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“Helping? With what? Were you helping Bron find Birdie?”
“Yes, yes, he was,” Bron said, and Darcy tapped twice on his shoulders as if giving reassurance.
“Oh, that’s just brilliant. Brilliant. Ah, okay. Well …” She looked at their two faces, smiling so widely her own face could have broken in two. “You two keep looking and—well, I’m sure together we’ll be able to find her. Oh, this is so exciting. I’ll keep looking in the other rooms since you’ve got in here covered. Let’s share notes in about … fifteen minutes? We can tick off the rooms searched as being all-clear. What a fun game this has turned out to be!Birdie, where are you?” she screamed, running out of the room and back up the stairs.
They waited a moment before pulling apart.
“Right, well,” Bron said. “Do you want to be the one to tell her, or should I?”
“I really don’t think we should tell her.
“Why not, it’s always best, telling the tru—”
Darcy held up the decapitated body. Brought it closer to him.
“Oh my God, stop. That’s disgusting!”
“You really think we ought to explain … this?”
“Okay, okay, I get it. Just get it away from me.”
Darcy placed the thing back on the floor and muttered under his breath, “Poor little murdered bird. I think it was Miss Scarlett, in the living room, with the—”
“Stop it.” Bron slapped him on the shoulder. “If we’re not going to tell her, we have to make sure she doesn’t see this. Seriously.”
“Okay, okay. She won’t see it.”
“Good.” Bron moved to guard the room’s entry. “Okay, I’ll tell you when the coast is clear.”
It only took them a few minutes to clear up the evidence. Darcy grabbed a wad of paper towels from the kitchen and rolled what was left of the body into it—“This is truly vile, bits of it keep flaking off”—and used surface spray to wipe away the blood that had yet to leave a stain on the wooden floor.
“Hurry up!” Bron urged.
Darcy snuck through the front door while Bron stayed put in the living room. He watched through the window as Darcy walked the perimeter of the house, stopped to point at him, and held out his hand to signal—You. Outside. Five minutes—before trudging away.
Once he was sure Ada remained upstairs and all the evidence downstairs was gone, he, too, crept out of the house to find Darcy where he knew he would be, at the bench overlooking the fields. He’d dug a little hole under the tree, where the mummified bird drenched red would now be laid to rest.
“Well, I guess that’s that.”
“Do you think we should—?”
“No.”
“—say a few words?”
“Absolutely not. Bron.”
“I think we should. Ada would.”
“I draw the line here,” Darcy said, wiping his soil-brown hands onto his jeans before walking back toward the house. “I’ll see you inside.”
Bron hovered back to say a quick prayer himself—“and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from all evil, amen”—then used hisshoe to repave the hole with soil. He found two sticks on the ground and placed them at the top of the heap, in the shape of a cross.
Back in the kitchen, Darcy was rinsing his hands under the running tap. Captain was barking at his feet. Bron swirled through a list of possible things he could say to Ada. Should he really keep this from her? He could say that they had found the bird—and then what? Poof, into thin air? No … Perhaps he could distract her, have Darcy drive somewhere and purchase a quick replacement budgie. A Birdie 2.0—although wasn’t that what Birdie had been in the first place? Shit.
Darcy looked at him. “I suppose this would be a bad time to ask if you’d gotten my note?”
“Yes,” he said.
