No, I thought, you didn’t. I don’t think you can take the credit for this one, Shana.
Before I could say anything aloud, though, the sound of sirens flared and came to an abrupt halt, and Shana fell sobbing against my chest again.
“I don’t have any tissues,” I said, more to myself than to Shana. As a high school counselor, I always had tissues within reach in my office. Dealing with the drama of teenage girls daily, tissues were my stock in trade.
But I wasn’t in my office. School was out for the summer, and I’d come to Fillmore County to find a Bobwhite, not the murdered husband of a long-ago summer crush. A summer crush who looked like she could give birth to triplets at any moment. And here I thought that going birding for the weekend was going to be a relief from the burgeoning production of my sister’s upcoming wedding. Now it looked like I’d landed in the middle of the first night of a B-rated television mini-series—one that not only featured a murder, but an impending birth. The fact was, weddings are over in a day, but murder cases can drag on for weeks.
I didn’t even want to think about how long labor could go on.
Wait a minute.
“What did you say?” I asked the sobbing Shana. I lifted her chin off my chest and looked her in the eyes. “You didn’t kill Jack. You told us he left early to find the Cuckoo, and you’ve been with the rest of us since coffee at the hotel. Whoever did this—whoever shot Jack—was here at the camp with Jack not that long ago. This isn’t your fault, Shana.”
Before she could answer me, three uniformed officers rounded the corner of the wagon and started barking orders at us.
“Step away from the body, please,” said the woman wearing the sheriff’s jacket.
“Don’t go anywhere,” the deputy instructed us. “We’ll need statements.”
“I need an ambulance,” the third officer said into his walkie-talkie.
I helped Shana to stand up, and we moved away to give the officers room.
“I already checked for a pulse,” I told the sheriff as she bent to drop her hand on Jack’s neck. “He’s dead.”
“And you are?”
“Bob White. I’m one of the birding group that Jack’s … that Jack was going to be leading today.” I tilted my head to indicate Shana, who stood next to me, her arms wrapped around her expansive stomach. “This is Shana O’Keefe. The dead man is her husband, Jack O’Keefe.”
The sheriff gave us both a quick once-over with her hard eyes. “And you were comforting the widow, I take it?”
I could feel the blood rushing to my cheeks, though my rusty beard probably hid it from the sheriff.
“They’re both old friends,” I said, bristling at her innuendo. “Actually, I was trying to keep Shana away.”
“Didn’t look like you were being very successful, Mr. White.” She tapped her shoulder patch. “I’m Sheriff Paulsen. This is my county. And it looks to me like we’re going to need to talk. The three of us.”
Oh, boy. I was really excited about that idea. Especially since the sheriff seemed to be spinning her own version of what had happened.
“You got to talk to me, too!”
We all turned to see Bernie poking her head around the corner of the wagon. She’d obviously made a full recovery from her faint and managed to escape Tom’s supervision. Her cheeks were flushed, but she was clearly eager to be included in our upcoming chat with the sheriff.
“They’ve been with me all morning,” Bernie offered. “Me and the other birders. We had coffee at the hotel about 6:00 a.m.. Then we split up into three cars to come over here, but we stopped at the sewage ponds to see if we could spot any ducks, but all we saw were some turtles. Believe me, it’s a slow day for birdwatching when you got a bunch of birders standing on the side of the road talking about turtles.”
“Bernie,” I said, trying to catch her attention. Judging from the deepening frown on Sheriff Paulsen’s face, I was pretty sure Bernie wasn’t scoring any points with her morning play-by-play. Turtles were obviously not high on the sheriff’s list of suspects at the moment. But Bernie was on a roll.
“Anyway, then we drove over here, and after we parked, Bob and Tom took off in this direction, and Shana and I were still up the hill when Tom came to tell us about Jack.” She paused to take a breath. “Besides, everyone knows that Bob wouldn’t kill anyone. He’s the sweetest man I’ve ever met. He just seems to find bodies a lot.”
Thanks, Bernie. Not exactly what I would have shared at that particular moment, but hey—what are friends for, right?
Sheriff Paulsen’s dark eyes locked back on mine. “Is that right?”
I started to shake my head and put my hand out in a qualifying kind of gesture.
“Absolutely!” Bernie gushed. “The first two times he found bodies, they were already dead, and the last time, he was right there when a man was shot. Right there! I know because I was right there, too. And then when that sweet little girl student of his got shot—“
“Bernie!” Geez Louise, she was making me sound like a walking death trap. I’d be lucky if I didn’t get handcuffs slapped on me right then and there and hauled off to jail without even getting my Miranda rights read to me. In my peripheral vision, I could have sworn that I saw the two deputies getting ready to pull their guns.
Bob White, sensitive high school counselor and closet homicidal maniac. Thank you again, Bernie.
“Sounds like we’ve got even more to talk about,” Sheriff Paulsen said, as the ambulance crew finally made it down the slope and hunkered down around Jack’s body. Right behind them were the other six people who’d signed up for a weekend of birding with leader Jack O’Keefe. Standing just beyond the old wagon in a tight clump, they could almost have passed for a small brood of abandoned chicks, their faces ashen and lined with strain.
“You know, I’d kill for a cup of coffee right about now,” Bernie announced. Then she pointed up at a bird in a tree behind the covered wagon. “Yellow-billed Cuckoo.”
All of us, including the sheriff looked up.
“Ow,” Shana moaned.
“What is it?” I almost grabbed one of the paramedics away from Jack’s body. If Shana was going into labor, there was no way I was going to coach her through it.
“My back hurt when I looked at the Cuckoo,” she complained, rubbing her knuckles against the small of her back. “Although, to be completely honest, it hurts when I do anything these days.”
Great. Just what I wanted to hear. The pregnant lady was in constant pain. “I think you should go with the paramedics, Shana. Get checked out. Make sure you—and the baby—are okay.”
“I’m fine, Bob,” she assured me, even while tears continued to track silently down her face. “And I’m not having a baby.”
I looked at her in complete disbelief, and she smiled, her eyes regaining some of their sparkle.
“I’m having twins.”
Okay, so I was right. She did have a whole pod in there.
Holy shit.