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

hurried to take the leftovers out of my hands and help me onto the bed.
    “We’re just having a quick conference on how to handle The Face,” he said. “We figure now’s the time to strike.”
    “Yes,” I said. “From what I can see, Blanco doesn’t really have it in for the drama students. He was just trying to please Dr. Wright. So he might be lying low and staying neutral until he sees which way the wind is blowing.”
    “That’s what we think,” Abe said. “And we need to do as much as possible to see that it’s blowing in our direction.”
    “You might want to use this,” I said. I handed him the wad of papers I’d received from Danny Oh, the thick file folder Kathy had given me, and finally, on top, the paper Josh had given me. Michael and Art came to peek over his shoulders.
    “You see!” Michael said, snatching up the copy of Dr. Wright’s e-mail. “He did get permission.”
    “Think what a lot of bother it would have saved if the young fool had kept that e-mail handy,” Abe said, shaking his head.
    “What’s the rest of this?” Art asked.
    “Some documents Kathy gave me,” I said. “And some stuff from Danny Oh.”
    I leaned back and uttered a sigh of contentment.
    “You’re tired,” Art said. “You want us to leave? We could find someplace else to do this.”
    “There isn’t anyplace else, and I’m fine,” I said. “As long asI’m awake, you’re good company, and when I’m ready to sleep, you could clog dance on the dresser and it wouldn’t bother me. Just poke me if I snore loud enough to drown out your discussion.”
    I picked up my bedside book as if I were planning to read, to reassure them that they weren’t keeping me up. Michael came over, pulled an afghan over me, and gave me a quick kiss before returning to join Art and Abe.
    After a few moments, I let the book fall on my chest. I did the yoga breathing exercises Rose Noire had taught me. I wondered what time it was, but I couldn’t muster the energy to turn my head toward the alarm clock. Hansel and Gretel were squirming enough to keep me from falling asleep, but with luck they’d settle down eventually. And in the meantime, it was peaceful, lying there on our nice, warm bed, listening to the faint rustle as Michael and his colleagues turned pages.
    Eventually, though, the rustle of pages began to be accompanied by muffled exclamations and sharp intakes of breath.
    “Good God,” Abe said finally, in a low tone. “We knew we had a problem, with some of our best performers not wanting to become drama majors.”
    “And the fact that not a single graduate student has actually completed a degree in the last three years,” Michael added.
    “I thought we could get around it by helping them select English classes with teachers who weren’t in on it,” Art said.
    “It’s gone past that,” Abe said.
    “We knew it was bad,” Art said.
    “But not this bad,” Abe added.
    “Why didn’t the students come to us?” Michael said.
    “Because you’d have tried to do something,” I said without opening my eyes. “And they know that, and they were afraid you’d all try to do something and end up getting hurt.”
    A few moments of silence.
    “They were trying to protect us?” Michael said.
    “And we should have been protecting them,” Abe put in.
    Something that had been bothering me all day popped back in my mind and I sat up.
    “Answer me one question,” I said. “If everyone knows Dr. Wright hated drama students so much and did everything she could to torpedo their academic careers, why didn’t they just avoid taking her classes?”
    “They did, as far as possible,” Abe said. “At least after we all realized what she was doing and began steering them away from her classes. But last year she managed to have one of her classes made a degree requirement.”
    “ ‘Literature and Popular Culture,’ ” Art said. “A semester’s worth of listening to Dr. Wright rant about everything she hated about the modern world.”
    “She got Blanco to do it for her,” Michael said.
    “For years, she and a couple of other English professors have been doing what they could to make life miserable for the drama students,” Abe said. “But it wasn’t till Blanco started helping them that things got really bad.”
    “And now we’ll never know just why she hated the theater so much,” Art said, shaking his head.
    “Yes we will,” I said. “She was a frustrated actress.”
    “No way,” Michael