The Real Macaw: A Meg Langslow Mystery

with us. The house is enormous, and you know how tight the housing market is in Caerphilly. And luckily Rose Noire likes helping with the children.”
    Actually, although Rose Noire loved the boys dearly, I suspected her motive for helping out was her fear that, left to our own devices, Michael and I probably wouldn’t feed the boys entirely on wholesome, organic food, much less raise them to be self-aware, environmentally responsible little vegetarians.
    “Oh, no,” someone behind me said. “They’re swarming again.”
    Swarming? I looked around, expecting to see a cloud of some kind of insect and ready to throw myself between it and the twins. But no one else seemed alarmed, and I realized that the speaker was pointing to the ball field. One of the Clay County Yankees had gotten a decent hit, and several of our Red Sox were competing to see who could reach it first.
    In fact, the first, second and third basemen, the left and right shortstops, and the left and center fielders were all running madly in the direction of the ball. I understood what the other mother meant by swarming. The only players not involved were the right fielder, who appeared to be taking a nap; the catcher, who was so weighed down by his protective gear that he could barely walk; and Timmy, who was watching a bug crawl up his arm.
    “Play your positions! Play your positions!” the coach was shouting.
    “Jason! Get back on first base!” one mother shouted. “Jason, I mean it! Now!”
    Other mothers and a few fathers shrieked equally futile instructions. The kids were ignoring them, and had ended up in a small, writhing heap in the general vicinity of where we’d last seen the ball.
    The Yankee runner had reached first base and was watching the action, perhaps wondering if she should try for another base. In a real ball game, she’d have been crazy not to. By this time, three of the Red Sox were wrestling for the ball, while the coach and one of the fathers tried to separate them, and the rest of the team stood watching and cheering them on. The Yankee batter could probably have made two or three circuits of the bases by the time one Red Sox player emerged holding the ball.
    But in T-Ball, there was either a rule or a longstanding tradition that you only got one base when you hit the ball, so after looking longingly at second, the runner sat down on first base to untie and retie her shoelaces half a dozen times.
    “Positions!” the Red Sox coach shouted, giving various players gentle shoves in the right directions. “Positions!”
    But it took a while for the game to resume, because one of the players who had not won the fight for the ball ran off the field to be comforted by his mother, and another sat down in the outfield and refused to get up. And when the Red Sox coach finally got all his players upright and back where they belonged, someone finally noticed that there were two Yankee runners on second base. It took several minutes to sort out which one belonged there and which one should have continued on to third when the batter got her hit.
    “Coach really needs Sammy,” one of the mothers behind us said when the game finally resumed. “Keeping those kids in line is tough enough without being shorthanded.”
    “Well, don’t count on seeing Sammy for a while,” another mother said. “Chief’s got him pretty busy with this murder investigation.”
    “He’d be here if this wasn’t the very first day of the investigation,” the first one said.
    “I hope you’re right,” said the other. “Because if the chief kept him on overtime until they could check out everyone Parker Blair ever fooled around with, the season would be over before we saw him again.”
    “The season?” The other mother snorted. “Are you kidding? Our kids would be in college before we saw him again!”
    The two of them cackled together.
    I glanced at Francine. She was frowning, lips pursed. Evidently she shared my feeling that too much hilarity at the expense of a murdered man was in poor taste.
    “Good God,” one of the mothers at the top of the bleachers stage-whispered, pointing at the field. “What do you suppose those two are up to?”
    “No good, that’s for sure,” another muttered.

Chapter 6
    I looked to see what the two mothers were talking about and winced. Terence Mann, Francine’s husband, was the third-base coach. But he wasn’t watching the game at the moment. He was talking intently to Mayor Pruitt.
    I studied Mann. He