Cockatiels at Seven (22 page)

She finally drained the glass and went inside. I waited a few minutes before extricating myself from the bushes and creeping along the side of the house to
the front, and then walking down the driveway. Act as if you belong, I reminded myself. Pretend you’re someone who lives here.

What I really wanted to do was pretend I was someone who jogged here, but I wasn’t dressed for it, so I forced myself to stay down to a walking pace. As soon as I was out of her yard and across the street, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Chief Burke.

“What can I do for you?” he asked. He sounded tired. Was he really tired, or just trying to discourage me from bothering him?

“I was just over at Nadine Hanrahan’s,” I said. “Did you know she’s leaving town?”

“No,” he said. Rather guardedly. “Should I be concerned about that?”

“Did you also know that her two-million-dollar mansion, which she certainly did not purchase on her college salary, is completely empty? No furniture, no pictures, not even any boxes?”

A pause.

“That’s interesting,” he said. “And you know this because . . .?”

“I peeked in all her windows while waiting for her to come home.”

“And then when she came home, she told you she was leaving.”

“No, I decided I didn’t want to talk with her after all, so I hid, and I overheard her arranging to stop her mail indefinitely and have a car pick her up at six p.m. tonight to take her to the airport.”

Silence on the other end, and then a sigh.

“Thank you,” he said. “I think. Why don’t you try to stay out of trouble for the rest of the day, and let us take care of Ms. Hanrahan?”

“Roger,” I said. He hung up.

I wondered if I should have mentioned the last phone call. To someone named Duke. There was nothing innately wrong with the name Duke, was there? So why did I keep picturing a hulking thug Nadine had hired to do something sinister and unspeakable?

My overactive imagination plus my dislike of Nadine, I decided. So even though the call raised my hackles, probably just as well I hadn’t mentioned it. No sense letting Chief Burke think I was totally irrational and paranoid.

I hurried back to the playground, and was relieved to see that Timmy was still happily climbing up the ladder into the tallest cabin and then sliding down one of the slides.

Rose Noire looked a little the worse for wear, though. She was sitting on a platform near the top of the log cabin structure with her feet over the side and her head and arms leaning over the railing. I’d have thought she was unconscious, except that her head moved slightly to follow Timmy as he ran across her field of vision.

“Auntie Meg!” Timmy shouted, when he saw me. He swooped down the slide and ran toward me, arms outstretched. When he reached me, he grabbed onto my legs, with both hands, almost knocking me down.

“Come watch me slide, Auntie Meg!” he pleaded.

“There you are,” Rose Noire said. “We were just going to look for you.”

We stayed at the playground for a little while, letting Timmy wear himself out on all the slides and swings and climbs. I let Rose Noire do the running around at ground level while I perched at the top of one of the playground structures, in a sort of lookout post, shouting encouragement to Timmy as needed and flipping through the classified sections of the bird and pet magazines I’d picked up at the bookstore on our way.

The pet magazines had virtually nothing about birds at all, though they had some interesting articles on dog care and training. I put them aside for Rob, who seemed to be taking an increasing interest in Spike’s welfare. Two of the three bird magazines appeared to deal exclusively with bird watching, so I put them aside for Dad. But
Bird Talk
, with a brightly colored close-up of a parrot on the cover, looked like the ticket. They had eighteen or twenty pages of ads from places selling birds—mostly parrots, macaws, and other exotics, but a few places offered canaries, parakeets, and cockatiels.

The Belle Glade Bird Farm wasn’t among them, though. No other aviaries anywhere near Caerphilly, so they weren’t advertising under an alternate name. And they weren’t listed among the several hundred vendors providing specialized bird merchandise, from cages and perches to food and toys. There were even people selling bird car seats and little bird harnesses, similar to what I was still considering buying for Timmy.

I couldn’t find Belle Glade in the classified section of the
Clarion
, either. They weren’t even in the
Caerphilly Shopper
, the free weekly advertising rag. In fact—

I hopped out of my perch, dashed back to the car and rummaged under the seat, where I kept a spare copy of the local phone book. Aubrey Hamilton was listed, but Belle Glade Bird Farm didn’t appear in the white or yellow pages.

So Belle Glade wasn’t an established bird breeder. In fact, it looked as if someone—Aubrey Hamilton or her reclusive nephew—was just breeding a few birds in the barn.

I’d also seen an article in
Bird Talk
about all the ghastly things that could be wrong with your birds if you bought them from anyone but a responsible breeder. Could Belle Glade be one of those irresponsible, fly-by-night breeders the article condemned so roundly?

Perhaps I’d mention the bird farm to Dad and Dr. Blake. No doubt they’d go dashing off to check the place out, and I could stop worrying about it.

“Auntie Meg! Take me, too!”

Timmy came running up and launched himself at my leg. Rose Noire came puffing along behind.

“He got very upset when he saw you go up to the car,” she said. “He seemed to think you were leaving him behind.”

“No, I’m not leaving him anywhere,” I said, putting my arm around Timmy. “Who wants some ice cream?”

“Ice cream! Ice cream!” Timmy scrambled into his car seat and sat completely still waiting for me to buckle him in. I found myself wishing I’d resorted to bribery much earlier.

After ice cream, we went home, and Rose Noire retired to one of the guest rooms to lie down with a
lavender-scented compress over her eyes while Timmy and I played, had lunch, napped, and played some more. I didn’t get much done, but then I couldn’t think of much else that needed doing.

Well, with one exception. I wanted to find someone to babysit Timmy this evening. I had several expeditions I wanted to make. Probably a lost cause, finding someone in time to follow Nadine to see what I could learn about her travel plans, but perhaps a return visit to her house after six might be fruitful. Or some snooping around the Belle Glade Bird Farm. Maybe even a little stroll around the college campus, to see if I could find an excuse to go back to Karen’s office. The financial administration building wasn’t that far from the drama department—if I ran into anyone, I could always pretend I was on my way to see Michael. But all of these were expeditions I’d rather make under the cover of darkness, and without a toddler underfoot. And baby sitters were proving strangely hard to find.

Michael was out, of course, because he was tagging along with Dad and Dr. Blake, who were similarly unavailable. Rose Noire managed to sound genuinely sorry when she informed me that she was driving Mother somewhere. When Rob finally showed up, he turned me down with a convoluted and implausible excuse. I felt more sure than ever that he’d once again found true love with someone he suspected would not pass muster with the family. And none of the other relatives were answering my phone calls.

But late in the afternoon, when I was beginning to think I’d have to give up my plans, I got a call from Sandie.

“What’s new?” she asked.

“Not much,” I said. “Timmy has several new boo-boos, and the sheep are getting very tired of playing horsie-horsie.”

“Oh,” she said. “I thought you were, like, investigating. Trying to find Karen and all.”

“There’s a limit to how much investigating you can do with a toddler underfoot,” I said. “And for some reason, everyone I ask to baby-sit Timmy seems to have other plans this evening.”

“Oh, dear,” she said. “If you really, really need someone, I suppose I could help out. Of course, I don’t have that much experience with kids.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “And if you’re serious . . . ”

“Sure,” she said. “Just let me know when you need me. After all, if you can do anything to help wrap this up and get bloody Nadine off my back, it’s worth it.”

We agreed that she would come over around eight and I returned to playing tag with Timmy with a lighter heart.

Dad tried to join in the game, but while trying to hide, he found several vigorous new poison ivy shoots behind the barn and took it very personally.

“It’s my fault,” he kept saying the whole time we were putting on our plastic gloves, pulling the vine out by the roots, and shoving it safely into a trash bag. “It’s all my fault.”

“Why, did you plant it?” I asked. “Some notion of Dr. Blake’s perhaps? Does one of the animals from the zoo need freshly picked poison ivy to thrive?”

“No, of course not. I just haven’t done a poison ivy hunt in weeks.”

“Probably because Dr. Blake has been keeping you too busy with his projects.”

Dad looked pained.

“Yes,” he said. “But they’re such worthwhile projects. And I think it’s important to spend time with him. You understand that, don’t you?”

Yes, I understood—Dr. Blake was over ninety, and since he and Dad had only found each other a few months ago, they had a lot of catching up to do.

But I could also see that Dad felt incredibly guilty about falling down in his self-appointed mission to keep his family safe from poison ivy. As a young man, while on a bird-watching trip to the Dismal Swamp, Dad had volunteered to climb into the water and untangle some vines that were keeping the boat from moving. The water had been up to his neck and the vines turned out to be poison ivy, resulting in the worst case of poison ivy anyone in the county had ever seen. The experience had made Dad passionate about exterminating any poison ivy that dared to grow near his family or friends. Discovering that the enemy had infiltrated our yard while his back was turned definitely depressed him.

“You’ve been spending a lot of time helping Dr. Blake with his projects,” I said. “Maybe it’s time to let him learn about some of your interests. He’d probably enjoy it.”

“You think so?”

“Definitely,” I said. Actually, I cared a lot less about whether Dr. Blake would enjoy poison ivy wrangling than whether Dad would. As I watched a smile growing on Dad’s face, I realized that one reason I’d rather
resented Dr. Blake was that he seemed to be monopolizing all of Dad’s time for his own projects. Dad’s garden, his poison ivy extermination efforts, and many of his pet projects had languished all summer—it felt as if Dad himself had been partially eclipsed.

To Dr. Blake’s credit, when he showed up a little while later he joined in the poison ivy hunt with reasonably good humor, and Dad and I spent a happy afternoon teaching him and Timmy how to recognize and safely remove the ubiquitous three-leaved menace. He even seemed entertained by Dad’s vast store of poison ivy lore and trivia. Maybe I was being too hard on him.

When Michael got home, he took over Timmy-wrangling while I fixed dinner. Then he slipped off with Dad and Dr. Blake on their still-secret mission while I put Timmy to bed. I was in luck—I’d managed to wear him out enough during the day that he barely made it through two Dr. Seuss books.

Or maybe my newfound resolution to be gentle but firm with him was paying off.

I was already in my skulking clothes—jeans and a dark t-shirt—when Sandie arrived.

“So where’s the little cherub?” she said.

“You’re in luck,” I said. “He’s already safely in bed. And if your luck continues, he’ll sleep through, and all you’ll have to do is entertain yourself while he sleeps. Still—just in case.”

I introduced her to the mysteries of Timmy’s now well-organized instruction manual. Showed her the stash of juice, milk, and fruit all ready if Timmy woke up and wanted something to eat or drink. Demonstrated
how to secure the car seat, and then brought it in so it would be handy in case of emergencies. Made sure all the emergency numbers were right by the phone.

I was beginning to understand why Karen had lost touch with me after Timmy’s birth—why some new parents ceased to have a social life at all.

About the time I was finishing up my demonstration, I heard a knock on the door. I opened it to see Mother and Rose Noire standing on the front porch.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Meg,” Mother said. “You’re not dressed.”

I looked down at my jeans and t-shirt.

“Actually, I think I am,” I said. “Unless you’re trying to tell me I’m having an ‘emperor’s new clothes’ moment.”

“You’re not dressed for the garden party,” Mother said.

“That’s because I’m not going to a garden party.”

“It’s the garden club summer outing,” Mother said. “I know I told you.”

“If you did, I didn’t remember it,” I said. “Sorry. No can do. Unless it’s okay to bring Timmy.”

“Perhaps next time,” Mother said. “Unless perhaps your friend . . . ”

She looked at Sandie, who glanced over at me.

“This is Sandie, a friend of Karen’s,” I said. “And I’m sure if she could, she’d love to take care of Timmy while I go with you to the garden party. But she has to leave pretty soon.”

Sandie looked puzzled, and then caught on.

“Yes, darn it all,” Sandie said. “Maybe some other time.”

Mother sighed as if deeply disappointed in both of us and floated out.

“Isn’t it a little late in the day for garden parties?” I asked Rose Noire.

“They’re illuminating Mrs. Wexford’s garden with hundreds and hundreds of those little fairy lights,” Rose Noire said. “It’s going to be so magical—are you sure you can’t come?”

“Duty calls,” I said. Rose Noire sighed, and followed Mother.

“Was I supposed to say that?” Sandie asked, after I shut the door. “I mean, I thought you did need a baby sitter.”

“Yes, but not to go to a garden party,” I said. “I’m going to snoop and see if I can find anything incriminating about Nadine.”