Stork Raving Mad(86)

“Yes,” Abe said. “The rehearsal starts in five minutes.”

“We need to get seats near The Face,” Abe said.

“Ramon’s saving us three at the front,” Michael said.

“Go get ’em,” I murmured.

I heard footsteps. I felt Michael kiss the top of my head and twitch the covers up a little. Then I faded into sleep.





Chapter 27


I was dreaming that an army of people was crawling over the house, some of them cleaning it while others messed it up again so the cleaners wouldn’t run out of things to do, and all of them keeping me from sleeping. And just when I finally managed to lock myself in the hall bathroom, the doorbell began ringing over and over again.

I woke up and answered the phone.

“Meg?” It was Clarence Rutledge, Spike’s vet. “Did I wake you?”

“What’s wrong?” I asked, sitting upright. “Is Spike all right?”

“Spike’s fine,” he said. “You can send someone to bring him home again tomorrow.”

“Damn,” I said. “I was hoping he’d require at least a week of hospitalization. What about Hawkeye?”

“He isn’t fine yet, but he will be eventually,” Clarence said. “He’s a lucky dog. If Sammy and Horace hadn’t gotten him in so fast, and if your father hadn’t been around to help—well, all’s well that ends well.”

“I just hope they catch the bastard who did it,” I said.

“That’s why I was calling. Is the chief still there? I’ve taken the DNA swab from Hawkeye and wanted to find out what to do with it.”

“He’s out in the barn, watching the play,” I said. “You could leave a voice mail on his cell phone.”

“Do you have the number?”

I fished out my cell phone, looked up the chief’s number, gave it to Clarence, wished him a good night, and turned out the light again.

Unfortunately, by this time I was wide awake.

I tossed and turned for a while, worrying about Kathy, Danny, Ramon, and even the unlikable Bronwyn. And about the play. What was The Face thinking? Were Michael and his colleagues making any progress in the quest for secession?

I finally decided that as long as I was up, I might as well go to the bathroom. I reached over to the bedside table for the flashlight I kept there. I’d gotten in the habit of using the flashlight to keep from waking up Michael every time I had to go to the bathroom in the night.

It wasn’t on the bedside table. I turned the light on and looked again. No flashlight anywhere.

Of course, now that I had the light on, I could just as easily have gone to the bathroom without the flashlight. Michael was still down at the rehearsal—probably wouldn’t come to bed for hours. But the lack of the flashlight bothered me. I could always just use the light and wake Michael. Or ask him to get me one when he came up to bed. We kept several downstairs in the hall closet.

Or I could go down to the hall closet and fetch one for myself. The self-sufficiency of that pleased me.

I got up, stuck my cell phone in the pocket of my robe, and made my pit stop before heading for the stairs. And then turned back to grab my keys. I remembered that for once I’d actually locked the closet, as we’d been trying to do, so the flashlights and other useful items it contained would still be there when Michael and I went looking for them.

As I climbed down the stairs, I realized that I didn’t feel all that bad. In fact, considering how long and exhausting a day I was having, I was feeling remarkably energetic. My back felt better than usual. Perhaps all the exercise was good for me.

Or perhaps I was still revved up from too much excitement.

The front hall was quiet. Apparently Ramon had a full house for the dress rehearsal. I unlocked the hall closet and rummaged through the shelves until I found a flashlight on one of the higher shelves. I tested it—working fine. And then I stuck it in my pocket and turned to go.

Something fluttered to the floor in front of me. I stooped to pick it up and saw that it was a worn envelope in the characteristic pale blue used for all official Caerphilly College papers. And there was something typed on the outside: “Dr. Enrique Blanco—confidential.”

I turned it over. It was folded in half, so I unfolded it and saw that although the gummed flap had been sealed at some point, someone had opened it. A good thing, since it saved me from the moral dilemma of whether to unseal it. All I had to do was pop the flap open to sneak a peek at the contents.

I pulled out several folded pieces of paper and opened them up. The top one was a photocopy of a yearbook page. The top half of the page showed a dozen teenagers lined up in two rows under the headline “Business Club.” The bottom showed the chess club gathered picturesquely around a table. Two of their number were glaring at each other over a chess board, while the rest assumed eloquent attitudes of fear, triumph, scorn, or indifference. Who’d have expected such a flair for the dramatic from a group normally dismissed as the school geeks? Were any of these hams now treading the boards in our barn? I pored over the photo and studied the names beneath, but none were familiar.