It was another few minutes before the two of them and Stas were in the Jeep, heading up the street. About as soon as they were moving, Jack commented, “I have to admit, that went better with your mother than I expected.”

“Me too,” she replied. “Shit, I thought I was toast when the phone calls started coming. I guess Mary Lou’s mom called her up and really lit into her before I got up, and so she had to get me out of bed and start bugging me. I told her it wasn’t anything like that at all, she should ask Ashley or Mr. Jorgensen or someone else who was there. She really surprised me when she did it. By the time it was over with I was out of trouble and you were some kind of hero for saving my ass.” She smiled at him and added, “And you are some kind of hero for saving my ass. I heard what happened with Alan Jahnke. I can’t help but think it would have been me out there if you hadn’t come along.”

“Yeah, what Frenchy and his buddies did to Alan really sucks,” Jack agreed. “My guess is that nothing will happen to them over it, though. They’ll just do it again to someone else, and I hope it isn’t us.”

“Do you think the cops will do anything to them?”

Jack shook his head. “I don’t know and I’m not holding my breath. It would be nice if they did something, but I’m afraid that all they’re going to do is to piss Frenchy and his buddies off. I know I intend to stay away from the Frostee Freeze for a while, just on general principles. Frankly, I don’t want to think about it anymore this afternoon. I’d rather think about birds and you.”

“I can go along with that,” she smiled. “I’m sick of it, too. Birds and you works for me. Where are we going, and what are we going to do?”

That was more like how he’d hoped this afternoon would go, Jack thought as he explained, “Out around the tip of the point and the backside is about my favorite area to look for birds. There are a lot of different habitats in a small area, and it’s a good place to see migrants and travelers, as well as the locals who hang around for the summer. I figured we’d just see what we could see, and I could introduce you to the little present I got for you.”

“You got me a present?” she frowned.

“No birder should be without one,” he said as he reached down behind the seat and pulled out the Barnes and Noble bag and handed it to her.

She took the bag with a slightly confused look on her face, reached inside, and pulled out the Peterson’s Field Guide to the Eastern Birds. “A bird book? ” she asked.

“There’s more to watching birds than just looking at them,” he explained. “Identification is critical. You said last night that you could tell a seagull from a sparrow or something like that. Well, there’s a bunch of different gulls, and a bunch of different sparrows. Sometimes the markings and other ways you use to tell them apart are pretty subtle. There are a lot of birds I can pick out just from practice, but I’d say the majority of the time I find myself going to the bird book if there’s something that looks iffy or different. That’s how I managed to pick out that Kirtland’s Warbler out in the pine barrens, for example. Sometimes you don’t have a lot of time to look, so you have to be able to quickly note the characteristics and markings so you can look them up later. Once you get a bird identified you should write it down with the date, identification, location, and circumstances where you saw it. That notebook becomes your life list, so we’ll start yours today.”

“It seems like a lot of work,” she protested.

“It is a lot of work,” he agreed, “but it’s invaluable work, to know that you’ve seen something, especially something new. We probably won’t see anything today that’s actually new to you, but the identification for most birds will most likely be new. A life list is, well, a life list. Most birders have a life list that runs well into the hundreds.”

“Hundreds?” she said.

“Mine hit two thirty-seven with the Kirtland’s Warbler,” he explained. “I don’t often see anything new anymore, since I’ve pretty well exhausted the birds that I’d expect to find in this part of the country, which probably sees an above average number of types of birds over the course of the year. There are about seven hundred North American birds. I say ‘about’ since there’s some controversy over what constitutes a North American bird but that’s neither here nor there. Anyway, it’ll be kind of fun to go back to the basics again with you. So all we’ll do today is look at some common birds and work on identification. The idea is to have fun, after all. Sound reasonable?”

“It sounds a hell of a lot more reasonable than sitting around home with the phone in my ear all afternoon,” she shook her head. “The damn thing was about to drive me nuts. I mean, it was worse than my mother, and that’s saying something. You do more than just identify birds, don’t you?”

“Well, yeah,” he nodded. “Study their habits and actions, mostly. Different birds have different ways of feeding and everything else. Different birds act differently, have different habits, and will do different things in different situations. What you might think is simple is pretty complicated.”

Jack was going into lecture mode now, and he talked more about the things they’d be looking for or could be looking for as he drove the Jeep through town and out Point Drive. The city of Spearfish Lake is located just north of the north root of the point, which extends several miles out into the lake. The north side of the point is relatively high; while sandy in spots it’s mostly firm ground. More than a century before a promoter decided that the north side of the point would make a really good location for summer cottages, which would allow well-off people to escape from the heat of cities like Camden, Milwaukee, Decatur, and Chicago. Near town, several of the monster old “cottages” were real classics of gingerbread Victorian architecture in an era when good wood was cheap. While some of the “cottages” were only used seasonally, many were used year around by some of the more prominent and wealthy citizens of the area.

Farther out on the point – it’s technically “West Point” but no one from Spearfish Lake ever referred to it that way – the ground is lower and sandier, the cottages smaller and sparser. The paved road comes to an end near the tip of the point, which stretches out on a sand bar sometimes only inches below the water for another mile, slowly getting deeper. Where the pavement comes to the end, a sand road turns off to the south and runs a short distance along the south shore of the point. Then it soon turns to a two-rut, and peters out in a nearly impenetrable swamp, about the same thing as is found along the old rail grade on the south shore of the lake. Not a lot of people use the last part – a handful of duck hunters in season, a few shore fishermen, and occasionally Jack.

In the wrong season, with the wind in the wrong direction, the area around the two-rut is extremely uncomfortable, since the swampy shore is home to what had to be billions of mosquitoes. This wasn’t one of those days. The sun was bright, and there was a pretty good breeze that kept the mosquitoes back in the swamp. That made the two-rut along the south shore of the lake just about the ideal place for Jack to introduce Vixen to birding; he figured they could go to less comfortable places when she was well and truly hooked. One of those places could be right here, in three or four months. An amazing number of birds from polar climes found that an area as mild as Spearfish Lake was in the winter – in their terms, anyway – made a good place to winter over.

On a day like today, though, a little casual birding like they were doing could be an absolute joy. After parking the Jeep in a shady spot with a good view, Jack cast his eyes around, noticing that there were a number of different birds in sight, even if none of them were particularly unusual at a casual glance. For example, fifty yards off there was a Great Blue Heron casually wading in the water, looking for small fish to capture with its long bill. Jack showed Vixen how to look the bird up in the bird book, and how to focus the binoculars on it, and how to pick out some of the things that identified it as a Great Blue Heron, like the color of the bill and belly. “Now, you can pick a Great Blue out pretty easily because of those things, and partly because most of the birds in this area that look like that are Great Blues. But every once in a while you’re going to run across a bird that looks pretty much like a Great Blue, but not quite right. That’s when you go for the bird book, because you may have just seen something else.”

They spent an hour or so there, sitting right in the open Jeep with Stas asleep on the back seat, just picking out obvious local birds, not working too hard at it. At the end of that hour, Vixen had fifteen birds on her life list and it seemed likely that it was going to be more before they headed in for the day. Even in the shade it was hot, so after a while Vixen cracked open the cooler and got out a couple Diet Cokes for them. Jack hoped they’d pick out a bird that was a little odd, just for the thrill of seeing a rarity, but nothing presented itself, which wasn’t surprising.

After a while, it seemed like they had exhausted the possibilities of this spot; at least they weren’t picking up more additions to Vixen’s life list. “Since we’re just fooling around today, what do you say we move a little?” he suggested. “There’s a little more of the two-rut that gets us closer to the swamp, so we might pick up some marsh birds we don’t see here. Marshes are usually pretty interesting places to check out.”

“You’re the one driving this thing,” Vixen smiled. “I’m just along for the ride.”

Jack polished off his Diet Coke and tossed the can into the back seat, then started the Jeep. He backed it out into the two-rut and drove slowly down it, around several slight bends as the trail became progressively fainter. Finally, he had to come to a stop, since a white car was parked in the middle of the two-rut and there was no way around it. “Well, piss,” he said. “Somebody’s probably out shore fishing and didn’t expect anyone else to come along.”

“We could walk past it,” Vixen suggested.

“No choice but to do it,” Jack agreed. “I don’t want to park right here, though, in case he wants to get out and we’re not around. We’ll have to back up a bit until we can pull off the road.”

“If you call this a road,” Vixen snickered.

“Well, such as it is,” Jack shrugged as he twisted around in the seat and dropped the Jeep into reverse. He had to back up a hundred yards or more before finding an opening in the brush that lined the two-rut large enough to back into and park. “Since we’ve come this far, we might as well go take a look,” he said, shutting the Jeep off and taking the key from the ignition.

It took them a couple minutes to get ready. Vixen had the 8x35s slung around her neck, and the back pocket of her denim shorts was big enough for her Peterson’s, which left her hands free. Jack didn’t like going out without the long-lens camera just on the odd chance he might see something interesting. Since it didn’t seem likely, he left the camera in the backpack, along with his own bird book – he could use Vixen’s if he really needed to look up something in a hurry. He had his 10x50s on the strap around his neck. That pretty well covered what they would need, especially since they probably wouldn’t be away from the Jeep for any length of time.

It was an easy walk up the packed sand of the two-rut to where the white car blocked the road. As Jack walked closer, he looked at it, and realized in his gut that something didn’t seem right about it, although he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. What really made him stop and think about it was seeing the fur on Stas’s back standing up, and his tail hanging low. Obviously, Stas figured something didn’t seem right, either.

“Something’s funny,” he said to Vixen suddenly. “I think maybe you’d better stay back a little while I go check this out.”

“What do you think?” she asked quizzically.

“Hell if I know, something just doesn’t seem right.” With Vixen lagging back a couple of steps, he walked slowly up to the left side of the car.

He could see that there was someone in the driver’s seat, his head leaning back against the headrest. He took a step closer, and frowned as he recognized the person who lay with his head back, eyes wide open, and his jaw hanging slack. The car window was closed, but he could still make out an unpleasant smell.

Jack stepped back and said softly, “Vixen, it’s Mr. Ordway, and it looks to me like he’s dead.”

“Shit,” she replied, stepping closer to get a closer look. “You’re kidding!” She stood looking in the window for a moment, then said, “I think you’re right. Now what do we do? Do you think we should try to get in the car and see?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “If someone killed him, we don’t want to screw up any evidence. Did you bring your cell phone?”

“No, it’s back at the Jeep,” she said. “Do you think I should go get it?”

“I think we should both go get it,” he said. “And call in from there. Like I said, if someone killed him we don’t want to screw up any evidence. Let’s get back to the Jeep.”

They started walking back up the two-rut, walking in a hurry; by the time they made it back to the Jeep, they were at a dead run. Vixen dug into the small bag they’d brought and pulled out the phone, handing it to Jack. “I . . . I think maybe you’d better be the one to make the call,” she said uncertainly.

It only took Jack a few taps of the buttons on the phone to have the County Call Center on the line. “We’ve found a body in a car,” he told the dispatcher. “At least it looks like he’s dead.”

“Where are you located?” the woman said.

“We’re out just about at the absolute end of Point Drive, back toward the end of the two-rut,” Jack reported.

“Have you disturbed anything?” she asked.

“No, we didn’t think we should.”

“Why do you think this person is dead?”

“The way he looks,” Jack said. “And the smell. It smells like he’s been dead for a while.”

“All right,” the woman said. “We’ve got someone heading your way, but it’s going to be a few minutes. You probably should stay away from the scene.”

“We’re about a hundred yards away and we’re going to stay right here until someone gets here,” Jack promised.

“OK, I’ve got your number on caller ID,” the woman said. “I’ll call you back if we need more information.”

“We’ll be here,” Jack said, punching the call off, closing the phone and handing it back to Vixen. “Well, shit,” he told her. “I never expected that to happen.”

“Me either,” she agreed. “That’s Mr. Ordway, all right. I wonder what happened?”

“Hell if I know,” Jack sighed, getting into the seat of the Jeep – it was more comfortable than just standing there. “I had him in class one year and I thought he was more than a little weird, like he wasn’t all there, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I did too,” she nodded, taking a seat in the Jeep herself. “He was always humming this weird little tune, and he’d wander way off what he was saying at the drop of a hat. I mean, he’d be talking about English and somehow or other he’d start talking about what he’d had for dinner one night a month or so ago, and there was no clue as to how he got there. I’m not sure how I learned anything about English out of that class.”

“Me either,” Jack shook his head. “Vixen, I’m sorry this had to happen. I was trying to make this a good time for you, and now this . . . well, it wasn’t what I was hoping for.”

“Don’t be sorry about that,” she said. “I was really enjoying learning about birds from you, and I was getting a lot out of it. You didn’t plan this, it’s just that unexpected things happen once in a while.”

“Shit,” he shrugged, “Unexpected things have been happening to me a lot the last day or so. It makes me just want to go home and go to bed hoping this day will be over with, but that’s not fair to you. You’ve been the one good unexpected thing that happened to me, and I’m just glad we finally managed to make the connection.”

“Thanks, Jack,” she replied. “I’m glad we made the connection, too. I mean, I . . . well, you’re not what I thought you were, I guess.”

“Same goes for you,” he sighed, and changed the subject. “I wonder what happened with Mr. Ordway?”

“No telling just now, I guess,” she sighed. “It sure makes me wonder, though.”

“Yeah, me too. I mean, he was just so weird that you almost expect that anything could have happened.”

It seemed a long time before they heard sirens heading their way, although Jack thought it could only have been a few minutes. He heard the sirens pass on the north side of the point, then come back on the south side, sounding a bit louder. He got up out of the seat of the Jeep, with the idea of flagging down whoever came first.

The first arrival proved to be a deputy sheriff – not surprising, since they were several miles out of the city – and there were more sirens coming. The deputy braked to a stop where Jack was standing, and said, “Are you the person who called about the body out here?”

“Yeah,” Jack replied. “The car is about a hundred yards up the road.”

“Don’t go away,” the deputy said. “I’ll want to talk to you for a few minutes before you go.”

“We’ll be here,” Jack told him.

The deputy got his car into motion, heading on up the two-rut, just as an ambulance from the fire department came into sight; Jack just stood back and let it pass. In another minute or two the rescue van from the fire department rolled up, and then, for whatever reason, one of the fire engines. It was easily the most vehicles that Jack had ever seen back on this obscure little patch of two-rut. Finally, it didn’t seem as if any more sirens were coming right away. “Do you want to go back and see what’s happening?” Vixen asked.

“Not particularly,” Jack said. “There’s not a lot of room back there, and I wouldn’t want to get in anybody’s way.”

“Sounds good to me,” she replied. “I don’t think I want to be around when they open up that car. I got a whiff of that smell too.”

“Yeah, at least the wind is blowing toward them,” Jack agreed.

Not much happened for a while. Well, Jack saw a Red-winged Blackbird and pointed it out to Vixen, who looked it up desultorily in her Peterson’s, and then made a couple notes. “That makes sixteen,” she shrugged.

After a bit, they heard a beeping sound and saw the fire engine backing up the two-rut, with several firemen helping the driver back it up on the narrow path. The fire engine missed the front of the Jeep by inches, and they had a long way to go to get to any place where they could turn around. “Boy, that’s really got to be a pain in the ass,” Jack commented, more for something to say than anything else.

Vixen leafed through the bird book, getting interested in the section on ducks and geese for a bit, while nothing much happened. After a while, they hit the cooler for more Diet Coke, and were drinking from the cans when the deputy walked back up to them. “Good, you’re still here,” he said.

“Is he dead?” Jack asked.

“Oh God, is he dead,” the deputy shook his head. “Looks like several days’ worth. They had to break the side window to get in and that smell would make a brass monkey barf. It’s just as good that you kids didn’t try to get in.”

“What happened?” Jack asked.

“Don’t really know,” the deputy said. “I didn’t see any obvious wounds, but that means nothing. We’re waiting for the coroner to get here before we do anything else. He can’t get here until they get that damn pumper out of the way so I figured I’d better get a statement from you kids so you can get out of here. What brought the two of you out here, anyway? A little romance?”

“Bird watching,” Jack grinned. “We were up the road about a quarter mile for about an hour, and then decided to come and see what birds we could see around the swamp when we found him. We called 911 right away as soon as we did.”

“See any interesting birds?” the deputy asked casually, pulling out a note pad.

“Just routine stuff, but they’re all interesting,” Jack said.

The deputy got their names and addresses and a brief statement about what they’d been doing and how they found the body. He said that it wouldn’t amount to anything, but he had to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. After a few minutes he was finished, and a Jeep Cherokee drove by. “That’s the coroner,” the deputy said. “You kids might as well get out of here while you can. I think we’re going to be out here for a while. Be careful on your way out the two-rut, there’s some crime scene people coming.”

“You think he was killed?” Vixen asked.

“Don’t know, but I doubt it,” the deputy said. “But something like this has to be investigated. You kids take care, now.”

“I’m not sure there’s anything more to tell you, but give us a call if you think of something,” Jack said, and started the Jeep.

It only took the two of them a few minutes to make it back out to the wider sand road, where there would be room for oncoming traffic to get by. “Well, shit,” Jack said. “I suppose we could go out to the tip of the point and look for waders, but I don’t want to right now.”

“Me, either,” Vixen said. “Don’t get me wrong, I liked the bird watching and I’d like to do some more with you, but right now my heart wouldn’t be in it. But I’ll be damned if I want to go home and have the phone ringing all the time. You know damn well that it’s not going to be long before the whole damn town knows who died and that we found him, and everybody will want to get the straight scoop.”

“Yeah,” Jack agreed. “I haven’t had much of that because I’m gone all the time, but I’ll be damned if I want to go home and deal with the phone myself. I’d just as soon stay gone for a while.”

“Me, too,” Vixen agreed. “I wonder if Mom would pitch a hairy fit if the two of us drove down to the Multiplex in Camden, caught a movie and hit the Golden Arches.”

“I’m up for it,” Jack said. “You’re the one with the cell phone.”

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