“Vern,” Horace said. “Can you hold down the fort here? Secure the car and arrange to have it towed back to town, to the impound lot? Or you could tow it as far as the fair gate and I’ll get back here as soon as I can to finish up and go with it to the lot.” Vern nodded. He was already pulling out his cell phone to call his cousin who ran the local towing service.
“I need to go to the poultry barn.” Horace picked up the bag containing the feathers and trotted off down the road. I took off after him.
“What are you planning to do?” I asked when I caught up. Which I did fairly quickly—I had the longer stride and was in better shape.
“Identify these feathers.”
“Okay, I guessed that much,” I said. “Maybe I should have said ‘Where are you going?’ Because this is the long way, you know. We could save time cutting through the woods.”
“I’d rather take the long way,”
“It’ll take hours.” Okay, I was exaggerating, but only a little. “Follow me.”
He wasn’t happy about it, but he didn’t argue. After what Plunkett had done to him, I was flattered that Horace followed me into the woods, and didn’t begrudge him his sigh of relief when we broke out of the trees again and spotted the pie and quilt barn dead ahead. Once inside the fairgrounds, he took the lead. We dived into the poultry tent and Horace almost danced with impatience as we shoved our way through the crowds until we reached the part of the tent where the Bonnevilles’ chicken cages were.
“Here we are,” I said.
Behind the cages, almost invisible behind the huge black bows, were the Bonnevilles.
“Are these the cages that your stolen chickens occupied?” Horace asked.
“We’re leaving them here as a memorial,” Mr. Bonneville said. Mrs. Bonneville just sniffled.
“There are feathers here,” Horace said. “Have any other chickens been in these cages?”
“No,” Mr. Bonneville said. “And no other chickens ever will. We plan to keep them as a shrine.”
“Awesome,” Horace said. He fished an evidence bag out of his pocket and reached for the door of the cage.
“What are you doing?” Mrs. Bonneville cried. “Those few forlorn feathers are all we have left of Anton Chekhov and Anna Karenina.”
“Anton Chekhov?” Horace repeated. “Anna Karenina?”
“They’re Russian Orloffs,” I explained. “Hence the Russian names. Horace is our crime scene technician,” I told the Bonnevilles. “If you want the feathers as keepsakes, Horace can return them after our investigation. But right now, he needs to collect them. Unless you have a problem with our borrowing the feathers to help our efforts to recover your missing chickens.”
Putting it that way quelled their objections, and they cooperated enthusiastically with Horace’s attempts to pick the cages clean.
“Now,” Horace said, when he’d finished. “Do you recognize these feathers?”
He held up the evidence bag containing the feathers we’d collected in Brett’s car.
“They’re not the ones you just collected from Anton’s cage?”
“We found these in another location,” Horace said.
The Bonnevilles waxed sentimental over the feathers, particularly the long tail feather. “It could be Anton’s,” Mrs. Bonneville said. “It’s just like his.” But they ultimately admitted that the most they could say was that there was nothing about the feathers to prove that they weren’t from their Orloffs.
“This other chicken,” Horace said finally, pointing to the diminutive black-and-brown bird occupying the third cage.
“Agrippina Vaganova,” Mrs. Bonneville said.
“Is she related to the stolen ones?”
A simple yes or no would have been sufficed. Instead, the Bonneville treated us to a lengthy discourse on their breeding program. I could see that Horace’s eyes were glazing over.
“Let me make sure I have this straight,” I said, finally, interrupting their explanations about chickens with strawberry-, cushion-, and walnut-shaped combs. “Agrippina is Anton’s half-sister, and Anna Karenina is their aunt.”
The Bonnevilles nodded, and Mrs. Bonneville choked back a few more sobs. Agrippina, by contrast, seemed to be taking her possible bereavement with admirable stoicism.
Further questioning revealed that while Anton’s and Agrippina’s sire had been eaten by a fox a few months ago, their mothers—Anna Karenina’s sisters or half-sisters, all with polysyllabic Russian names—were still presumably clucking and foraging with the rest of their free-range flock back at the Bonnevilles’ farm, and could be made available for DNA comparison testing. Mr. Bonneville took to the notion of DNA testing with such enthusiasm that we had a hard time preventing him from setting out immediately to fetch his entire flock.