The parrot goes missing

Oliver was swiped on a Sunday. Joe had gone to meet a classmate at the local university, where he takes courses. Tara had brought her outside for some fresh air and to give her a bath. It was the very ordinariness of the situation that caused Tara to forget Oliver was still in her tree when she left for work in nearby Lindale.

Joe immediately noted the house’s strange silence when he returned an hour later, however, and called Tara. “He was panicking,” she said.

Despite his bodybuilder appearance, Joe’s moods can be brittle. He’d met Tara near her home in southern California, when he was a new enlistee in the Marine Corps.

“I wanted to see Iraq for myself,” he said. “I felt like there was more to the war, and I thought the Marine Corps infantry would put me on the front lines.” It did, and today Joe is rated as 60 percent disabled by the Veterans Administration, partially deaf with a titanium shoulder and traumatic brain injury from roadside bombs.

After talking to Joe, Tara quickly called their lawn service company, the only other people who’d been at the property over the last day. “I was frantic and crying,” Tara said. “I explained the meaning of Oliver. They said if they saw her when they returned on Monday, they’d put her back in her tree.”

The workers’ story was unconvincing, though, and Tara soon concluded Oliver had been abducted by the lawn crew. “I just had a gut intuition,” she said. So when one of the workers came to her door later that afternoon to get paid, she bluffed.