Owl Be Home for Christmas

by Donna Andrews

  “Not necessarily,” Dad said. “Nitroglycerin’s usually prescribed for angina pectoris—stable angina. If it belongs to Frogmore, it would mean he had some degree of coronary disease—but he could still have been a long way from a heart attack. We need to talk to his physician.”

  “The chief’s working on that,” I said.

  “And we need to find out what other medicines he’d been taking,” Dad said. “Of course, some heart attacks happen without any prior indications that there’s a problem, or at least without the patient noticing such clues as there are and seeking medical attention. And it really doesn’t present like a heart attack. Still—it would be worth looking for other medications—ACE inhibitors, beta-blockers, digoxin.”

  “How about if I go find Ekaterina, then, and tell her you want to search Dr. Frogmore’s room,” I suggested. “And then, if you could use my help—”

  “Absolutely,” Dad said, and Horace nodded.

  “I’ll change into something more suitable for snooping,” I said.

  “While you’re there, ask her if she’s got that refrigerator ready,” Dad said absently. He was, for some reason I decided not to think about, taking off Dr. Frogmore’s well-polished dress shoes.

  I nodded and left the room. I resisted the temptation to take one last look at Dr. Frogmore’s body.

  Chapter 13

  Out in the Gathering Area, several clumps of people were standing around holding glasses and conversing in low tones. They all looked up and stared at me. Rose Noire was still guarding the door, although she’d abandoned the chair and was sitting cross-legged on the floor with her eyes closed, doubtless performing some kind of meditation. A kind that would permit her to notice and fend off would-be lookie-loos, I hoped.

  “Did someone break the news about Frogmore’s death?” I asked.

  “Michael made a very dignified announcement,” she said. “And then we all had a minute of silence. It was quite moving. People still seem … subdued.”

  One of the small groups of attendees burst out laughing, and then quickly hushed themselves, looking around to see if anyone was offended.

  “More subdued than last night,” Rose Noire added.

  “That wouldn’t take much,” I said. “Last night they were all but dancing on the tables.” And I wondered if some of them were repressing the impulse to do so now. “I’m going back to the cottage to change into something more suitable for helping Horace and Dad. I see you’ve already managed.” The long, ethereal, gauzy dress she’d worn to the banquet had been replaced by jeans and an embroidered peasant blouse.

  “Your mother spelled me for long enough to change,” she said. “And then she went off to make sure your grandfather gets his rest.”

  “Good.” If Grandfather was feeling the least bit guilty about his dislike for Frogmore, rest was the best thing for him. Although about the most negative thing I recalled hearing him say about Frogmore personally was that the field of owl ornithology would be a lot more congenial with him out of it. Then again, Grandfather wasn’t nearly as prone to guilt as I was. Any dismay he felt might be largely offset by his relief at the prospect of seeing peace and harmony restored to the field. If that were the case, definitely a good thing if he’d gone to bed rather than hanging about having to pretend a solemnity he didn’t feel. Nothing was more likely to put him in a foul mood.

  Just then Dr. Green showed up carrying a tray that held a teapot and two cups and saucers. To my surprise, he lowered his bearlike body into a cross-legged lotus pose beside Rose Noire, with an ease that suggested that he’d put in some serious hours in yoga class.

  “Thank you, Ben,” Rose Noire said as Dr. Green handed her a steaming cup. “Meg, would you like some?”

  “I can fetch another cup and saucer,” Dr. Green offered.

  “Thanks, but I have to run.” And even if I didn’t have to, I had detected the familiar unpleasant odor of one of Rose Noire’s famous herbal teas. Dr. Green was sipping his cup with a look of bliss on his face. Either he was a consummate actor, he had no taste buds, or he was truly besotted with her.

  “I’ll be back,” I said, in my best Terminator voice, and headed for the lobby. I found Ekaterina in her public office, the one behind the reception desk. She seemed to be tidying up, although, like any other space under her supervision, the office was already impeccably organized.

  “Horace needs a reasonably large space to serve as his ‘command post.’” I could tell she liked the term. The office might just have been permanently rechristened. “I think this will work well.”

  “He’ll be like a pig in clover.” I realized as the words came out of my mouth that the idiomatic phrase might not be familiar to the Russian-born Ekaterina, so I went on. “Which is slang for very contented indeed. Any chance you could take Dad and Horace up to search Dr. Frogmore’s room?” I’d let them do their own nagging about the refrigerator. It might be some time before I wanted to eat anything that had been in the Inn’s refrigerators.

  “Of course.” She picked up several key cards from the little machine that made them and strode out of the Command Post. I followed her out and headed for the Madison Cottage.

  The temperature had plummeted since the last time I’d ventured outside. I only had to be out in it for the few yards that separated the cottages from the main hotel, but my face and fingers were tingling by the time I stepped inside the Madison.

  I found Michael and the boys in the living room, swaddled in blankets, watching Die Hard. Michael pressed the pause button when he saw me come in, and the boys jumped up to greet me.

  “Finally,” Josh said. “We have to go to bed early, and we thought you were going to keep us up.”

  “We want to get up early to get back to our digging,” Jamie said.

  “Digging?” I echoed.

  “We’re digging tunnels in the snow,” Jamie said. “You want to see?”

  They led me over to the French doors that opened out onto a small terrace that ran along the back of the cottage. The last time I’d looked through those doors, I’d seen nothing but snow, drifted some four feet high against the glass. Now I could see that the boys had excavated most of the terrace—an area five by ten feet—to form a cave about two and a half feet high. Along the walls of the cave, tunnels led off in various directions.

  “That one goes to Great’s cottage.” Jamie pointed to the tunnel on the far right. “And from there to Grandpa and Grandma’s cottage. That one in the middle goes out some way into the golf course. We meant it to go toward the hotel so we could go by tunnel to feed Percival, but we got turned around.”

  “So we started another one to go to Percival,” Josh said, pointing to the left-hand tunnel. “It should only take us another hour or so to get there in the morning.”

  “What do you do with the snow you dig out?” I seemed to recall in movies like The Great Escape and Escape from East Berlin disposing of the dirt was always one of the biggest problems facing tunnel rats.

  “We bring it in and put it in the bathtub to melt,” Josh explained.

  I made a mental note to tip the housekeeping staff more than usual.

  “Time for us to get some sleep,” Jamie announced. “See you in the morning.”

  They hurried off to the bathroom, and I heard the sound of toothbrushing.

  “I’m not quite sure whether Horace allowed them to do the tunneling or whether they got started after he got called to the crime scene,” Michael explained.

  “Quite possibly they convinced him that we’d already given permission.” I went into the bedroom to shed my finery, and he followed. “Seems reasonably harmless, as long as someone keeps an eye out to make sure they don’t stay out too long.”

  “Which I plan to do if they’re still determined to be tunnel rats in the morning,” Michael said. “Strangely enough, it’s warmer inside their tunnels. And look on the bright side—all that work is burning off an amazing amount of energy that might otherwise make them … just a little chal
lenging to share the cottage with.”

  “Full speed ahead, then. They didn’t ask about Frogmore?”

  “I filled them in when I got here, and I guess that satisfied their curiosity.” He frowned, and his jaw clenched slightly. “When I told them who it was, they said, ‘Oh, the mean man.’”

  “What did he do to them?” I probably sounded a little fierce, but the idea of Frogmore turning his venom on Josh and Jamie angered me.

  “Nothing to them. Apparently they saw him yelling at your grandfather sometime Friday and took an immediate dislike to him.”

  “Sensible of them,” I said. “Well, leave the light on, and expect me and Horace when you see us. Although we’ll try not to wake you.”

  “Don’t stay up too late.” He gave me a quick kiss. “Solving Frogmore’s murder is the chief’s job, and you will still have a conference to run tomorrow.”

  Back in the lobby there were quite a few attendees milling about with drinks in their hands. Was the bar full to overflowing? Or had they figured out that the lobby was the better place to keep an eye on Horace’s Command Post and get some clue about what was happening in the investigation

  I went into the Command Post. Horace had definitely taken over. He’d improvised a stand for his police radio and had commandeered a satellite phone—not, I hoped, Ekaterina’s only one, or she would be cranky. His makeshift forensic kit was arranged neatly on top of the desk. A canvas hotel laundry cart stood in one corner, half full of evidence bags. At least I assumed they were evidence bags. The paper bags Ekaterina had found for him to use were white with the Inn’s logo embossed on them in gold—bags the kitchen used when a guest requested a lunch to take with them when on an all-day sightseeing or shopping trip. I wondered what the Crime Lab down in Richmond would make of them.

  And there were rather a lot of them, from which I suspected that they’d made at least a preliminary foray into Frogmore’s room.

  Dad and Horace were engrossed in earnest discussion.

  “Of course, it could be completely irrelevant,” Dad was saying. “We won’t know for sure until the autopsy.”

  “What could be completely irrelevant?” I asked.

  “Everything I’ve collected, if it turns out he died of natural causes,” Horace said. “But we have to keep going. And—”

  “Dr. Langslow?”

  Chapter 14

  Ekaterina came in holding another satellite phone and a slip of paper.

  “The chief called,” she said. “He has notified Dr. Frogmore’s employer, and obtained the name of his primary care doctor. He suggested that perhaps you should talk to the doctor and fill him in on what you learn. The doctor’s expecting your call.” She handed Dad a paper before disappearing again.

  “Dr. Thomas Lanville,” Dad said. “And another 541 area code.”

  Dad put the phone on speaker and dialed.

  “Lanville.” The voice was deep, gruff, and booming.

  “Dr. Lanville, I’m Dr. James Langslow, the local medical examiner here in Caerphilly, Virginia. I have Deputy Horace Hollingsworth with me—he’s our forensic expert, and also in charge of our on-site investigation—and my daughter Meg, who’s helping us with logistics. Thank you for agreeing to talk to us—did Chief Burke explain the situation?”

  “After a fashion. I gather you’re snowbound in a five-star hotel, and instead of being able to relax and enjoy yourselves, you have a sudden and suspicious death on your hands, and no real facilities for investigating until the snowplows come to your rescue.”

  “That’s pretty much it,” Dad said. “And we understand the deceased was a patient of yours—Dr. Oliver Frogmore.”

  “Annoying man,” Dr. Lanville said. “Sorry; not the done thing, speaking ill of the dead, but he really was. Complete hypochondriac—the scientific kind. Gets it into his head there’s something wrong with him, spends hours looking up symptoms, then storms in demanding treatment for something that it only takes a few simple tests to show is not the problem at all.”

  “Oh, yes,” Dad said. “I know the kind, the ones who have every crackpot pseudo-medical site on the Internet bookmarked.”

  “Well, to Oliver’s credit, he didn’t much hold with Internet research,” Dr. Lanville said. “If it wasn’t the NIH or the Mayo Clinic, he had no time for it. Got himself a whole collection of medical reference books—dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. He used to inspect my bookshelves regularly to see if I had anything new. At least he wasn’t a big TV watcher, thank God. I can’t stand medical dramas, but my husband loves them. I get him to fill me in on what rare diseases they’re featuring each week, so I can have a heads-up on what my hypochondriacs are going to come in with next. Oliver wasn’t quite that bad, but still. There was the whole mushroom thing.”

  “Yes,” Dad said. “We understand he was allergic to them.”

  “Nonsense! He was no more allergic to them than I am. We did three rounds of testing and there was no sign of any sensitivity to mushrooms. Or any of the other hundred or more possible allergens we tested for. What he had was gallbladder disease.”

  “Gallbladder disease,” Dad echoed. “I wouldn’t think that would present with symptoms that resembled mushroom allergy.”

  “No, it most certainly wouldn’t,” Dr. Lanville agreed. “You know how he came up with the mushroom allergy idea? He had an artery-clogging over-the-top five-course meal in one of Portland’s most expensive French restaurants, and between the pâté and the duck confit and who knows what else—well, he made his long-suffering gallbladder miserable on a truly epic scale. And then decided that the sauce béchamel aux champignons was to blame.”

  “Yes. Easier to give up mushrooms than fatty foods.” Dad nodded as if he’d seen it all before.

  “He ended up having his gallbladder out last year, and it was all I could do to keep from saying ‘I told you so’ afterward,” Dr. Lanville said. “At least from what I can tell, he’d been doing reasonably well at keeping to a proper post-gallbladder-removal diet. Whining about it, but doing reasonably well. Was doing, rather. Still getting my head around the notion that he’s dead.”

  “Did he have any heart trouble?”

  “Not a bit of it,” Dr. Lanville said. “Given his age—seventy-two this August—and his relatively sedentary lifestyle, that’s one of the things I check on regularly. But he’s fine there. Low cholesterol. Low-normal blood pressure. Passes the stress tests with flying colors. Got the cardiovascular system of a man twenty years younger. And funny thing—in all his fits of hypochondria, I can’t ever remember him convincing himself there was anything wrong with his heart.”

  “Perhaps because that’s such a common ailment for men his age,” Dad said. “All too real. And much more fun to imagine you’ve got something rare and wonderful.”

  “Much more fun!” Dr. Lanville hooted with laughter. “Yes, that’s it exactly. And it would be all too ironic if he died of a heart attack—is that what you’re leaning toward?”

  “No,” Dad said. “We won’t know for sure until the autopsy, of course, but I saw what happened—I was sitting at the next table—and it didn’t look to me like a heart attack.”

  “Any idea what it was?”

  “Well … it’s just speculation at this point. I only have what I observed to go on, both when he had his attack and when Horace, our EMT, and I were treating him. But I’m wondering if it could have been an overdose of vasodilators.”

  “Hmm … interesting.” Dr. Lanville sounded thoughtful. And I’d have bet anything that if we could see him, his face would be wearing the same slightly puzzled frown that Dad was showing.

  Since they showed no signs of explaining anything, I barged in with a question.

  “That medicine Horace found under his table—is that a vasodilator?”

  “Yes. A nitroglycerin lingual spray,” he added over the phone for Lanville. “One that delivers 400 micrograms with each pump.”

  “He didn’t get that from me,” Dr. Lanville said. �
��And I can’t imagine why any reputable doctor would prescribe it for someone with absolutely no history of cardiac disease.”

  “Do people ever use it for recreational purposes?” I asked.

  “I don’t think there’s a chemical out there that some fool hasn’t sniffed, smoked, or shot up with for recreational purposes,” Lanville said. “I suppose nitro’s more plausible than some—the effects for the recreational user are probably similar to poppers.”

  “Amyl nitrite inhalers,” Dad translated. “Which have been very popular recreational drugs for decades.”

  “And no doubt he could have gotten it on the black market,” Lanville went on. “Everything’s available on the black market these days. But why would he? Given that amyl nitrite is available legally over the counter. And I’ve never seen any evidence that he had an interest in recreational substances other than vintage wine and expensive Scotch.”

  “We don’t know for sure it was his,” Dad said. “We have to consider the possibility that someone administered it to him without his knowledge.”

  “Damn. Any idea how much?”

  “No, but the spray bottle was nearly empty.”

  Dr. Lanville whistled in sardonic appreciation.

  “And he showed every sign of sudden catastrophic loss of blood pressure,” Dad continued.

  “He’d be more vulnerable to that than most,” Lanville said. “Given his normally low blood pressure. I always kept my eye on that, in case it drifted too low, but it was always rock steady at around ninety over sixty.”

  “We also found something interesting in his room,” Dad said. “Had you prescribed sildenafil for him?”

  I frowned at Horace—what was this sildenafil stuff, and why hadn’t he mentioned finding something interesting?

  “What?” Dr. Lanville sounded very surprised. “Never. He never even asked about it. Are you sure?”

  “We found five—no, make that six tablets in an unlabeled plastic pill bottle.” Dad held up the little bottle in gloved hands. I was close enough to see the contents—a little cluster of diamond-shaped light blue pills. Nothing I could remember taking—or anyone in my household, for that matter—but they looked vaguely familiar. Annoying that the Internet was out and I couldn’t look up sildenafil.