Stork Raving Mad (29 page)

I flipped the paper over and looked at the next sheet. It was a bad photocopy of what appeared to be a court document of some sort.

After peering at it for a few moments, I suddenly realized what I was seeing. A copy of a twenty-year-old court document
granting Henry S. White a change of name to Enrique Blanco.

No wonder Blanco had been so unsympathetic to Ramon’s cause and so reluctant to address Señor Mendoza in Spanish. He probably wasn’t Latino at all.

The other papers in the envelope were a medley of little Henry’s greatest hits since changing his name. Enrique Blanco accepting a scholarship from the Spanish Culture Association. Enrique Blanco awarded a certificate for outstanding Hispanic student at his business school. Enrique Blanco being honored as the Latino administrator of the year by some other organization.

Why had someone hidden an envelope in our closet containing evidence that would do serious damage to Dr. Blanco’s career if it were made public?

My nose was tickling again. I turned my head again and sneezed several times.

It wasn’t dust. I lifted the envelope to my nose, took a hesitant sniff, and then had to turn aside to sneeze six times in a row. The envelope was permeated with the faintly acrid and completely annoying smell of Dr. Wright’s perfume.

Had this envelope come out of Dr. Wright’s purse?

Most probably. When she’d looked in her purse for her PDA—was it only this morning?—she’d taken out her wallet and a folded envelope. I was willing to bet this was the same envelope—and also the reason for Blanco’s curious willingness to connive in Dr. Wright’s persecution of the drama students. If she had proof of his underhanded behavior and threatened
him with exposure, he’d probably have done anything she asked. Until he got a chance to eliminate her.

And he had probably taken these papers from her and then hidden them in our closet in case the chief searched him, either individually or as part of a general search of all the suspects. Rotten luck for him that I’d decided to lock the closet after he’d stowed the papers there.

I needed to tell the chief about this. It gave Blanco the strongest possible motive for murdering Dr. Wright. And if he was, by his own admission, her closest friend at the college, who more likely to know about her diabetes?

And from his retreat in my office, out in the barn, he could easily sneak across the yard and in through the sunporch to the library. What if he’d been in the library when Randall Shiffley entered the library? He could have shouted and waved outside the window not because he was trying to get in, but because he was trying to disguise the fact that he’d already entered, killed her, and fled when he heard Randall’s approach.

I stuffed the papers back in the envelope and reached for my cell phone as I backed out of the closet.

I bumped into someone on my way out.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t see you.”

Suddenly I felt something cold and hard poking into the middle of my back.

“Don’t move.”

“Very funny, Dr. Blanco,” I said, forcing a laugh and projecting my voice as much as possible. “But I’m a little tired for practical jokes. Why don’t—”

“Shut up and give me the envelope,” he said, emphasizing his words with a jab from the gun. At least I assumed it was a gun. I didn’t think Blanco had enough imagination to fool me with a pencil or an umbrella. “And stop shouting. It won’t do you any good. Everybody’s out in the barn watching that wretched farce.”

“Does that mean you’re hoping The Fa—the president will cancel Ramon’s show?”

“I couldn’t care less whether it’s canceled or not,” he said. “That was Jean Wright’s particular obsession.”

“Great,” I said. “Then we have no quarrel. Here.”

I held the envelope over my left shoulder. After a second, I felt it snatched away.

“Now if you’ll just let me go back to sleep—” I began.

“Oh, do shut up,” he said, jabbing the gun in my back. “And drop the cell phone.”

I complied.

“There’s no need to—”

“Shut up!” He jabbed me again. “You’re annoying me, and you’re going to make me late for my plane.”

“Plane?” I echoed.

“Yes, I’m leaving,” he said. “And no, I’m not going to tell you where I’m going. Let’s just say there’s no extradition and my money will be waiting there to meet me.”

A sudden thought hit me.

“Your money?” I echoed. “Strictly speaking, aren’t we talking about the college’s money?”

“Mine now,” he said. “And it’s all Jean Wright’s fault.”

“It was her idea to embezzle from the college?”

“No!” His voice was scornful. “She has enough family money to have no financial worries, and she’s not interested in anything except her stupid little department. But if she hadn’t been blackmailing me to help her with all her dirty tricks, I wouldn’t have needed the money. I could have just stayed here and built up my resumé until I finally got a well-paid administrative job at an important college. But then she came along. And I knew sooner or later she’d spill the beans.”

“That you’d cheated your way into your position, taking scholarships and awards that were intended for deserving Latino students.”

“I was deserving, too,” he said. “I was tired of seeing people whose grades weren’t any better than mine getting all the breaks just because they belonged to some minority, while I had to work and take out thousands of dollars of loans to get what was being handed to them.”

I was tempted to echo Ramon and point out that he didn’t
know what those other students had gone through to get those grades and what kind of prejudice they’d experienced. But I got a feeling that starting a debate over affirmative action wasn’t in my best interest at the moment. Not with my opponent holding a gun at my back.

Suddenly I realized that my legs and feet were wet. Had I peed myself out of fright? Not my normal reaction to danger. I usually coped well as long as a crisis lasted, and then got the shakes afterward. But who knew what the hormones were doing to my normal reactions.

Wait—the hormones . . .

“Oh my God!” Blanco exclaimed. “You just peed on my foot!”

“No, I didn’t,” I snapped. “My water just broke!”

“Your what?” He stepped away from me, and I’d have breathed a sigh of relief, but when I turned around, the gun was still pointed at me.

“My water,” I said. “Amniotic fluid. What the babies are floating in.”

“Yuck!” His tone was a curious mixture of disgust and puzzlement, as if he were trying to figure out if this was less gross than being peed on, or more. For that matter, I wasn’t sure myself whether my water had broken or whether the stress had made my bladder give way.

“Wait!” he said. “Does this mean—?”

“That I’m going into labor?” I said. “Probably. I have no idea how soon, though. Could be anytime, though since—
aaaaahhhhh!
”

I faked a contraction, clutching the twins and doubling over as if in pain. I wasn’t sure how long a first contraction was supposed to last. Probably best if I make it relatively short, though long enough to rattle him. I relaxed my tensed body and glanced back at Blanco.

He was still pointing the gun at me and looked annoyed, not rattled.

“Stop that,” he said. “We don’t have time for that now.”

“I can’t very well stop it,” I said. “It’s labor. It happens when it happens, and you can’t—AAAAHHHH!”

This time the contraction was all too real, as if my body wanted to say, “You think that was what labor’s like? You have no idea. Watch this!” I vaguely remembered that there was something I was supposed to be doing to get me through this. But what?

Patterned breathing! That was it! If only I could remember how it went. I’d thought the father’s role as a Lamaze coach was designed to make him feel like an integral part of the birth process rather than the anxious, useless bystander he’d have been a few decades ago. Now I realized how critical it was going to be to have Michael beside me, shouting instructions about whatever the hell it was I was supposed to do to get through this horrible pain.

“I said stop that!”

It had to be several centuries later, and for all I knew, Blanco had been uselessly nagging at me to stop the whole time.

As the pain finally eased, I heard a burst of laughter in the distance. From the rehearsal in the barn. They had to be pretty
loud for us to hear them all the way in here. No way they’d have heard me over that, especially since everyone thought I was upstairs in bed. I was on my own.

“Get up!” Blanco snapped.

I found myself staring up at him from the floor, where I had crouched to ride out the pain. The gun was still pointed at me. I stood up, more than a little shaky. The gun lifted, but only to the level of my belly.

A wave of rage surged through me and I suddenly knew the answer to one of those philosophical questions the students were so fond of debating. Was I capable of killing another human being? Yes, in a heartbeat. At least this particular excuse for a human being. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt that way if he’d kept that gun aimed at my head. But there it was, pointing at my twins, and if the sheer force of my anger had any power to touch him, he’d already be lying in small bloody pieces on the ground.

Just wishing him dead wasn’t going to work, though. I’d have to figure out a way to make it happen.

“Move!” he said.

“Move where?”

“None of your business. You’ll find out when you drive me there.”

Like hell was I driving him anywhere. I looked around for a weapon. Nothing but the chair farm and the forest of coatracks and coat trees, all of them draped with wraps. Could I throw a coat over him and smother him to death? Or at least immobilize him long enough to get my hands around his throat?

“My coat’s upstairs,” I said. “I should—”

“Just borrow someone’s,” he said.

“If I can find one to fit me,” I said, grumbling. I pretended to consider and discard a couple of coats on one of the racks. “Maybe Rose Noire’s cape.”

I moved on to a large, ornate Victorian coat tree, as if expecting to find the cape there. As my hand touched the sturdy oak upright portion of the tree, I faked another contraction. I figured I knew what the real thing was like now and could do a better job of faking. I grabbed the coat tree as if for support, and as I pretended to hunch over in agony, I turned so I was facing Blanco. I could see through my not-quite-closed eyes that he was flinching a bit. Maybe he was reconsidering the wisdom of taking a hostage who was about to turn into three hostages.

Another wave of laughter from the barn. His eyes flicked toward it, distracted for just a second.

I grabbed the coat tree by the shaft, heaved its base into the air, and lunged at Blanco, holding it under one arm like a lance.

“Take that!” I shouted, as it slammed into his solar plexus.

He doubled over and fell back, landing so hard in one of Michael’s exiled office chairs that it skidded across the polished floor and hit the wall with a thud. No use trying to run away, as slow as I was, so I charged after him, dropping the coat tree on the way.

He tried to stand up and failed, of course. No one had yet succeeded in escaping the comfy chairs without a strong push
with both arms, and he was still holding the gun in one hand and his precious envelope in the other.

By the time he fell back in surprise, I had grabbed his gun arm and was twisting it, as hard as I could, trying to take the gun away. I slipped, landing hard on his lap, knocking the breath out of him.

“No!” he wheezed. He began pulling the trigger over and over, but I had a good grip on his arm, and the shots fired harmlessly away from us.

Well, not quite harmlessly. A couple of the students’ coats would probably have holes in them, and one bullet knocked down a big chunk of the plaster we’d recently paid good money for the Shiffleys to repair and paint.

As soon as I heard the gun click empty, I heaved myself up again.

Blanco was still struggling to rise, and having trouble because he was still holding the gun. If he dropped it and used both arms, or worse, reloaded, I could be in trouble. Surely someone would have heard the shots by now.

I fumbled in my pocket. Aha! My flashlight. I grabbed his hand with one of mine and beat on it with the flashlight until his fingers opened and the gun fell out.

I snagged the gun and stood up, holding it in my right hand and the flashlight in my left. I began backing away, trying to decide if I should run for it. Probably better to find a way to keep him in the chair, since in my current condition I’d have trouble outrunning an elderly snail.

“Meg? Are you all right?”

Help was on the way. Deputy Sammy. I could hear his footsteps running up the front walk.

I pointed the gun at Blanco.

“That’s stupid,” he said, still a little breathless. “I emptied it while you were attacking me.”

“Are you sure?” I said.

I pulled the trigger.

He flinched as the gun clicked uselessly.

“Ah, well,” I said.

Just then the front door burst open, and Sammy strode in, holding his gun at the ready.

“Stand back, Meg,” he said. “I’ve got this covered.”

I dropped the now-useless weapon and put a well-stocked coatrack between me and the comfy chair Blanco was still trying to get out of.

“Are you Dr. Enrique Blanco?” Sammy asked.

“Yes,” Blanco wheezed. “How dare you point that gun at me?”

“Are you the owner of a dark blue Escalade?” Sammy asked, and he rattled off a license number and a VIN number.

Blanco blinked in surprise. Clearly this wasn’t what he was expecting to hear.

“Yes,” he said.

It wasn’t what I was expecting to hear either.

“Arrest him, Sammy,” I said. “He’s the one who killed Dr. Wright, and he tried to kidnap me.”

“And ran over my puppy with his horrible SUV,” Sammy
said. “Horace is out there taking forensic samples. You’ll do time for this, you jerk!”

I heard voices and footsteps coming from the kitchen.

“Meg! Are you all right?” Michael.

“Ms. Langslow?” The chief.

“I’m fine,” I called. “And Sammy has your murderer.”