Stork Raving Mad Read online

  I considered asking why he didn’t go back to his own office to make his calls. After all, the planned emergency meeting of Ramon’s dissertation committee was presumably postponed for the time being. But perhaps he had his reasons. The lack of heat in his office. Or orders from the chief to stick around for a while.

  He had begun to thrash around, dislodging the sports equipment that had landed on him. He looked up at me as if expecting help. I patted the twins and watched as he struggled to his feet.

  “If the bowling ball did hit you on the head, you could ask Dad to take a look at it,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he said. “But I think I would prefer to see my own physician. But—”

  He paused as if deep in thought.

  “This incident has made me wonder. About Dr. Wright’s death, I mean. Could she possibly have hit her head in the fall?”

  “In the fall?” I echoed. Had I described Dr. Wright’s body falling over when I found her? I didn’t think so. I frowned suspiciously at him. And then the light dawned.

  “You mean when she tripped over one of Señor Mendoza’s pills?”

  Blanco nodded.

  “I think Dad would have noticed if she’d wounded herself then,” I said.

  Blanco pursed his lips. My temper flared. Was his snide expression intended to cast aspersions on Dad’s medical skill? His commitment to the welfare of his patients?

  Or was I just reading too much into Blanco’s habitual sour, anxious expression? I took a deep breath and told myself to chill.

  “I understand it can be very difficult to diagnose head injuries,” he said. “And Jean—Dr. Wright—she was very resistant to the idea of going to the hospital.”

  “In general? Or did Dad suggest it this morning?”

  “In general,” he said. “Like so many people who enjoy robust health, she rather looked down on anyone who went running to the doctor with every scratch.”

  It sounded like a quote. And he was absently fingering his coat pocket. Was it just my imagination or did I see a small lump there, the size and shape of a roll of Tums?

  “And your father did suggest it—both to Dr. Wright and to Mr. Mendoza,” Blanco said. “I got the impression he was disappointed that they both refused.”

  “I’m sure he was,” I said. “He loves riding in the ambulance.”

  “So his disappointment wasn’t necessarily due to any reservations over their condition?’

  “If he’d had any reservations about their condition, he’d have kept nagging till they agreed to go to the hospital,” I said.

  “I don’t know about Mr. Mendoza, but Dr. Wright is very strong willed,” he said. “She’s hardly ever sick and when she is, she does her best to carry on as if there were nothing wrong with her.”

  I suspected I knew the type—the people who wouldn’t stay home when they caught cold, but insisted on dragging themselves to work, shedding germs and damp tissues everywhere. I’d gone through a phase of being like that myself, until I’d realized that the world could usually manage to get along without me for a day or two. Dr. Wright seemed like the type who had liked feeling indispensable.

  “I should have insisted that she go to the hospital,” Blanco said.

  “And if you had, would she have listened to you?”

  Blanco sighed and shook his head.

  “If Dad thought she was injured, either she’d be in the hospital right now or he’d still be following her around, nagging her,” I said. “You have no idea how persistent he can be.”

  “Isn’t that possible—for someone to hit their head and feel fine initially and then later have some complication?”

  “Like a subdural hematoma,” I said. “Yes, I suppose that’s possible.”

  Possible, but I hoped it didn’t turn out to be true. Dad would never forgive himself if he’d failed to hospitalize a patient who turned out to have had a traumatic head injury.

  “You should suggest that to Dad and the chief,” I said. “If you haven’t already.”

  “It would be so much easier to understand,” he said, “if it were all a horrible accident. I can’t imagine why anyone would actually kill her.”

  Clearly he hadn’t been eavesdropping on Ramon and Bronwyn.

  “Not everyone agrees with the actions she’s taken on Ramon Soto’s case,” I said.

  “But that’s hardly a life-or-death issue,” Blanco said.

  “It could be for Ramon,” I said.

  “He could do another dissertation, couldn’t he?” Blanco’s expression was puzzled. Maybe tossing off major research projects was a breeze for him.

  “He’s spent three years on this one,” I said. “That’s probably an eighth of his entire life. And what’s more, it’s three years of tuition. Unless he’s on full scholarship, Ramon has probably racked up some pretty serious student loans. Another three years of work, more tens of thousands of debt.”

  I suddenly realized that I was probably making too good a case for Ramon as a suspect. I could feel Ramon’s pill bottle pressing against my leg.

  “And Ramon’s just the one we know about,” I said. “How many other students and former students might be walking around feeling that Dr. Wright ruined their lives?”

  “Oh, dear,” he said. “I never considered that. The fact that someone could have some violent, irrational grudge.”

  Irrational? Well, it was all in your point of view.

  “Watch your back, then,” I said as I turned to leave. “We wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “To me?” His voice rose to a squeak. “Why should anything happen to me?”

  “Right now, a lot of people associate the two of you,” I said. “For all some of these people know, you were helping Dr. Wright with whatever she was doing that they don’t like. So be careful. We don’t want more trouble.”

  He gave me a startled look and scurried back to the kitchen, clutching his cell phone like a talisman.

  Okay, it was a mean thing to say, but he’d angered me, with his slurs on Dad’s professionalism and his automatic assumption that anyone who didn’t like Dr. Wright was irrational.

  Still, he was looking less and less like a credible threat to Ramon’s dissertation. I had been wrong in thinking that we were facing two formidable adversaries. Dr. Wright might have been formidable. Dr. Blanco was merely the faithful sidekick.

  Or perhaps he was only a weapon Dr. Wright had planned to use—a weapon now harmless with no hand to wield it.

  A weapon someone else could use for good, perhaps? I’d leave that to Art, Abe, and Michael, who presumably knew Dr. Blanco better than I did.

  I was about to shuffle out of the hall when an impulse struck me. I reached into my pocket for my key ring. I didn’t know if it was an old-fashioned custom or an eccentricity of the previous owner, but most of the doors in our house had keyed locks, even the closets—and all with different keys. The coat closet was supposed to be for Michael’s and my stuff, which was why the entire hall was crammed with borrowed coatracks. We hadn’t been locking it, but whether Dr. Blanco had really been using it as a phone booth or whether he’d been snooping, I could keep him from doing it again. I sorted through my keys till I found the right one and locked the door.

  If Dr. Blanco wanted privacy for his phone calls, he could go out in the yard as the students did.

  As I turned away from the door, I ran into Ramon and Bronwyn coming back from the kitchen.

  “Rehearsal over?” I asked.

  “About to begin,” Ramon said. “Would you like to come and watch?”

  “No thanks,” I said. “Farther than I want to walk right now and I’ve seen a couple of rehearsals already.”

  “I don’t suppose you could keep Dr. Blanco here in the house with you, then,” Bronwyn said. “We don’t want him interrupting the rehearsals telling us how obscene and offensive the play is.”

  It had puzzled me before when Blanco said that. I’d have called the play merely bawdy. I planned to d
iscourage Mother from seeing it. But I wouldn’t have called it obscene. Clearly Blanco’s literary taste matched his rather prim and priggish exterior.

  “He’s entitled to his opinion,” Ramon said.

  “But he’s not entitled to force his opinion down everyone else’s throat,” Bronwyn said. “That’s censorship.”

  “He probably likes censorship,” Ramon said. “And anyway, he’s been pretty quiet since Dr. Wright died.”

  Perhaps Blanco was making a few token protests to prove he wasn’t a pawn.

  “He’s obnoxious,” Bronwyn said, turning to me. “When Ramon or any of the other students speak Spanish to him, he ignores them. Pretends he doesn’t understand.”

  “Maybe he’s not pretending,” Ramon said. “Not everyone with Latino heritage actually speaks Spanish.”

  “Then it’s dishonest of him to take advantage of an accident of birth if he doesn’t honor his heritage enough to speak the language or learn about the culture,” Bronwyn said. “Have you looked at his CV?”

  “His what?” Ramon echoed.

  “CV—curriculum vitae,” I put in. “It’s what they use in academia instead of resumé.”

  “Never use an English word when a Latin one will do,” Bronwyn said with a sniff.

  “Actually, resumé is French, but I know what you mean,” I said. “Where’d you see his CV, and what’s so interesting about it?”

  “It’s posted on the college Web site,” she said. “It lists a lot of awards and honors. First Latino professor on the staff of this college, certificate of thanks from some Hispanic cultural association. I mean, it looked encouraging. We knew Dr. Wright was going to be hard to deal with, but when we heard that the other professor assigned to deal with Ramon’s case was a Latino, we were relieved. We thought he’d be sympathetic.”

  I frowned suspiciously. Ramon had managed to give the impression that the prunes’ arrival was a horrible surprise. But how could that be if he and Bronwyn had known Blanco was assigned to the case—or even that there was a case to begin with? Maybe the prunes were right and Ramon had been deliberately avoiding them.

  Clearly Ramon had done well in his acting classes. Or maybe it was Bronwyn who had been busy gathering intelligence about the enemy.

  “But instead of being helpful, he’s as bad as she was,” Bronwyn said. “He’s nothing but a Tío Taco.”

  “Stop calling him that,” Ramon snapped.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s a term for someone who’s sold out his Latino heritage,” Bronwyn said. “Like Uncle Tom or Oreo for blacks.”

  “It’s a nasty insult and I wish you’d stop saying it,” Ramon said. I got the feeling I was seeing the latest round of an old argument.

  “Even if the guy deserves it? Look at him—turns up his nose on every aspect of Spanish culture—”

  “How do you know he deserves it?” Ramon snapped back. “How do you know what the guy went through to get where he is? You don’t know what kind of economic barriers he had to overcome, what kind of prejudice and discrimination he experienced. None of us do.”

  “If he’s suffered and struggled so much, how come he isn’t more sympathetic to other Hispanics?”

  Ramon just closed his eyes as if tired of arguing, so I spoke up.

  “Suffering and struggling don’t automatically ennoble someone,” I said. “Sometimes it just beats people down. Makes them anxious. Fearful. Protective of what they have.”

  “Yeah,” Ramon said. “Believe it or not, ‘I made it, so let me help you’ is a lot less common than ‘I got where I am under my own power—what’s wrong with you?’ ”

  “But does he have to be so hostile to his fellow Hispanics?”

  “He probably doesn’t see it as hostile,” Ramon said. “He probably sees it as making sure he isn’t seen to be favoring one group over another.”

  “I can’t believe you’re defending him,” Bronwyn said.

  “I’m not defending him,” Ramon said. “I’m just trying to explain why I’m not condemning him. I’d like to think I’ll do things differently if I’m ever in a position of power—”

  “When, not if,” Bronwyn put in.

  “But in the meantime, I’m not going to come down on the guy for doing what he thinks he has to. And hey—even if we don’t think he’s a very good role model, when outsiders look at the college staff directory, they see a Spanish name with ‘doctor’ in front of it and a fancy title after it. He doesn’t have to be a nice guy to break glass ceilings. Just hardheaded.”

  “And if he cancels your play and does what he can to sabotage your dissertation?” Bronwyn said softly.

  Ramon shook his head.

  “You can’t just sit back and do nothing,” Bronwyn said. “You have to fight to preserve your culture. Look what’s happening to whales!”

  I tried to make sense of what she was saying. Had I taken another brief power nap? At what point had the conversation jumped from ethnic discrimination to conservation and animal welfare?

  Ramon simply rolled his eyes as if to say, “Not that again.” I could understand his point of view—Bronwyn was strident and singularly persistent.

  Then light dawned.

  “You mean the country of Wales?” I asked.

  “Well, of course the country,” she said. “A country where due to generations of discrimination against it, the native language has become all but obsolete. My family’s originally Welsh but none of them has spoken our native language for generations. Of course, that’s not surprising. Did you know that only twenty percent of the population of Wales can speak Welsh?”

  A sudden though hit me.

  “That’s why you came to school here, isn’t it?” I asked. “Because the college has a Welsh name.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Caerphilly. Such a beautiful name.”

  I was struck by the way she said the word. Not just that she was pronouncing it right, “car-FIL-ly,” instead of “care-FIL-ly” or, worse, “CARE-ful-ly.” But when she said it, there was a lilt, a hint of music, an echo of—

  “It’s Welsh?” Ramon asked.

  “Of course it is, you dolt,” Bronwyn snapped.

  “What did you think it was?”

  “I always figured it was Native American,” Ramon said.

  “It’s a town in Wales,” I said. “When we’re not mangling Indian place names, Virginians like stealing place names from the British Isles.”

  “And pretty soon, that will be all that’s left of Wales,” Bronwyn said. “Beautiful place names that no one can pronounce, because all the Welsh turned their back on their culture. Just the way you—”

  “Give it a rest, dammit!” Ramon said. He grabbed a coat from one of the racks, strode over to the front door, and stormed out, slamming it behind him.

  Bronwyn looked after him, frowning. Then she glanced at me.

  “The guy is trouble,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said noncommittally, glancing at the front door, which I could almost imagine still quivering. Yes, with a temper like that, he could be.

  “He’s out to get Ramon,” she said.

  I should have realized she wouldn’t criticize Ramon, at least not to me. From my point of view, Blanco looked less likely to cause trouble than to become the next murder victim. Perhaps Bronwyn had already formed her opinion and wasn’t seeing his current mild-mannered behavior.

  “We expected it from Dr. Wright, but we were hoping for better from Dr. Blanco,” she went on. With that, she followed Ramon out, though at least she closed the front door more quietly.

  I stared at the closed door, frowning. Bronwyn had been studying Dr. Blanco’s CV. And so far, Danny, who was supposed to be my researcher, hadn’t brought me a single bit of information. Granted, he probably hadn’t had much time at his computer, given the murder investigation.

  Still, he’d found time to talk to Bronwyn. He’d told her about seeing Ramon put something in Dr. Wright’s tea. And he’d promised not to tell a
nyone.

  I needed to talk to Danny. And possibly do a little online research of my own.

  Time to visit the basement again.

  Chapter 15

  I had to pass through the kitchen on my way to the basement. I stopped for a few moments to look around. Only a lingering hint of the paella smell remained, and that seemed to be coming from the remarkable mountain of dirty dishes in and around the sink. The room was empty, and peering out the back windows, I could see why. A few people were milling about outside the barn, and bright light spilled out of the door as someone slid it open to go inside. I could see Señor Mendoza and my grandfather inside, laughing in the center of a group of people. I saw a couple of students turn to the door, no doubt to complain about the arctic air coming into the warmer interior of the barn. The people outside hurried to enter and slid the door closed again.

  I realized I felt ever so slightly lonely. When the students had first arrived, I’d felt the occasional twinge of resentment, feeling that they were spoiling the last few weeks Michael and I would ever have together as just a couple. But I’d gotten used to having them around day and night. When they were gone, it would probably feel downright peaceful and cozy with only Michael, the twins, and Rob and Rose Noire underfoot.

  Of course that sounded rather like a half-remembered joke of Rob’s, about a man hitting himself over the head with a two by four because it felt so good when he stopped. Still, to my surprise, I realized I’d miss the students.

  I peered down into the basement. The TV was on again, and I could hear melodramatic music.

  Danny might not be at his computer, but even if he wasn’t, I could use his computer—or one of the other computers down there—to do a little Googling.

  I began to descend, slowly and carefully.

  “The neck’s broken,” came a voice from the television. “The brain is useless. We must find another brain.”

  Was this some kind of omen? Warning me to watch my step so I didn’t break my neck?

  More likely, if it was an omen, it was warning me that I’d made the wrong choice of researchers. I needed another brain—one that wasn’t obsessed with the beautiful but potentially untrustworthy Bronwyn.