The Class Menagerie jj-4 (6 page)

"Your grandfather knows everybody in the State Department, but they don't know
you."

"So? All I need is their stationery," he said with a grin.

Jane laughed. "You'll do fine with what you've got, honey. With your test scores and your grades, any college would be nuts to pass you up."

"Aw, that's Mom Talk."

"That's what I'm for," Jane said. She explained the revised plan for the night. "You better get to bed."

Jane helped him get his papers straightened up, then let Willard the Cowardly Dog out one more time before she went up the steps with Willard panting at her heels and Max and Meow weaving around her feet. The cats loved it when Jane went up to bed, apparently

because it meant the next thing she'd do would be to get up in the morning and feed them, Willard always slept with Todd, but the cats slept in Jane's room so they were on hand when she woke up. "Sorry, guys, but I'm not staying," she told them.

Jane dumped her clothes in the dry-cleaning heap in her closet, and put on jeans and a sweatshirt. Leaving the cats watching her
in
perplexity, she grabbed a few necessities, locked up the house, and went back to the bed and breakfast.

"I've put you in the Gary Grant room," Edgar said when she got out of the car. He'd been waiting for her at the back door. "It's Hector's favorite place. And I've told the others where to find you if they need anything."

Jane went upstairs and made herself comfortable in the room she was assigned. Hector did follow her, but didn't seem ready to settle down for the night any more than the Ewe Lambs did. Jane could hear them down the hall laughing and talking. She got into bed, turned out the lights, and smiled to herself. The house wasn't terribly well soundproofed and she could still hear them a little. Except that the voices were a little bit lower, a bit more restrained, it sounded just like her house did when Katie had friends for a sleepover.

She had to be up early and tried to will herself to fall straight to sleep, but it was impossible. Not because of the voices, but because her mind kept replaying snippets of the evening.

Some parts of it had been fun. Crispy had told some really funny stories about her various moneyed marriages. But between stories on herself, she managed to slip in quite a few uncomfortable ones about the others. "Remember that time you went around with the toilet paper stuck to your shoe all day, Pooky,

and nobody told you?" she said as if it were hilarious. She also managed to remind Kathy of the time she'd planned the giant protest rally and it rained and nobody showed up except the newspaper reporters she'd invited.

Lila was even worse. Where Crispy's taunts and digs were fairly harmless and most were delivered with apparent affectionate memory, Lila's were vaguely ominous. She reminisced at some length about a slumber party, the point of the story seeming to be that Avalon was into drug use then and probably still was. She suggested, without actually saying so, that this might have accounted for the switch in purse contents — that "somebody" expected to find suspicious substances in either Rooky's purse or Avalon's.

Later on Lila made a point of bringing up the gossip about Bern's possible Supreme Court appointment. "Think of the scrutiny, Beth," she said. "Every aspect of your life under a public microscope. We'll all watch the hearings and I bet we learn things about you we never knew."

But Beth wasn't playing. "I doubt it," she said with a bored smile. "I'm not that interesting."

"None of us are," Kathy said with a laugh.

"Oh, I don't know. I'll bet anybody who turned a spotlight on you would learn some fascinating things," Lila said to her.

Kathy blushed and blustered and left the room.

When Lila turned her malevolent attention to Mimi, she failed utterly. "Soong…" she said 'as if talking to herself. "Rather a famous Chinese name for an American to have."

"Isn't it?" Mimi answered. To the questioning looks of the others, she said, "There were three Soong sisters in China. One married Sun Yat-sen, one married

Chiang Kai-shek and the other… I've forgotten what the other one did. No relation to my husband though. It's a very common name."

"I'm surprised that somebody so 'aggressively' American would marry anyone of Chinese descent," Lila went on.

Mimi just laughed and turned to Jane to explain. "Lila, in her subtle way, is referring to the fact that I once wanted to be Doris Day and Sandra Dee all in one. I wish you could have seen me — oh, I forgot! I brought yearbooks."

She had dashed off to get them while Jane wandered into the kitchen where Edgar and Gordon were playing gin rummy at the table. Kathy was there, too, leaning into the gigantic open refrigerator, her oversized derriere sticking out obstructing traffic. "Has anybody killed her yet?" she asked as Jane edged around her.

"Who? Lila? Not yet."

Pooky had followed Jane through the door. "Then I'll volunteer." She squeezed around Jane and Kathy and headed for the back door. "She just got through reminding everybody in the living room that I'm a year older than the rest of you because I was held back that year I had mono and missed so much school!"

"Poor thing. Sick
and
stupid," Kathy muttered into the refrigerator.

Fortunately Pooky didn't hear this. She asked Edgar, "May I go outside? I just want some fresh air."

"Sure," Edgar replied, laying out his cards smugly. "I won't lock up for another hour yet."

"I only want to go out for a few minutes. I always take a walk before going to bed. It helps me sleep," Pooky said, making a hair-tossing gesture which failed because her stiff, thin hair had no "toss" left in it.

Max interrupted Jane's thoughts by walking across her seeking a warm corner to curl into. It took her a second to realize it wasn't her own Max, it was Hector. She sat up and gave him a chin chuck. He settled into the crook of her knees. Jane adjusted to make room for him. If only she could fall asleep like he could. Maybe it had to do with being able to purr…'.

Her last thoughts were of the school yearbook Mimi brought out. Mimi's senior photo was hysterical. She actually had a platinum blond flip hairdo and raccoon makeup designed to disguise her Oriental eyes. Which it didn't. "Pooky did my hair. It took so much bleach her ringers peeled for a week," Mimi said, giggling. "I don't know why my mother didn't just drown me and spare herself the misery of having me around."

Jane fell asleep smiling.

At first she dreamed she heard the light tapping, then gradually awoke to realize it was somebody at her door. She stumbled over and opened it. Beth Vaughn was standing in the hallway wearing a sensible tailored robe. "Jane, I'm awfully sorry to wake you up," she whispered. "But I have a problem. Can you hear it?"

Jane stepped into the hallway. A faint ding-ding-ding was sounding someplace. "What's that?" she asked stupidly.

"I don't know. I think it's a smoke alarm, but there's no smoke and it's not loud enough. I can't find it."

As they padded toward Beth's room, Avalon's door opened. Her red hair was in wild disarray. "What's that bell?" she asked.

"We don't know," Jane replied. "We're trying to find it"

By the time they located the source of the sound, half the Ewe Lambs were up and roaming the hallway. It turned out to be a cheap alarm clock stuck into the glass bowl of the overhead light fixture in Beth's bedroom. Beth, a little taller than the rest, climbed a chair and retrieved it. "Who in the world would have put it there and set it to go off?" she asked.

"Pretty damned inconsiderate trick if you ask me," Kathy groused. "I'm going back to bed."

Nobody was in much of a mood to discuss the alarm clock. "Let's all go back to bed," Jane said, taking the alarm clock from Beth.

Jane found it hard to get back to sleep. She had nearly dropped off when someone sat down on her bed.

She bolted upright, barely containing a scream.'

But it was only Hector. "Geez, Hector, you scared the stuffing out of me," she said, petting him. Then she realized that the last time she'd seen him he was in the hallway getting underfoot. She was sure she'd shut him out of her room when she went back to bed, but here he was. Maybe he'd pushed the door open. But no, she could see in the dim, reflected glow i of the moon that her door was tightly closed.
How elid he get in here?

It was a mild night and the window was open, but she was on the second floor. Curious, she got up and looked out. Yes, there were sturdy vines outside. Hector could have climbed them. But that presupposed he was starting from outdoors and she knew he had been indoors. Still, he might have some other means of leaving the house. It was a big, old place and might well have some other cat-sized escape routes. Still, it was strange and a little alarming.

And in that frame of mind, she settled back into

bed and could hear a thousand suspicious sounds. The creaking in the hallway sounded like a furtive tread on the old stairs, the clattering of leaves outside the window being stirred by a breeze sounded like little creatures scrabbling around. Little red-eyed creatures, she thought and shuddered. She had just managed to clear this scary thought from her mind when she heard another ding-ding-ding. By the time she got to her door this time, Mimi was standing outside it, hand raised to knock. Mimi still looked cool and serene and her hair wasn't even mussed, but she was cranky. "I'm sorry," she said curtly. "Would you help me find the damned thing before it wakes everybody again?"

This time the clock was in Mimi's bathroom cabinet.

And the one that went off at four o'clock was between the mattresses in Kathy's room.

The next alarm clock that went off was Jane's own that she'd brought from home. She fumbled for it, turned it off, then looked blearily around the room, for the moment not remembering where she was. She got dressed quietly and quickly, and crept downstairs to let herself out. It was just seven when she got home.

When she got back to the bed and breakfast an hour and a half later, the back door to the kitchen stood open. "Edgar? I'm sorry I'm late. Katie lost her lunch ticket and missed her car pool—"

Edgar was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper. "No hurry. We had a long night here as you well know."

Jane poured herself a cup of his miracle coffee and sat down. "So you heard the commotion."

"I stayed out of it, but couldn't help but hear the noise and eavesdrop."

"Edgar, I don't get it. I just don't have the mind-set for practical jokes. I can't think them up. I don't think they're funny. At least these seem harmless. Nobody can get hurt when an alarm goes off. That's not like exploding cigars or something. So everybody's sleeping in?"

"Not everybody. Shelley's in the living room. She got here about ten minutes ago. And somebody else went through here and had coffee while I was back upstairs. Left a coffee cup in the sink."

Gordon stumbled into the room in jeans and a sweatshirt, his hair rumpled and sheet-creases on his cheek. "My God, what was that? An old-fashioned slumber party? Or did I imagine noises all night?"

Edgar explained. "Crazy," Gordon mumbled, pouring himself a gigantic mug of coffee.

"You're not working today?" Jane asked him when he finally raised his face from the mug.

"Not at the salt mines. I told Edgar I'd hang around in case he needed me."

"The only assistance I need now is getting breakfast into these women. It would help if they got up. Jane, you want to see if you can stir them?"

Jane obediently went up the front stairs. Before she even reached the second floor, she could hear somebody tapping on a door and saying something. But there wasn't anybody in the hallway. She went along and discovered that the sound was coming from the apricot room, which was assigned to Avalon.

"Avalon?" she said to the closed door.

"Thank God! Get me out of here. The doorknob came off in my hand."

Jane looked down and sure enough, there was just a hole where the post of the old-fashioned doorknob should have been. Someone had removed the outer

knob so that the inner knob simply pulled out when Avalon.tried to open the door. Jane fetched Edgar, who instructed her to reinsert the post so he could turn it with pliers from the outside. But by the time this was completed, they discovered that Pooky's and Beth's doors had also been rigged and they had to be rescued.

It was a cranky flock of Ewe Lambs that finally started drifting down to the aroma of coffee and, bacon. "This is a nightmare, Jane," Shelley said from where she hunched in the living room pretending to watch the morning news. "Edgar told me about last night and the clocks. I'm sorry you were stuck with that."

"It's okay. It wasn't your fault. Did Paul call?"

"He did. And was reassured, but I couldn't get back to sleep. And there are still days of this ahead before it's over!"

"Yes, but look at it this way: one whole day of it is behind you. And I found all the missing doorknobs in the flour canister. So that problem's taken care of."

"I hate chirpy people," Shelley said.

"Oh? I thought you'd prefer chirping to baa-ing," Jane said, making a dreadful sheep noise. She went back to the kitchen smiling. This was a rare treat, seeing Shelley, at her wit's end. Shelley never lost control of herself or a situation and here she was more tired and rattled than Jane herself.

Jane helped Edgar fix English muffins that were toasted with a rich cheddar cheese topping, shirred eggs with mushrooms and minced basil from a pot on the windowsill, and an arrangement of kiwi and strawberry slices. At least, she tried to help him. Mainly she got in his way, oohing and aahing and taking mental note of the ingredients.

By the time the breakfast was ready, Shelley had gotten a grip on herself. "Ladies, we need to get breakfast over and begin our meeting," she was saying as she shooed them toward the dining room. "We really have a lot of business to work out if we're going to contribute to the fund-raising effort."

Jane took in the tray of fruit and said, "Who's missing?"

They all glanced around at each other. "Where's Lila?" Beth asked. "She's not locked in her room, too, is she?"