on Fred. I was pretty sure it was Fred’s mug, because it, too, gave off a strong odor of Scotch. I hesitated for a moment. Should I leave it where it had fallen? No, all too likely that the cleanup crew would whisk it away. And if Dad was right about Fred being poisoned—and if it turned out to be intentional rather than accidental—the cup would be evidence. Not a good idea to leave it where the poisoner could find and dispose of it. I bagged it and stowed it and the blouse in my tote. It was getting bulky. But surely the police would arrive soon to investigate the suspected poisoning, and I could turn everything over to them. Should I hunt down Stanley first and show him the contents of the tote? Or—

  “Ms. Langslow?”

  I turned to find Dr. Ffollett standing behind me. He seemed tense and kept darting glances around him, making him look rather like a mouse making his way through an encampment of cats.

  “Welcome to Camp Emu,” I said. “I’m afraid you’ve caught us in the middle of a medical emergency.”

  Dad would have perked up at that news but Dr. Ffollett didn’t.

  “She’s having a fit,” he said. Annabel, of course. “People keep showing up at the gate and trying to get in. She sent me out to give directions to the first few, but she’s not happy.”

  “Tell her we’ll take care of it,” I said.

  “Right.” He turned and fled, looking more mouselike than ever.

  We’ll take care of it. More likely me. Although perhaps it would be nice to have something I could take care of, since there was nothing I could do for poor Fred. I could hear Natalie and the boys still chattering happily in Caroline’s caravan. Good. I strolled through camp, passing clumps of picnickers at every turn. I made my way to Grandfather’s Airstream. In front of it was a tarp that sheltered a small folding table and chairs that served as the command center. Grandfather wasn’t there—no doubt he’d taken his place at the head of the chow line, and by n
ow was having his first spoonsful of the chili whose odor was wafting through camp. But a woman I recognized as one of his assistants was on duty—a harried-looking thirtyish woman in jeans and a BLAKE’S BRIGADE T-shirt. She was typing on a laptop. She looked up when I approached, and braced herself, as if afraid I was bringing her another problem.

  “Any news about Fred?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Look, we need to keep people from bothering the woman who owns this field. People keep going up and knocking on her gates instead of going round. She’s a recluse, remember?”

  “We said that in our directions,” she said. “Which nobody reads, apparently. We could put up a sign.”

  “A sign would be nice,” I said. “And do you have someone you could spare to sit out there and snarl at anyone who doesn’t read the sign? Just for today. I assume most of the brigade will be here by the end of the day.”

  She frowned, and then a sudden look of delight crossed her face. She pulled out her cell phone and dialed a number.

  “Evan,” she said. “Come see me ASAP. I have an important job for you.”

  She hung up and began to rummage through a stack of supplies under the table.

  “This Evan,” I said. “Someone who’ll be a good watchdog?”

  “If the job involves loitering for hours on end and bossing people around, Evan can do it,” she said. “And he’ll love putting some distance between him and Sherry. What do you want your sign to say?”

  We started our sign with DO NOT BOTHER HOMEOWNER! and followed that with both written instructions and a small map. Evan had not appeared by the time we’d finished, so I set out to post the sign and guard the gate until his arrival.

  “I’m going to take a shortcut through Miss Annabel’s yard,” I said. “But only in the interest of getting the sign up as soon as possible. Tell Evan to come the long way round.”

  The woman nodded, and I set off with my sign and a roll of duct tape.

  The ambulance had arrived and was parked near the mess tent. But no police vehicles, so I took my tote bag full of evidence with me.

  I could see curtains flutter along the side of the house as I passed, and then in the front as I taped the sign to the tall iron gate, where Dr. Ffollett was standing on guard.

  “You think they’ll bother to read this?” he asked, watching me tape up the sign.

  “We’ll have a guard out here to reinforce it, at least for today,” I said. “The first shift is already en route.”

  “Good.” He nodded and headed back to the house.

  I resigned myself to waiting for the elusive Evan. Who had better not show up reeking of chili.

  I loitered by the gate for a while. Then, growing restless, I began strolling up and down the length of the iron fence. In fact, when I reached the end that bordered Theo Weaver’s lot I decided to stretch my legs a little more. So I kept going past the borderline and sauntered along the road, studying the Weaver house in sidelong glances.

  It was a white Victorian, much like Annabel’s, though slightly smaller. Neatly maintained, though not as homey looking—no bird feeders, no porch furniture, nothing to indicate the occupant made any use of his yard or porch. And while the lawn was neatly mowed, it was more weed than lawn. He had a few bushes around the foundations of the house, but they were the sort of low-maintenance kind you’d have put in if you didn’t want to bother much with gardening. Nothing that would shed fruit or blossoms on the tidy if unimpressive lawn.

  And then, just as I drew level with the closer end of Mr. Weaver’s house, I realized, in one of those sidelong glances, that someone was in the yard. Doing something in the border next to Miss Annabel’s fence.

  I made a show of peering down the road to see if anything was coming, then turned, and pretended to notice Mr. Weaver for the first time.

  “Good afternoon,” I called out, in my most cheerful tone.

  Weaver froze, then glanced up and stared at me for a few moments before replying.

  Was it Cordelia’s face working its magic again? Not necessarily. He’d frozen—almost flinched, actually—as soon as he heard my voice.

  “Afternoon,” he said. His facial expression suggested that, whatever I might think, his afternoon wasn’t good. Though it might improve slightly if I left.

  He had the pallor of someone who doesn’t go outdoors all that much. I guessed he was in his sixties, and surmised, from the pattern of the wrinkles on his long, rather horsy face, that over those sixty-odd years he’d spent a great deal more time frowning than smiling.

  He continued to stare up at me for a few moments. Then he turned his attention back to the flower bed. Actually, flower bed probably wasn’t the right word. I’d have called it a weed bed. If he plucked out every sprig of dandelion, pigweed, plantain, crabgrass, curly dock, chickweed, knotweed, and ragweed, he’d have nothing left but bare dirt.

  Probably not an observation that would charm him. I found myself wishing I’d spent more time preparing a conversational gambit. “Hello, I was wondering if you murdered my grandmother?” wasn’t exactly a question I could ask. I decided to go with the other, less sensitive reason I was in town.

  “By the way, I was just wondering if you had any information about the emus,” I said.

  “Emus?” He had frozen again and was frowning up at me as if this were a trick question.

  “They’re large, flightless, gray-brown birds—a lot like ostriches, but a little smaller. They—”

  “I know what an emu is,” he snapped. “Seen enough of them these last few years. Don’t belong here. Someone should deal with them before it’s too late. But why are you so interested in the emus?”

  “My grandfather’s here to deal with them,” I said. “He’s going to round them up and take them away to a wildlife sanctuary.”

  “Take them away?” Weaver was all attention now. “Out of Riverton?”

  He wasn’t suddenly getting possessive about the town emus, was he?

  “To the Willner Wildlife Sanctuary,” I said. “It’s only about an hour from here.”

  “Good riddance,” he said. “There’s some people in town who want to turn the farm those damned emus escaped from into a sanctuary for them.”

  From his tone, I deduced that he wasn’t a supporter of the proposed ratite sanctuary.

  “That’s an interesting idea,” I said. “But it hasn’t happened yet, and Grandfather doesn’t think we can afford to wait any longer to do something about the emus. Especially since there’s an established sanctuary so close.”

  That seemed to please him.

  “So that’s what the commotion behind my house is all about?” He seemed to find this amusing. “Bunch of bird nuts come to rescue the emus?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “How long are they going to be there? They’re not sleeping over there, are they?” Suddenly his face changed, as he realized the commotion might be going on into the night. “Not even noon and the police have already been out there. Don’t deny it—I heard the siren.”

  “It was an ambulance,” I said. “One of the volunteers was taken ill.”

  “This is a quiet, respectable neighborhood,” he said.

  “I know it will be annoying,” I said. “Miss Annabel’s already pretty steamed about the commotion, too, but she knows if she makes a fuss, Grandfather could very well lose his temper and storm off without rescuing the emus.”

  “And what’s more—steamed about it, is she?” A slow smile was spreading across his face.

  “Livid,” I said. “I certainly hope she doesn’t have a heart problem, or high blood pressure, because this could set it off. You’ll probably see me running in and out a dozen times a day, trying to placate her and keep her from kicking us out.”

  “She’s too fussy by half,” he said. “What’s the big deal about a little noise? How long’s this thing gonna take, anyway?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I wish I did; it would calm Miss Annabel down a bit. First we
have to find the emus. As I said before, I was wondering if, living out here at the edge of town, you ever saw any of them nearby.”

  “Not for a year or more,” he said. “Not since Chief Heedles gave her men orders to shoot the damned things on sight. But if I see any I’ll let you know.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He returned to his weeding—or perhaps returned to contemplating his weeds and keeping an eye on the comings and goings next door. And no doubt gloating at the annoyance our presence was causing to his unloved neighbor.

  Or maybe he was just waiting for me to leave.

  Chapter 10

  Just then my phone rang. I was relieved to find that it was Michael calling.

  “Are you coming back soon?” he asked.

  “As soon as someone named Evan turns up to guard Miss Annabel’s gate,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “He’s on his way,” Michael said. “And should be there soon if he isn’t already. Any chance you can come back to play diplomat? A police car just showed up. They’re searching one of the tents—the one that belongs to the guy who collapsed during the meeting. And the chief of police is supposedly en route. You know how your grandfather is with authority figures.”

  “Yes, he likes to be the only one around,” I said. “On my way.”

  I hoped no callers arrived before Evan, but greeting the police chief seemed more important than waiting for him. I jogged back through Miss Annabel’s yard and vaulted over the wire back fence, since detouring to the gate would slow me down. Easy enough for me, though I found myself wondering if the sedentary-looking Weaver could ever have managed it. I could see a police car stopped by the side of the road at the edge of camp, so I headed that way.

  A woman in a khaki uniform was standing beside it, talking on her cell phone. As I approached her car, she nodded to me, held up a finger as if asking me for a moment.

  I stayed far enough away that I could pretend I wasn’t eavesdropping, and her end of the conversation wasn’t very interesting anyway, just “Yes, I see,” and “Right,” and “I agree.”