“I have to see,” I said.
“Are you sure you want to?” Prue protested.
“I have to.”
I walked slowly into the barn, letting my eyes adjust to the dimness. There were three overhead lights, large industrial-looking things that gave out just the faintest whisper of a glow, humming with the effort. There was only one person in here, standing directly in the center of the space, eyes trained on the floor.
My mother.
She took one step to the side and held her hand out to me.
It was worse than I could have imagined.
Annabella was lying next to a thick wooden support beam, broken and small in death. Her wings were spread limply open, as if she had died in an eternal flight. There were clumps of straw and feathers and twigs around her, and it took a moment for my brain to understand what it was—her nest. Her nest was lying in pieces all around her, as if someone had taken it in their hands and ripped it apart.
“Mom,” I said. “Did somebody... ?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It certainly looks that way.”
“Her nest...”
“I know.”
“Harrison called for the police.”
“I know.”
She knelt down on the dirt floor of the barn and heldher hand over the broken body of the bird, as if she could feel something I couldn’t. She plucked a thin straw of hay from the dirt and held it, considering.
“It was an accident,” I insisted. “It had to have been an accident. Birds fly into windows all the time, right?”
“I think we both know Annabella was no ordinary bird,” she replied softly. She let the hay drop to the floor, and then she stood up and took my hand. “Somebody did this to her.”
But I didn’t want to believe it. The thought that somebody could have hurt Annabella was so sharp and toxic it made my stomach curl.
I felt something brush against my side, and Charlene Brooks stepped around to the other side of Annabella. She was By-the-Sea’s sheriff, a woman about my mother’s age with dark-brown skin and short curly hair mostly covered by a baseball hat.
“I didn’t want to believe it,” she said.
By-the-Sea’s one deputy, Whitey, had followed her into the barn. He put his hand over his heart. The four of us stood there looking at Annabella.
“What do you make of it?” Whitey finally said. He was talking more to my mom than to Charlene.
“I don’t think this was an accident,” my mom answered softly.
Charlene nodded. “The ripped nest. That break there, in her wing.” She crouched down and pointed to Annabella’sleft wing, twisted and stretched at an unnatural angle. “She couldn’t have done this much damage herself.”
We were silent again.
There was no crime to speak of on By-the-Sea. We were all quiet here; we all liked minding our own businesses and doing our jobs. There was no theft, no assault, no abuse. Until that day, the most Charlene and Whitey had had to do was write out parking ticket after parking ticket, which nobody ever bothered to pay and they likewise never bothered to follow up on. The one jail cell was used by Whitey to take his midafternoon naps. They were utterly out of their element now, moving uncertainly around the corpse, taking notes, taking photographs, and they both looked a little sick. The barn was stuffy, and I imagined that Annabella was starting to smell, the sharp tang of decomposition, even though it was too early for that.
Finally it became too much for Whitey—he clicked the lens cap onto his camera, bowed his head to us and to Annabella, and left the barn.
Charlene took a shallow inhale and turned to us, shrugging. “I have no idea what to do.”
“Let me think about it,” my mom said quietly. “I may be able to come up with something.”
“I don’t know about all that,” Charlene said, “but I’ll take all the help I can get.”
