Parrots Prove Deadly by Clea Simon Page A

there?” I’m no good at this. Behind me, the parrot shuffled and muttered. “Damn it all.” I tried not to smile.
    “They had a meeting.” She bit down on the last word. “Mortality and—morbidity?”
    “Yeah, that sounds right.” Too many memories.
    “They’re saying that the death was not natural.” She had to pause there and reach for more tissues. I turned toward the parrot. Randolph tilted his head. “That someone was ‘at fault.’”
    I whipped back to Jane. “At fault?” God, I was sounding like a parrot.
    “Her care. My care.” Ah, that was why the tight mouth.
    “Are they going to do an autopsy?” How many days had the old woman been dead—five? No, six. “Can they?”
    A sharp, quick shake of the head. “They’d asked that morning, when she—when she—but I said no. I didn’t think…”
    I’d made the same decision. The offer seemed so pointless, the exact cause of death after so many months of suffering a useless bit of knowledge. Under the circumstances, though…
    Jane was still talking. “—saying she should not have been left unsupervised, because of the level of medication. The number of prescriptions she had.”
    My look asked the question. “Painkillers,” Jane said. I thought of the voice I had heard. Maybe that hadn’t been recent. Maybe Polly Larkin hadn’t been able to speak at the end. Keeping my own memories in mind, I tried to phrase my next query gently.
    “Was she in a great deal of pain?” Listening to my own voice, I could imagine how Wallis would scoff. Humans, as she well knew, were wimps.
    Jane was toughening up, though. “It was her back. Something with the cartilage in her disks—it had worn away. That was why she had the walker.”
    Another shake of her head, as she reached for some books. “But they didn’t know her. They didn’t know how tough she was. The amount of drugs she’d had, the strength of some of them, she shouldn’t have been able to get out of bed at all, they said.” She shoved the books into a box as if they were to blame and reached for more. “The doctor on the phone told me that his committee was going to discuss starting some kind of inquiry.”
    “Well, that’s good, right?”
    In response, she grabbed more books. Anger came off her like heat, replacing the earlier sadness and shock. What I didn’t understand was why.
    “Pain meds.” More books. At least she was getting the packing done. “Their fancy new ‘miracle drug.’ None of it was working.”
    “Damn it all!” Randolph startled us both. “What are you doing? What are you doing?” He’d spread his wings—the cage gave him just enough room—and was flapping them as he shrieked. “Put that down!”
    “What?” Jane looked up confused.
    “He’s agitated. Your voice.” I went over to the cage. “Is there a cover? It might calm him down.”
    She handed me a light-resistant cover that I wrapped around the cage, fixing the Velcro shut. “Damn it all!”
    I shared the sentiment. “Look, maybe you should take a break. Go get a cup of tea or something.” I looked around at the hamburger wrappings, the Styrofoam cups. “Have something proper to eat. I’ll take care of Randolph.”
    Jane stopped packing. “Thanks.”
    As she reached for her coat, I had another thought. “When was the last time you let Randolph fly around?”
    “Fly around?” She turned back toward me, clearly clueless.
    I tried not to sigh audibly. “A bird that size, especially in a cage that size, should have some time to fly every day. Surely, your mother…” I paused. I really didn’t want her to start crying again.
    “She—I always thought that was a filthy habit. The bird is,” she bit her lip, “not trained.”
    “No, they aren’t. Still…” Even under his cage cover, we could hear Randolph fluttering, jumping from perch to perch. “Look, I’ll keep an eye on him and clean up if he poops anywhere.” I forced a smile. “You deserve a break.”
    Now that her