Case of the Glacier Park Swallow (5 page)

W
hen Juliet got home her parents were waiting for her in the living room.

“Are you sure about this trip to Canada?” her father asked.

“I'm sure,” Juliet assured them. “There's something very strange happening with these birds.”

She could see that her parents were worried. Her mother came to her and gave her a hug. “We raised you to be independent,” she said. “But now that you're going every which way, we're having second thoughts. Please be careful.”

Juliet put her arm around her mother and promised to be very careful.

That night Katie came into her room and sat on the end of her bed.

“When are you leaving?” she said.

“I'm going early in the morning.”

Juliet could tell that Katie had something that she wanted to say and was having a lot of trouble trying to say it.

Juliet said it for her. “You want to come, don't you?”

Katie nodded.

Juliet pulled herself up and sat foreward. Katie was petting Max absentmindedly as she waited for Juliet to say something, and when Juliet finally spoke she stopped and folded her hands and waited.

“I wish you could, Katie,” Juliet said. “But you can't this time.”

Katie's eyes clouded. Juliet didn't want to make her sad, but she had to. “It might be dangerous, Katie, but don't tell Mom and Dad that. I'll be all right, but I can't have anybody but Max with me to worry about. Maybe next time. Is that all right?”

“I guess so,” Katie said, too quickly. “Did I tell you about the weasel? He was all white. I thought weasels were brown.”

“Did it have a long tail?”

“Very long.”

“Then it was a long-tailed weasel. They turn white in the winter so that they can blend with the snow and hide from predators.”

“Like mountain goats and snowshoe hares,” Katie said as she slipped off the bed and started for the door. When she was almost there she hesitated and turned and said, “Could I come to work with you when you get back?”

“Of course you can,” Juliet said. “Why? Have you decided to become a vet?”

“I think so. Animals are interesting, aren't they?”

Juliet smiled. They were alike after all. It was nice to know that. “They're very interesting, Katie,” Juliet said. “But they're a problem too, because you always fall in love with them, and then they leave you.”

“Be careful,” Katie said.

“I will. I promise.”

Juliet left the next morning. She drove straight through. She stopped to eat and feed Max, and let Max out for a run, but that was all.

She arrived in Edmonton at dusk, checked into a small bed and breakfast on the outskirts of the city, and fell into a deep, dream-filled sleep. She dreamed about Canada geese this time, hundreds and hundreds of them, flying in V-formation. The old males kept changing places, so that one of them would always be leader, just like they always do, except that in the dream it wasn't always an old male at the tip of the V. One minute a swallow was the leader, and the next minute it was a swan. And then something strange happened. Instead of a bird at the tip it was Cam, and then herself, and then Cam again, and they kept fighting and fighting to lead the geese south. And just as she was about to become the leader of all leaders, she woke up and looked around and realized that she was in another strange room in another strange place. She pulled the blanket up to her chin and called Max to her and held him tightly until she had calmed down, and then she pushed him off the bed and slid off behind him.

She looked at her watch and saw that it was almost ten in the morning. She fed Max and drove to the main post office. The line was long and slow, and by the time she reached the counter she was quite nervous.

“I'm trying to find the person who rented box number 98,” she said to the clerk. Her voice sounded shakey to her, and she wondered if it was obvious to the woman behind the counter.

“We can't give out that information,” the woman said.

Juliet wasn't surprised, but she was a bit disappointed. She went directly to box number 98 and looked inside and saw that it was full. He'll come soon, she thought. And if he doesn't then I'll just wait until he does.

She didn't have to wait long.

He came at eleven. She saw him coming down the street through the window, saw him stroll toward her, saw him glance at the jeep and move closer to it and look inside at Max. She could tell by the way that his shoulders stiffened that he recognized him, and he must have made a noise of some kind because suddenly Max abandoned his bone and leapt at the window and began to bark and bark. The man jumped backward and turned and ran into the post office. He was watching Max still, and so he didn't see her, and she had a moment or two to hide.

But where?

There was no place, and so she ran to the line before he turned. She got lost there with her back to the door and she waited like that, with her head down, for what seemed like hours instead of only minutes.

When she turned around he was gone.

She ran to Box 98 and looked inside and when she saw that it was empty she ran outside.

The man with the grey cap was nowhere in sight.

He knew now that she was after him. She had made a very, very big mistake. he next day she went back to work.

M
ax found him.

When Juliet unlocked the door to the jeep and opened it he leapt past her and took off down the sidewalk as if he knew exactly where the man was going and how to find him.

Juliet tried to keep up, but Max was much faster, and more determined now, and he didn't care if she was behind him or not.

“Slower Max, slower,” she called as she turned a corner, but he paid no attention at all. He didn't even glance back over his shoulder, not even once, and so she called out to him again. “You're going to training school, Max!” she hollered. “You're going to dog-training school the minute we get home.” But he didn't care. He just kept chasing the man in the grey hat through the streets of Edmonton, and it didn't even matter that there was no man there to chase.

He kept his head down as he ran, as if he was pursuing a rabbit or a bird, and Juliet remembered that he had the scent and she knew that he would not stop until he found the man.

Juliet caught up with Max at a busy intersection about four blocks from the jeep. He had stopped at the corner, and he was very quiet as he watched the man wait for the light to change. He seemed to understand that silence and an element of surprise were important if he was to catch his prey.

The light changed to green, and Max looked up at Juliet for the first time, as if he was asking what he was supposed to do next, and when she whispered, “Get him, Max,” he ran to the man and caught him by the pants leg, and pulled him down.

Juliet caught up then and noticed the pile of tied-up envelopes lying on the ground. She picked them up quickly and stuffed them into her jacket pocket. Then she grabbed Max and pulled him away, pulled him all the way to the jeep, and drove back to the bed and breakfast.

She spread the letters out on the bed and moved them around. Then she moved them around some more and placed them in order according to the dates on the postmarks. The earliest, it appeared, was May 15th.
May 15th?
It was December now, and someone had mailed a letter on May 15th in Fort Worth, Texas. And these letters might not even have been the first batch. This bird-banding thing might have been going on for years. In fact, it must have been going on for at least one year if someone had found one of the birds in Texas in May.

The letters were from people who had seen the address on the bands of birds that had come down.

The most recent letter had been sent from Puerto Rico last week. “Regarding your swallow number 18,” it said. “It was sighted on the north side of the island and seen to leave at seven a.m.”

It was too early for reports of swallow number 6 or whistling swan number 36, but Juliet searched for news of them anyway.

She opened the rest of the letters then, starting with the earliest postmark and working her way toward the most recent ones. She was looking for a pattern, any pattern at all. Perhaps there were some clues in the kinds of birds found in various locations, or the times of departure or arrival, or medical symptoms, or deaths. But it all was very random.

The birds seemed to be coming down everywhere from Virginia to Argentina, and most of them had been spotted in the very early morning or at dusk, as would be expected.

Three dead Canada geese had been discovered, and fourteen swallows appeared to be sick but well enough to fly by the next day. There was no mention of any swans, and oddly, no one seemed to notice that the birds might have been drugged.

The only pattern she could find was the fact that there were no patterns. However, three of the letters made her stop and think.

The first was the one with the May postmark. She had been so busy thinking about the behavior of the birds that she had forgotten all about the behavior of the people writing the letters, or the people picking up the mail.

Why, for instance, would a letter postmarked May 15th arrive in a mailbox seven months later? All the rest of the letters had been sent in December, so the man in the cap must have been picking up his mail on some kind of a regular basis.

So why was he receiving a letter now that was sent seven months earlier?

Juliet read the letter again. A banded Canada goose had been spotted off the coast of Guatemala in the first week of May. The person who had written the letter was so surprised to see it that she had written asking for information about the goose.

Juliet understood why the woman had been so surprised. Canada geese should have been back in Canada by May.

And Canada geese rarely, if ever, migrated farther south than the United States. So what was this one doing there?

She examined the postmark and remembered that there had been political problems in Guatemala the summer before. The letter was probably one of those rare ones that got waylayed.

But the third letter was the oddest of all.

“I discovered your swallow number 45,” it said. “And I watched it for a long time. It seemed tired, but managed to flap its wings. But it couldn't get off the ground. The ring on its leg seemed to be causing problems, and seemed heavy, so I took it off, and at that point the bird flew away. I am enclosing the ring.”

Juliet turned the envelope upside down and shook the ring out into the palm of her hand. She had never held a band before, so she didn't know if this one was heavier than other bands, but it seemed much too heavy for a tiny swallow to carry.

She turned it over and over in her hand and examined it carefully, until something began to come to her as concepts often do, beginning with a tiny thought, and then another, and another, until all the little thoughts had grown into a whole.

Something was wrong.

The band was too heavy.

The edges of the band had been soldered together.

There were seams along the top and the bottom of the band.

The band consisted of two pieces of light metal soldered one on top of the other.

Juliet pried open the seams with her jackknife until they came apart. Then, when they had been separated she called Max to her and said, “Look, Max. Look at this. Someone's created an envelope out of this band, and he's put something inside it.”

Max sat back and looked up at her with eyes filled with tolerance and curiosity.

“He's filled this band with sand, Max. And he's put too much into it. Either this guy's very smart, or very dumb.

She thought about the sand and the bald eagle and the May postmark all day long. She walked around the city, shifting the pieces back and forth, trying to put them into some kind of order, and by the time she and Max returned to the bed and breakfast she had fashioned them into a wall that she thought would stand.

But there was one hole left to fill, and the piece that belonged there was being held by the man in the grey cap.

Interspersed with the bird reports was a letter with his name on it. She looked up his address in the phone book.

“Get ready,” she said to Max. “Tomorrow we're going to visit Mr. James Dinkins, and I'm going to need you to sniff out some answers.”

Max seemed to understand. He came to her and jumped up and put his front paws on her shoulders and buried his head in her hair.

“You're a good dog, Max,” she whispered. “And we make a very nice team.”

S
he woke up very early the next morning, fed Max, then ate her breakfast alone in the dining room. She was just finishing when the rest of the guests began to come downstairs, and she left as quickly as she could because she didn't want to speak to them.

She wanted to find James Dinkins, the man in the grey cap and shoes the same size as her own.

She found the apartment building easily, but she couldn't work up the courage to go inside.

She wanted to get into the apartment when he wasn't there. His light was on so she knew he was still inside, and when the light went off and he finally did come out, she was too frightened to go in.

At eleven she locked the doors of the jeep. “Bark if he comes back,” she said to Max, and then she went upstairs. The door to the apartment was locked, as she knew it would be, but she was good at jumping locks, and she unlocked it easily.

The place was a mess. There were papers everywhere, and charts all over the walls, and piles of letters on the kitchen table and the desk and the floor in the bedroom. There were two computers in the living room, several gadgets that she didn't recognize, and two cellular phones, one large and one tiny.

The letters were all from people who had found Dinkins' birds.

She moved on to the charts. The first one had a heading that said SWALLOW. The second one said GEESE. The third one said SWAN. And the fourth one said EAGLE. Along the top of each of the charts were dates, starting with January 1, and down the sides were the numbers 1–100. In each of the tiny boxes there was the name of a place.

The dates probably indicated when the birds had left Canada, and the numbers identified the birds. Dinkins must have held some of the birds back, because some had left in January, a few had left in February and March, some in April and May, thirty in the summer, and the rest in the fall.

The place names must be the locations where the birds came down.

So it had been Mr. Dinkins who had been implanting and controlling the birds' behavior. She wondered if he had a partner on the other side of the border.

She heard Max bark then and she jumped away from the window so that she could not be seen. She waited a moment, and then peeked out.

The man with the cap was standing beside the jeep. He was staring at Max, and Max was against the window, barking frantically.

As Juliet watched, the man stepped back from the jeep slowly and hesitated, as if he was thinking, and then he turned and looked up at the window. Juliet stepped backward and froze by the wall, and when she looked again a few minutes later he was gone, the door of the jeep was open, and Max was gone too.

Her chest tightened and her eyes filled with tears. When she could breathe again, she tried to think. Where, she wondered, would a man like Dinkins take Max? She didn't know Edmonton, but maybe there was something about the man himself that would tell her.

She wondered where he was keeping the birds. They had to be somewhere.

She went to the computer, punched into it, and tried the files one by one until she found the first reference to “the farm.” There were other references as well, and after the sixth one she knew that the farm was the place where the birds were kept. She wrote down the address and ran out of the apartment.

When she was halfway down the stairs she remembered something, and she went back and picked up the small phone and put it into her pocket, just in case.

She went downstairs to the front desk and asked directions to the farm. Then she climbed into the jeep and drove there as fast as she could.