Stork Raving Mad
Authors: Donna Andrews
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #Mystery Fiction, #Murder, #Humorous, #Humorous Fiction, #College Teachers, #Murder - Investigation, #Langslow; Meg (Fictitious Character), #Dramatists, #Pregnant Women, #Doctoral Students
Stork Raving Mad
OTHER MEG LANGSLOW MYSTERIES BY DONNA ANDREWS
Swan for the Money
Six Geese A-Slaying
Cockatiels at Seven
The Penguin Who Knew Too Much
No Nest for the Wicket
Owls Well That Ends Well
We’ll Always Have Parrots
Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon
Revenge of the Wrought-Iron Flamingos
Murder with Puffins
Murder with Peacocks
A Meg Langslow Mystery
Donna Andrews
Minotaur Books
New York
Table of Contents
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS
.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
STORK RAVING MAD
. Copyright © 2010 by Donna Andrews. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.minotaurbooks.com
ISBN 978-0-312-62119-3
First Edition: August 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Thanks, as always, to all the folks at St. Martins/Minotaur, including (but not limited to) Andrew Martin, Pete Wolverton, Hector DeJean, Matt Baldacci, Toni Plummer, and especially my longtime editor, Ruth Cavin.
Ellen Geiger and the staff at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency continue to make my life easy by taking care of the business side of writing. And special thanks to Dave Barbour at Curtis Brown for helping turn
Murder with Peacocks
into
Falscher Vogel fangt den Tod.
My writing groups, the Rector Lane Irregulars (Carla Coupe, Ellen Crosby, Laura Durham, Peggy Hansen, Valerie Patterson, Noreen Wald, and Sandi Wilson) and the Hellebore Writers (Erin Bush, Meriah Crawford, M. Sindy Felin, Barb Goffman, and C. Ellett Logan), continue to be a source of much-needed help and advice, as do my blog sisters at the Femmes Fatales (Dana Cameron, Charlaine Harris, Toni L.P. Kelner, Kris Neri, Hank Phillipi Ryan, Mary Saums, and Elaine Viets). As always, my friends, including Chris Cowan, Kathy Deligianis, Suzanne Frisbee, David Niemi, Dina Willner, and all the Teabuds, help keep me sane. Well, relatively sane.
When I realized that
Stork Raving Mad
was taking a direction
that would require rather more medical expertise than usual, I called on the generosity of Dr. Doug Lyle, Luci Zahray (the Poison Lady), and Dr. Robin Waldron. To the extent I’ve achieved any degree of accuracy, it’s due to their efforts to set me straight, and they should not be held responsible if I’ve blown it.
Finally, many thanks to Stuart and Elke for giving me the idea of inflicting twins on Meg and Michael in the first place, and to Liam and Aidan, the Andrews family’s dynamic duo, for helping me realize how awesome twins can be.
Stork Raving Mad
“Meg? Are you asleep?”
I kept my eyes closed while I pondered my answer. If I said “Yes,” would my husband, Michael, understand that I was only expressing how much my sleep-deprived body craved a few minutes of oblivion?
No, I’d probably just sound cranky. I felt cranky. Most women occasionally do when they’re eight-and-a-half months pregnant, especially with twins. Any woman who says otherwise has obviously never been pregnant.
“Meg?”
“I’m thinking about it.” I opened one eye and saw Michael’s tall, lean frame silhouetted in the bedroom doorway. He was holding a small brown paper bag in one hand. “If that bag contains chocolate, then I’m definitely not asleep.”
“Chocolate chip cookies from Geraldine’s,” Michael said, shaking the bag enticingly.
“Okay, I’m awake,” I said. “It’s not as if Heckle and Jeckle were going to let me get any sleep anyway.”
I began the laborious process of hauling myself upright. Michael cleared some junk off the little folding table by my side of the bed, produced a plate from somewhere, poured half a
dozen enormous soft chocolate chip cookies onto it, and placed a large glass of cold milk beside it. Then he pulled the curtains open, revealing that it was still fairly early in the morning, and a dreary gray winter morning at that.
“At times like this, I’m particularly glad I married you,” I said, reaching for a cookie. “So what’s the reason for this bribe?”
“There has to be a reason?” He snagged a cookie for himself and pulled a chair up to the other side of the table.
“As busy as you usually are in December grading exams and reading term papers and all that other end-of-semester stuff faculty have to do at the college, you still went all the way to Geraldine’s for cookies?”
“Okay, there’s a reason.” He paused, then frowned as if puzzled. I took a big bite of cookie and washed it down with a swig of milk, to brace myself. Michael was rarely at a loss for words, so whatever he wanted to say must be momentous.
“Is it okay if we have another houseguest?” he finally asked. He sounded so anxious that I looked up in surprise.
“Is that all?” I said through a mouthful of cookie. His face relaxed into something more like its usual calm good humor. “Michael, I haven’t the slightest idea how many houseguests we have already. There’s Rob—”
“Your brother’s not exactly a houseguest,” Michael put in. “After two years, I think he qualifies as a resident.”
“And Cousin Rose Noire—”
“Also more like a resident, unless you’ve changed your mind about accepting her offer to stay on and help us through that difficult adjustment to having the twins around.”
“Right now, I have no objection if she stays on long enough to help us through the difficult adjustment to sending them off to college.” I reached for a second cookie. “But there’s still my grandfather, and of course all those displaced drama department students filling up the spare rooms and camping out in the living room. How many of them do we have, anyway?”
He frowned again.
“Maybe a dozen?” he said. “Or a dozen and a half?”
“Seems like more,” I said. “There are at least a dozen sleeping in the living room.”
“Two dozen, then,” he said. Still probably a conservative estimate. “More or less. And before you ask, I have no idea how much longer they’ll be here. Last time I heard, some critical piece of equipment down at the college heating plant was still in a million pieces on the floor, and the dean of facilities was running around with a harried look on his face and a bottle of Tums in his pocket.”
I heard a series of thuds and thumps in the hallway. A month ago I’d have gone running to see what was happening, or at least sent Michael to check. Our weeks of living with students underfoot had made us blasé about such noises.
“You’d think a big place like Caerphilly College could figure out how to get a boiler repaired,” I said. “It’s been—what, three weeks now?”
“Three weeks tomorrow.” Michael took another cookie. “Not that I’m counting or anything. Meanwhile, the whole campus is still without heat. And from the temperatures the weatherman is predicting next week, you’d think we lived in Antarctica instead of Virginia.”
“Which means the students stay for the foreseeable future,” I said. “And since the Caerphilly Inn is also full to overflowing with displaced students, and Grandfather can’t get the suite he usually stays in when he comes to town, we’re stuck with him, too. With all that going on, what’s one more person?”
“You’re a trouper,” Michael said, with a smile that could have convinced me to invite the entire freshman class to move in.
I heard the crash of something breaking downstairs in the hall. I winced out of habit, even though I knew nearly everything of ours that the students could possibly have broken had long ago been locked up in the basement or the attic. By the time I got downstairs, the student would have picked up the broken object, whatever it was, and Rose Noire would probably have washed, waxed, and polished the patch of floor on which it had fallen.
“So who’s our newest houseguest?” I asked.
“Remember Ramon Soto?” he asked. “One of my grad students?”
“The one who’s been holding his play rehearsals in our library? Yes. I thought he was already living here.”
“He is. As is most of his cast. Makes it convenient. Anyway, the play’s part of his dissertation project. He’s doing it on Ignacio Mendoza, the Spanish playwright.”
Was Mendoza someone famous? The Spanish equivalent of Shakespeare, or Shaw, or at least Neil Simon? The name didn’t sound familiar, but one side effect of pregnancy, at least for me, was that my hormone-enriched brain temporarily jettisoned
every single bit of information it didn’t think was useful in my present situation. At least I hoped it was temporary.
“Ignacio Mendoza?” I said aloud. “Is that a name I should recognize?”
“Not unless you’re a fan of obscure mid-twentieth-century Spanish playwrights,” Michael said. He finished his cookie and moved to sit on the foot of the bed. “For Ramon’s dissertation project, in addition to the critical study on Mendoza, he’s done a new translation of one of Mendoza’s plays and is directing it. And one thing he discovered while doing his research is that, to everyone’s amazement, Mendoza is still alive.”
