Cockatiels at Seven (14 page)

“Only an amateur, compared with you,” Dr. Driscoll said.

“Dr. Driscoll is too modest,” I said. “He has a life list of over eight hundred birds.”

Dr. Driscoll beamed with delight.

“Yes—814, to be precise,” he said. “How kind of you to remember.”

“Marvelous!” Dr. Blake exclaimed. “We need more concerned birders—if only I could interest these young people in the cause!”

I sat back to let my grandfather charm the Driscolls and enlist them in his legion of supporters who would
write letters to Congress and checks to the Montgomery Blake Foundation whenever their leader rallied them. I’d spotted something interesting.

Blake was dressed in his customary garb—cargo pants, cotton shirt, and fishing vest, all in muted earth tones, and hiking boots. He wasn’t wearing his pith helmet, but the pockets of his vest bulged, as usual, with random bits of junk and gear. All of this was perfectly normal—he wore the same outfit whether he was slogging through the jungle, appearing on CNN to denounce some corporation’s environmental record, or sipping wine at the bar of the Caerphilly Inn.

But behind him I could see the door to the hotel lobby. As Blake was holding forth in his most charming manner, I saw Dad stick his head in, look left and right, and then duck back out. And then I saw him creep past the doorway in the most dramatically furtive manner imaginable. And he was wearing an over-the-top outfit similar to Dr. Blake’s.

A few moments after Dad disappeared, Dr. Blake wished us all a good evening and shook hands all around. I followed him to the door.

“What are you and Dad up to, anyway?” I asked Dr. Blake.

“Up to?” He was wearing his most innocent expression. It wouldn’t have fooled Timmy.

“Just try to stay out of trouble for a while,” I said. “I’m a little tied down with Timmy right now. If you two get arrested, I can’t just take off and drive down to North Carolina again in the middle of the night to bail you out.”

“That was an unusual situation,” Dr. Blake said.
“How were we supposed to know the police were going to stage a raid on the cockfight the very night we were filming it?”

“You could have considered the possibility and had a local lawyer on call,” I said. “In fact, here.”

I pulled out my notebook, tore out a page, flipped to a page near the front, copied a couple of names and phone numbers, and handed the loose sheet to him.

“What’s this?”

“Defense attorneys. Relatives of Mother’s. If you get arrested, give one of them a call, mention that you’re a Hollingworth cousin, and they’ll take care of it.”

“Hmph,” he said. “So you carry the names and numbers of two criminal defense attorneys around wherever you go?”

“Always,” I said. “People I’m related to keep getting into trouble.”

“Some family I’ve found,” he said. But he didn’t sound too upset, and I noticed that he tucked the slip of paper carefully into one of his dozens of vest pockets as he strode through the lobby.

I went back to the table and found the Driscolls all atwitter with excitement at having met one of their idols.

“You never mentioned that Dr. Blake was your grandfather!” Ambrose Driscoll said.

“We watch all his specials,” his wife said.

The subject of Dr. Blake and his exploits got us through the dessert course, and I suspected the Driscolls went home feeling quite happy with their evening. Since it was only a little past eight, and barely dark, my evening would normally have just begun, but I was
feeling a lot more tired than I usually would so early. It wasn’t all Timmy’s fault—some of it was Karen’s. But I found myself wondering if Michael had considered the effect parenthood would have on night owls like us.

“I think I overdid it on the wine,” Michael said, as we reached the parking lot. “I’ll ride with you, and pick up my car tomorrow.”

He almost changed his mind when he saw that I was driving Rob’s Porsche, but after a brief sigh of regret, he settled into the passenger seat and stared up at the stars as I eased the car down the Inn’s driveway.

“This is the life,” he said. “If I make tenure, let’s celebrate by trading in my old convertible for one of these.”

“Another convertible? Not a sturdy minivan for the planned family?”

He frowned.

“We can get one of those, too,” he said, after a moment. “Tenure’s worth celebrating in every possible way. I don’t suppose you want to park down by Caerphilly Creek, for old time’s sake? Put in a downpayment on the celebrating?”

I had to smile.

“I’m tempted,” I said. “But at the moment, I’m a little anxious about Timmy. You realize he’s about to spend his second night with us. That’s scary.”

“Inconvenient, perhaps, on a night like this, but hardly scary.”

“What’s scary is that either Karen isn’t the person I thought she was, to abandon him for so long, or she’s in some pretty serious trouble. And when you come right down to it, it’s pretty scary that she left him with me in
the first place. When people have kids, they start doing responsible things like buying insurance and minivans, not handing off their kids to near strangers. Karen and I have hardly seen each other in the last two years, and she had no idea whether I had any experience with small children, and Timmy didn’t know me.”

“He seems to be holding up well,” Michael said. “He’s a pretty adaptable little kid. And maybe Karen has good instincts about who she can trust.”

“I still don’t like it.”

“I gather you struck out trying to find her today.”

“Worse than that. I’m starting to think maybe she had good reasons to disappear.”

As we drove along—well under the speed limit, which must have been a first for the Porsche—I brought him up to date on what I’d learned during the day.

“Not encouraging,” he murmured, when I’d finished.

“Any theories about what’s going on?” I asked.

“None that you probably haven’t already thought of,” he said. “Frankly, if I were Chief Blake and had to make sense of what you’ve learned, I’d say she’s probably involved in the embezzling scheme, realized that the police were about to close in, and decided to run. And figuring her chances of getting away were a lot better without Timmy, she found a safe place to leave him while she fled.”

My stomach clenched.

“I’m sorry,” Michael said. “I know she’s your friend.”

“You’re not saying anything I haven’t thought,” I said. “It just sounds a little worse out loud.”

“I can think of some other possible explanations.”

“Yeah, but they don’t sound too logical, do they?”

We drove on a while in silence.

When we reached the ridge that gave a view of the road, I looked for Mr. Early but it was too dark to see if he was still there or if he’d given up his vigil for the evening.

Then I noticed that our house was dark.

“That’s odd,” I said, pointing to it. “Do you suppose Rob has gotten Timmy to bed?”

“You never know. He’s really rather good with kids. I’ve seen him in action before, with your nieces and nephews. He really knows how to communicate on their level.”

“That’s because he still thinks on their level,” I said. “It’s communicating with adults he can’t handle.”

“Could be,” Michael said, with a chuckle. “At any rate, he has a weak stomach when it comes to diapers, but he’s really good at entertaining kids.”

I nodded. Good, but not very firm. I’d expected him to leave the hard work of getting Timmy to bed to Michael and me. In fact, I more than half expected to find the two of them asleep in front of the TV. But that was okay, I told myself, determined to keep my mellow, post-dinner mood as long as I could.

I lost the battle when we pulled into the driveway.

“My car’s not here,” I said. “What’s going on?”

As soon as the car came to a stop I jumped out and ran inside.

“Hello,” I called. “We’re home.”

No answer. I saw no one in the living room, the dining room, or the kitchen. And no notes posted anywhere to tell us where Rob had gone with Timmy. Upstairs, I peered into the bedroom where we’d set up Timmy’s portable crib. It was empty. So were all the other bedrooms on that floor and the third floor—empty of Rob and Timmy, at any rate. I found the room on the third floor in which Rob was setting up his little home away from home, and in a room at the other end of the hall was an object covered with a tarp. It turned out to be a cage containing six brightly colored birds, all fast asleep. They stirred slightly when I lifted one edge of the tarp, and one of them uttered a faint squawk before settling back into slumber.

I ran downstairs again. Michael was just emerging from the basement. He looked a little pale.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“We have snakes again,” he said. “I think I should
have a word with your father. And your grandfather. This is really getting out of hand.”

I was astonished. Michael usually enjoyed all of Dad’s projects and antics, and for that matter, all of Dr. Blake’s.

“Getting out of hand? What do you mean? What kind of snakes?”

“I don’t know. Big snakes. The basement’s swarming with them.”

“They’re loose?” My voice went up at least an octave.

“No, thank goodness,” he said, with a shudder. “They’re all in terrariums. About a dozen of them. But I’m not really that fond of snakes.”

“I never knew that,” I said. “Don’t let Dad know.”

“Why not?”

“He’d probably recommend spending a lot of time observing snakes and handling them as a way of overcoming your fear.”

“I’m not afraid of them,” Michael said, sounding ever so slightly testy. “I’m just not fond of them, and I have no desire to spend any quality time with them. Normally they don’t bother me that much, but I’m not used to going into my own basement, turning on the light, and finding a whole collection of them staring back at me.”

“I wouldn’t like that either,” I said.

“I think it’s the fact that they never blink,” he said. “That kind of creeps me out.”

“It’s not their fault,” I said. “They have no eyelids.”

“I didn’t say it was their fault. I just don’t like it.”

“Let me lay down the law to Dad about snakes,
then,” I said. “I could pretend that I’ve developed a sudden irrational but insurmountable fear of having snakes around with children in the house. Manage to imply that it’s either snakes or grandchildren, and lay down an ultimatum. Get Mother to help.”

“Good idea,” he said. “Meanwhile, I gather you didn’t find Rob and Timmy upstairs.”

“Not unless an evil magician has transformed them along with Dad and Dr. Blake into brightly colored birds,” I said.

“Brightly colored birds?”

“There’s a cage of them in one of the third floor bedrooms. I definitely need to speak to Dad.”

And possibly rekey the house locks.

“Let’s call your father,” Michael suggested. “Maybe he knows what’s up. After all, if there was any kind of emergency, Rob would probably call him.”

“Assuming Rob actually has his cell phone with him and turned on, which seems unlikely. But just in case, you call Dad and I’ll call Rob.”

But there was no answer at the farmhouse or on Rob’s cell phone. Mother and Rose Noire were still up in Washington, of course. I called a few of Rob’s friends, none of whom had any idea where he was. Most of them hadn’t seen much of him lately.

Always a bad sign when Rob started neglecting his friends. It usually pointed to a new girlfriend or a new hobby, and Rob’s taste in both was highly dubious.

“Maybe I should call the police,” I said.

“Chief Burke would love that,” Michael said. “A missing toddler, with the town in the middle of what amounts to a crime wave by Caerphilly’s standards.”

“This missing toddler could be related to the crime wave,” I reminded him.

Though when I called, I couldn’t reach Chief Burke. Debbie Anne, the dispatcher, promised to tell all the patrol cars to keep an eye out for my Toyota and to tell Chief Burke as soon as she could reach him, but the minutes ticked into hours without a call back. And without a sign of Rob.

At about eleven-thirty, we finally heard a car pull into the driveway. I ran out to see Rob stepping out of my car.

“Where the hell have you been?” I asked.

Apparently Rob wasn’t expecting to find anyone up. He leaped into the air with surprise.

“Sssh,” he stage-whispered. “Timmy’s asleep in the back seat.”

I peered into the back seat of the Toyota. Timmy looked unharmed. He was clutching Kiki in one hand and Blanky in the other and had his head tilted in one of those impossible angles that would give an adult a sore neck for days but never seemed to bother little children.

“He’s fine,” Rob whispered.

“He’d better be,” I said. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Just after you left, I got a call from a friend who was flying into Dulles and needed a ride back here,” he said.

“You took Timmy with you to Dulles? It’s a four-hour round trip.”

“I didn’t figure it would be a problem—he’s in his
car seat and everything. He slept most of the way back, actually. You should probably just let him sleep.”

“We can’t leave him out here in the car all night,” I said.

“I’ll carry the car seat in,” Michael offered. “Maybe we can ease him gently into the crib without waking him up.”

It almost worked. It would have worked, if Rob hadn’t knocked over the trash can just as we were all tiptoeing out of the room.

Michael and I were basking on the beach, drinking fruity drinks with parasols stuck in them. The waiter came around and leaned over—I assumed he was going to ask if I wanted a refill. I smiled, and held up my nearly empty glass. The waiter reached out and said,

“KIKI!”

I’m not sure whether I fell out of bed or rolled out, but I found myself on the floor, ears ringing, while up on the bed Timmy continued to bellow “Kiki! Want Kiki! Where Kiki?” at the top of his lungs. Michael, who had apparently abandoned ship on the other side of the bed, growled something and strode out of the room.

I knew I should get up and try to comfort Timmy, but I was still gathering my wits when Michael returned.

“Here’s Kiki,” he said. “You left him in your crib. Now go back to sleep.”