The Two Birds
Teddie ("Ducky") and Herman ("Drakey") are friends with benefits, but they aren't spending much time, lately, billing and cooing. Teddie has been cast as Lady Macbeth in the local community theater troupe; and she and her husband George have to practice to stay competitive in their tennis club. Herman has been drawn into pursuing a decades-old cold case; but his wife Sylvia needs his help fighting off a challenge to her professional life.
The spouses, who long ago gave up sex, are willing to tolerate the arrangement, as long as it doesn't become public knowledge. But that's a big risk, since Ducky and Drakey have flown into mysteries before, uncovering murder and mayhem in Grand Lake City. Fortunately, police homicide detective Sarah Larson has, by the summer of 2019, come to accept their help and to help them in return.
The cold case revolves around an urban legend that somewhere in the city there is a warehouse of vintage motorcycles that were stolen from the factory-still in their shipping crates-back in 1948. Felix Long, an aspiring writer, brings this story to Herman, who is a retired magazine editor, hoping that, together, they can write a book about it. That would mean locating the con man Don Reynolds who, in 1986, claimed to have found those stolen bikes. He sold them, then ran off with the money, never having produced any bike but the one he drove around town.
Sylvia's need for Herman's help is more pressing. She chairs the local college's School of Forestry and runs its research lab about 100 miles away in the mountains. The owners of the acreage just uphill from the lab are a 93-year-old man named Homer Gilley and a corporation called Harvest Gold, LLC. They are asking the state's Department of Land Management to issue a logging permit. At a public hearing, Gilley says he wants to sell the timber to give a nest-egg to his daughter Agnes, who's in her 70s.
Logging would wreak havoc on the forest land around the lab. To prioritize Sylvia's dilemma, Herman sidelines Felix by introducing him to Irwin Duteriane, who has a local true-crime podcast; and to Shirley McKenzie, who writes a local true-crime blog. Each of them promises to help Felix, but after a week Irwin disappears, and two weeks later Shirley disappears too. So Herman feels he has to pick up the ball again.
Teddie is being whipsawed between the theater troupe's more experienced leading ladies: Susie Warriner and Margo Boyd. Both are trying hard to be Teddie's new best friend, even though each of them wanted-expected-to play Lady Macbeth herself, until Teddie came along. And her shoulder is giving her trouble, so she might not be able to compete in the tennis club's upcoming tournament.
But what seems like separate threads are actually woven into a tapestry of poison and murder. If Ducky and Drakey try to unravel it, they could zero out their benefits and-if they don't watch their backs-wind up dead.
The Two Birds is the third mystery in the Friends With Benefits series, which includes The Nest and The Office Wife.
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