good, thank you. Alice Crane,” I say, offering my hand. “I work in the physics department. As a secretary slash office manager, I wouldn’t know an electron if it bit me on the ankle! This is so nice of you. I’m at my wit’s end. Did you say Chinese boy? I’ve been so worried.”
“Oh yeah?” she says cautiously, attempting to suss me out.
“Couldn’t sleep a wink last night, worrying about that poor little guy.”
“Wait,” she says, her eyes hooding slightly. “You know the kid?”
“No, no,” I say, shaking my head and keeping up the frazzled bit. “Never met him myself, and nobody in the department seems to know where he is, or who has legal custody. But everybody says Joe had a little boy, so he must be somewhere, mustn’t he?”
“Everybody, huh?”
“You know how it is. People talk.”
“And they say the kid is Professor Keener’s son, do they?”
It’s easy enough to look befuddled. “Do I have it wrong? Oh dear, maybe I’m worried about nothing. But you said—what was it you said?”
“Haven’t yet,” she says, going all cagey. “Joe, is that what his friends called him? Really? He was always Professor Keener to me. Very formal man, very private about himself. First time I went over there and introduced myself he looked at the ground and said, ‘Professor Keener,’ and that’s how it stayed. It fit him, too. He was the perfect neighbor, really. Anyhow, he used to have a little kid that came around on a regular basis, but that stopped a couple of years ago. Not every day, but like on weekends. A toddler, couldn’t have been more than three years old, the last time I noticed. Played in the backyard a few times, but mostly they kept him inside.”
“They?” I ask, genuinely surprised.
“The Chinese lady I assumed to be his wife. Or ex- wife, or whatever. She was always here with the boy and she was obviously his mother. She’s a real beauty, an exotic type, wears those formal Chinese dresses, doesn’t speak a word of English. At least not to me.”
“But you haven’t seen her or the boy for the last two years?”
“Something like that. At first I thought maybe she was just a friend of his. They didn’t look like a couple, if you know what I mean. Not even a divorced couple. But one day one of my ninjas got out.”
“Excuse me?”
“My kitty cats. Ninjas, I call ’em. I’m owned by four cats, shelter cats, and they like to hide under the furniture, whack your ankles as you go by. Anyhow, Jeepers got out and bolted over to Professor Keener’s yard, and the little boy was sitting in the sandbox, playing with a scoop, and wouldn’t you know, Jeepers was interested in the sandbox, or that’s what I thought. I go running out, afraid the kid might get scratched, but the cat was sitting there, perfectly well behaved, letting the little boy pet her. Very cute, I wish I’d had my camera. The professor came out at the same time, and I retrieved Jeepers and he retrieved the boy, and we had ourselves a little conversation. Which is all you ever got with the professor. I said, what an adorable child, I can see he takes after his father, and he smiled and said, ‘He’s my keyboard kid,’ and that was all. Not another word. I mean, what does that mean, ‘keyboard kid’? I asked, but the conversation was obviously over. He never even told me the boy’s name.”
“But you took him to mean the boy was his son.”
“Absolutely. You could tell, the way he was holding him, the pride in his eyes. He actually looked me in the eye that one time, just for a second, and I could tell how much he loved the boy. And close-up like that you could see the resemblance, I wasn’t kidding about that.”
“You haven’t seen the child in at least two years. Did you ever ask Professor Keener where his son was? Why he didn’t come around anymore? What happened to the boy’s mother? Anything like that?”
Mrs. Nadeau shakes her head, gives me a flinty, dismissive look, almost scornful. “Who are you really?” she wants to know. “If you worked with Professor Keener, you’d know what he was like. You’d know not to ask him personal questions like that. What are you, some kind of reporter?”
Boss lady always says that when you’re engaged on a case, it’s best to season your prevarication with just enough truth to make it edible—and be ready to alter the recipe on the fly. “Not a reporter, no, absolutely not,” I say, backpedaling in place. “And to be totally truthful with you—I’m so sorry I fibbed—I never actually worked in the physics department and I never met Professor Keener personally. But before he died, before he got killed, Keener hired a friend of mine to help him find his missing five-year-old son. It was my friend—he’s a former FBI agent who specializes in child recovery—it was my friend who found the body, okay? And my friend who is now a suspect in the murder.”
To my surprise, Toni Jo Nadeau grins at me. “This is a much better story, sugar,” she says, eyes bright with interest. “Some of it might even be true.”
“Please don’t tell the police. They’ll think I’m meddling.”
“Describe this ‘friend’ of yours and I’ll think about it.”
“You want to know what he looks like?”
She shakes her head. “I know what he looks like. I want to know if you know what he looks like.”
“You know… Oh, I get it. You happened to notice when he visited Professor Keener, is that it?”
“I’m waiting, sugar.”
“Okay, what he looks like. Here goes. Well, for starters, he’s a hunk, big and lean and tall. Way over six foot—I mean, I barely come up to his shoulders, you know? Soulful eyes. And a cute little salt-and-pepper chin beard.”
Mrs. Nadeau nods along with the description. “You had me at hunk, sugar. That’s our boy. I saw him ringing the bell over there last week and my first thought, I wish he was ringing the bell over here, you know what I mean? No offense, but your man is tasty.”
As you may have noticed, I’m rarely at a loss for words, but that pretty much stops my tongue. Mrs. Nadeau notices my discomfort and reaches out to pat my hand. “Wispy little thing like you, I’m guessing he really is just a friend. Don’t look so worried, these things take time.”
Wispy? I’m wearing what I call my librarian glasses, Target clothing and a cloth handbag, going for the nonthreatening mousy look. But wispy? Really?
“Man like that, he’d want a woman with some meat on her bones,” Mrs. Nadeau says. “Somebody with a little bounce in her jounce. But he may come around. You just hang in there.”
When my power of speech finally resumes, I say, “Yesterday morning, when it happened, did you notice anything wrong?”
Mrs. Nadeau explains that because of her allergies—she’s allergic to cats, why is that no surprise?—she takes an antihistamine before bed and sleeps, in her words, like a dead dodo bird. Therefore she has no awareness of what happened in the early hours, or who might have murdered Joseph Keener.
“The sirens woke me. That’s the first I knew something was wrong. The cops wouldn’t tell me what happened, but
