Summer of the Spotted Owl (14 page)

“Dee dee,” went the chickadees.

“Di.
Di
.”

Whoa. That was one chickadee that'd got its lyrics wrong.

Then, zooming through the clumps of hot-dog eaters like a quarterback—
Bald Guy
. “Di!” he exclaimed. Some chickadee.

“Oh, no,” I said, retreating.

“Oh,
yes
.” He had an eager, almost feverish look about him. Also some remaining crumbs and icing from the cupcake I'd lobbed.

“I'm going to have it out with Zoë,” I informed him, scowling. “You do know Zoë, don't you?”

“Yeah, but you can't talk to her now.” Bald Guy advanced.

We were both distracted by loud scratching nearby. It was Itchy, regarding us unhappily as he scraped his arms.

“That scratching you do,” Bald Guy said, “is it, like, a hobby?”

“This is no time to discuss skin conditions,” I informed Bald Guy. “I'm going to find out what Zoë is up to—and Rowena too, with her brassbound trunk.”

That got him. He blanched. “Y-you know about that?” he gasped.

“Of course I do,” I lied briskly. “And soon the whole world will too.” Huh! I thought. Maybe Pantelli was right.

Maybe the trunk
was
full of national security secrets.

“You can't tell anyone,” Bald Guy gulped. “I'll be ruined—all my plans…”

He paced toward me, slowly, heavily, like Frankenstein. “You—just—can't—”

I'd had enough of this. Raising the overloaded plate of potato salad, I smashed it against his face.

And ran.

The woods are
lovely, dark and deep
.

That was another of the maternal unit's favorite quotations. Whenever we went to Stanley Park for a picnic, Mother would grow dreamy-eyed in the silence of the ancient Douglas firs. She'd murmur lines from “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” (Not that we Galloways actually picnicked on snowy evenings.)

Stepping into these woods, I escaped the applause and whoo-whooing of the crowd. Stillness surrounded me.

Though just a Robert Frost minute now. Amid the stillness, a faint crackle of a twig. And there was that flash of pink again—

Zoë materialized round an aspen. “There you are,” she beamed, with her very lipsticked doll-like smile. Her
real
mouth might not have been beaming for all I could tell.

I stomped toward her. I wasn't afraid of anyone my height. “You have dog hair all over your clothes,” I said accusingly. “Norman isn't a little boy. He's a poodle.
You're
Rowena's secret buyer
.”

Zoë gave her tinkling laugh—the one that reminded me of carnival music. Cheap and not quite real, I thought.

“No law against buying someone's house,” Zoë pointed out, still amused. “And did we ever keep trying: different realtors, higher offers…

“Then, finally, we lit upon the one thing that would force Rowena to move. A threat to her precious cats!” Zoë's voice rose to a high, scornful pitch—and all at once I knew she was the anonymous phone caller and tipster. Anonymity, the favorite ploy of sneaks.

Zoë's smile turned thin and very sneaky. “Not that Rowena can complain. She's getting a wonderful price for her dump.”

Snap
! Breaking more twigs, Zoë swiveled on her spike heels and trotted away. I followed. More trees closed around us, but I told myself it was just a small woods. Nothing could happen to me.

“This is the deal you needed to sign before the nineteenth, isn't it, Zoë?” I demanded. “And if Rowena's house is such a dump, why did you want it so much? All those pranks,” I added in disbelief.

At a clearing, Zoë halted and faced me. “Yes, those pranks. Intended to annoy Rowena into moving, but performed less than satisfactorily by Rock Junior. He couldn't even leave my witch signs at Rowena's without being seen.”

“Those were horrible signs,” I said.

Zoë shrugged. “An artist, like your oh-so-snobby sister, I'm not…Oh, you mean the
messages
.” A tinny giggle. “Means to an end, m'dear, means to an end.

“Anyhow,” and Zoë's smile twisted into a grimace that suddenly made her look quite ugly, “because of Rock Junior's bungling,
you
came into the picture. Most inconvenient.”

She leaned against a tree, and I saw past her that we weren't in a clearing so much as on a cliff's edge. A huge pink blanket lay on a grass patch overlooking a particularly steep side of Grouse Mountain. To one side of the blanket, a picnic basket. To another, a cooler.

“I'd hoped you'd just sit and watch the hang gliding, like a normal kid would. Then I could head off in peace to sign the house deal,” Zoë said. Her doll-like smile returned, though the lipstick had splintered a bit after the grimace. “But since you're too curious to sit still, I have to resort to plan B.”

Plan B? I didn't like the sound of that.

“Yes, plan B,” she twinkled. “That is, to tell you everything.”

“Huh?” I said, not very originally. “After all this secrecy, you—”

“Of course! You really mustn't view everything in black and white, Dinah,” Zoë tsked. “I'm not a bad person—just a practical one. And I'd like you and me to be friends… What kind of soda would you prefer?” She stepped around the blanket to the cooler.

“Do you have any Alka-Seltzer?”

Zoë tinkled out her laugh again. “You're so amusing, Dinah. A wisecrack for every occasion! Well, go on, have a seat, and I shall tell all.” She waved toward the blanket.

Like Zoë said, I was curious. I did want to hear her out. I walked onto the blanket.

That was my big mistake. Memo to self: Never trust a villain who's being cooperative. The blanket gave way beneath me, and I went into free fall.

Chapter Fourteen
A Real Cliffhanger

C
apilano Canyon spiraled up to meet me, but—
thump
! I landed sooner than I expected.

I sprawled sideways on moss, dead leaves and pine needles. For a moment I was too shocked to move.

I was on a ledge about ten feet wide and maybe jutting out seven. I shifted to a sitting position. Nothing broken on the side I'd fallen on, though—
ow
, my shoulder—it was doubtful I'd be competing in shot put any time soon.

I tilted a sore neck upward. In the shimmering sunlight, the cliff's edge, shaped in a ragged U, wavered above me. The blanket had been draped over the U. If I weren't aching so much, I would have smacked the palm of my hand against my forehead in chagrin. Of course! The blanket had been held in place by the picnic basket and the cooler.

A pink figure teetered into view on spike heels. “I'm afraid I'm too petite to reach down and rescue you after your accident,” Zoë said pleasantly.

“Accident!” I yelped. “You booby-trapped me, Zoë Klapper!”

Zoë sighed as if I were being a difficult pupil. “You're famous for being troublesome, Dinah. Everyone knows how you stopped a play in mid-scene last year to accuse people of being thieves. If you try to blame
me
for your clumsiness, well,” she shrugged, “everyone will just smile and say, ‘That's Dinah Galloway for you.' ”

“Dinah
Mary
Galloway to you,” I shouted angrily. I was too sore to come up with anything wittier.

And now she was swiveling on her spike heels. “Wait— you said you'd explain,” I protested, getting up. Being booby-trapped was one thing. But being booby-trapped without knowing why: that I couldn't bear.

“Too busy, Dinah. Got a deal to sign!”

If only the pieces in my brain would unscramble! They were too jumbled to form any sort of pattern.

Though Zoë didn't know how jumbled they were. Maybe I could bluff her into thinking I knew more than I did.

I grabbed at the most puzzling piece of all.

“Blueprints!” I blurted.

Whoa, that got her. Zoë stalked back, swaying to one side as a heel sank in the soil. Her eyes blazed. “How did you know…” she choked.

I was very glad, all of a sudden, that she was too petite to reach me. “Yeah, the blueprints,” I babbled, trying to sound knowledgeable, and thinking,
Blueprints? Okay, that's got
her riled, but just what is it about the blueprints?

“The blueprints on Councillor Cordes's computer,” I said. “The ones of Rowena's house, the ones that go on and on—”

Wait. I'd said something wrong. Zoë's eyeballs weren't bulging anymore. They'd narrowed, and she was smirking.

I'd said,
The ones of Rowena's house, the ones that go
on and on
…

Well, they did go on and on. Blue lines and curves and numbers stretching everywhere. So
that
couldn't be a mistake.

What had I got wrong?

Maybe when I'd said…
The ones of Rowena's house
.

“Not that they're really of her
house
,” I ad-libbed desperately.

The effect on Zoë was immediate. Her eyes bulged like gumballs. Always satisfying to a junior sleuth.

But if the blueprints weren't of Rowena's house, what were they of?

I squinted up at Zoë, my fingers digging so deep into the cliff wall that baseball-sized clumps of soil were forming in my palms. I thought of the first time I'd seen her, huddled with Councillor Cordes in the salmon hatchery.

Unlike me, the councillor and Zoë hadn't been at all interested in the salmon valiantly struggling upstream. They'd been conferring about some papers that the councillor needed.
No time to waste
, he'd said.

No time to waste because of the meeting on the nineteenth?

I pictured those endless blueprints again, and then—

And then I got it.

“You and the councillor are planning to develop Rowena's property,” I gulped. “It's a huge property, the biggest on Marisa Drive. You could cram dozens of condos on it, couldn't you? As long as you buy the house and get all your permit papers approved by the nineteenth.

“No wonder Councillor Cordes is thinking of buying yachts. Once you start selling the condos, it'll be like winning the lottery.”

Zoë stretched her lipsticked mouth into a sneer. “To the top of the class, Dinah. That's why Rock fired his previous assistant and hired me, his sister. I'm family, and I'm in on the profits if we can pull this off. I was willing to work round the clock to get this done.

“Once we read soac's research, proving a spotted owl family lived off Marisa Drive, we knew there was no point in fighting Jack French, the environmental superhero. We realized that what we
could
do, though, was pre-empt the spotted owl bylaw. Shove a development plan through before the nineteenth. Then no one could stop us from building right down the canyon slope, as far as Rowena's property goes.”

Zoë's sneer widened. I couldn't blame her. There I was, trapped on a ledge, unable to stop the deal, helpless to save our local spotted owl family. I was fisting the soil clumps so tightly that they came away in my hands. I fell backward.

“But it's only a couple of days till the nineteenth,” I objected from my undignified sitting position. “Nobody gets plans approved that fast. Permits take ages.”

I knew, because we'd had to wait weeks to get our deck plans approved. Jack, who'd hoped to start the deck in early fall, had ended up building it under a tarp in rain-drenched December, while Madge served him tea from a thermos, and I offered helpful advice from under my
Deathstalkers
rain slicker.

Zoë waved a pink-fingernailed hand. “We put the proposal through weeks ago and got all our permits. True, I didn't yet own Rowena's property,” another tinny giggle, “but we'd bribed the permit manager. Herbert pulled strings for us: forged signatures, stamped approvals, whatever had to be done.”

Dimly an image came back to me of a moustached young man at the Cordeses' garden party. He'd been pretending to pull springs. No wonder the councillor had been unamused. Not very discreet, that Herbert.

Zoë smirked. “Good-bye, detective girl. I'll call someone to come and get you—by and by.”

“By what time? When I'm a skeleton?”

“Always the wisecracks,” Zoë chuckled.

And this time she did leave.

I brushed
the soil off my hands and reviewed my options.

The review didn't take long. I
had
no options.

I felt tears forming: the fallback position of a junior sleuth. I stared blurrily at a clump of huckleberries growing from the dark soil of the cliff's wall. At least I'd have food handy as the hours dragged on.

The red berries swam against the dark wall—and turned into my dad's black-and-red-checked flannel shirt. I brushed a wrist against my eyes. Yup, there he was, with his crisp black hair, wide grin and bright black eyes that snapped with good humor. He was leaning comfortably against the wall as if there weren't any sort of crisis.

I don't tell anyone about this, but once in a while Dad does appear to me. I'm not saying he's a guardian angel or anything. He couldn't be. Anyone who got drunk and died smashing his car into a tree wouldn't qualify. At least, not from what I've heard of angels.

I blubbered at him, “Now you're going to tell me to sing.” Singing's saved me from jams before. “But all I want to do is bawl,” I informed Dad. How I wished he were there in human form so I could snuggle up against his flannel shirt and rest. I got so
tired
sometimes.

What song have you been working on, Dinah?

“ ‘Sweet Sue,' ” I told him grudgingly. “But no one will hear if I belt it out. They're too busy cheering themselves hoarse for the hang gliders.”

Sing it for me, then.

“Who are
you
to be asking for favors?” I demanded. “You left me! You
died
.”