Murder With Puffins by Donna Andrews Page A

collection of pebbles and sticks with it. The man stopped and then backed up a few paces. I grabbed another rock and held it at the ready.
    "Why the hell are you shooting at us?" I yelled.
    "This is private property," he yelled back. "You're trespassing!"
    "Trespassing?" I shouted. I stood up, ignoring Michael's frantic gestures. Foolish, perhaps, but somehow I didn't think that the man was going to shoot us. Not in front of witnesses. I could see a flock of birders peeking out of the woods at the other edge of his property, snapping away with their cameras.
    "Trespassing?" I repeated. "Excuse me, quite apart from the fact that this trail has been a public right-of-way for generations, and assuming you do have some legal claim to keep people out, which I very much doubt--and I assure you that I intend to investigate very thoroughly--quite apart from that, were you planning to post any signs, or were you just going to kill off anyone not psychic enough to guess that you don't want them hiking here?"
    "Meg," Michael said. He tugged on the leg of my jeans. I shook him off.
    "There's a sign right there--" the man began, raising his hand to point and then stopping when he saw there wasn't a sign after-all. "What the hell have you done with my sign?"
    "Don't look at us," I said. "We just got here."
    The man snorted in exasperation. He walked forward a few paces, then leaned his gun against a tree and reached down. He pried a battered sign out of the mud beside the path, picked up a large rock--possibly the one I'd thrown at him--and began hammering the sign back into the ground.
    "I'm not kidding," he said, looking up from his work. "I'm fed up with people trespassing. And people knocking down my signs. I've served notice that this is private property, and I intend to enforce it."
    "Well, serve notice a little more visibly from now on," I said, dodging Michael, who had despaired of making me crouch down again and was trying to put himself between me and the lunatic. "And speaking of serving notice, exactly who are you anyway? I'd like to know whom I'm going to ask the police to charge with attempted murder."
    "You know perfectly well who I am!" the man shouted. He threw the rock in my direction, then reached for his gun. I quickly followed Michael's advice and we ducked behind the crest of the path, but instead of firing, the man stormed back toward the house. I suppressed a giggle; he was getting himself even grimier than before, stomping through the mud like that. And when he slammed the door, I burst out laughing: the huge, pretentious--and, no doubt, expensive--front door didn't fit quite right. Perhaps all the dampness had warped it. He had to spend several minutes wrestling it closed, his struggles clearly visible through the sweeping glass wall and slanted glass roof of the entrance hall.
    "I'll refrain from saying anything about people who live in glass houses," Michael said. "But they shouldn't shoot rifles at people, either."
    "And they definitely shouldn't live this close to the ocean," I said, giggling. A seagull had just flown in from the ocean, banked gracefully over the house, and landed, with a clumsy thud, on the glass roof of the entranceway, which was somewhat sheltered by the rest of the house from the full brunt of the wind. Several other gulls followed, and enough bird droppings coated the glass to show that this wasn't the first time the birds had discovered this refuge. The lunatic suddenly appeared behind the glass of the entranceway, causing both Michael and me to jump. The gulls, however, stared down unmoved as he thumped with a broom handle on the heavy plate glass beneath their feet.
    "Serves him right," I said. "I hope that creep has to wash all those windows every day."
    And he certainly had a lot of windows. In addition to the main house, we saw a smaller glass building nearby. A studio, apparently; while off-white curtains screened the lower six feet or so of its glass walls, from our place on the