Cockatiels at Seven Read online

  “Want stay here,” Timmy sobbed, once we had him in the car seat. I suddenly realized that maybe he wasn’t just being obstreperous. The last time he’d been in the car seat, his mother had dumped him at my house. Did he think I was going to haul him off and leave him with yet another stranger?

  “But I have to run some errands,” I said. “And I thought you were going to come with me. Would you rather stay here with Rob?”

  Rob looked panic-stricken. Timmy considered it.

  “Come with you,” he said, and settled back in his car seat. Rob breathed a sigh of relief.

  “So, hold down the fort,” I said to Rob. “And if Karen calls, find out where the hell she is. And if she shows up, call me and don’t let her leave till I can get back.”

  “Roger,” Rob said.

  As I got into the car, Timmy was amusing himself by kicking the seat in front of him and singing “Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!” I squelched the kicking and, by way of distraction, shoved in a CD Karen had left as part of Timmy’s baggage—a home-burned CD labeled “car music”—and turned on the stereo. A peppy rendition of “The Eensy Weensy Spider” echoed through the car as I drove off toward town. Normally I have nothing in particular against “The Eensy Weensy Spider,” but this singer made it sound so cutesy that I couldn’t wait for it to end.

  Track two was a repeat of the same marzipan-sweet rendition of “The Eensy Weensy Spider.” I skipped the track, only to find more of the same on track three.

  Timmy had calmed down considerably, though, and was chanting “eensy weensy eensy weensy” in a comparatively quiet tone, so I gritted my teeth and drove on

  A few blocks from Karen’s house and twenty renditions of “The Eensy Weensy Spider” later, the program finally moved on to “Old McDonald Had a Farm.” I had the sinking feeling that the CD would consist entirely of Timmy’s five or ten favorite tunes, repeated fifteen or twenty times each.

  I pulled up in front of Karen’s small bungalow and got out. Timmy seemed oblivious to our arrival at his home, and continued happily singing “Moo moo here! Moo moo there!” and waving Kiki and Blanky in the air. I considered taking him out of the car seat—there were lights on, and I could hear the sound of a TV. But I decided I’d rather have Karen’s help controlling him once I let him loose, so I figured out how to unhook the car seat from the car while still leaving him strapped inside—so that was why the thing had so many straps—and hauled him with me up to the door.

  I set the car seat in a shady place beside the door, rang the door bell, and stood there for some moments, glancing back and forth between the door and Timmy. I heard a noise inside, and I noticed a slight shadow through the peephole, as if someone was checking me out. I smoothed my face into a smile and worked on looking harmless. The door finally opened and a short, twenty-something woman looked out at me with a slightly wary look.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “This is 125 Hawthorne Street?”

  I glanced back at the mailbox, and then at the house again. It was the house I remembered visiting, and this wasn’t the kind of cookie cutter neighborhood where you could be one street over and not notice the difference. I even remembered the little planter beside the front door. The impatiens Karen had planted in it the last time I’d visited had given way to some plastic sweet peas.

  “Yes,” the woman said.

  “I was looking for Karen Walker—” I began.

  The woman’s face changed dramatically the minute I said Karen’s name, and she drew back a step.

  “Just leave me alone!” she shouted. “She hasn’t lived here for two years, and I already told you people where she went, so just leave me alone! I’ll call the police on you if you don’t go away.”

  She slammed the door.

  “Not s’posed to slam doors,” Timmy said, shaking his head as if to imply that he, of course, had never been guilty of such heinous behavior.

  I stood, stunned for a moment. Yes, I was a little vexed with Karen for dumping Timmy on me so long, but I couldn’t imagine why the woman would react to her name with such anger. Or was it fear?

  After standing there in stunned silence for a few moments—well, silence except for the Timmy’s soft chanting of “Moo moo here; moo moo there”—I rang the bell again.

  “I said go away,” the woman shouted through the door.

  “I’m going!” I said. “Just tell me where to go!”

  “I have the phone in my hand!”

  “Fine, call the police if you like,” I said. “But first, please tell me where Karen went.”

  “I told you already!”

  “You told someone,” I said. “Not me.”

  “Why do you need to know?” she said. Less loudly. It sounded as if she might be calming down a bit.

  “Because she dumped her toddler on me last night and I want to give him back!”

  The door opened a crack and she peered out.

  “Her toddler?”

  I pointed down at Timmy, who was talking to Kiki in a low tone, with a very earnest look on his face—in short, looking very cute.

  “I hadn’t seen her since shortly after Timmy was born,” I said. “Then yesterday morning she showed up, asked me to watch the kid for a little while, and that’s the last I’ve seen of her. I’m worried. Do you know where she moved to?”

  The woman studied me for a few moments. She glanced back at Timmy. I thought I saw her face soften slightly.

  And there was a toy dump truck on the lawn. If this woman had kids of her own . . .

  “He’s distracted right now,” I said, shaking my head and frowning sadly. “But being without his mother all day yesterday—and then overnight; going to bed without a goodnight kiss from Mommy—you can imagine! I have to at least try to find Karen. For Timmy’s sake.”

  It sounded over the top to me—I’d put a small quiver in my voice, and you could practically hear violins playing in the background. But it worked.

  “Wait here a minute,” she said.

  She closed the door and disappeared. Timmy tired of “Old McDonald’s Farm” and began singing “The Eensy Weensy Spider” again.

  The door opened again, and the woman handed me a sheet of paper. I glanced at it. An address. 1415 Stone Street, apartment 12.

  “It’s those apartments over behind the bus station,” she said. “Those kind-of run-down ones.”

  “The College Arms?”

  “Yeah, the Armpits,” she said, snickering. “That’s what most people in town call them, you know.”

  I knew the place. So did anyone who regularly read the police blotter column in the Caerphilly Clarion. If I were one of Caerphilly’s finest and found myself running a little short of my monthly arrest quota, I’d just mosey over to the College Arms and keep my eyes open until a few of the part-time burglars or small-time drug dealers in residence did something blatantly illegal so I could haul them in.

  “What on earth is Karen doing living there?” I said.

  “They’re cheap,” the woman said. “And maybe she was hoping to shake all the people who’re after her.”

  “What people? Bill collectors?”

  “Yeah, I guess they could be bill collectors,” she said. “Me, I don’t run up bills with people like that. Look, I’m sorry about your friend, but I don’t know anything else about her. She doesn’t live here anymore. I told them where she went. I just want all those thugs to leave me alone.”

  With that she shut the door.

  I picked up Timmy’s car seat and hauled it back to the car. As I was buckling the seat in place again, Timmy’s mood shifted from cheerful into miserable.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Na mimo!” he said. Actually, he said a great deal, but none of it was any more intelligible than “na mimo” had been. I experimented with various solutions. No, he didn’t want a train or a ball. The relatively limited investigation of his Pampers that I could make without unstrapping him did not reveal any serio
us cause for concern. I handed him the bag of Cheerios and a sippy cup of milk from the cooler and that did the trick.

  With Timmy contently swigging milk and munching Cheerios, I drove over to the College Arms.

  Karen must have fallen on hard times to have moved there. Was this before or after her husband left? And what the hell did the woman mean about not running up bills with “people like that?” People like what—drug dealers? Loan sharks? The woman had said thugs. None of that sounded like Karen. Maybe the woman was mistaken about her forwarding address. Maybe someone else far less respectable had lived in the house briefly between Karen’s departure and the woman’s arrival.

  At least I knew why Timmy hadn’t shown any sign of recognition when we’d driven up. He wouldn’t remember the bungalow on Hawthorne Street since he was probably less than a year old when they left.

  He began getting excited as we pulled up in front of the College Arms, but I couldn’t be sure it was the joy of homecoming.

  “Fire engine!” he shouted, banging his sippy cup on the arm of the car seat and waving the Cheerios bag in the air with such enthusiasm that its contents scattered about like confetti. “Fire engine! Fire engine!”

  “No, Timmy,” I said. “Those aren’t fire engines. Those are police cars.”

  Eight

  The Caerphilly Police Department didn’t have that many police cruisers, and I suspected all of them were on the scene, lights flashing. And there were a lot more civilian vehicles than usual in the lot and up and down both sides of the street. Vehicles that didn’t really look as if they belonged at the Arms, whose residents drove either junkers or old trucks, if they were poor but honest, or brand-new high-end cars and SUVs if they were successful in their chosen felonies. So evidently something had happened here at the Arms to attract the attention of local law enforcement. Not an unusual occurrence. Possibly not even the first time the whole force had turned up here—but given Karen’s apparent disappearance, finding them on site today seemed ominous.

  I even saw a couple of campus police cars. Normally the Caerphilly police and the Camcops, as the students called them, were barely on speaking terms, but I saw a brace of Camcops talking amicably to Sammy Wendell, one of Chief Burke’s deputies. I slowed down and waved at him. He waved back.

  And while waving, I realized where all the police activity was centered. The second stairwell. Apartment twelve. Wasn’t that—?

  I glanced down at the piece of paper I’d gotten on Hawthorne Street. Yes, it said apartment twelve.

  “Oh, sh—oot!” I said, catching myself at the last moment before I taught Timmy another word Karen wouldn’t thank me for when I turned him back over to her. If she was still around to—no, I wasn’t even going to think that.

  I pulled up to the next corner and stopped to mull things over—leaving the engine on, though, so I wouldn’t stop the air conditioner or the wretched music. I needed to find out what was going on there—apparently in Karen’s apartment.

  “Go see ‘leese car?” Timmy suggested.

  “In a minute,” I said.

  Maybe I could get some information out of Sammy. Like our neighbor, Mr. Early, Sammy was infatuated with my cousin Rose Noire—who was a free spirit, and so far had barely noticed the existence of any of her suitors. As a result, Sammy was highly vulnerable to manipulation by any member of my large extended family who wanted a favor, or the answer to some question about police business that she really shouldn’t even be asking. I tried to be the exception to the family rule, and only play the Rose Noire card in truly dire emergencies.

  “ ’Leese car now?” Timmy repeated.

  But with county and campus police swarming in and out of Karen’s apartment after more than twenty-four hours during which she hadn’t been seen, hadn’t called, hadn’t answered her cell phone or her home phone—this was a dire emergency, wasn’t it?

  Just then the car tunes CD segued from “Old McDonald’s Farm” into Barney the dinosaur singing “I Love You, You Love Me.” That settled it. Definitely an emergency. I cut the ignition, grabbed the diaper bag, and resigned myself to liberating Timmy from the safety of his car seat.

  “Come on, Timmy,” I said. “We’re going to see the police cars.”

  Keeping a grip on Timmy’s hand proved to be an impossible task, so I settled for getting a good grip on the waistband of his pants. The shirt collar would have worked better—I wouldn’t have had to stoop so much—but I suspected that would work much as a choke chain did on Spike. Unlike most dogs, Spike never seemed to notice the first warning signs of strangulation, and I suspected Timmy would prove equally oblivious to pain. With Spike, we’d solved that problem with a harness that shifted the pressure from his throat to his chest. Did they make toddler harnesses? And if so, was it worth finding one for what I hoped would be the short remainder of Timmy’s stay with me?

  “Hi, Sammy,” I called out, as we drew near. “What the heck’s going on?”

  “Hi, Meg,” he said. “I’m sorry, but you can’t come in here now.”

  I decided to play dumb.

  “Drat,” I said. “You guys would have to be making a big raid on this dump just when I need to take Timmy home.”

  I indicated Timmy, who was straining toward the nearest police car, repeating “ ’Leese car! ‘Leese car!”

  “Timmy?” Sammy said, looking down at the preoccupied toddler. “He lives here?”

  “His mother is my friend, Karen Walker,” I said. “Apartment twelve. If I can’t come in, could you get a message to Karen that I’m out here with Timmy?”

  Sammy and the Camcops looked at each other.

  “I’ll go find Chief Burke,” one of the Camcops said.

  “So you’ve been babysitting the kid?” the other Camcop asked.

  “She—no, Timmy!” I snapped, and grabbed him by the waist again. He’d been reaching toward Sammy’s service revolver.

  Just then Chief Burke came trotting up. Things must be serious—I couldn’t recall when I’d seen the chief moving faster than his usual stately walk.

  “This is Karen Walker’s son?” he asked.

  “Timmy,” I said. “Timmy, say hello to Chief Burke. He’s the boss of all the police here.”

  The remaining Camcop frowned. Timmy tilted his head and inspected the chief with interest.

  “Hello,” he said. “Want ride in the ‘leese car.”

  “Do you indeed?” the chief said.

  Timmy frowned and cocked his head, as if this was a test.

  “Please?” he said finally.

  “That’s the magic word,” the chief said, with a faint smile. “We need to talk,” he added to me. “Sammy! Why don’t you take Master Timothy for a ride in your cruiser?”

  “I don’t have a car seat,” Sammy said, turning pale.

  “I do,” I said, holding out my keys. “My car’s down the block.”

  “Make it a good long ride,” the chief said. “Use the siren a lot. Stop for ice cream if you’ve a mind to.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sammy said. He moved around so he could take Timmy’s hand with his left, to keep him as far from the gun as possible.

  “Fred, you want to go along, help Sammy?” the chief said, turning to the remaining Camcop. It was a question, not an order, but I could see Fred was frowning and digging in his heels. “Might be good to have another officer along, if the kid happens to let slip any information.”

  “Yes, sir!” Fred’s face cleared, and he strode off looking very polished and military, especially compared with Sammy, whose gangly frame was contorted as he tried to stoop down so his hand was at toddler level.

  “I gather all this has something to do with Karen,” I said, gesturing to the herd of police vehicles.

  “Ms. Walker’s a close friend of yours?” The chief had taken out his notebook. And he was looking at me with suspicion. More suspicion than usual. Of course, usually all he suspected me of was snooping around and interfering with one of his investigations. This time . .
.

  “She’s a friend, yes. I wouldn’t say a close friend. I hadn’t seen her in months.”

  “And yet she left her child with you.”

  “Close enough at one time that it didn’t seem too odd leaving him with me for a little while—that’s what she said, a little while, and it was clearly some kind of emergency. I assumed maybe an hour or two. But that was at eight a.m. yesterday. Around noon I started calling her, and not getting an answer, so I thought I’d come over today and see if I could find out anything.”

  He scribbled away in silence.

  “Look, what’s wrong?” I asked. “Has something happened to Karen?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me,” he said.

  “Then she’s not—” I stopped myself. I didn’t want to say the word “dead.” I didn’t even want to think it.

  “We haven’t found a body, if that’s what you mean,” the chief said. “The place was broken into last night, and has been pretty thoroughly ransacked. Any chance you’d be willing to take a look around, see if anything’s been taken?”

  “I’m willing, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be very useful,” I said. “I didn’t even know she lived here. I went over to the bungalow she used to live in, on Hawthorne Street. That’s 125 Hawthorne Street,” I added, anticipating the chief’s question.

  “Bit of a comedown from Hawthorne Street,” he said, glancing up over his shoulder at the College Arms.

  I nodded. The town of Caerphilly didn’t have much in the way of bad neighborhoods, but if there was anyplace within the town precincts that would make me surreptitiously click my door lock button before I drove through it, this two-or three-block stretch of Stone Street would be it.