Cockatiels at Seven (13 page)

Usually most of my family could be convinced that they owed me multiple favors, but apparently I’d burned through a lot of those in the past couple of days. Dad and Dr. Blake had plans—presumably plans connected with whatever crime against wildlife my grandfather would be exposing in his next documentary. But when I asked what their plans were, they both changed the subject. Rose Noire was driving Mother up to Washington for a flurry of visits to antique stores and fabric stores and at the last minute they’d decided to go up the night before, to get an early start. As they scurried out the door, they assured me that their change of plans had nothing to do with Timmy.

I finally cornered Rob.

“Gee, I’m really sorry,” he said. “But—”

“After all, you should at least try to help out with things if you’re going to be practically living here,” I said.

“I’m not practically living here,” he protested.

“Oh, so I can throw away that pile of stuff in the closet of the bedroom on the third floor?”

It still took me fifteen minutes of my best guilt-inducing
persuasion plus the reassurance that I’d probably be home by 9
P.M
. if not much earlier, but I broke him down.

By the time I’d gone over the most important sections of Timmy’s instruction manual with Rob and reassured Timmy that even though I was going away for a few hours, Uncle Rob would be happy to play horsiehorsie with him all evening, I barely had enough time to throw on presentable slacks and a nice blouse before taking off for town.

I was walking out the door, car keys in my hand, when a complication hit me.

“I’ll need to take your car,” I said.

“Why?” Rob was still a little protective of his latest automotive toy, a Porsche convertible that had yet to acquire its first real scratch.

“What if something happens and you need to take Timmy someplace?” I said. “Like to the emergency room?”

“He can ride in the Porsche.”

“It doesn’t have a back seat to put the car seat in,” I said. “And trust me, even if it did, you wouldn’t want Timmy riding in your Porsche.”

Rob digested that for a moment.

“Yeah, but what are the chances I’ll actually have to take him to the ER?”

“Slim,” I said. “So what does it matter if you’re staying home with an aging tin can or a brand new race car in the driveway?”

He eventually gave way to common sense, but he was still sulking when I drove off. Or maybe just worrying about whether I could drive his car.

I had to admit, the Porsche was quite a change from
my reliable but aging Toyota. And after two days of driving around with a car seat in the back, feeling as if I spent more time looking in the rearview mirror at Timmy than at the road ahead, being in the car alone would have been exhilarating all by itself. Throw in the sense of power and freedom of driving a hot car with no roof—well, I found myself playing fast and loose with the speed limit on one long open stretch. Fortunately I had slowed to a relatively sedate five miles above the speed limit by the time I passed Chief Burke, stopped by the side of the road, apparently talking on his cell phone.

Looking in the rearview mirror, I thought I saw him frowning at me, though his face disappeared in the distance too soon to really tell.

Well, a frown was normal for Chief Burke when he was in the middle of an investigation. No particular reason for him to be frowning at me, was there?

I pushed the thought from my mind to enjoy the rest of my drive. And I had to admit, the most beautiful part of it was the last mile, from the gate of the Caerphilly Inn to the hotel’s wisteria-draped front door. The rest of the county was looking a little bare and baked by a long, hot, dry summer, but the Inn’s driveway was cool and leafy under the overarching shade of the trees on either side, and patches of bright summer flowers appeared at charmingly unpredictable intervals. Now that I’d started to try my hand at gardening, I had gained a new appreciation for how expensive and labor-intensive the Inn’s low-key landscaping really was.

But I felt a lot less intimidated by the Inn now that my recently discovered grandfather had taken up
semipermanent residence there. He terrorized the staff on a regular basis, but they clearly adored him, which either meant that they thought his bark was worse than his bite or that he tipped hugely. Possibly both. At any rate, with Dr. Blake in the picture, I felt a lot less worried these days that they’d do something dire like tow my battered car for dripping oil on the spotless white gravel of their parking lot. The locals debated hotly whether the Inn had its gravel power-washed annually or just replaced it. And of course Rob’s practically new Porsche shouldn’t offend the Inn’s sensibilities at all.

I glanced down at my clothes. The black slacks that had looked okay at home suddenly seemed dowdy, and flecked with bits of Spike’s fur. And was that a spot of yogurt on the left knee? Maybe I should have worn a skirt. And heels. And—

Okay, so the Inn still had the power to intimidate.

I nodded to the desk clerk as I strolled through the lobby toward the restaurant.

“Shall I tell your grandfather you’re here?” he called.

I waved, smiled, shook my head, and pointed to the dining room. He waved, smiled, and nodded in return.

Michael was already seated at a table with a view of the lush expanse of the Caerphilly Golf Course, sipping a glass of red wine. He leaped to his feet when he saw me.

“You look marvelous,” he exclaimed, and leaned over to kiss me with far greater decorum than usual. Probably the civilizing influence of the hotel. I could see the maitre d’ beaming with subtle approval. Such a well-dressed, well-behaved young couple.

Yes, it was definitely yogurt on the knee of my pants,
with tufts of dog-hair stuck in it. But the blouse was fine. I’d feel a lot more at ease once I got my unprepossessing legs under the tablecloth.

“I look okay,” I said. “Imagine how marvelous I could look if—Yow!”

I’d started to sit down while talking, and didn’t realize that the waiter had pulled out my chair for me—pulled it so far out and with such a flourish that when I tried to sit down where I’d last seen the chair, I landed on the floor in a heap.

I spent the next several minutes assuring the waiter and the maitre d’ that yes, I was fine, and no, I didn’t want the hotel doctor to check me out, and for heaven’s sake, we didn’t expect them to pick up our check.

“They’re like sharks,” I said to Michael in an undertone. “One drop of blood in the water—”

“Is madame injured?” Now it was the hotel manager at my elbow.

We finally agreed to accept a bottle of wine as suitable recompense for my injury. The hotel staff were still hovering solicitously over us when the Driscolls arrived.

Dining with the Driscolls was like dining with someone’s grandparents. We managed to fill the first few minutes of the dinner with discussions of what each of us planned to order. But all too soon, the waiter took our orders and whisked away the menus, stranding us without any obvious means of conversation.

Michael and Dr. Driscoll fell back on college politics, and I hit on the notion of telling Mrs. Driscoll about our recent elopement and honeymoon. Either I’d found a subject dear to her heart, or she was as relieved as I was
to have found something we could talk about. At any rate, she listened with a grandmotherly smile, making the occasional chirping comment, and happily sipping first a glass of the excellent wine Michael had initially ordered and then a few glasses of the even more excellent wine the maitre d’ brought by way of apology. By the end of the salad course, I suspected Mrs. Driscoll would happily have listened to me read her the Caerphilly phone directory as long as I kept her glass filled.

By the time we reached the main course, though, I was eager to change the topic. I searched around for a ploy.

“Do you mind if I call home?” I asked, pulling out my cell phone and glancing apologetically around the table. I moved a few feet away and dialed Karen’s number. Not that I really expected her to answer it, but I’d dialed it so often in the last couple of days that it was the first number that came to mind. I let it ring for a while, turning my back to the table so the Driscolls couldn’t see that I wasn’t talking to anyone, and then returned to my seat.

“Sorry,” I said. “My brother Rob is baby-sitting, and I’m a little worried. He’s not very experienced.”

“Oh, you have children?” Mrs. Driscoll asked. And then a puzzled and slightly alarmed look crossed her face—no doubt as she recalled the scant two months since our wedding.

“Not yet,” Michael said. “We’re taking care of a friend’s child. In fact, you probably know her—Karen Walker. Meg, isn’t Karen in Ambrose’s department?”

“Young Timothy?” Mrs. Driscoll exclaimed, a relieved smile spreading over her face. “My goodness—he’s quite a handful, isn’t he?”

“You have no idea,” I said.

Dr. Driscoll looked troubled.

“Do you know where she’s gone?” he asked.

“No idea,” I said. “She dropped Timmy off with me Monday morning and I haven’t heard from her since. Not that I can convince Chief Burke of that.”

“Isn’t it shocking?” Mrs. Driscoll said, shaking her head. “Ambrose has had the police in his office all day.”

“You’d think they suspected me of something,” Dr. Driscoll said.

“Well, Chief Burke’s not with the college,” Michael said.

“Precisely!” Mrs. Driscoll said, beaming as if Michael had said something particularly significant. Dr. Driscoll nodded solemnly and folded his hands on the table.

“I really don’t think Chief Burke quite grasps the situation,” he said, in a voice that had probably lulled generations of his fellow college staffers into gentle naps during financial meetings. “Karen is not the sort of young person to get involved in some kind of sordid embezzlement scheme. In fact—are you familiar with the unfortunate events we experienced two years ago?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Not to go beyond this table,” he said, holding up one forefinger in warning. “But as I tried to explain to the police—”

“And were absolutely ignored,” Mrs. Driscoll put in.

“Two years ago, Karen came to me with very disturbing news,” Dr. Driscoll said. “She and her husband had separated—a very sad business.”

“Speak for yourself,” Mrs. Driscoll said. “Nothing
sad about it. If you ask me, getting rid of that rascal was the smartest thing she ever did.”

“Yes, of course. I meant the marriage. I think she knew it was a mistake almost from the first. At any rate, she told me that she was packing up some things he’d left behind after she asked him to leave—”

“Kicked him out on his ear, you mean,” Mrs. Driscoll said. “If she’d asked him to leave, he could have packed up his own things.”

“And she found some information that troubled her—information that seemed to indicate that her husband had been misusing his computer skills and the knowledge of our financial systems that she had helped him to acquire.”

“He was embezzling,” his wife said. “He hadn’t taken much yet, but if she hadn’t turned him in, he’d probably have taken the college for millions.”

“I think we would have caught him before he stole quite that much,” Dr. Driscoll said, frowning at her.

Mrs. Driscoll looked at me, rolled her eyes, and took another deep sip of her wine.

“At any rate,” Dr. Driscoll continued, “Karen was instrumental in saving the college from substantial losses. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to bring the matter to trial—”

“Hired himself a hotshot attorney who tried to make it look as if Karen was involved, too, the son-of-a—”

“Mabel!” Dr. Driscoll looked over his glasses at his wife, who shrugged and took another gulp of wine.

“You all backed down,” she said. “You should have taken the jerk to court. He did it. You all knew that. Bastard should be in jail.”

“Perhaps we did make a mistake,” Dr. Driscoll said, with a sigh. “Karen’s absence has me worried. Obviously her estranged husband has reason to resent her. What if Walker is responsible for her . . . disappearance?”

“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Mrs. Driscoll muttered.

“But if this all happened two years ago, what were the police investigating today?” I asked.

Dr. Driscoll looked embarrassed.

“It begins to look as if we may not have done as good a job of investigating Mr. Walker’s crime as we thought,” he said. “We handled it internally, of course—more discreet that way.”

Michael nodded sagely, and I wondered if, like me, he was having to bite his tongue at the notion of handling an embezzler discreetly—instead of bringing his crimes into the open, trying to have him prosecuted, and generally doing everything possible to reduce the chances that anyone would give him a chance to embezzle again.

“It appears that far from terminating with his employment, his crime has been, well, ongoing,” Dr. Driscoll said. “The police even seemed to think Karen was involved.”

“Idiots,” Mrs. Driscoll muttered.

“They have to investigate every possibility, you know,” he said. “And it really doesn’t look good, her running away like that, just when the whole thing came to light. If you see her—”

“I know,” I said. “She needs to come back, talk to the police, and clear her name.”

“If she
can
come back,” Mrs. Driscoll said. “What if something has happened to her?”

No one quite knew what to say to that, and luckily, before the awkward silence dragged on too long, the waiter came around to ask us if we wanted dessert. And along with dessert, another distraction arrived.

“Meg! Michael!” It was Dr. Blake, striding up to our table. “What brings you here?”

“The food,” I said.

“How are you, Dr. Blake?” Michael asked, standing up to shake my grandfather’s hand. “Have you met Dr. and Mrs. Driscoll?”

“Dr. Blake!” Ambrose Driscoll had bounded to his feet and was staring with awe at the new arrival. “What an honor to meet you! I can’t tell you how much I admired your article in
Audubon
magazine on the plight of the Blue-throated Macaw!”

“Thank you, thank you,” Dr. Blake said, shaking hands vigorously with Dr. Driscoll. “Are you a birding man yourself?”