Cockatiels at Seven Page 11

  “Sorry,” I said. “My brother Rob is baby-sitting, and I’m a little worried. He’s not very experienced.”

  “Oh, you have children?” Mrs. Driscoll asked. And then a puzzled and slightly alarmed look crossed her face—no doubt as she recalled the scant two months since our wedding.

  “Not yet,” Michael said. “We’re taking care of a friend’s child. In fact, you probably know her—Karen Walker. Meg, isn’t Karen in Ambrose’s department?”

  “Young Timothy?” Mrs. Driscoll exclaimed, a relieved smile spreading over her face. “My goodness—he’s quite a handful, isn’t he?”

  “You have no idea,” I said.

  Dr. Driscoll looked troubled.

  “Do you know where she’s gone?” he asked.

  “No idea,” I said. “She dropped Timmy off with me Monday morning and I haven’t heard from her since. Not that I can convince Chief Burke of that.”

  “Isn’t it shocking?” Mrs. Driscoll said, shaking her head. “Ambrose has had the police in his office all day.”

  “You’d think they suspected me of something,” Dr. Driscoll said.

  “Well, Chief Burke’s not with the college,” Michael said.

  “Precisely!” Mrs. Driscoll said, beaming as if Michael had said something particularly significant. Dr. Driscoll nodded solemnly and folded his hands on the table.

  “I really don’t think Chief Burke quite grasps the situation,” he said, in a voice that had probably lulled generations of his fellow college staffers into gentle naps during financial meetings. “Karen is not the sort of young person to get involved in some kind of sordid embezzlement scheme. In fact—are you familiar with the unfortunate events we experienced two years ago?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Not to go beyond this table,” he said, holding up one forefinger in warning. “But as I tried to explain to the police—”

  “And were absolutely ignored,” Mrs. Driscoll put in.

  “Two years ago, Karen came to me with very disturbing news,” Dr. Driscoll said. “She and her husband had separated—a very sad business.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Mrs. Driscoll said. “Nothing sad about it. If you ask me, getting rid of that rascal was the smartest thing she ever did.”

  “Yes, of course. I meant the marriage. I think she knew it was a mistake almost from the first. At any rate, she told me that she was packing up some things he’d left behind after she asked him to leave—”

  “Kicked him out on his ear, you mean,” Mrs. Driscoll said. “If she’d asked him to leave, he could have packed up his own things.”

  “And she found some information that troubled her—information that seemed to indicate that her husband had been misusing his computer skills and the knowledge of our financial systems that she had helped him to acquire.”

  “He was embezzling,” his wife said. “He hadn’t taken much yet, but if she hadn’t turned him in, he’d probably have taken the college for millions.”

  “I think we would have caught him before he stole quite that much,” Dr. Driscoll said, frowning at her.

  Mrs. Driscoll looked at me, rolled her eyes, and took another deep sip of her wine.

  “At any rate,” Dr. Driscoll continued, “Karen was instrumental in saving the college from substantial losses. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to bring the matter to trial—”

  “Hired himself a hotshot attorney who tried to make it look as if Karen was involved, too, the son-of-a—”

  “Mabel!” Dr. Driscoll looked over his glasses at his wife, who shrugged and took another gulp of wine.

  “You all backed down,” she said. “You should have taken the jerk to court. He did it. You all knew that. Bastard should be in jail.”

  “Perhaps we did make a mistake,” Dr. Driscoll said, with a sigh. “Karen’s absence has me worried. Obviously her estranged husband has reason to resent her. What if Walker is responsible for her . . . disappearance?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him,” Mrs. Driscoll muttered.

  “But if this all happened two years ago, what were the police investigating today?” I asked.

  Dr. Driscoll looked embarrassed.

  “It begins to look as if we may not have done as good a job of investigating Mr. Walker’s crime as we thought,” he said. “We handled it internally, of course—more discreet that way.”

  Michael nodded sagely, and I wondered if, like me, he was having to bite his tongue at the notion of handling an embezzler discreetly—instead of bringing his crimes into the open, trying to have him prosecuted, and generally doing everything possible to reduce the chances that anyone would give him a chance to embezzle again.

  “It appears that far from terminating with his employment, his crime has been, well, ongoing,” Dr. Driscoll said. “The police even seemed to think Karen was involved.”

  “Idiots,” Mrs. Driscoll muttered.

  “They have to investigate every possibility, you know,” he said. “And it really doesn’t look good, her running away like that, just when the whole thing came to light. If you see her—”

  “I know,” I said. “She needs to come back, talk to the police, and clear her name.”

  “If she can come back,” Mrs. Driscoll said. “What if something has happened to her?”

  No one quite knew what to say to that, and luckily, before the awkward silence dragged on too long, the waiter came around to ask us if we wanted dessert. And along with dessert, another distraction arrived.

  “Meg! Michael!” It was Dr. Blake, striding up to our table. “What brings you here?”

  “The food,” I said.

  “How are you, Dr. Blake?” Michael asked, standing up to shake my grandfather’s hand. “Have you met Dr. and Mrs. Driscoll?”

  “Dr. Blake!” Ambrose Driscoll had bounded to his feet and was staring with awe at the new arrival. “What an honor to meet you! I can’t tell you how much I admired your article in Audubon magazine on the plight of the Blue-throated Macaw!”

  “Thank you, thank you,” Dr. Blake said, shaking hands vigorously with Dr. Driscoll. “Are you a birding man yourself?”

  “Only an amateur, compared with you,” Dr. Driscoll said.

  “Dr. Driscoll is too modest,” I said. “He has a life list of over eight hundred birds.”

  Dr. Driscoll beamed with delight.

  “Yes—814, to be precise,” he said. “How kind of you to remember.”

  “Marvelous!” Dr. Blake exclaimed. “We need more concerned birders—if only I could interest these young people in the cause!”

  I sat back to let my grandfather charm the Driscolls and enlist them in his legion of supporters who would write letters to Congress and checks to the Montgomery Blake Foundation whenever their leader rallied them. I’d spotted something interesting.

  Blake was dressed in his customary garb—cargo pants, cotton shirt, and fishing vest, all in muted earth tones, and hiking boots. He wasn’t wearing his pith helmet, but the pockets of his vest bulged, as usual, with random bits of junk and gear. All of this was perfectly normal—he wore the same outfit whether he was slogging through the jungle, appearing on CNN to denounce some corporation’s environmental record, or sipping wine at the bar of the Caerphilly Inn.

  But behind him I could see the door to the hotel lobby. As Blake was holding forth in his most charming manner, I saw Dad stick his head in, look left and right, and then duck back out. And then I saw him creep past the doorway in the most dramatically furtive manner imaginable. And he was wearing an over-the-top outfit similar to Dr. Blake’s.

  A few moments after Dad disappeared, Dr. Blake wished us all a good evening and shook hands all around. I followed him to the door.

  “What are you and Dad up to, anyway?” I asked Dr. Blake.

  “Up to?” He was wearing his most innocent expression. It wouldn’t have fooled Timmy.

  “Just try to stay out of trouble for a while,” I said. “I’m a little tied down with Timmy right
now. If you two get arrested, I can’t just take off and drive down to North Carolina again in the middle of the night to bail you out.”

  “That was an unusual situation,” Dr. Blake said. “How were we supposed to know the police were going to stage a raid on the cockfight the very night we were filming it?”

  “You could have considered the possibility and had a local lawyer on call,” I said. “In fact, here.”

  I pulled out my notebook, tore out a page, flipped to a page near the front, copied a couple of names and phone numbers, and handed the loose sheet to him.

  “What’s this?”

  “Defense attorneys. Relatives of Mother’s. If you get arrested, give one of them a call, mention that you’re a Hollingworth cousin, and they’ll take care of it.”

  “Hmph,” he said. “So you carry the names and numbers of two criminal defense attorneys around wherever you go?”

  “Always,” I said. “People I’m related to keep getting into trouble.”

  “Some family I’ve found,” he said. But he didn’t sound too upset, and I noticed that he tucked the slip of paper carefully into one of his dozens of vest pockets as he strode through the lobby.

  I went back to the table and found the Driscolls all atwitter with excitement at having met one of their idols.

  “You never mentioned that Dr. Blake was your grandfather!” Ambrose Driscoll said.

  “We watch all his specials,” his wife said.

  The subject of Dr. Blake and his exploits got us through the dessert course, and I suspected the Driscolls went home feeling quite happy with their evening. Since it was only a little past eight, and barely dark, my evening would normally have just begun, but I was feeling a lot more tired than I usually would so early. It wasn’t all Timmy’s fault—some of it was Karen’s. But I found myself wondering if Michael had considered the effect parenthood would have on night owls like us.

  “I think I overdid it on the wine,” Michael said, as we reached the parking lot. “I’ll ride with you, and pick up my car tomorrow.”

  He almost changed his mind when he saw that I was driving Rob’s Porsche, but after a brief sigh of regret, he settled into the passenger seat and stared up at the stars as I eased the car down the Inn’s driveway.

  “This is the life,” he said. “If I make tenure, let’s celebrate by trading in my old convertible for one of these.”

  “Another convertible? Not a sturdy minivan for the planned family?”

  He frowned.

  “We can get one of those, too,” he said, after a moment. “Tenure’s worth celebrating in every possible way. I don’t suppose you want to park down by Caerphilly Creek, for old time’s sake? Put in a downpayment on the celebrating?”

  I had to smile.

  “I’m tempted,” I said. “But at the moment, I’m a little anxious about Timmy. You realize he’s about to spend his second night with us. That’s scary.”

  “Inconvenient, perhaps, on a night like this, but hardly scary.”

  “What’s scary is that either Karen isn’t the person I thought she was, to abandon him for so long, or she’s in some pretty serious trouble. And when you come right down to it, it’s pretty scary that she left him with me in the first place. When people have kids, they start doing responsible things like buying insurance and minivans, not handing off their kids to near strangers. Karen and I have hardly seen each other in the last two years, and she had no idea whether I had any experience with small children, and Timmy didn’t know me.”

  “He seems to be holding up well,” Michael said. “He’s a pretty adaptable little kid. And maybe Karen has good instincts about who she can trust.”

  “I still don’t like it.”

  “I gather you struck out trying to find her today.”

  “Worse than that. I’m starting to think maybe she had good reasons to disappear.”

  As we drove along—well under the speed limit, which must have been a first for the Porsche—I brought him up to date on what I’d learned during the day.

  “Not encouraging,” he murmured, when I’d finished.

  “Any theories about what’s going on?” I asked.

  “None that you probably haven’t already thought of,” he said. “Frankly, if I were Chief Blake and had to make sense of what you’ve learned, I’d say she’s probably involved in the embezzling scheme, realized that the police were about to close in, and decided to run. And figuring her chances of getting away were a lot better without Timmy, she found a safe place to leave him while she fled.”

  My stomach clenched.

  “I’m sorry,” Michael said. “I know she’s your friend.”

  “You’re not saying anything I haven’t thought,” I said. “It just sounds a little worse out loud.”

  “I can think of some other possible explanations.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t sound too logical, do they?”

  We drove on a while in silence.

  When we reached the ridge that gave a view of the road, I looked for Mr. Early but it was too dark to see if he was still there or if he’d given up his vigil for the evening.

  Then I noticed that our house was dark.

  “That’s odd,” I said, pointing to it. “Do you suppose Rob has gotten Timmy to bed?”

  “You never know. He’s really rather good with kids. I’ve seen him in action before, with your nieces and nephews. He really knows how to communicate on their level.”

  “That’s because he still thinks on their level,” I said. “It’s communicating with adults he can’t handle.”

  “Could be,” Michael said, with a chuckle. “At any rate, he has a weak stomach when it comes to diapers, but he’s really good at entertaining kids.”

  I nodded. Good, but not very firm. I’d expected him to leave the hard work of getting Timmy to bed to Michael and me. In fact, I more than half expected to find the two of them asleep in front of the TV. But that was okay, I told myself, determined to keep my mellow, post-dinner mood as long as I could.

  I lost the battle when we pulled into the driveway.

  “My car’s not here,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  Nineteen

  As soon as the car came to a stop I jumped out and ran inside.

  “Hello,” I called. “We’re home.”

  No answer. I saw no one in the living room, the dining room, or the kitchen. And no notes posted anywhere to tell us where Rob had gone with Timmy. Upstairs, I peered into the bedroom where we’d set up Timmy’s portable crib. It was empty. So were all the other bedrooms on that floor and the third floor—empty of Rob and Timmy, at any rate. I found the room on the third floor in which Rob was setting up his little home away from home, and in a room at the other end of the hall was an object covered with a tarp. It turned out to be a cage containing six brightly colored birds, all fast asleep. They stirred slightly when I lifted one edge of the tarp, and one of them uttered a faint squawk before settling back into slumber.

  I ran downstairs again. Michael was just emerging from the basement. He looked a little pale.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “We have snakes again,” he said. “I think I should have a word with your father. And your grandfather. This is really getting out of hand.”

  I was astonished. Michael usually enjoyed all of Dad’s projects and antics, and for that matter, all of Dr. Blake’s.

  “Getting out of hand? What do you mean? What kind of snakes?”

  “I don’t know. Big snakes. The basement’s swarming with them.”

  “They’re loose?” My voice went up at least an octave.

  “No, thank goodness,” he said, with a shudder. “They’re all in terrariums. About a dozen of them. But I’m not really that fond of snakes.”

  “I never knew that,” I said. “Don’t let Dad know.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’d probably recommend spending a lot of time observing snakes and handling them as a way of overcoming your fear.�
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  “I’m not afraid of them,” Michael said, sounding ever so slightly testy. “I’m just not fond of them, and I have no desire to spend any quality time with them. Normally they don’t bother me that much, but I’m not used to going into my own basement, turning on the light, and finding a whole collection of them staring back at me.”

  “I wouldn’t like that either,” I said.

  “I think it’s the fact that they never blink,” he said. “That kind of creeps me out.”

  “It’s not their fault,” I said. “They have no eyelids.”

  “I didn’t say it was their fault. I just don’t like it.”

  “Let me lay down the law to Dad about snakes, then,” I said. “I could pretend that I’ve developed a sudden irrational but insurmountable fear of having snakes around with children in the house. Manage to imply that it’s either snakes or grandchildren, and lay down an ultimatum. Get Mother to help.”

  “Good idea,” he said. “Meanwhile, I gather you didn’t find Rob and Timmy upstairs.”

  “Not unless an evil magician has transformed them along with Dad and Dr. Blake into brightly colored birds,” I said.

  “Brightly colored birds?”

  “There’s a cage of them in one of the third floor bedrooms. I definitely need to speak to Dad.”

  And possibly rekey the house locks.

  “Let’s call your father,” Michael suggested. “Maybe he knows what’s up. After all, if there was any kind of emergency, Rob would probably call him.”

  “Assuming Rob actually has his cell phone with him and turned on, which seems unlikely. But just in case, you call Dad and I’ll call Rob.”

  But there was no answer at the farmhouse or on Rob’s cell phone. Mother and Rose Noire were still up in Washington, of course. I called a few of Rob’s friends, none of whom had any idea where he was. Most of them hadn’t seen much of him lately.