Erie View

The elderly woman opened the back door only slightly, just enough for her to squeeze out, as if to prevent any peeking inside. She smiled at the two policemen, both in casual clothes. The lieutenant, who was an older man, and a young detective.

“The monarchs are on their way,” she said. “They’ll be here soon. It will be absolutely glorious.”

“The who?” asked the young detective.

“The butterflies. They left a couple hours ago. They can fly up to twenty-five miles an hour. The lake is about forty some miles across here. So they should arrive soon, and they’ll be plenty tired. You’d think that following the shoreline would be easier than flying across the lake, but that’s not how Mother Nature programmed them. They don’t have maps. Just a compass.”

The two policemen had come to discuss a murder, but first they would hear a brief talk on monarch migration.

It was September, time for the butterflies to begin their long journey south to Mexico. For most butterflies in Ontario, Canada, their first hurdle would be crossing the Great Lakes. The past few days had been windy, and huge masses of butterflies had gathered on Erie’s Northern shore awaiting windless weather. When the calmer condition arrived, swarms of monarchs departed to cross the lake. Though, as the woman noted, the proper grouping word for butterflies is kaleidoscope, not swarm.

The young detective rolled his eyes with an impatient, disdainful expression. Like many his age, he assumed that all older women were somewhat batty.

By contrast, the lieutenant smiled back at her warmly and attentively. A year shy of mandatory retirement, he felt closer to her than his young colleague. For the lieutenant, old age was not something winging its way from a distant shore, but a thing already on his doorstep. There was the twinge of arthritis in his right knee. Lower back pain. Declining vision. Chronic tinnitus. And another problem that required stirring soluble fiber into his morning coffee.

“Oh, my,” she stopped. “It’s chillier than I thought out here. If you’ll excuse me, I need to grab a jacket.”

She cracked open the door again and squeezed herself back inside.

The young detective scowled. “She’s hiding something. The answer is in there somewhere. We got to find an excuse to bust in there.”

The lieutenant sighed. “Have you ever heard of finesse?”

“Yeah. It’s some kind of shampoo.”

The lieutenant suspected that she was a hoarder who, like most, didn’t want anyone to know. He deduced that from the condition of the backyard, which featured untrimmed shrubs, bird baths and feeders, and various, cockeyed garden statues half-obscured by unmown grass. 

Located on Lake Erie’s southern shore between Lorain and Huron, Ohio, the house itself was a bit ramshackle, needing paint and repairs. It was not even properly a house. Built a century ago as a summer cottage, it rested on a tiny sliver of land. With only 700 square feet of living space, the house had only one bedroom and one bath. Most of these places had been leveled long ago, replaced with expensive homes befitting a lakefront property. But here and there, a few of these vestiges remained where the lot was constrained by a road, train tracks, or topography. So it was paradoxically a low-value property with a million-dollar view.

The lieutenant strolled toward the lot’s back edge, whose ragged, eroded boundary betrayed the violence of angry waves. There he pondered the mystery at hand.

The previous evening, the woman had called the station with an odd report. She claimed to have seen a man dropping the body of a woman off a birdwatching platform into the lake. It happened in a park on the opposite shore. Canada.

She said the man had rolled the body into a light-colored tarp, like a painter’s canvas drop cloth. She added that the tarp unrolled on the way down to the water. That’s how she knew it was a woman inside it.

The young detective had taken the report. He didn’t act upon it, thinking the woman was wacky. In the morning, he mentioned it in passing to the lieutenant, thinking the lieutenant would find it amusing. He did not.

The lieutenant had learned from many years of experience to always check out everything. Always perform due diligence. CYA. Cover your ass. 

The lieutenant called the Ontario Provincial Police. The OPP contact, of similar mindset, also performed due diligence. Had someone check it out.

A couple hours later, the OPP called the lieutenant back. They’d found the body. The tarp, too. Exactly where the woman said it would be.

Again, the lieutenant having learned from experience to always ask follow up questions, to always seek specificity, called the woman back.

“The tarp,” he asked, “did it looked used? Was it covered with paint spots or dirt? Or did it look crisp and brand new?”

She replied without hesitation: “Crisp and brand new.”

The lieutenant called back the OPP contact. He supplied the new bit of information and suggested that maybe the tarp had been recently purchased for the occasion and that they should maybe check with hardware stores in the area.

The OPP appreciated both the new information and the suggestion.

Afterward, the lieutenant questioned his young detective.

“Tell me again what she said last evening. Tell me exactly.”

“She said she was out looking off to the north shore when she saw a man drop a body into the water.”

“You’re sure that’s what she said? Exactly?”

“Absolutely.”

The lieutenant then got on his computer and started investigating the physics of the puzzle. It did not help much.

The distance from the woman’s backyard to the park in Ontario was about forty-five miles across the water. The curvature of the earth constrains the range of vision. Even with a powerful telescope, one cannot see over the horizon line. 

 A six-foot person standing at the water’s edge can see about three miles. The height of the bluff would extend the range by a few miles, and the height of the platform on the other side, maybe a few more. But no way did it add up to forty-five.

The lieutenant kept researching. A short while later, he had a eureka moment. He found an article describing a refraction phenomenon called looming. Under certain meteorological conditions, the atmosphere above water can act like a lens that allows one to see over the horizon line. It also provides a degree of magnification. It was commonly observed in the North Atlantic, but had often been observed in the Great Lakes, as well. 

For a moment, he thought he had solved the mystery, until realizing that the current atmospheric conditions were not congruent with the phenomenon. Looming typically occurs when a layer of warm air moves over cold water, something that would happen in late winter or early spring. This was September. The water was warm and the air above it chilly, exactly opposite the required condition. Furthermore, even looming would not magnify enough to observe the tarp’s details.

He needed to pay her a visit. And now, standing where he believed she stood, staring northward, all he saw was gray water and matching gray clouds. 

When she came back out with her jacket, she launched into a bird talk. The seed preferences of the various species. The distinct drumming noises made by different woodpeckers. Plants that attract hummingbirds. She recommended the lobelia especially, and noted that they like the red better than the blue. And the oranges impaled on sticks attracted orioles. 

She conceded that seeds spilled from the feeders attracted chipmunks, but they were often dispatched by a Cooper’s hawk that hid in the white pine tree.

During this talk, the lieutenant’s phone buzzed and he stepped away to take the call. It was the OPP contact letting him know that the perpetrator was in custody. The tip about the tarp looking new and that they should check local hardware stores proved fruitful. The guy had bought the tarp the same day. He was just smart enough to use cash for the purpose, but could not resist using his shopper rewards card to save a few bucks. 

One mystery solved, but the other remained. How did she see the unseeable?

The lieutenant informed the detective.

“They got him. Or rather, she got him. But how?”

She was still talking birds, oblivious to the fact that she had just solved a murder committed in a different country. She was going on about how friendly chickadees can be when she suddenly gasped. With widened eyes she pointed to the lake.

“Here they come!”

The lieutenant spun around. Out on the lake, rising over the horizon line was a dark, undulating cloud. Masses of butterflies, barely letting any daylight between them. He watched with fascination.

At the same time, his brain was burning with puzzlement. And then his years of experience poked at him again. Remember to ask follow up questions. Seek specificity. He looked back at the woman.

“When we first arrived a bit ago, you informed us that the butterflies had recently departed the north shore. How did you know that?”

“Well, I saw them leave.”

“From here? Your backyard?”

“Of course not. That’s silly. I saw them on the park shore cam, just like I saw the man throwing the woman into the water. Like I told the detective.”

“Excuse me,” the lieutenant said. “Did you say cam, as in camera?”

“Yes. The park on the other side has this camera set up to watch the birds. They gather and pause there before crossing in the fall, and they stop to rest there after crossing in the spring. It’s a veritable feast for the eyes. That it catches the butterflies, too, well, that’s just a bonus.”

“So you watch this on a computer?”

“Yes. The camera was put there by the ornithology department at a university in Toronto. It’s powered by solar cells. The video feed goes to a cell phone tower and then through the cell network to the university, where it’s uploaded to the internet. I have a twenty-seven inch monitor, so I get a good view of it all. Unfortunately, the cataracts are getting worse. I need to do something there if I want to keep watching.”

The lieutenant turned toward the young detective with an accusatory look.

“You did not hear the word cam when she spoke with you?”

The detective squirmed slightly. “I might have missed it. The way she was jabbering, all excited and everything.”

“Detective. You realize that all calls to the station are recorded, even the ones coming in on the non-emergency line? I will be able to replay her call.”

“All right. I was tired. Okay? I’d already put in a few hours of OT. You know we’re understaffed, right? So, maybe I . . .”

“So maybe you didn’t take her seriously.”

The young detective, out of defenses, sighed with exasperation and looked away, avoiding the lieutenant’s disapproving stare.

 The brief awkward silence was interrupted when the woman cried out with delight.

“Oh, my goodness. Will you just look at that.”

The lieutenant turned toward the lake. The billowing mass of butterflies drew closer. More importantly, the sun had broken through the clouds near the shore. Golden shafts of light illuminated the fluttering monarchs, causing their orange wings to glow against the dark overcast sky behind them, creating a stunning contrast. The Renaissance masters of chiaroscuro could not have conjured it better.

The three humans stood still, mesmerized by the sight. Eventually, the kaleidoscope surged ashore. As predicted, the precious little things desperately needed to rest, and quickly engulfed the yard, covering everything in it.

The woman clasped her hands to her face, as if in prayer. Her eyes watered.

“Please don’t step on them,” she begged.

The young detective complained. “Well, then, we’re trapped. What are we supposed to do?”

The lieutenant grinned. “Well, you could just relax a bit. Enjoy the view.”

Photo by Alex Guillaume on Unsplash.