Chapter Twenty-Four

By midafternoon, Kate had gotten Bonnie settled into her room at the Hamilton Springs Hotel. Kate had tried to get her friend to stay at the house, but Bonnie wanted her independence. So Kate stayed awhile with her, then Bonnie had wanted to take a nap. Kate had the perfect opportunity, she decided, to have that long-overdue chat with Artie Best. She called ahead this time, and though Artie didn’t seem particularly thrilled at the prospect of company, he didn’t outright refuse her request.

Kate made the drive through the eerily quiet countryside, taking the time to mull over all the events and information of the past few days. She turned things over and over in her mind, trying to untangle the legitimate mystery from the challenging but less urgent puzzle of it all. She tried to sort out the people with motivations she didn’t know about, or hadn’t yet uncovered, and the stories that, while fascinating, couldn’t help her find the answers.

If this were a work of great literature assigned for analysis by Bonnie Mulgrew, she would have found herself searching for a common theme threaded through every scene by a skillful author. But people didn’t behave as predictably as characters in a book, and very seldom did they reveal themselves as readily.

“Dud and Charlene Howell, for instance,” she murmured to herself. What was their story? And did it have anything to do with the missing birds? She had no evidence to make that connection. But perhaps they knew about Artie’s money.

That would add a whole new twist to the plot.

Kate looked across the field where they had found Dot Bagley trying to trap a wayward tabby. Kate slowed the car to take a moment to search the branches of the trees. The early autumn sun already lengthened the shadows enough that she found herself deliberating whether she could even have picked out any birds among the play of leaves and limbs, dark and light. She turned her gaze to the afternoon sky in hopes of catching a flock of birds in flight. She stopped the car, waited, and watched. No birds flew by, and yet she felt a sense of comfort and peace.

Matthew 6:26 came to mind. “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?”

She sighed and took one last look into the field. That’s when something brown and rectangular caught her eye. She pulled the car to the side of the road and got out. Before just charging out into the field, she made a sweeping survey to see if there was a fence to climb over or a Private Property, Keep Out sign posted. In doing that, she got a better look at the field. She squinted to make sure she was seeing right. Intrigued, she decided to go in for a closer look.

Before marching into the field, she called out, “Hello? Is anyone out here?”

When no one answered, she made her way into the open field and didn’t stop until she reached the cardboard box she’d spotted from the road.

“What’s this about?” she muttered to herself.

She bent down to peer at what looked like the kind of trap a cartoon character might have set for a rascally rabbit. A dowel rod in the ground held one end of a cardboard produce box fairly high up off the ground. Beneath the box was a small plastic plate, where she presumed the trapper would place food. But what kind of food? Birdseed?

Kate crouched to examine the area under the box, but the plate and the area around it were empty. Her gaze trailed to the construction of the trap. Tied to the dowel was string. Only it wasn’t string; it was heavy fishing line.

Her heartbeat sped up. She thought of Cassie Capshaw, who had asked if someone had set animal snares in the countryside. Had the person who set this trap set the one near Artie Best’s land as well? And why?

Kate stood and found where the fishing line lay in the grass. She followed it visually to the nearest clump of bushes, the obvious place for someone wanting to spring the trap to hide. It would have been so easy for someone to have been watching her the whole time. “Hello?”

No answer.

She took a step toward the brush. Not so much as a rustle of leaves came in response. She moved carefully to the brush to find the fishing line tied to a stake, and attached to that stake was a piece of familiar fabric. “Bonnie’s scarf!”

It had been cut into a strip and tied around the stake, probably to make the fishing line easier to find.

This finding put Kate on high alert. She looked around and considered waiting to see if anyone showed up, but Artie Best had been hard enough to pin down for this meeting. She didn’t want to risk arriving late and giving him an excuse to refuse to let her in.

She climbed back into her car, but as she drove on, she couldn’t help recalling the stacks of seed in Artie’s supply barn and his erratic behavior in inviting the Howells to come see him, then posting a sign to keep visitors at bay. She thought, with her heart heavy, of the anger Cassie felt toward the man and finally of the poignant story of love lost between him and Joanie.

What had happened there? None of her business, of course, but she couldn’t help a little wistful thinking. If only things had worked out between them. Was it too late?

With that thought in mind, she turned into Artie’s drive through the open gate, got out, and approached the house with a new mind-set. The home no longer accentuated inconsistencies between its cozy, cottagelike exterior and the man with dirt under his fingernails and a reluctance to interact with fellow humans. Now it spoke to her of a man who had wanted to make amends. As a place where he lived by himself, it looked like the work of a man who had tried to fix the things he had broken—a promise, a future, a good woman’s heart—and knew he never could.

Kate couldn’t believe a man like this was capable of setting traps near his property. Bonnie and Paul had both cautioned her that Artie might not be cooperative or even particularly kind about what she had come to talk to him about, but Kate didn’t care. She knew that God, the Author of all good things, was woven in the very fabric of Artie’s life, and that there was something worth reaching out to in Artie. And she fully intended to find it.