Cockatiels at Seven

by Donna Andrews

  Sandie shrugged.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I only really know Jasper because of Karen. He was a couple of grades ahead of me in school, you know.”

  I nodded.

  “I should be getting back to the office,” Sandie said, picking up her tray. “Just in case Nadine calls or sticks her head in. You can’t imagine how nasty she’s been. As my gran always said, a person’s true character comes out in hard times, and Nadine’s true character is just plain mean.”

  “Good luck,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”

  “And you’ll let me know if you hear anything from Karen?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “You’re a good friend to her,” Sandie said. “You just let me know if there’s anything I can do.” She gave me a quick hug before dashing out the door.

  I went back to puzzling over the identity of the im-poster in the goatee.

  “A few grades ahead of Sandie,” I repeated. “Aha!”

  I bussed our table and headed back to my car.

  Next stop, the Caerphilly County Library.

  Like the rest of the town, the Caerphilly County Library was on a slow, summer schedule. Only a few people lounged over books in the reading section, and they looked as if they were mainly there for the air conditioning. Unfortunately, Ms. Ellie, my favorite librarian, was on a hiking vacation in the Andes and not due back until Labor Day, which meant I was on my own when it came to unearthing local information.

  In the reference section, I found what I was looking for—yearbooks from Caerphilly High School, at least fifty volumes lined up neatly on a top shelf.

  I’d estimated Mr. Goatee’s age at twenty-five, which would mean he’d graduated around seven years ago. If he graduated. Just to be on the safe side, I started with the books from ten years back and moved forward from there.

  Sure enough, there he was. Frederick (“Freddy”) Hamilton—so he must be a relative of Aubrey’s. He’d graduated nine years ago. Apart from the marching band in his freshman year and woodworking club in his senior year, he didn’t have any extracurricular activities, which made him a bit of an oddball. He looked a lot younger in his senior photo, and a lot more presentable, too—probably because he hadn’t yet grown the unfortunate goatee.

  I flipped over a few more pages and found the other name I’d been halfway looking for. Jasper Walker, also looking very young in a coat and tie, and without the scraggly ponytail.

  Jasper had a slightly better roster of extracurricular activities—computer club all four years, track and field in his freshman and sophomore years, and the woodworking club for his junior and senior years.

  Which meant, in a school as small as Caerphilly High, that Freddy Hamilton must have known Jasper.

  Of course, he hadn’t denied knowing him. Just hadn’t made a big deal about knowing him. Going to high school together, and being in a club together didn’t mean they were friends.

  And if he was related to Aubrey Hamilton, maybe there wasn’t anything sinister about the fact that he was hanging around her house while she was away for the summer.

  Still—the fact that he had not corrected my mistake, and had let me go on thinking he was Aubrey—and his clear anxiety when it had looked as if Timmy was about to go into the barn—made me wonder if Freddy had something to hide.

  Just then I realized that my purse, which was sitting on the table beside the stack of yearbooks, had begun vibrating. Which meant that someone was calling me on my cell phone.

  I closed the yearbook, grabbed my purse, and rummaged around to find the phone while I headed for the library exit. Though I stopped to answer it in the library’s vestibule, which still held a little of the air conditioning.

  “Meg? Is that you? Meg?”

  Rob, sounding panic stricken.

  “It’s me,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Get back here right away! I don’t know what to do about—no!”

  Twenty-Three

  Rob hung up, leaving me still firing questions at him. And didn’t pick up when I tried to call back. Didn’t pick up the whole dozen times I tried to call him while breaking every speed limit on the way back to the house.

  When I got to the point where I could see the house from the road, I was relieved to see that the house wasn’t on fire or surrounded by a SWAT team. In fact, the only thing I could see happening was that Rob was out in the yard, holding the garden hose with the spray nozzle on while a stark naked Timmy ran in and out of the water. Timmy was probably giggling by the look of it. I couldn’t tell Rob’s mood, though. Had the crisis, whatever it was, passed so soon, or was he pulling a fast one to cut short his stint of childcare?

  “Thank God you’re here,” he exclaimed when he saw me striding across the yard toward him. “Timmy has—no! Get back!”

  Timmy had started to run toward us, until Rob spotted him and turned the hose on him, much the way I’d seen police on television turning fire hoses on rioters. Luckily the spray from our garden hose was considerably less forceful and wasn’t likely to hurt Timmy, only make him giggle and prance around gleefully.

  “Easy with the hose,” I said. “You don’t want to knock him down or get water up his nose.”

  “No, I’m just trying to keep him the hell away from me.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “He’s covered with poop!”

  I glanced at Timmy. He didn’t seem to be covered with anything, except maybe drops of water. I could see one or two dabs of what I had supposed was mud, but nothing thirty seconds with a washcloth couldn’t fix. Still, given Rob’s well-known queasiness . . .

  “What happened?” I asked aloud.

  “I turned my back on him for a minute, and the next thing I knew, he’d taken his diaper off and was waving it around. What a mess! You should see the kitchen.”

  I closed my eyes to count to ten. At three I got hit in the face with a blast of water.

  “Dammit, enough!” I said, putting my hands on my hips. “Turn the hose off!”

  Rob dropped the hose. It landed at an angle and continued to squirt me just below the left knee until he reached the spigot and turned it off.

  “More! More!” Timmy called. He ran in to pick up the spray head and shake it, to make it start again. I snagged him.

  “Come on Timmy,” I said. “Uncle Rob and I are going to give you a bubble bath. Rob, put on your bathing suit.”

  Timmy didn’t actually look particularly dirty, but I shared Rob’s squeamishness to the extent of wanting to make sure. And besides, I knew the only way to calm Rob down was to convince him that Timmy was no longer noxious. I hauled Timmy into Michael’s and my bathroom and gave him a quick scrubbing in the walk-in shower while Rob, at my orders, prepared the bubble bath and fetched Timmy’s bath toys.

  “There,” I said, plopping Timmy in the tub. “Splash to your heart’s content.”

  “You’re so good with kids,” Rob said. “I couldn’t get him to cooperate.”

  “I didn’t get him to cooperate,” I said. “I just picked him up. Where was he running around without his diaper?”

  “All over the kitchen,” Rob said, wrinkling his nose.

  “Keep him entertained while I clean the kitchen, then.”

  Apart from the diaper dumped in one corner, the kitchen seemed about as clean as it had been when I’d left it. Either Rob had cleaned up the marks left by Timmy’s diaper-swinging rampage or he’d exaggerated the whole incident out of proportion. My money was on exaggeration.

  I dumped Rob’s and Timmy’s discarded clothes in the washer. Then I shed my own clothes, trying to ignore the fact that I had a sizeable audience—the snakes that had so disconcerted Michael last night. While in theory I knew they were only responding to light and motion, and not watching me with any kind of menace, it was still rather creepy.

  “We need to get you guys back to the zoo,” I said to the snakes, and reached for my cell phone—at least, I reached for where my cell phone would be
if I hadn’t just dumped my jeans, cell phone and all, into the washer. I fished out the phone, started the machine, and called Dad.

  As the phone rang, I rummaged through the piles of clean clothes on the folding table. I could tell how busy Michael and I were by how full the table was. Right now, it contained over half of our wardrobe.

  I got Dad’s voice mail.

  “Dad,” I said. “When you get this, I need you to get the snakes out of our basement ASAP. I want everything to go smoothly when Mother comes over tonight, and you know how she feels about snakes. And don’t just stash them somewhere else over here—if she starts measuring one room, there’s no telling where she’ll go.”

  Okay, it wasn’t quite a lie—odds were Mother would find some reason to drop by tonight, if only for a few moments; and it had been at least a week since she’d dragged me off to some corner of the house to propose a decorating scheme, so we were probably overdue for that, too. I threw on some clothes, waved at the snakes for what I hoped would be the last time, and went up to clean the kitchen—which could use a good scrub, even if Rob had seriously exaggerated the damage done by Timmy’s diaper-slinging.

  As I scrubbed, I kept an ear open to make sure the splashing and squeals of laughter from upstairs still sounded as if both boys were happy. After Timmy’s bath, it would be time for his supper, followed by watching some of his favorite videos and then getting him into pajamas and reading him a few stories.

  I supposed I could have delegated more of it to Rob, or to the various other family members who had begun drifting in. But I was feeling irrationally guilty for dragging Timmy to a murder scene and then abandoning him to Rob’s care. And I also found it a lot easier to forget about finding Jasper’s body with Timmy around.

  Although having Timmy around didn’t ease my anxiety about Karen. Quite the contrary.

  I continued to brood and fret, unnoticed by the rest of the family—possibly because I spent a lot of my time in the kitchen, cleaning up, or in the basement, catching up on the laundry. At least until Michael came home.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked about two seconds after he clattered down the stairs to find me.

  “Apart from the fact that we still have too many snakes?”

  “One is too many,” he said. “What else is wrong? You look worried.”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “At least nothing that hasn’t been wrong for the last several days.”

  “But it’s starting to get to you,” he said. He pulled a stack of clean but tangled laundry toward him and began sorting it out.

  “How can she just leave him here like this?” I said.

  “I know it feels like a big imposition,” Michael began.

  “Screw the imposition,” I said. “I’m not talking about the effect on us. Clearly Timmy needs a safe place to stay for whatever reason—no problem. He can absolutely stay here as long as he needs to. But what kind of a mother could leave her kid somewhere for three days with people she doesn’t know that well, on no notice, and not even call to see if he’s okay?”

  “A pretty lousy mother,” Michael said. “Which Karen isn’t, as far as I can see.”

  “You’ve only met her a couple of times,” I said. “How can you possibly know what kind of a mother she is?”

  “From Timmy. He’s a pretty good kid. Rambunctious and headstrong—I suspect she’s a little more indulgent than I would be—kids need limits. But then again, we don’t know what he’s like at home, under normal, unstressed conditions. I suspect she does a decent job of parenting, so dumping him here on no notice and disappearing for days isn’t in character. Which means there must be something else going on. I have no idea what.”

  “I have a whole lot of ideas,” I said. “None of them reassuring.”

  “Such as?”

  “Maybe she only planned to leave Timmy here a little while but hasn’t come back or called because she was physically unable. She could be dead, seriously ill, kidnapped, in jail, in a looney bin, or traveling on a spaceship to the third moon of Jupiter with a malfunctioning deep space radio.”

  “Plausible,” he said. “Well, except for the spaceship theory. No one goes to the moons of Jupiter anymore. So twentieth century! Alpha Centauri, maybe.”

  I smiled to show that I appreciated his attempt to lighten my mood, not because anything was going to strike me as funny under the circumstances. Michael shoved his hand into a sock, waggled two fingers at me through a hole in the toe, and then pulled it off and tossed it into the rag bin. Okay, I chuckled slightly at that.

  “Second possibility.” I went on. “She is physically able to come back or communicate with us if she wanted to, but has some reason not to. Which would pretty much boil down to bad guys after her, and she’s afraid to lead them here, or even to communicate with us. Afraid of involving us—and Timmy—in whatever danger she thinks is after her.”

  Michael paused with a half-folded towel in his hands to ponder that.

  “Problem with that theory is that Timmy’s whereabouts aren’t exactly secret,” he said. “Anyone who really wanted to find him could, anytime.”

  “So maybe she’s only afraid that something will happen to her and doesn’t want it to happen with Timmy nearby,” I said.

  “Or maybe she was—and is—too stressed out to think it through and realize that someone trying to find her could use Timmy as leverage. As a hostage.”

  “Which would mean Timmy’s in danger.”

  We both involuntarily glanced up at the ceiling. We could hear Timmy squealing with delight at something.

  “I’ll kill anyone who tries it,” I said. “Maybe I should take him away someplace. Hide him until this blows over.”

  “I’d feel better if you were both here, with lots of friends and family around,” Michael said. “I think that’s safer in the long run than trying to go it alone. And frankly, Karen on the run from bad guys doesn’t seem to me the most likely option. I can think of at least one you haven’t mentioned yet.”

  “Such as?”

  “She’s dodging the police. Not necessarily because she’s done anything wrong,” he added, seeing my face. “But what if she’s afraid they’ll arrest her—for Jasper’s murder, or for the embezzlement—and thinks she needs to be free to clear herself?”

  “Seems unlikely,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Are you the only person who thinks maybe she could do a better job of finding the bad guys than the police?”

  “I don’t think I can do a better job,” I protested. “Chief Burke has the skills and the resources. But he’s got other things on his plate, and you can’t expect him to drop them all to focus on looking for Karen and—”

  “And you can,” Michael said. “What if Karen feels the same way and is off doing what she thinks is the best thing for her and Timmy’s future?”

  “So we trust Karen?” I said, after a bit.

  “We keep our minds open,” Michael said. “And how about if I drop by the station tomorrow and make Chief Burke aware of our concerns about Timmy’s safety?”

  “You think he won’t listen to me?”

  “I think maybe he’ll be more inclined to listen to me when I do my concerned, overprotective husband routine. And did I mention that I offered to give Dr. Driscoll a ride tomorrow? I’m sure he won’t mind coming into the station for a few minutes to look stern and disapproving if the chief doesn’t take me seriously enough.”

  “And since Dr. Driscoll is Karen’s department head,” I said, nodding.

  “More important, Dr. Driscoll’s department ultimately oversees the Camcops, with whom Chief Burke is working so hard to build a more congenial relationship . . . .”

  “Oh, excellent,” I said.

  “Normally I like to avoid all this town versus college political stuff,” Michael said, shaking his head. “But this is serious.”

  “Thanks,” I said. We folded and hung in amicable silence for a few minutes, until I came across a t-shirt I’d never seen bef
ore.

  “This isn’t yours, is it?” I asked, holding it up.

  “No,” he said. “What’s ‘Death Cab for Cutie’?”

  “A band Rob likes,” I said. “I don’t mind him using the washer and dryer, but I draw the line at doing his laundry for him.”

  “It could be the t-shirt Timmy puked on,” Michael said.

  “Puked? When? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

  “Relax,” Michael said. “This morning, before you got up. It was only a little bit, and it only happened because Rob was tossing him in the air too soon after breakfast. He’s fine.”

  Okay, Timmy was fine. But if taking care of kids was going to turn me into a nervous wreck . . .

  I’d worry about that later. We finished folding all the laundry and Michael offered to put it all away. The laundry room was empty—well, except for the snakes. I stuck out my tongue at them—after all, they’d been flicking theirs at me for hours now. They didn’t seem to notice.

  Twenty-Four

  Up in the kitchen, Rose Noire was fixing dinner—for the rest of us as well as Timmy. Mother, of course, was supervising. I heard a lively game of tag going on in the hallway and went out to see. I found Dr. Blake sitting on the hall bench, watching as Dad, Rob, and Timmy raced up the stairs.

  “So,” he said, when the giggling had retreated to the second floor. “I understand you had quite an exciting day!”

  I blinked in surprise, and glanced quickly over my shoulder to make sure he was talking to me.

  “That’s one word for it,” I said. “I actually think ‘lousy’ is a better adjective for any day that includes finding a dead body.”

  He beamed.

  “Tell me about it,” he said. He leaned back and folded his hands, gazing at me expectantly. It was rather like the way Timmy looked when I’d agreed that yes, yes, I’d read him another story.

  “Why?” I asked. “I didn’t see a single endangered species all day.”

  “There’s more to life than endangered species.”