Free Case of the Glacier Park Swallow by Dina Anastasio Page B

me. I’m sure he’s fine. Maybe he just needed a rest for awhile.”
    â€œHe’s not fine,” Juliet insisted. “You should have seen him a little while ago. He was almost dead.”
    Cam gave her the swallow and turned his back. She knew he thought she was being an alarmist, and she tried not to care. But she did care, and when he walked over to his desk and started flipping through his letters, she felt sick.
    â€œHave you taken a blood sample?” he asked without looking up.
    Juliet shook her head and sighed. Of course. Blood samples. Why hadn’t she thought of that?
    She placed the bird on the counter and watched him for a moment to see if he would fly away. When she saw that he wouldn’t she left him under Max’s watchful eye and began to prepare the injection. She took a tiny bit of blood, and then she found a box for the bird and gently placed it inside on a soft towel.
    She was putting her parka and hat back on when Cam said, “Why don’t you take the blood over to the lab and see what they say.”
    â€œThat’s where I’m going,” Juliet snapped. She was going to do that. He knew she was going to do that, but he just had to be in control. She was tired of him. She was tired of his attitude, and his style, and his bossiness, and everything else about him.
    â€œAnd Juliet,” he said.
    Juliet waited.
    â€œCall me when you get the results,” he said. It was an order. She hated him.
    Juliet slammed the door and went to the lab with Max. An hour later she called Cam. “He’s been poisoned or something,” she said. “Somebody injected him with something that made him sick. We’re not sure what it is yet, but it was probably injected into him up north, and it took awhile to bring him down. We’re working on what it was.”
    Behind her, Max whined a slow worried wine. The day, it seemed, was flowing away in an unexpected direction.

2. THE QUESTION
    J uliet stopped to see the bird on the way home. It was still in the box, and it seemed sleepy again, as if it had become worse while she was gone. She picked it up and studied it, and then she walked around the room.
    Cam wasn’t there, but Juliet could tell that he had spent most of his day in the office. The medical encyclopedia was on the desk, and there were notes all over the place. She didn’t understand most of them, but the last one interested her. “Convulsions?” it said with a question mark. This was followed by the word strychnine? When Juliet saw the encyclopedia opened to the poison section, she understood what he had been looking for.
    The bird was awake again, and for the first time it flapped its wings and tried to fly. Beside her, Max whimpered and wagged his tail.
    Juliet mulled things over as she watched it. It was possible that a swallow could have picked up some strychnine in some rat poison somewhere, although it wasn’t likely. But would it behave like this? Wouldn’t it have died? And the question, the one about what it was doing in those woods, remained.
    Cam came in then, saw her there beside the book, and understood that she was annoyed that he had taken over her case.
    â€œI was just guessing,” he explained. He seemed softer, as if he were trying to be nice. “I don’t even know why I thought it was strychnine since we didn’t see it when it came down and we don’t know if it convulsed ... but....”
    â€œIt was the swans, wasn’t it?” Juliet asked. They had read about the swans in the paper the week before. It had been just a small item in the paper, a human interest story, and they had almost missed it. Two dying swans had been discovered by a woman in Yellowstone, and before they had died they had convulsed, or so she had said. She had buried them somewhere. She couldn’t remember where, but was sure they had convulsed. Cam and Juliet had guessed that the swans had been poisoned with