Cockatiels at Seven (19 page)

“In my day, we’d just give the little brat a slug of bourbon in his milk,” Dr. Blake said.

“I think not,” Mother said, in such an icy tone that even Dr. Blake got the message.

I began to suspect that our efforts to calm Timmy were having the opposite effect, so I shooed everyone downstairs to see if he would eventually calm down if left alone.

As an experiment, it was a failure.

“There he goes again,” Michael said, after yet another shriek. By this time, we were all clustered at the foot of the stairs, wincing at every noise from above—except for Mother, who was sitting nearby in the living room, reading one of her decorating magazines and frowning.

“KIKI!” Timmy shrieked. It was a heart-rending wail, slightly hoarse and quivering with pathos. We all flinched when we heard it. Well, all but Mother.

“Oh, for heaven’s sakes,” she exclaimed. She slapped her magazine down on the coffee table and began marching up the stairs.

“I thought we were testing Michael’s theory,” I whispered, as I hurried to keep up with her.

“Theory’s a bust,” Michael murmured, from the bottom of the stairs.

“I could try a massage,” Rose Noire suggested. “A drop or two of lavender in some baby oil—it works wonders with Seth’s sheep.”

“I’ve got a baby wombat we could show him,” Dad said. “Just let me run out and get it.”

“This is no time for wombats,” Mother said. “Or aromatherapy.”

She reached the top of the stairs and strode down the hall.

“Mother, what are you going to do?” I scurried into Timmy’s room behind her.

Timmy was standing in his crib, holding onto the bars and shaking them like a prisoner, and howling with more determination than energy. I could swear I saw a look of satisfaction cross his face when we entered. He had an audience again. Then again, the poor kid was tired and cranky and no doubt getting more and more upset by his mother’s absence. He still had a long way to go before we cast him in a remake of
The Omen
. And I was pretty sure the fuss wasn’t really over Kiki.

“Timothy,” Mother said. “This Will Not Do.”

Timmy paused for a moment and cocked his head to one side in puzzlement.

“You will go to sleep now,” she said. “And while you are sleeping, Meg will find Kiki and bring him back, so he’ll be here when you wake.”

She gave him her gracious smile, with a little hint of the don’t-push-it glance.

Timmy considered for a moment.

“Promise?” he said.

“I promise,” Mother said. “Now lie down and go to sleep. I will wait here with you for news of Kiki.”

She sat down in the rocking chair, turned on the reading lamp, and picked up several books from the floor. After inspecting them, she opened a Dr. Seuss book and began reading it. Silently. She was rocking very slowly and waving one graceful hand to the soft strains of Mozart.

Timmy stood in his crib, watching for a few moments, then lay down, pulled a blanket over his head, and fell silent. After a minute or so, I heard his soft, slow breathing, and then a soft snore.

Mother looked up from her book.

“Well?” she said.

“Are you going to help me hunt?” I asked. “Since you promised results that I have no confidence we can deliver.”

“I will supervise from here. And keep an eye on Timothy.” She lowered her eyes to her book and turned a page.

Downstairs, muted celebrations were taking place.

“Your mother is a wonder,” Dad said.

“I could use a nap myself,” Rob said, with a yawn.

“I think I’m going to try some of that lavender,” Rose Noire said. “It’s also very good for headaches.”

“We still have to find Kiki before he wakes up,” I said, to muted groans. Everyone scattered and resumed the search, though most of them were so tired and frazzled they were searching places they’d already searched two or three times. I’d have tried to convince them to go home and get some sleep, but I was too tired to think straight.

“Maybe Kiki isn’t even in the house,” Michael said. “I can go search some of the places you and he went today.”

“Some of the places will be closed,” I said.

“I’ll find night watchmen. Or break in.”

Something in me cracked, seeing the look of grim determination on his face. I burst out in tears.

“I’m sorry,” I said, as Michael swept me in a
comforting embrace. “You’re being so great about this—everyone is. And it’s my fault he’s here and I should have been keeping a better eye out for Kiki and—I can’t believe I’m having hysterics, too, over a stupid stuffed cat.”

My tears mutated into giggles.

“It’s important to Timmy,” Michael said. “And the poor kid has been through a lot. If we can’t bring his mother back, at least we can find Kiki.”

“If you’re game to go driving around the county in search of a stuffed cat, I’m not going to argue with you,” I said. “Let me get my notebook—I left it in the car. Jasper Walker’s address is there.”

“I’ll change into something more likely to inspire confidence in a night watchman,” Michael said.

On my way to the car, I passed by the outdoor section of Spike’s pen. Damn! In our distraction over Kiki, we had left Spike out, which was dangerous. No matter how fierce Spike thought he was, to a fox or a large owl, he’d be easy pickings. We always made a point to take him inside before dark.

“Come here, Spike,” I said. “Time to come inside for dinner.”

Normally the D-word got his attention, but he was off in the far corner of the pen chewing on something.

Something black and fuzzy that was leaking cotton stuffing.

“Kiki!” I exclaimed. “Spike, drop it!”

Spike stubbornly refused to drop Kiki. Maybe it was just because I wanted the stuffed toy, or maybe Timmy had spilled enough food on Kiki over the years to make him downright tasty, but Spike had no intention of surrendering his prey. It finally took me, Rob, and Dad to pry the two apart.

“Come on, Rob,” Dad said. “Let’s go put antiseptic on these bites. Meg, did he get you?”

“No,” I said. “But he really did a number on Kiki.”

Back inside, things were still quiet upstairs. I fetched my sewing kit and sat down at the kitchen table to mend Kiki. Rob, Michael, Dad, and Rose Noire gathered around, looking as anxious as the family of a human patient. And after my preliminary examination, I realized that the patient needed more than surgery.

“There’s a good chunk of stuffing missing.”

“I could go out and look for it,” Rob offered.

“No, Spike will have eaten a lot of it, and the rest will be muddy. For that matter, half of what’s still here is pretty nasty. And so’s Kiki—she needs a bath, and
then she needs a stuffing donor. Find me a stuffed animal, pronto!”

They all looked at each other and then scattered.

I spread some old newspapers on the kitchen table and began removing the remaining stuffing. The bits that were clean—very few of them—I put in a pile for reuse. The bits that were stained with mud and possibly dog poop went into the trash. Once I had emptied Kiki, I could throw her into the wash and—

Suddenly the finger I was using to pull out bits of stuffing hit something hard, stuffed into Kiki’s left hind leg. It took me a couple of minutes to tease it free. Michael came back into the kitchen while I was working on it.

“I checked all the stuff Karen left with Timmy, but there weren’t any other stuffed animals,” he said. “Your mother and father have gone back to the farmhouse and will let us know if your nieces and nephews have left any stuffed animals behind.”

“Unlikely,” I said. “Most of them had outgrown stuffed animals by the time Mother and Dad bought the farmhouse.”

“And I stopped Rob from taking the sofa apart for its stuffing. Rose Noire is driving back to her apartment—she thinks she might have a stuffed animal there. Do we—what’s that?”

I was holding my find up to the light to inspect it.

“I think it’s a thumb drive—you know, one of those tiny little computer storage things you can hang on your keychain.”

“Where’d you get it?”

I gestured at the disemboweled Kiki.

“Remember how Timmy kept saying that Kiki had a boo-boo?” I asked. “Maybe he wasn’t just doing it for attention. Maybe he was trying to tell us about this.”

“This could be important,” Michael said.

“Yes,” I said. “Why don’t you put Kiki in the washer—delicate cycle. I’m going to the office to see if I can figure out what’s on this thing.”

“Shouldn’t we turn it over to the police?” Michael asked, as he picked up Kiki. “A data storage device that could be directly connected to a murder and an embezzlement case?”

“We will,” I said. “But not before I’ve checked it out. After all, if the only thing it contains is a backup copy of Timmy’s favorite musical selections, there’s no sense running to Chief Burke with it, is there?”

He shook his head as if he didn’t quite buy it, but didn’t argue with me.

In the office, I booted up my laptop and attached the thumb drive to it. I was able to see the files on the thumb drive, but I could tell figuring out the contents wasn’t going to be easy. The file names were cryptic and apparently random strings of numbers and letters, and my computer stubbornly refused to open any of them.

I had just finished copying the contents of the thumb drive into a directory on my laptop when Michael joined me.

“Any luck?” he asked.

“Clearly, this wasn’t intended to contain a top-secret message from Karen to us,” I said. “Because if it was, she’d have made at least some of the files in a format normal human beings could read.”

“Chief Burke can probably call on forensic computer analysts to unravel it.”

“No doubt,” I said. I could tell he was relieved when I picked up the phone and dialed the police station.

To my surprise, Chief Burke was still there. Caerphilly’s crime wave must still be going strong. And also to my surprise, he actually seemed interested in the thumb drive.

“Can you bring it down to the station?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Now?”

“First thing tomorrow will do,” he said. “Good-bye.”

Rats! I was hoping he’d say that no, he wanted it now. Not that I was very keen on driving into Caerphilly just now, but I wanted to know that the chief felt a sense of urgency about it.

“I can drop it off on my way to the college,” Michael said.

I handed over the thumb drive to Michael.

“Don’t trust me to do it?” I asked.

“You’ll be busy with Timmy,” he said. “And I’m going that way anyway, remember. You coming up?”

“As soon as I finish fixing Kiki,” I said.

Though after he left the office, I found myself frowning at the directory in which I’d copied the files from the thumb drive. No doubt the police would figure out how to open them, but fat chance they’d tell us anything. I opened my e-mail program and sent the entire file collection to Jack Ransom, with a message to call me if he could figure out what the files were.

Down in the laundry room, I moved Kiki from the washer into the dryer, and had a sudden inspiration. We had several old socks in the rag bag, and if that wasn’t
enough, a shelf over the washer and dryer contained, among other things, the Lonely Socks Club, a basket where we stowed all the unmatched socks on the off chance their mates would eventually turn up. I fetched my scissors and began shredding some of the nicest, softest cotton socks. By the time Kiki emerged from the dryer, I was all prepared to restuff her and sew her back up.

Timmy looked deceptively angelic when I slipped Kiki in beside him. And he would be up early tomorrow, I told myself, so I should probably get to bed. It was already . . . ten o’clock.

Michael had already fallen asleep. I wasn’t sure I liked what having children was going to do to our love life. But I had no energy to stay awake and worry about it.

Apparently I slept through Timmy’s early morning incursion into our bed. When I woke up, I was alone, except for Blanky, who had no doubt been left behind in the excitement of Timmy’s reunion with Kiki.

Blanky could use a trip through the washer, I decided, so I threw him on top of the contents of the hamper, added the discarded clothing from Timmy’s room, and dragged the pile downstairs.

The kitchen was empty—of people, at least; there was a pot of reasonably fresh coffee on the counter and a still-warm bowl of oatmeal on the table. I took the hamper down into the basement and nodded with approval to see that I once more had the laundry area to myself. The snakes were gone.

Back up in the kitchen, I could see Dad’s truck in the driveway, its bed loaded with glass terrariums containing the snakes. Michael and Timmy were standing near the truck. Timmy was trying to climb into the truck bed with the snakes. Michael was holding him back while talking to Rose Noire, and he looked as if his patience was wearing rather thin. I grabbed my oatmeal and a spoon and strolled out to join them.

“It’s important to acknowledge and work through our fears,” Rose Noire was saying. “Because children are so sensitive and impressionable, and if they realize you’re afraid of something, they could pick up your fears—”

“I’m not afraid of snakes.” Michael said. “I just really dislike them. And I doubt if Timmy’s going to be scarred for life if he realizes that I don’t like snakes as much as he does. Are you, Timmy?”

“No,” Timmy said. “Can I have ‘nake now?”

“No,” I said, coming up to join them. “The snakes have to go back to the zoo. If you’re good, we’ll take you to see the snakes later, at their house.”

“Do you want to say good morning to the sheep?” Rose Noire asked. A couple of stray sheep—escapees from Seth Early’s pastures, no doubt—were grazing nearby.

Timmy frowned at first. Clearly sheep were no competition for the snakes in his mind. Then he smiled.

“Sheep play horsie-horsie,” he said, and dashed off toward the unsuspecting ewes, with Rose Noire in hot pursuit.

“Well, that will keep them both busy,” Michael said. “It would help if your father would hurry up and haul the snakes away while Timmy’s torturing the sheep. Which reminds me—I have some good news.”

“You’ve located Karen and she’s coming to pick up Timmy in half an hour?”