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

Watson jutted out into the open doorway rather obviously. I looked behind me and saw a mountain of dirty laundry. Was that all ours? Surely we weren’t letting the students use the machines again. I thought we’d laid down the law about them going to the Laundromat in town after the first week, when we’d had major problems with our septic system.
    No time to worry about that now. I eased myself back onto the laundry and, for good measure, grabbed an empty plasticlaundry basket, turned it upside down, and pulled it on top of my head. Better than hiding behind the door. Not only was I sitting down, but I could peek out through the ventilation holes in the laundry basket and see at least some of what was happening in the basement.
    The hollow sound of steps on the wooden stairs gave way to a few dull steps on the concrete of the basement floor. Then Bronwyn appeared. Luckily she decided to stop while she was still within my limited field of vision. Danny joined her.
    “What did you want to ask me, Danny?” Bronwyn said. She probably was a wonderful actress. It was the voice—warm, intimate, caressing. The little tremor when she said his name was priceless. And from the poleaxed look on his face, he was falling for it, completely.
    “I saw something,” Danny said. “At least I thought I did.”
    “What?” Bronwyn said in an almost inaudible whisper.
    “It looked like—but it couldn’t be . . .”
    His voice faded away. He shook his head slightly but didn’t take his eyes from hers.
    “You know you can tell me, Danny,” Bronwyn cooed. “What did you see?”
    “It looked like you were putting something in Dr. Wright’s tea.” It wasn’t an accusation—more a plea for her to tell him it wasn’t so.
    “Only some of Ramon’s sleeping medicine,” Bronwyn said. “Just a couple of pills. We—I didn’t want to hurt her. Just to knock her out for a while until we could figure out how to handle the problem.”
    I digested this for a while and assumed Danny was doing the same. It was a masterful little bit of manipulation—the change from “we” to “I” suggesting, of course, that she was taking the blame for something that was ultimately Ramon’s idea.
    Actually, from the look of it, Danny wasn’t digesting it. Bron was running her fingers across his chest, tracing the letters on his T-shirt, and from the look on his face, Danny wasn’t thinking much.
    So apparently Bronwyn had also put something in Dr. Wright’s tea. Before or after she saw Ramon drugging it? And why did Bronwyn lie to Ramon, telling him that Danny had seen him put something in the tea? Was she just trying to pry an admission out of Ramon? Then why not say that she’d seen him? Why bring Danny into it? Or had Danny seen both of them?
    I decided I could learn to dislike Bronwyn.
    “You should tell the police,” Danny said. His voice sounded a little hoarse.
    “They’d get the wrong idea,” Bronwyn said.
    “You don’t know what those sleeping pills did to her.”
    I had to hand it to Danny. He was clearly trying. And also clearly so besotted with Bronwyn that there was no danger he’d spill the beans.
    “I’m going to tell Chief Burke, but I need to do it myself,” she said. “At the right time. You know how people would react if they knew I’d done that. I know now it was a stupid thing to do. So maybe after I’ve had a chance to talk to the chief, I can persuade him to keep it private. Just give me a chance to do that.”
    “Okay,” Danny said. “And he’ll understand when you tellhim about how evil she was, won’t he? How many lives she was ruining?”
    “Of course he will,” Bronwyn said. “Now I’ve got to go—I’m late for the rehearsal.”
    She turned and disappeared from my view. Footsteps began ascending the stairs. Danny’s eyes followed her, and the naked yearning on his face was painful to see.
    “Rehearsal?” he said, after a few moments. “I thought the library was a crime scene.”
    “We’re using the barn,” Bronwyn called down. “Come on. You can watch.”
    “Okay.” From the expression of rapture on his face, you’d have thought she’d just conferred an enormous honor on him. He bounded away and his footsteps, like hers, faded into the distance.
    I remained ensconced in the laundry, brain running furiously, like a hamster in a wheel.
    Danny had seen Bronwyn putting something in Dr. Wright’s tea. Something that Bronwyn said was Ramon’s sleeping medicine.
    And Ramon