“It could be worse…I could be on fire right now,” I said in a voice approximately two octaves higher than the one I usually employed.I stared down into a pair of malevolent yellow eyes and told myself that their owner was not really a demon from the pit of Hades, but as they stared back into my own brown ones, I wasn’t convinced.If you squinted at that face just right in this light, you could almost see a wisp of sulfur curling out of its nostrils.I shifted uneasily and yelped as the beast sank its claws deeper into my left calf.“Lucy!Get off me!” I tried, in the most commanding voice I could muster.My neighbor’s cat merely flicked her black tail in response.“Pretty please?”I could feel my tenuous grip on my panic level slipping, and at this point in the game, I wasn’t above begging for mercy.There was no response.There was only one thing left for me to do.“Frank,” I shrieked at the top of my lungs.“Help me!”

My neighbor scurried out of his garage and surveyed the scene.“Don’t you dare laugh,” I warned him as I saw his lips twitch. “This is entirely your fault.Why couldn’t you get a sweet ol’ doggie instead of this monster? Get her off of me! Now!”

Frank strolled over and carefully detached Lucy’s extended claws from my leg. “Bad kitty,” he scolded. She curled up in his arms and purred contentedly. Frank shook his head. “I don’t see why you have a problem with her. She’s a doll.”

“Right,” I snapped. “And you named her Lucifer just for that reason, did you?”

“Her name is Lucy Fur,” Frank patiently reminded me for quite possibly the billionth time.

“Yeah, and I’m Godzilla. You owe me a new pair of panty hose.” I sank onto the top step of my front porch and examined my leg. The punctures weren’t deep, but my stockings were goners. I massaged my earlobes and breathed deeply, trying to slow my heart rate. Panty hose would have been the least of my problems if I hadn’t realized that a demented cat was stalking me. Not that I could explain my mortal terror of cats to Frank. One would think that having super powers would be awesome. But, for the love of Peter Pan, why did I have to shape-shift into a bird? And if it had to be a bird, why did it have to be a robin? Why not an ostrich or a condor? No cat in its right mind would attack an ostrich. “Of course, that’s assuming that cats have right minds,” I muttered, forgetting that I had an audience.

“Um.  Come again?” he asked.

“I was just saying…never mind. How was work?” I noticed that Frank was still in uniform, his “blueberries,” as we called the blue digital cammies that he wore on his ship.

“Kinda stupid. We’re starting workups in a couple of weeks, so there’s lots of inspections and cleaning and junk going on. I don’t supposed you’ll pet-sit Lucy for me while I’m gone?” he said, half teasing.

“Sorry,” I said. “My therapist says that a recovering ailurophobe shouldn’t spend much time around the creature that causes her to have crippling panic attacks and I happen to agree with her.”

He shrugged. “Your loss.She’s quite cuddly once you get to know her.” He released Lucy and she slunk off into the azalea bushes…to plan her next assault, I thought. He sat down next to me and loosened his bootlaces. “You know, if you tucked your pants into your socks like me you would still have full leg cover and you wouldn’t have to wear panty hose.”

“That would be awesome,” I said feelingly. “Whoever invented those things should be dragged into the streets and shot. But, it might be hard to walk with my skirt tucked into my shoes.” We sat for a while in companionable silence.

“So…skirts and panty hose. New client?”

“Yup.  More drama.  This guy thinks that his wife is running around on him.  You know, the usual.  Seriously, I thought I’d constantly be finding missing relatives and thwarting rings of jewel thieves when I became a private investigator.  You know.  Like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys do every in every book in just under two hundred pages.  Some of these weirdos belong on the Jerry Springer or Maury show.”  I brooded for a minute.  I had become a private investigator six months after graduating from college to start paying off my student loans.  Eight years later, I actually owned my own agency.  So much for that degree in classical voice.  These days, the only ones who heard me sing were my shampoo bottles and shower tiles. 

 “Luckily, you’ll always have a job…being in a military town and all that. There are always gonna be sailors deploying and spouses doing who knows what with who knows whom while they’re gone.”

“Sadly true. I just wish I could do something bigger. Like fighting cyber terrorism.”

“Saving the world.”

“Conquering the moon.”

At that, Frank let out a bellowing laugh. I giggled with him.I couldn’t help it. He had one of the most contagious laughs I had ever heard.“I’m ready when you are,” he promised.

"Great!  I needed a henchman!"

“I can hench with the best of them.” He gave me a mock salute. “Shall you be known as The Supreme Lunar Commander or simply as the Moon Empress Magnificent?”

“I’ll get back to you.” I stood up and brushed the loose dirt and dead leaves off of my skirt. “Later, Frank.”

“See you, Feather.”

As I pushed open my peeling red door, I saw Lucy lurking in my azaleas. I made a mental note to research feline repellent as I stepped inside. Or land mines.I’m not terribly picky.

I tossed my keys on the corner table and kicked off my shoes.  I glanced at my answering machine on the way to my bedroom and noticed that the red light was flashing.  I’d deal with that later.  Fifteen minutes later, I was in my raggedy gray sweatpants and an Orioles T-shirt I’d stolen from my dad on my last visit home.  Orioles, as in the nine species of orioles commonly seen throughout North America, not the Baltimore Orioles of Major League Baseball.  This may be a good time to pause our regularly scheduled programming and bring you up to speed on certain things about my life that have contributed to me being, well, me.

You may be wondering why my name is Feather.  Or possibly, you thought that the editors somehow missed the “F” and my name is really “Heather.”  Not so much.  I wish that I could tell you that my parents had planned to name me “Heather” and the nurse filling out my birth certificate paperwork just had really bad handwriting and the powers that be thought that she had written “Feather” and I was stuck with it, but that would be a totally fictional account.  What really happened was that my parents, who are a couple of crazed birdwatchers, named me Feather Avis Thomas.  (Yes, my initials spell “FAT.”  Why do you ask?  For monogram purposes?  No, thanks.  Monograms make me feel like my belongings are calling me names.)  It could be worse, I suppose.  They could have named me “Gizzard.”  For most of elementary school, I tried to convince my teachers that my name was Queen Elizabeth.  While sympathetic to my desire to be more anonymous, my teachers weren’t that hot at playing along.  Suffice it to say that I developed a fairly thick layer of metaphorical skin. 

Fast-forward to the year I turned thirteen.  Thirteen is such an awkward age.  That was the year I fell off the stage at my vocal recital.  I had just performed a lovely aria from Handel’s opera “Rinaldo” and was flushed with embarrassment and pride at the thunderous applause.  I bowed and promptly fell flat on my face.  The pièce de résistance to this little manifestation of gravity’s might was that I found myself spread-eagled on the floor at the feet of Jimmy Maxwell, the graduating senior upon whom I had a secret burning crush.  Anyway, puberty set in.  In addition to all of the normal yet weird physical changes that teenagers go through, I woke up one morning much smaller than I normally was.  Since most teenage girls struggle with skinny issues, you’d think I’d have been thrilled.  Then again, most teenage girls don’t wake up with a beak, wings and weird little bird feet.  Apparently, my parents had failed to mention the teensy little detail about our family being a part of a long chain of super heroes, with powers ranging from super strength to x-ray vision to supersonic flight.  I was a shape shifter.  Who knew, right?  My parents were thrilled when they found out that I could become a robin redbreast at the drop of a hat.  Not only did their daughter inherit the super hero gene, but they now had the ability to closely observe one of the most beloved birds of all time right in the comfort of their own living room.

Like most teenage girls with or without superpowers, I managed to survive high school.  Like most teenage girls, I managed to do it without sprouting feathers during gym, although I did lose control of myself and ate the worm that I was supposed to be dissecting in biology.  (Relax…nobody saw.)  I graduated at the top of my class.  This girl ain’t no bird-brain, okay?  (See what I did there?  Oh, yeah.  I’ll be here all week.)  I even won first place in the teenagers classical division at the International Whistlers Convention my junior year.  As I mentioned earlier, after high school, I majored in classical voice at Berklee School of Music in Boston.  I had a partial scholarship which definitely helped with tuition, but I still graduated with a metric butt-ton of student debt.  Like most classical musicians, I needed to find a job that would actually pay the bills.  However, there weren’t many job openings for classical singers readily available, so I started to widen my search terms. 

That’s when I landed on an opening at a local private investigator agency as a receptionist.  Six months later, I got my license and became an investigator myself.  It is an undeniable fact that there is always going to be a need for professional snoops, no matter how much of a hot mess the economy is at the moment.  Last year, I moved to Norfolk, Virginia and opened my own agency—Recce Solutions, LLC.  I wanted something that didn’t scream “You are not the father” every time a client wrote a check.  I figured “Snoops ‘R’ Us” or “Finders Peepers” would kind of give it away.  Being a military town, there is always plenty of stuff going on, if you know what I mean by “stuff.”  Plenty of “stuff” going on equals steady paycheck for Feather.   Now, as a (more) mature adult, I can bring myself to admit that being a shape shifter is pretty dang cool.  My alter ego being what it is, I have a distinct advantage over other private investigators…a built-in disguise that makes me practically invisible.  Unless a person is Mary Poppins, who is going to notice a robin lurking in the bushes underneath their bedroom window?  Besides, if the person in question was in fact Mary Poppins, Burt wouldn’t have needed to hire me in the first place, because she, unlike most people, is Practically Perfect in Every Way. 

Did I think that I would still be a private investigator nearly a decade after college?  Absolutely not.  Do I want to be an investigator forever?  Absolutely not.  I shouldn’t complain, I know.  I have a recession-proof job, no more loans, and a cute little house with a cute next-door neighbor on whom I may or may not have a teensy weensy little crush.  My best friend and I get to work together.  Wait.  I didn’t tell you about my best friend?  Shame on me!

Okay.  We need to go back a ways—you know, before I was a demi-bird.  We’re talking back to kindergarten.  I sneezed spaghetti out of my nose on my first day.  This could have been a social crime punishable by social death, but Anna Jo (I call her AJ) thought it was a pretty cool party trick…so much so that she repeated the feat at dinner that night and name-dropped me when asked where she learned that particular skill.  Her revolted mother telephoned my mother to let her know how “talented” I was and they hit it off.  We’ve been best friends ever since that fateful day.  Our friendship is unique in that we could go years without so much as a text and still pick up right where we left it.  In fact, that’s pretty much what happened.  Her dad got transferred during middle school and our friendship was relegated to a long-distance one.  We only got to see each other once a year, but we always made the most of it.  When I decided to open the agency, she took the leap with me and she’s pretty much the best business manager ever.  I’m kind of flighty (ba-dum-bum-CHING) and tend to misplace paperwork, my car keys—and occasionally, my mind.  She is really good at helping me keep them all where they belong.  We have shared every secret since the inception of our friendship. 

Except one.  I still hadn’t been able to bring myself to tell her about the whole “I can change into a bird at will” thing.  She may have been just fine with spaghetti noodles, but I’m still terrified that sprouting feathers and talons might be pushing the proverbial tolerance envelope just a little bit.  Outside of my parents, nobody knows my little secret. 

Hopefully, I can keep it that way. 

Where was I?  Oh, yeah.  I was in my raggedy gray sweatpants and an Orioles T-shirt I’d stolen from my dad on my last visit home.  Orioles, as in the nine species of orioles commonly seen throughout North America, not the Baltimore Orioles of Major League Baseball. 

 

I made my way back down the hall towards my still-flashing answering machine.  I know that it is quaint and just a little antiquated to still have a land line.  However, my house seems to reside in the Bermuda Triangle of cell phone service because I have to go out to the corner of my street to get any signal.  Obviously, that isn’t the most convenient thing to do when it’s raining and I want to order Chinese food, for example.  I pressed Play and waited for Marvin the Machine to tell me how many messages I had today.  I had five new messages, slightly more than average.

The first was a collection agency trying to reach someone I could only assume had lived at my house some hundred years ago.  The second and third messages were my mother, asking me about my plans, first for Thanksgiving and then for Christmas.  I groaned.  The holidays were seriously like five months away.  Maybe three.  I made a mental note to call her this weekend.  The fourth message was from a telemarketer.  I made a mental note to add my number to the Do Not Call Registry.  Again.  The fifth message was from AJ.  I called her back.

“How did the new client meeting go?” she asked. 

“Well, there was a beginning, a middle, and an end,” I replied.  I could almost hear her rolling her eyes on her end. 

“It was pretty standard,” I elaborated.  “The green tea latte was superb.  Our new client, who may or may not be the reincarnation of the aged version of Henry VIII, believes that his wife is having an affair with his executive assistant, who may or may not be the reincarnation of Errol Flynn as Robin Hood.”

“He was so hot in that,” she said. 

“Totally.  Anyway, I gave him the standard spiel and we’re officially hired.  I told him I’d start surveillance as soon as he provides us with their normal routine, blah-blah-blah.  I’m telling you.  Nancy Drew had much cooler cases than we do.”

“Yeah, but we get paid better,” she reminded. 

“Her cases came with getting to moonlight as a stunt rider in a circus and ball gowns made out of spider silk.”

“You wouldn’t wear a dang dress made out of spider silk anyway,” she consoled. 

I sighed.  She was probably right.  I hate spiders and everything to do with their creepy eight-legged selves.  In my opinion, spiders are not entitled to fair trials.  All spiders are guilty of everything simply because they are spiders. 

“What are you doing tonight?” I asked, even as I wondered what I was doing tonight. 

“Kevin and I are supposed to be going to a movie and then dinner.  You?”

I quickly decided.  “Chinese food and a good book—and if things get really crazy, a steaming mug of tea and a bubble bath.”

AJ sighed.  Gustily.  “As exciting as that sounds, you should really change your plans and ask Frank out.  That way, we can go on double dates and have a double wedding and have double babies.”

“Have fun, AJ.  I’ll see you tomorrow.”  Her stony silence told me that she disapproved of my failure to get with her program, but that she was going to let it go.  For now.

“You, too, Sweetie.  Nighty-night.” 

I hung up the phone, feeling both slightly guilty and slightly annoyed.  Call me old-fashioned, but I didn’t really want to ask Frank out first.  I still wasn’t sure if he really “liked me” liked me or not, despite AJ’s many emphatic assurances that he most certainly did like me and probably spent every duty-free evening by his phone breathlessly awaiting my call.  Besides, if we got to the point where we were having double babies, I’d have to explain about the whole “I can change into a bird at will” thing.  Most guys love superheroes, but I’m not sure how Frank would feel about playing genetic roulette.  I mean, I shapeshift into a robin.  My baby could end up with Super Strength…or he could shapeshift into something much worse than a robin, like a fly or a cat.  I shuddered and padded into the kitchen to find the take-out menu.  Garlic chicken sounded perfect.  I wasn’t going to be kissing anybody tonight anyway.

My mood lifted slightly as I devoured lo mein noodles and chicken and eyed the new murder mystery hanging out on my coffee table.  My feet were aching after being stuffed into four-inch heels all afternoon, so I decided that the hot bath was definitely on the menu.  I dumped some aromatherapy bath salts into the tub and breathed in the spearmint and eucalyptus wafting through the air.  As I eased into the scalding water, I congratulated myself.  This was exactly what I had needed. 

As I curled up in my bed with my book an hour later, my mental forecast was officially sunny and cloudless.