Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon

I stuck the keys back into my pocket and glanced around to see if anyone had noticed. Which was silly, of course. It was just a set of keys. As long as I didn't make a fuss, no one would suspect they weren't my own keys.

Not even whoever had turned them in when Ted had lost them. At least they hadn't mentioned them to the police. Not surprising; he'd lost them early Monday morning, probably during his first round on the mail cart. I'd forgotten them myself until just now.

And of course I was going to turn them over to the police.

Tomorrow. After I found them again.

Today, I was going to make a little side trip over to Ted's house. In the unlikely event anyone – like the police – caught me there, I could always pretend I was searching for his urgently needed files.

By the time the microwave dinged, this plan had made me so cheerful that I actually hummed as I slid the mouse into George's bowl, shook a little Parmesan cheese over it, which he seemed to like, and headed back down the corridor.

Even running into two of the therapists didn't spoil my mood.

“I'm afraid you're going to have to do something about this,“ the eating-disorder therapist said.

“You can't expect us to conduct therapy in this kind of atmosphere,“ the size-acceptance therapist added.

Isn't it nice how a crisis brings people together? I thought. This was the first time I'd ever seen them join forces to pick on someone else.

“It's not exactly ideal for programming, either,“ I said.

“We've had one disruption after another ever since your group moved in,“ Eating Disorders went on.

“Frisbee-throwing in the corridors,“ Size Acceptance said, shaking her head.

“And this juvenile obsession with the martial arts.“

“It's worse than Fraternity Row.“

“Of course, that's what you get when you have so few women and minority employees to diversify your workforce.“

“And now a murder!“ Size Acceptance exclaimed. “I assure you, we never had a murder before you people arrived.“

“We want to know what you're going to do about this,“ Eating Disorders demanded.

“I'm not sure what we're going to do about it,“ I said. “You have to remember that we never had a murder either, before we moved in with you people. We're still assessing the implications of that. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to feed George.“

I held the bowl up where they could see its contents. Apparently they had finished complaining – at any rate, they left rather rapidly. I went back to the reception area to reward Dad and George for their patience.

“Really? How do you know that?“ Dad was saying on the phone as I walked in.

I put the bowl in the holder attached to George's perch.

“Right here in this office?“ Dad said.

“Dad, who are you talking to?“ I asked.

“Some reporter,“ he said, covering the mouthpiece. “An actual murder?“ he went on, to the reporter.

“Oh, Lord,“ I muttered, closing my eyes. “Dad, why are you talking to a reporter?“

“Right here in the reception room where I'm sitting?“ Dad said. “You're kidding.“

“I hope you know what you're doing,“ I muttered.

“No, I certainly didn't know anything about it,“ Dad said. “Thank you for telling me. If you hear anything else, please call back and let me know.“

He hung up, looking very pleased with himself.

“All you really have to do is tell them 'No comment,' you know,“ I said.

“I did that for the first four,“ he said. “It was getting boring. Maybe I should tell the next one about how they have me and the other temps washing the blood off the walls.“

“Maybe I should take back the switchboard now,“ I suggested. “The Doctors from Hell team are probably waiting for you.“

“They just want to talk about FVs and blood gases,“ Dad said as he got up from the switchboard. “Don't you want to hear the details of the autopsy?“

“Do I have a choice?“

He chuckled as if he thought I was kidding. “Of course, it was all very ordinary and straightforward,“ he said, frowning. “No really interesting features at all.“

“I will make a point of conveying your disappointment to the killer, should the occasion arise.“

Dad seemed to interpret that as an invitation to fill me in on the details of the autopsy. For an autopsy with no interesting features at all, there were a lot of details, at least the way Dad told it, in between the phone calls I was answering.

“So what do I know now that I didn't before you told me all this?“ I asked when Dad had finished. At least I assumed he was finished when he began to reminisce about similar but more interesting past autopsies.

I must have sounded a little testy. Dad thought about it for a second and then summed up the previous half hour of conversation with unusual brevity.

“The blow to the throat required quite a bit of strength – not everyone could have done it. If it was deliberate, it could indicate some special knowledge of anatomy or fighting tactics, but the killer could have just hit the right spot by accident. And once he was temporarily stunned by that, strangling him with the mouse cord didn't require greater than average strength. Or special knowledge.“

“So the chief's going to be looking a little harder at anyone who's large, strong, or has special training, but really the autopsy neither conclusively points the finger at anyone nor eliminates anyone,“ I said. “Keisha and Luis may be long shots, but they're still in the running.“

Dad's face lit up. “Is that who you suspect?“ he asked in a stage whisper. “And they were in on it together?“

“No,“ I said, “I named them only because they're about the smallest people on staff.“

“Ah,“ he said, looking glum again.

“The autopsy's not a lot of help,“ I complained.

“Sometimes science doesn't hold the answers,“ he proclaimed. “Sometimes only the power of the human mind can ensure that justice is done.“

“You've been watching those crime-solving shows again,“ I said with a sigh. “Why don't you go tell the Doctors from Hell designers about blood gases now?“

He patted me on the shoulder and trotted off.

I was alone in the waiting room, except for one patient waiting' meekly in the corner for an appointment with his therapist. At least I assumed he was a patient, since he kept glancing at George out of the corner of his eye and looking anxious if I caught him at it. People who came to see Mutant Wizards for the first time would invariably walk in and exclaim, “Why the hell do you have a buzzard in your waiting room?“ And if we kept them waiting, they'd spend the time staring unabashedly at George. Patients, on the other hand, always tried to act as if George didn't exist, or as if there were nothing out of the ordinary about sharing a waiting room with a live buzzard. Perhaps they thought it was some kind of Rorschach test, and if they mentioned it, someone would immediately say, “That's a good question. Why do you think we have a buzzard in our waiting room?“

I suppose I should have drafted Dad to keep minding the switchboard for me as soon as I realized that he wasn't working with the Doctors from Hell team. Shortly after I took the switchboard back, the mail cart cruised through with Dad sitting on top of it. He'd acquired a notebook remarkably similar to die one Chief Burke carried, and was scribbling diligently in it.

The second time he rode by, he'd apparently run out of interesting things to note. He was sitting cross-legged and appeared to be lost in thought.

On his third circuit, he'd begun looking distinctly bored.

The fourth time through, he was lying down on his stomach, gripping the front of the mail cart, looking for all the world like a slow-motion toboggan rider. After that, he lay down on his back.

“What are you doing, anyway?“ Jack asked when he happened to be in the reception area as the cart rolled through.

“Detecting,“ Dad said. “I'm studying the victim's point of view.“

“And you're not the least bit superstitious about what happened to the mail cart's last passenger?“ Jack asked.

“A sleuth has to take some risks,“ Dad called as the mail cart rolled out of sight.

“I'd be a little less worried if I hadn't heard him snoring the last time he passed my cube,“ Jack said.

I sighed. “Here,“ I said, picking up Spike's crate. “Stick Spike on top of the mail cart with him. If anyone tries anything, Spike is sure to bark.“

“Good idea,“ Jack said.

For the rest of the afternoon, Dad and Spike snoozed comfortably on top of the mail cart, and Jack spread the word among the staff to keep an eye on them, in case anyone tried anything. No one did. Dad awoke, near five o'clock, chagrined at having taken so long a nap, and I took advantage of his embarrassment to dump Spike on him for the evening. I had things to do and didn't want dog walking duties to slow me down.

I found the disgruntled Eugene Mason's personnel file singularly uninformative. According to the paperwork, he'd left at the end of his ninety-day probation period by mutual agreement. Not much grounds for discontent there. Then again, as Liz was always reminding people, anything we wrote, including e-mails, could be subpoenaed by someone suing Mutant Wizards. Perhaps Personnel felt it safer not to go into too much detail about why we hadn't wanted to keep Mason on.

I hadn't learned anything more that afternoon – not that I didn't try to interrogate anyone unlucky enough to pass through the waiting room. By five o'clock, when I finally locked the doors and put the switchboard on night mode, I suspected most of the staff members were sneaking out the back door to avoid me.

I decided that I'd gone as far as I could with what little information I had to go on. I was going to come back tonight and snoop around.

Before I left, I strolled through the office. Either the afternoon's build had gone far better than usual, or the programmers had decided to run the evening build on Luis's spare server over at the Pines. At any rate, the Mutant Wizards staff was clearing out. Not entirely, though, and a few of the therapists had evening office hours and would be seeing patients as late as eight or nine o'clock.

Under the circumstances, I thought, pausing in a corridor, it didn't make sense to come back before eleven, at the earliest. Perhaps even midnight. Or –

“Can I help you?“

I glanced up and realized I was standing outside the door of one of the therapists' offices. The short, mousy, bespectacled man who was Dr. Lorelei's partner. He was hunched over his keyboard, and his hands covered the monitor, as if to protect it, even though it was facing away from me.

Get a life, I wanted to say. Even if I could see, from here, what you're typing, why would I want to? I doubt anyone wants to pry into your poor patients' secrets. At any rate, I don't.

“Sorry,“ I said. “Trying to remember where I left something.“

He didn't speak, and continued to clutch his monitor.

“Good night,“ I said, and walked away.

When I was a few feet away, I heard the rattle of the keyboard start up again.

“Weird,“ I muttered. And then pushed him out of my mind. I had more important things to worry about.

Like seeing what I could find in Ted's house.

I looked up the address on the map before I set out. Not that I really needed to; I had a pretty good idea where it was. After so many months of house-hunting in Caerphilly, I could probably have walked blindfolded through any of the promising neighborhoods – promising, these days, began with any house that actually had indoor plumbing, and stopped only a little short of houses large enough to have their own zip codes.

Ted had lived in the country, about a twenty-minute drive south of town, an area I didn't know as well because it was almost entirely farmland. As I drove, I brooded on the injustice of the fact that the beastly Ted had actually managed to snag a house in the country, while all Michael and I had found was the Cave.

At least he'd said it was a house. Maybe it would turn out to be someone's old toolshed or a converted tobacco barn.

I finally came to a mailbox with the name CORRIGAN scrawled in black Magic Marker over another, faded name beginning with an S. I craned my neck to see the house, but the driveway was lined with boxwoods, ten feet tall and so overgrown they nearly met in the middle. I backed up, but the hedge continued across the front of the yard until it met the woods on either side.

“Here goes,“ I muttered, and pointed my car down the driveway – whose condition suggested that the owners had given up maintaining it about the same time they'd abandoned the poor boxwoods. The driveway seemed longer because I had to drive three miles an hour, but still – this was a large lot. And when I emerged from the boxwood tunnel in front of the house, I was so startled that I almost ran into a crumbling sundial.

If Alfred Hitchcock hadn't modeled the house in Psycho on this place, then surely Edward Gorey had found inspiration here. It was a three-story gray Victorian, complete with a widow's walk on the top, and sporting several dozen odd turrets, gables, bay windows, balconies, and other architectural flourishes. I spotted one tall, stately window that wasn't marred with either cracked glass or boarded-over panes, but if there was a square foot of unpeeled paint or undamaged gingerbread, it had to be on the back of the house. A lugubrious weeping willow appeared to be dying of some wasting disease in the front yard. I followed a trampled path through the foot-high weeds to the porch.

“A real fixer-upper,“ I said, craning my neck to see if the shingles had finished falling into the yard or if there were still a few lurking up there, waiting to land on unwary visitors.

Someone had nailed unpainted boards in place of the missing porch steps, and the porch floor seemed sound enough to hold me. Fighting the tendency to look over my shoulder – not to mention the superstitious expectation that if I did, I'd see a tall, cadaverous figure with a black cape and very pointed teeth – I managed to unlock the door.

And almost turned and ran. Not that the inside was scarier than the outside. Quite the contrary. Although equally neglected-looking, the interior was so unrelentingly cozy that I had a moment of panic, thinking that I must have come to the wrong house and was about to be arrested for trespassing.

“Don't be daft,“ I told myself. “It's the right address, and the key fits.“

I closed the door behind me – yes, it creaked – and began slowly and carefully making my way through the house. Slowly and carefully, because nearly every square foot of floor was covered with furniture or small, fussy throw rugs, and nearly every square inch of horizontal table or shelf space with objects, most of them small and breakable.

Three sets of wind chimes and a bumper crop of cobwebs dangled from the crystal chandelier in the foyer. Three drab coats, a tangled mass of canes, and several dozen battered black umbrellas occupied the huge Victorian coat stand to my left, while to my right, a hall table displayed a heterogeneous collection of marble obelisks, painted china eggs, miniature foo dog statues, seashells, mineral specimens, and brass bells. I made the mistake of trying to draw aside the velvet curtain that partly filled the archway from the foyer to the living room, and the resulting dust cloud sent me into a fit of coughing so violent that all the tiny spiders I'd dislodged had managed to hide themselves by the time I recovered.

The living room held four mismatched velvet couches, their colors softened by time except where someone had recently moved one of the lace doilies or antimacassars, and so covered with needlepoint pillows that I doubt a small child could have found room to sit on them.

The massive velvet curtains might be wonderful insulation in the winter, but I longed to jerk them aside and fling open a few windows. The temperature outside had finally begun to drop, but inside it was near one hundred degrees. But touching the curtains would disturb months – maybe years – of accumulated dust. I didn't want to leave that much evidence of my visit.

So I blotted the sweat from my face with the hem of my shirt and tiptoed past glass-fronted bookcases bulging with faded, dusty books and odd bric-a-brac. A collection of elegant glass paperweights shared space with several dozen souvenir models of buildings and landmarks from around the world. I particularly liked the way the plaster Statue of Liberty seemed to be conversing with the miniature of The Thinker, and how the Eiffel Tower seemed to be in the backyard of the White House.

“Okay, Ted,“ I said aloud as I dodged a giant dead fern perched on a tiny fretted Victorian plant stand and narrowly missed overturning a whatnot filled with tiny china cats and shepherdesses. “I can think of three explanations for this. One – you were going to give up programming for an exciting new career selling antiques, collectibles, and kitsch. Especially kitsch.“

On the whole, I thought that explanation unlikely.

Wouldn't a dealer have better taste? I paused for a moment, distracted, to inspect a small curio cabinet that seemed to be entirely filled with the kind of little ceramic birds and frogs florists use to decorate inexpensive potted plants.

“Two – you're a medium and you've been channeling one of the legendary packrats of history.“

I reached the doorway to the kitchen and looked around. The calendar beside the phone was still turned to April, with its overly cute picture of a quartet of fuzzy yellow kittens spilling out of an Easter basket. On the windowsills, the earthly remains of dozens of houseplants rustled gently in the faint draft created by my arrival. And on the counter, among the trivets, trinkets, and tea cozies, I found a nest of pill bottles, all in the name of a Mrs. Edwina Sprocket. Who had apparently suffered from an impressive variety of ailments, including heart problems, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, indigestion, and constipation. The most recent refill dated from the end of March.

“Three – you convinced the landlord, or the heirs, to let you move in before they held the estate sale.“

The more I looked around, the likelier that explanation seemed. The kitchen cabinets held dusty canned goods. Mostly cream soups and other bland prepared foods. The refrigerator contents were definitely Ted – several six-packs of Coors, leftover pepperoni pizza, kung pao chicken trimmed with feathery gray mold, and frozen enchiladas. The only kitchen items that seemed recently used were a few utilitarian pans, utensils, and plastic dishes – stored in the dish drainer, probably because it would have taken a magician to fit another saucer into Mrs. Sprocket's tightly packed kitchen cabinets.

Other than the kitchen, the other rooms on the ground floor seemed undisturbed for weeks, except where someone – probably the Caerphilly police – had recently walked through, as I was now doing, leaving a trail through the dust. Most of the bedrooms on the second and third floor appeared to have been shut up for years. I sneezed a lot.

I had poked head and shoulders through the trapdoor to the attic and was peering around, trying to decide if it was worth searching, when the doorbell rang. I started, hitting my head on a low beam. And then I went downstairs to investigate.

The doorbell rang again as I tiptoed through the living room to peek out the lace curtains covering the glass panes in the door.

It was Frankie, looking as eager as ever, though minus the phony police uniform. But still, what was Frankie doing here?

I opened the door to find out.

“Oh, Meg – hi,“ he said, looking rather surprised to see me.

“Hi, Frankie,“ I said. “What can I do for you?“

“Urn… I saw your car,“ he said, teetering a little as he nervously wound one leg farther than usual around the other. “So I thought I'd see if I could help you out.“

I looked pointedly from my car to the giant hedges surrounding the driveway. Unless Frankie had X-ray vision, there was no way he could have seen my car from the road.

He squirmed. “So have you found any of Ted's files? We could really use some of his files.“

“The police took all his computer equipment,“ I said. “I'm just locking up.“

Maybe that was a sneaky thing to say – implying, as it did, that I was here as part of the police search.

“Oh, okay,“ he said. “Well… I'll be going now.“

I watched him drive away and waited until I was sure he was gone. Ted's files were urgent – but were they urgent enough to bring Frankie this far out of town? After work?

Strange.

I went back to explore the one part of the house I hadn't yet seen – the basement.