Stork Raving Mad (28 page)

“I can’t exactly share that with a civilian, Meg.”

“I know that,” I said. “But in about five minutes, Sammy will be calling you from Michael’s office to confirm that he and only he is standing there, ready to pull the pages out of the machine.”

“I get it,” she said. “Give me the number.”

I did, thanked her, and hung up.

“Meg, thanks,” Sammy said as he headed for the hallway to the office. “I can start studying the list and planning how to tackle them.”

“Just don’t get so caught up in the list that you let any of our suspects escape,” I said to his back.

I continued on up the stairs.

In our bedroom, I found Abe, Art, and Michael.

“You’re going to miss the play,” I said as I poked my head in.

“We just wanted to have a quick powwow before the rehearsal begins,” Abe said.

“Sorry to interrupt,” I said.

“I would object if you didn’t interrupt,” Art said. He stood up, and the others followed suit. “You need rest.”

“Finish your conference,” I said.

“And you’ll want to get dressed for bed,” Abe said.

“I can do that later,” I said. “I’m going to read for a while first.”

Michael hurried to take the leftovers out of my hands and help me onto the bed.

“We’re just having a quick conference on how to handle The Face,” he said. “We figure now’s the time to strike.”

“Yes,” I said. “From what I can see, Blanco doesn’t really have it in for the drama students. He was just trying to please Dr. Wright. So he might be lying low and staying neutral until he sees which way the wind is blowing.”

“That’s what we think,” Abe said. “And we need to do as much as possible to see that it’s blowing in our direction.”

“You might want to use this,” I said. I handed him the wad of papers I’d received from Danny Oh, the thick file folder Kathy had given me, and finally, on top, the paper Josh had given me. Michael and Art came to peek over his shoulders.

“You see!” Michael said, snatching up the copy of Dr. Wright’s e-mail. “He did get permission.”

“Think what a lot of bother it would have saved if the young fool had kept that e-mail handy,” Abe said, shaking his head.

“What’s the rest of this?” Art asked.

“Some documents Kathy gave me,” I said. “And some stuff from Danny Oh.”

I leaned back and uttered a sigh of contentment.

“You’re tired,” Art said. “You want us to leave? We could find someplace else to do this.”

“There isn’t anyplace else, and I’m fine,” I said. “As long as
I’m awake, you’re good company, and when I’m ready to sleep, you could clog dance on the dresser and it wouldn’t bother me. Just poke me if I snore loud enough to drown out your discussion.”

I picked up my bedside book as if I were planning to read, to reassure them that they weren’t keeping me up. Michael came over, pulled an afghan over me, and gave me a quick kiss before returning to join Art and Abe.

After a few moments, I let the book fall on my chest. I did the yoga breathing exercises Rose Noire had taught me. I wondered what time it was, but I couldn’t muster the energy to turn my head toward the alarm clock. Hansel and Gretel were squirming enough to keep me from falling asleep, but with luck they’d settle down eventually. And in the meantime, it was peaceful, lying there on our nice, warm bed, listening to the faint rustle as Michael and his colleagues turned pages.

Eventually, though, the rustle of pages began to be accompanied by muffled exclamations and sharp intakes of breath.

“Good God,” Abe said finally, in a low tone. “We knew we had a problem, with some of our best performers not wanting to become drama majors.”

“And the fact that not a single graduate student has actually completed a degree in the last three years,” Michael added.

“I thought we could get around it by helping them select English classes with teachers who weren’t in on it,” Art said.

“It’s gone past that,” Abe said.

“We knew it was bad,” Art said.

“But not this bad,” Abe added.

“Why didn’t the students come to us?” Michael said.

“Because you’d have tried to do something,” I said without opening my eyes. “And they know that, and they were afraid you’d all try to do something and end up getting hurt.”

A few moments of silence.

“They were trying to protect us?” Michael said.

“And we should have been protecting them,” Abe put in.

Something that had been bothering me all day popped back in my mind and I sat up.

“Answer me one question,” I said. “If everyone knows Dr. Wright hated drama students so much and did everything she could to torpedo their academic careers, why didn’t they just avoid taking her classes?”

“They did, as far as possible,” Abe said. “At least after we all realized what she was doing and began steering them away from her classes. But last year she managed to have one of her classes made a degree requirement.”

“ ‘Literature and Popular Culture,’ ” Art said. “A semester’s worth of listening to Dr. Wright rant about everything she hated about the modern world.”

“She got Blanco to do it for her,” Michael said.

“For years, she and a couple of other English professors have been doing what they could to make life miserable for the drama students,” Abe said. “But it wasn’t till Blanco started helping them that things got really bad.”

“And now we’ll never know just why she hated the theater so much,” Art said, shaking his head.

“Yes we will,” I said. “She was a frustrated actress.”

“No way,” Michael said.

“Way,” I said. “Check the stuff Danny found. Bottom of the stack.”

The three of them bent their heads over the photocopies. I settled back under the afghan and listened again to the rustling paper and their muted exclamations.

“Fascinating,” Michael said at last. “And while normally I feel sorry for anyone who’s been bashed that badly by a reviewer, I can make an exception in Dr. Wright’s case.”

“Yes,” Abe said. “Just because life spoiled her dream of an acting career doesn’t excuse her torturing drama students for the rest of her life.”

“Inexcusable,” Michael said. “But at least now we understand why.”

“By the way,” I said. “What’s the scoop on Kathy Borgstrom? The chief heard that she was expelled from the graduate drama program for plagiarism.”

“She was,” Abe said. “The charges turned out to be unsubstantiated.”

“The charges were phony,” Art put in. “It was a frame.”

“We have always suspected it was,” Abe said. “And we might have been able to prove it if Dr. Wright had been willing to cooperate.”

“We did cast enough doubt to allow her to work for the department,” Art said.

“So she’s got even more reason to hate Dr. Wright,” I said.

None of them said anything, so I gathered they agreed with
me. And maybe they were wondering, just a little, if Kathy were guilty.

“Should we be going?” Art said, after a while. “It’s 7:55.”

“No wonder I’m so tired,” I muttered. I usually began the night’s tossing and turning at eight, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spent so much of the day not only out of bed, but on my feet.

“Yes,” Abe said. “The rehearsal starts in five minutes.”

“We need to get seats near The Face,” Abe said.

“Ramon’s saving us three at the front,” Michael said.

“Go get ’em,” I murmured.

I heard footsteps. I felt Michael kiss the top of my head and twitch the covers up a little. Then I faded into sleep.

I was dreaming that an army of people was crawling over the house, some of them cleaning it while others messed it up again so the cleaners wouldn’t run out of things to do, and all of them keeping me from sleeping. And just when I finally managed to lock myself in the hall bathroom, the doorbell began ringing over and over again.

I woke up and answered the phone.

“Meg?” It was Clarence Rutledge, Spike’s vet. “Did I wake you?”

“What’s wrong?” I asked, sitting upright. “Is Spike all right?”

“Spike’s fine,” he said. “You can send someone to bring him home again tomorrow.”

“Damn,” I said. “I was hoping he’d require at least a week of hospitalization. What about Hawkeye?”

“He isn’t fine yet, but he will be eventually,” Clarence said. “He’s a lucky dog. If Sammy and Horace hadn’t gotten him in so fast, and if your father hadn’t been around to help—well, all’s well that ends well.”

“I just hope they catch the bastard who did it,” I said.

“That’s why I was calling. Is the chief still there? I’ve taken
the DNA swab from Hawkeye and wanted to find out what to do with it.”

“He’s out in the barn, watching the play,” I said. “You could leave a voice mail on his cell phone.”

“Do you have the number?”

I fished out my cell phone, looked up the chief’s number, gave it to Clarence, wished him a good night, and turned out the light again.

Unfortunately, by this time I was wide awake.

I tossed and turned for a while, worrying about Kathy, Danny, Ramon, and even the unlikable Bronwyn. And about the play. What was The Face thinking? Were Michael and his colleagues making any progress in the quest for secession?

I finally decided that as long as I was up, I might as well go to the bathroom. I reached over to the bedside table for the flashlight I kept there. I’d gotten in the habit of using the flashlight to keep from waking up Michael every time I had to go to the bathroom in the night.

It wasn’t on the bedside table. I turned the light on and looked again. No flashlight anywhere.

Of course, now that I had the light on, I could just as easily have gone to the bathroom without the flashlight. Michael was still down at the rehearsal—probably wouldn’t come to bed for hours. But the lack of the flashlight bothered me. I could always just use the light and wake Michael. Or ask him to get me one when he came up to bed. We kept several downstairs in the hall closet.

Or I could go down to the hall closet and fetch one for myself. The self-sufficiency of that pleased me.

I got up, stuck my cell phone in the pocket of my robe, and made my pit stop before heading for the stairs. And then turned back to grab my keys. I remembered that for once I’d actually locked the closet, as we’d been trying to do, so the flashlights and other useful items it contained would still be there when Michael and I went looking for them.

As I climbed down the stairs, I realized that I didn’t feel all that bad. In fact, considering how long and exhausting a day I was having, I was feeling remarkably energetic. My back felt better than usual. Perhaps all the exercise was good for me.

Or perhaps I was still revved up from too much excitement.

The front hall was quiet. Apparently Ramon had a full house for the dress rehearsal. I unlocked the hall closet and rummaged through the shelves until I found a flashlight on one of the higher shelves. I tested it—working fine. And then I stuck it in my pocket and turned to go.

Something fluttered to the floor in front of me. I stooped to pick it up and saw that it was a worn envelope in the characteristic pale blue used for all official Caerphilly College papers. And there was something typed on the outside: “Dr. Enrique Blanco—confidential.”

I turned it over. It was folded in half, so I unfolded it and saw that although the gummed flap had been sealed at some point, someone had opened it. A good thing, since it saved me from the moral dilemma of whether to unseal it. All I had to do was pop the flap open to sneak a peek at the contents.

I pulled out several folded pieces of paper and opened them up. The top one was a photocopy of a yearbook page. The top half of the page showed a dozen teenagers lined up in two rows under the headline “Business Club.” The bottom showed the chess club gathered picturesquely around a table. Two of their number were glaring at each other over a chess board, while the rest assumed eloquent attitudes of fear, triumph, scorn, or indifference. Who’d have expected such a flair for the dramatic from a group normally dismissed as the school geeks? Were any of these hams now treading the boards in our barn? I pored over the photo and studied the names beneath, but none were familiar.

I went back to the top photo. Business club? Was this some kind of organization for high schoolers who had already figured out where they were getting their MBAs and which corporation would be the target of their first hostile takeover? Not my idea of a fun way to spend your after-school hours, and from the looks on the faces of the four girls and eight boys, probably not theirs either. The business club members had “pad your extracurricular activity list for that college application” written all over their faces.

Most were staring awkwardly at the camera, wearing the sort of fixed smiles that always result when the photographer says, “Hold that smile. . . . Just one more shot.” And to make it worse, they were all sporting fashions from the late ’70s and early ’80s, including some truly memorable examples of why big hair had been such a hideous trend. Was it quite fair to shudder at fashion crimes you’d once committed yourself? Surely
most of these earnest-looking young future businesspeople had sworn off mullets and Farrah ’dos and grown up to regret what they were wearing here?

At the far right side of the back row I spotted Enrique Blanco. Apart from the slight suggestion of a mullet, his hair wasn’t too bad, and his clothes were pretty bland compared to the rest of the crew. Only his air of superiority remained unchanged. He stared out with a faint frown on his face, as if preparing to chide the photographer for taking too much of his valuable time.

I turned my head aside to sneeze. The old papers must be dustier than they looked.

I turned back to the photocopy and read the caption. Just a list of the names, but I studied them anyway.

Odd. Enrique Blanco wasn’t listed. Yet there was his face, radiating juvenile pruniness.

I counted the names till I got to the seventh one, corresponding to his place in the group shot. The face I knew as Enrique Blanco was listed as belonging to a Henry White.

Henry White?

Blanco was Spanish for white, and if I wasn’t mistaken, Enrique was the Spanish equivalent of Henry. Had Blanco gone through a period of juvenile rejection of his ethnic heritage? Bronwyn wouldn’t be surprised.