Cockatiels at Seven (9 page)

“Thanks,” I said. “You’ve been a big help.”

“I should be getting back,” she said, with another disapproving glance at Kiki. “But please keep me posted on how you’re doing.”

“Will do.”

Though when I got back to the car, I wondered if taking Timmy along on my visit to Jasper was such a great idea. For that matter, if Karen had disappeared after going out to see Jasper, maybe going out there myself wasn’t such a great idea.

Maybe I needed to find out a little more about Jasper first.

I had a lot of trouble getting Timmy back to the car—I practically had to carry him down the sidewalk. Not that he was being deliberately uncooperative, but he had clearly hit the wall and was falling asleep on his feet. When I got him strapped in, I consulted his instruction manual and remembered that after lunch was supposed to be story and nap time.

I shoved in the car songs CD to substitute for the story, but with the volume turned down so it wouldn’t interfere if he decided to start his nap immediately. Then I turned the car homeward. While Timmy was napping, I’d see what I could find out about Jasper.

About a mile from our house, the road from town ran up onto a ridge, giving motorists a sweeping view of the landscape for several miles around—including our house and the sloping part of Seth Early’s pasture that lay across the road from us. Michael always said that he loved that first sight of our house waiting for him at the end of his drive home from the college. I was usually more interested in getting a preview of who and what might be waiting for me when I arrived at the house. A couple of times, the ridge had let me spot some unloved relative’s car parked in front of the house, giving me a chance to remember that I hadn’t quite finished all my errands yet.

Today, I could see that Seth Early was skulking across the road from our house, behind the hedge and fence that separated his pasture from the road. I found that reassuring. Mr. Early reacted with great alarm to even the most harmless of breaks from routine, suspecting innocent-seeming delivery men and lost motorists of having sinister designs on his prize Lincoln sheep. Surely anyone who actually meant us harm would raise Mr. Early’s hackles and inspire him to call
the Caerphilly police long before the intruder could do anything.

I thought of waving to him when I pulled up at the house, but I decided against it. He probably thought he was cleverly concealed and I didn’t want to spoil his fun.

Timmy was fast asleep in his car seat, presenting me with a dilemma. I suspected that, like sleeping dogs, sleeping toddlers should be left undisturbed. I needed Timmy’s nap at least as much as he did. But the thermometer was a blistering ninety degrees outside.

I parked the car in the shade and left the air conditioning running while I pondered the problem. I decided that I could probably get the car seat out of the car without waking him, but hauling him upstairs and transferring him to the crib probably wouldn’t work. So I opened all the doors and prepared to wait until he awakened by himself. Just to be safe, I dragged a portable fan and an extension cord out of the kitchen and set them up so the breeze would blow gently across Timmy’s car seat. The resulting breeze was actually a considerable improvement over what the window air-conditioning units had achieved in the house, so I fixed myself a glass of lemonade and settled down beside Timmy to enjoy it.

I had almost fallen asleep when I heard a noise at my elbow.

“Psst!”

I opened my eyes to find Seth Early standing beside the car. I put my finger to my lips and led him about fifteen feet away so we wouldn’t wake Timmy.

“How do I get in touch with Homeland Security?” he said.

“Why would you want to?” I asked. “I mean, what’s up?”

“Remember that guy you told me about? The one who’s been hanging around here?”

“Hanging around here? I only saw him that one time.”

“He’s been hanging around here. Swarthy-looking guy. Definitely not from around here.”

Swarthy-looking? Considering how brown Seth Early was from all his outdoor work, I wondered how deeply tanned someone had to be to qualify as swarthy in his eyes.

Could it be Jasper, Karen’s ex? I called up his image from the photo on her desk.

“Was he tall and skinny? Long brown hair in a ponytail? Weak chin?”

“No, that’s not him. This guy was shortish, with short hair.”

Not Jasper, then. But perhaps one of the thugs who had been hanging around, looking for Karen? And did Seth Early actually know what swarthy meant? Maybe he thought it merely meant thuggish or suspicious.

“Did you call the police?” I asked aloud.

“They said they’d drop by later. They haven’t, though. Wouldn’t do much good; the guy’s gone now. But he’ll be back, I suspect.”

“If he comes back, call them right away,” I said. “And remind them that you live across the street from me, and that I’m baby-sitting Karen Walker’s son.”

“You think that’d make a difference?”

“After today it will,” I said. “Her apartment was broken into. Lots of cops there. At the moment, anything
related to Karen is probably high priority with Chief Burke.”

He shook his head doubtfully and ambled off to return to his vigil.

Even though Chief Burke had made Seth Early give up carrying his shotgun around, I felt a little better knowing he was keeping watch across the street.

But he’d ruined my chances of napping. I walked over to make sure Timmy was still cool and comfortable, then sat down under a nearby tree and pulled out my cell phone. I was stuck here until Timmy woke up, but maybe I could make good use of the time.

I called Jack Ransom. Jack was technically the second-in-command at Mutant Wizards, the computer gaming company Rob had founded. In reality, Jack ran the company, since Rob had no managerial, business, or computing skills whatsoever. From the company’s point of view, Rob more than justified his existence by providing a steady stream of oddball ideas that, more often than not, could be turned into successful computer and video games by Jack’s legions of programmers and graphic designers.

But unless the staff needed him to come in to brainstorm for them or impress some important client, Mutant Wizards ran just fine without Rob. In fact, having Rob on site usually proved so disruptive that the staff went to great lengths to keep him away. Most of the time, he was content to live the life of a dilettante, but every so often he’d have a brief attack of guilt and vow to be more industrious. One of my unofficial jobs, as a member of the Mutant Wizards board of directors, was
to detect Rob’s guilt trips in their early stages and sidetrack him into something else.

These days I saw a lot more of Jack than Rob did—we’d arranged to give me a bunch of corporate titles that meant I could sign off on documents when Rob was nowhere to be found. Luckily, seeing Jack was a lot less stressful now that he’d gotten used to the idea that Michael and I were not breaking up anytime soon and he would not be getting a dramatic promotion from understudy to leading man in my life—his metaphor, not mine.

And Jack was very plugged into Caerphilly’s relatively small tech community. Jasper was a techie. If Jack didn’t have the lowdown on him he would know someone who did.

“Jasper Walker,” Jack repeated. “Yeah, rings a bell. We interviewed him a couple of times. He had a great resume—too bad he must have stolen it from someone who actually has a functioning brain.”

“So you weren’t impressed?”

“Only by his gall in repeatedly applying for positions for which he was totally unqualified. How did you meet Jasper, anyway?”

“I didn’t; a friend did.”

“Steer her away from him, then; the guy’s bad news.”

“Too late—she married him.”

“Bummer.”

“And I think he’s dragged her into some trouble. I desperately need to find out what. Could you maybe ask around, figure out what he’s up to these days—Is
he still working over at the college’s data support center? If not, what happened? Is he in some kind of trouble?—stuff like that.”

“Can do. In fact, why don’t you drop by here this afternoon—anytime after two. We have a programmer who used to work with Jasper. I remember it really shook the kid up when he saw Jasper in the waiting room, and he was visibly relieved we weren’t hiring him. He just said they didn’t get on, and it wasn’t important, since I wasn’t hiring Jasper anyway. But I bet he knows more, and you could probably get it out of him.”

“It’s a plan.”

I settled back to wait until Timmy woke up. I took out my notebook that tells me when to breathe, as I called my giant to-do list. I tried, without much success, to find a few items in the to-do section that could be done while waiting for a napping child to wake. Clearly, before embarking on motherhood, I needed to get better at making good use of small windows of time when I couldn’t go anywhere. And also at rearranging my life at a moment’s notice.

Timmy finally awoke around two-thirty, but thanks to diaper changing and snacks and such, it was closer to three-thirty by the time we hit the road, and I was overdue for some adult conversation.

I found a shady spot in the Mutant Wizards parking lot and led Timmy inside to find that the reception room had altered dramatically since last week. The furniture was unchanged, but it had been rearranged in a much more efficient layout, and most of the clutter and tchotchkes had gone. The waiting room now looked chic, modern, and uncluttered—exactly the sort of decor I’d always thought we needed for the reception room in the first place. And a lot easier to keep Timmy safe in, for that matter.

“Morning, Apple,” I said to the receptionist. “I see you’ve been doing some redecorating.”

“More like undecorating,” Apple said, with a sniff. “I told Jack I was sick and tired of seeing all those bamboo flutes and Chinese dragons all over everywhere, and I was going to put them in a closet for a while and see if anything horrible happened. And so far nothing has.”

“Not a believer in feng shui, then?”

“Feng shui’s okay within reason, but the place was starting to look like a souvenir stand in Chinatown.”

“No kidding,” I said. And then I felt a stab of guilt. I
reminded myself that family honor didn’t require me to defend Rose Noire’s feng shui expertise—she’d installed the flutes and dragons and hundreds of other feng shui cures after we’d had a murder on site. And it was true that Mutant Wizards had not experienced any further homicides, but then neither had any of the buildings in town that Rose Noire hadn’t feng shui’d. “I’m glad you kept the fish tank, though,” I added.

“The guys like the fish tank,” she said.

So did Timmy. He hadn’t made a sound since he’d walked in and spotted the tank. He was now six inches away from the glass and staring avidly—about the longest I’d seen him stay in one place when not asleep or securely strapped in. I scrutinized the tank, but it looked fairly sturdy and well balanced. Though I noticed that even the fish tank had changed.

“Different fish, I see.”

“Piranha,” Apple said. “A lot more interesting. Especially at feeding time. The guys love that. You want to see Jack, right?”

I nodded and went over to keep a closer eye on Timmy. At the moment, he had his nose plastered against the tank and was staring cross-eyed at the deceptively ordinary-looking fish inside. But I wouldn’t put it past him to find a way to put his head into the tank if I turned my back on him, or perhaps pull it down on top of himself. And I reminded myself that telling Timmy to stay away from the tank would almost certainly make him more interested in it.

“Good grief,” Jack said, as he strode out into the reception area. “Has Rob forgotten to tell me something very interesting? Have you and Michael—?”

“He’s not ours,” I said. “He’s only temporary.”

“Taking a test drive to see if you like the model? Smart move.”

“Actually, I’m looking for his mother. And his father, for that matter. That’s why I called you.”

“Oh, God,” he said. “You’re not going to ask me where I was on the night of November 13th and pull out a Q-tip to sample my DNA, are you?” I could tell he was clowning. Possibly for the benefit of Apple, who was drinking in our conversation.

“Nothing so dramatic,” I said. “I know his father’s identity; it’s his whereabouts that are in question.”

“Yeah, I figured. I may have something for you. Come on.”

He turned to go into the main office area.

“Wait—you’re not leaving him here, are you?” Apple protested.

“Of course not,” Jack said, though clearly he had been about to. He strode over to Timmy, picked him up and lifted him up over his head. Timmy squealed with delight, as he usually did at becoming airborne.

“Whoa,” Jack said, pretending to tap Timmy’s head against the ceiling tiles. “Would you look at this kid! He’s too big for our office—even taller than I am. Come on, Timmy; we’ll find some way to make you useful.”

He set off down the hallway, alternately lifting Timmy up near the ceiling and waving him down along the floor. Fortunately, Mutant Wizards wasn’t the sort of place where a squealing toddler would prove much of a disruption to the working day. Only two or three employees stuck their heads out as we passed, and they didn’t seem annoyed, just curious.

Jack stopped at a cubicle and set Timmy down.

“Here, Hal. I’ve got a test subject for you.”

Hal, a sleepy-looking thirty-something Asian man, regarded Timmy with greater enthusiasm than most people would have shown at having a two-year-old suddenly dropped off in their office.

“Test subject for what?” I asked, feeling suddenly protective.

“Kiddy games,” Hal said.

“New game line we’re experimenting with,” Jack said. “Educational games for preschoolers. Hal, why don’t you and Muriel see if Timmy likes any of the prototypes.”

Muriel, apparently, was the young woman with the purple hair sitting in Hal’s cube. She examined Timmy with calm interest.

Now that Timmy was on the ground, he was starting to look a little anxious at being in a strange place, surrounded by strangers. He grabbed my leg and I found myself feeling curiously protective.