Cockatiels at Seven Page 10

  The leaves, I noticed with a sinking feeling, were poison ivy.

  Sixteen

  I managed to extricate Timmy from the poison ivy grove with promises of chocolate, though I had to wade through some of it to get back to the car. I postponed any notion of picking the lock and snooping inside Jasper Walker’s house. I knew that if I could get home and wash the poison ivy oil off myself and Timmy immediately, we might have a chance of escaping an outbreak of the dreaded rash. Then again, either I was having psychosomatic itching or it was already too late. For me, anyway. Dad always said that children didn’t develop sensitivity to poison ivy until after they’d been exposed several times, so Timmy would probably be all right. Then again, active as Timmy was, he could have already used up his immunity. I strapped him into his car seat and took off.

  But as I reached the fork in the driveway, I saw the tail end of a red pickup truck disappearing in the direction of the canary farm. I hesitated. Washing off the poison ivy oil was important. So was finding Karen.

  What the hell, I decided. I might not find the denizens of the canary farm home another time. The car and truck skeletons strewn on either side of the road made it difficult to turn, but I finally managed it. As we rattled down the lane, I told myself that if Aubrey Hamilton was a friendly soul, maybe I’d even beg the use of a bathroom to wash off the poison ivy oil. Come to think of it, the first aid kit probably contained some Fels-Naptha soap, which Dad recommended for that purpose.

  I pulled up behind the pickup in front of a large, comfortable-looking farmhouse. The grass was a little unkempt, but the house itself looked in good repair, and the white board siding had been painted not that long ago. To the left and a little behind the house was a large barn, also in good repair, as was the fence around the barnyard.

  A man came out of the house and stood at the top of the steps looking down at me as I got out of the car. He was youngish—probably around twenty-five—but had a faintly worn air about him, as if life hadn’t treated him that well. And if we were friends, I’d have tried to convince him that nature had not designed him to wear a goatee—it made his already pointy chin look even pointier.

  “Can I help you?” he said. He leaned on the top rail of the porch. He looked ill-at-ease but not unwelcoming, as if his country dweller’s ingrained suspicion of unexpected visitors was at war with his hope that we might be here to buy canaries.

  “You must be Aubrey Hamilton,” I said. I strode over and shook his hand. “You run the canary farm, right?”

  “Are you looking to buy a bird?” he asked. A little too eagerly—I wondered if perhaps the bird business wasn’t going too well.

  “Sorry, no,” I said. “I’m looking for the guy who lives next door. Mr. Bass. Have you seen him recently?”

  Hamilton shook his head.

  “What do you want with the old guy, anyway?” he said. Was he frowning in suspicion of me, or in disbelief that anyone would voluntarily seek out his neighbor’s company?

  “I’m actually trying to find his nephew, Jasper Walker.”

  The frown deepened. Definitely suspicion.

  “Jasper is or was married to my friend Karen,” I went on. “And she left her son Timmy with me yesterday.”

  I indicated the car, where Timmy was chugging his juice. Hamilton barely glanced at him.

  “Karen said she would just be gone for a little while,” I said. “And that was yesterday morning. She’s not answering my calls. I’m checking anyplace she might have gone and anyone who might have seen her.”

  “I haven’t seen anyone next door for days,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “Ah, well,” I said. “Look, this may sound odd, but—Timmy got loose and wandered into a patch of poison ivy. I’d really like to wash him off. The sooner I do that, the less chance that he’ll develop a rash.”

  Hamilton hesitated, clearly torn between a reluctance to appear inhospitable and an even stronger reluctance to let a wayward toddler into his house.

  “We could just use that,” I said, pointing to a green garden hose neatly coiled and hanging from a hook by the side of the house.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let me bring you a towel.”

  “He might have invited us in,” I grumbled to Timmy as I stripped his clothes and diaper off.

  Though once I began soaping him up and rinsing him off, I realized that it was an extraordinarily messy project, and I’d have been mortified at doing it inside a stranger’s house.

  “Sorry to put you to this trouble,” I told Hamilton when he returned with the towel. “But you probably know how bad poison ivy can be for a little kid.”

  “No trouble at all,” he said, though clearly he was getting tired of having us underfoot. He kept glancing over at the barn.

  “Is that where you keep the birds?” I asked, pointing to the barn.

  “What?” he said, looking startled.

  “Your canaries. Is that where you keep them?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Canaries, cockatiels, and parakeets. Are you interested in buying—sorry, you already said you weren’t.”

  “How’s business?” I asked.

  “Slow,” he said. “The market’s depressed. Too many breeders. Damned things are eating me out of house and home. I could give you a good deal on a pair of cockatiels, if you like.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m not much of a bird-fancier. But I’ll ask my family if anyone’s in the market for a pet bird.”

  He nodded gloomily.

  “Maybe you should have stuck to poodles,” I said.

  “Poodles?”

  “The Prancing Poodle Kennels,” I said. “I gather you’re not breeding poodles anymore?”

  “No money in poodles either.”

  “So when was the last time you saw Jasper Walker?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Why?”

  “I’m still trying to find him. Have you seen him within the last few days?”

  “No,” he said. “Not for months. I didn’t even know he was back in town. Last I heard, he’d gotten fired from his job at the college and gone up to D.C. to look for work.”

  “Have you seen anyone over there lately?”

  “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t expect to. Old Mr. Bass is in the nursing home, you know. Place has been empty for years.”

  I nodded. Apparently Jasper—or whoever had left the beer cans and pizza box—had been coming and going unseen. But maybe I should keep that to myself for now.

  “Thanks a lot,” I said, handing him the towel. “And if you see anything of Jasper or Karen, could you give me a call?”

  I wrote my cell phone number on a sheet torn from my notebook and handed it to him.

  “Okay,” he said. “But I don’t expect I’ll see anything. It’s—hey! Get away from there!”

  I turned to see Timmy crawling through the barnyard fence. I gave chase, and managed to catch up with him before he reached the barn.

  “Want see horsie,” Timmy complained as I picked him up.

  “There aren’t any horsies there,” I said. “Just birdies. Sorry,” I added to Hamilton, who had only just caught up with us, and was seriously out of breath. “You turn your back on him for a second and he’s gone.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  “Want see birdies,” Timmy said.

  Hamilton looked uneasy. He kept glancing at the barn and then back at Timmy.

  “Look, I know he’d like to see the birds, but the last time a kid got in there he opened all the cages. Took us hours to catch the damned birds again.”

  “I understand,” I said. “I doubt if Timmy’s old enough to open cages, but it’s time I got him home anyway. Thanks a lot.”

  Hamilton stood in the barnyard watching as I carried Timmy back to the car, wrestled him into clean clothes, strapped him into the car seat, and drove off.

  “Is he hiding something, do you think?” I asked Timmy. “Or is he just not a sociable kind of guy?”

  “Doggie,”
Timmy said.

  Was that an incisive insult to Aubrey? No, Timmy had spotted Scout lying in the middle of the driveway to Hiram Bass’s house. He lifted his head when he saw us, and his tail thumped a couple of times, and then, when we drove by, he put it back on his paws again.

  “If you’re still here when I come back, I’ll call the animal shelter,” I said as I watched the dog in my rearview mirror.

  Back at home, I managed to get in a quick shower while Timmy took the shoelaces out of several pairs of Michael’s shoes. I was down in the laundry room, putting our potentially poison-ivy contaminated clothes into the washer while Timmy ran around wearing nothing but a diaper, with a torn pillowcase over his head, pretending to be a ghost, when my cell phone rang. It was Michael.

  “So do you think you can find a baby-sitter for Timmy tonight?” he said.

  “Possibly, if I recruit someone from a few counties away, where he’s not already notorious,” I said. “Please don’t tell me you scored tickets for something so hot that I’ll hate Timmy forever if he makes me miss it.”

  “Actually, I was trying to arrange a dinner with Dr. Driscoll and his wife. At the Caerphilly Inn. I’m the department rep to one of his committees this year, and I’m supposed to ingratiate myself.”

  Granted, the prospect of dinner at the Inn was mouth-watering, but was Michael really expecting me to play charming faculty wife tonight? With Timmy on my hands and Karen’s disappearance on my mind?

  “You’ll love the Driscolls,” he said. “He’s an avid bird-watcher—over eight hundred species on his life list. He’ll tell you all about it if you ask. And his wife needlepoints and arranges flowers. They’re elderly, and go to bed early, so I agreed we’d meet them there at five-thirty. That way they can still drive home before dark.”

  “You’re telling me this so I won’t mind missing dinner at the Inn to stay home and take care of Timmy. Who is this ghastly Dr. Driscoll, anyway?”

  “Head of the financial administration department.”

  “Karen’s department? Okay, you’re on. I’m sure somebody around here owes me a favor.”

  “Let’s hope it’s a big favor,” he said.

  Seventeen

  Usually most of my family could be convinced that they owed me multiple favors, but apparently I’d burned through a lot of those in the past couple of days. Dad and Dr. Blake had plans—presumably plans connected with whatever crime against wildlife my grandfather would be exposing in his next documentary. But when I asked what their plans were, they both changed the subject. Rose Noire was driving Mother up to Washington for a flurry of visits to antique stores and fabric stores and at the last minute they’d decided to go up the night before, to get an early start. As they scurried out the door, they assured me that their change of plans had nothing to do with Timmy.

  I finally cornered Rob.

  “Gee, I’m really sorry,” he said. “But—”

  “After all, you should at least try to help out with things if you’re going to be practically living here,” I said.

  “I’m not practically living here,” he protested.

  “Oh, so I can throw away that pile of stuff in the closet of the bedroom on the third floor?”

  It still took me fifteen minutes of my best guilt-inducing persuasion plus the reassurance that I’d probably be home by 9 P.M. if not much earlier, but I broke him down.

  By the time I’d gone over the most important sections of Timmy’s instruction manual with Rob and reassured Timmy that even though I was going away for a few hours, Uncle Rob would be happy to play horsiehorsie with him all evening, I barely had enough time to throw on presentable slacks and a nice blouse before taking off for town.

  I was walking out the door, car keys in my hand, when a complication hit me.

  “I’ll need to take your car,” I said.

  “Why?” Rob was still a little protective of his latest automotive toy, a Porsche convertible that had yet to acquire its first real scratch.

  “What if something happens and you need to take Timmy someplace?” I said. “Like to the emergency room?”

  “He can ride in the Porsche.”

  “It doesn’t have a back seat to put the car seat in,” I said. “And trust me, even if it did, you wouldn’t want Timmy riding in your Porsche.”

  Rob digested that for a moment.

  “Yeah, but what are the chances I’ll actually have to take him to the ER?”

  “Slim,” I said. “So what does it matter if you’re staying home with an aging tin can or a brand new race car in the driveway?”

  He eventually gave way to common sense, but he was still sulking when I drove off. Or maybe just worrying about whether I could drive his car.

  I had to admit, the Porsche was quite a change from my reliable but aging Toyota. And after two days of driving around with a car seat in the back, feeling as if I spent more time looking in the rearview mirror at Timmy than at the road ahead, being in the car alone would have been exhilarating all by itself. Throw in the sense of power and freedom of driving a hot car with no roof—well, I found myself playing fast and loose with the speed limit on one long open stretch. Fortunately I had slowed to a relatively sedate five miles above the speed limit by the time I passed Chief Burke, stopped by the side of the road, apparently talking on his cell phone.

  Looking in the rearview mirror, I thought I saw him frowning at me, though his face disappeared in the distance too soon to really tell.

  Well, a frown was normal for Chief Burke when he was in the middle of an investigation. No particular reason for him to be frowning at me, was there?

  I pushed the thought from my mind to enjoy the rest of my drive. And I had to admit, the most beautiful part of it was the last mile, from the gate of the Caerphilly Inn to the hotel’s wisteria-draped front door. The rest of the county was looking a little bare and baked by a long, hot, dry summer, but the Inn’s driveway was cool and leafy under the overarching shade of the trees on either side, and patches of bright summer flowers appeared at charmingly unpredictable intervals. Now that I’d started to try my hand at gardening, I had gained a new appreciation for how expensive and labor-intensive the Inn’s low-key landscaping really was.

  But I felt a lot less intimidated by the Inn now that my recently discovered grandfather had taken up semipermanent residence there. He terrorized the staff on a regular basis, but they clearly adored him, which either meant that they thought his bark was worse than his bite or that he tipped hugely. Possibly both. At any rate, with Dr. Blake in the picture, I felt a lot less worried these days that they’d do something dire like tow my battered car for dripping oil on the spotless white gravel of their parking lot. The locals debated hotly whether the Inn had its gravel power-washed annually or just replaced it. And of course Rob’s practically new Porsche shouldn’t offend the Inn’s sensibilities at all.

  I glanced down at my clothes. The black slacks that had looked okay at home suddenly seemed dowdy, and flecked with bits of Spike’s fur. And was that a spot of yogurt on the left knee? Maybe I should have worn a skirt. And heels. And—

  Okay, so the Inn still had the power to intimidate.

  I nodded to the desk clerk as I strolled through the lobby toward the restaurant.

  “Shall I tell your grandfather you’re here?” he called.

  I waved, smiled, shook my head, and pointed to the dining room. He waved, smiled, and nodded in return.

  Michael was already seated at a table with a view of the lush expanse of the Caerphilly Golf Course, sipping a glass of red wine. He leaped to his feet when he saw me.

  “You look marvelous,” he exclaimed, and leaned over to kiss me with far greater decorum than usual. Probably the civilizing influence of the hotel. I could see the maitre d’ beaming with subtle approval. Such a well-dressed, well-behaved young couple.

  Yes, it was definitely yogurt on the knee of my pants, with tufts of dog-hair stuck in it. But the blouse was fine. I’d feel a lot more at ease
once I got my unprepossessing legs under the tablecloth.

  “I look okay,” I said. “Imagine how marvelous I could look if—Yow!”

  I’d started to sit down while talking, and didn’t realize that the waiter had pulled out my chair for me—pulled it so far out and with such a flourish that when I tried to sit down where I’d last seen the chair, I landed on the floor in a heap.

  I spent the next several minutes assuring the waiter and the maitre d’ that yes, I was fine, and no, I didn’t want the hotel doctor to check me out, and for heaven’s sake, we didn’t expect them to pick up our check.

  “They’re like sharks,” I said to Michael in an undertone. “One drop of blood in the water—”

  “Is madame injured?” Now it was the hotel manager at my elbow.

  We finally agreed to accept a bottle of wine as suitable recompense for my injury. The hotel staff were still hovering solicitously over us when the Driscolls arrived.

  Dining with the Driscolls was like dining with someone’s grandparents. We managed to fill the first few minutes of the dinner with discussions of what each of us planned to order. But all too soon, the waiter took our orders and whisked away the menus, stranding us without any obvious means of conversation.

  Michael and Dr. Driscoll fell back on college politics, and I hit on the notion of telling Mrs. Driscoll about our recent elopement and honeymoon. Either I’d found a subject dear to her heart, or she was as relieved as I was to have found something we could talk about. At any rate, she listened with a grandmotherly smile, making the occasional chirping comment, and happily sipping first a glass of the excellent wine Michael had initially ordered and then a few glasses of the even more excellent wine the maitre d’ brought by way of apology. By the end of the salad course, I suspected Mrs. Driscoll would happily have listened to me read her the Caerphilly phone directory as long as I kept her glass filled.

  By the time we reached the main course, though, I was eager to change the topic. I searched around for a ploy.

  Eighteen

  “Do you mind if I call home?” I asked, pulling out my cell phone and glancing apologetically around the table. I moved a few feet away and dialed Karen’s number. Not that I really expected her to answer it, but I’d dialed it so often in the last couple of days that it was the first number that came to mind. I let it ring for a while, turning my back to the table so the Driscolls couldn’t see that I wasn’t talking to anyone, and then returned to my seat.