The Puffin of Death (16 page)

“How about Tab Cooper? Know anything bad about him?” As a zookeeper who spent three-quarters of her waking life up to her knees in muck, I'd grown to be suspicious of anyone who was obsessively neat.

A brief silence, then, “Oh, no real scandals there unless you consider bad acting a crime. He shows up on TV sometimes, either as a walk-on or as some airhead's dim-witted boyfriend, which believe me, is total type-casting because that boy couldn't find his well-pressed bee-hind without a map. But Judy really fell for him. 'Course, she's not the brightest star in the firmament, either, so I guess they're a good match.”

“They're engaged?”

“Were. Past tense. Lucinda threw a wrench in the works.”

“She didn't approve of Tab? Why not? He seems nice enough, even if he may be a lousy actor.” And too clothes-conscious for my taste.

“It wasn't that Lucinda disapproved of the kid so much as that she'd her sights higher for her darling daughter.”

My own mother had spent half her life shoving eligible bachelors at me, and to her, “eligible” always meant “moneyed.” So with some sympathy I asked, “Did Lucinda have a prospective husband in mind for Judy?”

“Simon, of course, but only
after
he won that obscene Powerball payout. If Judy had married him, or played house with him, her and Lucinda's money troubles would vanish. But now that Simon's pushing up daisies, it sounds like Judy's gone back to her pretty boy. Bet that's got ol' Lucinda's knickers in a knot! Listen, Freckle Face, I'm tired of talking about those crazy birders. What about you? Married and settled down with two-point-three kiddies and a golden retriever?”

It was fun setting Cowgirl straight on my life, and to give the devil her due, she sounded impressed when hearing about my work at the Gunn Zoo. She had always liked animals more than people.

While I was thinking about the other things we had in common, she said, “Hey, the ranch house has a nice guest room with an ensuite, so there's no need to be a stranger. I've got a couple of horses I'd like to see you try to ride. Besides the Angus, the ranch is a sanctuary for rescued mustangs.”

“You want me on a mustang?”

“For as long as you can stay on, Freckle Face. Or are you chicken?” She made clucking noises.

Intrigued by the thought of riding a mustang across the Arizona desert, I promised to visit someday.

In the middle of adding how pleased she was about that, she gave a yelp. “Oh, crap! One of the horses got his hoof stuck in the wire fence. Gotta go!”

The phone went dead.

It was only later that I realized that I'd asked Cowgirl Spencer everything but one important question.

Which of the birders did she think was most likely to commit murder?

Chapter Fifteen

Despite my frustration at not having asked that important question, I slept dreamlessly through the night and awoke feeling refreshed. Iceland's pollution-free air had performed yet another miracle. Before stepping into the shower I checked my phone. No messages or texts from Joe, no surprise there, since it was still the middle of the night in California.

After a quick shower I wandered over to the restaurant, where I found the birders lingering through breakfast. As I approached, I heard Oddi speaking about the benefits of Iceland's geothermal energy. When I joined them at the table, he broke off to welcome me, but Lucinda cut his warm greeting short.

“With your ‘old school chum' dead, I can't see why you're still hanging around,” she sniped.

Some scientific studies claim that the ozone produced by running water is mood-enhancing, but Lucinda apparently hadn't heard about them. “I'm sure Dawn would have wanted it this way.” Like the others, I could speak for the dead, too.

Lucinda opened her mouth to say something else, but Elizabeth interjected. “I'm the one who invited Teddy to accompany us on the rest of the tour. I find her knowledge of animals most interesting.”

“She doesn't know a tern from a titmouse,” Lucinda muttered, but after a glare from Oddi, fell silent.

Elizabeth looked less haggard today, so reuniting with her friends must have helped. She even smiled once as I reeled off a list of birds I'd seen on the way from my cottage to the hotel.

“In addition to the Arctic terns…” this, a snipe at Lucinda…“I saw a blackcap, several mallards, and a scaup.”

Elizabeth's eyes lit up. “I'm hoping for a dotterel, myself. I saw a couple in Ireland, once, and they sometimes make it to Iceland like the hoopoe Simon…” Her eyes dulled momentarily, but after a pause, they brightened again. “Everyone laughed when Simon said we might see a hoopoe before the trip was done, but Inspector Haraldsson showed me some of the pictures Simon took before, well, before what happened, and there it was, big as life. Simon was a wonderful birder. That's how we met, you know. But I'm sure you're not interested in that.”

Fleetingly, I wondered if Haraldsson had shown Elizabeth the other pictures, such as the one Simon had taken of a nude Adele Cobb, but nodded politely when Judy Malone interjected, “Elizabeth, go ahead and tell Teddy how you two met. It's such a romantic story!” The young yoga instructor was sitting so close to Tab Cooper that their shoulders touched. Despite the frown Lucinda directed at them, neither moved away.

I noticed several other restaurant patrons who appeared to be eavesdropping on our table. Fans of romantic suspense, perhaps?

Elizabeth seemed pleased at Judy's prompt. “Well, if you insist. Twenty-seven years ago almost to the day, I was in Wyoming doing research for
Mesozoic Passion
, when this handsome young man wearing binoculars around his neck came up to me and said he recognized me from my book covers. I was flattered. What author wouldn't be when a good-looking guy says he reads your books? But then he went on to say I'd made an error in
Jurassic Passion
that, to date, no large flocks of seagulls had ever been spotted swooping up fish from Wyoming lakes. I wasn't a birder then, you understand. After informing me about a few rare sightings of solo lesser-black-backed gulls, he offered to buy me lunch and I accepted. Long story short, a year later, I moved from Laguna Beach to Arizona to be with him. As they say, the rest is history.”

Simon Parr? Handsome? I'd only seen him dead, with a chewed-on nose and a bullet through his head, but the idea of him as handsome was a new one.

My surprise must have showed on my face, because Elizabeth said, “Oh, Teddy, you should have seen him then! Thick black hair—yes, this was before his Elvis sideburns phase, which believe me, I didn't approve of—bright blue eyes, and a wonderful physique. He was built like a marathon runner, slim and fit. For his fortieth birthday, he even ran, swam, and biked all the way through the Iron Man to prove he could! People were always telling him he should have been an actor. Like you, Tab.”

Here Elizabeth looked across the table at the young man, who up to that point hadn't been paying much attention to the conversation. Tab, wearing yet another perfectly ironed ensemble, beamed.

“Tell Teddy about the name thing, too,” Judy urged.

Elizabeth's smile held a hint of wistfulness. “A romantic suspense writer can't use a name that sounds golf-related—
Parr
, get it?—so when we married, I kept my maiden name. I'd discussed it with Simon, and he didn't mind. Why, at parties he always introduced me by my still-legal maiden name, by saying, ‘And my wife, here, is Elizabeth St. John. The
famous
Elizabeth St. John.”

“Reflected glory,” Lucinda sniffed.

Irritated, Judy turned to her mother. “Women don't have to take their husband's last names. Think of all the trouble keeping your maiden name would have saved you.”

The ensuing silence gave me time to wonder: was it my imagination, or had Judy become bolder recently? When I'd first met her, she'd seemed shy and deferential, especially around her bullying mother. Maybe her behavior had been camouflage for a more independent mind.

Tab saved the awkward moment. “Anyone want to join us for yoga before we leave for Thingvellir? Judy's giving a beginner's class this morning at her cottage. Oddi, Adele, and Enid Walsh are coming. How about you, Teddy? And Lucinda?”

“Count me out,” I said. After last night's conversation with Cowgirl Spencer, I needed time to think. Contorting myself into Downward Dog would be distracting.

“No yoga for me, either,” Lucinda snapped at her daughter. “Since you've taken it upon yourself to ask everyone over to
our
cottage without my approval, I'm going to take a walk. Birds make more sense than that om-om gibberish.” She pushed her chair away and left the restaurant in a huff.

Her outburst signaled the end of breakfast, and we filed outside, where Oddi and others headed for yoga class, leaving me standing in front of Geysir with Elizabeth. Lucinda had already disappeared down the marked trail.

After a long silence, Elizabeth said. “Mother-daughter relationships can be stressful, can't they?”

“So I've noticed.”

Lucinda might have caused considerable familial disruption by marrying three times, but my own mother, with her five marriages, had her beat by two. The constant changing of the guard at home hadn't always been easy.

Elizabeth's voice broke into my trip down Memory Lane. “Penny for your thoughts.”

Here was my chance to find the truth about something that had been puzzling me. “I was thinking about Judy. A sweet person, but someone told me—sorry, I can't remember who—that she once broke someone's car window with a rock. Some kind of road rage incident?”

Elizabeth shrugged her bony shoulders. “That sounds like something Dawn would say. Pay no attention to anything that poor girl ever told you, Teddy. I was fond of her, but she and truth were not exactly close friends. There was no road rage incident. Judy has always been a considerate driver, and as far as temper, she's quite peaceful. All that yoga, I guess. Here's the real story about that broken window. You know how hot it gets in Arizona in the summer? One day when Judy was crossing the parking lot at the Geronimo Mall, she spotted a puppy locked in a car. It had to be something like 115-degrees outside, which meant that the temperature inside the car was even hotter, so she did what any decent human being would do.”

“Called 9-1-1?”

“That, too. But first she ran back to her own car, got a tire iron, and broke the car window to drag the little thing out. He was in bad shape. Dehydration, heat stroke, the whole nine yards. Then, before the cops arrived, its owner showed up, some dunderheaded woman who saw no problem leaving an animal in a car in the middle of July while she was in an air-conditioned mall buying shoes. Judy was beside herself. There was a fight, and by the time the cops pulled up, she'd bloodied the woman's nose. Both cops being animal lovers themselves, they didn't arrest her, but she did get a ticket. And later, she got sued.”

“For hitting the woman or breaking the window?”

“Dog theft. Judy refused to give it back, still has it, too. Named it Shiva. Ugliest creature you ever saw, some kind of pit bull/great Dane mix, grew to the size of a donkey. But loyal? God help any burglar who tries to break into that house!”

“Lucinda didn't mind her bringing a rescue home?”

A wry smile. “She would have have preferred a rescued eagle instead of some dehydrated mongrel, but she wasn't about to turn it away. On that front, she's the same as her daughter. She's like that inscription on the Statue of Liberty, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, et cetera,' only applied to animals instead of people.”

***

Since I had to resort to my Icelandic guidebook to find the place, the birders arrived at Thingvellir ahead of me but I caught up with everyone in the crowded visitors' center at the top of a steep hill. While hordes of vacationers milled around them, the birders listened as Oddi explained the area's significance. I was so entranced by the spectacular view outside the center's large window that only now and then did I catch a few words of the tour guide's well-practiced spiel.

“Beginning in the tenth century, the Vikings held their national assembly, called the Althingi, here and…”

Having already read about Thingvellir's significance, I moved closer to the window and further away from the history lesson. In the distance ran the deep rift of Almannagja, where two active geological plates literally split Iceland in half. Running northeast to southwest, the eastern side of the canyon marked the end of the Eurasian continental plate. On the western side, the beginning of the North American plate. Each year the two tectonic plates moved further apart by almost an inch, which may not sound like a lot, but to geologists and science nerds like myself, it meant Iceland would eventually become two separate land masses divided by the North Atlantic. I couldn't wait to get outside and study the rift more closely, along with the birds that flew above it, of course, but I didn't want to be rude and leave the others behind.

“…and it's rumored that the Vikings actually practiced human sacrifice here,” Oddi continued, to the oohs and ahs of his appreciative audience.

Weren't the Geronimos here to see birds? Flocks of various species were winging their way through the Almannagja, swooping down to pluck up a snack, then back aloft in an aerial dance. Gulls, terns, puffins—you couldn't go anywhere in Iceland without being surrounded by puffins—warblers, goldfinches…Wait! Wasn't that red bird with the black wings a scarlet tanager? Impossible. A tanager's habitat was too far south. Then I remembered the African-based hoopoe Simon had photographed at Vik before he was murdered, so anything, however improbable, was possible. I wouldn't know for sure unless I heard the bird's distinct
chip-durr, chip-durr
call, but from in here, with Oddi yammering…

“…while the law-giving assembly conducted its business, merchants displayed their wares in booths all along the Almannagja. You can still see the remains of…”

Oh, the hell with it.

“Scarlet tanager!” I yelled, dashing out the door.

***

It took only a few minutes to reach the Almannagja, and from ground level, it was even more impressive than it had been from above, yet somewhat claustrophobic. The cliff walls between the two sides of the chasm loomed forty feet above me as I hurried along the trail below in pursuit of the red bird. The tanager didn't make it easy, darting back and forth from both sides, stopping every now and then to scoop up a bug. Finally, about a quarter-mile from the hubbub of the visitors' center, it came to rest atop a moss-encrusted outcropping on the North American plate and began preening its feathers. I moved into the shadows of the Eurasian side, not wanting to frighten it away.

Chip-durr, chip-durr.

Yep, a scarlet tanager.

Although the bird's grating call was considerably less beautiful than its plumage, it still thrilled me. iPhone at the ready, I crept closer to the preening bird. I managed to snap three shots before it cocked its head as if listening to something, emitted an un-tanager-like squawk, and flew further down the chasm.

Cursing under my breath, I followed, while the tanager increased its distance from me.

Now the claustrophobia I'd felt upon first entering the low trail between the two plates really kicked in. Those high canyon walls seemed to close in on me as I ran after the bird, while the flat plain of civilization above appeared to vanish. Down here in the narrow rock tunnel it was all too easy to imagine fierce Vikings above, throwing their sacrificed victims down to the chasm below. Scarlet tanager or no scarlet tanager, I was beginning to regret leaving the visitors' center by myself.

But there!

The tanager, spotting a tasty morsel atop a pyramid-shaped rock on the North American side of the chasm, swooped down. After landing and gobbling another treat, it stayed to scratch for more.

Perfect.

I stepped out of the shadow of the Eurasian cliff wall and moved forward to get another picture.

And that saved my life.