Stork Raving Mad(44)

“Watch your back, then,” I said as I turned to leave. “We wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

“To me?” His voice rose to a squeak. “Why should anything happen to me?”

“Right now, a lot of people associate the two of you,” I said. “For all some of these people know, you were helping Dr. Wright with whatever she was doing that they don’t like. So be careful. We don’t want more trouble.”

He gave me a startled look and scurried back to the kitchen, clutching his cell phone like a talisman.

Okay, it was a mean thing to say, but he’d angered me, with his slurs on Dad’s professionalism and his automatic assumption that anyone who didn’t like Dr. Wright was irrational.

Still, he was looking less and less like a credible threat to Ramon’s dissertation. I had been wrong in thinking that we were facing two formidable adversaries. Dr. Wright might have been formidable. Dr. Blanco was merely the faithful sidekick.

Or perhaps he was only a weapon Dr. Wright had planned to use—a weapon now harmless with no hand to wield it.

A weapon someone else could use for good, perhaps? I’d leave that to Art, Abe, and Michael, who presumably knew Dr. Blanco better than I did.

I was about to shuffle out of the hall when an impulse struck me. I reached into my pocket for my key ring. I didn’t know if it was an old-fashioned custom or an eccentricity of the previous owner, but most of the doors in our house had keyed locks, even the closets—and all with different keys. The coat closet was supposed to be for Michael’s and my stuff, which was why the entire hall was crammed with borrowed coatracks. We hadn’t been locking it, but whether Dr. Blanco had really been using it as a phone booth or whether he’d been snooping, I could keep him from doing it again. I sorted through my keys till I found the right one and locked the door.

If Dr. Blanco wanted privacy for his phone calls, he could go out in the yard as the students did.

As I turned away from the door, I ran into Ramon and Bronwyn coming back from the kitchen.

“Rehearsal over?” I asked.

“About to begin,” Ramon said. “Would you like to come and watch?”

“No thanks,” I said. “Farther than I want to walk right now and I’ve seen a couple of rehearsals already.”

“I don’t suppose you could keep Dr. Blanco here in the house with you, then,” Bronwyn said. “We don’t want him interrupting the rehearsals telling us how obscene and offensive the play is.”

It had puzzled me before when Blanco said that. I’d have called the play merely bawdy. I planned to discourage Mother from seeing it. But I wouldn’t have called it obscene. Clearly Blanco’s literary taste matched his rather prim and priggish exterior.

“He’s entitled to his opinion,” Ramon said.

“But he’s not entitled to force his opinion down everyone else’s throat,” Bronwyn said. “That’s censorship.”

“He probably likes censorship,” Ramon said. “And anyway, he’s been pretty quiet since Dr. Wright died.”

Perhaps Blanco was making a few token protests to prove he wasn’t a pawn.

“He’s obnoxious,” Bronwyn said, turning to me. “When Ramon or any of the other students speak Spanish to him, he ignores them. Pretends he doesn’t understand.”

“Maybe he’s not pretending,” Ramon said. “Not everyone with Latino heritage actually speaks Spanish.”

“Then it’s dishonest of him to take advantage of an accident of birth if he doesn’t honor his heritage enough to speak the language or learn about the culture,” Bronwyn said. “Have you looked at his CV?”

“His what?” Ramon echoed.

“CV—curriculum vitae,” I put in. “It’s what they use in academia instead of resumé.”

“Never use an English word when a Latin one will do,” Bronwyn said with a sniff.

“Actually, resumé is French, but I know what you mean,” I said. “Where’d you see his CV, and what’s so interesting about it?”

“It’s posted on the college Web site,” she said. “It lists a lot of awards and honors. First Latino professor on the staff of this college, certificate of thanks from some Hispanic cultural association. I mean, it looked encouraging. We knew Dr. Wright was going to be hard to deal with, but when we heard that the other professor assigned to deal with Ramon’s case was a Latino, we were relieved. We thought he’d be sympathetic.”

I frowned suspiciously. Ramon had managed to give the impression that the prunes’ arrival was a horrible surprise. But how could that be if he and Bronwyn had known Blanco was assigned to the case—or even that there was a case to begin with? Maybe the prunes were right and Ramon had been deliberately avoiding them.