Murder With Puffins

'Of course he knows, Mother,' I said. 'We all heard it from the Dickermans last night.'

'Oh dear me,' Mother said. She drifted down the stairs, looking preoccupied.

'Where did you say Phoebe was?' Mrs. Fenniman asked.

'Probably up at Victor Resnick's house, giving him a good thrashing,' I said.

'I'm sure your father is doing no such thing,' Mother said. 'That's absolute nonsense.'

She strode out into the kitchen, leaving the swinging door flapping wildly.

'Not Dad--Aunt Phoebe,' I called after her. 'Why on earth would Dad want to thrash Victor Resnick?'

'Well, he's a birder, too, isn't he?' Michael said. 'Probably upset about what everyone thinks Resnick's doing to the birds.'

'Birds! Don't be silly,' Mrs. Fenniman said with a cackle. 'The green-eyed monster, more likely.'

'Green-eyed monster?' Michael and I said in unison.

'They were quite an item, your mother and Victor Resnick,' Mrs. Fenniman said. 'Of course, that was a few years ago, before she met your dad.'

'Over forty years ago, if it was before she met Dad,' I said. 'What makes you think Dad would still be jealous of Victor Resnick after all this time?'

'Quite a famous man, Victor Resnick,' Mrs. Fenniman said. 'Bound to make a man a little nervous, his wife's old beau showing up like this. And still single.'

With that, she disappeared into the kitchen.

'He didn't show up; Mother and Dad did,' I said as the door swung to again.

I heard a smothered chuckle from Michael, who sat there as calmly as you please, flipping through one of the old family photo album. Men.

'Very funny,' I said. 'You don't really think Dad is off confronting Victor Resnick, do you?'

As if in answer, Michael held out a photo album, pointing to one of the pictures. I glanced down and saw Mother, posing arm in arm with a tall, gawky young man who looked dreadfully familiar. Something about the hawklike nose and the pugnacious expression. I flipped the page. And the page after that. Picture after picture of Mother with the same young man. In several, they were affectionately entwined in a manner that wasn't particularly shocking today but probably was back then. Particularly since the fashions and the ages of some of the younger cousins showed that Mother wasn't more than fourteen or fifteen. In one photo, he held a sketch pad and Mother had assumed an exaggerated cheesecake pose.

'Resnick.' I said. 'Damn.'

The kitchen door swung open again.

'Meg, go and find your father at once!' Mother said. 'Make sure he doesn't do anything foolish.'

'Mother, he's probably just gone to Green Point to watch the hurricane hit the island,' I said.

Mother looked at me in silence for a moment.

'Anything foolish,' she repeated, and disappeared into the kitchen.

Mrs. Fenniman stuck her head out a few seconds later.

'Keep your eye out for Phoebe, too,' she said. 'She ought not to be out in this weather. Hurricane's moving again.'

'Is it going to hit the island?' Michael asked.

'No, but it's going to come close enough to make things pretty nasty,' Mrs. Fenniman said. 'Don't forget your knapsacks; you may need some of that gear out there!'

With that, she popped back into the kitchen.

Michael and I looked at each other. For a moment, I could see a look of utter exhaustion on his face, and I felt a sudden surge of anger. Why on earth couldn't my family behave like sensible human beings for once? Then his face relaxed into a tired smile and he reached down to pick up his knapsack.

'Well, no one ever called life dull with your dad around,' he said, turning to open the door. 'Once more into the breach, my Mends.'

I sighed, picked up my own knapsack, and followed him out.

'So where do we go first?' he asked. 'Green Point or Resnick's house?'

'It's the same general direction,' I said.

We hurried through the village, asking passing birders if they'd seen Dad. No one had. We peered into the dimly lit general store and saw Jeb Barnes had apparently just arrived back. He was shedding his wet wraps by the stove.

'Have you seen my dad?' I asked.

'No, nor your aunt Phoebe, neither,' he said. 'I thought you said she'd gone up to Resnick's.'

'She did.'

'Well, she'd left by the time we got there, and he wasn't too happy to see us, either,' Jeb said. 'Mad as a wet hen about something, so we didn't stay long.'

The electric lights flickered on and off again.

'Jim's not having much luck with that thing today, is he?' one of the locals said.

'Too much rain,' Jeb said. 'He might as well give up till the storm's past. Go ahead and light some more of those oil lamps, will you?'

'Come on,' I said to Michael. 'I guess we'll have to look for Dad by ourselves. Before he breaks his neck or something.'

The men huddled by die stove looked uncomfortable, but none of them volunteered to help. I stomped outside. The rain was growing worse by the minute. The birders had all gone somewhere to roost, and the only local we saw as we passed through town was Fred Dickerman, trying to ease his truck out of a mud hole in the road. We gave him a wide berth and squelched up the road in the same direction we'd last seen Aunt Phoebe hiking.

'We're not really going back to Resnick's, are we?' Michael asked.

'We can claim we've come to rescue him from Aunt Phoebe,' I said. 'And we'll try to detour around the edge of his property.'

Michael still looked dubious. I wasn't sure which prospect worried him more, meeting Resnick again or taking another of my detours.

The closer we got to Victor Resnick's house, the more anxious I felt. Michael reacted the same way, although since he didn't know the local landmarks, this meant he'd been in a constant state of anxiety since about five minutes after we left the village.

'Are we getting close to that lunatic's property line?' he kept asking.

'Yes,' I said finally. 'We'll start our detour in a few minutes. I just want to go a little farther up this path. There's a lookout point where we can see quite a way down the shore.'

'Damn!'

I whirled, to see Michael sprawled facedown in the mud.

'Michael! What's wrong?'

'Tripped over another of these damned water pipes,' he said. 'Why don't they bury the damned things where they'll be out of the way?'

'Well, for one thing, half the places the pipes run don't have enough topsoil to bury a matchstick, much less one of these pipes,' I said, pausing in the path to get my breath. 'And for another, they take the pipes up in the fall to prevent them from freezing. They'd have a hard time doing that if they buried them.'

'Take them up?' he echoed. 'What do they do for water in the winter?'

'Use cisterns,' I said. 'And practice rigorous water conservation.'

'When in the fall?' he asked. 'They're not going to take them up while we're here, are they?'

'Not unless there's a freeze predicted,' I said. 'Make sure you didn't disconnect the pipe you tripped over, by the way.'

'Right,' he said. 'You go on; I'll catch up in a second.'

As Michael bent over to examine the pipe, still shaking his head in disbelief, I trudged up the path until I emerged from the trees into the open and could see along the shore to the end of the point of land on which Resnick's house and studio stood. I was hoping to see Dad, alive and well and ready to come back to the house to dry off and warm up.

Instead, I saw a dead body.