'Amazing!' Michael said.
'How much does a thing like that run anyway?' another birder asked.
'Later, guys,' I said. 'I thought you said you had a picture of a puffin. That's not a puffin; it's a cedar.'
'No, it's a wren,' she said. 'See there, he's roosting inside the cedar.'
'If you say so,' I said. 'What about the puffin?'
'Just press this button,' she said.
I put down Spike so I would have my hands free. He galloped off to bark at the waves, which were creeping closer and closer; we'd have to adjourn to the top of the hill soon. I took the small camera, pressed the button Mrs. Peabody had indicated, and waited for several seconds as another picture of the cedar tree scrolled onto the screen.
'Keep going,' she said. 'It's been an hour; I may have taken quite a few pictures.'
I kept pressing the button and waited while several more pictures of the cedar loaded. These were followed by pictures of other shrubbery, presumably containing other wrens. Interspersed with the nature photos were occasional off-center shots of the sky or of Mrs. Peabody's muddy hiking boots, which I assumed she'd taken by mistake. Michael and several male birders looked over my shoulder, exclaiming at the high quality of the pictures, and Mrs. Peabody explained how she took the electronic pictures and e-mailed them to her sister in California.
Finally, a puffin appeared on the tiny screen. It lay on its back on the flat rock, with its toes pointing straight to the sky, its wings neatly folded by its side, and its feathers carefully groomed and reasonably clean. It looked a lot better in the photo than it did now that Mrs. Peabody had hauled it around for an hour. It looked as if it'd been laid out for viewing at a wake, and I didn't for a minute believe it had landed in that position by accident.
'There's something odd about this,' I muttered, glancing from the puffin on the camera screen to the flat rock. I took off my knapsack, fished around in it, and pulled out a small pamphlet called
'Was the puffin there when you found the body?' Mrs. Peabody asked.
'No,' I said, still leafing through the guide.
'How can you be sure?' she insisted.
'Well, in the first place,' I said, 'that was the rock where we put Resnick's body after we hauled him out of the water; if the puffin had been there, we'd have stepped on it.'
Several birders who were leaning against the rock shuffled a few feet away from it.
'And, in the second place, I took a good look around for clues, and I'd have noticed something as unusual as a dead puffin. In the third place, that rock's underwater at high tide, so even if it had been there yesterday when we found the body, it'd have washed away by this morning. The tide came in after we found Resnick's body, you know. This whole place was underwater between ten p.m. and two a.m.'
I waved the pocket guide, held open to the page with this year's tide tables on it.
'That's true,' a birder said.
'Perhaps it washed out to sea after the murder and then washed back in again this morning,' Mrs. Peabody said.
'Does it look as if it was washed in?' I said, pointing at the little screen. 'It looks as if someone posed it there. Deliberately. But why?'
'Maybe the murderer did it,' Michael said. 'To confuse us.'
'He's wasting his time, then,' I said. 'We're already as confused as we're ever going to get; he should save it for the mainland cops.'
'Maybe someone's trying to give us a subtle clue to the murder?' Michael said.
'Well, they're going to have to try a lot harder, and be a lot less subtle,' I said.
'This is all very odd,' Mrs. Peabody announced, frowning at Michael and me as if the whole mess were our fault and we should do something about it.
'And speaking of odd,' I said. 'There's something else rather odd about that puffin. Let me take a look at it.'
'Yes, of course,' Mrs. Peabody said. She tried to hand me the small carcass. Spike growled and leapt up, trying to attack it. I backed away, happy to settle for a visual inspection. Yes, there was definitely something unusual about the puffin.
'Strange,' I said. 'I wonder why anyone would bother to keep a dead puffin around all this time.'
'I beg your pardon! I'm not keeping it around, as you put it,' she said. 'I only brought it along to show what that horrible man was doing.'
'I didn't mean you,' I said. 'I meant whoever had it before you.'
'No one had if before me. I found it today, not even an hour ago, right here on this rock.'
She pounded the rock with one plump fist by way of emphasis.
'Well, you may have found it there, but I doubt if it died there; and it didn't die today, or yesterday, for that matter,' I said. 'That is not a recently deceased puffin.'
'Nonsense, it's still quite fresh,' Mrs. Peabody said, thrusting it under my nose by way of proof.
'Possibly,' I said, backing away. 'I suppose whoever put it there could have had it in his freezer for the last couple of months.'
'In the freezer?' she said. 'Whatever makes you think someone had that poor puffin in a freezer?'
The other birders were muttering, 'The freezer?' and looking at me as if I'd announced my intention of serving them southern-fried puffin with a side of pickled puffins' feet.
'This puffin is wearing mating plumage, or whatever you call it,' I said. 'I mean, that is what the white face and those bright orange-and-yellow plates on the beak mean, isn't it? That when this puffin died, he was still looking for his soul mate? Unless I've completely misunderstood all the puffin lore everyone's babbled at me, he would have shed the white feathers and the pretty little plates by the end of the spring, right? So he must have died before that.'
The birders looked at each other and then at the puffin.
'She's right,' one of them murmured. 'She's absolutely right.'
'Do you mind if we keep your camera for a while?' I asked Mrs. Peabody.
'Not at all,' she said. 'Or if you want to come by the Island Inn, I can have my husband transfer the pictures onto diskettes for you.'
'Thanks,' I said. 'We'll probably do that.'
'I've got some digital pictures, too,' another binoculars-toting man said, bounding up holding his camera. 'I've got pictures of that lunatic shooting at you!'
'That has nothing to do with the murder!' Mrs. Peabody said, elbowing him aside.
'Well, neither does your puffin,' said the second birder. I almost expected him to say, 'So there!'
Michael tried to defuse the confrontation by taking the man's camera and exclaiming over the pictures, but the two birders were squaring off for a verbal donnybrook, when a voice rang out from above us.
'What's going on here?'
I glanced up and saw Jeb Barnes, hands on hips, stumbling down the last few feet of the path.
Inspired by the interest we had shown in the puffin, Mrs. Peabody strode over and, with a flourish, tried to present it to Jeb, who began backing up the path to escape her.
I flipped through Mrs. Peabody's pictures of the puffin again. The remaining birders, sensing that I wasn't going to do anything else amusing, followed Jeb and Mrs. Peabody.
'This puffin is evidence!' Mrs. Peabody shouted.
'Nonsense!' Jeb shouted back.
'Mind if I take a look at the puffin?' I asked, looking up at the two.
'No,' Jeb said. 'I mean yes. I'm impounding it. As… as… as a danger to public health.'
With that, he snatched the puffin from Mrs. Peabody's hands and, holding it at arm's length, fled up the path.
Mrs. Peabody frowned.
'I think he's going to lock it up for the police,' I said.
'Well, that's all right, then,' Mrs. Peabody said.
'And you people stay away from the crime scene,' Jeb called from the top of the cliff.
'Yes, we'd better get off the beach before the tide gets any higher,' Michael suggested.
