Dedication
Hey, Tim and Jesse!
Mother and sons forever!
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