Cockatiels at Seven

by Donna Andrews

  I was about to try a game of wheeling a tomato slice around my plate and into my mouth when Sandie appeared at the other side of the table carrying a tray.

  “Boy, did you upset Nadine,” she said, as she sat down.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” she said, with a shrug. “Nobody likes Nadine.”

  “Then would you like me to go back and annoy her some more? Maybe sneak in and spill some molasses on the floor?”

  She giggled and shook her head. She cast an ostentatiously jealous look at our hamburger and fries, then sighed.

  “Want fry?” Timmy said, offering her one of his largest.

  “No thanks,” she said. “Not that I wouldn’t love one,” she added to me. “I’ve been on this diet forever. Doomed to nibble lettuce like a rabbit for the rest of my life.”

  I nodded sympathetically. Since she was busily emptying four packets of blue cheese dressing on an enormous Cobb salad, I found myself wondering whether my lunch was all that much more fattening than hers, but I’d learned long ago to keep my mouth shut about other people’s diets and pray that they did the same about mine.

  “When Nadine gets over being ticked at you and Karen, maybe I’ll ask you to come back and rile her up again,” she said. “Right now she’s just ignoring me, and that’s the way I like it. So Karen left Timmy with you?”

  When he heard his name, Timmy grinned broadly, revealing all the bits of ketchup-daubed French fry he was chewing. Sandie and I both averted our eyes.

  “Don’t chew with your mouth open,” I reminded him. “Yes, Karen asked me to take care of him for a little while. That was yesterday morning. I’m getting a little frantic.”

  “I can imagine.” She glanced over at Timmy, who was jamming a fry against Kiki’s stitched mouth.

  “You have to eat something, Kiki,” he said. More of a sentence than he usually constructed, so I suspected he was echoing something he’d heard repeatedly from Karen.

  “It’s probably because of her husband,” Sandie said. “She found out Friday he was back in town.”

  “Her husband? Jasper? They’re still married?”

  “She filed for divorce when he ran out on her, but it takes a while, especially if you can’t find the jerk to get him to sign any papers. So when she heard he was back, living at his uncle Hiram’s old house, she said she was going to go out and get him to sign something.”

  “Don’t people usually get a lawyer or a process server to do stuff like that?”

  “Yeah, but she didn’t have a lot of money,” Sandie said. “I guess it’s cheaper if you do it yourself. Anyway, she was going to go out and see him.”

  “Did she say when?” I could feel the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. If Karen had left Timmy with me because she was going to see her estranged husband—and hadn’t returned . . .

  “She was talking about it Friday afternoon,” Sandie said. “I assumed she meant to do it over the weekend. And then when she didn’t come on time yesterday morning, I thought maybe she’d taken the morning off to do it. Then Nadine went on the warpath—she’s a real stickler about unexcused absences.”

  I imagined Nadine was a real stickler about a lot of things. Escaping the Nadines of the world was one of the main reasons I’d chosen blacksmithing over more secure but confining jobs.

  “Maybe that’s what she’s doing,” I said. “She dropped by my house about eight in the morning yesterday.”

  “You’ve seen her a lot more recently than I have, then,” Sandie said. “She left Friday afternoon, just like usual, and that’s the last I saw of her.”

  Her face was solemn, and the words sounded a little rehearsed, as if she had already practiced saying them for CNN, should the occasion arise.

  “Do you know her husband?”

  “Jasper? Not that well. Of course, his parents were from around here.”

  Clearly she didn’t like him, or she’d have said Jasper himself was “from around here.” Still, he was a native, even though an unlikable one. And so was Sandie, from her words—though come to think of it, I could have guessed that from her voice, with its subtle hint of an accent.

  “He didn’t stick around much after his parents died,” Sandie went on. “They sold the farm and all. So I think everyone was surprised when he moved back here again. Got a decent job at the college, in the data support center. Though he didn’t hang onto it for long. That’s how he met Karen, you know. They were putting in this big, automated bookkeeping system and Karen was the one from our department who worked on the conversion.”

  “Do you have any idea why he was fired?” I asked.

  Sandie shook her head.

  “Whatever it was, Karen was real upset about it,” she said. “But she never did say much. It was about that time they broke up, though—and good riddance to bad rubbish. I’ll say one thing for Jasper—he makes my ex look good, and that takes some doing.”

  The newly returned Jasper Walker was starting to sound more and more suspicious.

  “Kiki got a boo-boo,” Timmy announced. I dug into my purse and handed him a Band-Aid. Not for the first time—in my opinion, Kiki was a hypochondriac.

  “You said Jasper was living at his uncle Hiram’s house,” I said aloud. “Do you know where it is?”

  “Out in the woods somewhere near the Clay County line. Hiram Bass—Jasper’s mother’s sister married one of the Clayville Basses.”

  To someone “from around here,” that snippet of genealogy probably told volumes about Jasper and his family, but all it told me was that my quest to find Karen was probably going to lead Timmy and me to the county property records office, to locate Hiram Bass, and then out into the more rural end of the county.

  I noticed that Sandie was looking at Kiki and frowning. Well, yes, Kiki wasn’t exactly in pristine condition. If Karen didn’t show up by bedtime tonight, I was going to try stealing Kiki after Timmy had dropped off to sleep and putting her through the washer and dryer. Or maybe Sandie was expressing disapproval of the number of Band-Aids festooning Timmy’s hands and Kiki’s paws. Well, yes, I suppose I had made a mistake, letting Timmy find out that I routinely carried Band-Aids in my purse.

  “Thanks,” I said. “You’ve been a big help.”

  “I should be getting back,” she said, with another disapproving glance at Kiki. “But please keep me posted on how you’re doing.”

  “Will do.”

  Though when I got back to the car, I wondered if taking Timmy along on my visit to Jasper was such a great idea. For that matter, if Karen had disappeared after going out to see Jasper, maybe going out there myself wasn’t such a great idea.

  Maybe I needed to find out a little more about Jasper first.

  I had a lot of trouble getting Timmy back to the car—I practically had to carry him down the sidewalk. Not that he was being deliberately uncooperative, but he had clearly hit the wall and was falling asleep on his feet. When I got him strapped in, I consulted his instruction manual and remembered that after lunch was supposed to be story and nap time.

  I shoved in the car songs CD to substitute for the story, but with the volume turned down so it wouldn’t interfere if he decided to start his nap immediately. Then I turned the car homeward. While Timmy was napping, I’d see what I could find out about Jasper.

  Eleven

  About a mile from our house, the road from town ran up onto a ridge, giving motorists a sweeping view of the landscape for several miles around—including our house and the sloping part of Seth Early’s pasture that lay across the road from us. Michael always said that he loved that first sight of our house waiting for him at the end of his drive home from the college. I was usually more interested in getting a preview of who and what might be waiting for me when I arrived at the house. A couple of times, the ridge had let me spot some unloved relative’s car parked in front of the house, giving me a chance to remember that I hadn’t quite finished all my errands yet.

  Today, I could see that
Seth Early was skulking across the road from our house, behind the hedge and fence that separated his pasture from the road. I found that reassuring. Mr. Early reacted with great alarm to even the most harmless of breaks from routine, suspecting innocent-seeming delivery men and lost motorists of having sinister designs on his prize Lincoln sheep. Surely anyone who actually meant us harm would raise Mr. Early’s hackles and inspire him to call the Caerphilly police long before the intruder could do anything.

  I thought of waving to him when I pulled up at the house, but I decided against it. He probably thought he was cleverly concealed and I didn’t want to spoil his fun.

  Timmy was fast asleep in his car seat, presenting me with a dilemma. I suspected that, like sleeping dogs, sleeping toddlers should be left undisturbed. I needed Timmy’s nap at least as much as he did. But the thermometer was a blistering ninety degrees outside.

  I parked the car in the shade and left the air conditioning running while I pondered the problem. I decided that I could probably get the car seat out of the car without waking him, but hauling him upstairs and transferring him to the crib probably wouldn’t work. So I opened all the doors and prepared to wait until he awakened by himself. Just to be safe, I dragged a portable fan and an extension cord out of the kitchen and set them up so the breeze would blow gently across Timmy’s car seat. The resulting breeze was actually a considerable improvement over what the window air-conditioning units had achieved in the house, so I fixed myself a glass of lemonade and settled down beside Timmy to enjoy it.

  I had almost fallen asleep when I heard a noise at my elbow.

  “Psst!”

  I opened my eyes to find Seth Early standing beside the car. I put my finger to my lips and led him about fifteen feet away so we wouldn’t wake Timmy.

  “How do I get in touch with Homeland Security?” he said.

  “Why would you want to?” I asked. “I mean, what’s up?”

  “Remember that guy you told me about? The one who’s been hanging around here?”

  “Hanging around here? I only saw him that one time.”

  “He’s been hanging around here. Swarthy-looking guy. Definitely not from around here.”

  Swarthy-looking? Considering how brown Seth Early was from all his outdoor work, I wondered how deeply tanned someone had to be to qualify as swarthy in his eyes.

  Could it be Jasper, Karen’s ex? I called up his image from the photo on her desk.

  “Was he tall and skinny? Long brown hair in a ponytail? Weak chin?”

  “No, that’s not him. This guy was shortish, with short hair.”

  Not Jasper, then. But perhaps one of the thugs who had been hanging around, looking for Karen? And did Seth Early actually know what swarthy meant? Maybe he thought it merely meant thuggish or suspicious.

  “Did you call the police?” I asked aloud.

  “They said they’d drop by later. They haven’t, though. Wouldn’t do much good; the guy’s gone now. But he’ll be back, I suspect.”

  “If he comes back, call them right away,” I said. “And remind them that you live across the street from me, and that I’m baby-sitting Karen Walker’s son.”

  “You think that’d make a difference?”

  “After today it will,” I said. “Her apartment was broken into. Lots of cops there. At the moment, anything related to Karen is probably high priority with Chief Burke.”

  He shook his head doubtfully and ambled off to return to his vigil.

  Even though Chief Burke had made Seth Early give up carrying his shotgun around, I felt a little better knowing he was keeping watch across the street.

  But he’d ruined my chances of napping. I walked over to make sure Timmy was still cool and comfortable, then sat down under a nearby tree and pulled out my cell phone. I was stuck here until Timmy woke up, but maybe I could make good use of the time.

  I called Jack Ransom. Jack was technically the second-in-command at Mutant Wizards, the computer gaming company Rob had founded. In reality, Jack ran the company, since Rob had no managerial, business, or computing skills whatsoever. From the company’s point of view, Rob more than justified his existence by providing a steady stream of oddball ideas that, more often than not, could be turned into successful computer and video games by Jack’s legions of programmers and graphic designers.

  But unless the staff needed him to come in to brainstorm for them or impress some important client, Mutant Wizards ran just fine without Rob. In fact, having Rob on site usually proved so disruptive that the staff went to great lengths to keep him away. Most of the time, he was content to live the life of a dilettante, but every so often he’d have a brief attack of guilt and vow to be more industrious. One of my unofficial jobs, as a member of the Mutant Wizards board of directors, was to detect Rob’s guilt trips in their early stages and sidetrack him into something else.

  These days I saw a lot more of Jack than Rob did—we’d arranged to give me a bunch of corporate titles that meant I could sign off on documents when Rob was nowhere to be found. Luckily, seeing Jack was a lot less stressful now that he’d gotten used to the idea that Michael and I were not breaking up anytime soon and he would not be getting a dramatic promotion from understudy to leading man in my life—his metaphor, not mine.

  And Jack was very plugged into Caerphilly’s relatively small tech community. Jasper was a techie. If Jack didn’t have the lowdown on him he would know someone who did.

  “Jasper Walker,” Jack repeated. “Yeah, rings a bell. We interviewed him a couple of times. He had a great resume—too bad he must have stolen it from someone who actually has a functioning brain.”

  “So you weren’t impressed?”

  “Only by his gall in repeatedly applying for positions for which he was totally unqualified. How did you meet Jasper, anyway?”

  “I didn’t; a friend did.”

  “Steer her away from him, then; the guy’s bad news.”

  “Too late—she married him.”

  “Bummer.”

  “And I think he’s dragged her into some trouble. I desperately need to find out what. Could you maybe ask around, figure out what he’s up to these days—Is he still working over at the college’s data support center? If not, what happened? Is he in some kind of trouble?—stuff like that.”

  “Can do. In fact, why don’t you drop by here this afternoon—anytime after two. We have a programmer who used to work with Jasper. I remember it really shook the kid up when he saw Jasper in the waiting room, and he was visibly relieved we weren’t hiring him. He just said they didn’t get on, and it wasn’t important, since I wasn’t hiring Jasper anyway. But I bet he knows more, and you could probably get it out of him.”

  “It’s a plan.”

  I settled back to wait until Timmy woke up. I took out my notebook that tells me when to breathe, as I called my giant to-do list. I tried, without much success, to find a few items in the to-do section that could be done while waiting for a napping child to wake. Clearly, before embarking on motherhood, I needed to get better at making good use of small windows of time when I couldn’t go anywhere. And also at rearranging my life at a moment’s notice.

  Timmy finally awoke around two-thirty, but thanks to diaper changing and snacks and such, it was closer to three-thirty by the time we hit the road, and I was overdue for some adult conversation.

  Twelve

  I found a shady spot in the Mutant Wizards parking lot and led Timmy inside to find that the reception room had altered dramatically since last week. The furniture was unchanged, but it had been rearranged in a much more efficient layout, and most of the clutter and tchotchkes had gone. The waiting room now looked chic, modern, and uncluttered—exactly the sort of decor I’d always thought we needed for the reception room in the first place. And a lot easier to keep Timmy safe in, for that matter.

  “Morning, Apple,” I said to the receptionist. “I see you’ve been doing some redecorating.”

  “More like undecorating,” Apple said, wi
th a sniff. “I told Jack I was sick and tired of seeing all those bamboo flutes and Chinese dragons all over everywhere, and I was going to put them in a closet for a while and see if anything horrible happened. And so far nothing has.”

  “Not a believer in feng shui, then?”

  “Feng shui’s okay within reason, but the place was starting to look like a souvenir stand in Chinatown.”

  “No kidding,” I said. And then I felt a stab of guilt. I reminded myself that family honor didn’t require me to defend Rose Noire’s feng shui expertise—she’d installed the flutes and dragons and hundreds of other feng shui cures after we’d had a murder on site. And it was true that Mutant Wizards had not experienced any further homicides, but then neither had any of the buildings in town that Rose Noire hadn’t feng shui’d. “I’m glad you kept the fish tank, though,” I added.

  “The guys like the fish tank,” she said.

  So did Timmy. He hadn’t made a sound since he’d walked in and spotted the tank. He was now six inches away from the glass and staring avidly—about the longest I’d seen him stay in one place when not asleep or securely strapped in. I scrutinized the tank, but it looked fairly sturdy and well balanced. Though I noticed that even the fish tank had changed.

  “Different fish, I see.”

  “Piranha,” Apple said. “A lot more interesting. Especially at feeding time. The guys love that. You want to see Jack, right?”

  I nodded and went over to keep a closer eye on Timmy. At the moment, he had his nose plastered against the tank and was staring cross-eyed at the deceptively ordinary-looking fish inside. But I wouldn’t put it past him to find a way to put his head into the tank if I turned my back on him, or perhaps pull it down on top of himself. And I reminded myself that telling Timmy to stay away from the tank would almost certainly make him more interested in it.