Stork Raving Mad (7 page)

I giggled in spite of myself.

“I think Art and Abe are right,” I said. “The drama department needs its independence. Wouldn’t most of the English department be happy to see you leave?”

“Ah, but there are budget issues,” Michael said. “They think we take up more than our share of the budget. Our expenditures are higher—putting on shows takes money.”

“The produce alone could bankrupt the department,” I said.

“What they can’t seem to get into their thick heads is that the shows also generate income.” He was suddenly serious, though since he was still gesticulating with the zucchini, I had to smother the urge to giggle. “Hell, they might even earn a profit for the college if our theater were a little larger. Right now we sell out every show, but there aren’t enough seats to cover expenses. With a bigger theater—which we’ll never get as long as we’re in the English department—that could change.”

“You could earn enough to pay for a new theater?” I asked.

“We could probably find a donor for the theater, and earn enough to cover ongoing expenses,” he said. “At least that’s what Abe thinks—he’s the closest thing we have to an expert on practical stuff like budget.”

“But getting back to the English department—if you’re such a drain on their budget, why wouldn’t they be happy to see you go?”

“Because then we’d be yet another department competing with them in the college budget process,” Michael said. “And they’re afraid we’re cool enough to wow the budget committee into giving us more than our share.”

“You are,” I said.

He smiled faintly and shook his head. I didn’t think he was disagreeing with me, just feeling bone weary of cutthroat academic politics.

“But all that can wait,” he said. “Right now, I should have a talk with Ramon. See how bad things are.”

He tossed the zucchini on the counter and turned toward the door.

“I’ll make sure the prunes are out of the way,” I said.

He helped me up from the stepladder and we slipped out of the pantry.

Out in the kitchen, groups of students were talking in small huddles.

I glanced out one of the back windows. Señor Mendoza was smoking a cigarette and deep in conversation with my grandfather. I tried not to worry about this.

My grandfather gestured, and the two of them strode off. Heading for the front porch, no doubt. Most of the student smokers had long ago figured out that the front porch was a lot more sheltered than the backyard, and they were even nice enough to stick to the far end.

I scowled at the barn. The thought of Blanco occupying my office annoyed me no end. And just for good measure, I scowled to the left, in the general direction of the library wing, although I couldn’t really see it—just a corner of the sunporch on the far end.

And then one of the twins gave a small kick, and I realized how silly I looked, scowling at invisible menaces. I patted them and turned back to tackle whatever was coming next. I saw Rose Noire was standing at the stove, holding a plate and scowling as darkly as I had been.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“That woman,” she said.

“Dr. Wright?”

“I have never met anyone with such negative energy.”

“Neither have I,” I said.

“Her aura is dark brown, almost black,” Rose Noire said.

I could see a couple of the students gawking at the statement, but I’d become used to Rose Noire’s apparent ability to assess people’s auras as easily as their wardrobes.

“A person with an aura like that is capable of . . . well, anything,” Rose Noire continued. “Even murder.”

To say nothing of murdering the careers of Michael and his poor grad student.

“And do you know what she did?” Rose Noire went on.

I shook my head.

“She requested—no, demanded—that I bring her tea and toast. ‘And don’t let it steep too long’,” Rose Noire said, in a fair imitation of Dr. Wright’s precise, supercilious voice. “ ‘And be sure to bring it while it’s still hot. And be careful not to burn the toast.’ The nerve of some people. I was about to ask if she wanted anything—she didn’t have to be so . . . so . . . Oh!”

The toast popped out of the toaster, startling her. Rose Noire arranged the slices on a plate, then placed the plate neatly on a small tray already loaded with a teacup and saucer, a spoon, a sugar bowl, a tray of lemons, a butter dish, a marmalade jar, a butter knife, and a lacy starched napkin. I wondered if the elegant tray was intended to improve Dr. Wright’s aura or her mood, or whether Rose Noire was simply incapable of being as rude as I would have been to our guest.

“I’d have showed her the way to the kitchen and let her make her own weak tea and pale toast,” I said.

“But then we’d all have to put up with her here,” Rose Noire
said. “Her and her negative energy. I already need to do a cleansing in the house as soon as she leaves.”

“While you’re at it, have the place fumigated,” I said, blowing my nose. “That perfume of hers is driving me bonkers.”

“Some sort of ghastly artificial scent, no doubt,” Rose Noire said. “An essential oil would never do that to you. Where’s the teapot?”

It took a couple of minutes for her to locate the teapot—a student was cutting up onions on the counter where Rose Noire had left it, and another student was kneading dough in the place where the first student thought she’d put the teapot. It finally turned up on the floor near the basement door. Rose Noire hurried to whisk the tea infuser out.

“Do you think it’ll be too strong for her?” I asked.

“I only used about three tea leaves,” Rose Noire said with a sniff. “She’s more likely to mistake it for plain hot water.”

I noticed she’d used our black Wedgwood teapot and a matching cup and saucer—was that because they were among the few impressively expensive bits of china we owned, or because she thought they matched Dr. Wright’s poisonous aura?

She covered the pot with an incongruously cheerful quilted tea cozy and placed it on the tray. Dr. Wright would probably think Rose Noire was our housekeeper. In fact, I suspected she already thought that, which would account for her excessive rudeness.

Not a good idea to tell Rose Noire that. I just shook my head in sympathy and got a glass from the cabinet.

“Let me fix that,” Rose Noire said.

“You’ve got Dr. Wright to worry about,” I said.

“She can wait,” Rose Noire said. “Juice?”

“Some ginger ale,” I said. “My stomach’s a little unsettled. Probably just the excitement.”

“Damn, but that guy’s rude,” someone said behind me.

I turned to see a young woman bundled up like an arctic explorer coming in through the back door.

“You mean Dr. Blanco?” I asked.

She nodded. She pushed her hood back and I saw it was the young woman who’d arrived with Ramon and Señor Mendoza.

“What’s wrong, Bronwyn?” Rose Noire asked.

“Dr. Blanco came in and complained that it was too cold out there in your office,” Bronwyn said. “So I went out to show him where the space heater was,” she said. “As soon as I got it going, he demanded some hot tea and snapped at me that he was busy and needed privacy and wasn’t to be disturbed. So what am I supposed to do with the tea—slip it under the door?”

“Here.” Rose Noire handed me a glass of ginger ale—probably organic ginger ale made from free-range ginger roots, if there was such a thing, but it tasted fine. In fact, it tasted delicious. I had to force myself to sip rather than gulp. I’d have to visit the bathroom soon enough as it was.

“He probably won’t even notice if I don’t bring him any tea,” Bronwyn went on. “When I left, he was yelling into his cell phone. Something about the heating plant.”

“If he’s working on getting the heat back on, let’s do anything we can to help him,” I suggested. Blanco was probably the administrator Michael had mentioned earlier—the one
running around with a roll of Tums in his pocket. And if he was the person in charge of solving the heating-plant problem, perhaps I should revise my already pessimistic estimate of how long the repairs would take.

Rose Noire finished fussing with the tea tray and carried it out. I glanced at the kitchen clock. Almost noon. We should probably offer some kind of lunch to Michael and the other professors. And by “we” I meant Rose Noire, who wouldn’t let me fix a meal even if I had the energy to do so.

I followed her out of the kitchen and plunked myself down in one of the dining room chairs that cluttered our hall, my glass of ginger ale in hand. Time for another nap. Past time, in fact. But I didn’t want to nod off while there was anything I could do to help Michael, and climbing the stairs wasn’t something I did any more often than I had to.

I pulled out my cell phone and then paused to study it. At one point in my life, I’d refused to get a cell phone. The idea of being always interruptible appalled me. “I’m a blacksmith,” I said. “How connected do I need to be?”

But the safety and convenience of having a cell phone when I traveled had made a dent in my resistance, and when Michael entered my life, I realized that there was at least one person I nearly always wanted to talk to, no matter where I was and what I was doing when he called. And now I wouldn’t go two steps without it. I was deathly afraid of going into labor at a moment when everyone around me was doing such a good job of leaving me in peace and quiet that they wouldn’t hear my
cries for help. These days, the cell phone only left my pocket when I slipped it into the charger on my nightstand.

“What a negative person!” I looked up to see Rose Noire returning from the library. Evidently she hadn’t lingered to chat with Dr. Wright. “I should start the cleansing now.”

“Make it an exorcism,” I said. “Maybe you can chase her out.”

Rose Noire giggled at that, and returned to the kitchen in better spirits. I speed dialed my brother, Rob. Although he was devoid of any skill with computers or talent for business, his uncanny ability to come up with ideas that would turn into popular computer games had catapulted him into his present role as CEO and chief game theorist at Mutant Wizards, now an industry leader in designing what his head of public relations referred to as “infotainment.”

Right now Rob’s easy access to technologically savvy people was just what I needed.

“Hey,” he said, as he answered his phone. “Do I have nieces and/or nephews yet?”

“Alas, no,” I said. “Soon, but not yet.”

“You don’t want to wait too long,” Rob said. “Don’t do to them what Mother did to me and stick them with a birthday too close to Christmas.”

Rob’s upcoming mid-December birthday had always been a sore spot with him. He was convinced that everyone ignored his birthday, giving him a slightly larger Christmas present in lieu of two presents, so that his overall present haul suffered
greatly. I was five years older and remembered events quite differently—it seemed to me that our parents had gone to great lengths to throw him quite elaborate birthday parties, and that our friends and relatives had brought heaps of presents out of pity for the poor December birthday boy.

But what seemed to matter decades later was his perception, not what really happened. For that matter, how could I be sure my own perception wasn’t off base?

“If you like, I’ll jog around the yard a few times after I hang up. See if I can bring on labor before the holidays get any closer,” I said. “Right now, though, I need something.”

“Your wish is my command,” he said. “What do you need?”

“A tame hacker.”

A small pause followed. I sipped my ginger ale as I waited for him.

“What for?” he asked. “Nothing illegal, I hope. Don’t you just mean a techie?”

“I want someone who’s absolutely expert at working with the college data systems,” I said. “You know Ramon? Grad student who’s been staying with us?”

“Of course,” he said. “The one directing the play. With the gorgeous girlfriend.”

“Gorgeous girlfriend?”

“Bronwyn Jones. She plays the prostitute with the heart of gold in the play. If she wasn’t spoken for . . .”

So that was her name. I’d already marked her down as a potential ally.

“Getting back to Ramon,” I said. “Some creeps from the college
might be trying to pull a fast one and lose some forms that he needs to have filed for his dissertation.”

“Typical. Jerks.”

“So I want someone who can comb the college systems for useful information. Proof that Ramon’s forms were submitted, if such a thing exists. Or proof that the creeps are trying to pull a fast one. I’d prefer finding stuff that’s legitimately available, but don’t find me anyone with too many scruples. If we exhaust the legit sources . . .”

“Yeah, I get it,” he said. “If they’re sending e-mails to each other saying, ‘Okay, let’s sabotage this Soto kid and that will help us prevent that horrible Michael Waterston from getting tenure,’ you want to know about it. I think I know just the person, and he’s probably already there. Have you met Danny Oh? That’s O-H, last name, not a nickname.”

“Not that I know of—should I have?”

“He’s only been living in your basement for three weeks,” Rob said. “One of our student interns. Remember when I asked if I could have some of the interns live in the basement until the heat came back on in the dorms?”

“I’d forgotten, actually,” I said. “It’s been weeks since I went down into the basement.”

“Probably just as well,” he said. “It’s taken on a sort of frat-house ambiance. Nothing we can’t fix with a few trash bags, of course,” he added quickly. “But you might want to let me call Danny and have him come up to the ground floor.”

“Call him and brief him,” I said. “And tell him I’ll drop down to his lair to see him a little later. I need him at his computer,
not doing the flamenco in the kitchen, and I may want to look over his shoulder.”

I also might want to take a look at the basement, to see if I thought getting it back to normal was going to take more than a few trash bags. I had visions of squalor that would take Dumpsters, fire hoses, and fumigation.

“Will do,” Rob said, and hung up.

The doorbell rang. Again. What now?

I set down my ginger ale, waddled to the door, and opened it to find Abe Sass and Art Rudmann standing on the doorstep.