Yeah, incidents like this made for a pleasant change.
They pulled up outside an elegant old Queen Anne villa set high in the foothills amongst what must have been two acres of orchard and gardens. A “for sale” sign out the front brandished a big “sold” sticker.
“Bloody hell,” Richo said as they walked down the driveway towards the house. “Check out the turret.”
Tina snorted. “You’ve got a one track mind, Richo.”
Caleb appreciated the joke even as he was busy taking in the house. Not only the turret and the crenelated entry porch with a grand arch below, but the chimneys. Big ones. They sure didn’t build them like that anymore.
“Thank heavens you’re here,” said a sixty-something woman bursting out of the front door to greet them. “I didn’t know who else to call.”
She introduced herself as Eleanor and led them into the sprawling house, talking nineteen to the dozen as she wove her way through expansive rooms shrunken by the old, overstuffed furniture and stack of packing boxes in various stages of being filled. “It started just before the auction, you see. First a fluttering sound, and then squeaking. At first I was afraid they were rats. Imagine that, rats, just when you’re trying to sell your house! So I called a chimney sweep but they said they don’t deal with live animals in chimneys and I had to call a pest exterminator. And I called a pest exterminator but they asked if I was sure they were rats and by that stage I wasn’t because their squeaking sounded more like cheeping and maybe they could be parrots. At least, they sound more like parrots now than rats. We’ve got fruit trees outside and the parrots are always into the fruit and so it could be. And so I called Fauna Rescue, because if they’re parrots, they’re protected, you see, and they’ll take the chicks and care for them, but they needed to be old enough to survive the trauma and they needed someone to get them out because they don’t have the equipment and how on earth are they supposed to get out otherwise? Learn to fly straight up a chimney?” She stopped in front of a massive open fireplace topped by an equally massive mantelpiece bearing a mirror that went all the way to the ceiling which had to be twelve-foot high if it was an inch, thought Caleb, and then there would be a few feet of the chimney through the roof above. How indeed could they fly out of there? It would be nothing like falling out of a tree.
“But if you can get them out,” Eleanor continued, “I’ve got the name and address of a local carer who’ll take them and I’ve promised to deliver them. If you can get them out, that is.”
Caleb nodded. At least she’d got that angle covered. Now all he had to do was work out how to get them out. “And the birds are somewhere inside this lot?
“I think they’re somewhere behind here,” the woman said, pointing to the timber frame below the mantelpiece, “just behind this. There’s a baffle over the fireplace, and it’s closed when it’s not in use, and I think they must be nesting there, but I tried to move the handle and it seems to be jammed shut. You can hear them, especially at meal times. They’re so loud then. When they go quiet, I worry they might have died. But it would be terrible if they died in there wouldn’t it? Imagine the smell! But they could die if anything happened to the parents and they didn’t come back. Anything could happen. And the new owners move in next week, and I just didn’t know what to do and I’m just so glad you’re here.”
And four firies in yellow uniforms blinked at each other and lined up along the wide fireplace, which had been brooding silently by while the owner voiced every one of her fears in almost the same sentence, and put their ears to the wood, and listened and heard...
Absolutely nothing.
Richo looked at Caleb, his eyes ducking horizontal towards the anxious woman standing nearby, before he winked and mouthed “bats’ and Caleb curled his hand into a fist and slammed the side of it into the wood, and somewhere inside all hell broke loose and there was cheeping and fluttering and mad swooping sounds.
“You see,” said the woman triumphantly. “I’m not imagining it, am I? There’s definitely something in there.”
“Something sure is,” Caleb said, instructing Richo to grab some tarpaulins from the truck to lay on the carpet. He wasn’t the most junior in the crew – Matt was the rookie – but Richo deserved to be made to fetch and carry after the crack about the woman. She might be able to talk nonstop for ten minutes without drawing breath, but she wasn’t imagining anything. “Now we just have to work out how to get whatever it is out.”
Tina radioed back to base to let them know what they were faced with while they lay the tarpaulins down in front of the fire place in preparation for opening the baffle, which just as the woman said, was stuck fast when Caleb tested it, with bits raining down and what sounded like something tap dancing on the top.
“Do you think the birds have jammed it with their nest?” the woman asked.
Caleb suspected it was probably jammed up with bird poo, but he didn’t want to say so. “If it’s parrots, there shouldn’t be a nest,” he said. “They usually nest in hollow tree trunks and the like, just using whatever space is available. Here,” he said to Richo, “help us out with a bit of grunt, and see if we can’t move this thing.”
They combined their efforts and gave the lever an almighty shove and finally
