Owl Be Home for Christmas

by Donna Andrews

  “Thereby convincing the barred owls that bad things will happen to them if they stay?” I asked. “Are they that gullible?”

  “More important, are barred owl distress cries that different from spotted owl distress cries?” he said. “Because it’s no use chasing out the barred owls if we freak out the spotted owls at the same time. Needs testing.”

  Grandfather ambled back to his table and soon he and Dr. Green were as deeply engrossed in conversation as Melissa and Dr. Craine.

  Michael and the boys greeted me with delight when I returned to our table.

  “So, are we having Christmas here or at home?” Josh asked.

  “We don’t know yet,” I said. “It depends on when the snowplows get here.”

  “Well, we’re ready for them,” Jamie said. “We’ve shoveled the whole parking lot.”

  “And plowed the driveway,” Josh added.

  “With a little bit of help from the Inn staff,” Michael said with a chuckle.

  “Well, yeah, they did a lot,” Jamie said. “Especially the plowing.”

  “Since some people think we’re not old enough to drive a tractor.” Josh sounded scornful of the entire idea.

  “So once the plows come by, we go home?” Jamie asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “We don’t know how much longer Great will need our help here.”

  “And there’s also the fact that we don’t know how the road leading out to our house is,” Michael added. “Mr. Beau and Mr. Osgood could still have a lot of plowing to do.”

  “We should get a snowmobile,” Josh pronounced. “It would be very useful at times like these.”

  “Perhaps we should discuss it with Santa,” Jamie said, with a look of utter innocence on his face.

  We had all reached that phase of a meal that hobbits would call filling up the corners. Many of the conference attendees would have been content to loll around the ballroom filling up corners all night, but Mother had other ideas.

  “It’s time for the group caroling!” she called. “Everybody who’s coming to the group caroling, follow me to the lobby.”

  A few Grinch-like souls might have stayed behind, but most of the crew obediently trooped out to the lobby, where Rose Noire handed around photocopied wads of carol lyrics and Sami turned down the canned carols.

  I spotted Grandfather slipping out of the lobby toward the cottages.

  “You feeling okay?” I asked. It had been a long day.

  “I’m fine, and before you ask, there’s nothing wrong with my Christmas spirit. Got something I want to do. Get it off my mind before I start enjoying the carols. I’ll be back.”

  He looked okay, so I shoved any worry to the back of my mind and went back to the lobby.

  Mother, as self-appointed musical director, was in her element. We began with “Good King Wenceslas,” and continued with “Jingle Bells,” and “Deck the Halls.” We were just about to start on “The Twelve Days of Christmas” when Sami rushed to the front door and peered out.

  “The snowplows are coming! The snowplows are coming!” he shouted.

  A stampede followed, as nearly everyone in the lobby tried to rush outside to get a glimpse.

  And it was Beau Shiffley’s snowplow, which caused a lot of merriment for the out-of-towners who hadn’t seen it before. He normally kept the antlers from a ten-point buck mounted on the front of his plow, but he upped the ante for the holiday season. Attached below the antlers was a life-size plush reindeer head with a blinking red nose, and a dozen or so strings of twinkling multicolored lights festooned the sides of the plow.

  We all swarmed out into the parking lot, cheering and waving. Beau stepped out of the cab and acknowledged the cheers by raising both fists and shaking them, the way a winning boxer might in the ring.

  Ekaterina strode out with a covered cup of coffee, and a thermos containing more for later, and Beau thanked her and took a few sips while we serenaded him with a full-throated rendition of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”

  “I guess he didn’t have to do much here,” Jamie said with considerable pride as he watched Beau’s snowplow disappear down the drive again. “Just a little cleaning up around the edges.”

  “Let’s go back in,” Josh said. “It’s freezing out here.”

  Back in the lobby, Ekaterina had set up a complimentary coffee, tea, and hot chocolate service right beside the front desk, and everyone stopped for a short hot beverage break before starting the singing again.

  I looked around and realized that Grandfather hadn’t reappeared. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing. He’d had a long day, and he might have just gone to bed. Still. He was no spring chicken.

  “Next, let’s do ‘We Three Kings.’ Page four of your carol sheet,” Mother announced.

  “I’m going to look in on Grandfather,” I whispered to Michael while everyone was still shuffling their sheets. “Back in a little bit.”

  At the door that led out into the courtyard, I waited to hear the first few bars of the carol before slipping outside.

  Where it was still bitter cold, but at least there was nothing falling from the sky. I hoped we’d eventually find out how much snow the storm had actually deposited on Caerphilly. No way to tell here in the courtyard, where the shoveled snow had been piled as high as six or seven feet on either side of the paths.

  I knocked softly at the Jefferson Cottage door and then used my master key to slip inside. As I walked down the small hallway, the first thing I saw of the living room was Percival’s cage. Apparently, after his star turn at the conference, they’d brought him back here rather than return him to the dubious safety of the storage room. An excess of caution, if you asked me—Mr. Ackley was now locked up, and they’d confiscated the key card he’d stolen from me. And there was no sign Percival had ever been one of his targets. But as long as it was Grandfather who had to live with him, I wasn’t going to argue.

  Grandfather and the chief. Well, only for one night.

  They’d had to move the sofas a bit to fit in the cage, and it almost completely blocked my view of the sliding glass doors leading out to the terrace. Or, under the present circumstances, out into the Jefferson Cottage branch of the boys’ tunnel and cave system. The cages containing the mice and crickets destined to be the owl’s future meals sat on the floor between his cage and the sliding glass doors. Were they going to be warm enough there? I made a mental note to check. After I figured out what was up with Grandfather.

  Percival opened an eye when he heard me and almost immediately closed it again, no doubt because he recognized me as an unlikely source of mice.

  Grandfather was sitting on one of the sofas with a sheaf of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven papers in his hands. His reading glasses were perched on his nose. When he heard me he looked over them at me, then put his papers down and took a sip from the glass of bourbon on the coffee table.

  “Feeling antisocial?” I sat down on the other couch.

  “I had some stuff I needed to read,” he said. “Remember what I told Ned Czerny earlier today? When I was trying to console him?”

  “You mean when you told him to grow a backbone and find a boss who wasn’t as much of a jackass as Frogmore? At least that’s what Dad told me he’d heard. Your notion of how to console people is so refreshingly different from most people’s.”

  “Maybe your father missed that I also told him that if he needed some ideas about what to do with himself I’d be happy to talk to him about it.”

  “You’re thinking you might help him—as you did for Dr. Craine when she was down?”

  “That was different. Vera’s brilliant. You could tell even back then that she had a bright future ahead of her if she could just get past the damage Frogmore had done. Czerny’s no Vera Craine. Not exactly a first-class brain. I’ve never felt that a high-powered research-oriented institution like Buckthorn was a good fit for him anyway.”

  “What would be a good fit, then?” I asked. “Teaching high school biology?”
<
br />   “Heavens, no.” Grandfather looked amused. “The students would eat him alive. But surely there’s someplace he’d fit in. I suggested he and I talk later, to see if we could figure out what he was interested in and suited for. I was figuring we’d do a phone call sometime in the next week or so. I was most definitely not expecting to have him scurry back carrying a copy of his curriculum vitae plus every single academic paper he’s ever had published.”

  “You’re thinking it was a little pushy?” I asked.

  “Well, I did offer to help, but it’s just kind of weird, if you ask me. I can’t think of many reasons why someone would be carrying all that with him to a conference.”

  “I can only think of one—that he was already planning to do a little job hunting.” Grandfather nodded as if he agreed with me. “Of course you realize that he didn’t necessarily bring hard copies of all that.” I went on. “He could have brought a flash drive with all the documents, and printed them out in the business center after you offered to read it.”

  “True. Still weird even if he had them all with him on a flash drive. And thank God he’s not particularly prolific.” He eyed two stacks of paper on the coffee table. Not a minuscule collection, but still, not impressive as a lifetime achievement, even for a relatively youthful professor like Czerny.

  “Won’t that count against him in the academic job market—not being prolific?”

  “In some places, yes. And frankly, even before I started reading, I’d decided it made sense to steer him to someplace a good deal less competitive.”

  “So that’s why you’re looking a little down—you’ve promised to help someone who isn’t going to be that easy to help?”

  “You know why I didn’t just shove Czerny’s CV and his publications in a box to look at when I had more time? Did that once before, about fifteen years ago, and it didn’t go well.”

  “Didn’t go well how?”

  “Long story.” He leaned back, took off his glasses, and rubbed his temples. He looked tired. I should probably tell him to go to bed and tell me his story tomorrow. But my curiosity was aroused.

  “I’ve got nothing planned,” I said aloud. “What happened fifteen years ago that didn’t go well?”

  “A grad student came to me. Young woman named Julia Taylor. She was … frustrated. Her doctoral advisor really wasn’t a good fit for the direction she wanted to take her research. To be blunt, his input was not just useless but downright counterproductive because he didn’t know squat about her topic and had no interest in learning and tried to get her to do something that would be useful for his career.”

  “So she came to you instead?”

  “And unfortunately I didn’t know much more about her topic than her advisor did, but at least I was willing to admit it. And I said I’d see if I could think of anyone who could help. She gave me her draft and a bunch of file folders full of data, and I took it all with me on a long trip. I forget which one. Was it that bat rescue in Australia? Or maybe filming the Return to Galapagos special? Long trip, anyway. Six, eight weeks. When I came back she had disappeared. No one knew where she’d gone. Took me forever to track her down.”

  “Define forever.”

  “Couple of years.”

  “I’m impressed with your perseverance.”

  “She impressed me. But it didn’t do any good. She’d given up. I tried to guilt-trip her, telling her the world needs more women scientists, but she gave me an earful. Told me to butt out of her life. That if she didn’t want to deal with the all the nonsense anymore, that was her decision.”

  “Did she just say nonsense?” I asked. “Or was it sexist nonsense?”

  “Probably sexist nonsense.” He shook his head. “I don’t remember. It’s been fifteen years.”

  Fifteen years during which not a lot had changed for the Julia Taylors and Melissa McKendricks of the world.

  “Maybe she’d have given up anyway,” he went on. “World’s full of ABDs—that’s—”

  “All but dissertations,” I said. “I know. Ph.D. students who complete their course work but never finish their dissertations and so never get their degrees.”

  “I felt as if I’d failed her. Didn’t help her at the moment when she really needed it. So when Czerny was moaning about his career being over. I figured, yeah, he probably is feeling pretty devastated right now, losing his mentor and all. I offered to help. I was kind of taken aback when he showed up with this whole stack of stuff, but I told myself ‘Don’t screw it up this time.’ So I brought it all back here, ordered myself a Basil Hayden, and sat down to slog through it. And that’s when things got really weird.”

  “Weird how?”

  “Because I realized I’d seen it before.”

  “The situation with the distraught grad student whose advisor can’t or won’t help? That wouldn’t apply to Czerny. Unless—”

  “No, this paper.” He lifted the top paper from the smaller of the two piles. “I think I’ve seen this specific paper before. It’s her paper. Julia Taylor. The grad student who gave up before I got around to helping her.”

  Chapter 32

  “Holy cow! Czerny stole this woman’s dissertation? Are you sure? Fifteen years ago, you know.”

  “Can I be absolutely sure it’s word-for-word the same paper?” Grandfather said. “Of course not. But it’s the same topic, no doubt of it. Unusual topic. She had an interesting slant on some owl behavioral issues. I wasn’t sure I agreed with her premise—in fact, since then, it’s been studied and disproven. That didn’t matter—I thought when she did her research she’d figure out herself that it wasn’t valid, and maybe come up with something useful and even more interesting along the way. Because it was interesting. She was interesting. Different. Had an original mind. And she had a fairly distinctive writing style—light, almost breezy, very down-to-earth, but without sacrificing accuracy or scientific rigor. I remember thinking she’d be a natural for writing the sort of books or articles that make scientific material comprehensible and entertaining to the general public. Or teaching, if her oral style was a match for the written.”

  “Doesn’t sound like Czerny’s style.”

  “No.” Grandfather glanced at the larger of the two stacks of papers and grimaced. “Most of his stuff is turgid, overwritten—you can see Frogmore’s heavy editorial hand. They’re crap. But his doctoral dissertation, and two of his early published papers—there’s some interesting stuff there. But he didn’t write them. Not the whole of them. She did. I’d stake my life on it.”

  “How come nobody ever noticed this before?” I asked.

  “I doubt if many people outside of Czerny’s doctoral committee ever read his dissertation,” Grandfather said. “And Julia Taylor never finished hers, so the only other person in the world who could have spotted the resemblance would be her advisor—and he’s been dead a decade now, poor sod. And as for the rest of Czerny’s publications … well, I wouldn’t have read them before. These places he’s publishing them are not exactly the top academic journals in the field. Some aren’t even reputable journals. They’re scam operations that will publish any garbage you send to them if you pay their fee.”

  “Why would someone do that? I know professors have to publish or perish, but surely nobody’s going to be fooled by the spurious publications.”

  “Some of the fake journals look legit. Some of them have names vaguely like those of legit publications. Look at this one.” He held out a sheaf of papers. “He included a copy of their masthead, which lists me as a member of their advisory panel. Never heard of the crooks. When we get back to civilization, I’ll be turning this over to my attorney. But not all institutions have a sufficiently rigorous tenure process. Evidently Buckthorn doesn’t. If their committee just ticked off the number of his publications and settled for ‘oh, yeah, that sounds vaguely familiar,’ he’d get away with it.”

  “So Czerny’s CV isn’t likely to help him get a good job anywhere else.”

  “It’s li
kely to get him fired from Buckthorn if I tell them what I know.”

  “It’ll be your word against his,” I pointed out.

  “Not if I show them what that poor young woman sent me. Pretty sure I still have it all in the files—you know what a paper pack rat I am. I might even be able to find her to testify against him. I’ll sic Trevor on it when he gets back from wherever it was he felt he had to go for the holiday.”

  “Bermuda. He has family there, remember?” I tried, once again, not to resent the fact that Grandfather’s assistant was almost certainly sitting on a beach drinking a rum swizzle or a dark ’n’ stormy instead of being here to do much of the work that had fallen on me in his absence. “And what will you tell Dr. Czerny?”

  Grandfather blew out his breath in what I took for an expression of exasperation.

  “No idea. I probably shouldn’t say anything until I finish all of these.” He waved his hand at the stack of paper.

  “Oh, so you’re jumping to a negative conclusion before you’ve reviewed all your data—how unprofessional.” I smiled to show I was only teasing.

  His answering smile was lukewarm.

  “No, I think I have enough data to cast serious doubts on both his integrity and his academic credentials,” he said. “But that’s a good point. I don’t just need to read all of these very closely—I need to do some more digging. On top of stealing someone else’s topic, I think he may have faked his data.”

  “Yikes.”

  “So maybe the best thing to do would be to just avoid him for a while. Till I can do a full investigation of this whole thing. And till I get over the urge to punch his lights out for the cheating bastard I’m pretty sure he is.”

  “Sounds reasonable. Shall I put him at the top of the list when the airports open and Ekaterina and I start trying to help your attendees get home in time for Christmas?”

  “Definitely.” He took another sip of his bourbon and went back to gazing with a gloomy expression on his face at the two stacks of paper on the coffee table.