The Buzzard Table

CHAPTER

12


Circling vultures often indicate the presence of a carcass.

—The Turkey Vulture Society




Sigrid Harald—Wednesday afternoon (continued)

The old Ferrabee tenant house was typical of the living quarters a landowner might provide a sharecropper family in the thirties, forties, and fifties. It would have had electricity, but no running water or indoor plumbing and certainly no central heating. Martin Crawford gave Anne and Sigrid a quick tour to show how he had weather-stripped the doors and windows and layered threadbare carpets over the cracks in the floor. Mrs. Lattimore had invited him to rummage in her attic for pieces of cast-off furniture—the carpets, three mismatched chairs, a badly scarred and water-stained oak kitchen table, and a bookshelf. A few kitchen utensils and a single-bed mattress to put under his sleeping bag came from a thrift store in Cotton Grove, as did the kerosene lanterns. There were four rooms, but he was using only three: the kitchen, a bedroom, and the front room. A potbellied stove in the front room was enough to keep those three rooms warm and cozy.

The table was more than six feet long. Camera cases, a laptop, and several file folders littered the near end. He shifted a pile of photography magazines and news journals from two of the chairs and invited them to join him at the table.

When they told him that a woman’s body had been found nearby, he said, “Do they know who she was?”

“We haven’t heard, but according to the local newspaper, a Realtor went missing Saturday,” Sigrid said.

Talk turned to other matters while Martin added more tea to the pot, brought out a tin of shortbread, and opened the door of the little iron stove so that the dancing flames could be seen.

“You’ve made yourself very comfortable here,” Anne said, “but Mother still doesn’t understand why you can’t stay with her and drive back and forth to photograph your vultures.”

“This is luxury living compared to some of the places I’ve slept in,” he told her as the teapot and biscuit tin went around. He described camping in the high Andes to photograph condors, of being stalked by a leopard while trying to get a shot of lammergeiers in the Elburz Mountains.

Anne countered with a mud hut in Ethiopia and a yurt in Mongolia.

And Sigrid sat quietly watching both of them as they compared notes and tried to decide where they might have overlapped in the past. She had interviewed so many criminals in her career that she had gone on automatic alert the first time their cousin’s eyes flicked from Anne’s face to hers, as if to see how she was taking it before flicking back again to Anne’s. Without his beard, his own face seemed more expressive than before.

“My father was stationed in Islamabad for a couple of years. That’s the closest I ever came to Mongolia, so it must have been Peru,” Martin said at last. “I forget when, though.”

Sigrid wanted to shout, “Don’t tell him!” But with no good reason to explain why, she kept silent; and when Anne supplied the year and the month, Martin nodded in agreement.

“That sounds correct. I do remember that it was May.”

Like hell you do, Sigrid thought. But why would he lie about something so innocuous?

“What about So—?” Before Anne could complete her question, her teacup somehow collided with the pot Martin was holding out and hot tea splashed on her trouser leg while the pot went flying.

Her teacup shattered but the teapot landed on the pile of magazines and survived its fall.

“Oh, Martin, I’m so sorry,” Anne said, picking up the pieces of the broken cup.

“No, no. My fault entirely.” He hurried to the kitchen and came back with a roll of paper towels for Anne to dry herself off with. “Fortunately, the carpets aren’t Persian.”

Which led to talk of Iran and how stupid the United States and Great Britain had been to orchestrate the overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadegh and replace him with a dictatorial shah.

“You think we could have had a secular Muslim state there like Turkey?” Anne asked.

“Probably. That’s what my father always thought.” He sighed. “But enough about politics. I have some wonderful photographs of Medina. Were you ever there? Let me show you.”

He swiveled his chair around to open the laptop on the table and the two women pulled their own chairs closer. Once they were past the novelty of an Arabic keyboard, the pictures had Anne oohing and ahhing over some of the effects he had achieved and how his pictures of village life captured the ebb and flow of the culture.

“This is exactly what I’m hoping Jeremy can learn,” she told Sigrid, her eyes snapping with excitement.

“Jeremy?” he asked.

She described her morning in court and how Deborah Knott had consented to a community service plan she hoped to put together with a youth minister in Dobbs. “Would you talk to him, too, Martin? Show him some of your work? Please?”

He raised a doubtful eyebrow. “Talk to him about the poverty-stricken life of a freelance ornithologist?”

“About making a living with words and a camera without breaking the law. If we hadn’t come along just now, I have a feeling he would have found a way to sneak through the woods to where the body is. Deborah went pretty easy on him this morning, but if he keeps pushing the boundaries, she could send him to jail for violating his probation, right, Sigrid?”

Sigrid rather doubted it would come to that, but she nodded anyhow, knowing Anne thought it would strengthen her appeal for help.

“Well…” he said.

“Great! Give me your phone number so I can call you. Maybe we can set something up for tomorrow and—” Movement through the front window caught her eye. “More company, Martin. A police car.”

There was a tap of the horn—a way of announcing oneself that country people still used—then someone emerged from the squad car.

Sigrid’s chair gave her an unobstructed view of the yard. “It’s Dwight Bryant,” she said. “He probably wants to know if you saw anything over there.”

As Dwight and Mayleen Richards stepped up onto the porch, Martin Crawford opened the door for them.

“Bryant,” he said, holding out his hand to shake. “Good to see you again. It didn’t quite register last night that you’re a police officer. Come in, come in. I’m afraid I’m a bit short on chairs, though.”

As Dwight introduced his deputy to the others, Martin gestured for her to take his chair and refused to take her no for an answer. He closed his laptop and pushed the clutter down to the far end of the long sturdy table.

“I think it will support both of us,” he told Dwight; but as he backed up to the table and started to press down with his arms to hoist himself up, they saw an involuntary grimace of pain. Embarrassed, he settled for leaning against the table.

Concerned, Anne said, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Really. Took a bad tumble last year and broke both arms. Fell down the stairs in my own house. Would you believe it? Slipped on a loose tread. I keep forgetting that they haven’t completely healed.”

Another lie? Sigrid wondered. In her experience, people deviating from the truth tended to give more information than was needed. She glanced at Dwight Bryant, who was leaning against the doorframe. His face showed nothing more than polite sympathy.

“I’d offer you some tea, but I only have three cups.” Martin smiled at Anne. “Actually, I seem to be down to two at the moment. I shall have to see about getting more.”

“That’s okay,” Dwight said. “We can’t stay. We’ve discovered the body of a missing woman on the other side of those woods there and wondered if you could tell us anything about it?”

“A missing woman? I’m afraid not. As you know, I was away last night until after ten and I went straight to bed when I returned.”

“We think she may have been put there three or four nights ago. We’re hoping to find someone who saw car lights at an odd time or noticed an unfamiliar vehicle on the road. It’s a dead end and you’re probably the only one using it much on a regular basis.”

Martin Crawford shook his head. “Sorry, Bryant. I’m a stranger here myself so I wouldn’t know who did or didn’t belong. For what it’s worth, when your wife and her nephew stopped by yesterday, they were my first visitors in the two months I’ve been here. I have heard some young chaps larking up and down the road on their quads, and they did try to come through here a few weeks ago, but I told them they were trespassing and sent them packing. Can’t have my vultures scared away, you see.”

“The thing is,” Dwight said, continuing as if the other man hadn’t spoken, “someone called it in around two this afternoon. An anonymous man. Sounded like he had an accent very much like yours.”

“Oh?”

“Was it you?”

“Anonymous, you said?”

“That’s right.”

“Probably someone who wanted to be helpful but didn’t want to become involved, wouldn’t you say? From the size and grandeur of that housing estate, surely one or two of her majesty’s subjects might live there and have telephones?”

“Would you mind if we looked at the call record on yours?” Dwight asked bluntly.

“Actually, I bloody well would,” Martin said. He was at least four inches shorter than Dwight but he drew himself up pugnaciously. “I’m not used to having my veracity questioned.”

“Martin,” Anne said softly, and he turned to her with a what-the-hell? shrug of his shoulders and a sheepish smile.

“Quite right, my dear.” He went into the closed and unheated bedroom and returned with two cell phones. One was the latest iPhone, the other was a cheap throwaway. “I haven’t used either of them in several days. This one’s for overseas calls and this disposable toy is for local calls to the library and Aunt Jane. It costs too much to use my regular mobile here in the States.”

He selected the outgoing call option on both phones and handed one to Dwight and the other to Mayleen Richards.

It took them only a moment to see that he had told the truth.

“I apologize, Crawford,” Dwight said, returning the phones. “It’s just that when I saw the buzzards kettling above the body, I thought maybe they made you curious enough to go over and take a look.”

“Quite all right. I expect it goes with the job.” He laid the phones on the table and turned toward the kitchen. “Now, I can’t offer you tea, but I do have an extra glass if you’d like a spot of something else?”

“Another time,” Dwight said. “Right now, we have to get back to Dobbs. I have to tell the woman’s husband that she’s been found.”

Sigrid watched him go with torn loyalties.

Martin Crawford might be family, but Dwight Bryant was a fellow law officer.

When her cousin had given them a brief tour of the house earlier, there had been an open satchel on the floor beside his sleeping bag. He had immediately directed their eyes to the north wall papered in old newspapers to keep out the worst of the winter chill. Most of them dated back 30 years and Anne had marveled at some of the headlines. When Sigrid looked again at the satchel, a pillow lay on top of it, hiding the four or five throwaway phones she had glimpsed before.

None of her business, she told herself. If Martin was the one who had made that call, he had acted responsibly. He wouldn’t be the first person who preferred not to get involved with murder.

“What did Dwight mean when he said the buzzards were kettling?” Anne asked.

“It’s a fanciful way of describing the way they move up and down when they circle over prey. It reminds people of air bubbles in a pot of boiling water.” Martin smiled. “Speaking of which, shall I make us another pot of tea?”