Chapter Twenty-Nine
TWENTY-NINE
Callahan
Beau turns out to be easy to spot inside the diner. Except for a group of six elderly women enjoying an early dinner, the place is mostly empty. That and the fact that he’s wearing a beanie with his name embroidered onto the cuff.
“Cal and Annie, I presume?” he asks as we approach, and holds out his hand.
“Thanks for meeting with us,” I say, shaking it.
“Yeah, well, this isn’t the kind of thing you wanna put down in writing to be subpoenaed later, is it?” His neutral expression makes it unclear if this is meant to be a joke.
Lylah strolls over, not looking up from her notepad until she reaches our table. “Oh. It’s you guys again. And…Beau, right?”
“Lylah, hey. I mean, hi. Hello. Great memory.” Beau’s fumbling over his greeting is enough for even someone as oblivious as I am to see that he has an interest in the purple-haired server. “Or did you see it on my hat?” He lets out an awkward chuckle.
“Oh. No. I don’t read cursive,” she says, leading me to wonder if she means she doesn’t know how or simply refuses. “I just remember you from when you came by the apartment that time.”
Beau’s light bronze skin takes on a pinkish hue at his cheeks. “Cool.” He simply stares at her, mouth slightly open for an uncomfortable amount of time before she says, “So do you want to, like, order something?”
I only get coffee, hoping more caffeine might ease the headache starting to throb at my temples, and Annie requests the same. Beau orders a slice of cake and a Coke, changing his mind about the variety of cake three different times until it turns into a slice of pie instead.
Once Lylah leaves with her mostly crossed out order pad, Beau exhales in relief. “We only met once, a couple weeks ago, when I went with Rolly to pick up his friend El to go to a concert, but she remembers me. That’s a good sign, right?”
“It’s something!” Annie says.
“Your cousin says taxidermy is your ‘thing’?” I ask before Beau can suggest we play she-likes-me, she-likes-me-not with the table’s sugar packets.
“Yeah, though that seems like too weak a description, really. I’d describe it more as my passion. My raison d’être, if you will.”
Yep, Beau and Roland are definitely related.
“Er, sure. So you’re a professional taxidermist?”
“Nah, it’s more of a hobby at the moment.
But I do study it professionally. I guess.
If you count grad school as a profession.
Which I do, since I pay income tax on my stipend.
Which is a real crock, if you ask me.” He leans in, tenting his fingers on the table.
“I’m a History of Science and Technology PhD student at Hopkins.
My dissertation is on the use of mounted specimens in museum settings throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
” Beau leans back again. “Or it will be. I only just passed comps—that’s actually why it took me so long to get back to you, sorry.
I went out to celebrate getting the results with my friends and the effects lingered a few days.
I’ve only just started researching in earnest since the exam, trying to get my proposal drafted by summer.
But that’s one of the reasons I knew the goose was important when Rolly sent me his photos of it. ”
“Important?” Annie asks. “Important how?”
“Well, I’ve been combing through online newspaper archives, looking for announcements of new exhibit openings to see how they talked about the specimens used, or if they talked about them.
Either is valuable to me. And one of the more interesting articles I found the other day was about this very distinctive goose—leucistic, is what it’s called, when it’s missing most of its pigment like that.
Some people confuse it with piebald, but that’s more of a mottled—”
“You were saying about the articles?” I prompt.
“Right. Yeah. So I came across one about this leucistic goose and how it went missing from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.”
“You think our goose is the same one that was…what, stolen?”
Oh god. Oh no. This is worse than I thought. Because if this bird belonged to a museum, maybe it wasn’t mounted illegally as we originally feared, but it certainly had no legitimate reason to be in Nicole’s attic.
“I don’t think, I know. Now that I have it in my possession, I’ve compared it to the photo and description in the article, and examined it to determine the techniques used to mount the fowl so I could approximately date it.
It’s an exact match. The likelihood of two rare yet identical taxidermy geese, both from the early twentieth century?
If it isn’t the missing one, I’ll strip down naked and sing show tunes outside the stadium on opening day. ”
“Let’s hope for all our sakes it’s the missing one, then,” I mutter.
Lylah returns with our drinks and Beau’s pie (which is lemon meringue and not the apple he settled on, not that he seems inclined to say anything about it).
“So, what do we do about this?” Annie asks. “If we try to return it, are they going to think we were the ones who stole it?”
“I doubt it, since it went missing in the sixties and none of us were even alive then,” Beau says as he takes a bite of his pie, wincing at the tartness.
“Wow. This sure is…lemony.” He takes a long drink of Coke and squints harder against the mix of flavors.
When he recovers, he continues, “I have a contact at the museum, a guy named Jeff. I’ve emailed with him a few times to chat about setting up a time to check out their collections this summer. ”
“And you’re going to reach out to him to say you found the missing goose?” I ask.
“Oh, no, not me,” he says. “I mean, I guess I would have if you hadn’t gotten in touch.
Eventually. But like, I’m really busy. I’ve got my dissertation proposal, some data analysis for my advisor, and I’ll be teaching two gen ed sections in the spring.
I haven’t even started working on the syllabi, and they’re due before Thanksgiving.
That’s just over a week away, you know. I don’t exactly have time to get sidetracked with all of this at the moment.
” He glances around, searching for something—a napkin, perhaps, which Lylah did not bring us—before giving up and wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his dingy bomber jacket.
“You said in your text that you got the goose from a friend? Well, I got it from a friend, who got it from someone who got it from someone…”
“Who got it from someone who stole it from a porch, where it was put by someone who stole it from a moving truck, where it wound up because of a mistake we made at our shop, where the goose was being stored while we were researching it for said friend,” Annie supplies.
“Exactly. You know the story better than I do. So if they have questions, it’s better if they talk to you directly.
” He takes another massive bite of pie, apparently now acclimated to the taste.
“Besides,” he continues with a full mouth, crust crumbs tumbling from his lips as he speaks, “I don’t want any confusion about who mounted it.
I get caught with it, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife realize I have a taxidermy license?
I could prove it wasn’t done recently, of course, but that’s a load of trouble I don’t want and frankly don’t have the bandwidth for.
That’s why I was glad you reached out. Well, actually, at first I thought maybe you were, like, black market dealers or something and you wanted to murder me.
But then I did a quick search and saw the headshot on your website, Cal. ”
“My picture convinced you I wasn’t a criminal?” I ask.
“Nah,” Beau says. “Just convinced me I could probably take you.”
The hope I’d generated that someone else was going to handle solving this problem for us drains from my body like when a plug is yanked from an old bathtub.
This goose is a load of trouble I don’t want either, but I suppose I have no choice in the matter.
Beau has a point; it makes the most sense for us to contact the museum and let them know what we have.
And should anything go sideways, we at least would be less likely to be accused of killing and stuffing the bird ourselves.
Not to mention, I did take this on as a favor to Nicole.
It wouldn’t be right not to see it through for her.
To try to protect her as much as I can while still returning the goose to its rightful home, especially now that I know she was unwittingly in possession of stolen goods.
“All right,” I concede. “Give us the goose and the email address for your contact at the museum and we’ll work on getting it back to them.”
“Cool. I’ll send you the article too so you can tell Jeff about how you identified it as the stolen one.
But do me a favor and keep my name out of it.
Just in case. Don’t want to piss him off and have him deny my collections access request.” The last bite of pie disappears into his mouth and, as he swallows, he says, “So you own an antique shop?”
“Half owns it,” Annie whispers so that only I can hear.
When I look at her, she flashes a cheeky smirk that makes me want to throw her over my shoulder and haul her off to a private location.
Then the smile is joined by the tip of her tongue coasting along her bottom lip before she takes the corner of it into her mouth, and I’m honestly not even sure if the location needs to be all that private so much as nearby.
“Cal?” Beau prompts.
I shake my head, regaining focus. “I do, yes.”
“Like I said, taxidermy is mostly a hobby right now, but grad school is expensive, man. I’ve been trying to find ways to earn some extra cash.
Would you be interested in carrying some of my mounts on consignment?
Here, lemme show you what I’ve been working on lately.
” Beau pulls out his phone and turns it around to show us a photo of a bunch of stuffed rodents dressed like Hollywood starlets in famous films. “The Marilyn Monroe squirrel has gotten a ton of love on socials.”
“Sorry, that’s not really the kind of stuff we sell,” I say, staring down at the bizarre images on his screen. “We’re pretty much only in the antique business. Not the…this business.”
“Oh. All right.”
“I might be interested, though,” Annie says, studying a rat Gloria Swanson that is apparently ready for its close-up with genuine consideration.
“Not right now, but in a few months. I’m going to open up my own store in Asbury Park, in New Jersey.
Sort of a curiosity shop along with more traditional antiques. These could be a fun addition.”
My head whips to the side to stare at Annie.
This is the first time she’s mentioned anything about this, and something about her not telling me her plan feels like a tiny knife to the gut.
I guess a large part of me was banking on there being a chance that she might admit to herself that there’s something substantial between us, might even choose to stay here in Baltimore awhile so we could keep exploring it.
But if she didn’t feel it worth sharing her dreams with me, I need to accept the possibility that it’s because she never had any intention of me being part of them.
Or maybe she’s not actually as set on the idea as she’s made it seem?
Maybe she thinks I’m the one who doesn’t want to give this a try, and is planning her life back in New Jersey accordingly?
“I’ll hold on to your number and be in touch in late spring, hopefully,” she adds, and it does very little to help me figure out where we stand.
“Sweet,” Beau says, leaning back in the booth.
With Lylah nowhere in sight, I do a quick calculation of how much our meal costs and throw a twenty onto the table to cover the total and tip.
Then I open up the navigation on my phone.
“Where do you live?” My question must come out overly brusque, because it causes Annie to give me a confused but pointed look.
“So we can come by to pick up the goose,” I elaborate more calmly.
Annie excuses herself to go to the restroom while Beau gives me an address in Towson.
“Meet you there,” he says, showing no signs of leaving beyond pulling his beanie back down over his ears.
I follow his gaze and find him staring longingly at Lylah, who has reemerged from the kitchen and is now behind the counter, blowing bubbles with her gum while playing on her phone.
I consider suggesting he should just ask her out, see if there’s anything there instead of living in the excruciating limbo of not knowing if she’s interested.
But then I think about my own situation with Annie and realize I’m probably the last person on earth who should be giving relationship advice.
My only qualification is being a delusional, smitten fool.
I suspect Beau doesn’t need any help in that arena, so I keep my mouth shut.