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working hours, and for the first time in my life, I had all the desserts I could eat.
    I knew there was a good reason for marrying her.
    I took a turtle éclair out of the refrigerator and walked out to the deck to check on my birdfeeders. Just last evening I’d seen a river of Red-winged Blackbirds heading south. I must have watched for a good five minutes as thousands of the birds streamed through the sky. Thankfully, they hadn’t needed to make a refueling stop at my feeders, so I figured what I had left in my bag of sunflower seeds would probably last till the end of the month. After that, I was going to switch over to suet blocks to keep all the woodpeckers happy. Humans weren’t the only species that enjoyed having a full belly.
    As long as it wasn’t a belly full of hemlock.
    I leaned on the porch railing and ate my pastry.
    Sonny Delite was a skilled birder, a man totally at home in the natural world. Often, when we birded together, he pointed out dozens of plants to me and recited both their common and scientific names. To think that a man like that could mistakenly ingest poisonous hemlock was nothing short of an unbelievably long stretch.
    But that only left two equally disturbing possibilities: Sonny either committed suicide or was murdered. His wife had jumped without hesitation to the second option yesterday at Millie’s, and, I supposed, without any suicide note or other mental distress indications, the police had to take her allegations seriously.
    So who would be mad enough at Sonny Delite to feed him a toxic plant? And who would have the opportunity to do that at a public place like the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum on an early Sunday morning?
    If you listened to Prudence Delite’s accusations, I guess you’d have to look for someone who might have held a grudge—and a murderous one, at that—against Sonny because of his opposition to utility projects that impacted the environment. Considering that there was a conference about energy sources underway at the Arboretum, it wouldn’t be surprising if a lot of the folks in attendance knew Sonny from past projects. Determining whether those people were his friends or foes would take some legwork, but unless I missed my guess, the police were already sifting through the conference rosters looking for anyone who might have had some past history with the newly deceased. Then, if the police could place any of those people at Millie’s during lunch the previous day when Red had made a scene with Sonny, they’d have a head start on investigating suspects.
    Piece of cake, I thought. Make a list, check it twice, narrow it down to naughty and nice. Pick a killer, and you’re done.
    Except then you had to find the evidence to prove that your designated killer did it.
    Which meant you also had to identify the motive.
    And pin down the opportunity.
    I swallowed the last bite of my éclair, licking some wayward cream filling off my fingers.
    Man, I loved éclairs. They were definitely not any old piece of cake.
    But neither was solving a murder.
    A Downy Woodpecker flew in from the woods and perched on the porch railing a few feet away from me. He gave me the once-over and then took off. I guessed that since I wasn’t a block of suet, he didn’t have much use for me at the moment.
    Sort of like Officer Kurt at Millie’s yesterday.
    Not that he was looking for a block of suet, but he could have been a little more generous with his evaluation of my usefulness to a murder investigation that I had unwittingly and unwillingly initiated.
    Oh, that’s right—I was only a high school counselor, for crying out loud . Heaven forbid that I tread on the sacred territory of local law enforcement, despite the fact that I’d made significant contributions to solving three Minnesota murders last year.
    Granted, I didn’t set out to become an amateur sleuth, and much of what I had contributed, I discovered through blind luck, but what could I say? When it came to birding or