Murder With Puffins

'Rob's like Mother,' I said. 'You have to be firm with him.'

'Like you are with your mother,' he said with a smile, and disappeared into the kitchen.

Good point.

I slumped on the sofa and listened to the increasing wind, the rattle of pans, the rise and fall of Michael's voice as he narrated our day's adventures, and the occasional exclamation from Mrs. Fenniman. I couldn't actually make out Michael's words, thanks to the wind, which suited me just fine. I wanted to think about something other than lost relatives and dead bodies for a while. Not that I had the slightest chance of doing so. My brain was running like a hamster in a wire wheel, wondering where Dad and Aunt Phoebe were, and what they were doing, and whether they were all right, and occasionally, just by way of a change, wondering who had done in Victor Resnick.

Every few minutes, Mrs. Fenniman would pop out of the kitchen and bring me the next course of what was rapidly turning into an epicurean feast. I managed to put away a ham and cheese sandwich, a bowl of chili, a bowl of soup, a plate of mixed fruit, and a baked potato before I called a halt. Mrs. Fenniman didn't. She kept bringing out more food and insisting I needed to eat to keep my strength up. I got tired of arguing with her and started shoving the new arrivals under the coffee table. Spike was in ecstasy, alternating between devouring the food and licking my ankles. After an hour, Rob finally ceded the bathroom to poor Michael and settled onto the other sofa to be fed.

At one point, Mrs. Fenniman bustled upstairs. I could hear her and Mother squabbling about something, and then she stormed down again.

'Finally got her to take one of my Valium,' she said. 'Calm her down a little. Only way she's going to make it though tonight without going crazy.'

As the night wore on, I became convinced that whoever had prescribed Mrs. Fenniman's Valium had actually slipped her a placebo. Mother didn't calm down in the slightest. Periodically, she would limp out of her room and lean over the balcony. She would stand motionless until she had attracted everyone's attention. Then she would look pointedly at the door and even more pointedly at me.

I should have just ignored her, but every time, I patiently explained that we had spent several hours searching all over the island before the storm made it too dangerous. That if Dad had any sense, he'd found someplace to hole up for the night. That as soon as it was light enough to see six feet in front of our faces, we'd go out and start hunting all over again.

She would look reproachfully at me, heave an enormous sigh, mutter something like 'Your poor father!' and disappear. For about fifteen minutes. Then we'd go through the whole thing all over again.

Dad always says a person's true character comes through in a crisis. Judged by his own standard, Dad didn't come off too badly. Unless the crisis was a medical one, he was generally of no practical use and had a tendency to run around getting underfoot and making implausible suggestions. But he remained so cheerful and optimistic that no one really minded having him around. In fact, they almost invariably spoke of him afterward as a tower of strength and a real inspiration.

Mother ignored crises as long as possible, on the assumption that of course someone else would take care of them. Usually me. On those rare occasions when Mother felt a situation needed her attention, she would go into what Rob and I called the 'off with her head' mode--making decisions and issuing orders with a ruthlessness that made Robespierre look benign. Once Mother took charge, crises tended to work themselves out quite satisfactorily--at least if you agreed with Mother's definition of a satisfactory outcome. That Mother could think of nothing to do except pace the floor and lay a guilt trip on me disturbed me almost as much as Dad's absence.

So far, Michael had shown a great deal of grace under pressure. He'd kept his sense of humor when the trip hadn't turned out to be the private, romantic getaway we'd planned, and if he was grumbling about the primitive conditions here on the island, he'd kept it to himself. Since Dad had gone AWOL, Michael had run himself ragged helping me search, all the while remaining supportive and upbeat, without displaying the sort of mindless, cheerful optimism that would have sent me over the edge. Over the last few weeks, Mrs. Fenniman had decided that Michael was, as she put it, 'a keeper.' Her habit of telling me this loudly, repeatedly, and in front of Michael had grown irritating, but I couldn't exactly argue with her.

I only hoped he felt the same way about me. I Like to think that in a crisis I'm the cool, collected one who really gets things done with calm efficiency. I'm afraid that I'm really a lot more like Dad, with occasional touches of Mother at her worst. Well, I'd worry about that when the crisis was over; all I could do now was wait the storm out. For lack of something better to distract my mind, I picked up one of the bird books that perched on every available horizontal surface and began thumbing through it, trying to concentrate on the contents. Despite my agitated state, I couldn't help marveling at both the incredible variety of birds in the world and the incredible subtlety of some of the variations. I leafed through page after page of birds largely indistinguishable from one another unless you happened to have memorized minute differences in the amount of white on the head or red on the wing. And the way they were arranged--all the birds on the same page in the very same pose, like some avian chorus line--was particularly daunting.

'What's that?' Michael asked, sitting down beside me and handing me a cup of hot tea. He had a towel draped around his neck and smelled faintly of soap. He seemed in fairly good spirits for someone who had probably just taken a cold shower. I held up the bird book so he could see the cover.

'Thinking of taking up bird-watching?' he asked. 'Not on your life,' I said. 'I'd go crazy. Look at this!' I pointed to a page entitled 'Small Hooded Gulls.'

'Seagulls,' he said. 'Lots of seagulls. So?'

'Yes, but that's only one page of seagulls. There are five or six more, not to mention the terns. And look at these: the laughing gull and the Franklin's gull? Can you tell them apart? What if one of them gets a spot of tar on the red beak? You'd probably think he was a Bonaparte's gull, the one with the all-black beak.'

'Does it really matter?' Michael asked, giving me an odd look.

'That's my point,' I said. 'I just don't get it. They're gulls; they eat garbage and scream at the ferry. Does it really matter that much which particular kind of gull they are? I can't figure out why the birders get so obsessive.'

'See, I knew we had a lot in common,' Michael said. 'I promise I will never take up bird-watching.'

'Here, take a look at this,' I said, flipping to another page and pointing to a bird. Michael glanced at it.

'That's not a seagull,' he said.

'No,' I said. 'It's our friend the Bohemian waxwing. Bombycilla garrulus. You know, the one those birdwatchers got so upset at us for scaring away this morning.'

'If you say so,' Michael said, putting his arm around my shoulder. 'It seems like days ago, not this morning, and anyway, my mind wasn't on the damned bird at that point'

'I was just thinking about how fanatical some of those birders are,' I said. 'Do you think one of them could have lost all sense of proportion and attacked Resnick because of what they all thought he'd done to the birds?'

'It's possible,' Michael said. 'I think the lobstermen have a more down-to-earth reason.'

'Oh, did you understand all that about the bill?' I asked.

'Not one word in ten, but I got the idea that they thought he'd spent a lot of money supporting a cause that would put them all out of business.'

'It's a motive all right,' I said. 'And anyone who cares about preserving the unspoiled charm of the island has a motive every time they look at that horrible house of his. Anyone he's taken potshots at could have a motive. Somehow, I can't see the Puffin Lady of Monhegan bashing anyone's head in, but I wouldn't put it past Mayor Mamie.'

'Yes, she's very protective of poor little Rhapsody,' Michael said.

'I'm sure she sells a lot of her books.'

'Is there anyone on the island who doesn't have it in for the guy?'

'Probably not,' I said. 'Maybe we're looking at a real-life reenactment of Murder on the Orient Express.'

'Well, let's forget about it for now,' Michael said. He used his bare toe to nudge aside some of the plates on the coffee table and then propped both feet up on it. 'We can't do anything now, and we'll have to get up early to search. Let's unwind and get some rest.'

It sounded like a good idea to me. I took a sip of my hot tea, leaned back into Michael's arm, and sighed. As