Free A Bobwhite Killing by Jan Dunlap Page B

and me, planning a night of owling to pass the time while Sheriff Paulsen tried to solve her husband’s murder.
    The fact was, Shana O’Keefe was a woman any man would be attracted to. If her raven-haired beauty didn’t catch a guy’s eye, her sheer vitality would. Heck, even here in the A&W, I noticed that the high school boys flipping the burgers were checking her out.
    So why, I asked myself for the hundredth time, would Jack have cheated on her?
    And why would Big Ben have been so eager to let the world know about it?
    The waitress brought us the basket of onion rings that Tom had already ordered for us, but something didn’t smell right to me.
    Not the onion rings. They smelled great. I loved onion rings.
    No, something else was beginning to stink.
    Or, rather, someone.
    And his name was Big Ben.
     

Chapter Thirteen
     
    It was a nice night for owling. We’d picked a spot just about twenty minutes away from the hotel where a spread of old-growth forest offered plenty of roosting spots for owls. About five minutes into our walk through the woods, we spotted a Barred Owl perched at the entrance of a tree cavity. Since it was still dusky, we could just make out his dark eyes peering at us above his richly barred chest.
    “Those black eyes always give me the creeps,” Bernie whispered at my shoulder. “All the other owls have nice yellow eyes. They’re like little night lights in their faces.”
    “Barn owls have dark eyes,” Tom corrected her.
    “Well, I’ve never seen one,” Bernie replied. “But I’d guess it looks pretty spooky, too, sitting there in the dark with its black eyes glowing.”
    “But Barn Owls have the sweetest face shape, Bernie,” Shana told her. “It’s like a white heart. And because they’re so light in color, they’re easy to see even at night. I saw a lot of them in Central America while I was working for the Nature Conservancy. Some of the biologists there think that the Barn Owl population has dramatically increased in wet lowlands and highlands because so much of their native habitat is being destroyed by deforestation.”
    She paused when a low hooting call sounded through the trees.
    “Sounds like a Great Horned Owl,” I said. “I guess the deforestation hasn’t pushed more Barn Owls our way yet.”
    Shana chuckled lightly. “Can you believe that Great Horned Owls are very rare in Central America?” Shana asked. “I think everyone in America lives within the calling distance of a Great Horned Owl, but it’s a real find down there.”
    We walked a while longer, listening to the call of the Great Horned as it floated through the night. Shana’s casual comments about her work in Central America reminded me that I knew little about the woman walking beside me in a Fillmore County forest on a balmy June evening. While Jack’s involvement with conservation had been highly publicized in the last few years, Shana’s name had never surfaced. Yet her passion for her chosen field was clearly something she hadn’t put aside when she’d left her job to marry Jack. Even when she referred to it in passing, as she’d just done, I could hear an excitement just below the surface of her voice. I could hear it because it was the same excitement that I always felt when I started talking about birds. For the first time since I’d seen her in the hotel lobby last night, I wondered what it had cost her personally to give up her globe-trotting research career to become Mrs. Jack O’Keefe.
    Considering how she and her stepson had nearly come to blows this afternoon in her hotel room, I’d guess the price had been plenty high. And judging from Chuck’s threats as he left Shana’s room in Sheriff Paulsen’s company, that price was only going to go higher. Not only did Jack’s son want to blame his stepmother for his father’s death, but he was bound and determined to let everyone know exactly what he thought of the second Mrs. O’Keefe.
    And it wasn’t a very complimentary