She 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.