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

finishing my paper, and she smirked and said, ‘You pulled an all-nighter for nothing, then—it’s not due till next week.’ So I told her I knew that, but that I was about to be very busy with rehearsals for
Hamlet
, and I wanted to get it done before that happened. You’d think she’d be glad someone was being responsible.”
    “She wasn’t?”
    “No,” the girl said. She had gone back to hand-wringing. “She just stood there holding my paper with her thumb and forefinger, like she thought it might have cooties or something. And she didn’t say anything—not ‘Thank you’ or ‘Good morning’ or even ‘Go away and leave me alone.’ It was kind of awkward. So I offered her a chocolate macaroon—I’d stopped by Geraldine’s on the way to get some for my breakfast—and she acted as if I’d tried to hand her a chocolate-covered worm. She snapped, ‘No!’ and reared back like she was going to lectureme. I wasn’t sure what I’d done wrong, so I just said ‘Sorry!’ and ran away as fast as I could. I still don’t know what I did to upset her. You’d think I’d tried to poison her or something.”
    “Actually, you did try to poison her,” Kathy said. “Though she should have known it was quite unintentional. She was diabetic.”

Chapter 22
     
    Luckily Kathy was so focused on comforting Alice that she didn’t see my jaw drop when she revealed her knowledge of Dr. Wright’s medical history.
    “Diabetic?” Alice said. “Oh no, I had no idea.”
    “Yes,” Kathy said. “And much as I adore Geraldine’s cookies, they’re definitely not something a diabetic should be eating.”
    “Did a lot of people know this?” I asked Kathy.
    “Hardly anyone,” she said. “I only know because I caught her shooting up in her office one time. I knocked before I went in, but apparently she didn’t hear me so I went on in to leave some papers in her in-basket, and she was sitting there with her skirt hiked up, injecting herself in the thigh.”
    There would be a needle mark on the body, I realized. Had Dad spotted it? Was that why he’d told Horace to be on the lookout for insulin? And would there be some way of telling the fatal needle mark from any Dr. Wright had recently made herself?
    “What did she do when you interrupted her?” I asked.
    “Chewed me out something wicked for trespassing,” Kathy said. “And I did knock. Then she showed me the insulin bottle—as if I’d really think she was doing smack or something—and told me that her medical history was herown business and if this got out in the department, she’d know who was responsible.”
    “So you never told anyone?” I asked.
    “Not till now,” Kathy said. “And I was living in fear that someone else would find out and leak it and she’d blame me. But I guess she’s beyond caring about her privacy now, and beyond retaliating against me for spilling the beans.”
    I nodded. I ached to tell poor Alice that she could relax, that her fingerprints on Tawaret weren’t going to be as incriminating as she thought—but the chief wouldn’t like it if I spilled the real story of Dr. Wright’s death.
    And the chief would probably want to know that one of his suspects was aware of Dr. Wright’s diabetes.
    “Wow,” Alice said. “I didn’t realize. No wonder she snapped at me.”
    “But she didn’t have to be so rude,” I said. “She could have just said ‘No, thank you.’ ”
    “Yeah, but what if she loves cookies and can’t eat them, and there I was, waving them under her nose,” Alice said. “When you come down to it, I was torturing her.”
    “That may be,” I said. “But you can’t just go around losing people’s papers when they annoy you.”
    “Except she did, all the time,” Kathy said. “That’s one of the reasons she hated me so much. She was doing this to students all the time—to drama students, that is. That’s why we started this thing where people who were afraid she’d do it to them would give their papers to her in front of me. So they’d have a witness.”
    “Stupid me,” Alice said. “I should have done that. I thought turning it in a week early would be safe.”
    “You need to tell the chief about all of this,” I said.
    “All right,” Alice said. “If you’ll go with me.”
    “We’ll all go together,” I said. “Right, Kathy?”
    Kathy turned pale. Then she nodded and began burrowing in her cavernous black tote bag.
    “Before we do,” she said. “Here.”
    She