The Killdeer Connection by Tom Swyers

Author:Tom Swyers [Swyers, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kindle Press
Published: 2017-08-07T22:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

No sign or gate marked the entrance to Chautauqua Park. It simply began at the end of Twelfth Street NE, right where the pavement stopped and the dirt-road loop around the park started. The grass on the inner circle had turned brown, like the old hay bales along the interstate. David proceeded slowly, letting the Spark dip in and out of a shallow pothole. He saw a cluster of gray slabs, two perfect rows on the inner circle of the park. At first, David thought they were aboveground graves, but as the car labored out of yet another shallow pothole, he realized the concrete enclosed twenty individual courts for playing horseshoes. Lights for nighttime play loomed over the courts.

David spotted the brown dumpster just around the bend. Beyond that, he could see a small picnic pavilion and, farther away, a clump of leafless trees about fifty feet tall. There were no designated parking spaces, so he pulled his Spark off into a wide spot in the dirt road by the dumpster.

He got out of the car and pulled on his parka and gloves before grabbing a pair of binoculars and his camera out of the luggage. He was going to search for killdeers. The first place he was going to look was where Sheila Safferson had been attacked. It was a chilly school morning, and the park was deserted. Over the trees, the sun tried to burn through the fog that floated over the Sheyenne River as it twisted and turned southward through Valley City, carving Barnes County in half.

David locked his car. His feet crunched on the frozen ground as he walked to the outer edge of the park, along the banks of the near-frozen Sheyenne. In a clearing beyond the trees, he spotted a three-foot-long freshly cut pine stake driven into the ground. David touched the drooping, orange-plastic ribbon atop the stake and ran it between his fingers, wondering about Sheila Safferson.

He lifted his eyes to look 200 yards up the valley. That’s when he saw it. At first, David thought he was seeing things. But as the fog crawled over and around the massive structure, the skeleton of the High Line Bridge came into focus. Its black-steel trestles propped the bridge up 150 feet in the air. The bridge spanned the river and the entire valley for almost a mile.

For a second, he thought he heard the grinding of steel rails on the bridge, as if a train were about to cross. He heard kill-dee, kill-dee, kill-deeeee in the distance, coming closer and closer. It wasn’t a train but a killdeer that had dropped down in front of him on the grass. The bird’s black-and-white-striped head jerked all around as amber eyes looked David over. The bird screeched at him every few seconds. David reached for his cell phone to snap a picture of it. He fumbled turning it on and opening the camera app. As the screen came up, he saw there were now two killdeers eying him.

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