Probable Claws

31

February 2, 2017

Thursday

“Where’s Pirate?” Felipe asked when Harry walked through the door.

“Home with Tucker. I thought it would be too upsetting for him to come back here. He’s still looking for Lisa. Breaks my heart.” Then she added, since Felipe looked brokenhearted, too, “He’s settling in. Tucker adores him. Mrs. Murphy rubs up against him. Pewter, pfft.” She flicked her hand.

“Thank you for giving him a good home. I would have liked to have kept him. Such a mellow fellow, but my apartment is small and Pirate will not be small.”

“No. He’s a loving puppy. He’ll be fine in time.” She smiled. “I stopped by to see if you and Raynell needed anything? Where is she by the way?”

“Back in Lisa’s office. The sheriff’s department sifted through everything. She’s trying to get it all back in place before Kylie Carter shows up. Tomorrow.”

“Ah. I assume nothing much came of the crime team.”

He shook his head. “Well, they’re thorough. Actually, I was impressed with them, and we all know Cooper, of course.”

“That’s something, I guess.” Harry unzipped her worn work jacket. “Feels good in here. Are you sure you don’t need anything?”

“No, but thank you.”

Raynell emerged from Lisa’s office, a sheaf of papers in hand. “Oh, hello, Harry.”

“Just dropped by to check in on you all.”

“We’re still in shock,” Raynell confessed, putting the papers on the side table by the front door. “I believe Lisa saved everything she’d ever read.”

Felipe smiled. “Close to it. She’d research something on her computer, but if she read a magazine she’d tear out pages.”

“Her file cabinets are organized. Give her that,” Raynell remarked. “Me, I’m paperless if I can help it. Just hit the save button. Takes care of everything.”

A colored glossy page caught Harry’s eye. “Dinosaurs. Gary had little rubber dinosaurs everywhere.”

“When he was working here, sometimes he’d be on all fours.” Raynell smiled. “The two of them would be yakking about a ‘saurus’ this and a ‘saurus’ that. I know Nature First has an interest in prior periods of life, but pretty much I stick to what’s on the planet now.”

“Me, too,” Harry agreed.

Felipe interlocked his fingers, placing his hands behind his head. “She had this theory that whatever happened before could happen again. Lisa believed Mother Nature moves forward and backward. She’d say, ‘Look at how rivers have changed course even in a few hundred years. Who is to say we can’t all be dragged back in time to the primordial swamp.’ ”

Raynell shifted her weight from one well-shod foot to the other. “I guess anything is possible.”

“Yeah, but the more we find from, say, the Triassic-Jurassic period to the Cretaceous period up to the Paleogene time, the more we will know about what truly happened. You know, the times of mass extinction. Look at what’s happening with these monster hurricanes. Maybe there will be evidence of enormous climate changes we haven’t found yet,” Harry said, betraying that she had done some homework.

“People are pushing this change,” Raynell said with conviction.

“We are, but that doesn’t mean that Nature wasn’t heading down that path. There’s so much we don’t know.” Felipe looked up at Harry, whom he much liked. “For instance, did you know that where the Blue Ridge Mountains are, our beautiful mountains, there was once a sixty mile by ten mile lake? It was a bit east of the mountains and over the millenia the mountains kept eroding into this lake. Every time there’d be an earthquake or an uplift of the mountains, they’d erode into the lake. So in this former lake, in the muds and that good old Virginia red clay, there is over two hundred and fifteen million years of stuff, of fossils, of footprints, of bones. We’re just beginning to understand what we are literally standing on.”

“True, but Felipe, dinosaurs and whatever aren’t coming back,” Raynell calmly replied. “I don’t see that happening.”

“We don’t know. What if the earth permanently tips just one percent more away from the sun or toward the sun? Think what could happen.”

“It is fascinating.” Harry thought it was.

“I guess it is, but I’m more concerned with saving and improving the environment for, say, hummingbirds, raptors, even elk if they release them into the mountains down in Lee County.” Raynell mentioned a Virginia county at its southwestern corner, a poor county but so beautiful.

Harry glanced again at the pile of papers and couldn’t help herself. She flicked through a few of them.

“Funny. Gary had this article in his files.”

“What’s that?” Raynell asked.

“This one.” Harry pulled out an article about why frogs survived when dinosaurs died en masse. “This one that states that eighty-eight percent of frogs on earth today began to flourish, just bred their little hearts out, after the dinosaurs died off.”

“I haven’t read that one,” Felipe said, and smiled when Raynell handed the article to him. “Well, I better show frogs new respect.”

“I read the article in Gary’s file box. Couldn’t help myself. As I recall the theory is that frogs survived because they didn’t need so much space to live. When the forests came back they could climb up in trees to escape predators or hide under leaves. Plus they could eat insects and there sure are enough of those, I guess, at any time on earth.” Harry laughed. “Chiggers. That’s what we really need. An investigation into why chiggers developed.”

Felipe and Raynell laughed with her.

“Well, I’d better get back to putting everything in order. Kylie will be here tomorrow with some of her staff.”

“I imagine everyone is shook up.”

“And then some. Felipe and I want to keep the office running.”

“Raynell, they aren’t going to shut it down. What we’re really worried about is will we get a new boss or will one of us take over? It’s easier if it’s one of us mostly because we worked closely together, we knew Lisa’s methods and she really did teach us political maneuvering,” Felipe gratefully said.

A concerned look crossed Harry’s even features. “Gary redid your office. He and Lisa got on like a house on fire. Both are dead. Murdered.”

“Murdered? Lisa died of a stroke or a heart attack,” Raynell objected, clearly upset at the suggestion.

“Well, we don’t know yet. But I believe the two deaths are connected.”

“Harry, that’s nuts,” Raynell blurted out.

“Yeah, well, I’ve heard that before. Maybe I am nuts but two people who knew each other fairly well, both had an interest in nature in all of its manifestations, both opposed rampant development by builders. I don’t know but that little light in my head just lit up.”

“Harry, I hope it’s a dim bulb.” Raynell breathed deeply.