Stork Raving Mad

by Donna Andrews

  Stork Raving Mad

  OTHER MEG LANGSLOW MYSTERIES BY DONNA ANDREWS

  Swan for the Money

  Six Geese A-Slaying

  Cockatiels at Seven

  The Penguin Who Knew Too Much

  No Nest for the Wicket

  Owls Well That Ends Well

  We’ll Always Have Parrots

  Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon

  Revenge of the Wrought-Iron Flamingos

  Murder with Puffins

  Murder with Peacocks

  Stork Raving Mad

  A Meg Langslow Mystery

  Donna Andrews

  Minotaur Books

  New York

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

  STORK RAVING MAD. Copyright © 2010 by Donna Andrews. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  ISBN 978-0-312-62119-3

  First Edition: August 2010

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks, as always, to all the folks at St. Martins/Minotaur, including (but not limited to) Andrew Martin, Pete Wolverton, Hector DeJean, Matt Baldacci, Toni Plummer, and especially my longtime editor, Ruth Cavin.

  Ellen Geiger and the staff at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency continue to make my life easy by taking care of the business side of writing. And special thanks to Dave Barbour at Curtis Brown for helping turn Murder with Peacocks into Falscher Vogel fangt den Tod.

  My writing groups, the Rector Lane Irregulars (Carla Coupe, Ellen Crosby, Laura Durham, Peggy Hansen, Valerie Patterson, Noreen Wald, and Sandi Wilson) and the Hellebore Writers (Erin Bush, Meriah Crawford, M. Sindy Felin, Barb Goffman, and C. Ellett Logan), continue to be a source of much-needed help and advice, as do my blog sisters at the Femmes Fatales (Dana Cameron, Charlaine Harris, Toni L.P. Kelner, Kris Neri, Hank Phillipi Ryan, Mary Saums, and Elaine Viets). As always, my friends, including Chris Cowan, Kathy Deligianis, Suzanne Frisbee, David Niemi, Dina Willner, and all the Teabuds, help keep me sane. Well, relatively sane.

  When I realized that Stork Raving Mad was taking a direction that would require rather more medical expertise than usual, I called on the generosity of Dr. Doug Lyle, Luci Zahray (the Poison Lady), and Dr. Robin Waldron. To the extent I’ve achieved any degree of accuracy, it’s due to their efforts to set me straight, and they should not be held responsible if I’ve blown it.

  Finally, many thanks to Stuart and Elke for giving me the idea of inflicting twins on Meg and Michael in the first place, and to Liam and Aidan, the Andrews family’s dynamic duo, for helping me realize how awesome twins can be.

  Stork Raving Mad

  Chapter 1

  “Meg? Are you asleep?”

  I kept my eyes closed while I pondered my answer. If I said “Yes,” would my husband, Michael, understand that I was only expressing how much my sleep-deprived body craved a few minutes of oblivion?

  No, I’d probably just sound cranky. I felt cranky. Most women occasionally do when they’re eight-and-a-half months pregnant, especially with twins. Any woman who says otherwise has obviously never been pregnant.

  “Meg?”

  “I’m thinking about it.” I opened one eye and saw Michael’s tall, lean frame silhouetted in the bedroom doorway. He was holding a small brown paper bag in one hand. “If that bag contains chocolate, then I’m definitely not asleep.”

  “Chocolate chip cookies from Geraldine’s,” Michael said, shaking the bag enticingly.

  “Okay, I’m awake,” I said. “It’s not as if Heckle and Jeckle were going to let me get any sleep anyway.”

  I began the laborious process of hauling myself upright. Michael cleared some junk off the little folding table by my side of the bed, produced a plate from somewhere, poured half a dozen enormous soft chocolate chip cookies onto it, and placed a large glass of cold milk beside it. Then he pulled the curtains open, revealing that it was still fairly early in the morning, and a dreary gray winter morning at that.

  “At times like this, I’m particularly glad I married you,” I said, reaching for a cookie. “So what’s the reason for this bribe?”

  “There has to be a reason?” He snagged a cookie for himself and pulled a chair up to the other side of the table.

  “As busy as you usually are in December grading exams and reading term papers and all that other end-of-semester stuff faculty have to do at the college, you still went all the way to Geraldine’s for cookies?”

  “Okay, there’s a reason.” He paused, then frowned as if puzzled. I took a big bite of cookie and washed it down with a swig of milk, to brace myself. Michael was rarely at a loss for words, so whatever he wanted to say must be momentous.

  “Is it okay if we have another houseguest?” he finally asked. He sounded so anxious that I looked up in surprise.

  “Is that all?” I said through a mouthful of cookie. His face relaxed into something more like its usual calm good humor. “Michael, I haven’t the slightest idea how many houseguests we have already. There’s Rob—”

  “Your brother’s not exactly a houseguest,” Michael put in. “After two years, I think he qualifies as a resident.”

  “And Cousin Rose Noire—”

  “Also more like a resident, unless you’ve changed your mind about accepting her offer to stay on and help us through that difficult adjustment to having the twins around.”

  “Right now, I have no objection if she stays on long enough to help us through the difficult adjustment to sending them off to college.” I reached for a second cookie. “But there’s still my grandfather, and of course all those displaced drama department students filling up the spare rooms and camping out in the living room. How many of them do we have, anyway?”

  He frowned again.

  “Maybe a dozen?” he said. “Or a dozen and a half?”

  “Seems like more,” I said. “There are at least a dozen sleeping in the living room.”

  “Two dozen, then,” he said. Still probably a conservative estimate. “More or less. And before you ask, I have no idea how much longer they’ll be here. Last time I heard, some critical piece of equipment down at the college heating plant was still in a million pieces on the floor, and the dean of facilities was running around with a harried look on his face and a bottle of Tums in his pocket.”

  I heard a series of thuds and thumps in the hallway. A month ago I’d have gone running to see what was happening, or at least sent Michael to check. Our weeks of living with students under
foot had made us blasé about such noises.

  “You’d think a big place like Caerphilly College could figure out how to get a boiler repaired,” I said. “It’s been—what, three weeks now?”

  “Three weeks tomorrow.” Michael took another cookie. “Not that I’m counting or anything. Meanwhile, the whole campus is still without heat. And from the temperatures the weatherman is predicting next week, you’d think we lived in Antarctica instead of Virginia.”

  “Which means the students stay for the foreseeable future,” I said. “And since the Caerphilly Inn is also full to overflowing with displaced students, and Grandfather can’t get the suite he usually stays in when he comes to town, we’re stuck with him, too. With all that going on, what’s one more person?”

  “You’re a trouper,” Michael said, with a smile that could have convinced me to invite the entire freshman class to move in.

  I heard the crash of something breaking downstairs in the hall. I winced out of habit, even though I knew nearly everything of ours that the students could possibly have broken had long ago been locked up in the basement or the attic. By the time I got downstairs, the student would have picked up the broken object, whatever it was, and Rose Noire would probably have washed, waxed, and polished the patch of floor on which it had fallen.

  “So who’s our newest houseguest?” I asked.

  “Remember Ramon Soto?” he asked. “One of my grad students?”

  “The one who’s been holding his play rehearsals in our library? Yes. I thought he was already living here.”

  “He is. As is most of his cast. Makes it convenient. Anyway, the play’s part of his dissertation project. He’s doing it on Ignacio Mendoza, the Spanish playwright.”

  Was Mendoza someone famous? The Spanish equivalent of Shakespeare, or Shaw, or at least Neil Simon? The name didn’t sound familiar, but one side effect of pregnancy, at least for me, was that my hormone-enriched brain temporarily jettisoned every single bit of information it didn’t think was useful in my present situation. At least I hoped it was temporary.

  “Ignacio Mendoza?” I said aloud. “Is that a name I should recognize?”

  “Not unless you’re a fan of obscure mid-twentieth-century Spanish playwrights,” Michael said. He finished his cookie and moved to sit on the foot of the bed. “For Ramon’s dissertation project, in addition to the critical study on Mendoza, he’s done a new translation of one of Mendoza’s plays and is directing it. And one thing he discovered while doing his research is that, to everyone’s amazement, Mendoza is still alive.”

  “Why amazement?”

  “Because most people thought Generalissimo Franco had Mendoza shot back in the fifties.” He picked up my right foot and began massaging it.

  I closed my eyes, the better to enjoy the foot rub. Carrying around an extra fifty or more pounds does a number on your arches.

  “Apparently he just went to ground in Catalonia and kept a low profile for the last sixty years,” Michael added.

  “Sixty years?” I echoed. “How old is he, anyway?”

  “Nearly ninety. Which is why Ramon thought it was pretty safe to invite him to come to the opening night of the play. He just assumed the old guy would be flattered and send polite regrets. No one ever expected Mendoza to accept—and at the last possible moment. We’ve managed to scrape up some money from the department to pay for his airfare, but even if we had enough to cover a hotel stay—”

  “Every single hotel room in town is full of refugee students,” I said. “Plus every spare room in just about every private house. I’d have thought we were pretty full ourselves.”

  “The students are going to rearrange themselves to free up a room,” Michael said.

  Aha. That probably explained the earlier thumps and thuds, along with the dragging noises I could hear out in the hall. Michael switched to my left foot.

  “We’re also going to swap a few of our drama students who aren’t in the play for a few more Spanish-speaking students,” he went on. “That way there will always be someone around to translate for Señor Mendoza. And the students will chauffeur him around and cook for him or take him out to eat—in fact, your grandfather’s promised to help as well. And if he’s in his eighties, how much trouble can Señor Mendoza be?”

  I thought of pointing out that even though my grandfather was over ninety, he regularly stirred up quite a lot of trouble. Of course, trouble was a way of life for Dr. Montgomery Blake, world famous zoologist, gadfly environmentalist, and animal-welfare activist. Why was Grandfather offering to help entertain our guest, anyway? Did he consider the elderly playwright a kind of endangered species?

  But I had to admit, Michael had done everything possible to make sure our potential houseguest wouldn’t cause me any work or stress.

  “So it’s really all right if we host Señor Mendoza?” he asked.

  “It’s fine. The more the merrier. Wait a minute—the play opens Friday and it’s already Wednesday. How soon is he arriving?”

  Michael glanced at his watch.

  “In about half an hour.”

  Chapter 2

  Actually, the beat-up sedan carrying our latest guest pulled up just twenty minutes later, almost precisely at the stroke of ten. A slender, dark-haired young man of medium height stepped out. Ramon Soto—I recognized him from seeing some of the rehearsals. A pretty, dark-haired young woman sprang out of the front passenger seat and ran around to the driver’s side so that she and Soto almost bumped heads in their haste to open the left rear door and assist a bent, gnarled figure out of the car and up the steps.

  I saw this from upstairs, where I was in the middle of getting dressed, which seemed to take longer every day.

  I sat back down on the bed and resumed trying to put on my shoes in spite of the fact that I couldn’t see my feet—hadn’t seen them in months. My cousin Rose Noire bustled in, looking, as usual, like a New Age Madonna, thanks to her long, flowing, cotton-print dress and her frizzy mane of hair.

  “Look what I found for you!” she said. She was holding out a two-foot parcel wrapped in a length of mud-brown stenciled cloth and tied at several points with bits of raffia.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Open it and see. Oh, wait—it might be too heavy for you.”

  She set it down on the table and began unwrapping it herself. Ever since she’d learned of my pregnancy, Rose Noire had alternated between urging me to exercise, for the good of the babies, and deciding I was too fragile to lift anything heavier than a teacup. As she struggled with the bits of raffia, I gave thanks that she was in the latter mood at the moment.

  “Ta da!” she exclaimed, lifting a large object out of the cloth. It looked like a statue of a heavily pregnant woman with the head of a hippopotamus.

  “What is it?” I repeated.

  “It’s Tawaret! The Egyptian goddess who protects women during pregnancy and childbirth.”

  “She looks like a pregnant hippopotamus,” I said. “A very irritated pregnant hippopotamus.”

  Rose Noire, to her credit, refrained from pointing out that at the moment I looked rather like a hippopotamus myself.

  “She takes the form of a hippopotamus to protect young children from demons,” she said instead, as she handed me the statue.

  Yes, even demons would probably avoid tangling with a goddess who looked like that.

  As Rose Noire swooped down to help with my shoes she chattered with enthusiasm about Tawaret’s powers, her importance, and even her marital history. Apparently, after first marrying Apep, the god of evil, then Sobek, the crocodile god, she became the concubine of Set, who must have been more important, since Rose Noire didn’t bother to explain who he was. And I didn’t dare ask, for fear of setting her off again. It was like listening to someone talk about characters in a soap opera I didn’t watch.

  “Do you need anything else?” she asked.

  I started guiltily. I’d been turning the statue around to study it and not liking what I saw. Taw
aret was stout, with pendulous breasts, a bulging abdomen, frowning brows, and an open-mouthed snarl that revealed a large collection of sharp teeth. Her figure probably did resemble mine at the moment, but her expression reminded me of my Great Aunt Flo, who was so fond of telling me about ghastly things that had happened to women friends during childbirth and pregnancy. Not a happy association.

  Perhaps my fleeting impulse to drop the statue showed on my face.

  “I’ll just put her here where you and she can get acquainted,” Rose Noire said. She took Tawaret back and cleared a space for her on the dresser—which wasn’t an easy task. In addition to Michael’s and my relatively modest collection of grooming supplies, the dresser already held a large collection of pregnancy-related books, CDs, videos, statues, charms, amulets, herbs, organic stretch-mark creams, aromatherapy vials, and other gewgaws—most of them courtesy of Rose Noire, who seemed a great deal more enthusiastic about the whole pregnancy process than I was.

  Of course, she wasn’t living through it.

  “Meg?”

  I looked up to see Rose Noire frowning slightly at me. I was zoning out again.

  “Do I look presentable?” I asked. “I don’t want to embarrass anyone when I go downstairs to welcome our latest guest.”

  Rose Noire tweaked, tugged, and patted bits of hair and clothing that had looked perfectly fine to me, then nodded her approval and flitted off.

  On my way out of the bedroom, I waddled over to the dresser and grabbed Tawaret. Even after five minutes’ acquaintance, I’d decided she wasn’t someone I wanted to share our bedroom with. I’d find a place downstairs to stash her. Correction: display her. If Rose Noire objected, I could say I wanted everyone to benefit from her demon-chasing powers.

  When I reached the front hall I could hear torrents of Spanish outside. I peeked out one of the front windows and saw Michael, my grandfather, Rose Noire, and several of the students chatting with Señor Mendoza. Why were they keeping him out in the cold? Not waiting for me, I hoped.