Cockatiels at Seven (7 page)

“Hi, Sammy,” I called out, as we drew near. “What the heck’s going on?”

“Hi, Meg,” he said. “I’m sorry, but you can’t come in here now.”

I decided to play dumb.

“Drat,” I said. “You guys would have to be making a big raid on this dump just when I need to take Timmy home.”

I indicated Timmy, who was straining toward the nearest police car, repeating “ ’Leese car! ‘Leese car!”

“Timmy?” Sammy said, looking down at the preoccupied toddler. “He lives here?”

“His mother is my friend, Karen Walker,” I said. “Apartment twelve. If I can’t come in, could you get a message to Karen that I’m out here with Timmy?”

Sammy and the Camcops looked at each other.

“I’ll go find Chief Burke,” one of the Camcops said.

“So you’ve been babysitting the kid?” the other Camcop asked.

“She—no, Timmy!” I snapped, and grabbed him by the waist again. He’d been reaching toward Sammy’s service revolver.

Just then Chief Burke came trotting up. Things must be serious—I couldn’t recall when I’d seen the chief moving faster than his usual stately walk.

“This is Karen Walker’s son?” he asked.

“Timmy,” I said. “Timmy, say hello to Chief Burke. He’s the boss of all the police here.”

The remaining Camcop frowned. Timmy tilted his head and inspected the chief with interest.

“Hello,” he said. “Want ride in the ‘leese car.”

“Do you indeed?” the chief said.

Timmy frowned and cocked his head, as if this was a test.

“Please?” he said finally.

“That’s the magic word,” the chief said, with a faint smile. “We need to talk,” he added to me. “Sammy! Why don’t you take Master Timothy for a ride in your cruiser?”

“I don’t have a car seat,” Sammy said, turning pale.

“I do,” I said, holding out my keys. “My car’s down the block.”

“Make it a good long ride,” the chief said. “Use the siren a lot. Stop for ice cream if you’ve a mind to.”

“Yes, sir,” Sammy said. He moved around so he could take Timmy’s hand with his left, to keep him as far from the gun as possible.

“Fred, you want to go along, help Sammy?” the chief said, turning to the remaining Camcop. It was a question, not an order, but I could see Fred was frowning and digging in his heels. “Might be good to have another officer along, if the kid happens to let slip any information.”

“Yes, sir!” Fred’s face cleared, and he strode off looking very polished and military, especially compared with Sammy, whose gangly frame was contorted as he tried to stoop down so his hand was at toddler level.

“I gather all this has something to do with Karen,” I said, gesturing to the herd of police vehicles.

“Ms. Walker’s a close friend of yours?” The chief had taken out his notebook. And he was looking at me with suspicion. More suspicion than usual. Of course, usually all he suspected me of was snooping around and interfering with one of his investigations. This time . . .

“She’s a friend, yes. I wouldn’t say a close friend. I hadn’t seen her in months.”

“And yet she left her child with you.”

“Close enough at one time that it didn’t seem too odd leaving him with me for a little while—that’s what she said, a little while, and it was clearly some kind of emergency. I assumed maybe an hour or two. But that
was at eight a.m. yesterday. Around noon I started calling her, and not getting an answer, so I thought I’d come over today and see if I could find out anything.”

He scribbled away in silence.

“Look, what’s wrong?” I asked. “Has something happened to Karen?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” he said.

“Then she’s not—” I stopped myself. I didn’t want to say the word “dead.” I didn’t even want to think it.

“We haven’t found a body, if that’s what you mean,” the chief said. “The place was broken into last night, and has been pretty thoroughly ransacked. Any chance you’d be willing to take a look around, see if anything’s been taken?”

“I’m willing, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be very useful,” I said. “I didn’t even know she lived here. I went over to the bungalow she used to live in, on Hawthorne Street. That’s 125 Hawthorne Street,” I added, anticipating the chief’s question.

“Bit of a comedown from Hawthorne Street,” he said, glancing up over his shoulder at the College Arms.

I nodded. The town of Caerphilly didn’t have much in the way of bad neighborhoods, but if there was anyplace within the town precincts that would make me surreptitiously click my door lock button before I drove through it, this two-or three-block stretch of Stone Street would be it.

“You might want to talk to the woman who moved into her old house,” I said. “I don’t usually think of myself as a very menacing presence, but she was afraid to open her door to me at first. I had to use Timmy to lull her suspicions, and I get the idea some pretty unsavory
characters have turned up there looking for Karen.”

The chief scribbled some more.

“Just how do you know Ms. Walker?” he asked.

“She was one of the first friends I made when I came to town,” I said. “The first who wasn’t really Michael’s friend. And I got the feeling all of them were a little wary of me.”

“Wary?” the chief repeated. I had to smile, because the word rather accurately described his usual attitude toward me.

“Well, they didn’t know how long I’d be around—we were just dating then. And most of them were faculty or faculty spouses, and sometimes the college gets a little suffocating, you know?”

He nodded.

“I met her when I went by the college accounting department to drop off some form Michael kept forgetting to turn in,” I went on. “Karen works there. At least she did work there. We started talking, and hit it off. She invited me for coffee. She helped me find my way around. Let me use guest passes to her gym until I found I was spending so much time down here that I might as well join myself. We did yoga classes there together at first, but after a while, we began drifting apart.”

“Any particular reason?”

“No,” I said. “We had common interests, but not a lot of them. And of course, that was about the time she met Jasper. Her husband. Ex-husband now, I gather. I guess if there was any one thing you could call a reason, it would be Jasper.”

“You didn’t like Jasper?”

“Not really,” I said. “And it was mutual. That does have a cooling effect on a friendship, you know, when she says ‘Isn’t he wonderful!’ and you have a hard time saying anything more than ‘If you say so.’ And I hadn’t heard that they broke up. Maybe she was afraid I’d say ‘I told you so.’”

“So you haven’t seen Mr. Walker recently either?”

I shook my head.

“You have no idea what he did?”

“Do you mean did for a living, or are we talking about something in particular he did that brought him to your attention?”

He looked over his glasses at me.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be nosy. He did some kind of tech work. I think Karen met him when he fixed her computer. Look, something’s happened to Karen, hasn’t it? I can understand now why she wasn’t answering her phone, but she’s not answering her cell phone either, and that’s a bad sign.”

The chief frowned for a moment.

“Try calling her again,” he said.

I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Karen’s number. I could hear her phone ringing in stereo—from my own cell phone, and from a nearby cruiser.

“Chief,” one of the officers called. “The cell phone we found—”

“Just ignore it,” the chief called back. “You can hang up now,” he said to me.

I ended the call. The ringing in the cruiser stopped. We looked at each other for a long few seconds.

“Now let’s go over what happened yesterday,” he said. “In detail.”

I winced. Chief Burke’s appetite for details usually far exceeded my ability to remember them. This could take a while. I hoped Sammy was up to the job of entertaining Timmy for that long.

It was nearly eleven by the time Chief Burke finally let me leave, and even then I suspected he was only taking pity on Sammy and the other officers who’d been keeping Timmy busy. And he gave me no hint of what was really going on—surely that many police wouldn’t turn out for a simple burglary. Even more frustrating, from the questions he’d asked he was clearly assuming that Karen was involved in something illegal. I found myself fuming. Yes, there were a lot of small-time drug dealers and petty criminals living at the College Arms, but there were also a few impoverished grad students and honest, hardworking, but badly paid people. Like single mothers whose husbands skipped out on them and weren’t paying any child support, which I suspected was what had happened to Karen. And all the chief could do was ask about her known associates.

And was he looking for her? Looking for her effectively, that is? He seemed to be assuming she was a suspect, or at least what the media call a “person of interest.” And while I didn’t know much about police procedure, I suspected the way you looked for a person
in jeopardy might be radically different from the way you hunted down a suspect.

Still fuming, I drove over to the campus, trying to stay patient while explaining to Timmy every few minutes that no, I couldn’t turn on the siren because my car didn’t have one. I found a semi-legal parking space a couple of blocks from the college administration building, liberated Timmy from the durance vile of his car seat, and slung the heavyweight diaper bag over my shoulder.

I thought of telling Timmy that we were going to Mommy’s office, but decided maybe that was a bad idea. I’d had a home address for Karen that was two years out of date—what if my information on where Karen worked was equally obsolete? After all, she hadn’t put her work number in Timmy’s instruction manual. Did that mean she no longer worked at the college, or that she hadn’t expected to be at the college during Timmy’s stay with me, or perhaps that she didn’t want me calling the college for some reason?

I was relieved to note, as we headed up the steps toward the administration building, that Timmy seemed to recognize the place, and pulled at my hand. That had to be a good sign. Surely Timmy didn’t have enough short-term memory to recall the place unless Karen still worked there or at least had until very recently.

We strolled into the administration building. It was quieter than I’d ever seen it, but then I didn’t recall ever having a reason to go there before the school year began. I ran into the occasional staff or faculty member strolling calmly through the halls. No one I actually knew, but we all nodded pleasantly, even the ones
whose faces I didn’t recall seeing around the town and campus for the last several years. After all, my presence here three weeks before the start of classes proved we were on the same team—staff, faculty, and their families. I wasn’t one of the hordes of students and parents who would come swarming in after Labor Day, briefly and predictably overwhelming all the administration offices with their forms and questions.

I headed for the office where Karen had been working when I met her. Thanks to Timmy, I didn’t have any trouble finding my way—all I had to do was keep a good grip on his hand. He knew the way. Better and better.

I knew from previous visits—like the one on which I’d first met her—that Karen sat at one of four vintage metal desks in a big room whose walls were lined with battered beige four-drawer file cabinets. And right inside the door, if they hadn’t rearranged things, two cafeteria tables, placed end to end, served as a makeshift counter piled high with stacks and boxes of forms, all printed on the pale blue copier paper the Caerphilly College administration used to distinguish its official forms from lesser documents. I wasn’t sure if I should just march in and ask for Karen or pretend to be looking for some form or other. I’d play it by ear.

I pushed open a door marked
FINANCIAL ADMINISTRATION.
Just as I’d remembered it, except that the file cabinets had multiplied so they not only lined the walls but served as low dividers between the desks. But the counter was there, and they’d even put out a couple of folding chairs so people could sit down to fill out forms. Now all I had to do was—

“Mommy!” Timmy shouted, and pulled himself out of my grip to duck under the tables and race toward the back of the room.

My heart gave a brief lurch of relief—she was all right! And then I realized that he hadn’t seen Karen. He was heading for her desk.

“Oh, my God, it’s Timmy!” someone exclaimed. I glanced over to see that the speaker was seated at one of the closer desks. Had been seated at the desk. Now she had jumped up and was frantically trying to clear everything off the top of her desk into her already crowded drawers.

It was Sandie, the tchotchke lady. Karen and I had laughed and shaken our heads over her during some of our lunches. Every square inch of Sandie’s desk that wasn’t covered with papers was filled with tiny breakable ornaments: bud vases, glass or china figurines of dogs and cats and fawns, tiny china frames with babies’ pictures in them, snow globes, porcelain thimbles, miniature teapots and who knew what else. It was a veritable museum of things that should not be left within a mile of Timmy’s busy little hands. I’d have thought the top of the desk was safe, but Sandie probably had more experience with Timmy than I did.

Luckily, Timmy ignored all the temptations on Sandie’s desk and headed straight for Karen’s. I was expecting a temper tantrum when he didn’t find her there, but instead, he climbed up into her desk chair and sat there, clutching Kiki and his sippy cup, twirling the chair slightly, and looking expectant.

“Karen promised she wouldn’t bring him in here again,” Sandie fussed, as she continued clearing things
off her desk. I knew how she felt; I’d spent most of the previous evening doing the same deck clearing at home. “She knows how he disrupts our operations.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Karen didn’t tell me that—I guess she was in a hurry when she dropped him off. Is she here?”

“No,” Sandie said. She paused in her tidying and looked up. “And let me tell you, Nadine is pretty burned up about that. If you know where she—”

“Sandra?” Sandie flinched slightly and returned to her tidying, so I deduced that the speaker meant her. I turned to see a tall, elegant woman in a gray suit standing in a doorway that led to an inner office. Nadine, I presumed.