Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon

“Sometimes science doesn't hold the answers,“ he proclaimed. “Sometimes only the power of the human mind can ensure that justice is done.“

“You've been watching those crime-solving shows again,“ I said with a sigh. “Why don't you go tell the Doctors from Hell designers about blood gases now?“

He patted me on the shoulder and trotted off.

I was alone in the waiting room, except for one patient waiting' meekly in the corner for an appointment with his therapist. At least I assumed he was a patient, since he kept glancing at George out of the corner of his eye and looking anxious if I caught him at it. People who came to see Mutant Wizards for the first time would invariably walk in and exclaim, “Why the hell do you have a buzzard in your waiting room?“ And if we kept them waiting, they'd spend the time staring unabashedly at George. Patients, on the other hand, always tried to act as if George didn't exist, or as if there were nothing out of the ordinary about sharing a waiting room with a live buzzard. Perhaps they thought it was some kind of Rorschach test, and if they mentioned it, someone would immediately say, “That's a good question. Why do you think we have a buzzard in our waiting room?“

I suppose I should have drafted Dad to keep minding the switchboard for me as soon as I realized that he wasn't working with the Doctors from Hell team. Shortly after I took the switchboard back, the mail cart cruised through with Dad sitting on top of it. He'd acquired a notebook remarkably similar to die one Chief Burke carried, and was scribbling diligently in it.

The second time he rode by, he'd apparently run out of interesting things to note. He was sitting cross-legged and appeared to be lost in thought.

On his third circuit, he'd begun looking distinctly bored.

The fourth time through, he was lying down on his stomach, gripping the front of the mail cart, looking for all the world like a slow-motion toboggan rider. After that, he lay down on his back.

“What are you doing, anyway?“ Jack asked when he happened to be in the reception area as the cart rolled through.

“Detecting,“ Dad said. “I'm studying the victim's point of view.“

“And you're not the least bit superstitious about what happened to the mail cart's last passenger?“ Jack asked.

“A sleuth has to take some risks,“ Dad called as the mail cart rolled out of sight.

“I'd be a little less worried if I hadn't heard him snoring the last time he passed my cube,“ Jack said.

I sighed. “Here,“ I said, picking up Spike's crate. “Stick Spike on top of the mail cart with him. If anyone tries anything, Spike is sure to bark.“

“Good idea,“ Jack said.

For the rest of the afternoon, Dad and Spike snoozed comfortably on top of the mail cart, and Jack spread the word among the staff to keep an eye on them, in case anyone tried anything. No one did. Dad awoke, near five o'clock, chagrined at having taken so long a nap, and I took advantage of his embarrassment to dump Spike on him for the evening. I had things to do and didn't want dog walking duties to slow me down.

I found the disgruntled Eugene Mason's personnel file singularly uninformative. According to the paperwork, he'd left at the end of his ninety-day probation period by mutual agreement. Not much grounds for discontent there. Then again, as Liz was always reminding people, anything we wrote, including e-mails, could be subpoenaed by someone suing Mutant Wizards. Perhaps Personnel felt it safer not to go into too much detail about why we hadn't wanted to keep Mason on.

I hadn't learned anything more that afternoon – not that I didn't try to interrogate anyone unlucky enough to pass through the waiting room. By five o'clock, when I finally locked the doors and put the switchboard on night mode, I suspected most of the staff members were sneaking out the back door to avoid me.

I decided that I'd gone as far as I could with what little information I had to go on. I was going to come back tonight and snoop around.

Before I left, I strolled through the office. Either the afternoon's build had gone far better than usual, or the programmers had decided to run the evening build on Luis's spare server over at the Pines. At any rate, the Mutant Wizards staff was clearing out. Not entirely, though, and a few of the therapists had evening office hours and would be seeing patients as late as eight or nine o'clock.

Under the circumstances, I thought, pausing in a corridor, it didn't make sense to come back before eleven, at the earliest. Perhaps even midnight. Or –

“Can I help you?“

I glanced up and realized I was standing outside the door of one of the therapists' offices. The short, mousy, bespectacled man who was Dr. Lorelei's partner. He was hunched over his keyboard, and his hands covered the monitor, as if to protect it, even though it was facing away from me.

Get a life, I wanted to say. Even if I could see, from here, what you're typing, why would I want to? I doubt anyone wants to pry into your poor patients' secrets. At any rate, I don't.

“Sorry,“ I said. “Trying to remember where I left something.“

He didn't speak, and continued to clutch his monitor.

“Good night,“ I said, and walked away.

When I was a few feet away, I heard the rattle of the keyboard start up again.

“Weird,“ I muttered. And then pushed him out of my mind. I had more important things to worry about.

Like seeing what I could find in Ted's house.

I looked up the address on the map before I set out. Not that I really needed to; I had a pretty good idea where it was. After so many months of house-hunting in Caerphilly, I could probably have walked blindfolded through any of the promising neighborhoods – promising, these days, began with any house that actually had indoor plumbing, and stopped only a little short of houses large enough to have their own zip codes.

Ted had lived in the country, about a twenty-minute drive south of town, an area I didn't know as well because it was almost entirely farmland. As I drove, I brooded on the injustice of the fact that the beastly Ted had actually managed to snag a house in the country, while all Michael and I had found was the Cave.

At least he'd said it was a house. Maybe it would turn out to be someone's old toolshed or a converted tobacco barn.

I finally came to a mailbox with the name CORRIGAN scrawled in black Magic Marker over another, faded name beginning with an S. I craned my neck to see the house, but the driveway was lined with boxwoods, ten feet tall and so overgrown they nearly met in the middle. I backed up, but the hedge continued across the front of the yard until it met the woods on either side.

“Here goes,“ I muttered, and pointed my car down the driveway – whose condition suggested that the owners had given up maintaining it about the same time they'd abandoned the poor boxwoods. The driveway seemed longer because I had to drive three miles an hour, but still – this was a large lot. And when I emerged from the boxwood tunnel in front of the house, I was so startled that I almost ran into a crumbling sundial.

If Alfred Hitchcock hadn't modeled the house in Psycho on this place, then surely Edward Gorey had found inspiration here. It was a three-story gray Victorian, complete with a widow's walk on the top, and sporting several dozen odd turrets, gables, bay windows, balconies, and other architectural flourishes. I spotted one tall, stately window that wasn't marred with either cracked glass or boarded-over panes, but if there was a square foot of unpeeled paint or undamaged gingerbread, it had to be on the back of the house. A lugubrious weeping willow appeared to be dying of some wasting disease in the front yard. I followed a trampled path through the foot-high weeds to the porch.

“A real fixer-upper,“ I said, craning my neck to see if the shingles had finished falling into the yard or if there were still a few lurking up there, waiting to land on unwary visitors.

Someone had nailed unpainted boards in place of the missing porch steps, and the porch floor seemed sound enough to hold me. Fighting the tendency to look over my shoulder – not to mention the superstitious expectation that if I did, I'd see a tall, cadaverous figure with a black cape and very pointed teeth – I managed to unlock the door.

And almost turned and ran. Not that the inside was scarier than the outside. Quite the contrary. Although equally neglected-looking, the interior was so unrelentingly cozy that I had a moment of panic, thinking that I must have come to the wrong house and was about to be arrested for trespassing.

“Don't be daft,“ I told myself. “It's the right address, and the key fits.“

I closed the door behind me – yes, it creaked – and began slowly and carefully making my way through the