Free Cockatiels at Seven by Donna Andrews

didn’t find her there, but instead, he climbed up into her desk chair and sat there, clutching Kiki and his sippy cup, twirling the chair slightly, and looking expectant.
    “Karen promised she wouldn’t bring him in here again,” Sandie fussed, as she continued clearing thingsoff her desk. I knew how she felt; I’d spent most of the previous evening doing the same deck clearing at home. “She knows how he disrupts our operations.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “Karen didn’t tell me that—I guess she was in a hurry when she dropped him off. Is she here?”
    “No,” Sandie said. She paused in her tidying and looked up. “And let me tell you, Nadine is pretty burned up about that. If you know where she—”
    “Sandra?” Sandie flinched slightly and returned to her tidying, so I deduced that the speaker meant her. I turned to see a tall, elegant woman in a gray suit standing in a doorway that led to an inner office. Nadine, I presumed.
    “Hi,” I said, in a deliberately light and cheerful tone. “I’m looking for Karen.”
    “Karen’s not here,” Nadine said. “And I’m sorry, but I’m afraid we cannot permit a toddler to stay in the office. Too disruptive.”
    She frowned slightly at Timmy, who was actually behaving quite well. He was turning Karen’s desk chair around in slow circles, and yes, he was pushing against the desk and the file cabinets with his feet to do so, but they looked as if they had survived far worse abuse. For Timmy, he was being positively angelic.
    Of course, perhaps Nadine had met him before in another mood.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll take him right out again. I must have gotten my signals crossed about where I was supposed to drop him off. She’s not in today?”
    “No.” Nadine said. I waited, hoping she’d say something else, but she simply stood there, looking forbidding,with that faint frown on her face. Sandie was trying very hard to be invisible.
    “Damn,” I said. “Well, I’ll get Timmy out of your hair. Could I give you a message in case you see her?”
    “Perhaps you could write your message down,” Nadine said, looking down her nose at me. “And leave it on her desk.”
    “Okay,” I said, trying to look abashed. Actually, that was just what I was hoping she’d say. I’d spotted a sheaf of pink “While-you-were-out” slips spread out across Karen’s desk.
    I made my way through the forest of file cabinets to Karen’s desk, ostentatiously pulling out my notebook as I did, and flipping to a clean page. Nadine walked over to one of the other empty desks and picked up a paper. It wasn’t lost on me that from her new position she could keep an eye on me.
    “Can I sit down, Timmy?” I asked. Timmy obligingly slid off the chair and crawled under the desk, where he began rummaging through various boxes and papers.
    I took a moment to glance at the photos on Karen’s desk. Several of Timmy at various ages, and one family group, with Karen and Jasper holding the infant Timmy. At least I assumed it was Jasper—Karen had covered the man’s head by sticking a square cut from a yellow Post-it note to the glass.
    I flipped up the sticky note—yes, that was the Jasper I remembered. Tall and angular, with long, straight brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. Decent looking, if you overlooked a slightly weak chin. And I’d always thought his smile looked a little forced.
    I shook my head, dropped the tab back over his face, swung myself around with my back to Nadine, and began writing. I pretended to tap my left hand on the desk while I was writing, though what I was actually doing was flicking the “While-you-were-out” notes aside, one by one, so I could jot down all the names, numbers, and messages. Most of them were written in a round, loopy handwriting and initialed with an S, except for one that was written in a handwriting so tiny that you could have fit an entire short story on the small sheet of paper, and yet so precise I had no