The Gift of the Magpie Read online

  Actually, it wasn’t looking that bad. Along with all the boxes, Randall had rounded up at least a dozen sturdy metal utility shelves, and the crew had arranged them along the walls in the front of the store, ready for the sorting to come. Meanwhile the boxes were stacked three or four high and arranged in neat rows—and to my delight, someone had done at least some rough labeling. A lot of MISCELLANEOUS DECORATIVE boxes probably contained things like the ghastly vase and the pink elephants. Quite a lot of smallish boxes were labeled BOOKS. And an impressive number of boxes were labeled, in Josh and Jamie’s neat printing, PAPERS.

  While we’d been at the concert, someone had brought over Harvey’s kitchen table—the slab of marble on its wooden base—and his customary chair. They were arranged in the very back of the store, near the door that led into the back room. The back room held a rough kitchenette—no more than a hotplate, a sink, and an under-the-counter refrigerator, but it would make it much nicer for everyone to work here as we helped Harvey with the sorting. There was even a small closet-like bathroom in one back corner of the main room—not a very satisfactory bathroom by Randall’s standards, since it was partitioned off from the main room with wallboard so thin and cheap that it was barely a step above cardboard. But it was there. Harvey could actually live here in the short term, if he insisted on staying with his stuff, although I was hoping we could convince him to move into a bed-and-breakfast a few blocks away where, wonder of wonders, the owner had gotten a cancellation and could put Harvey up at Helping Hands’ expense starting tomorrow night.

  But for tonight, we’d christen the new space with the party before hauling him back home—to what I considered a much improved space. Mother and the visiting relatives were finishing the work of turning the furniture store into a festive Christmas party venue.

  Some had set up folding tables—borrowed, as I noted from the labels on the underside, from Trinity—and were flinging red and green tablecloths over them. Others were ferrying great quantities of food in from their vehicles, and I could hear the beeping of several borrowed microwaves from the back room. Still others were teetering on the top steps of ladders to hang the last few garlands of tinsel, evergreen, and red ribbons as high as possible along the double-height walls of the furniture store. One cousin was even going around flinging large red or green drop cloths over the stacks of boxes and sticking on enormous bows, so it began to look as if the entire room was filled with oversized Christmas presents.

  A lively guitar riff that I recognized as the opening of Chuck Berry’s “Run Rudolph Run” suddenly blasted through the store at a volume that made most of us jump and grab our ears. But the cousin in charge of the stereo dialed it back immediately, and began reassuring us that he had plenty of more sedate Christmas music to play during the actual party.

  “I just thought this would pump everyone up while we get the place ready,” he explained.

  Mother gave her approval; and “Run Rudolph Run” was followed by “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” “Jingle Bell Rock,” and Run-D.M.C.’s “Christmas in Hollis.”

  Harvey’s Christmas tree was standing in the front of the store, visible from the display window. The decorating crew had put lights on it, but Mother discouraged any other attempts to decorate it.

  “It’s Harvey’s tree,” she said. “Let’s give him the chance.”

  “I assume someone found his Christmas ornaments,” I said to Mother in an undertone.

  “What there was of them,” she said. “He has some very nice antique blown glass ornaments—obviously family heirlooms—but not nearly enough for a tree this size. So I brought over a few more, to make sure it looked festive.” Following her glance I spotted six boxes neatly labeled CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS.

  We were running out of things to do, and the people who had been working so hard on the decorations were eyeing the plates of food with intent, when my brother, Rob, ran in, closely followed by Delaney, his fiancée.

  “They’re coming! They’re coming! Let’s surprise them!”

  Chapter 11

  We hadn’t actually rehearsed anything in particular for Harvey’s arrival, but someone turned out the store lights, and we all crouched where we were until we heard fumbling at the door.

  “Well, at least the door’s open,” Cordelia was saying. “But I’d have thought there would be someone here to—”

  Just then the lights went on, and everyone yelled either “Surprise!” or “Merry Christmas!” Harvey stood for a few moments, obviously startled, before smiling broadly.

  “Merry Christmas everyone!” he said.

  Mother led Harvey to a seat of honor in a shabby armchair by the Christmas tree. I recognized the armchair as one a well-meaning parishioner had donated to Trinity several years ago, to the consternation of Mother and Robyn, who thought it spoiled the whole look of the parish hall and had been conspiring to get rid of it ever since. Rose Noire hurried up with a plate of food, and she and Cordelia arranged their folding chairs around Harvey, keeping up a cheerful conversation with him while Mother took charge of seeing that people who wanted to talk to him arrived singly or in small groups that wouldn’t overwhelm him.

  I was pleased to see that the meal Mother had organized avoided some of the holiday staples. So no turkey or stuffing and no cranberry sauce. Ham, but also roast beef. Big vats of several different kinds of salads. A lot of casseroles that were the specialties of the best Trinity and New Life church cooks. And tons of finger foods—ham biscuits, samosas, quesadillas, dumplings, and spring rolls.

  “So that’s your hoarder,” Grandfather said through a mouthful of samosa. “It’s common in the animal world, you know. Though most of them only do it with food. Very common with rodents and certain bird species.”

  “I think humans are most likely to hoard paper,” I said, the sight of Harvey’s office springing to my mind unbidden.

  “In fact, in German the verb for hoarding is hamstern—after the hamster,” Grandfather went on. “And there are similar connections in Dutch, Swedish, and Polish.”

  I had a mouth full of spring roll, so I merely made a noise intended to convey polite interest.

  “In birds it’s usually referred to as caching rather than hoarding,” he added. “And several of the species I’m studying practice it. Crows, magpies—”

  “I knew magpies would come into it sooner or later,” I said. “Hold that thought—I should see what Josh and Jamie are up to.”

  In fact, what they were up to was introducing Harvey to Spike and Tinkerbell. Tink was no problem—she never met a human—or for that matter, a living creature—that she didn’t like. But Josh seemed to be holding out Spike for Harvey to pat, which was sheer madness. Didn’t he realize—?

  But evidently being in the company of the only two humans he was fond of had a beneficial effect on Spike’s behavior. He only growled faintly when introduced to Harvey, and allowed himself to be scratched behind the ears without retaliating.

  A pre-Christmas miracle.

  Mother had begun helping Harvey decorate his tree with the ornaments they’d brought over from his house—most of them vintage if not antique glass ornaments that, according to Harvey, had belonged to his Dunlop grandmother. He was visibly excited, telling anyone what little he remembered of her and his long-ago Christmas visits to her house.

  I had the depressing feeling that it had been many years since he’d decorated a tree. And then I banished the feeling. We were engineering a fresh start for Harvey. This was going to be the best Christmas he’d had in years—maybe decades. And the start of a brand-new life for him.

  Others seemed to have the same thought.

  “Poor Harvey,” Rose Noire said. “Do you suppose he usually spends Christmases alone?”

  “If the choice is solitude or the Haverhills, I know what I’d choose,” I said.

  “Not the Haverhills.” She bit her lip, and I could tell her devotion to seeing the best in everyone was warring with the reality of Harvey’s cousi
ns. “They have a very negative aura,” she said finally. “And those neighbors of his aren’t much better. I think it would be a very good idea to do a cleansing of that house—of his whole property. I’ll check my sage supply tonight.”

  At one point Spike suddenly froze, growled, and walked stiff-legged toward the front door. I followed him and peered out into the night.

  No one.

  I opened the door and glanced up and down the street. Still no one, although that didn’t mean there hadn’t been. I thought, uneasily, of all those reports of prowlers around Harvey’s house.

  I closed the door and went back to where I’d been listening to Michael telling Grandfather about some interesting behavior he’d observed in our llamas.

  “Who was it?” Michael asked.

  “No one there,” I said.

  “Maybe they ran away?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I hope it wasn’t one of the Haverhills. That seems like the sort of thing they’d do.”

  “Haverhills?” Michael echoed

  “The praying mantis people.” I did a quick imitation of the Haverhills, hunching my shoulders and rubbing my hands together.

  “Ah,” Michael said. “I only saw the one. There are more?”

  “Three,” I said. “Two of them are—”

  “By praying mantis people, I assume you mean entomologists?” Grandfather sounded interested. While vertebrate predators were his favorites, he didn’t look down his nose at invertebrates, and he was always alert for the possibility of a meaningful discussion with fellow natural scientists.

  “No,” I said. “Merely three people whose physical appearance happens to remind me of praying mantises. I’m not trying to make fun of them, which would be politically incorrect as well as downright unkind, but they give me the creeps in much the same way praying mantises do. And don’t remind me that praying mantises are a natural part of the ecosystem and a valuable biological pest control—”

  “Actually they’re not,” Grandfather frowned. “Not a valuable biological pest control, that is.”

  “They’re not?”

  “No.” He struck a pose as if recording a bit for one of his television shows. “What you want in a biological pest control is a predator that specializes mainly if not entirely in a specific pest species, and multiplies rapidly when there’s an increase in its prey. Mantises are general predators. They eat whatever they can catch, including beneficial insects as well as harmful ones. So, an interesting species, and very effective predators, but of negligible use for pest control.”

  “Well, damn,” I said. “So all this time I’ve been apologizing to the wretched things for calling them creepy and thanking them for their service to our yard, and they’re nothing but self-centered imposters? Just eating what they damn well please? Hmph!”

  “The value of a species does not lie in its utility to mankind,” Grandfather said sonorously.

  “Humanity,” I corrected. “And I never said it did. But I intend to stop apologizing to them.”

  “You said there were three of them,” Michael said. “Haverhills, that is.”

  “Two brothers and a sister,” I said. “All praying mantises in human shape. And Harvey doesn’t like any of them. For that matter, I don’t either. It didn’t occur to me until afterward, but he said they all lived near Farmville—that’s the other side of Richmond. It must be at least two hours from here. Maybe more if you ran into traffic, which would be pretty likely, since you’d almost certainly have to go through at least the outskirts of Richmond to get here from there.”

  “So they drove a couple of hours to help their cousin?” Michael asked. “What’s not to like?”

  “More like they drove a couple of hours to park across the street and glare at him,” I said. “Because that’s all they did. Well, except for possibly trying to make in-person visits to the building inspector and Adult Protective Services. But this is the weird part—they drove in three separate cars.”

  “Why would they do that?” Michael mused.

  “No concern for the environment,” Grandfather grumbled. “Taking three cars when one would do.”

  “Well, maybe they just dislike each other so much that they couldn’t stand being cooped up in the same car for a couple of hours,” I said. “But I’m wondering if they had some kind of plan to haul away a lot of his stuff. And I don’t mean hauling junk to the dump—if that was the plan, they could use one car to ferry it back and forth. I think they were planning to help themselves to whatever they decided was worth hauling away. Three cars meant more than three times the cargo space.”

  “Wow,” Michael said. “They clearly didn’t make a good first impression on you, did they?”

  “I wouldn’t trust them an inch,” I said. “And Cordelia agrees with me, and Rose Noire says they have very negative auras.”

  “I was ready to dislike them on your word alone,” Michael said with a laugh.

  “When we go over in force tomorrow, we’ll have to warn all our volunteers not to let them in,” I said.

  “Do you have a lot of them?” Grandfather asked.

  “If everyone who signed up shows up, maybe three dozen.” I wondered why he’d asked—was he actually thinking of helping out?

  “Signed up?” He looked puzzled. “What are you talking about—I wanted to know if you have that many praying mantises in your yard.”

  Okay, so he wasn’t going to help out.

  “Sorry,” I said aloud. “I thought you were asking if we had a lot of people coming tomorrow to participate in one of the Helping Hands projects. I should have realized you were talking about insects. At the moment we don’t have any praying mantises that I know of, which I assume is because they all died out when the weather got cold.”

  “Obviously.” His impatience was showing. “But in season, did you have an unusual number of them?”

  “Not that I noticed,” I said. “Just what is the usual number?”

  He made a growling noise.

  “Sorry,” I said. “My mind wasn’t on mantises this summer.”

  “We should keep an eye on the situation,” he said. “Lately I’ve been seeing some fascinating studies about the incidence of mantid predation on birds.”

  It took a second for that to register.

  “Wait—do you mean praying mantises are eating birds?”

  “Mostly Trochilidae,” Grandfather said. And then, seeing our blank looks, he clarified. “Trochilidae—hummingbirds. Although there are cases on record of them bagging birds as large as twenty grams. Five or six times the size of a hummingbird. But I doubt if that was done by native mantises. Ever since people got the wrongheaded idea that mantises are good for pest control they’ve brought in a lot of non-native mantises. Some of them huge.”

  “And they’re going after the hummingbirds?” For all I knew Grandfather might disapprove, but I much preferred hummingbirds to almost any insect.

  “Not in any significant numbers,” he said. “Free-range cats are a much bigger threat. But still, there have been dozens of reported cases. Many from people with backyard hummingbird feeders. They’re partial to the brains.”

  “Who’s partial to brains?” Josh had joined the conversation. “Are we talking about zombies?”

  “He’s not talking about eating brains,” Jamie said, with a dismissive wave.

  “Yes, I am,” Grandfather said. “If you go on the Internet you can find any number of pictures of praying mantises feeding on hummingbird brains.”

  “Gross,” Jamie exclaimed.

  “Gross,” Josh agreed. “Mom, can we borrow your phone?”

  I refused to surrender my phone for the purpose of letting them view pictures of mantid predation on Trochilidae. Michael proved to be less squeamish, so before long the boys were off in a corner, wincing and exclaiming “gross!” at intervals.

  “Should they really be watching that?” Michael asked.

  “It’s never too early to learn about nature, red in tooth and claw,
” Grandfather said.

  “It will motivate them,” I said. “I plan to assign them the task of keeping our hummingbird feeders mantis-free this summer.”

  “The other interesting thing about them,” Grandfather said, “is the controversy over the degree to which they practice sexual cannibalism.”

  “Sexual what?” Michael asked.

  “Cannibalism,” Grandfather repeated.

  “That’s what I thought you said.” Michael raised an eyebrow. “I assume we’re back to talking about praying mantises again, not the Haverhills.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “I’m not sure I want to think about sexual anything in connection with the Haverhills.”

  “It’s generally considered to be very common among many arachnids and a few insect orders, like the Mantodea,” Grandfather went on. “The female will bite off the male’s head immediately after or even during mating.”

  “Like black widow spiders?” Michael asked.

  “Same phenomenon,” Grandfather agreed. “Entomologists have developed a variety of theories. Adaptive foraging is the most interesting—that upon encountering a male of her species, a female quickly assesses his value as a mate against his nutritional value—the hungrier she is, the more dangerous for him. But lately there’s been some work that suggests the high rate of sexual cannibalism is actually caused by intrusive laboratory observation.”

  “Wait—the female mantises resent having their love life spied on, so they bite off their mates’ heads?” Michael asked.

  “They’re very visually oriented, mantises,” Grandfather said. “Easily distracted by bright laboratory lighting, or the presence of observers. Also, if you’re doing a study like this and you don’t want mantises hopping all over your laboratory, you have to keep them confined, and that may increase male mortality by making it harder for them to escape. Ah—there’s Rose Noire. I need to talk to her about my magpies.”

  He strode off.

  “Does he really think he’s ever going to get those magpies back?” Michael asked.

  “He might, if he can convince her it’s for their own good,” I said. “If I were him, the first thing I’d do would be to stop calling them ‘my magpies.’ Because I’m sure by now she thinks of them as her magpies.”