Cockatiels at Seven (8 page)

“Hi,” I said, in a deliberately light and cheerful tone. “I’m looking for Karen.”

“Karen’s not here,” Nadine said. “And I’m sorry, but I’m afraid we cannot permit a toddler to stay in the office. Too disruptive.”

She frowned slightly at Timmy, who was actually behaving quite well. He was turning Karen’s desk chair around in slow circles, and yes, he was pushing against the desk and the file cabinets with his feet to do so, but they looked as if they had survived far worse abuse. For Timmy, he was being positively angelic.

Of course, perhaps Nadine had met him before in another mood.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll take him right out again. I must have gotten my signals crossed about where I was supposed to drop him off. She’s not in today?”

“No.” Nadine said. I waited, hoping she’d say something else, but she simply stood there, looking forbidding,
with that faint frown on her face. Sandie was trying very hard to be invisible.

“Damn,” I said. “Well, I’ll get Timmy out of your hair. Could I give you a message in case you see her?”

“Perhaps you could write your message down,” Nadine said, looking down her nose at me. “And leave it on her desk.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to look abashed. Actually, that was just what I was hoping she’d say. I’d spotted a sheaf of pink “While-you-were-out” slips spread out across Karen’s desk.

I made my way through the forest of file cabinets to Karen’s desk, ostentatiously pulling out my notebook as I did, and flipping to a clean page. Nadine walked over to one of the other empty desks and picked up a paper. It wasn’t lost on me that from her new position she could keep an eye on me.

“Can I sit down, Timmy?” I asked. Timmy obligingly slid off the chair and crawled under the desk, where he began rummaging through various boxes and papers.

I took a moment to glance at the photos on Karen’s desk. Several of Timmy at various ages, and one family group, with Karen and Jasper holding the infant Timmy. At least I assumed it was Jasper—Karen had covered the man’s head by sticking a square cut from a yellow Post-it note to the glass.

I flipped up the sticky note—yes, that was the Jasper I remembered. Tall and angular, with long, straight brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. Decent looking, if you overlooked a slightly weak chin. And I’d always thought his smile looked a little forced.

I shook my head, dropped the tab back over his face, swung myself around with my back to Nadine, and began writing. I pretended to tap my left hand on the desk while I was writing, though what I was actually doing was flicking the “While-you-were-out” notes aside, one by one, so I could jot down all the names, numbers, and messages. Most of them were written in a round, loopy handwriting and initialed with an S, except for one that was written in a handwriting so tiny that you could have fit an entire short story on the small sheet of paper, and yet so precise I had no trouble reading it. Nadine, I suspected.

When I’d finished copying the names and numbers, I glanced under the desk.

“What are you doing, Timmy?” I said.

“Nothing,” he said. He was almost telling the truth. He was just sitting under the desk, clutching Kiki and gently poking at my ankles with his foot. But as I bent down, pretending to check on him, I turned the notebook page I’d been writing in so I’d have a clean sheet.

“We’re leaving in a second,” I said. I quickly scribbled a note to Karen:

Karen—hi! Dropped by with Timmy. Please call me to let me know where I should bring him.

I added my home and cell phone numbers and underlined the word “please” several times. Then I ripped the sheet out of the spiral notebook and set it on top of the “While-you-were-out” notes.

“Okay, Timmy,” I said. “Mommy’s not here yet. We’ll come back later when she’s here.”

Nadine frowned and opened her mouth, then closed it again, apparently realizing that any mention of a return visit was only intended to expedite Timmy’s exit. She returned to the door of her office to watch us go.

“Sorry,” I said, glancing down as we passed Sandie’s now denuded desk.

Sandie’s back was to Nadine. She didn’t move her head, or smile, but she made some sort of frantic, incomprehensible gesture with her hands. I paused.

“Do you need any help putting stuff back on your desk?” I said.

“No thanks,” she said, looking up and still gesturing. As a mime, she was a dismal failure. If she was trying to tell me something, it wasn’t working. Maybe she wasn’t signaling. Maybe she was just having some kind of stress-induced arm spasms.

I gave up trying to interpret her signals and reached down to take Timmy’s hand. He shifted his sippy cup into his other hand to take mine and its top fell off, spilling the tiny amount of milk that he hadn’t finished—maybe a tablespoon’s worth.

“Oh, no!” Sandie whispered. A little melodramatically, if you asked me. It was milk, not blood.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I stooped down and began mopping at the spill with a tissues from my purse. “Do you have any paper towels? Because I could run to the ladies room if—”

“This is one of the reasons we cannot allow children here,” Nadine said. She squatted down and began to spray Windex on the remnants of the spill and mop around with giant wads of paper towel. “Apart from the
potential damage to the facility, it constitutes a serious safety hazard.”

Damage to the facility? The floor was linoleum. And yes, spills could be a safety hazard, but so was knocking people down in your haste to clean up spills. My ribs still smarted where she’d elbowed me out of the way.

“I’m so sorry,” I said aloud. “I’ll take him away right now.”

Nadine didn’t answer. By this time, she’d sprayed Windex on an area at least five times larger than the original spill, and showed no signs of slowing down. I grabbed Timmy’s hand, made sure his sippy cup was upright, and tiptoed out.

Outside in the hall, I stopped to adjust the Velcro on one of Timmy’s shoes. It didn’t really need adjusting, but it put me out of Nadine’s sight and still visible to Sandie. I was hoping Sandie would notice me, and wondering if I should try to contact her to find out why she was signaling me so urgently. Should I call her up? Lie in wait until Nadine left and then return?

At first, Sandie didn’t see me—presumably because she was focusing on Nadine’s cleanup efforts. I could tell when Nadine had finished because Sandie relaxed slightly, took a deep breath, and glanced out the doorway as if contemplating escape. She saw me crouching outside and luckily she got the hint.

“Nadine, I’m going over to the cafeteria as soon as I finish this batch of receipts,” she said. “Can I bring you back something?”

Apart from the initial no, I didn’t quite catch Nadine’s answer, but the tone of polite contempt came through
loud and clear. No campus cafeteria food for her. I stood up and turned to leave. Probably time to fuel up Timmy again. We’d head for the cafeteria, too.

As we passed the open doorway, I glanced in to see that Nadine had decorated the site of Timmy’s spill with one of those yellow C
AUTION!
W
ET
F
LOORS!
signs that cleaning staffs use. Sandie looked up, saw me looking at the sign, and rolled her eyes.

I did my best to talk Timmy into grilled chicken and broccoli for lunch, but he held out for hamburger and French fries. I gave up. Let Karen guide him back onto the path of responsible nutrition when she showed up again.

“Make that two burger platters,” I told the student behind the counter. “With a lot of lettuce and tomato on the side.”

I even figured out a way to get Timmy to eat the lettuce, by stuffing one leaf sideways into my mouth and waggling it up and down while I chewed on the other end and gradually sucked the whole thing into my mouth. It was messy and a little gross, but Timmy was charmed, and while imitating me, he finished off all his lettuce and the balance of mine. That counted as one serving of fruits and vegetables, right? Perhaps I could figure out something equally entertaining to do with the tomato slices. Then again, Timmy seemed to consider French fries mainly as a vehicle for conveying vast quantities of ketchup from his plate to his mouth. He often loaded one French fry three or four times before it disintegrated to the point that he couldn’t reload
it with ketchup and reluctantly ate it. Surely a quarter bottle of ketchup would count as another serving, wouldn’t it?

I was about to try a game of wheeling a tomato slice around my plate and into my mouth when Sandie appeared at the other side of the table carrying a tray.

“Boy, did you upset Nadine,” she said, as she sat down.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she said, with a shrug. “Nobody likes Nadine.”

“Then would you like me to go back and annoy her some more? Maybe sneak in and spill some molasses on the floor?”

She giggled and shook her head. She cast an ostentatiously jealous look at our hamburger and fries, then sighed.

“Want fry?” Timmy said, offering her one of his largest.

“No thanks,” she said. “Not that I wouldn’t love one,” she added to me. “I’ve been on this diet forever. Doomed to nibble lettuce like a rabbit for the rest of my life.”

I nodded sympathetically. Since she was busily emptying four packets of blue cheese dressing on an enormous Cobb salad, I found myself wondering whether my lunch was all that much more fattening than hers, but I’d learned long ago to keep my mouth shut about other people’s diets and pray that they did the same about mine.

“When Nadine gets over being ticked at you and Karen, maybe I’ll ask you to come back and rile her up again,” she said. “Right now she’s just ignoring me,
and that’s the way I like it. So Karen left Timmy with you?”

When he heard his name, Timmy grinned broadly, revealing all the bits of ketchup-daubed French fry he was chewing. Sandie and I both averted our eyes.

“Don’t chew with your mouth open,” I reminded him. “Yes, Karen asked me to take care of him for a little while. That was yesterday morning. I’m getting a little frantic.”

“I can imagine.” She glanced over at Timmy, who was jamming a fry against Kiki’s stitched mouth.

“You have to eat
something
, Kiki,” he said. More of a sentence than he usually constructed, so I suspected he was echoing something he’d heard repeatedly from Karen.

“It’s probably because of her husband,” Sandie said. “She found out Friday he was back in town.”

“Her husband? Jasper? They’re still married?”

“She filed for divorce when he ran out on her, but it takes a while, especially if you can’t find the jerk to get him to sign any papers. So when she heard he was back, living at his uncle Hiram’s old house, she said she was going to go out and get him to sign something.”

“Don’t people usually get a lawyer or a process server to do stuff like that?”

“Yeah, but she didn’t have a lot of money,” Sandie said. “I guess it’s cheaper if you do it yourself. Anyway, she was going to go out and see him.”

“Did she say when?” I could feel the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. If Karen had left Timmy with me because she was going to see her estranged husband—and hadn’t returned . . .

“She was talking about it Friday afternoon,” Sandie said. “I assumed she meant to do it over the weekend. And then when she didn’t come on time yesterday morning, I thought maybe she’d taken the morning off to do it. Then Nadine went on the warpath—she’s a real stickler about unexcused absences.”

I imagined Nadine was a real stickler about a lot of things. Escaping the Nadines of the world was one of the main reasons I’d chosen blacksmithing over more secure but confining jobs.

“Maybe that’s what she’s doing,” I said. “She dropped by my house about eight in the morning yesterday.”

“You’ve seen her a lot more recently than I have, then,” Sandie said. “She left Friday afternoon, just like usual, and that’s the last I saw of her.”

Her face was solemn, and the words sounded a little rehearsed, as if she had already practiced saying them for CNN, should the occasion arise.

“Do you know her husband?”

“Jasper? Not that well. Of course, his parents were from around here.”

Clearly she didn’t like him, or she’d have said Jasper himself was “from around here.” Still, he was a native, even though an unlikable one. And so was Sandie, from her words—though come to think of it, I could have guessed that from her voice, with its subtle hint of an accent.

“He didn’t stick around much after his parents died,” Sandie went on. “They sold the farm and all. So I think everyone was surprised when he moved back here again. Got a decent job at the college, in the data support center. Though he didn’t hang onto it for long. That’s how he
met Karen, you know. They were putting in this big, automated bookkeeping system and Karen was the one from our department who worked on the conversion.”

“Do you have any idea why he was fired?” I asked.

Sandie shook her head.

“Whatever it was, Karen was real upset about it,” she said. “But she never did say much. It was about that time they broke up, though—and good riddance to bad rubbish. I’ll say one thing for Jasper—he makes my ex look good, and that takes some doing.”

The newly returned Jasper Walker was starting to sound more and more suspicious.

“Kiki got a boo-boo,” Timmy announced. I dug into my purse and handed him a Band-Aid. Not for the first time—in my opinion, Kiki was a hypochondriac.

“You said Jasper was living at his uncle Hiram’s house,” I said aloud. “Do you know where it is?”

“Out in the woods somewhere near the Clay County line. Hiram Bass—Jasper’s mother’s sister married one of the Clayville Basses.”

To someone “from around here,” that snippet of genealogy probably told volumes about Jasper and his family, but all it told me was that my quest to find Karen was probably going to lead Timmy and me to the county property records office, to locate Hiram Bass, and then out into the more rural end of the county.

I noticed that Sandie was looking at Kiki and frowning. Well, yes, Kiki wasn’t exactly in pristine condition. If Karen didn’t show up by bedtime tonight, I was going to try stealing Kiki after Timmy had dropped off to sleep and putting her through the washer and dryer. Or maybe Sandie was expressing disapproval of the
number of Band-Aids festooning Timmy’s hands and Kiki’s paws. Well, yes, I suppose I had made a mistake, letting Timmy find out that I routinely carried Band-Aids in my purse.