Stork Raving Mad(79)

“Don’t be so hasty,” I said. “The biology department isn’t the whole college. No building for biology—but what about drama?”

“The drama department needs a building?”

“You’ve been to a couple of plays in the Pruitt Theater—what do you think?”

“I thought it was a charming little theater.”

“Yes,” I said. “The operative word is ‘little.’ It’s a converted lecture hall. Nearly every show is sold out, but there are so few seats to sell that it’s rare for a show to break even, and the college bean counters are always complaining and trying to cut back on the number of productions. And talk about not being in tune with the current developments in their professions—the drama faculty would like to be, but they don’t have the facilities. The theater-technology students need to have a fully equipped modern theater if they’re going to learn the skills they need to be competitive in the job market they hope to enter. Instead, they’re back in the nineteenth century. What’s more, the lion’s share of the work out there is in television and film, not live stage. Just ask Michael how he feels about trying to teach film with no equipment other than a few Betacams one of the Richmond TV stations donated ten years ago, when they upgraded their own equipment.”

“Hmm.” It sounded like a “How do I say no gracefully?” kind of hmm, but at least he wasn’t rejecting the idea outright. Probably a measure of how eager he was to put his name on a building—and how frustrated he was by his quest’s failure to date. “A theater’s a nice idea, but I’m not sure I see how this fits in with the Blake Foundation’s environmental mission.”

“It could be a state-of-the-art green theater,” I said. “Constructed with environmentally sensitive materials and designed for minimal energy use. You could put solar panels on the roof so it doesn’t just generate enough energy to power itself, it could actually give back to the grid.”

“Hmm,” he said again. I’d been hoping for a “Yes!” but at least this was a more thoughtful, positive-sounding “hmm.”

“And I’m sure you can find a way to encourage synergy between the drama curriculum and environmental issues.”

“The hell with synergy. If I built them a nice professional film-production facility, you think I could get the college to let me use it whenever I needed to do some studio work on one of my nature programs?”

“You could probably even have a lot of the work done by student interns,” I said. “Get someone on your staff to develop plans for a student internship program, and it’s a win-win. You get affordable service and they get solid experience for their resumes.”

“Hmm.” Now Grandfather looked thoughtful. “The Blake Drama Building. The Montgomery Blake Theater. Yes, it has a nice ring to it. Who do I talk to?”

“Let me find out.” I heaved myself out of the chair. “Don’t say anything to anyone—especially not the annoying Dr. Blanco—until I can find some more information about how to get this done efficiently.”

“Excellent,” he said. “Nothing would please me more than doing an end run around that annoying twerp. Keep me posted.”

“Oh, one more thing,” I said. “Did you hear about Sammy Wendell’s dog being run over?”

“Yes,” he said, looking thunderous again. “Hell of a thing, someone running over a dog and not even stopping to see if the poor beast was hurt.”

“We’re collecting donations,” I said.

“To pay the vet’s bill?” He reached into his coat pocket. “Sure. How much do you need?”

“And the cost of a DNA test to help convict the perpetrator when we catch him,” I added.

“Just tell me how much you need,” he said. “Better yet, just have them send a bill to my office. So, you coming to the show?”

Show? It took me a few minutes to realize he meant Ramon’s rehearsal.

“I’ve seen it,” I said. “I want to see the inside of my eyelids for a while.”

“I’m going to snag a good seat before things get too crowded,” he said, and strode off toward the kitchen.

I followed, planning to retrieve the doggie bag I’d made myself in the barn, which I’d left on the counter in all the excitement over the purse. By the time I reached the kitchen, the back door was already slamming behind him.

The kitchen was still a mess, but not nearly as bad as it had been the last time I’d seen it. In fact, it hadn’t looked this good in weeks. There were still about a million dirty dishes, but they’d been stacked neatly on the right side of the sink, and someone had actually scraped and rinsed enough of them to load and start the dishwasher. I could see clutter everywhere, but no half-eaten food, and there were two black plastic garbage bags, neatly tied, beside the nearly full garbage can. The air smelled floral, more so than the half-dozen little dishes of potpourri scattered around on the counters could possibly account for. Rose Noire had probably been spritzing essential oils to supplement the potpourri. A welcome change from the fish odor, whatever it was, and not annoying to my hypersensitive nose.