“Thanks for meeting with us,” I say, shaking it.
“Yeah, well, this isn’t the kind of thing you wanna put down in writing to be subpoenaed later, is it?” His neutral expression makes it unclear if this is meant to be a joke.
Lylah strolls over, not looking up from her notepad until she reaches our table. “Oh. It’s you guys again. And…Beau, right?”
“Lylah, hey. I mean, hi. Hello. Great memory.” Beau’s fumbling over his greeting is enough for even someone as oblivious as I am to see that he has an interest in the purple-haired server. “Or did you see it on my hat?” He lets out an awkward chuckle.
“Oh. No. I don’t read cursive,” she says, leading me towonder if she means she doesn’t know how or simply refuses. “I just remember you from when you came by the apartment that time.”
Beau’s light bronze skin takes on a pinkish hue at his cheeks. “Cool.” He simply stares at her, mouth slightly open for an uncomfortable amount of time before she says, “So do you want to, like, order something?”
I only get coffee, hoping more caffeine might ease the headache starting to throb at my temples, and Annie requests the same. Beau orders a slice of cake and a Coke, changing his mind about the variety of cake three different times until it turns into a slice of pie instead.
Once Lylah leaves with her mostly crossed out order pad, Beau exhales in relief. “We only met once, a couple weeks ago, when I went with Rolly to pick up his friend El to go to a concert, but she remembers me. That’s a good sign, right?”
“It’s something!” Annie says.
“Your cousin says taxidermy is your ‘thing’?” I ask before Beau can suggest we play she-likes-me, she-likes-me-not with the table’s sugar packets.
“Yeah, though that seems like too weak a description, really. I’d describe it more as my passion. My raison d’être, if you will.”
Yep, Beau and Roland are definitely related.
“Er, sure. So you’re a professional taxidermist?”
“Nah, it’s more of a hobby at the moment. But I dostudyit professionally. I guess. If you count grad school as a profession. Which I do, since I pay income tax on my stipend. Which is a real crock, if you ask me.” He leans in, tenting his fingers on the table. “I’m a History of Science and Technology PhD student at Hopkins. My dissertation is on the use of mounted specimens in museum settings throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” Beau leans back again. “Or it will be. I only justpassed comps—that’s actually why it took me so long to get back to you, sorry. I went out to celebrate getting the results with my friends and the effects lingered a few days. I’ve only just started researching in earnest since the exam, trying to get my proposal drafted by summer. But that’s one of the reasons I knew the goose was important when Rolly sent me his photos of it.”
“Important?” Annie asks. “Important how?”
“Well, I’ve been combing through online newspaper archives, looking for announcements of new exhibit openings to see how they talked about the specimens used, orifthey talked about them. Either is valuable to me. And one of the more interesting articles I found the other day was about this very distinctive goose—leucistic, is what it’s called, when it’s missing most of its pigment like that. Some people confuse it with piebald, but that’s more of a mottled—”
“You were saying about the articles?” I prompt.
“Right. Yeah. So I came across one about this leucistic goose and how it went missing from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.”
“You think our goose is the same one that was…what,stolen?”
Oh god. Oh no. This is worse than I thought. Because if this bird belonged to a museum, maybe it wasn’t mounted illegally as we originally feared, but it certainly had no legitimate reason to be in Nicole’s attic.
“I don’tthink, Iknow. Now that I have it in my possession, I’ve compared it to the photo and description in the article, and examined it to determine the techniques used to mount the fowl so I could approximately date it. It’s an exact match. The likelihood of two rare yet identical taxidermy geese, both from the early twentieth century? If it isn’t the missing one, I’ll stripdown naked and sing show tunes outside the stadium on opening day.”
“Let’s hope for all our sakes it’s the missing one, then,” I mutter.
Lylah returns with our drinks and Beau’s pie (which is lemon meringue and not the apple he settled on, not that he seems inclined to say anything about it).
“So, what do we do about this?” Annie asks. “If we try to return it, are they going to thinkwewere the ones who stole it?”
“I doubt it, since it went missing in the sixties and none of us were even alive then,” Beau says as he takes a bite of his pie, wincing at the tartness. “Wow. This sure is…lemony.” He takes a long drink of Coke and squints harder against the mix of flavors. When he recovers, he continues, “I have a contact at the museum, a guy named Jeff. I’ve emailed with him a few times to chat about setting up a time to check out their collections this summer.”
“And you’re going to reach out to him to say you found the missing goose?” I ask.
“Oh, no, not me,” he says. “I mean, I guess I would have if you hadn’t gotten in touch. Eventually. But like, I’m really busy. I’ve got my dissertation proposal, some data analysis for my advisor,andI’ll be teaching two gen ed sections in the spring. I haven’t even started working on the syllabi, and they’re due before Thanksgiving. That’s just over a week away, you know. I don’t exactly have time to get sidetracked with all of this at the moment.” He glances around, searching for something—a napkin, perhaps, which Lylah did not bring us—before giving up and wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his dingy bomber jacket. “You said in your text that you got the goose from a friend? Well, I got it from a friend, who got it from someone who got it from someone…”
“Who got it from someone who stole it from a porch, where it was put by someone who stole it from a moving truck, where it wound up because of a mistake we made at our shop, where the goose was being stored while we were researching it for said friend,” Annie supplies.
“Exactly. You know the story better than I do. So if they have questions, it’s better if they talk to you directly.” He takes another massive bite of pie, apparently now acclimated to the taste. “Besides,” he continues with a full mouth, crust crumbs tumbling from his lips as he speaks, “I don’t want any confusion about who mounted it. I get caught with it, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife realize I have a taxidermy license? I could prove it wasn’t done recently, of course, but that’s a load of trouble I don’t want and frankly don’t have the bandwidth for. That’s why I was glad you reached out. Well, actually, at first I thought maybe you were, like, black market dealers or something and you wanted to murder me. But then I did a quick search and saw the headshot on your website, Cal.”
“My picture convinced you I wasn’t a criminal?” I ask.
