Leaning against a spectacular oak, Harry thought about three of her contemporaries gone to eternal rest—Barry, Sugar, and Jerome. She didn’t like to dwell on her own demise, but under the circumstances it was hard not to think about it.
“Tucker, ever notice that skulls are grinning?”
“Can’t say that I’ve thought about it,” the corgi replied seriously, the slanting rays of the early sun burnishing her coat red-gold.
“Don’t,” Pewter, sitting on a flat long slab, said. “Morbid.”
Just then a fat caterpillar, green with spiky outgrowths, traversed over her tail, all those caterpillar feet in her fur. Pewter jumped straight up, flipping the caterpillar onto another flat slab tombstone.
Harry, Mrs. Murphy, and Tucker laughed.
“Mighty Puss!” Murphy mocked her.
“Oh, shut up.” Pewter turned her back on them all, picked up her tail, and licked the fur back down.
The sky, a brilliant blue, promised a spectacular day.
Harry exhaled through her nose. “Up and at ’em.”
“Is she going to cut hay today?” Tucker wondered.
“Think so, but at the moment,” Mrs. Murphy paused as Harry opened the gate and headed toward Blair’s, “she’s going to pay a social call. Pewter, are you coming?”
“No, I’m going to stay here and commune with nature,” came the haughty reply.
“Oh, I thought the caterpillar was more nature than you could handle.” The tiger bounded out of the graveyard along with Tucker.
“I’ll show them. Bunch of snots. I’m not afraid of a caterpillar. It felt creepy, that’s all. Too many chubby legs, and there’s sticky stuff on the feet. O-o-o.” She wrinkled her nose as she turned to watch her family skip toward the farmhouse.
Her nemesis, the bluejay, zoomed into the oak, shrieked, squawked, shook the branches, and then, conceit to the max, floated down to perch on top of a vertical tombstone not four feet from Pewter, who was nursing her pride.
“Where’d you put the caterpillar, idiot cat?”
Pewter’s pupils widened. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking at your sorry self,” the jay whistled.
“I’m not sorry. I’m sitting here amongst the dead, which provokes me to philosophical musings.” She wished that the hateful bird were even six inches closer. She knew she’d nab him for sure then.
“Don’t make me regurgitate!” The bluejay’s topknot stood straight up as he laughed, which sounded like “queedle, queedle,” the little happy sound jays make.
“Actually, I didn’t think your range would be this far. There’s plenty to eat at our place.”
“I fly from one state to the other if I feel like it. Bluejays migrate, you know. Life’s too good here, so I stay. Course, right now it’s getting a little exciting, what with Tucker finding Mary Pat’s thigh bone. All the wild animals and birds are talking about it.”
“I helped, you know.” Pewter puffed out her chest, as did the jay. They looked like odd mirrors of each other.
“Queedle, queedle,” the jay’s beak clacked.
“I did!”
“Pewter, you’d run the other way if you saw a dead anything.”
“Bull! I picked up a dead pileated woodpecker, and I’ve seen plenty of dead old things.” She stopped for a moment as she inched a tad closer. “The smell. Hate the smell. Tucker, of course, loves it, but dogs are—well, I don’t have to explain.”
As birds have a sharp sense of smell, the jay shrugged. “Doesn’t bother me one way or t’other. I’m not a carrion eater so I don’t much care, but the crows, now, they’ll tell you that the eyes and the tongue are the greatest delicacy. Whenever a large mammal dies, they hurry to get there before the buzzards.” He slicked down his handsome crest for a moment. “I love acorns and seeds. I bury them, you know.”
“You don’t remember where you buried them.”
He cocked his head. “Sometimes I do forget. Tell you what, whoever planted Mary Pat up there on that high ridge didn’t forget.”
“Don’t know if it’s Mary Pat for sure.” Pewter scooted a tiny bit closer.
“It is. We birds can get the word out faster than you guys. And I’ll tell you something else, fatty: No Ziggy Flame up there. I bet you Ziggy was right under the human noses all the time.”
A thin tongue of breeze licked the distinctive pin-oak leaves.
“That was before my time, but everyone says that Ziggy was charismatic and bright, a bright chestnut. I don’t think anyone could hide him. Not for long. He wasn’t under their noses.” Pewter refuted the jay.
“You know, if you fly over those high pastures there are old trails, and some will take you east, some west. But the most interesting one, considering what’s going on, is the one that will take you right down into Greenwood and Route 250. Whoever killed Mary Pat could have hidden Ziggy, then walked him down to Greenwood, loaded him on a trailer, and been out of town before you can say ‘caterpillar.’ ”
“Guess that’s one of the reasons—the disappearance of Ziggy Flame—that Alicia wasn’t as solid a suspect as the cops hoped she was.” Pewter swished her tail. Since the caterpillar had crawled on it, she felt like other things were crawling over her. “I mean, the woman inherited everything but a couple of broodmares. Ziggy Flame was hers. Why steal him?”
The jay gurgled, then spoke clearly. “Throw everyone off the track.”
“Do you think Alicia Palmer killed Mary Pat?”
He shrugged, fluffed out his feathers. “I don’t know Alicia, but one human’s pretty much like any other. They’re killers by nature.”
Pewter didn’t dispute this. The human predatory drive seemed out of proportion to their needs. “Harry’s different.”
The bluejay liked to needle Pewter, but Harry did seem closer to animals than most humans. He decided not to disparage Pewter’s favorite human. He watched as Blair opened the back door of his farmhouse. “Aren’t you going to join them?”
“No.”
“What if a whole bag of tent caterpillars fell on you?”
Pewter shuddered. “Ugh.” Then she leapt at the bluejay, who simply flew straight up, circled, and dive-bombed her.
“Fat cat!”
“I will get you,” Pewter spat as he circled her one more time, then sped away.
Harry, like the Sanburnes, recognized that Blair was from other parts. But much as it cut against the grain, she decided to come straight to the point with him. This denied her the pleasure of coming to the point by those decreasing concentric circles that gathered in a wealth of information. That information might appear extraneous, but in good time it was always money in the bank. The other reason she shied away from this was she would go straight to the point only with a dear friend. Such communication was a sign of love and respect. Much as she liked Blair, he wasn’t as close to Harry as Susan, Miranda, or Herb.