Stork Raving Mad

by Donna Andrews

“Fascinating,” Michael said at last. “And while normally I feel sorry for anyone who’s been bashed that badly by a reviewer, I can make an exception in Dr. Wright’s case.”

  “Yes,” Abe said. “Just because life spoiled her dream of an acting career doesn’t excuse her torturing drama students for the rest of her life.”

  “Inexcusable,” Michael said. “But at least now we understand why.”

  “By the way,” I said. “What’s the scoop on Kathy Borgstrom? The chief heard that she was expelled from the graduate drama program for plagiarism.”

  “She was,” Abe said. “The charges turned out to be unsubstantiated.”

  “The charges were phony,” Art put in. “It was a frame.”

  “We have always suspected it was,” Abe said. “And we might have been able to prove it if Dr. Wright had been willing to cooperate.”

  “We did cast enough doubt to allow her to work for the department,” Art said.

  “So she’s got even more reason to hate Dr. Wright,” I said.

  None of them said anything, so I gathered they agreed with me. And maybe they were wondering, just a little, if Kathy were guilty.

  “Should we be going?” Art said, after a while. “It’s 7:55.”

  “No wonder I’m so tired,” I muttered. I usually began the night’s tossing and turning at eight, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spent so much of the day not only out of bed, but on my feet.

  “Yes,” Abe said. “The rehearsal starts in five minutes.”

  “We need to get seats near The Face,” Abe said.

  “Ramon’s saving us three at the front,” Michael said.

  “Go get ’em,” I murmured.

  I heard footsteps. I felt Michael kiss the top of my head and twitch the covers up a little. Then I faded into sleep.

  Chapter 27

  I was dreaming that an army of people was crawling over the house, some of them cleaning it while others messed it up again so the cleaners wouldn’t run out of things to do, and all of them keeping me from sleeping. And just when I finally managed to lock myself in the hall bathroom, the doorbell began ringing over and over again.

  I woke up and answered the phone.

  “Meg?” It was Clarence Rutledge, Spike’s vet. “Did I wake you?”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, sitting upright. “Is Spike all right?”

  “Spike’s fine,” he said. “You can send someone to bring him home again tomorrow.”

  “Damn,” I said. “I was hoping he’d require at least a week of hospitalization. What about Hawkeye?”

  “He isn’t fine yet, but he will be eventually,” Clarence said. “He’s a lucky dog. If Sammy and Horace hadn’t gotten him in so fast, and if your father hadn’t been around to help—well, all’s well that ends well.”

  “I just hope they catch the bastard who did it,” I said.

  “That’s why I was calling. Is the chief still there? I’ve taken the DNA swab from Hawkeye and wanted to find out what to do with it.”

  “He’s out in the barn, watching the play,” I said. “You could leave a voice mail on his cell phone.”

  “Do you have the number?”

  I fished out my cell phone, looked up the chief’s number, gave it to Clarence, wished him a good night, and turned out the light again.

  Unfortunately, by this time I was wide awake.

  I tossed and turned for a while, worrying about Kathy, Danny, Ramon, and even the unlikable Bronwyn. And about the play. What was The Face thinking? Were Michael and his colleagues making any progress in the quest for secession?

  I finally decided that as long as I was up, I might as well go to the bathroom. I reached over to the bedside table for the flashlight I kept there. I’d gotten in the habit of using the flashlight to keep from waking up Michael every time I had to go to the bathroom in the night.

  It wasn’t on the bedside table. I turned the light on and looked again. No flashlight anywhere.

  Of course, now that I had the light on, I could just as easily have gone to the bathroom without the flashlight. Michael was still down at the rehearsal—probably wouldn’t come to bed for hours. But the lack of the flashlight bothered me. I could always just use the light and wake Michael. Or ask him to get me one when he came up to bed. We kept several downstairs in the hall closet.

  Or I could go down to the hall closet and fetch one for myself. The self-sufficiency of that pleased me.

  I got up, stuck my cell phone in the pocket of my robe, and made my pit stop before heading for the stairs. And then turned back to grab my keys. I remembered that for once I’d actually locked the closet, as we’d been trying to do, so the flashlights and other useful items it contained would still be there when Michael and I went looking for them.

  As I climbed down the stairs, I realized that I didn’t feel all that bad. In fact, considering how long and exhausting a day I was having, I was feeling remarkably energetic. My back felt better than usual. Perhaps all the exercise was good for me.

  Or perhaps I was still revved up from too much excitement.

  The front hall was quiet. Apparently Ramon had a full house for the dress rehearsal. I unlocked the hall closet and rummaged through the shelves until I found a flashlight on one of the higher shelves. I tested it—working fine. And then I stuck it in my pocket and turned to go.

  Something fluttered to the floor in front of me. I stooped to pick it up and saw that it was a worn envelope in the characteristic pale blue used for all official Caerphilly College papers. And there was something typed on the outside: “Dr. Enrique Blanco—confidential.”

  I turned it over. It was folded in half, so I unfolded it and saw that although the gummed flap had been sealed at some point, someone had opened it. A good thing, since it saved me from the moral dilemma of whether to unseal it. All I had to do was pop the flap open to sneak a peek at the contents.

  I pulled out several folded pieces of paper and opened them up. The top one was a photocopy of a yearbook page. The top half of the page showed a dozen teenagers lined up in two rows under the headline “Business Club.” The bottom showed the chess club gathered picturesquely around a table. Two of their number were glaring at each other over a chess board, while the rest assumed eloquent attitudes of fear, triumph, scorn, or indifference. Who’d have expected such a flair for the dramatic from a group normally dismissed as the school geeks? Were any of these hams now treading the boards in our barn? I pored over the photo and studied the names beneath, but none were familiar.

  I went back to the top photo. Business club? Was this some kind of organization for high schoolers who had already figured out where they were getting their MBAs and which corporation would be the target of their first hostile takeover? Not my idea of a fun way to spend your after-school hours, and from the looks on the faces of the four girls and eight boys, probably not theirs either. The business club members had “pad your extracurricular activity list for that college application” written all over their faces.

  Most were staring awkwardly at the camera, wearing the sort of fixed smiles that always result when the photographer says, “Hold that smile. . . . Just one more shot.” And to make it worse, they were all sporting fashions from the late ’70s and early ’80s, including some truly memorable examples of why big hair had been such a hideous trend. Was it quite fair to shudder at fashion crimes you’d once committed yourself? Surely most of these earnest-looking young future businesspeople had sworn off mullets and Farrah ’dos and grown up to regret what they were wearing here?

  At the far right side of the back row I spotted Enrique Blanco. Apart from the slight suggestion of a mullet, his hair wasn’t too bad, and his clothes were pretty bland compared to the rest of the crew. Only his air of superiority remained unchanged. He stared out with a faint frown on his face, as if preparing to chide the photographer for taking too much of his valuable time.

  I turned my head aside to sneeze. The old papers must be dustier than they looked.<
br />
  I turned back to the photocopy and read the caption. Just a list of the names, but I studied them anyway.

  Odd. Enrique Blanco wasn’t listed. Yet there was his face, radiating juvenile pruniness.

  I counted the names till I got to the seventh one, corresponding to his place in the group shot. The face I knew as Enrique Blanco was listed as belonging to a Henry White.

  Henry White?

  Blanco was Spanish for white, and if I wasn’t mistaken, Enrique was the Spanish equivalent of Henry. Had Blanco gone through a period of juvenile rejection of his ethnic heritage? Bronwyn wouldn’t be surprised.

  I flipped the paper over and looked at the next sheet. It was a bad photocopy of what appeared to be a court document of some sort.

  After peering at it for a few moments, I suddenly realized what I was seeing. A copy of a twenty-year-old court document granting Henry S. White a change of name to Enrique Blanco.

  No wonder Blanco had been so unsympathetic to Ramon’s cause and so reluctant to address Señor Mendoza in Spanish. He probably wasn’t Latino at all.

  The other papers in the envelope were a medley of little Henry’s greatest hits since changing his name. Enrique Blanco accepting a scholarship from the Spanish Culture Association. Enrique Blanco awarded a certificate for outstanding Hispanic student at his business school. Enrique Blanco being honored as the Latino administrator of the year by some other organization.

  Why had someone hidden an envelope in our closet containing evidence that would do serious damage to Dr. Blanco’s career if it were made public?

  My nose was tickling again. I turned my head again and sneezed several times.

  It wasn’t dust. I lifted the envelope to my nose, took a hesitant sniff, and then had to turn aside to sneeze six times in a row. The envelope was permeated with the faintly acrid and completely annoying smell of Dr. Wright’s perfume.

  Had this envelope come out of Dr. Wright’s purse?

  Most probably. When she’d looked in her purse for her PDA—was it only this morning?—she’d taken out her wallet and a folded envelope. I was willing to bet this was the same envelope—and also the reason for Blanco’s curious willingness to connive in Dr. Wright’s persecution of the drama students. If she had proof of his underhanded behavior and threatened him with exposure, he’d probably have done anything she asked. Until he got a chance to eliminate her.

  And he had probably taken these papers from her and then hidden them in our closet in case the chief searched him, either individually or as part of a general search of all the suspects. Rotten luck for him that I’d decided to lock the closet after he’d stowed the papers there.

  I needed to tell the chief about this. It gave Blanco the strongest possible motive for murdering Dr. Wright. And if he was, by his own admission, her closest friend at the college, who more likely to know about her diabetes?

  And from his retreat in my office, out in the barn, he could easily sneak across the yard and in through the sunporch to the library. What if he’d been in the library when Randall Shiffley entered the library? He could have shouted and waved outside the window not because he was trying to get in, but because he was trying to disguise the fact that he’d already entered, killed her, and fled when he heard Randall’s approach.

  I stuffed the papers back in the envelope and reached for my cell phone as I backed out of the closet.

  I bumped into someone on my way out.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t see you.”

  Suddenly I felt something cold and hard poking into the middle of my back.

  “Don’t move.”

  Chapter 28

  “Very funny, Dr. Blanco,” I said, forcing a laugh and projecting my voice as much as possible. “But I’m a little tired for practical jokes. Why don’t—”

  “Shut up and give me the envelope,” he said, emphasizing his words with a jab from the gun. At least I assumed it was a gun. I didn’t think Blanco had enough imagination to fool me with a pencil or an umbrella. “And stop shouting. It won’t do you any good. Everybody’s out in the barn watching that wretched farce.”

  “Does that mean you’re hoping The Fa—the president will cancel Ramon’s show?”

  “I couldn’t care less whether it’s canceled or not,” he said. “That was Jean Wright’s particular obsession.”

  “Great,” I said. “Then we have no quarrel. Here.”

  I held the envelope over my left shoulder. After a second, I felt it snatched away.

  “Now if you’ll just let me go back to sleep—” I began.

  “Oh, do shut up,” he said, jabbing the gun in my back. “And drop the cell phone.”

  I complied.

  “There’s no need to—”

  “Shut up!” He jabbed me again. “You’re annoying me, and you’re going to make me late for my plane.”

  “Plane?” I echoed.

  “Yes, I’m leaving,” he said. “And no, I’m not going to tell you where I’m going. Let’s just say there’s no extradition and my money will be waiting there to meet me.”

  A sudden thought hit me.

  “Your money?” I echoed. “Strictly speaking, aren’t we talking about the college’s money?”

  “Mine now,” he said. “And it’s all Jean Wright’s fault.”

  “It was her idea to embezzle from the college?”

  “No!” His voice was scornful. “She has enough family money to have no financial worries, and she’s not interested in anything except her stupid little department. But if she hadn’t been blackmailing me to help her with all her dirty tricks, I wouldn’t have needed the money. I could have just stayed here and built up my resumé until I finally got a well-paid administrative job at an important college. But then she came along. And I knew sooner or later she’d spill the beans.”

  “That you’d cheated your way into your position, taking scholarships and awards that were intended for deserving Latino students.”

  “I was deserving, too,” he said. “I was tired of seeing people whose grades weren’t any better than mine getting all the breaks just because they belonged to some minority, while I had to work and take out thousands of dollars of loans to get what was being handed to them.”

  I was tempted to echo Ramon and point out that he didn’t know what those other students had gone through to get those grades and what kind of prejudice they’d experienced. But I got a feeling that starting a debate over affirmative action wasn’t in my best interest at the moment. Not with my opponent holding a gun at my back.

  Suddenly I realized that my legs and feet were wet. Had I peed myself out of fright? Not my normal reaction to danger. I usually coped well as long as a crisis lasted, and then got the shakes afterward. But who knew what the hormones were doing to my normal reactions.

  Wait—the hormones . . .

  “Oh my God!” Blanco exclaimed. “You just peed on my foot!”

  “No, I didn’t,” I snapped. “My water just broke!”

  “Your what?” He stepped away from me, and I’d have breathed a sigh of relief, but when I turned around, the gun was still pointed at me.

  “My water,” I said. “Amniotic fluid. What the babies are floating in.”

  “Yuck!” His tone was a curious mixture of disgust and puzzlement, as if he were trying to figure out if this was less gross than being peed on, or more. For that matter, I wasn’t sure myself whether my water had broken or whether the stress had made my bladder give way.

  “Wait!” he said. “Does this mean—?”

  “That I’m going into labor?” I said. “Probably. I have no idea how soon, though. Could be anytime, though since—aaaaahhhhh!”

  I faked a contraction, clutching the twins and doubling over as if in pain. I wasn’t sure how long a first contraction was supposed to last. Probably best if I make it relatively short, though long enough to rattle him. I relaxed my tensed body and glanced back at Blanco.

  He was still pointing the gun at me and looked
annoyed, not rattled.

  “Stop that,” he said. “We don’t have time for that now.”

  “I can’t very well stop it,” I said. “It’s labor. It happens when it happens, and you can’t—AAAAHHHH!”

  This time the contraction was all too real, as if my body wanted to say, “You think that was what labor’s like? You have no idea. Watch this!” I vaguely remembered that there was something I was supposed to be doing to get me through this. But what?

  Patterned breathing! That was it! If only I could remember how it went. I’d thought the father’s role as a Lamaze coach was designed to make him feel like an integral part of the birth process rather than the anxious, useless bystander he’d have been a few decades ago. Now I realized how critical it was going to be to have Michael beside me, shouting instructions about whatever the hell it was I was supposed to do to get through this horrible pain.

  “I said stop that!”

  It had to be several centuries later, and for all I knew, Blanco had been uselessly nagging at me to stop the whole time.

  As the pain finally eased, I heard a burst of laughter in the distance. From the rehearsal in the barn. They had to be pretty loud for us to hear them all the way in here. No way they’d have heard me over that, especially since everyone thought I was upstairs in bed. I was on my own.

  “Get up!” Blanco snapped.

  I found myself staring up at him from the floor, where I had crouched to ride out the pain. The gun was still pointed at me. I stood up, more than a little shaky. The gun lifted, but only to the level of my belly.

  A wave of rage surged through me and I suddenly knew the answer to one of those philosophical questions the students were so fond of debating. Was I capable of killing another human being? Yes, in a heartbeat. At least this particular excuse for a human being. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt that way if he’d kept that gun aimed at my head. But there it was, pointing at my twins, and if the sheer force of my anger had any power to touch him, he’d already be lying in small bloody pieces on the ground.

  Just wishing him dead wasn’t going to work, though. I’d have to figure out a way to make it happen.