"I thought the puffins were long gone by now," Michael said. "Out to sea for the winter or something."
"Well, this one obviously wasn't in any shape to make the trip," I said. "Where was it anyway?"
"Down by Victor Resnick's house," she said. "Near that tidal pool you found him in. The poor thing was probably his last victim."
"And when did you find it?"
"An hour ago," she said.
"An hour ago?" I echoed. Something about this didn't make sense. "Would you mind showing us where?"
"Not at all," said Mrs. Peabody. To my relief, she whisked the dead puffin out from under my nose and began striding toward the porch steps. "It's about time somebody did something about this! Clearly the local authorities aren't going to take any action!"
I looked around for Rob, but he had fled, and Mrs. Peabody was rapidly disappearing.
"Arg!" I exclaimed, taking the end of Spike's leash. "Come on, you little monster."
He followed me, barking with glee. As I expected, I had to pick him up and carry him after about fifteen feet--although, to his credit, he managed to pick up a remarkable amount of new mud during his short time on the ground.
To my dismay, other birders began following Mrs. Peabody as she strode through town. I suppose, given the weather, there wasn't all that much else for them to do, since most of the birds remained sensibly out of the rain. We had collected fourteen or fifteen stragglers by the time we reached Resnick's house. Mrs. Peabody led us past the house and down to the tidal pool, along the path the rising tide had prevented Michael and me from using yesterday.
"Right there," she said, pointing to a large flat rock. "It was lying right there."
"Lying how?" I asked.
"I'll show you," she said, reaching for her knapsack. For a second, I thought she was about to shed her knapsack and arrange herself on the rock in the place of the dead puffin. But instead, she pulled out a camera.
"I took pictures of the body," she said.
"The puffin's body, you mean?" I asked.
"Well, of course," she said. "What other body could I mean?"
"Victor Resnick's?" Michael suggested.
"Him," she said, shrugging. "Why would I bother? Here, I'll show you."
"Great," I said as she held out her camera. "We can have the film developed."
"You don't need to develop any film," Mrs. Peabody said with a scornful look. "This is a digital camera. Here."
She pressed a switch on the camera, looked at it for a few seconds, then turned it so we could see. The back of the camera had a little display screen, on which I could see a picture of a small evergreen tree.
"That's fantastic!" Michael said, looking over my shoulder. "You can see the pictures as soon as you take them! Does it use film?"
"No, it saves the pictures on a computer chip," Mrs. Peabody said.
"The things they do with computers these days," another birder said, shaking his head.
"And if you don't like what you've taken, you can erase mem and try again," Mrs. Peabody said.
"Amazing!" Michael said.
"How much does a thing like that run anyway?" another birder asked.
"Later, guys," I said. "I thought you said you had a picture of a puffin. That's not a puffin; it's a cedar."
"No, it's a wren," she said. "See there, he's roosting inside the cedar."
"If you say so," I said. "What about the puffin?"
"Just press this button," she said.
I put down Spike so I would have my hands free. He galloped off to bark at the waves, which were creeping closer and closer; we'd have to adjourn to the top of the hill soon. I took the small camera, pressed the button Mrs. Peabody had indicated, and waited for several seconds as another picture of the cedar tree scrolled onto the screen.
"Keep going," she said. "It's been an hour; I may have taken quite a few pictures."
I kept pressing the button and waited while several more pictures of the cedar loaded. These were followed by pictures of other shrubbery, presumably containing other wrens. Interspersed with the nature photos were occasional off-center shots of the sky or of Mrs. Peabody's muddy hiking boots, which I assumed she'd taken by mistake. Michael and several male birders looked over my shoulder, exclaiming at the high quality of the pictures, and Mrs. Peabody explained how she took the electronic pictures and e-mailed them to her sister in California.
Finally, a puffin appeared on the tiny screen. It lay on its back on the flat rock, with its toes pointing straight to the sky, its wings neatly folded by its side, and its feathers carefully groomed and reasonably clean. It looked a lot better in the photo than it did now that Mrs. Peabody had hauled it around for an hour. It looked as if it'd been laid out for viewing at a wake, and I didn't for a minute believe it had landed in that position by accident.