Owl Be Home for Christmas

by Donna Andrews

  Smith, Belasco, and Whitmore, the three young men who’d had the bad luck to be sitting at Frogmore’s table, were sitting together. Had they arrived at the conference friends, or was their friendship a relatively new one, forged by their sufferings here—enduring Frogmore, witnessing his death, being stalked by Dr. Czerny, and finally having to undergo a police interrogation? I’d be curious to find out. Horace went to notify them, while I led the chief over to the table where Grandfather was sitting with several other persons of interest.

  “A visitor from the outside world! Welcome!” Grandfather exclaimed when he saw the chief. “This is Chief Burke,” he said, turning to the rest of the table. “Chief, that’s Dr. Vera Craine.”

  “Nice to put a face to the voice.” Dr. Craine offered her hand.

  Grandfather proceeded to introduce Dr. Green and Dr. Lindquist, and then looked up at the chief with a twinkle in his eye.

  “So, are you here to interrogate us in person?”

  “First things first,” the chief said. “We have a warrant to search some of your rooms. Doctors Craine, Blake, Green, and Lindquist. I don’t have a physical copy of the warrant with me, but I can read you the text if you like, and I can provide you or your attorney with a written copy as soon as the weather permits. You’ll be notified when we’re finished, and at that time you’ll need to pick up a new key at the front desk.”

  Grandfather and Dr. Craine nodded matter-of-factly. Dr. Green muttered, “Oh, dear,” and wiped his palms on his trouser leg. Dr. Lindquist beamed as if this were one of the more entertaining occurrences of the weekend. I was relieved that none of them asked for a formal reading of the search warrant, since I doubted it would be either a short document or an entertaining one.

  “You’ll tell us what you find, I assume?” Grandfather said.

  “If we take any items into custody as possible evidence, we’ll give you a search warrant return, which is basically an itemized receipt.”

  No one had any other questions, so I led the chief over to where Melissa McKendrick was sitting. She, like the crew at Grandfather’s table, took it calmly.

  Horace had finished notifying the three lost lambs, as I called them, and had moved on to Dr. Czerny. Who didn’t seem at all calm about the prospect of being searched. But you couldn’t exactly say that he was resisting the idea—more that it appeared to have triggered an anxiety attack. We hurried over to rescue Horace.

  “You’ll notice we’re searching the rooms of everyone who was at Dr. Frogmore’s table,” the chief pointed out. “Purely a matter of procedure in some cases, of course.” Eventually he managed to calm Czerny down. We headed back to the Command Post to arrange the logistics for our search.

  Actually, their search, I reminded myself. While my help had saved them time on what I assumed amounted to serving the search warrants, they could probably do just fine without me during the search itself.

  Ekaterina was waiting for us in the Command Post, with a fresh laundry cart and a carton of gold-embossed lunch bags.

  “Did Michael tell you what he and your sons are doing?” she asked.

  “Nothing too destructive, I hope,” I said, warily.

  “Nothing of the kind!” she exclaimed. “They are helping the staff with snow removal. That is most helpful. Now that it has stopped snowing, some of our guests will be eager to leave, and I wish to ensure that when the roads are ready, they will find no impediment on the grounds of the Inn.”

  “Amen,” I said.

  I was about to head back to the conference when Horace spoke up.

  “Chief,” he asked. “Since there’s only the two of us—can we bring someone along to help with the logistics?”

  Which was how I ended up pushing the laundry cart and toting a clipboard that held a supply of blank search warrant return forms.

  We started out on the fifth floor. Ekaterina walked briskly up to each door, knocked, and then opened the door with her master key card. Then she and I watched with interest as Horace and the chief quickly and methodically searched each room.

  I rather enjoyed watching them search Dr. Green’s room. He had at least a dozen crystals of various sizes and shapes strewn about in what appeared to be a random fashion, although I suspected they had been carefully placed according to the principles of feng shui, vastu shastra, or some idiosyncratic energy flow system of Green’s own invention. A collection of reeds in a hotel water glass made an improvised stick diffuser, and the air positively reeked of lavender. A yoga mat was unrolled on the floor between the bed and the window, and a bamboo flute lay on the dresser.

  “It’s as if he and Rose Noire were twins separated at birth,” I murmured to Ekaterina.

  And had he really brought along all of this new age paraphernalia to the conference or had Rose Noire supplied some of it? I could easily imagine her taking pity on a kindred spirit, stranded on the wrong coast without an adequate supply of crystals and essential oils. And had Rose Noire lent him her treasured unicorn-shaped incense burner or did he own an identical one? Food for thought in either case.

  The only feature of interest to the chief and Horace, though, was the bathroom where—in addition to marveling at the large number of vitamins, supplements, and both alternative and conventional over-the-counter medicines—they studied the spot where the black widow spider had been found. They eventually decided that it was theoretically possible for her to have traveled through the opening around the sink’s drain pipe into the wall. And Dr. Frogmore’s bathroom was on the other side of the wall, so it was remotely possible that the spider could have traveled from one to the other. But not all that probable.

  “And Dr. Langslow doesn’t think there’s any chance he died of a spider bite,” the chief added. “So it’s not all that relevant anyway.”

  Since I was the one tasked with writing out the search warrant return forms for Horace’s signature, I was relieved that they only confiscated a few items from Dr. Green’s vast health arsenal—although I could already foresee that he’d declare some or all of the missing items vital to his continued survival and pitch a fit. And unfortunately for Horace, the chief wanted a list of any and all medicines found during their search. Dr. Green took up three pages.

  Dr. Craine’s room wasn’t nearly as interesting. Only a modest collection of medicines, to Horace’s relief, and none of them of sufficient interest to be taken as evidence. We moved on to Dr. Lindquist’s room.

  Ekaterina and I were watching from the doorway with diminished interest, since the first two rooms had produced nothing of interest. And at first it looked as if the search of Lindquist’s room would be similarly uneventful.

  Then while the chief was finishing up a methodical examination of the contents of the suitcase, Horace, who had been inspecting the contents of Lindquist’s conference tote bag, said something under his breath. Then he held up an object in one gloved hand and called out to the chief.

  “Check this out.”

  Ekaterina and I forgot about trying to be nonchalant as we peered into the room, trying to see what he’d found.

  A wadded-up piece of paper?

  I took out my phone and surreptitiously used its camera’s zoom function to get a closer look. Definitely paper, but not wadded up—folded up.

  Horace unfolded it slightly and showed it to the chief, who nodded solemnly. Horace looked up, saw Ekaterina and me gawking, and couldn’t repress a quick smile.

  “Is that what I think it is?” the chief asked Horace.

  Chapter 25

  “It appears to be the product information insert from a package of sublingual nitroglycerin spray,” Horace said, no doubt as much for our benefit as the chief’s. “I’ll check it against the bottle we found in the ballroom, but I’m pretty sure it’s a match.”

  “Meg,” the chief said. “Unless I’m mistaken, I saw several tote bags just like this down in the ballroom.”

  “Every conference attendee got one,” I said. “We put the conference program in it, and t
heir badges, and a few other goodies Grandfather convinced various organizations to donate—coupons and flyers from places like the Audubon Society, the American Bird Conservancy, the National Wildlife Federation. A copy of the Cornell Ornithology Lab’s bird-watching calendar for the coming year. Some of them carry it around and use it to stash handouts and water bottles, and whatever other gear they might not want to run back to their rooms for. Others just leave it in their rooms once they check in.”

  “And idea which camp Lindquist would have fallen into?”

  “No idea—you might be able to tell from the contents.”

  Horace picked up the bag’s contents from the table where he’d placed them and began sorting through them.

  “Here’s the calendar Meg mentioned,” he said. “Discount on Audubon membership—wouldn’t they all already belong? National Wildlife Federation pamphlet. Caerphilly Inn notepad and pen.”

  “May I take a look?” I asked. “I know exactly what we packed in those bags.”

  Horace brought over the tote bag’s contents and showed them to me, item by item.

  “Original contents,” I said when he’d finished. “Nothing added, nothing missing.”

  “Except for this.” Horace held up the package insert.

  “In other words,” the chief said, “while Dr. Lindquist will almost certainly claim that someone else planted the insert in his tote bag, it appears that he brought the bag to his room and left it here untouched.”

  “Of course, he hasn’t done anything to personalize his bag,” I pointed out. “There’s a slot on one side that could hold a business card—do you think any of them ever use it? No, they all run around picking up each other’s identical bags.”

  “So even though it’s almost certainly his, his lawyer will try to cast all kinds of doubt on it.” The chief sighed. “We’ll keep looking.”

  “Maybe it will have fingerprints.” Horace tucked the folded paper into an evidence bag.

  “Let’s finish inventorying his medicines and move on,” the chief said.

  The next search was uneventful. It turned out that the three lost lambs were sharing a room—only Belasco, the junior professor, was registered, but Smith’s and Whitmore’s gear was definitely there. I wasn’t sure how Ekaterina would take this. She’d never have thrown them out in the storm and probably wouldn’t even have charged Belasco any extra fees, but still …

  “Wasn’t it nice of Dr. Belasco to take those poor students in when they figured out they were going to get stranded here?” I said. “And I do hope they were able to get their deposit back from the bed-and-breakfast they’d originally planned to stay in.”

  I was relieved to see that she took the discovery of the two stowaways calmly. It probably helped that she’d have been hard pressed to find another room for them. And the search of their room was unproductive. Later, perhaps, I’d suggest to the lambs the wisdom of being seen spending money freely in the Mount Vernon Grill. And point out to Ekaterina what while Smith and Whitmore might be stowaways, at least they didn’t appear to be homicidal ones.

  The search of Dr. Czerny’s room was also unproductive. And a little depressing. The entire top of the dresser was taken up with stacks of handouts for Dr. Frogmore’s presentations and bundles of Dr. Frogmore’s academic papers and reprints from professional journals, only a couple of them including Czerny himself as a junior author. On the desk were the galleys of a lengthy and highly technical article—again by Dr. Frogmore, although it looked as if Dr. Czerny had been doing the Herculean task of proofreading it. Apart from a few items of clothing hung in the closet and a handful of toiletries on the counter in the bathroom, he didn’t seem to have unpacked—his suitcase was still half full of socks, underwear, and whatever else he’d brought.

  We locked the laundry cart in the Command Post before searching the cottages, though I was still allowed to come along, in case they needed help carrying the evidence bags.

  Apparently my parents had taken in Melissa McKendrick, who was sharing the study in the Washington Cottage with Rose Noire. I had a feeling Melissa had packed in a hurry when she’d realized she was likely to be snowbound. Everything she’d brought fit neatly in one drawer. Although I doubted she and Rose Noire had had quite as much fun with the Murphy beds as the boys, they’d clearly taken advantage of the library. Melissa appeared to be in the middle of A Wrinkle in Time.

  And while we found a lot of really interesting things at Grandfather’s cottage—a large collection of owl pellets and a taxidermied wombat for starters—none of them appeared related to the case. Which was a good thing, actually—so many people had been coming and going from the cottage that tying anything found there to any one of the chief’s suspects would have been next to impossible.

  When we’d finished with the cottage, the chief thanked me and Ekaterina for our assistance and he and Horace headed back to the Command Post. Ekaterina dashed off to see about preparations for the upcoming Hanukkah dinner. I had long since regretted having nothing to eat since the croissant that had constituted my breakfast. I was hovering between dashing off to see if there was anything left from the buffet and retreating to our own cottage to see if there was anything in the refrigerator there when my walkie-talkie sputtered to life.

  “Meg?” Grandfather’s voice. “Meg? I need you to do something.”

  Of course. I glanced at my phone. Well, the buffet was probably out anyway. The lunch hour was past, and we were ten minutes into the next panel session. I hoped whatever Grandfather had in mind could wait until after I’d grabbed a bite of lunch.

  “What do you need?” I asked.

  “Percival. We’re canceling the pesticide panel—it was Frogmore’s show anyway. I’m substituting a session with Percival. I’m not quite as knowledgeable as Clarence, but I think with your dad’s help I can give a pretty good presentation on his case. We need someone to bring him to the conference area. I’m filling in on a panel now, or I’d do it.”

  And that someone would probably have to be me, I realized with a sigh. The attitude of the hotel staff toward Percival ranged from wary to downright terrified, and besides, Grandfather took a dim view of allowing just anyone to take charge of his owl. And knowing Grandfather, I’d be better off fetching the owl and then eating. He wouldn’t leave me in peace until Percival was at his side.

  “Remember, I don’t do mice,” I said.

  “That’s fine,” he said. “I’ll want to feed him during the presentation, so skip the crickets, too.”

  If Michael and the boys were available—but no, they were shoveling snow.

  Never mind. I could do this. I’d taken him down there, hadn’t I? His cage was huge and bulky, but not heavy, and I’d managed to get it onto the dolly before with no problem.

  I made sure I had the right key card in my pocket and began the long trek down to the storage room.

  Percival seemed moderately glad to see me, probably because he was expecting more crickets.

  “Sorry, pal.” I was putting on the heavy leather gloves we kept there for anyone who might be putting their digits within reach of the owl’s formidable beak and talons, as I’d have to do when I lifted the cage onto the dolly.

  But Percival remained well-behaved—probably because before tackling his cage I’d stashed the mice and crickets on the front end of the dolly, thus galvanizing his attention on them. I rolled the dolly over to one end of the cage and heaved that end up until it was resting on the edge of the dolly’s platform.

  Percival ruffled his feathers slightly and fixed his attention on me rather than the mice, making me glad I had the gloves. He looked annoyed, but then he always did. It occurred to me that “resting owl face” would make a nice gender-neutral replacement for “resting bitch face.” Or would I be accused of speciesism for suggesting it? I filed away the thought as I lifted up the other end of the cage and gently shoved it onto the dolly.

  “Hope you’re ready for your star turn,” I told Percival.

 
I set my tote on top of the mice and cricket cages and began turning the dolly so I could pull it out the door. The otherwise narrow corridor widened into a little antechamber that gave just enough room to get the dolly out and turn it so you could steer it down the hallway. I propped the storeroom door open and began pulling it out into the corridor. Percival gave a harsh shriek and flapped his wings as we got going.

  And then something swooped down, cutting out the light and wrapping my arms. I struggled, but my arms were completely enveloped in whatever had fallen on me.

  Make that whatever someone had thrown over me. I could feel someone fishing in my pockets, removing everything in them—my phone. My key card. A used tissue that I hoped the sneak thief would find sufficiently disgusting. Then he pulled me away from the dolly, opened a door, and shoved me through it. I heard the door slam closed behind me.

  I was outside. In the snow. With no coat.

  Chapter 26

  I struggled to my feet and disentangled myself from whatever had been trapping me. A quilted moving blanket. There had been a small stack of them in the corner of the antechamber. I wrapped it around me for warmth.

  I tried the door, but it was locked, of course. My key card would have opened it, but my assailant had taken that. Odds were that I couldn’t have texted for help even if I had my phone—the wireless didn’t seem to extend to the storage area. But if I’d clipped the walkie-talkie or the satellite phone to my jeans, instead of leaving them both in the tote bag—

  “Enough,” I said aloud. Never mind how I got here. I had to get inside before frostbite set in. Or worse, before I froze to death.

  “People rarely freeze to death.” I could hear Dad’s voice, in one of his wide-ranging dinner table conversations. “They’re much more apt to die of hypothermia. And it doesn’t even need to be freezing to cause that—just colder than 98.6.”