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chapter one

There was someone in my car. There shouldn’t have been. It was 4:30 and most of the cars in the parking lot at the zoology building at Sussex University, where I work as an assistant professor, were gone for the day. I cautiously approached, then stopped dead as the rear lights flashed on and off and I heard the engine cough to life. Must be a friend, I thought, and immediately knew I was being ridiculous or deliberately blind. What friend borrows a car without asking and without keys? I stood glued to the spot as the car backed out. It was a man, but I couldn’t see his face easily because he was on the other side of the car and my eyesight stinks. All I could see was his profile. My brain finally alerted my body that something was amiss and that perhaps I should do something about it. There was also a distant rumbling that maybe I shouldn’t, maybe he had a gun or a knife or a can of mace, even a taser. But it was only a distant rumbling and I launched myself at the car, pounding on the passenger window. That got him turning. I could see he was wearing a deep-maroon hoodie; faded, ripped jeans; and a crooked smile, which he flashed at me as he gave me the finger and stepped on the gas. That did it. I was damned if I was going to let him get away. I started sprinting after him as he turned down onto the main street close to the university. I could see the traffic building and knew I had a chance. Of course, what I’d do when I got to him I wasn’t quite sure, but I sprinted down the road after him anyway. I saw his taillights go red and sped up. I was thirty feet and closing when he suddenly swung right down a back lane. I couldn’t lose him, not with the valuable cargo in my car.
When I reached the lane I skidded to a stop and eyeballed the situation. It was one of those lanes that divide the backsides of one row of houses from the other. My car was about fifteen feet away, its brake lights were on, and a massive moving van was blocking its way. I had him. I could see him looking back at me through my rear windshield, and this time I smiled. He responded by jerking my gears into reverse and stepping on the gas. I hadn’t been ready for that and the car barrelled down on me. I moved then, but not quite fast enough. The car brushed me and knocked me off my feet. With my face in the dirt, I turned and watched as my car careened down the lane, came to a screeching halt, ground the gears back into forward, and disappeared down an offshoot of the lane I was lying in. I got to my feet, feeling impotent and angry, and gingerly loped over to the fork in the road. My car was already at the end of it, pushing its way into traffic by sitting on its horn. My horn. My car. It occurred to me briefly that maybe my car and what was in it weren’t worth it, but it was my car and he was stealing it. So I loped down the lane, my right side aching from the fall. When I reached the main street my hopes rose; there was lots of traffic. I scanned the cars ahead of me and there it was: my little Mini moving at about my speed. I ran faster, my heart catching up, until I was right behind him.
Then he made his move. He floored it, jumped the curb, and raced along the sidewalk, pedestrians scattering like so many leaves in the wind as my car gained speed at an alarming rate. I guess he wasn’t a very good driver, or maybe he was actually scared of me because he swerved to miss a fire hydrant, lost control, and slalomed through the linen-covered outdoor tables of a little cafe. I saw the driver bail out just before the car took a one-way ticket to the recycling depot. The sound of crunching metal, breaking glass, and screaming people was overwhelmed by the horrendous crash of the car into the solid brick wall of the little restaurant. I stood transfixed, watching the car crumple into uselessness. I could see my thief running away from all the commotion. I almost ran after him but I was caught in a surreal moment as I watched my faithful little car burst into flames. It wasn’t so much the car that kept me standing there in disbelief. It was what had been in it. But I couldn’t dwell upon that now. It would have to wait.
The police were very efficient and took my statement in record time. They assured me they would be in touch as the case proceeded. I wondered how long I would have been tied up with them if someone had died. It had taken a lot longer to get to a rental agency and organize a car, and I’d had to settle for an old vermilion clunker from the guys who rent wrecks. Traffic was pretty bad on the Champlain Bridge, but I still made it home in record time. It always feels wonderfully therapeutic when I turn off the main highway and down the lane where I live in an old log cabin on a five-hundred-acre dairy farm I share with my brother, Ryan, and his wife and kids.
I was alarmed when I saw two cars in my driveway and then mystified to see two people on my porch. And then I remembered that I’d invited my lab tech Martha Bathgate and her boyfriend, my pathologist friend Duncan Macpherson, for dinner. Martha was staring at me with her mouth open as I got out of the car, her face signalling, as it always does, what she was thinking. But I wasn’t sure what that was — shock at the colour of my new car or panic because she had looked in my fridge, which she always did, and seen nothing and now here I was empty handed with dinner on the horizon. Martha loved her food, her sturdy rotund frame caressing every pound like a long-lost friend. I looked at them looking at me, arms empty, and blurted out, “Someone tried to steal my car.”
They both started talking at once but Duncan’s deep baritone won out. “Spill it,” he said with a smile that almost took my eyes off his nose. Almost. I just couldn’t get over that nose. It was so present. Big and bulbous it dwarfed the rest of his face. I shuddered to think what it must have been like as a teenager to get a zit on that nose. But then again, it was so big that a zit wouldn’t have made much difference.
I pulled myself together and spilled it. When I was finished there was dead silence.
“Jesus, Cordi. That’s pretty stupid,” Martha, who hardly ever minced her words, eventually said. She was sitting in the hammock, putting a severe dent in it. Her curly black hair framed the tiny, perfect features of her round face like a sunflower. “I mean, why would you chase him like that? No car is worth the risk.”
“It wasn’t the car,” I said. “It was what was in the car.”
“Which was?” asked Duncan, whose stomach had started to growl. What was I going to feed them? I wondered.
“The recordings of Indigo Bunting songs that I just brought back from Point Pelee yesterday.” Point Pelee is this amazing peninsula that juts out into Lake Erie. It is a major migratory corridor for birds — three hundred sixty species — and butterflies, on the southernmost point of mainland Canada. It’s a biologist’s dream, and getting to traipse around recording Indigo Buntings ranked right up there with chocolate ice cream and key lime pie for me.
“Dear girl, you’re getting into the habit of losing important pieces of your research.”
When I first met Duncan I had spent considerable energy trying to get him to stop calling me “dear girl,” but either his brain was irreversibly programmed or he chose to ignore me because I was the one who had had to give in.
“He’s got a point,” said Martha, corralling my brain back to the present for a split second.
I thought back to the first murder Duncan, Martha, and I had worked on together and the research disks that had been stolen from the lab. This was different though. It had been my fault this time. I’d lost my keys somewhere not long before the car was stolen but hadn’t panicked because I had a spare set hidden on the outside of the car. The thief could have discovered either set.
I sighed. “Well, I’ll need to replace the lost recordings of the ten birds I taped at Point Pelee. I guess there is nothing for it. I’ll just have to go back this week, if I can somehow reschedule all my other commitments.” I really didn’t want to go back and redo what I had done, but there seemed to be no other choice.
I left them talking on the porch and went and looked in the fridge. Cheese. A leftover loaf of bread. That was it. But I had an idea. I ducked out the back door and walked down the lane to the barn. I could hear Duncan and Martha talking on the porch and felt warm and safe as the sun made its way toward the horizon, pulling the night behind it. The escarpment at the back of my property was already in shadow as I pulled open the barn door. The cows rustled in their stalls and I knew my brother, Ryan, was somewhere in the barn milking cows. As kids we had sometimes competed against each other to see who could milk the most cows. Ryan usually won, but I secretly believed that he never emptied his cows’ udders. Those were the days before the newfangled vacuum-extraction method of milking. I made my way down the length of the stalls, each one full of a thousand pounds of cow, to the far corner of the barn where we had a small henhouse. I opened the door and was hit by the stench that chickens just seem to make no matter how clean the coop. I collected a dozen eggs, still warm, and headed to the back of my house where I picked a selection of lettuce, peppers, onions, and carrots. Eating off the land. It felt good, and the salad and omelette that we ate on the porch tasted like the summer sun — light and hot.
We were all watching the bobolinks in the field when Duncan cleared his throat.
“What IS your research with the bird song, and why are your lost recordings so important?” he said.
I wiped my mouth with my napkin. “I needed them as baseline data for song dialects for my new experiments that will also deal with the anatomy of singing.”
“Dialects?” asked Duncan.
“Yeah. Some birds sing in dialects. An Indigo Bunting in Kingston will sing a different version of the song than one in western Ontario.”
“Like English and cockney English?”
“Exactly. The young birds hear the male singing and pattern their song after him. His song will vary from the birds some distance away and dialects form. I’ve already got songs from eastern Ontario. Point Pelee was the other location. I’m going to compare the differences and catalogue the notes and then move on to the anatomy.”
“And how the devil do you do that — the identifying the bird by ear part?” asked Duncan. “You must have one hell of a good ear.”
Martha sniggered and I said, “Well, actually, I’m pretty close to being tone deaf.”
“Then my question stands.”
“It’s pretty simple. I suss them out by sight if I can, and go on a wing and a prayer if I can’t. Then I just record the bird’s song and convert it electronically into a sonogram, which is essentially the musical score of the bird’s song.”
“Like sheet music?” asked Duncan.
“Like sheet music but prettier to look at. You get blips and blobs and short fat notes and small, skinny ones and intricate lacework. Not all the same round dots that our music has. It’s actually pretty cool. The chickadee, for instance, says chick-a-dee-dee-dee, which sounds simple but its sonogram is surprisingly complex.”
“So why can’t you choose an entirely different location for your second population of birds? It doesn’t have to be Point Pelee does it?” said Duncan.
I cocked my head and looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said. Another location where buntings are present.”
“Did you have something in mind?”
“Spaniel Island.”
“Which is where?”
“It’s a small barrier island off the coast of South Carolina. There’s a biology research station there,” Duncan said as he mopped up the rest of his salad dressing with the bread.
“What’s a barrier island?” Martha asked.
“It acts as a barrier between the sea and the mainland, catching the brunt of the wind and the waves.”
“How do you know about this place?” I asked.
“I have a cottage on the island. I just came back from there a couple of weeks ago. I’m sure I could get you accommodation at the research station. Failing that, there is room in my cottage for you, but it would be more interesting at the research station. I know they have a vacant cabin because a researcher had to back out just this week. Shall I call them?”
Duncan was full of surprises. A cottage? On a barrier island? I looked at Martha, who shrugged and said, “Sounds like a good idea. It’s a new location. You won’t get frustrated over having to do it all again in the same place.”
“But I don’t have any equipment. It was all in the car. The tape recorder, the parabola, everything.” Besides, I thought, why would I want to go to a barrier island in the heat of summer, even if buntings were there?
“I can check and see if the research station has any of that equipment. I know they have quite a bit of stuff.” Duncan grabbed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger and pinched it. He was actually a good-looking older guy, if you could ignore his nose, which I couldn’t, although his fine head of silver-grey hair and grey-blue eyes, which constantly smiled, almost competed.
“It won’t cost you much either, Cordi. The station is subsidized,” he said.
Looking back, all I know for sure is that I’m glad I didn’t know the real price I would have to pay, or I never would have gone.