Authors: Donna Andrews
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Detectives, #Women Sleuths, #Mystery Fiction, #Humorous, #Humorous Fiction, #Humorous Stories, #Langslow; Meg (Fictitious Character)
The Real MacAw
To Ruth Cavin, Editor Extraordinaire
Thanks to all the usual suspects:
The folks at Minotaur, including (but not limited to) Andy Martin, Pete Wolverton, Hector DeJean, Matt Baldacci, Toni Plummer, Matt Shear, and Anne Bensson. And a special, long-overdue thanks to the art department for continuing to come up with such great covers.
Ellen Geiger and the crew at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency and Dave Barbor at Curtis Brown.
My friends, both writers and readers, who brainstorm with me, critique with me, or just help keep me sane while I’m writing: N. Renee Brown, Erin Bush, Carla Coupe, Chris Cowan, Meriah Crawford, Ellen Crosby, Kathy Deligianis, Laura Durham, Suzanne Frisbee, John Gilstrap, Barb Goffman, Peggy Hanson, C. Ellett Logan, David Niemi, Alan Orloff, Valerie Patterson, Art Taylor, Dina Willner, Sandi Wilson, and all the Teabuds.
Many thanks to my family—Mom, Stuart, Elke, Aidan, and Liam—for being only a little like Meg’s family.
And above all, thanks to all the readers who continue to welcome Meg and her family into their reading lives.
Contents
Other Meg Langslow Mysteries by Donna Andrews
“Stop!” I hissed. “Bad dog! Don’t you dare bite me!”
Spike, aka the Small Evil One, froze with his tiny, sharp teeth a few inches from my ankle. He looked up and growled slightly.
From one of the cribs across the room I heard another of the faint, cranky whimpers I’d detected over the baby monitor. Jamie always woke up slowly and fussed softly for a few minutes, which gave us a fighting chance of getting to the nursery to feed him before he revved up to cry so loudly that he woke his twin brother. Josh never bothered with any kind of warning, going from fast asleep to wailing like a banshee in two seconds or less.
“I mean it,” I said to Spike. “No more treats. No more sleeping in your basket here in the nursery. If you bite me again, you’re out of here. Back to the barn.”
Do animals understand our words or do they just pick up meaning from our tone of voice? Either way, Spike got the message.
He sniffed at my ankle. Pretending to recognize my scent, he wagged his tail perfunctorily. Then he trotted back to his basket, turned around the regulation three times, curled up, and appeared to fall asleep.
I tiptoed over to Jamie’s crib in time to pick him up and shove the bottle in his mouth a split second before he began shrieking.
I settled down in the recliner and leaned back slightly. Not for the first time, I felt a surge of gratitude to my grandfather, who had given us the recliner and helped me fight off all Mother’s attempts to banish it as an eyesore from the nursery she had decorated so elegantly in soft tones of lavender and moss green.
Eventually, Jamie finished his milk and fell asleep. I gazed down at him with maternal affection—and maybe just a guilty hint of gratitude that he and his noisier brother were, for the moment, both fast asleep and not demanding anything of me.
I pondered whether to get up, put him in his crib, and go back to bed, or whether it would be just as efficient to doze here until Josh woke up for his next bottle. If I dozed here, I could turn off the baby monitor and make sure Michael got a full night’s sleep, so he’d be well rested for teaching his Friday classes.
Or should I rouse myself to pump some milk for the boys’ next meal? I glanced at the clock—a little after 2:00
A.M.
Dozing was winning when an unfamiliar noise woke me up.
It was a dog barking. And not Spike’s bark, either. At eight and a half pounds, Spike tried his best, but could never have produced the deep basso “woof!” I’d just heard.
Or had I just imagined it? I wriggled upright and stared over at Spike.
He was sitting up and looking at me.
“Did you hear anything?” I whispered.
He cocked his head, almost as if he understood.
We both listened in silence for a moment. Well, almost silence. I could still hear the faint, almost restful sounds of the white noise machine we ran at night to minimize the chances of some stray sound waking up the boys.
Just as I was about to relax back into the recliner, I heard another noise. This time it sounded more like a cat meowing.
Spike lifted his head and growled slightly.
“Shush,” I said.
There was a time when shushing Spike would have egged him on. But almost as soon as we’d brought the twins home, he had appointed himself their watchdog and guardian. His self-assigned duties—barking whenever he thought they needed anything, and then biting anyone who showed up to take care of their needs—were made all the more strenuous by the fact that in spite of our efforts, the boys maintained completely opposite sleep schedules, so there was nearly always at least one twin awake and requiring Spike’s attention. After four months, like Michael and me, he’d learned to grab every second of sleep he could.
He curled back up on the lavender and moss-green cushion in his bed and appeared to doze off. He looked so innocent when asleep. An adorable eight-and-a-half-pound furball. What would happen when the boys started crawling, and mistook him for a stuffed animal?
I’d worry about that later.
I sat up carefully to avoid waking Jamie, and managed to deposit him, still sleeping, on the soft, lavender flannel sheet in his crib. I glanced over to make sure Josh was still snoozing in his own little moss-green nest. Then I tiptoed over to the nursery door, opened it, and listened.
I could hear rustling sounds that weren’t coming from the white noise machine. Soft whines. An occasional bark. Meows. Cat hisses.
Probably only someone in the living room watching Animal Planet on the big-screen TV and being inconsiderate about the volume. Most likely my brother Rob, and it was just that sort of behavior that had inspired us to get the white noise machine.
But white noise wouldn’t keep the growing commotion downstairs from waking Michael, who had to work tomorrow. Or five-year-old Timmy, our newly acquired long-term houseguest, who needed to be up early for kindergarten.
Unless of course Timmy was downstairs with Rob, watching television on a school night again.
“Woof!”
Definitely a dog, and not Spike, and it sounded a little too immediate to be coming from the television. Had Rob, miffed that Spike had deserted him for the twins, acquired a new four-legged friend? Or perhaps the local burglars were celebrating Bring Your Dog to Work Day.
I turned the monitor back on, slipped out of the nursery, and closed the door behind me. Now that I didn’t have the white noise machine to mask it, I could hear rather a lot of animal noises. A few barks and yelps. And an occasional howl that sounded more like a cat. Definitely not burglars, unless they’d stopped in midcrime to watch Animal Planet. Time to go downstairs and see what was up. I didn’t exactly tiptoe, but I moved as quietly as possible. If someone had smuggled in a contraband menagerie, I wanted to catch them red-handed.
I stopped long enough to peek into the guest room that had become, for the time being, Timmy’s room. He was fast asleep with his stuffed black cat clutched under one chubby arm. Under any other circumstances, I’d have been tempted to fetch the digital camera and take a photo I could e-mail to his mother to prove that yes, he’d settled in fine and was enjoying his stay. And maybe ask again if she knew just how long that stay would be. But that could wait. I shut his door to keep out the increasing din and crept downstairs to track the din to its source.
No dogs festooning the tall oak staircase or lurking in the front hall. I even glanced up at the double-height ceiling, because my first martial arts teacher had railed about how most people never looked up and were thus remarkably easy to ambush from above. No dogs or cats perched on the exposed beams, and no bats or ninjas hanging from the chandelier.
I stopped outside the wide archway to the living room, reached inside to flip on the light switch, and stepped into the room.
“Oh, my God!” I exclaimed.
The room was entirely filled with animals.
A dozen or so dogs, ranging in size from terriers to something not much smaller than a horse, were in the middle of the floor, lapping up water from several serving dishes from my best china set. Bevies of cats were perched on the oak mantel and on the tops of the bookshelves, some gobbling cat food from antique china dishes while others spit and hissed at the dogs and uttered unearthly howling noises. One irritable-faced Persian was hawking strenuously, apparently trying to launch a hairball at our wedding photo.
Several rows of crates and animal carriers were ranged up and down both sides of the room, some empty, while in others I could see eyes and noses of dogs and cats peering out at their liberated brethren and perhaps wondering when their turn for the food and drink would come.
A tiny black kitten was licking the oriental rug—had we spilled milk there or did he just like the taste of rug?
A Siamese cat had ventured down from the mantel and sat atop a leather photo album on our coffee table, fixedly eyeing a cage in which a small brown hamster was running frantically in his wheel, as if hoping that he could propel the cage away from the cat with enough effort. Several less anxious hamsters and guinea pigs gazed down from cages perched on other bits of furniture.
On our new sofa, an Afghan hound sprawled with careless elegance, like a model artfully posing for a photographer, its white fur vivid against the deep turquoise fabric.
“Hiya, babe! How’s about it?”
A bright blue parrot was fluttering in a cage just inside the door. I eyed him sternly, and he responded with a wolf whistle.
“Meg! Uh … what are you doing awake at this hour?”
My father had popped up from behind the sofa. He was holding a small beagle puppy in each hand. The two puppies were struggling to get at each other, and from the soprano growling that erupted from behind the sofa, I suspected there were other juvenile beagles still on the floor, tussling.
“I was feeding the boys,” I said. “What the hell are you and all these animals doing here?”
Dad looked uncomfortable. His eyes scanned the room as if seeking a safe place to set down the beagles, though I suspected he was merely avoiding meeting my eyes.
“We won’t be here long,” said a voice behind me.
The tall, lanky form of my grandfather appeared in the hall. He was carrying two Limoges soup tureens full of water.
“If you were thinking of giving those to the dogs, think again,” I said. “They belong to Mother, who will eviscerate you if you break them.”
“Oh,” he said. “They were just stuck on a high shelf in the pantry—I thought they were things you didn’t use much.”
“We don’t use them much, mainly because they’re expensive antiques that Mother lent us for that big christening party we threw last weekend,” I said. “And they were on a high shelf in the pantry to keep them as safe as possible until we got a chance to return them. I can show you some crockery you can use, but first I want to know what all these animals are doing here.”
“It’s no use,” came another voice. “The window’s too small.”
I turned to see the enormous leather-clad form of Clarence Rutledge, the local veterinarian. Since Grandfather was an avid animal welfare activist and Dad a sucker for anything on four legs, the menagerie in our living room was beginning to make a little more sense. But only a little.