Touch Not the Puffin
Unlike Aunt Phoebe’s cottage, which was just a small weathered saltbox, this really looked like a fairy-tale cottage. Rhapsody had painted it various shades of lilac and lavender, with blue trim. The blue tile roof hadn’t weathered the hurricane well, and several of the blue-and-lavender shutters had come loose, revealing, rather than protecting, the small diamond-shaped windowpanes. Dead vines covered the front. The vines probably bore purple flowers during Monhegan’s brief summer, but they looked pretty stark now. Still, the effect was charming, in a cloying sort of way. I half-expected to see Hansel and Gretel walk around from the backyard, munching on chunks of marzipan windowpane and gingerbread woodwork. The door knocker was shaped like a unicorn’s head, complete with a wickedly sharp horn, and I wondered how many people had impaled themselves on it.
“Isn’t it cute?” Mamie said.
“Very cute,” I said. Mamie smiled and Michael looked puzzled. Only Dad had known me long enough to realize that I’d just uttered my ultimate insult, but even Dad wasn’t tactless enough to say so.
“Look, we’ll catch up to you in a bit,” I said. “I want to talk to Rhapsody.”
“What about?” Mamie snapped.
Damn. I’d forgotten how protective Mamie was of her pet artist.
“Mother’s interested in a painting,” I said. Well, it wasn’t a
complete lie; if Mamie chose to think I meant one of Rhapsody’s paintings, that was her problem.
“I’ll come with you, then,” Mamie said. “She’s very shy, you know.”
“I’d like to meet her,” Dad said, falling into step beside Mamie.
We slipped and slid up the cobblestone path—nature never intended cobblestones for use in hurricanes—and Mamie knocked very gently on the front door.
After half a minute, I saw motion out of the corner of my eye. The curtain in the window to the left of the door fluttered slightly. I deliberately avoided looking at it, and pasted what I hoped was a friendly, harmless smile on my face.
Mamie had raised her hand to knock again when the door opened slightly, with the sort of creak they use in movies to suggest that maybe this is a door you’d be better off not entering. But there wasn’t a monster or a wicked witch hiding behind the door. Just poor Rhapsody, who peeked through the narrow opening as if she were the one expecting monsters.
“Rhapsody, we’re so sorry to intrude, but Meg’s parents want to buy a painting,” Mamie said.
Rhapsody didn’t seem reassured by Mamie’s words, but after staring at us blankly for a few seconds, she opened the door a little wider and scuttled back to let us pass.
“I’ll make tea,” she murmured, and fled down the tiny hallway while Mamie led us into the living room. I instantly wished I’d suggested inviting Rhapsody down to the general store or to Mamie’s house. Her decor gave me galloping claustrophobia. Not so much the furniture, although she had too much of it—fussy little chairs that would collapse instantly under anyone over a hundred pounds; rickety-looking tables about to overturn under their loads of knickknacks; spindly cabinets whose glass fronts bulged outward from the further hoard of knickknacks within. You could have sewed all the frayed antimacassars and antique
doilies together to make several bedsheets, and from the number of puffin-related items among the knickknacks, I gathered that Rhapsody was Mamie’s best customer.
And apart from the black and white of the puffins and the various wood tones, everything in the room was colored some shade of lavender, purple, or lilac.
Everything also carried a visible coating of dust. I sneezed four times while poking around the room to find a chair I would feel safe sitting on.
Mamie beamed with pride at the decor. Dad gazed at me, clearly awaiting brilliant deductions. I could tell Michael wanted to make a break for the wide-open spaces. I tried to stifle my sneezes by concentrating on the pictures on the wall. She had about thirty of them, all book covers or illustrations from the Puffin Family series. At the lower left-hand corner of every painting was Rhapsody’s signature—a fussy, overelaborate design, barely recognizable as the letter R, in luminous purple paint.
Rhapsody emerged from the kitchen, wearing a frilly lavender dress that served very well as camouflage, considering her decor. She carried a tray, from which she handed out tea in eggshell-thin antique china. The idea of actually grasping the delicate gold-and-lavender handle of the cup was more than I could manage; I was sure to break it. Besides, I could tell from the smell that she’d made some kind of odd-tasting herbal muck. So I cleared a space among the fragile-looking knickknacks on the doily-covered end table, set down my cup, and tried not to watch what Dad was doing with his.
“By the way, before we talk about the painting, I have a question about puffins,” I said.
“I don’t really know that much about them,” Rhapsody said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. “I just paint them.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s what I wanted to ask you about.”
She smiled nervously. I got the idea that four people were
almost more of an audience than she could handle. I felt a sudden surge of impatience and claustrophobia and decided not to waste time beating around the bush.
“You had a dead puffin you used as a model, right?” I asked. “You kept it in your freezer.”
She stiffened but said nothing.
“Oh, come on, Rhapsody,” I said. “We saw you down by Victor Resnick’s house on the day of the murder and—”
Rhapsody shrieked, burst into tears, and threw herself on the sofa. Mamie Benton hurried over and began patting her back.
“There, there,” she said, glaring at me. “That wasn’t a very funny joke, but I’m sure Meg didn’t mean anything by it.”
Mamie acted as if she’d caught me torturing a small child, which I suppose wasn’t far from the truth. Dad had that “I’m disappointed with you” look, and even Michael seemed rather uncomfortable.
“I didn’t do it on purpose!” Rhapsody wailed. “It was an accident! Honestly!”
Rhapsody lapsed into hysterical sobs. The others gaped when they heard her words, and Mamie froze, her hand still outstretched toward the sobbing woman’s shoulder.
“You don’t mean—” She gasped.
“Aha!” Dad said. “I knew you’d solve this!”
“She can’t possibly have done it!” Mamie wailed. “Oh, this is awful!”
“Oh, for heavens’ sake,” I said. “Stop carrying on; what she’s done may be perfectly legal.”
“Perfectly legal!” Mamie exclaimed. “I’m sure you could argue that killing Resnick was morally justified, but even if it was selfdefense—”
“Oh, do be quiet for a few minutes and let Rhapsody talk,” I said. I strode over to the sofa and nudged Mamie aside so I could take her place beside Rhapsody.
“Rhapsody,” I said in a firm, matter-of-fact tone.
She continued to sob. Dealing with sobbing members of my own sex isn’t my forte. I began to wonder if we should send for someone better equipped to deal with the situation—though I had no idea who that might be. Mrs. Fenniman or Aunt Phoebe would only scare Rhapsody to death, and Mother would enjoy the drama and encourage her to sob for a few more hours. We had no time for that.
“For heaven’s sake, stop sniveling and sit up,” I said, pulling her upright and giving her a firm shake. “No one cares about the stupid puffin; we just want to know the whole story so we can clear this thing up.”
She collapsed back on the sofa with such violence that she knocked over the end table. I could hear the tinkle of breaking glass and china. So much for the knickknacks and antiques.
Michael suddenly appeared, kneeling at our feet.
“Let me try,” he murmured. I scooted aside to let him sit closer to Rhapsody.
“Now Rhapsody,” he said, in soothing tones, taking her hands in his. “It’s all right. No one wants to hurt you. We just need to know what happened so we can take care of things.”
He went on in much the same vein while gently chafing her hands. He was making progress; her sobs grew less violent. She finally sat up, took the tissues Michael had ready, and began swabbing at her face with them.
“They’ll arrest me,” Rhapsody moaned, looking at Michael with an expression of adoration. I resisted the impulse to knock her down and jump up and down on her, yelling, “Mine! Mine!” Michael was, I reminded myself, an actor. The expression of tender concern on his face wasn’t real. Still, I was irrationally relieved to see that Rhapsody was not one of those women who can cry charmingly. Her entire face was beet red, and I upped my estimate of her age by a decade.
“Arrest you for what?” Michael asked.
“They’ll think I killed the poor little p-puffin,” Rhapsody said,
sniffling slightly. “They’ll arrest me for harming an endangered species.”
“Puffins? Nonsense, they’re not endangered,” I said.
“But there are only twelve puffin nests on Egg Island,” she said.
“And a couple million healthy puffins flying around northern Canada and Greenland,” I said. “Isn’t that right, Dad?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “It’s threatened in this habitat, of course; they’ve all moved farther north, where humans don’t impinge on their breeding grounds. But it’s not endangered. Not in the least.”
“But I can see your point,” I said. “The birders around here wouldn’t take kindly to anyone killing a puffin. But of course you didn’t, did you?”
“N-no,” she said. “That horrible man did, with his electric-shock things. I was trying to sneak past his house to go down to the point, where I could watch the live puffins, and I saw the poor thing die when it landed on the roof, and it fell off and was just lying there, and I couldn’t resist. He was always calling my drawings lifeless and mechanical, but all I ever have to work with are photographs and bird books. I thought maybe if I used a real puffin, it would help.”
“And did it?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I couldn’t even look at it without wanting to cry. But by the time I found that out, they’d made him stop using his electric-shock things, and he was chasing people out, and I didn’t have a chance to take it back.”
“So you kept it.”
“Why didn’t you just leave it somewhere else on the island?” Michael asked.
“Because Puffin Point’s the only place on the island where anyone ever sees puffins,” she said.
“And certainly the only place on the island where you’d expect to find one electrocuted,” I added.
“Yes,” she said, sniffing. “And when the hurricane came along, I thought I could just leave it there, and people would think it had washed up in the storm, and even if they figured out it had been electrocuted, they’d think he was at it again. I didn’t even know he was dead until after I did it.”
“That must have been quite a shock,” I said.
“I was so terrified someone had seen me and would think I’d done it,” Rhapsody said.
“Well, you should never keep quiet about something like that,” I said in my sternest tone. “These things always come out in a murder investigation, and you’re always better off if you tell the truth from the start.”
Michael quirked one eyebrow. I rolled my eyes to show I realized how stupid and pretentious that sounded. But Rhapsody, Dad, and Mamie all nodded with great enthusiasm.
“So,” I said. “Tell us more about the puffin.”