Death of a Songbird by Christine Goff

dangled against her chest at a rakish angle.
    “You look terrific.” Lark gave her two thumbs-up. “Everything’s going to go fine.”
    “We can only pray.” Dorothy glanced skyward.
    Lark eyed the clouds. Earlier in the day, the sky had threatened rain. Dark thunderheads had rolled over the mountain peaks, bringing jagged flashes of lightning that speared toward the earth. Not a drop had fallen, and the storm had moved past. Now, only a wake of puffy white clouds remained to gather the sunset.
    “Even the heavens fear Paul Owens,” Dorothy said.
    Lark cocked her head. “What do you mean by that?”
    “He’s very demanding.”
    That informational tidbit didn’t bode well for the Chipe Coffee Company partnership. Lark had only met him once, at a promotional fund-raiser in McAllen, Texas. He’d seemed nice enough then. “What else do you know about him?”
    “For one thing, he writes his speeches days in advance and practices them incessantly. I must have heard tonight’s comments and set of introductions six times—once or twice yesterday, and at least four times today already.” Dorothy glanced around to see if anyone was listening, then leaned in closer to Lark. “And, I can tell you something else, Lark. Paul Owens is only a figurehead. It’s Katherine who holds the reins, and that woman makes the devil quake.”
    “She can’t be that bad.”
    “With God as my witness,” Dorothy said, raising her right hand and pretending to place her left on a Bible. “She’s a witch with a capital B .”
    Lark added the information to what she already knew. Katherine, the only daughter of a prominent birder, shared her father’s passion for all things avian. It was he who had provided the seed money to found the Migration Alliance, and she who had placed Paul in the organizational driver’s seat.
    “Don’t look now,” Dorothy said. “But here comes Stephen. What do you suppose the problem is?”
    Velof’s loafers clicked a staccato on the flagstones, hailing his arrival. Lark spun around. “What’s up, Stephen?”
    Dashing in a black Armani knockoff, he ruined the effect by sputtering, “People are starting to show up in the lobby, and, if I may say so, some of them are quite inappropriately dressed.”
    Lark could imagine. Most of the people she had seen were dressed in bright green MA T-shirts emblazoned with a white ptarmigan. “How so?”
    “We have men in shorts, women in tank—” Velof stopped short, his eyes scanning Lark’s attire.
    She tugged at the straps of her silk knit top and brushed nonexistent dirt from the seat of her khaki pants. “These are birders, Stephen. They’ve come here to walk the mountain trails and look at the fauna. I think we can relax the rules for a couple of days.”
    “What about our other guests? The ones who aren’t interested in birds, but in the more civilized customs of humanity?”
    “They can dress up and eat in the dining room.”
    “You’re setting a dangerous precedent.”
    “Sometimes you have to bend the rules.”

CHAPTER 7
    At five o’clock sharp , with the sun drooping in the summer sky, Dorothy MacBean opened the doors and five hundred people flooded the patio. A small quartet played valiantly in one corner, fighting to be heard above the chatter. From experience, Lark knew that many of the attendees only saw each other once a year at the MA convention or another birding event, and stories of spotting a bird, field trips, and hitting a landmark number abounded. In search of downtime, she clustered near the bar with a group of Elk Park Ornithological Chapter members.
    Harry Eckles, one of her better friends and a longtime EPOCH member, lounged against the stone railing, stretching out his long legs. “I, for one, don’t want to hear any more about Esther. I want to hear about the bird you saw.”
    “Ja, me, too,” Eric Linenger said, joining them with a cold beer in hand. Having shed his park ranger uniform for chinos and a