“The bird was poisoned,” the woman on the other end of the line says, wasting no time. “Probably rat poison, but it’s hard to say if that’s the thing that killed it,” she goes on to explain. “Due to the fact that it had also been frozen at some point, which may have been the cause of death.”

It takes my mind a few seconds to compute what she’s saying. I stop in the shade of a tall oak so I can concentrate better. “So, it definitely wasn’t natural causes?” The question sounds stupid as soon as it comes out and hangs there between us.

She chuckles a bit. “Only if the bird ate a pile of rat poison and then flew itself into a freezer.”

“There were twelve of them,” I say, ignoring her poor attempt at a joke. “Twelve birds dead on my doorstep.” I appreciate the stunned silence I get in return.

I hear her readjust the phone and then clear her throat. “Well then, miss, it sounds like a case for the police rather than animal control.” I tell her I’ve told the police and that they’re looking into it. She says she’ll give them a call to provide more details on the situation. She wishes me luck, which I suddenly feel I’ll need, and then hangs up. It takes a lot of maliciousness on someone’s part to poison birds and then freeze them so they can be placed on a verandah. I’m not sure even Leslie Swann would have been up to that task, even if she had been in town the night it happened.

It’s cool inside Ezra’s place. It smells like him too—woodsy and clean, which would normally be comforting, but right now it’s not. Learning that someone put those birds on the verandah on purpose, systematically killing them first, combined with all the negative talk from the neighbor, has truly fucked with my head. I don’t feel safe at Avril Island, and now, thanks to Judy, I’m finding it hard to feel safe here at Ezra’s. I really don’t know who to trust anymore.

Deciding I have no choice but to make myself at home, I plug my phone into Ezra’s stereo to play some music. There are too many voices and questions in the silence. I find some burgers in the freezer and a lone beer, a perfect dinner for one, so I busy myself preparing that, taking it out to the deck to eat when it’s ready.