Die Like an Eagle Page 9

  It worked at first. I began picking up the odd phrase.

  “—wouldn’t put it past you,” Biff sneered.

  “You’d better watch what you’re saying,” the tall man said.

  “Or I’m next—is that what you’re saying?”

  Just then they both appeared to notice me, broke off their conversation, and headed in different directions. Biff stormed over toward his car, which was in the far end of the parking lot. The tall man hopped into a battered truck that stood near the entrance to the parking lot—a truck that hadn’t been there when the chief and I had surveyed vehicles a little while ago.

  The tall man drove off. I went and leaned against Dad’s car. After about ten minutes, Biff left.

  About that time, to my relief, Dad came trotting over. We hopped in his car, and I deliberately started a conversation about baseball’s designated hitter rule, a subject on which I knew Dad had firm opinions. I did not, but by playing devil’s advocate, I succeeded in distracting him so that he wouldn’t tell me any of the gorier details of his preliminary medical examination.

  As we were reaching the outskirts of town, and Dad was waxing eloquent on the batting skills of a retired Major League pitcher named Carlos Zambrano, my cell phone rang. Randall.

  “I should take this,” I said.

  “Hey, Meg,” Randall said. “How much longer are you going to be out at the ball field?”

  “I’m already on my way into town,” I said.

  “Great! Mr. Witherington and I are making some plans for how to get this weekend’s games back on track. We could use your help. Can you meet us on the steps of the town hall?”

  “Can do,” I said.

  “Oh, good,” Dad said as I was putting my phone away. “Because I’m sure poor Shep wouldn’t want his death to interfere with the game.”

  “You knew him, then?” Sometimes it surprised even me how much Dad got around.

  “Well, no,” Dad said. “I’ve seen him officiate at a few games, though.”

  “Was he a good umpire?”

  “I think it takes a special kind of person to be an umpire,” Dad said. “Someone who has both a passionate love of the game and a willingness to do a difficult and unpopular job.”

  Evidently Dad wasn’t going to give me an honest verdict on Biff’s umpiring skills.

  “I think that’s one of the most important things we can teach the kids,” Dad went on. “That it’s important to respect the ump’s position, even when we don’t agree with his decision.”

  Then again, maybe Dad had just made his verdict pretty clear.

  We pulled up in front of the town hall. I hopped out and waved as Dad drove off toward Caerphilly Hospital. In the town square, the crowds were already assembling on the benches that formed a half circle at the foot of the bandstand, though some people were still coming and going from the various shops and restaurants that surrounded the square on three sides. And a few people had discovered that the white marble town hall steps provided a good vantage point. Randall and Mr. Witherington were seated near the top.

  I stopped halfway up to scan the town square, and felt my frustration rising. The bandstand, draped in red, white, and blue bunting in honor of the Founder’s Day Weekend, looked festive from a distance, but if you looked close you could see all the peeling paint and broken bits of woodwork. And what should have been a lush, green lawn, broken only by the neatly raked paths, was a piebald muddle of green, brown, and red clay. Biff Brown ought to have been ashamed of himself for not having made at least some progress in the renovations. But I suspected he didn’t even care.

  I took a few of Rose Noire’s calming breaths and continued my climb, nodding greetings to friends, relatives, and neighbors along the way.

  “We’re in a pickle,” Randall said, as I reached the top step. “If you count all the levels, from t-ball through intermediate, we had sixteen games scheduled, four a day from this morning until Monday afternoon, and we’re not going to have nearly enough daylight to get it all in.”

  He showed me the schedule, which had games posted for nine, eleven thirty, two, and four thirty on each of the four days of Founder’s Day Weekend.

  “And that’s assuming we don’t have any rain delays,” Mr. Witherington said. “Unfortunately we’re under a threat of scattered thunderstorms from tomorrow on.”

  “There’s a whole bunch of daylight you’re not using,” I said. “The early kind. Start the games at eight instead of nine. And if you have Randall bring a whole bunch of his portable construction lights to the field, you can keep the games going till eight or nine at night.”

  On one margin of the schedule I scribbled a possible alternation, with games starting at eight, ten thirty, one, three thirty, and six. Randall and Mr. Witherington studied it briefly and then they both nodded.

  “We might even be able to get in a sixth game, at eight thirty,” Randall said. “If it’s one of the majors teams—those games tend to move faster anyway, and the parents won’t be quite as vexed if the kids are up late, especially on a holiday weekend.”

  “That seems sensible to me,” Mr. Witherington said. “Though I would like to discuss the issue with Mr. Brown. He seemed averse to the thought of an early start when I suggested it—I gather he didn’t think the local folk would like it.”

  “I think under the circumstances people would understand,” I said.

  “Mr. Brown may not be as knowledgeable about how the locals feel as he thinks he is,” Randall said.

  “Yes.” Mr. Witherington’s tone had grown just a shade less warm. “I gather there has been a certain amount of … tension in the league. I do hope I can help resolve that—but first we need to get these games back on track—preferably with Mr. Brown’s cooperation, or at least consent. And if we can ever manage to reach him, I would also like to discuss with him the possibility of doing just a little bit of maintenance at the field before the first game. I realize that he inherited a field that had been left in fairly poor condition thanks to years of neglect by the local management of another youth baseball organization, and that he has had to spend a great deal of time and money getting it into the shape it is now but—I beg your pardon? Have I said something amusing?”

  Both Randall and I had burst into laughter. In fact, Randall was leaning back on the steps, clutching his stomach as he uttered howls of laughter. I recovered first, perhaps because I could see the look on Mr. Witherington’s face.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “This weekend is already going very far from the way you wanted it to, isn’t it? You arrive expecting a quiet weekend of baseball, and instead you find yourself out in the boonies watching something that looks like the Hatfields and the McCoys going at it, complete with a genuine murder, and you’re probably looking around, wondering which of these lunatics can be trusted, or maybe whether any of them can.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far,” Mr. Witherington said, a tremulous smile returning to his face. “But yes, the weekend has not gone as expected.”

  “Sorry,” Randall said. “We weren’t laughing at you. It’s just that—well, Biff’s right that the newly organized Summerball League inherited the field in pretty poor condition, thanks to neglect by the previous management.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Witherington said. “That’s easy to see.”

  “What he doesn’t mention is that he was the previous management,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Mr Witherington looked puzzled.

  “Biff used to hold the same position with the previous league that he does in our Summerball League,” Randall said. “For about six or seven years. So I give you the pretty poor shape thanks to neglect, but if he tried to suggest that it was someone else’s fault, then shame on him.”

  “The reason we’re with Summerball is that everyone dropped out of the other league to get away from Biff,” I said.

  “Then how did he get elected head of our league?” Mr. Witherington demanded.

  “He never di
d,” Randall said. “Not in any meeting or election I ever heard about. My uncle Lemuel Shiffley was elected president, and people were pretty happy with how he ran things for last year’s fall season, but during the winter break he took sick and had to cut down on things.”

  “And suddenly we got an e-mail saying that Biff was head of the league,” I said.

  “There should have been a meeting of the league,” Mr. Witherington said.

  “Neither my husband nor I heard about a meeting,” I said.

  “I hear rumors that there might have been a meeting,” Randall said. “But apparently, through some oversight, only a small portion of the league parents heard about it in time to attend.”

  “Or heard about it at all,” I said.

  “We were told there was a meeting,” Mr. Witherington said. “And we received half a dozen glowing letters of recommendation for Mr. Brown.”

  “Match the names on those letters against the names of the parents on the two teams he’s coaching,” I said. “The Yankees in the majors and the Stoats in coach-pitch.”

  “He’s not without friends,” Randall said. “He takes care of his friends, and his friends take care of him.”

  “These are very disturbing allegations,” Mr. Witherington said.

  “Don’t take our word for them, then,” I said. “Take your time. Do your research. Talk to as many parents as you like—though you might want to keep in mind that a lot of people are afraid to speak up for fear of hurting their kids’ prospects in the league. I’ll try to spread the word that it’s okay to talk to you, but some people will still be wary.”

  Mr. Witherington nodded, but I could see he was still a little uneasy.

  “In the meantime,” Randall said, “I’m going to get some lights ready to bring over to the field tomorrow, and I’m going to have a crew on standby who can sweep in and fix things up a bit as soon as the chief releases the field. If you talk to Biff and the two of you decide you don’t want any of that, just tell me and we’ll stand down.”

  Mr. Witherington studied us for what seemed like a couple of years. He definitely had a good face for a corporate guy—the thick lenses made it hard to read his eyes, and the rest of his features didn’t give away a thing. I wouldn’t have wanted to play poker against him.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate the offer, and I’ll let you know my decision very shortly.” He turned to go, then looked back. “And thank you for your candor.”

  He picked a cautious path down the steps, carefully looked both ways at the street, and made his way toward the bandstand.

  “Did we come on too strong?” Randall asked.

  “Time will tell,” I said.

  “I’m an impatient cuss,” he said, with a laugh. “You know that. What’s your best guess?”

  “We haven’t convinced him,” I said. “But we’ve planted a seed. We need to give it space to grow.”

  “Just space? No encouragement?”

  “Time and space,” I said. “I think if we give it those, Biff will do the encouraging we need, all by himself. Let him make our case for us. By the way—on another subject, though not really unrelated, I gather Biff and Shep are both originally from Clay County?”

  “And Shep still lives there,” Randall said. “Lived, that is. Biff bought a house over here for his family about ten, twelve years ago.”

  “And he moved his business at the same time?”

  “He never moved his business,” Randall said. “Just his driveway.” He laughed at the puzzled look on my face and continued. “His office and scrapyard have always been right along the Caerphilly/Clay County line. Eventually he came up with the notion that he’d have better odds of getting business over here if he had a Caerphilly address, so he bought ten acres of useless swampland off my cousin Porterfield—land that just happened to be right next to his, but on this side of the border. And he made himself a brand new driveway that came out to the same road, but on the Caerphilly side of the line.”

  “And contracts poured in from grateful Caerphilly residents?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice.” Randall shook his head and grimaced slightly. “He’s real good at schmoozing when he’s trying to get a job. Hasn’t figured out that it also matters how you treat folks during the job, not to mention at the grocery store and the town square.”

  “And at the ball field,” I added.

  “Precisely,” he said. “Want to bet he tries to use Shep’s death as an excuse not to meet his deadline?”

  With that he shook his head and headed down the steps toward the bandstand.

  “Not on my watch,” I muttered.

  I headed down the steps myself, more slowly, scanning the crowd as I went; looking for Biff. I realized I needed to talk to him today. Ask him if the loss of a key employee—and a family member at that—was going to interfere with his completion of the contract. If he said yes, I could offer to let him out of it, suggest we’d keep him in mind for the next available bit of town or county work. If he said no—

  “What in the world is your fool grandfather up to?”

  Chapter 10

  I looked up to see Cordelia standing at the foot of the courthouse steps, with her hands on her hips, frowning at something over in the town square. I followed her gaze and saw that Grandfather had arranged to have his portable booth set up—the one he used during Caerphilly’s various festivals to support his efforts to raise public consciousness of environmental or animal welfare issues. Today, the banner over the booth read THE EAGLE HAS LANDED!

  “Oh, that’s right,” I said. “He mentioned that he was going to bring a bald eagle to exhibit. In honor of the boys’ team, and to help raise awareness of the environmental issues threatening the species. And before you ask, it’s not a wild eagle—he’s bringing one from the zoo’s raptor rehabilitation unit that’s too badly injured to be safely returned to the wild.”

  “Bald eagle, eh?” Cordelia uttered a sound that might have been either a snort or a sharp chuckle. “You might want to tell the old reprobate to get his eyesight checked.”

  With that she strode off. I sighed, closed my eyes, and took a few of those deep, calming breaths Rose Noire was always recommending I take when dealing with our family. It didn’t seem to help much. Of course, maybe it would have helped more if thinking of Rose Noire didn’t remind me of how she was such a consummate romantic and believed Cordelia and Grandfather, having been reunited, were eventually going to become a couple again, in spite of having gotten along perfectly fine without each other for well over half a century. I’d be satisfied if they just started speaking to each other again, instead of sniping at each other from a distance, using me as an intermediary.

  I strolled over to see what Grandfather was doing that had so provoked Cordelia’s scorn.

  I found him glaring at two uniformed zookeepers, one tall and blond, the other short and very tanned. From the anxious looks on their faces, I suspected he’d been doing more than glaring.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I’m planning some remedial training for Axel and Manoj,” Grandfather said.

  “We know what an eagle looks like,” said the short, dark zookeeper. His faint Indian accent suggested that he was probably Manoj. The tall blond, provisionally identified as Axel, just rolled his eyes.

  “Oh, really?” Grandfather said. “Meg, what do you think of the fine eagle they brought me?”

  He strode over to a tarp-shrouded object to the left of the booth and whisked off its covering, revealing a large bird hunched on a perch in the center. It was almost three feet tall with dark feathers and the unmistakably naked red head of a—

  “Turkey vulture, right?” I said. “Not an eagle, of course, but a very fine specimen of his species. Unusually large, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, a very fine specimen.” Grandfather seemed pleased by my praise. “He had an unfortunate experience with a barbed wire fence—damaged his left wing so badly that he’s unable to fly. But otherwise
a very healthy specimen.” His face grew thunderous again. “Of Cathartes aura. Not Haliaeetus leucocephalus, which is what Axel and Manoj were instructed to bring.”

  “Nobody instructed me about anything except to bring the truck around to the aviary,” Axel said.

  “The message I was given didn’t say to bring an eagle,” Manoj said. “It specifically said to bring Alexander Hamilton.”

  “Alexander Hamilton?” I echoed.

  “We name the eagles after famous patriots,” Manoj said.

  “Then why didn’t you bring him?” Grandfather demanded.

  “Alexander Hamilton is molting, and also off his feed,” Manoj explained.

  “Perhaps he’s sulking about the plans to kick him off the ten-dollar bill,” I suggested.

  “Did you call Dr. Rutledge?” Grandfather’s face changed from anger to concern.

  “I did,” Manoj said. “And he said Alexander Hamilton will be fine, but he also said to leave him at the zoo to rest, and take another bird instead. And as you have said yourself, even when they are in good health, the bald eagles are timid with crowds and easily stressed. So since I did not know there was a particular reason for bringing an eagle, I considered all the birds in the raptor refuge and asked myself which would put on the best show and actually enjoy being admired by the public. And the answer, of course?” He flung out his arm toward the vulture. “Escoffier!”

  “Gesundheit,” Axel muttered.

  “We name the vultures and buzzards after famous chefs,” Grandfather said.

  Escoffier appeared to recognize his name. He shifted slightly, and then hunched his neck lower, uttered a low hissing sound, and spread out his wings in a gesture eerily reminiscent of a B-movie vampire preparing to pounce on his cowering human prey.

  “A real crowd-pleaser, I can tell,” I said. “So what’s the problem?”

  “My great-grandsons play for the Caerphilly Eagles!” Grandfather exclaimed. “Not the Caerphilly Vultures!”