The Real Macaw: A Meg Langslow Mystery

Chapter 1
    “Stop!” I hissed. “Bad dog! Don’t you dare bite me!”
    Spike, aka the Small Evil One, froze with his tiny, sharp teeth a few inches from my ankle. He looked up and growled slightly.
    From one of the cribs across the room I heard another of the faint, cranky whimpers I’d detected over the baby monitor. Jamie always woke up slowly and fussed softly for a few minutes, which gave us a fighting chance of getting to the nursery to feed him before he revved up to cry so loudly that he woke his twin brother. Josh never bothered with any kind of warning, going from fast asleep to wailing like a banshee in two seconds or less.
    “I mean it,” I said to Spike. “No more treats. No more sleeping in your basket here in the nursery. If you bite me again, you’re out of here. Back to the barn.”
    Do animals understand our words or do they just pick up meaning from our tone of voice? Either way, Spike got the message.
    He sniffed at my ankle. Pretending to recognize my scent, he wagged his tail perfunctorily. Then he trotted back to his basket, turned around the regulation three times, curled up, and appeared to fall asleep.
    I tiptoed over to Jamie’s crib in time to pick him up and shove the bottle in his mouth a split second before he began shrieking.
    I settled down in the recliner and leaned back slightly. Not for the first time, I felt a surge of gratitude to my grandfather, who had given us the recliner and helped me fight off all Mother’s attempts to banish it as an eyesore from the nursery she had decorated so elegantly in soft tones of lavender and moss green.
    Eventually, Jamie finished his milk and fell asleep. I gazed down at him with maternal affection—and maybe just a guilty hint of gratitude that he and his noisier brother were, for the moment, both fast asleep and not demanding anything of me.
    I pondered whether to get up, put him in his crib, and go back to bed, or whether it would be just as efficient to doze here until Josh woke up for his next bottle. If I dozed here, I could turn off the baby monitor and make sure Michael got a full night’s sleep, so he’d be well rested for teaching his Friday classes.
    Or should I rouse myself to pump some milk for the boys’ next meal? I glanced at the clock—a little after 2:00 A.M. Dozing was winning when an unfamiliar noise woke me up.
    It was a dog barking. And not Spike’s bark, either. At eight and a half pounds, Spike tried his best, but could never have produced the deep basso “woof!” I’d just heard.
    Or had I just imagined it? I wriggled upright and stared over at Spike.
    He was sitting up and looking at me.
    “Did you hear anything?” I whispered.
    He cocked his head, almost as if he understood.
    We both listened in silence for a moment. Well, almost silence. I could still hear the faint, almost restful sounds of the white noise machine we ran at night to minimize the chances of some stray sound waking up the boys.
    Just as I was about to relax back into the recliner, I heard another noise. This time it sounded more like a cat meowing.
    Spike lifted his head and growled slightly.
    “Shush,” I said.
    There was a time when shushing Spike would have egged him on. But almost as soon as we’d brought the twins home, he had appointed himself their watchdog and guardian. His self-assigned duties—barking whenever he thought they needed anything, and then biting anyone who showed up to take care of their needs—were made all the more strenuous by the fact that in spite of our efforts, the boys maintained completely opposite sleep schedules, so there was nearly always at least one twin awake and requiring Spike’s attention. After four months, like Michael and me, he’d learned to grab every second of sleep he could.
    He curled back up on the lavender and moss-green cushion in his bed and appeared to doze off. He looked so innocent when asleep. An adorable eight-and-a-half-pound furball. What would happen when the boys started crawling, and mistook him for a stuffed animal?
    I’d worry about that later.
    I sat up carefully to avoid waking Jamie, and managed to deposit him, still sleeping, on the soft, lavender flannel sheet in his crib. I glanced over to make sure Josh was still snoozing in his own little moss-green nest. Then I tiptoed over to the nursery door, opened it, and listened.
    I could hear rustling sounds that weren’t coming from the white noise machine. Soft whines. An occasional bark. Meows. Cat