Cockatiels at Seven (17 page)

“So she wouldn’t know him well enough to have anything against him?”

“You mean you think Nadine had something to do with Jasper’s death?” Sandie asked. “How come?”

“What if they were both in on this embezzlement thing the police are investigating?” I said.

“Nadine?”

I could see she was thinking it over.

“That’s so hard to believe,” she said finally. “She’s so dedicated to her job—she’s always the first one in every morning and the last to leave. She hardly ever takes a vacation.”

“Classic embezzler behavior,” I said. “Her best chance of keeping others from finding out is to be around all the time, ready to smooth over any problems.”

“I never thought of that,” Sandie said. “And the nerve of her, being so strict with us about things like putting it down on our time cards if we leave half an hour early, when she was—”

“It’s only a theory,” I said. “We shouldn’t judge too hastily.”

“Sounds like a good theory to me,” Sandie said. She smiled, but it was the kind of smile I’d have if I saw something really awful about to happen to my worst enemy.

“We may not know until Karen turns up,” I said. “If she succeeded in finding Jasper, she might be the last person who did. And I’m wondering if maybe she found his body, knew people would suspect her of killing him, and decided to disappear until she could figure out how to clear herself.”

At least I hoped that’s what she was doing.

“What do you figure he came back for?” Sandie asked.

“No idea,” I said. “And it’s possible he was trying to keep out of sight—his next-door neighbor hadn’t seen him.”

“Next-door neighbor?” Sandie said. “What neighbor? I mean, from what Karen said, Jasper’s uncle’s place was in the back of beyond.”

“Aubrey Hamilton,” I said. “Owner of the bird farm next door.”

“Aubrey? I thought she was still summering in Maine.”

“No, when I went out there—wait a minute—she? The Aubrey I talked to was a guy. Twenty-something. Silly little goatee.”

“I don’t know who you talked to, but it sure wasn’t Aubrey Hamilton,” Sandie said. “She’s an older lady—older’n I am, anyway, late forties or maybe fifties. She and her husband used to raise poodles, but after he died, she gave it up. Just keeps a couple as pets. And every Memorial Day, like clockwork, she packs up the poodles and heads off to someplace in Maine, where she grew up.”

“Then who the hell did I talk to at her house yesterday?”

“Maybe she hired someone to look after the place while she was gone.”

“He didn’t correct me when I mistook him for Aubrey.”

“Maybe he figured if you didn’t know Aubrey any better than that, you didn’t have much business knowing she wasn’t around.”

I bit back a sharp comment. Yes, that was definitely
how some of the natives would react to a nosy outsider asking questions.

And the guy with the silly goatee was definitely a native. He’d had the typical old Caerphilly County accent, blending the round vowels of a Tidewater accent with just a hint of the twang that became more pronounced as you moved west toward the Shenandoah. My own voice, with a hint of Tidewater buried in the rather generic Mid-Atlantic accent I’d picked up from radio and television, instantly signaled to the natives that I was not from around here.

“Does Aubrey Hamilton have family in Caerphilly?” I asked.

“No. Well, maybe some by marriage,” Sandie said. “I don’t really know her. But I did hear about how she can’t take the summers and has to go north every year—everyone knows that.”

She sounded rather condescending. I thought Aubrey’s plan sounded quite sensible—if you didn’t like Virginia’s hot, sticky summers, why stay around and whine if you had the means to avoid them?

“So you wouldn’t know if she had relatives she let use her house,” I said. “The way Hiram Bass let Jasper use his house.”

Sandie shrugged.

“Sorry,” she said. “I only really know Jasper because of Karen. He was a couple of grades ahead of me in school, you know.”

I nodded.

“I should be getting back to the office,” Sandie said, picking up her tray. “Just in case Nadine calls or sticks
her head in. You can’t imagine how nasty she’s been. As my gran always said, a person’s true character comes out in hard times, and Nadine’s true character is just plain mean.”

“Good luck,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”

“And you’ll let me know if you hear anything from Karen?”

“Of course,” I said.

“You’re a good friend to her,” Sandie said. “You just let me know if there’s anything I can do.” She gave me a quick hug before dashing out the door.

I went back to puzzling over the identity of the im-poster in the goatee.

“A few grades ahead of Sandie,” I repeated. “Aha!”

I bussed our table and headed back to my car.

Next stop, the Caerphilly County Library.

Like the rest of the town, the Caerphilly County Library was on a slow, summer schedule. Only a few people lounged over books in the reading section, and they looked as if they were mainly there for the air conditioning. Unfortunately, Ms. Ellie, my favorite librarian, was on a hiking vacation in the Andes and not due back until Labor Day, which meant I was on my own when it came to unearthing local information.

In the reference section, I found what I was looking for—yearbooks from Caerphilly High School, at least fifty volumes lined up neatly on a top shelf.

I’d estimated Mr. Goatee’s age at twenty-five, which would mean he’d graduated around seven years ago. If he graduated. Just to be on the safe side, I started with the books from ten years back and moved forward from there.

Sure enough, there he was. Frederick (“Freddy”) Hamilton—so he must be a relative of Aubrey’s. He’d graduated nine years ago. Apart from the marching band in his freshman year and woodworking club in his senior year, he didn’t have any extracurricular activities, which made him a bit of an oddball. He looked a lot younger in his senior photo, and a lot more presentable, too—probably because he hadn’t yet grown the unfortunate goatee.

I flipped over a few more pages and found the other name I’d been halfway looking for. Jasper Walker, also looking very young in a coat and tie, and without the scraggly ponytail.

Jasper had a slightly better roster of extracurricular activities—computer club all four years, track and field in his freshman and sophomore years, and the woodworking club for his junior and senior years.

Which meant, in a school as small as Caerphilly High, that Freddy Hamilton must have known Jasper.

Of course, he hadn’t denied knowing him. Just hadn’t made a big deal about knowing him. Going to high school together, and being in a club together didn’t mean they were friends.

And if he was related to Aubrey Hamilton, maybe there wasn’t anything sinister about the fact that he was hanging around her house while she was away for the summer.

Still—the fact that he had not corrected my mistake, and had let me go on thinking he was Aubrey—and his clear anxiety when it had looked as if Timmy was about to go into the barn—made me wonder if Freddy had something to hide.

Just then I realized that my purse, which was sitting on the table beside the stack of yearbooks, had begun vibrating. Which meant that someone was calling me on my cell phone.

I closed the yearbook, grabbed my purse, and rummaged around to find the phone while I headed for the library exit. Though I stopped to answer it in the library’s vestibule, which still held a little of the air conditioning.

“Meg? Is that you? Meg?”

Rob, sounding panic stricken.

“It’s me,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

“Get back here right away! I don’t know what to do about—no!”

Rob hung up, leaving me still firing questions at him. And didn’t pick up when I tried to call back. Didn’t pick up the whole dozen times I tried to call him while breaking every speed limit on the way back to the house.

When I got to the point where I could see the house from the road, I was relieved to see that the house wasn’t on fire or surrounded by a SWAT team. In fact, the only thing I could see happening was that Rob was out in the yard, holding the garden hose with the spray nozzle on while a stark naked Timmy ran in and out of the water. Timmy was probably giggling by the look of it. I couldn’t tell Rob’s mood, though. Had the crisis, whatever it was, passed so soon, or was he pulling a fast one to cut short his stint of childcare?

“Thank God you’re here,” he exclaimed when he saw me striding across the yard toward him. “Timmy has—no! Get back!”

Timmy had started to run toward us, until Rob spotted him and turned the hose on him, much the way I’d seen police on television turning fire hoses on rioters. Luckily the spray from our garden hose was considerably
less forceful and wasn’t likely to hurt Timmy, only make him giggle and prance around gleefully.

“Easy with the hose,” I said. “You don’t want to knock him down or get water up his nose.”

“No, I’m just trying to keep him the hell away from me.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“He’s covered with poop!”

I glanced at Timmy. He didn’t seem to be covered with anything, except maybe drops of water. I could see one or two dabs of what I had supposed was mud, but nothing thirty seconds with a washcloth couldn’t fix. Still, given Rob’s well-known queasiness . . .

“What happened?” I asked aloud.

“I turned my back on him for a minute, and the next thing I knew, he’d taken his diaper off and was waving it around. What a mess! You should see the kitchen.”

I closed my eyes to count to ten. At three I got hit in the face with a blast of water.

“Dammit, enough!” I said, putting my hands on my hips. “Turn the hose off!”

Rob dropped the hose. It landed at an angle and continued to squirt me just below the left knee until he reached the spigot and turned it off.

“More! More!” Timmy called. He ran in to pick up the spray head and shake it, to make it start again. I snagged him.

“Come on Timmy,” I said. “Uncle Rob and I are going to give you a bubble bath. Rob, put on your bathing suit.”

Timmy didn’t actually look particularly dirty, but I shared Rob’s squeamishness to the extent of wanting to
make sure. And besides, I knew the only way to calm Rob down was to convince him that Timmy was no longer noxious. I hauled Timmy into Michael’s and my bathroom and gave him a quick scrubbing in the walk-in shower while Rob, at my orders, prepared the bubble bath and fetched Timmy’s bath toys.

“There,” I said, plopping Timmy in the tub. “Splash to your heart’s content.”

“You’re so good with kids,” Rob said. “I couldn’t get him to cooperate.”

“I didn’t get him to cooperate,” I said. “I just picked him up. Where was he running around without his diaper?”

“All over the kitchen,” Rob said, wrinkling his nose.

“Keep him entertained while I clean the kitchen, then.”

Apart from the diaper dumped in one corner, the kitchen seemed about as clean as it had been when I’d left it. Either Rob had cleaned up the marks left by Timmy’s diaper-swinging rampage or he’d exaggerated the whole incident out of proportion. My money was on exaggeration.

I dumped Rob’s and Timmy’s discarded clothes in the washer. Then I shed my own clothes, trying to ignore the fact that I had a sizeable audience—the snakes that had so disconcerted Michael last night. While in theory I knew they were only responding to light and motion, and not watching me with any kind of menace, it was still rather creepy.

“We need to get you guys back to the zoo,” I said to the snakes, and reached for my cell phone—at least, I
reached for where my cell phone would be if I hadn’t just dumped my jeans, cell phone and all, into the washer. I fished out the phone, started the machine, and called Dad.

As the phone rang, I rummaged through the piles of clean clothes on the folding table. I could tell how busy Michael and I were by how full the table was. Right now, it contained over half of our wardrobe.

I got Dad’s voice mail.

“Dad,” I said. “When you get this, I need you to get the snakes out of our basement ASAP. I want everything to go smoothly when Mother comes over tonight, and you know how she feels about snakes. And don’t just stash them somewhere else over here—if she starts measuring one room, there’s no telling where she’ll go.”

Okay, it wasn’t quite a lie—odds were Mother would find some reason to drop by tonight, if only for a few moments; and it had been at least a week since she’d dragged me off to some corner of the house to propose a decorating scheme, so we were probably overdue for that, too. I threw on some clothes, waved at the snakes for what I hoped would be the last time, and went up to clean the kitchen—which could use a good scrub, even if Rob had seriously exaggerated the damage done by Timmy’s diaper-slinging.

As I scrubbed, I kept an ear open to make sure the splashing and squeals of laughter from upstairs still sounded as if both boys were happy. After Timmy’s bath, it would be time for his supper, followed by watching some of his favorite videos and then getting him into pajamas and reading him a few stories.

I supposed I could have delegated more of it to Rob, or to the various other family members who had begun drifting in. But I was feeling irrationally guilty for dragging Timmy to a murder scene and then abandoning him to Rob’s care. And I also found it a lot easier to forget about finding Jasper’s body with Timmy around.

Although having Timmy around didn’t ease my anxiety about Karen. Quite the contrary.

I continued to brood and fret, unnoticed by the rest of the family—possibly because I spent a lot of my time in the kitchen, cleaning up, or in the basement, catching up on the laundry. At least until Michael came home.

“What’s wrong?” he asked about two seconds after he clattered down the stairs to find me.

“Apart from the fact that we still have too many snakes?”

“One is too many,” he said. “What else is wrong? You look worried.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “At least nothing that hasn’t been wrong for the last several days.”

“But it’s starting to get to you,” he said. He pulled a stack of clean but tangled laundry toward him and began sorting it out.