Archer Mayor - The Ragman's memory

"Joe? You've got a visitor."

I looked up from the paperwork spread across my desk.

Harriet Fritter, the squad’s administrative assistant, stood in the doorway with a half-smile on her face.

I glanced at the calendar thumbtacked to the wall before me, wondering what appointment I’d forgotten. There was nothing under today’s date.

Harriet stepped aside and gestured to a small, skinny girl with large, thick, wire-rim glasses, looking very serious. I guessed her to be about twelve years old. Her shoulder-length, straight dark hair was still dusted with the snow that had been falling heavily outside for the past twenty-four hours. She was holding a small brown grocery bag tightly with both hands.

“Lieutenant Joe Gunther, this is Norah Fletcher.”

I half-rose from my chair and shook the girl’s slim hand. She had a firm grip, which both surprised and pleased me. “Miss Fletcher. Please have a seat. Would you like to take your coat off?”

I gestured to my guest chair as Harriet faded from view. Norah Fletcher declined to remove her overcoat, and sat nervously on the edge of the seat, the brown bag between her knees.

“How can I help you?” I asked.

Her dark eyes rose from her rubber boots, which were creating small puddles on the carpeting. She studied me with great intensity. “I know about you from newspaper stories, and I thought you should see this. My mom said I shouldn’t, but I think something’s wrong.” She thrust the paper bag out to me.

I took it from her gingerly, noticing its light weight, and placed it on my desk. “What is it?”

Her eyes narrowed slightly, with a child’s surprise at my not tearing into the package without pause. “It’s a bird nest, but I want you to look at it before I say any more.”

I was impressed, both at her poise and her unusually mature strategy. Still, yielding to a cop’s instinct to control, I prolonged Norah Fletcher’s anticipation.

“May I call you Norah?”

She nodded without comment.

“If your mother was against the idea, how did you get here? You live nearby?”

“I walked from school. My mom thinks my lunch was in there.” She nodded toward the bag.

It was mid-afternoon. “Doesn’t she expect you back home?”

She hid any irritation at my delay, refusing to join the game I was only half-consciously playing. “I walk to the library every day. She picks me up there after work. She’s a secretary.”

“Where’s home, Norah?”

“Hillcrest Terrace-off the Guilford Street Extension.”

“Just you and your mom?”

She nodded, with the smallest flicker of a smile. “And Oreo. My cat.”

Maybe it was this resurfacing of the child from behind the serious face that made me abruptly cave in. I reached for the bag. “Let’s take a look.”

I peered into the dim opening, saw a cluster of dry grass and twigs, and poured it out into the hollow of my hand.

“It’s a chickadee nest,” Norah explained. “I have a bird box on a post in my backyard, near the field. A couple of chickadees have been using it for years. I clean it out because they like to build a new one each year. That’s why it looks a little weird-kind of boxy.”

I placed the nest on my desk and poked it with my finger, studying how the birds had woven their intricate home. Its outer sides had retained the distinct shape of a surrounding small box.

“Turn it around,” Norah urged, for the first time showing a little impatience.

I did so gently, rotating it on the tabletop without picking it up. As its far side came into view, I better understood Norah’s interest in what I’d seen as a perfectly normal abandoned nest.

The overhead fluorescent lighting caught it first, revealing among the scratchy, dull-colored hay a swatch of something smooth and reflective. I leaned forward to look at it more carefully.

“It’s human hair,” she stated with certainty.

I didn’t argue with her. It appeared she was right.

I sat back, opened my desk drawer and withdrew a Tiger Milk bar, which I offered her. “You must be hungry.”

She nodded and took the bar with another fleeting smile. As she peeled back the gold wrapper, I thought about her discovery, and what it might mean to us.

The fact that human hair was intertwined within a nest didn’t come as a surprise. My own mother had cut my brother’s and my hair outdoors so the birds could use it during the spring, and my father had once had a hunk of hair painfully plucked out by a bird while he was working in one of our fields.

But these memories brought me no comfort here, nor did they prompt me to dismiss Norah Fletcher’s concern with some patronizing lecture on symbiotic relationships.

For the long, thick twist of discolored strands was no mere tuft of cut or plucked hair. It was bound at its base by a small, withered, leathery patch of scalp.

The snow had stopped falling by the time we gathered in Norah Fletcher’s backyard on Hillcrest Terrace, high above Brattleboro, Vermont. The street marked the abrupt end of the town’s urban expansion to the southwest. On one side, in front of Norah’s home, was a modest, middle-class neighborhood, clinging to the side of a steep hill, and overlooking the town, the distant mountains, and the interstate slicing through it all. On the other side-neatly sheeted in glistening, pristine white-was a vast, empty, featureless field that stretched up and away to the horizon like a frothy, frozen sea.

Separating Norah’s backyard from that barren field, a split-rail fence stood guard like the shaky railing of some decrepit ancient ship-a faint and picturesque reminder of how much of Vermont remains dominated by its natural surroundings, despite the ambitions of urban developers and condo builders alike.

Norah, her mother Ann, my second-in-command Sammie Martens and I stood in a cluster by the back door under the pale gray sky and silently took in the implications of Norah’s discovery.

“If there is a body out there,” Sammie muttered bluntly, “it’ll be a neat trick finding it.”

Ann Fletcher shook her head, resting her hand lightly on her daughter’s shoulder. “Birds use hair all the time in their nests. I told Norah that. That’s why my dad used to cut my hair outdoors when I was little. I asked her not to pester you people.”

Norah didn’t react. She remained motionless, looking out at the wooden birdhouse that was nailed to an upright by one of the fence posts outlined like a ship’s crow’s nest against the fathomless pale expanse beyond it. She didn’t shake off her mother’s hand, which was there more in support than as a rebuke in any case, but I could sense the restless energy between them-of single parent and single child, strained by the mutual need to be independent, yet united by the strong bonds of steady companionship. Ann had told me earlier, when we’d dropped by her office to pick her up, that Norah was a loner-a studious perfectionist who preferred the tranquility of her own company to the chaotic tumble of her schoolmates-and that she sometimes lacked the benefit of other people’s opinions in forming her own thoughts.

A loner myself, I sympathized with the child.

“We’re glad she did pester us, Mrs. Fletcher. You’re right about the hair. We’ve even found marijuana growers collecting it from barber shops to ward off deer. But what Norah found wasn’t cut.”

I let the unstated implication float in the frigid air, interlaced with the mist from our breathing.

“Oh,” Ann Fletcher finally murmured.

“Norah,” I asked the girl, “from what you’ve told me, I guess you monitor those chickadees pretty closely.”