Sunday, December 22
Joy to the world, the Lord is come
Let earth receive her King
Let every heart prepare Him room
And Heaven and nature sing
And Heaven and nature sing
And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing
I liked Christmas carols. I really did. And “Joy to the World” was a particularly nice example of the species. But I didn’t much like being blasted out of sleep by it in the middle of the night. What time was it, anyway?
I rolled over to peer at my alarm clock. Which wasn’t there. Then I remembered that I wasn’t at home. I was at the Inn, in the Madison Cottage. Here, the alarm clock was over on Michael’s side of the bed.
And it read 9:00 A.M.
And still dark?
Well, no. Probably not still dark outside. The Inn had invested in truly top-notch blackout curtains. Not a ray of light made it past them. Odds were if I could see the light outside it would be dim and gray, assuming the storm was still raging. Still, there would be light, if not for the blackout curtains.
But they couldn’t block the joyous strains of song and pipe organ happening outside the bedroom. Apparently in the living room. Why in the world would anyone come caroling at this hour? And how had they managed the organ? And there seemed to be such a lot of them—in fact, it sounded as if the entire New Life Baptist Choir were singing in the room next door.
Of course. The 9:00 A.M. Baptist service by phone. Evidently someone had figured out how to connect a speaker to a satellite phone. Now that I realized what it was, I could detect a certain tinny sound to the music.
I stumbled to the door that led into the living room and peered out. In the living room, the volume was almost deafening. And the room was full of people. Not just family. Along with Mother, Rose Noire, and the boys, I saw at least a dozen assorted ornithologists, all sitting around with cups of coffee and plates of food, basking in the waves of sound. Or maybe bracing against them.
“The music is lovely,” I said, when the song was over, and the only thing coming over the speakers was the sound of people rustling their hymn books and coughing. “But wouldn’t it be almost as lovely a few hundred decibels lower?”
“Sorry!” Josh leaped to one of the speakers perched on the mantel and dialed down the volume. “We forgot you were still sleeping.”
I muttered something that I hoped sounded like “thanks” and stumbled back to bed.
Unfortunately, now I was awake. And likely to stay that way.
And I hadn’t seen Horace in the crowd around the speakers. That probably meant he was already up and working on the case.
“Once more unto the breach,” I muttered as I crawled out of bed again. A shower might make me feel human enough to tackle whatever was waiting for me back at the conference. A shower and a whole lot of caffeine. I’d seen coffee cups being wielded out there in the living room, hadn’t I? And plates of food?
Somewhat heartened, I motivated myself into the shower.
When I emerged from the bedroom, the boys greeted me with cheers—although I quickly realized that the reason for their enthusiasm was that they’d been itching to get back to work on their tunneling project and needed to use the tub in the bathroom for snow disposal. Since the bathroom could only be reached through the bedroom, my sleeping late—by their definition—was holding up progress. The sink in the tiny half bath off the entry wouldn’t even hold a single bucket of snow, they informed me with considerable scorn as they donned their outdoor gear.
“I’ll be keeping an eye on them,” Michael said once they had both disappeared into one of their tunnels. “Might even check out the diggings myself if things stay quiet.”
Just then the New Life Baptist Choir launched into a hearty rendition of “Glory to the Lamb,” which was a relief, since it meant I didn’t have to talk to anyone else before I was awake enough to make sense. I waved at friends, family, and familiar faces, then grabbed a croissant and a cup of coffee before heading over to the main building to see what was happening.
The weather hadn’t improved overnight. Snow was still falling and Sami’s thermometer registered a balmy seven degrees.
I found Horace in the Command Post, surrounded by paper and looking, as Mother would say, like something the cat wouldn’t even bother dragging in.
“Please tell me you didn’t stay up all night,” I said.
“I knocked off about one,” he said. “Couldn’t sleep well, though. This is the first time I’ve ever had this much responsibility for an investigation. And it’s not going well.”
“It’s going as well as you could expect, given the circumstances.” I pointed to the vast collection of paper in front of him. “What’s all this?”
“Audit records from every key card reader in the hotel. I’m trying to analyze them to see if I can get any useful information about whether anyone used the missing key card.” He lifted his coffee cup, found it empty, and set it down with a sigh and looked back at papers in front of him.
I was eager to learn what he’d found, but that could wait.
“You need more coffee,” I said. “And have you had breakfast?”
“I had a croissant.”
“That’s not breakfast, it’s an appetizer,” I said. “Stay here.”
I hurried across the lobby to the Mount Vernon Grill, which was predictably quiet at this time of the morning, given that a continental breakfast was included in Grandfather’s conference and there were only a handful of non-attendees in the hotel. Eduardo, back on duty, greeted me, and I put in an order for a full breakfast to be delivered to Horace at the Command Post.
Then I noticed that Dr. Lindquist was in the restaurant, eating a hearty bacon-and-egg breakfast and trying not to get any grease on the book he was reading. He still puzzled me a bit, so I decided to seize the chance to talk to him. I strolled over to his table.
“Not a fan of the continental breakfast buffet, I see.”
“Nope.” He tore off a piece of toast and began swabbing up the yolk of his over-easy egg with it. “I’m a carnivore. Got to start the day with protein. And I like my breakfast hot.”
“I’m with you,” I said. “Next time Grandfather throws a conference, I’m going to try to talk him into a full breakfast buffet.”
Dr. Lindquist had stuffed the toast chunk in his mouth and was chewing, but he gave me a thumbs-up with the hand that wasn’t busy tearing off another chunk.
“Mind if I ask you something?”
“Fire away,” he said, after swallowing.
“Is it fair to say that Dr. Frogmore’s demise won’t be all that devastating to the campaign for removing the barred owls from the Pacific Northwest?”
Dr. Lindquist burst out laughing and then stopped himself suddenly and looked around as if worried people might be staring. Since the only other people in the restaurant were the depressed-looking Ackleys, who almost certainly hadn’t heard of Frogmore and might not even know about his death yet, he didn’t really need to worry.
“Sorry,” Dr. Lindquist said. “Not funny that the old coot’s dead, obviously. It was the way you put it. Yes, fair to say that Frogmore’s death won’t have any ill effects for our side. Quite the contrary. Without him running around like a jackass, making deliberately inflammatory statements, people might take our side a little more seriously. In fact—” He broke off, stuck another small egg-dipped chunk of toast in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “Hindsight’s twenty-twenty,” he went on, eventually. “And I admit that I’m not a Frogmore fan. Never have been. But—you know that movie they always show this time of year? It’s a Wonderful Life?”
“Love it,” I said. “I watch it with the family every Christmas.”
“That whole thing about seeing what the world would be like if someone had never been in it. Be interesting if you could do that with Frogmore. You ask me, the whole battle over the spotted owl’s habitat back in the eighties would have been a lot less … toxic if he hadn’t been in it. Frogmore had a positive genius for riling people up and getting them to dig in their feet on issues where it should have been possible to reach a compromise. I can think of two, maybe three examples that I witnessed myself in West Coast ornithology and conservation circles, and I’ve done my best over the years to stay away from anything he’s involved in.”
“A genius for riling people up,” I repeated. “Sounds a little like my grandfather.”
“Nope,” he said through a mouthful of home fries. “Blake riles people up, yeah, but he usually does it for a reason. And he’s a realist. Knows when he has the ammo to stand his ground and when he needs to compromise. And he’s a sharp dealmaker when he has to be. Frogmore—if he was trying to cut a deal and got ninety-nine percent of what he wanted, he’d let the deal die over that one percent.”
“So not someone you’d want on your side when you’re fighting for an important issue.”
“Not anyone you’d want anywhere near the battle. Too many people got hurt by friendly fire when Frogmore was around, if you don’t mind my running the military metaphor into the ground. If it really was friendly fire. A lot of people suspected Frogmore’s motives. Me included, frankly.”
“His motives for what?” I asked.
“You have to wonder—could he really have been as misguided and off base as he seemed?” Lindquist had stabbed a couple of small home fries and was gesticulating with the fork. “Back in the nineties some people weren’t sure where his loyalties really lay. He had this positive gift for taking an environmentally sound position and then exaggerating it until it sounded like some kind of wildly impractical scheme dreamed up by a bunch of superannuated brain-damaged hippies. You had to wonder—was he really that crazy? Or was he actually on the other side? In the spotted owl issue, for example, that would mean on the side of the lumber industries.”
He popped the home fries into his mouth and chewed slowly.
“Wait—people actually suspected he was on the lumber industry’s side in the spotted owl issue?”
“Not just on their side—in their pay. He lived pretty comfortably—always had. More comfortably than you’d expect on a professor’s salary. Me, I figure he probably had family money. But there are people who’d swear up and down that the lumber companies bought him off.”
I digested this for a while as I watched Dr. Lindquist methodically apply butter and strawberry jam to another slice of toast.
“So it’s not just his personality that made him … less than popular at gatherings like this.”
“If you’re looking for someone with a motive to knock him off, there’s a whole lot of us,” Lindquist said. “Some of us hold grudges over stuff he’d pulled in the past. Some of us think he was up to no good now. And when you add in all the academic backstabbing he’s done over the years … well, it’s a good thing we bird brains are generally a mild-mannered bunch.”
“That’s a relief,” I said. “I think. So you know this crowd. If you had to bet on who knocked off Frogmore, who would you pick?”
“Interesting question.” He took a bite of toast and chewed it thoughtfully, as if giving due consideration. “A very interesting question. As I said, a whole lot of people with a motive, but now that I think about it, not a lot of them actually here at the conference. Maybe it’s the East Coast location. Or maybe people found out Frogmore was coming and canceled out.”
“We did have rather a lot of cancellations at the last minute,” I said. “I thought it was people freaking because of the weather.”
“That could be. But if it happened right after you sent out the lists of panels and presentations—hell, I kicked the wall a couple of times when I saw Frogmore’s name on it. And then I said ‘what the hell’ and came anyway. But I bet I could name some people who bailed.”
“Under ordinary circumstances, the police would probably be checking on them anyway,” I said. “In case any of them came here in disguise to knock him off. But I think someone would have noticed if someone with a known grudge against Frogmore came skiing in during the storm. So, of the people who are here, who do you like for it?”
“Good question.” He grinned. “If you ask me, given the interviews the police have been doing, you’ve already got the likely candidates pegged. Me, Ben Green, Vera Craine, and that black grad student, Melissa something.”
“McKendrick,” I said.
“Right. And I suppose you have to include Czerny, of course, but I don’t figure that’s very likely unless it happened on the spur of the moment. I can see him losing his temper and lashing out, but in the cold hard light of day, he knows better than to kill the goose laying his golden eggs. He won’t last long at Buckthorn without Frogmore’s protection. And I don’t see Vera doing it, either. Pretty sure she’s into living well as the best revenge. She’s going to miss seeing Frogmore squirm whenever someone rubs his nose in her vastly superior curriculum vitae.”
“And the rest of you?”
“Probably not Melissa,” he said. “She has a pretty low opinion of him, but it’s not like he’s the only entitled over-the-hill white jerk who’s ever tried to hold her back. She made a good impression here—asked some intelligent questions in a couple of panels. She’s on track. And she’s sharp enough to realize that Frogmore accidentally did her the biggest possible favor—I mean, would you have wanted to work with him or with Dr. Blake? Strong women don’t bother Blake, and he’s the closest thing to color-blind I’ve ever seen, which is all the more unusual, given his age. No, Melissa’s in a good situation now, and I don’t see her spoiling it, risking everything she’s earned by murdering an old fart who doesn’t have any power over her anymore.”
“And Dr. Green?”
“Ben doesn’t hate Frogmore.” Lindquist shook his head with vigor and chuckled slightly. “He’s deeply, deeply disappointed in Frogmore. And under the delusion that if he had just kept the communications channels open, got a dialogue going, eventually he could have resolved their differences. And besides, he’s completely opposed to violence of any kind. Wouldn’t hurt a spider.”
Interesting. Most people would have said “wouldn’t hurt a fly.”