Stork Raving Mad: A Meg Langslow Mystery (A Meg Lanslow Mystery)

Chapter 1
     
    “Meg? Are you asleep?”
    I kept my eyes closed while I pondered my answer. If I said “Yes,” would my husband, Michael, understand that I was only expressing how much my sleep-deprived body craved a few minutes of oblivion?
    No, I’d probably just sound cranky. I felt cranky. Most women occasionally do when they’re eight-and-a-half months pregnant, especially with twins. Any woman who says otherwise has obviously never been pregnant.
    “Meg?”
    “I’m thinking about it.” I opened one eye and saw Michael’s tall, lean frame silhouetted in the bedroom doorway. He was holding a small brown paper bag in one hand. “If that bag contains chocolate, then I’m definitely not asleep.”
    “Chocolate chip cookies from Geraldine’s,” Michael said, shaking the bag enticingly.
    “Okay, I’m awake,” I said. “It’s not as if Heckle and Jeckle were going to let me get any sleep anyway.”
    I began the laborious process of hauling myself upright. Michael cleared some junk off the little folding table by my side of the bed, produced a plate from somewhere, poured half adozen enormous soft chocolate chip cookies onto it, and placed a large glass of cold milk beside it. Then he pulled the curtains open, revealing that it was still fairly early in the morning, and a dreary gray winter morning at that.
    “At times like this, I’m particularly glad I married you,” I said, reaching for a cookie. “So what’s the reason for this bribe?”
    “There has to be a reason?” He snagged a cookie for himself and pulled a chair up to the other side of the table.
    “As busy as you usually are in December grading exams and reading term papers and all that other end-of-semester stuff faculty have to do at the college, you still went all the way to Geraldine’s for cookies?”
    “Okay, there’s a reason.” He paused, then frowned as if puzzled. I took a big bite of cookie and washed it down with a swig of milk, to brace myself. Michael was rarely at a loss for words, so whatever he wanted to say must be momentous.
    “Is it okay if we have another houseguest?” he finally asked. He sounded so anxious that I looked up in surprise.
    “Is that all?” I said through a mouthful of cookie. His face relaxed into something more like its usual calm good humor. “Michael, I haven’t the slightest idea how many houseguests we have already. There’s Rob—”
    “Your brother’s not exactly a houseguest,” Michael put in. “After two years, I think he qualifies as a resident.”
    “And Cousin Rose Noire—”
    “Also more like a resident, unless you’ve changed your mind about accepting her offer to stay on and help us through that difficult adjustment to having the twins around.”
    “Right now, I have no objection if she stays on long enough to help us through the difficult adjustment to sending them off to college.” I reached for a second cookie. “But there’s still my grandfather, and of course all those displaced drama department students filling up the spare rooms and camping out in the living room. How many of them do we have, anyway?”
    He frowned again.
    “Maybe a dozen?” he said. “Or a dozen and a half?”
    “Seems like more,” I said. “There are at least a dozen sleeping in the living room.”
    “Two dozen, then,” he said. Still probably a conservative estimate. “More or less. And before you ask, I have no idea how much longer they’ll be here. Last time I heard, some critical piece of equipment down at the college heating plant was still in a million pieces on the floor, and the dean of facilities was running around with a harried look on his face and a bottle of Tums in his pocket.”
    I heard a series of thuds and thumps in the hallway. A month ago I’d have gone running to see what was happening, or at least sent Michael to check. Our weeks of living with students underfoot had made us blasé about such noises.
    “You’d think a big place like Caerphilly College could figure out how to get a boiler repaired,” I said. “It’s been—what, three weeks now?”
    “Three weeks tomorrow.” Michael took another cookie. “Not that I’m counting or anything. Meanwhile, the whole campus is still without heat. And from the temperatures the weatherman is predicting next week, you’d think we lived in Antarctica instead of Virginia.”
    “Which means the students stay for the foreseeable future,” I said. “And since the Caerphilly Inn is also full to