Cockatiels at Seven

by Donna Andrews

  I saw Rose Noire’s jaw drop as her eyes traveled up the hill behind the cottage and saw the huge faux Georgian mansion looming overhead. You half expected Mr. Rochester to come striding out in pursuit of Jane Eyre.

  “Oh, my,” she said. “It’s . . . it’s . . . ”

  “A grotesque example of conspicuous consumption, aesthetic bankruptcy, and ecological insensitivity?” I suggested. “An absolute travesty?”

  “Well, yes,” she said. “But at least it’s a pretty travesty. Oh, look—that one looks like something out of Gone with the Wind.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It looks like what you’d get if you took a bicycle pump and inflated Tara to three times its original size.”

  “Oh, Meg,” she said. “You can be so negative.”

  “We’re chasing a killer, remember?” I said. “It brings out the cynical side of my personality.”

  “Playground! Playground!” Timmy exclaimed. He had begun bouncing up and down in his seat with excitement.

  “Look, there’s Nadine’s house,” I said, a few hundred feet farther on.

  Timmy and Rose Noire both stared with me as I drove slowly past. Nadine’s house was a two story in faux Tudor style.

  “Aren’t you going to stop?” Rose Noire asked.

  “Not right out in front, no,” I said. “Look, it’s a cul-de-sac.”

  I turned around in the circle at the end of the road and we cruised past Nadine’s house again. Rose Noire and I were still fascinated, but not Timmy.

  “Want playground!” he pleaded. He managed to sound as if being prevented from going to the playground was causing actual pain.

  “Oh, Timmy, I’m so sorry,” Rose Noire began. “We don’t have time to go to the playground right now—”

  “Yes, we do,” I said, as I began pulling over to park the car.

  “Not that I object to giving Timmy some recreation,” Rose Noire said. “But I thought the whole purpose of this trip was to pursue leads to the disappearance of his . . . um . . . ”

  “The playground gives us an excellent reason for being in the neighborhood,” I said. “We came over from the low-rent district to take insidious advantage of the rich people’s playground.”

  “And it’s only two houses down from the house you want to spy on,” Rose Noire said. “How convenient.”

  “Yes,” I said, as I went around the car to unfasten Timmy. “You can keep an eye on Timmy while I rove the neighborhood, conspicuously carrying the real estate section from Sunday’s paper to make me look harmless.”

  “You’re not going to break in, are you?” she asked, in an anxious tone. “Having intruders does such horrible things to the energy of a house—the occupants usually need a cleansing ceremony afterward, and they so rarely realize that. Of course, I suppose it helps that you’re breaking in for a good cause rather than to commit a crime, but still—it can be the start of a whole downward spiral in the lives of its occupants.”

  “No, I probably won’t break in, because getting caught would start a whole downward spiral in my own life. I expect most jails have even worse energy than burgled houses. I just plan to look in the windows.”

  Actually, I wouldn’t hesitate to sneak in if I thought I could, but most houses this fancy tended to have working burglar alarms. I didn’t think Rose Noire needed to know my reasoning.

  “Still, even looking in the windows is a kind of violation,” she said. “Ask the house’s permission first.”

  “Um . . . right,” I said. “Let’s get Timmy down to the playground before we worry about that.”

  It was an awesome playground, with at least a dozen pieces of equipment of various degrees of size and complexity. Timmy made a beeline for a structure like several small log cabins on stilts, with stairs and ladders leading up to them, slides coming out of them, and a variety of rope and board bridges connecting them. The whole area around the cabins was paved with some sort of rubbery substance that bounced underfoot, which probably did a lot to cut down on broken bones.

  And the whole playground was empty. A pity, really, to build such a nice playground and have no one use it.

  “Watch me! Watch me!” Timmy shouted, as he began scrambling up a ladder to the tallest cabin.

  “Oh, dear,” Rose Noire said, sprinting after him.

  “I’ll be back,” I said.

  When I got back to the street again, I glanced back and saw Rose Nore, with her ankle-length India-print skirt tucked up to a more practical level, waving her hands frantically as Timmy leaned backward out of one of the cabin windows.

  With Timmy safely occupied—well, at least occupied—I strolled back toward Nadine’s house.

  Holding my folded newspaper like a totem, I scanned the street. It didn’t look as if my acting efforts were particularly necessary. Not a creature in sight. Perhaps the residents of Westlake were all double-income couples who worked long hours to pay for their mansions.

  As I crossed the street and slogged up the sidewalk toward Nadine’s house, I thought of another possibility—most of the residents were probably wealthy enough to summer someplace else. Days like this, I could understand why. Though if everyone had gone away for the summer, why had they all left their air conditioning on high—the only sound I heard was the hum of several dozen huge compressors laboring away up and down the street.

  Nadine’s house was small, compared to some of the others, but still impressive. Like all her neighbors, she had a lawn manicured to velvety smoothness and lined with neat pruned shrubs in beds of perfectly mounded mulch.

  As I trudged up her walk, I found myself thinking about what Timmy and Spike could do to all that uncanny perfection if you turned them loose on it for five minutes.

  I pressed the doorbell, producing not a single note or even a chime, but several bars of vaguely familiar music. As I stood there waiting for an answer, I tried to hum it and figure out what it was.

  When I thought enough time had passed, I pressed the doorbell again. This time I listened more closely and recognized the notes—the college anthem.

  Most people at Caerphilly College tried to forget about the anthem whenever possible. The tune was twittery and unmusical, while the original words were embarrassingly flowery and sentimental—no doubt because they had been written by Mrs. Ginevra Braken-ridge Pruitt, a late nineteenth-century poet of dubious talent. The administration would have replaced the song long ago except that Mrs. Pruitt and her family were among the college’s biggest donors—nearly every third building on campus was named after one or another of the Pruitts. The students had succeeded in getting the administration to agree that the anthem needed new words, but since the commission to write them was now in its fourth decade of existence without coming any closer to agreement, I had no doubt that if Michael achieved tenure, we’d be humming the damned song at college gatherings until his retirement.

  The tune didn’t sound any better when played on doorbell chimes, I decided, as I pressed the button for a third time. The doorbell had to be an expensive custom order. What kind of lunatic—apart from the Pruitts—would even want it?

  I allowed plenty of time for Nadine to answer the door—after all this was the sort of house where you probably needed roller skates to be sure of getting to the door in under ten minutes, and I couldn’t see Nadine doing that. I concentrated on listening for any sound inside the house, and from time to time I looked at my watch and tried to look impatient, so anyone watching me would think I actually had an appointment with Nadine.

  Clearly she wasn’t home. I looked around to see if anyone was in sight. No one. And there were only a couple of houses within view anyway, and their sight-lines would be largely obstructed by all the ornamental trees and shrubbery.

  “Hope you don’t mind, house,” I said. “I’d like to see your insides.”

  I stepped into a flowerbed and peered into the foyer window.

  It was empty. No furniture, no rugs, no pictures—nothing.

  I stepped back to the wa
lk and pondered. I’d heard of people who overextended themselves by buying more house than they could afford and were too house-poor to afford furniture. In fact, Michael and I had been in that boat ourselves initially. But we did have some furniture and junk left over from our single lives, not to mention family members who would gladly have donated enough furniture and tchotchkes to fill the house from top to bottom if we let them. Our house was still a little minimal, but by choice. Nowhere near empty.

  I walked around to the next window, pretending I belonged there. I pulled out my notebook and a pen and tried to look preoccupied and professional, like someone who’d been asked to give an estimate on taking over the landscape service.

  “Lovely glass panes,” I said to the house. “Mind if I use them?”

  Hearing no objection, I peered in again. This window offered a view of the living room. Also completely empty.

  I continued around the perimeter of the house, peering into each window as I went and exclaiming enthusiastically about what I saw, to avoid hurting the house’s feelings. Though despite what I said to the house, I wasn’t very impressed. It was big and immaculately clean, but rather cold and formal. Though maybe the poor house would look better if it had some furniture to add a bit of warmth. I contemplated the other end of the vacant living room, an empty dining room, a kitchen stripped of everything but the appliances, and several more bare rooms that were probably intended to serve as family room, home office, guest room, or who knows what else. Curious how hard it was to put a name to a room when it was completely devoid of any contents.

  I did find a stepladder at the back of the house—it was leaning up against the wall behind some bushes, and looked as if it might have been forgotten. Or maybe the house, grateful that I’d asked permission before snooping, had provided the ladder to help me snoop more efficiently.

  Yeah, or maybe it was holding out the ladder to tempt me into getting into even deeper trouble.

  Still, I couldn’t resist. I used the ladder to climb from the rear terrace onto a deck that ran across much of the back of the house on the second story. I tiptoed over to the windows and peeked in, seeing only several empty bedrooms.

  Nadine didn’t have any stickers warning me that she was protected by one of the several local alarm services, so I was pondering the wisdom of trying some of the windows and doors, to see if I could sneak inside, when I heard the garage door opening.

  Damn! Nadine was returning at the worst possible moment. I ran back to the ladder, scrambled down, and began dragging it behind the bushes where I’d found it.

  I succeeded in hiding the ladder but not in fleeing the scene of the crime. I spotted a huge boulder near the side of the house, so I ducked behind that. While scrambling behind the boulder, I whacked my knee into it, and was surprised to realize it didn’t hurt much. And that the impact had jarred the boulder out of place. I looked closer and realized that the boulder was actually made of plastic, put in place to cover up the water meter. I settled it back in place just as Nadine strode out onto the terrace.

  I flinched, but she wasn’t looking for me. She had a highball glass in her hand, filled with ice and something liquid.

  I suddenly realized how hot and thirsty I was. And my throat was dry and dusty.

  Nadine sat on the stone wall that separated the terrace from the lawn and shook her ice.

  I could feel a cough trying to burst free. I took deep breaths.

  Nadine lifted her glass—there were little drops of condensation running down the side—and took a long swallow.

  The urge to cough was growing. Was there any way I could sneak out of the shrubbery without her noticing?

  She pulled out a cell phone, punched a few numbers into it, and then held it to her ear, with an irritable scowl on her face.

  “Hello, I’d like to put my mail on hold . . . .”

  Where was Nadine going? My urge to cough vanished as I listened to her giving her zip code, then her name and address.

  “Beginning tomorrow . . . . Yes. Indefinitely . . . . I don’t know precisely when . . . well, then put it down for thirty days—I can change that if I’m back sooner, right?”

  She scribbled something in a pocket notebook—the confirmation number, I assumed—said “thank you,” and hung up.

  Where was Nadine going tomorrow for an indefinite stay? Was she skipping town? It certainly looked as if she’d already packed up and moved all her stuff.

  She stared out across her flawless back lawn as she took another chug from the glass. Then she punched more numbers into the cell phone.

  “Hello? . . . yes, I’d like to arrange for a car to the airport tonight. Six p.m . . . . Just one.”

  She rattled off her address and her home and cell phones. I took notes on the phone numbers—you never know.

  She hung up again, and dialed another number.

  “Hello, is Duke in? . . . Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  Evidently the answer was not to her liking. Her tone became so frosty it made the ice cubes rattling in her glass sound warm.

  “Tell him to call Nadine Hanrahan ASAP. I want an update on the job he’s doing for me.”

  She pressed a button and snapped the cell phone closed. I got the idea she’d have found a land line, where you could slam down the receiver, much more satisfactory at that moment.

  After another sip, she pressed a couple of buttons. One of her speed dial numbers, apparently. She waited with the cell phone to her ear, tapping her foot in triple time, and finally spoke.

  “Sandra? I was expecting to find you, at least, in the office today. Call me as soon as you get this.”

  She stared at the phone for a few moments as if peeved with it. Then she pulled out her notebook again and began flipping through the pages, occasionally crossing something out or scribbling something in. It looked for all the world like me spending some quality time with my notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe. I wasn’t sure I liked finding any resemblance between me and Nadine.

  The resemblance was there, though. Like me, she seemed to find communing with her notebook soothing. That or the icy beverage she kept sipping. At first, her forehead was creased with a frown and she tapped her pen impatiently against the pages. But as time wore on, she stopped tapping and the frown began smoothing out, to be replaced by a faint smile.

  Problem was, time was wearing on down at the playground, too. And given the innate contrariness of toddlers, if I tried to hurry Timmy away from the playground, odds were he’d cry and clutch one of the support poles with a death grip, begging to stay, but since I was hoping he would stay happily amused until I got back, odds were he was getting bored with it. How much longer was Nadine going to commune with her to-do list?

  She finally drained the glass and went inside. I waited a few minutes before extricating myself from the bushes and creeping along the side of the house to the front, and then walking down the driveway. Act as if you belong, I reminded myself. Pretend you’re someone who lives here.

  What I really wanted to do was pretend I was someone who jogged here, but I wasn’t dressed for it, so I forced myself to stay down to a walking pace. As soon as I was out of her yard and across the street, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Chief Burke.

  Twenty-Eight

  “What can I do for you?” he asked. He sounded tired. Was he really tired, or just trying to discourage me from bothering him?

  “I was just over at Nadine Hanrahan’s,” I said. “Did you know she’s leaving town?”

  “No,” he said. Rather guardedly. “Should I be concerned about that?”

  “Did you also know that her two-million-dollar mansion, which she certainly did not purchase on her college salary, is completely empty? No furniture, no pictures, not even any boxes?”

  A pause.

  “That’s interesting,” he said. “And you know this because . . .?”

  “I peeked in all her windows while waiting for her to come home.”

  “And then when
she came home, she told you she was leaving.”

  “No, I decided I didn’t want to talk with her after all, so I hid, and I overheard her arranging to stop her mail indefinitely and have a car pick her up at six p.m. tonight to take her to the airport.”

  Silence on the other end, and then a sigh.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I think. Why don’t you try to stay out of trouble for the rest of the day, and let us take care of Ms. Hanrahan?”

  “Roger,” I said. He hung up.

  I wondered if I should have mentioned the last phone call. To someone named Duke. There was nothing innately wrong with the name Duke, was there? So why did I keep picturing a hulking thug Nadine had hired to do something sinister and unspeakable?

  My overactive imagination plus my dislike of Nadine, I decided. So even though the call raised my hackles, probably just as well I hadn’t mentioned it. No sense letting Chief Burke think I was totally irrational and paranoid.

  I hurried back to the playground, and was relieved to see that Timmy was still happily climbing up the ladder into the tallest cabin and then sliding down one of the slides.

  Rose Noire looked a little the worse for wear, though. She was sitting on a platform near the top of the log cabin structure with her feet over the side and her head and arms leaning over the railing. I’d have thought she was unconscious, except that her head moved slightly to follow Timmy as he ran across her field of vision.

  “Auntie Meg!” Timmy shouted, when he saw me. He swooped down the slide and ran toward me, arms outstretched. When he reached me, he grabbed onto my legs, with both hands, almost knocking me down.

  “Come watch me slide, Auntie Meg!” he pleaded.

  “There you are,” Rose Noire said. “We were just going to look for you.”

  We stayed at the playground for a little while, letting Timmy wear himself out on all the slides and swings and climbs. I let Rose Noire do the running around at ground level while I perched at the top of one of the playground structures, in a sort of lookout post, shouting encouragement to Timmy as needed and flipping through the classified sections of the bird and pet magazines I’d picked up at the bookstore on our way.