“Who’s coming?”
“The professor who oversees my project and three graduate students.”
“Are they ornithologists?”
“They are. How do you know that word?”
“From your Ornithology book. I read the preface and first two chapters,” she said, pronouncing the word pre-fāce.
“You actually read it?”
“I skipped the parts someone from Hetrayeh wouldn’t understand, but not that much. I liked the chapter about bird diversity and how their beaks match what they eat and their feet match where they live. I never really thought about that before.”
“You’re an advanced reader.”
“I use the dead girl’s brain to do things, and she was smart.”
Jo wiped her floury hands on a dish towel. “Go wash and I’ll let you pinch the edges of the piecrusts.”
The alien ran for the sink. When she finished washing, Jo said, “I need a better name to call you than Earpood. Can you think of a regular name?”
The girl put her chin in her hand and pretended to think. “What about Ursa . . . because I’m from the place you call Ursa Major?”
“I like the name Ursa.”
“You can call me that.”
“No last name?”
“Major.”
“That makes sense. Have you ever made piecrust, Ursa?”
“We don’t make pies on Hetrayeh.”
“Let me show you.”
Ursa mastered piecrusts as quickly as she grasped college-level reading, and while the pies baked, scenting the kitchen with their sweetness, she helped Jo make potato salad. They used Jo’s mother’s recipe—the only potato salad worth eating, in Jo’s opinion. Next they prepared ground beef to make burgers the way Jo’s mother had, with Worcestershire, bread crumbs, and spices. Jo hadn’t cooked so elaborately for herself since she’d lived at the cottage. She liked the idea of making her mother’s recipes on her birthday—a way of honoring her—and the food preparation helped distract her from the mounting tension of seeing Tanner again. Even the girl wasn’t enough of a diversion.
When Ursa put away the butter, she surveyed the beer cooling in the refrigerator. “Are the ornithologists alcoholics?”
“Why would you think that?” Jo said.
“That’s a lot of beer.”
“It’s for four people.”
“You won’t drink any?”
“I might have one.”
“You don’t like to get drunk?”
“I don’t.” Jo saw mistrust in the alien’s eyes. “Have you had bad experiences with people who drink a lot?”
“How could I have? I just got here.”
5
After they ate sandwiches and the pies were set out to cool, Jo sent Ursa to change back into her own clean clothes. When Ursa came out of the bedroom and saw Jo working on her laptop, she sat on the couch and read more of the Ornithology text.
Jo turned her screen so Ursa couldn’t see her use her phone to get on the internet. When she got a connection, she googled Ursa missing girl but found nothing. Though the sheriff’s deputy knew of no missing children in the area, she tried missing child Illinois, which brought her to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children website and a depressingly long list of missing Illinois children. Many of them were probably dead, their bones concealed in graves that would never be found. Some of the photographs were of kids who had been missing since as far back as 1960, and a few were computer reconstructions of dead children who’d never been identified. One nearly made Jo cry. It was a photograph of a pair of shoes—all that was recovered of a teenager’s remains.
Jo used the same website to look at photographs of children in nearby Kentucky, and also in the bordering states of Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Indiana. Ursa Major wasn’t on the lists, though she’d been away from home for at least two nights. Jo set down the phone. “How’s Ornithology going?”
“I don’t like systematics that much,” Ursa said.
“It’s not my thing either.” She took her car keys off the desk. “The rain has stopped. I’m going to drive down the road to monitor a few nests. Want to come with me?”
“Yes!” She sprang off the couch and slipped on Jo’s oversize flip-flops. “How do you monitor a nest?”
“I look at it and see how it’s doing.”
“That’s how you get a PhD?”
“There’s a lot more to it than that. I record the fate of every nest I find, and from that data I can calculate the nesting success of indigo buntings in each of my study sites.”
“What do you mean by fate?”
“Fate is what happens after the nest is built. I monitor how many eggs are laid, how many hatch, and how many baby birds fledge from the nest. Fledge means they fly away from the nest. But sometimes the parents abandon the nest before the female lays eggs, or the eggs are eaten by a predator. And sometimes the eggs hatch, but the babies are eaten by a predator before they fledge.”
“Why don’t you stop the predator from eating the babies?”
“I can’t stop it from happening, and even if I could, saving individual baby birds isn’t the purpose of my study. The research is meant to help us understand how to conserve bird populations on a bigger scale.”
“What is the predator?”
“Snakes, crows, blue jays, and raccoons are the main ones in my study sites.” Jo slung her field bag over her shoulder. “Let’s go before the weather turns again. I don’t like to scare birds off their nests when it’s raining.”
“Because the eggs can’t get wet?”
“I don’t want eggs or babies to get wet and cold. Research should have as little impact on nesting success as possible.”
When they left the cottage, Little Bear trotted over from the shed. He was much tamer, letting Ursa pet his head. “Stay here,” she told the dog. “Do you understand? I’ll be back soon.”
Ursa didn’t like that she had to sit in the back seat and use the seat belt. Someone had been letting her sit up front unbuckled. Jo explained why the seat belt was necessary and how the front airbag could kill children if it opened.
“If the airbag kills kids, why do they put it in the car?” Ursa asked.
“Because people who make cars expect kids to ride in the back seat where it’s safest.”
“What if a truck hits the back of the car where the kid is sitting?”
“Are you going to follow my rules or not?”
She clambered into the back seat and put on a seat belt.
The dog ran after the car as they left the Kinney driveway. “Jo, stop! Stop!” Ursa pleaded. “He’s following us!”
“How will stopping help?”
Ursa leaned out the back-seat window and watched the dog vanish with a bend in the road. “He can’t keep up!”
“I don’t want him to. He can’t come to my study site. Bringing a predator would freak out my birds.”
“Jo! He’s still coming!”
“Stop hanging out the window. This road is narrow, and you’re going to get whacked by a tree branch.”
Ursa stared miserably at the passenger-side mirror.
“He knows this road. This is where he was born,” Jo said.
“Maybe he wasn’t. He could have jumped out of a car.”
“More like he was dumped out of a car by someone who didn’t want him.”
“Will you go back for him?”
“No.”
“You’re mean.”
“Yep.”
“Is that where Gabriel Nash lives?” Ursa asked, pointing at the rutted dirt lane and NO TRESPASSING sign.
“I think it is,” Jo said.
“Maybe Little Bear will go there.”
“Egg Man probably wouldn’t like that. He has chickens and cats.”
“Why do you call him Egg Man when his name is Gabriel?”
“Because buying eggs is how I know him.”
“I thought he was nice.”
“I never said he wasn’t.”
Jo drove to the farthest nest to make sure the dog didn’t catch up, turning around at the western end of the road and stopping at the first piece of flagging tape. She took out the data from the folder marked TURKEY CREEK ROAD and showed the page to Ursa. “This is called a nest log. I have one for every nest I find, and each one gets a number. This one is TC10, which means it’s the tenth nest I’ve found in my Turkey Creek Road study site. At the top of the log, I record information about where and when I found the nest, and on these lines underneath I record what I see each time I monitor it. The nest had two eggs in it the day I found it and four the next time. The last time I visited, it still had four, and I noted that I flushed the female off the nest.”
“Will the babies be hatched yet?”
“It’s too early. The female incubates for around twelve days.”
“Incubates means she keeps them warm?”
“That’s right. Let’s see how she’s doing.” They left the car, and Jo showed Ursa how she marked instructions on a piece of orange flagging that would direct her to the nest. “INBU is the code for indigo bunting, the main bird I study, and this is the date I found it. The other numbers and letters say the nest is four meters to the south-southwest, and it’s about a meter and a half off the ground.”