Never Steal a Cockatiel (Leigh Koslow Mystery Series Book 9) (7 page)

“Is
that
the crazy bird lady?” Ethan asked.

“She’s not crazy!” Allison argued. “She does parrot rescue, and Grandpa says she takes good care of her birds. She’s just a little… well, weird. You know.”

“Eccentric,” Leigh supplied mechanically, her mind reeling. Never mind that Skippy was indeed known as “that crazy bird lady” to pretty much the entire North Boros. She lived with dozens of birds in a small house no one else ever went into or came out of. Her backyard was completely screened in like an aviary, and the local children had worn a path to it from the park so that they could sneak a peek at the colorful parrots. Skippy permitted the gawkers, but woe be unto any child who yelled at the birds, much less poked a stick or threw a pebble! It wasn’t the least surprising that a jogger following that path might run into her fencing in the dark.

Despite Skippy’s antisocial tendencies, the birds she brought to the clinic were always in good health, at least physically. Psychologically, all the larger, more intelligent pet birds showed problems sooner or later, which is why Skippy, along with the rest of Randall’s “bird people,” had gotten out of the breeding business over a decade ago. Now, they all focused on taking in troubled parrots no one else wanted — a population which, unfortunately, was only continuing to grow.

“She sounded nuts to me,” Ethan said dismissively. “When are we going, Mom?”

Leigh was distracted. Skippy had been a client of Randall’s forever — even back when Leigh herself had worked in the clinic as a teenager. The woman had looked exactly the same then as she did now. Ageless.
Nobody messes with my birds,
Skippy had threatened. Was she fired up over the same rumors as everyone else? Had she been so scared that she was sitting on her porch with her gun on her lap, just waiting for someone to try something?

Knowing Skippy, it would be entirely in character. Not that she was your stereotypical paranoid conspiracy theorist. She was, in fact, entirely apolitical, concerned with virtually nothing that didn’t directly relate to birds. But if you threatened Skippy’s babies, you had best be prepared to defend yourself.

A bulletproof vest was recommended.

“Mom?” Ethan repeated. “When are you taking us to the clinic?”

Leigh tried to focus. “We’ll leave around ten,” she answered, feeling suddenly bleary. Having been dragged out of bed by Allison’s cries of distress, she only now realized that her husband had left for work already. Given that she had gone to bed alone last night, she wondered briefly whether he’d come home at all. But she remembered hearing the chain saw rev up around eleven, and as tired as she currently felt, she doubted she had slept deeply the rest of the night, either.

After several cups of coffee and a lame attempt at accomplishing something on the pile of work she’d brought home from her advertising agency, Leigh bundled her two kids and one disturbed cockatiel into the van, collected Mathias from the farmhouse next door, and drove to the clinic.

She was pulling the van up to the curb across from the clinic’s back door when Allison groaned from the back seat.

“Whoa!” Matthias exclaimed from the opposite back seat. “Who is
that?”

Leigh looked over her shoulder to see a young teenaged girl floating across the parking lot toward the staff entrance. She was petite and generously curvy, with long, loosely curled blond hair that bounced around her shoulders like a model in a shampoo commercial. Leigh shot a glance at Mathias and resisted the urge to laugh out loud at his widened, admiring eyes. She wondered if somewhere in his adolescent mind a pop song was crooning and animated birds were flying around the girl’s head.

“Kirsten,” Allison answered without enthusiasm. “She’s been hanging out observing. She wants to be a vet.”

Leigh could hardly miss the derogatory tone in her daughter’s voice. “You don’t sound too happy about that,” she commented. Allison was used to other young veterinary wannabes hanging out at the clinic, particularly during the summer. What was so objectionable about this one?

Allison sighed dramatically. “It’s just that she’s such a suck-up! Like she thinks that because Grandpa owns the clinic, I can get her into vet school or something. It’s annoying.”

“She wouldn’t annoy me,” Matthias joked, still staring.

Allison rolled her eyes at him. “She’s fifteen. And she has a boyfriend already. An
older
boyfriend.”

Matthias deflated a bit and slouched in his seat. But his gaze continued to follow the girl as she disappeared into the building.

Leigh fought a grin. Matthias, who had only just begun to notice girls, showed signs of inheriting not only his father’s ridiculous good looks, but also Gil’s tendency toward smug overconfidence. Suspecting they had not heard the last of the bewitching Kirsten, she cast a glance at her own son and was relieved to find him watching his cousin with equal parts amusement and puzzlement.

Thank goodness,
she breathed. Having one precocious twin was more than enough.

They all piled out of the van, and as the kids went in through the clinic’s back door, Leigh carried the covered birdcage down the steps to the basement entrance. Bringing the cockatiel into the clinic would stress it more, she knew, but it was important that her father make sure it didn’t have any kind of physical problem. She stashed the bird away in a relatively quiet corner of her father’s office, noticing as she did so that a good deal more of his accumulated paperwork had disappeared from the desk and floor. Then she jogged up the steps into the main part of the clinic to make sure the boys had connected with Jared. She was not surprised to find the three already on their way down to the basement. She
was
surprised to find Randall already parked on his stool in an exam room.

“Dad!” she exclaimed. “You’re not supposed to be here yet! I was just leaving to pick you up at the house.”

Randall threw her a beleaguered expression. “I, uh… had some things I needed to attend to,” he mumbled. “Bess took pity on me.”

Leigh exhaled slowly. “That bad, huh?” She envisioned Bess trying to make breakfast while Frances yelled helpful tips from the living room about the proper way to prevent fried eggs from sticking to her cookware. Then she imagined what Bess might do with those eggs…

Randall cleared his throat, but said nothing.

“I see,” Leigh declared.

“I have an emergency coming in,” Randall said. “And besides, Bess wanted to take more paperwork back home to keep your mother occupied.”

I’ll bet she did.

Leigh started to explain to him about the cockatiel, but before she could get a sentence out the door to the reception room burst open.

“I’ll find him!” a scratchy female voice announced as none other than “that crazy bird lady” invited herself in and lifted a pet carrier onto the tabletop.

“If it’s broken,” Skippy raged, staring at Randall with her cool gray eyes, “I’ll sue every damn one of them!”

“Let’s take a look first,” Randall said calmly, opening the carrier door. Morgan, one of the newer veterinary assistants on staff, slipped behind Leigh and moved into position to help hold the bird.

“Come on out, lambkins,” Skippy crooned, her affected baby-voice striking a sharp contrast to the masculine figure she made in her long-sleeve plaid work shirt and shapeless jeans. “Mama won’t let anybody hurt you!”

Leigh watched in silence as a bedraggled and partially featherless African grey stepped tentatively out of the carrier and onto the tabletop, holding one of its wings in an awkward position.

“I’ve only had her a few months,” Skippy explained, seemingly to Leigh, as Morgan gently took hold of the bird for Randall to examine. “She hardly had a feather below the neck when I got her! But she’s been doing really well for me in the house, nearly got her flight feathers grown back. Then those damned police came storming in and she went totally bonkers, trying to fly and running into everything!” Skippy turned her attention back to Randall. “She seemed okay right after it happened, but now she’s holding her wing all funny-like!”

“You were on the news this morning!” Morgan gushed as she held the bird. “Did you see?”

Leigh cringed. Morgan, a slight and pretty dark-haired girl in her early twenties, was sweet-natured, good with the animals, and amenable to instruction. But when it came to client sensibilities, she had the tact of a preschooler.

“I was?” Skippy barked.

Morgan nodded emphatically, missing Randall’s warning glare. “They said you shot at an intruder!” Her eyes glinted with admiration. “But it turned out to be just a jogger,” she finished with disappointment.

“I didn’t aim at the idiot,” Skippy snapped. “Like I told the police, it was just a warning shot. And it worked, too. You’d better believe if he’d tried to snatch one of my birds—” She gestured a trigger pull. “That’d be the end of that!”

Morgan’s attractive dark eyes widened. “Have you ever shot anybody before?”

Randall cleared his throat. “Morgan,” he said sternly. “I’ll need you to—”

“Well, I’ll tell you, young lady,” Skippy answered, ignoring him. “There was this one time, back in Vietnam—”

“I don’t think the wing is broken,” Randall proclaimed, pulling Skippy’s attention back to the parrot. “But I’d like to take an x-ray, just to make sure.” He looked past Leigh. “Allison, would you go get Jeanine for us, please?”

Leigh didn’t bother looking behind her. Of course Allison was there.

Vietnam?

“Skippy,” Leigh said on impulse, trying to keep her voice casual. “Why were you worried that the jogger might be after your birds? Have you had people try to break in before?”

The woman —
was
she a woman? — shot a shrewd look back. “You can never be too careful,” she said grimly.

Jeanine appeared, and she, Morgan, and Allison took the parrot back to the treatment room, leaving Leigh and her father alone with Skippy. No sooner had the others left than Skippy leaned across the table close to Randall’s ear. “Nobody else’ll tell you,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “But I will. There’s a pet snatcher on the loose. Dogs and cats both stolen. Who says they wouldn’t take a bird? I don’t trust nobody. And you ought to keep your own eyes open around here too, Doc. You ask me, somebody’s doing this methodical like.”

Leigh sucked in a breath. She could tell from her father’s long-suffering expression that he gave no credence to the woman’s claim. “Doing what exactly?” Leigh asked.

Skippy studied her. As an extension of Randall whom Skippy had known four pant sizes ago, Leigh evidently passed muster for trustworthiness.

“Picking their victims,” she answered, “for
ransom.”

“That seems a bit—” Randall began skeptically.

Leigh jumped in. “What kind of money are we talking about?”

“Thousands.”
Skippy rasped.

“Shouldn’t someone tell the police?” Leigh suggested.

Skippy shrugged. “Only the people whose pets got snatched know enough to bother, and they’re all too scared to snitch. So far I hear the critters have all come back all right. But who knows when that’ll change? Somebody’s got to get this guy!” Her voice turned steely. “And me and my shotgun’d be only too happy to give it a whirl!”

“Has the grey been eating all right?” Randall asked, his tone slightly bored.

Skippy’s attention was easily diverted back to her bird. “Better and better all the time!” she answered proudly. “I know how to feed a parrot right. You take my quinoa and navy bean porridge. I could market that stuff. Now, Olan says his birds don’t like navy beans; he’s all into mixing everything up with yams and yogurt and sweet stuff. But I say…”

Leigh tuned out. Skippy and Olan, another client whose collection of rescue parrots numbered in the double digits, had been feuding over various points of bird care — with no small amount of acrimony — for as long as anyone could remember. The staff liked to joke about what would happen if the two met unexpectedly in the waiting room and someone called out, “Should you clip a pet bird’s wings? Discuss!”

The consensus was that neither would emerge alive.

Leigh looked at her watch. She couldn’t delay any longer; it was time for her Tuesday shift of Frances-watching to begin. Bess was probably already sitting in her car in the street with the engine running. Leigh had meant to ask Randall’s permission to post the signs soliciting anonymous information about the pet snatchings, but it was just as well that Allison did the honors. If Randall thought it was pointless, he would be more likely to humor his granddaughter.

Leigh quietly excused herself from the exam room, apprised Allison of the situation, and exited through the back door. As soon as she was back in the van and out of earshot of any curious bystanders, she picked up her phone and called Mason.

His line went straight to voicemail.

Leigh frowned. “Mason,” she said sternly, recording a message. “I need to talk to you. The bird isn’t doing well, and we need to contact its owner. Can you get in touch with this Kyle guy, or at least give me his number? It’s important.”

She hung up, still frowning. The man had a lot of nerve, turning his phone off.

Two women walked past the van on the sidewalk, one of them chattering so loudly Leigh could understand every word even with her windows rolled up.

“So then I said, ‘Well, can you make it Thursday?’ And she said ‘No, only Tuesday.’ But she’d just told me she could only make Thursday! That’s why I asked her ‘Can you make it Thursday?’ and she said, ‘No, only Tuesday!’”

Leigh looked up to see the clinic’s newest receptionist, Amy, heading in to start her shift with another of the veterinary assistants, Paige. The slightly heavy, freckled Amy was a nice enough girl and good with the computer, but Leigh had to wonder at Randall’s wisdom in hiring a receptionist who seemed genetically incapable of saying anything only once.

“Hi, Leigh!” Amy said with a wave as the two women cut in front of the van to cross the street to the clinic. “That’s Leigh,” she informed her companion. “I said ‘hi’ to her.”