I decided to go back for … thirds? Fourths? I’d lost count. On my way to the buffet, I stopped by Grandfather’s table to speak to Dr. Lindquist, who was now happily eating his way through a plate piled high with various tentacled delights from the Japanese section.
“Glad you were able to make it,” I said.
“Yeah, I could be eating bread and water in solitary,” he said.
“Now, now,” I said. “The meals at the Caerphilly jail are catered by Muriel’s Diner, and the only complaint we’ve ever heard is that the portions are so large it gives the prisoners indigestion.”
“Okay, that almost makes me sorry I didn’t get to eat there,” he said. “Still, I guess I owe a debt of thanks to this Ackley guy.”
“For what?” I asked. “Terrorizing the whole conference and threatening to shoot Grandfather?”
“Well, no.” He grimaced. “That must have been pretty awful, no question. But you have to admit, things were looking pretty grim for me until he had his meltdown. Incriminating evidence found in my room, my own confession about borrowing the housekeeper’s key card, plus your police chief found out about the time Frogmore claimed I’d tried to strangle him at a conference last year.”
“Tried to strangle him?”
“Actually, I only threatened, but for some reason Frogmore managed to convince people I’d actually tried it. So if Ackley had decided that having killed Frogmore he could declare victory and go home, I’d still be up the creek.”
He had a point.
“I’m surprised no one recognized Ackley,” I said. “If he was a major figure on the lumber industry side of the whole spotted owl thing.”
“You mean why didn’t I recognize him, right?” He chuckled at the idea. “Frankly, I never heard of him, so maybe he wasn’t all that major a figure. Or maybe he was, but before I got involved. The whole controversy started thirty or thirty-five years ago, remember. I may look like an old fogey, but the spotted owl thing, as you call it, was already well underway by the time I hit grad school. And I’ve done some reading about how it all started, but the name Ackley never showed up.”
“Or Ackwood Lumber?”
“Nope.” He shook his head. “Although frankly, even if he was still involved in some way—most of us on the conservation side of the issue don’t meet the high muckety-mucks of the timber industry. Just their lawyers. And another thing—it’s a Pacific Northwest battle, remember. Only four of us here are from that part of the world—Frogmore, Czerny, Green, and me. And Green and Czerny are younger than I am.”
“Which leaves Frogmore”
“Yeah. Frogmore.” He popped another small tentacle in his mouth, chewed thoughtfully, and swallowed before answering. “Okay, say Ackley was active on the lumber side twenty-five or thirty years ago—it only makes sense that Frogmore would have heard of him. Might even recognize him. But if he did, why didn’t he out him to the rest of us? I mean, why wouldn’t he?”
“No reason,” I said. “Unless he and Frogmore were really on the same side.”
“Bingo!” I tried not to look at the odd bit of seafood he waved to underscore his point. “And it would be very interesting to find out exactly why Ackley was here in the first place. No offense, because I really like Caerphilly—at least what I got to see of it before the snowstorm. I wouldn’t mind having more of a chance to look around—and I’d definitely come back to the Inn in a heartbeat. But it’s not all that well-known a tourist destination.”
“Please don’t let Mayor Shiffley hear you say that,” I said.
“How about not nearly as well-known as it deserves to be?” he said, with a laugh. “So you’ve got to admit, it’d be a pretty odd coincidence if Ackley just happened to show up here the same weekend as the Owl Fest.”
“You think he came to kill Frogmore?”
“Could be. Or maybe he came to meet with Frogmore, got mad at him, and knocked him off.”
“And instead of just letting an innocent bystander take the fall, he stages a highly dramatic hostage situation?”
“He probably lost it.” Lindquist shrugged. “He was unbalanced to start with. We may never know. Just as we may never know for sure whether Frogmore was in bed with the lumber industry.”
“Don’t despair,” I said. “There’s going to be a murder trial, remember? Which means that both the defense and the prosecution will be digging into the connection between Frogmore and Ackley.”
“You think they’ll find anything?”
“Ackley may have lost his lumber company, but I get the impression he’s still got enough money to hire a good defense attorney,” I said. “And Caerphilly may be a sleepy little town, but Chief Burke spent over a decade as a homicide detective with the Baltimore PD. If there’s dirt, one side or the other will find it.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.” He grabbed his wineglass. “Here’s to the chief finding all the dirt!”
I clinked my glass with his, and left him to wallow in his tentacle feast.
I headed for the buffet again. Heavenly—they’d just brought out another batch of brisket. I took a little of that—okay, a decent portion—and added a Christmas tamale and a slice of country ham.
“Whose idea was this, anyway?” Grandfather appeared beside me, holding a half-filled plate. “Much as I’d like to claim credit for it, I know I didn’t think this up.”
“Ekaterina,” I said.
“Smart lady.” He speared a slice of the ham. “She’s saving a couple of possible weekends for Owl Fest 2020. Weekends that are earlier in the year and don’t conflict with anything she can think of. Talk to her, see which one you think works best, then book it and tell me what I should put on my calendar.”
“I can do that,” I said. “What—”
“Aha! That’s good to see.” He pointed back at his table where Dr. Craine and Melissa McKendrick were absorbed in a conversation. “Vera Craine would make an outstanding external advisor for Melissa’s doctoral committee. And I think she’ll agree to do it if she sees what a sharp cookie Melissa is.”
He beamed at seeing the progress his academic matchmaking was having.
“And now I should go let Ben Green tell me about his new project. He’s suggesting that we drive the barred owls out of the spotted owls’ territory by setting up thousands of loudspeakers out in the woods to broadcast barred owl cries of pain and distress.”
“Thereby convincing the barred owls that bad things will happen to them if they stay?” I asked. “Are they that gullible?”
“More important, are barred owl distress cries that different from spotted owl distress cries?” he said. “Because it’s no use chasing out the barred owls if we freak out the spotted owls at the same time. Needs testing.”
Grandfather ambled back to his table and soon he and Dr. Green were as deeply engrossed in conversation as Melissa and Dr. Craine.
Michael and the boys greeted me with delight when I returned to our table.
“So, are we having Christmas here or at home?” Josh asked.
“We don’t know yet,” I said. “It depends on when the snowplows get here.”
“Well, we’re ready for them,” Jamie said. “We’ve shoveled the whole parking lot.”
“And plowed the driveway,” Josh added.
“With a little bit of help from the Inn staff,” Michael said with a chuckle.
“Well, yeah, they did a lot,” Jamie said. “Especially the plowing.”
“Since some people think we’re not old enough to drive a tractor.” Josh sounded scornful of the entire idea.
“So once the plows come by, we go home?” Jamie asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “We don’t know how much longer Great will need our help here.”
“And there’s also the fact that we don’t know how the road leading out to our house is,” Michael added. “Mr. Beau and Mr. Osgood could still have a lot of plowing to do.”
“We should get a snowmobile,” Josh pronounced. “It would be very useful at times like these.”
“Perhaps we should discuss it with Santa,” Jamie said, with a look of utter innocence on his face.
We had all reached that phase of a meal that hobbits would call filling up the corners. Many of the conference attendees would have been content to loll around the ballroom filling up corners all night, but Mother had other ideas.
“It’s time for the group caroling!” she called. “Everybody who’s coming to the group caroling, follow me to the lobby.”
A few Grinch-like souls might have stayed behind, but most of the crew obediently trooped out to the lobby, where Rose Noire handed around photocopied wads of carol lyrics and Sami turned down the canned carols.
I spotted Grandfather slipping out of the lobby toward the cottages.
“You feeling okay?” I asked. It had been a long day.
“I’m fine, and before you ask, there’s nothing wrong with my Christmas spirit. Got something I want to do. Get it off my mind before I start enjoying the carols. I’ll be back.”
He looked okay, so I shoved any worry to the back of my mind and went back to the lobby.
Mother, as self-appointed musical director, was in her element. We began with “Good King Wenceslas,” and continued with “Jingle Bells,” and “Deck the Halls.” We were just about to start on “The Twelve Days of Christmas” when Sami rushed to the front door and peered out.
“The snowplows are coming! The snowplows are coming!” he shouted.
A stampede followed, as nearly everyone in the lobby tried to rush outside to get a glimpse.
And it was Beau Shiffley’s snowplow, which caused a lot of merriment for the out-of-towners who hadn’t seen it before. He normally kept the antlers from a ten-point buck mounted on the front of his plow, but he upped the ante for the holiday season. Attached below the antlers was a life-size plush reindeer head with a blinking red nose, and a dozen or so strings of twinkling multicolored lights festooned the sides of the plow.
We all swarmed out into the parking lot, cheering and waving. Beau stepped out of the cab and acknowledged the cheers by raising both fists and shaking them, the way a winning boxer might in the ring.
Ekaterina strode out with a covered cup of coffee, and a thermos containing more for later, and Beau thanked her and took a few sips while we serenaded him with a full-throated rendition of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”
“I guess he didn’t have to do much here,” Jamie said with considerable pride as he watched Beau’s snowplow disappear down the drive again. “Just a little cleaning up around the edges.”
“Let’s go back in,” Josh said. “It’s freezing out here.”
Back in the lobby, Ekaterina had set up a complimentary coffee, tea, and hot chocolate service right beside the front desk, and everyone stopped for a short hot beverage break before starting the singing again.
I looked around and realized that Grandfather hadn’t reappeared. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing. He’d had a long day, and he might have just gone to bed. Still. He was no spring chicken.
“Next, let’s do ‘We Three Kings.’ Page four of your carol sheet,” Mother announced.
“I’m going to look in on Grandfather,” I whispered to Michael while everyone was still shuffling their sheets. “Back in a little bit.”
At the door that led out into the courtyard, I waited to hear the first few bars of the carol before slipping outside.
Where it was still bitter cold, but at least there was nothing falling from the sky. I hoped we’d eventually find out how much snow the storm had actually deposited on Caerphilly. No way to tell here in the courtyard, where the shoveled snow had been piled as high as six or seven feet on either side of the paths.
I knocked softly at the Jefferson Cottage door and then used my master key to slip inside. As I walked down the small hallway, the first thing I saw of the living room was Percival’s cage. Apparently, after his star turn at the conference, they’d brought him back here rather than return him to the dubious safety of the storage room. An excess of caution, if you asked me—Mr. Ackley was now locked up, and they’d confiscated the key card he’d stolen from me. And there was no sign Percival had ever been one of his targets. But as long as it was Grandfather who had to live with him, I wasn’t going to argue.
Grandfather and the chief. Well, only for one night.
They’d had to move the sofas a bit to fit in the cage, and it almost completely blocked my view of the sliding glass doors leading out to the terrace. Or, under the present circumstances, out into the Jefferson Cottage branch of the boys’ tunnel and cave system. The cages containing the mice and crickets destined to be the owl’s future meals sat on the floor between his cage and the sliding glass doors. Were they going to be warm enough there? I made a mental note to check. After I figured out what was up with Grandfather.
Percival opened an eye when he heard me and almost immediately closed it again, no doubt because he recognized me as an unlikely source of mice.
Grandfather was sitting on one of the sofas with a sheaf of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven papers in his hands. His reading glasses were perched on his nose. When he heard me he looked over them at me, then put his papers down and took a sip from the glass of bourbon on the coffee table.
“Feeling antisocial?” I sat down on the other couch.
“I had some stuff I needed to read,” he said. “Remember what I told Ned Czerny earlier today? When I was trying to console him?”
“You mean when you told him to grow a backbone and find a boss who wasn’t as much of a jackass as Frogmore? At least that’s what Dad told me he’d heard. Your notion of how to console people is so refreshingly different from most people’s.”
“Maybe your father missed that I also told him that if he needed some ideas about what to do with himself I’d be happy to talk to him about it.”
“You’re thinking you might help him—as you did for Dr. Craine when she was down?”
“That was different. Vera’s brilliant. You could tell even back then that she had a bright future ahead of her if she could just get past the damage Frogmore had done. Czerny’s no Vera Craine. Not exactly a first-class brain. I’ve never felt that a high-powered research-oriented institution like Buckthorn was a good fit for him anyway.”
“What would be a good fit, then?” I asked. “Teaching high school biology?”
“Heavens, no.” Grandfather looked amused. “The students would eat him alive. But surely there’s someplace he’d fit in. I suggested he and I talk later, to see if we could figure out what he was interested in and suited for. I was figuring we’d do a phone call sometime in the next week or so. I was most definitely not expecting to have him scurry back carrying a copy of his curriculum vitae plus every single academic paper he’s ever had published.”
“You’re thinking it was a little pushy?” I asked.
“Well, I did offer to help, but it’s just kind of weird, if you ask me. I can’t think of many reasons why someone would be carrying all that with him to a conference.”
“I can only think of one—that he was already planning to do a little job hunting.” Grandfather nodded as if he agreed with me. “Of course you realize that he didn’t necessarily bring hard copies of all that.” I went on. “He could have brought a flash drive with all the documents, and printed them out in the business center after you offered to read it.”
“True. Still weird even if he had them all with him on a flash drive. And thank God he’s not particularly prolific.” He eyed two stacks of paper on the coffee table. Not a minuscule collection, but still, not impressive as a lifetime achievement, even for a relatively youthful professor like Czerny.
“Won’t that count against him in the academic job market—not being prolific?”
“In some places, yes. And frankly, even before I started reading, I’d decided it made sense to steer him to someplace a good deal less competitive.”
“So that’s why you’re looking a little down—you’ve promised to help someone who isn’t going to be that easy to help?”
“You know why I didn’t just shove Czerny’s CV and his publications in a box to look at when I had more time? Did that once before, about fifteen years ago, and it didn’t go well.”
“Didn’t go well how?”
“Long story.” He leaned back, took off his glasses, and rubbed his temples. He looked tired. I should probably tell him to go to bed and tell me his story tomorrow. But my curiosity was aroused.
“I’ve got nothing planned,” I said aloud. “What happened fifteen years ago that didn’t go well?”
“A grad student came to me. Young woman named Julia Taylor. She was … frustrated. Her doctoral advisor really wasn’t a good fit for the direction she wanted to take her research. To be blunt, his input was not just useless but downright counterproductive because he didn’t know squat about her topic and had no interest in learning and tried to get her to do something that would be useful for his career.”
“So she came to you instead?”
“And unfortunately I didn’t know much more about her topic than her advisor did, but at least I was willing to admit it. And I said I’d see if I could think of anyone who could help. She gave me her draft and a bunch of file folders full of data, and I took it all with me on a long trip. I forget which one. Was it that bat rescue in Australia? Or maybe filming the Return to Galapagos special? Long trip, anyway. Six, eight weeks. When I came back she had disappeared. No one knew where she’d gone. Took me forever to track her down.”
“Define forever.”
“Couple of years.”
“I’m impressed with your perseverance.”
“She impressed me. But it didn’t do any good. She’d given up. I tried to guilt-trip her, telling her the world needs more women scientists, but she gave me an earful. Told me to butt out of her life. That if she didn’t want to deal with the all the nonsense anymore, that was her decision.”
“Did she just say nonsense?” I asked. “Or was it sexist nonsense?”
“Probably sexist nonsense.” He shook his head. “I don’t remember. It’s been fifteen years.”
Fifteen years during which not a lot had changed for the Julia Taylors and Melissa McKendricks of the world.
“Maybe she’d have given up anyway,” he went on. “World’s full of ABDs—that’s—”
“All but dissertations,” I said. “I know. Ph.D. students who complete their course work but never finish their dissertations and so never get their degrees.”
“I felt as if I’d failed her. Didn’t help her at the moment when she really needed it. So when Czerny was moaning about his career being over. I figured, yeah, he probably is feeling pretty devastated right now, losing his mentor and all. I offered to help. I was kind of taken aback when he showed up with this whole stack of stuff, but I told myself ‘Don’t screw it up this time.’ So I brought it all back here, ordered myself a Basil Hayden, and sat down to slog through it. And that’s when things got really weird.”
“Weird how?”
“Because I realized I’d seen it before.”
“The situation with the distraught grad student whose advisor can’t or won’t help? That wouldn’t apply to Czerny. Unless—”
“No, this paper.” He lifted the top paper from the smaller of the two piles. “I think I’ve seen this specific paper before. It’s her paper. Julia Taylor. The grad student who gave up before I got around to helping her.”