Qwilleran thought, Wait till Mildred hears about this! Riker's new wife was involved in tarot cards and other occult sciences. Soberly he did what Elizabeth requested:
JAMES MACKINTOSH QWILLERAN
KAO K'O KUNG a.k.a. KOKO YUM YUM,
formerly called FREYA
"Notice," he pointed out, "that my name is spelled with a QW."
"That's important," she said. "Each letter has a corresponding number. I'll take them home and work on them. And now I must drive back to The Pines, or Mother will fret. Your little friends are so beautiful. I hope we'll meet again."
"Yow!" came a stentorian voice from the desk.
"He's thanking you for the compliment," Qwilleran explained.
Koko had something else in mind, however. As soon as he had their attention, he nosed the maroon velvet box across the desk until it fell to the floor.
Qwilleran picked it up. "He has a parlor trick he performs. If I place the dominoes facedown on the table, he can make a blind draw and come up with high-scoring pieces, like double-six and double-five. You sit down and watch quietly." He spread the entire set on the table and encouraged Koko to draw.
The four dominoes that landed on the floor were not high-scoring pieces; they were 0-1, 1-2, 1-4, and 3-4. Elizabeth laughed merrily. It was the first time Qwilleran had heard her laugh. "Do you think cats have a sense of humor?" she asked.
"I think Koko gets a kick out of making me look like a fool."
She was toying with the four dominoes Koko had selected. "He's smarter than you think," she said. "If you add the spots on each one, you get one, three, five and seven. If you match them with the letters of the alphabet, you get A, C, E and G. And if you shuffle them, you get Cage. That's my middle name."
Qwilleran felt goosebumps on the back of his neck. It had to be pure coincidence, he thought. And yet he said, "I'd like to hear more about numerology. Would you have lunch with me at the hotel some day this week?"
"I'd be delighted!" she said, and her eyes sparkled.
He thought, There's nothing wrong with this girl that can't be cured by a reduction in motherpower and a few chocolate malts.
On the way out, Elizabeth caught sight of the gilded leather masks over the sofa. "Your theater masks are stunning!" she said and then she giggled. "One looks like my brother William, and one looks like Jack."
After the phaeton had rolled away from Four Pips, Qwilleran remembered an episode in his early-school years. His teacher, Miss Heath, had a toothy and ambiguous smile that could mean either good news or bad news. Being a domino player at home, although a reluctant one, his private name for her was Miss Double-six. The class was seated alphabetically, and James Qwilleran was assigned to sit in front of a fat kid named Archibald Riker. In dull moments they amused each other by exchanging notes in secret code. It was nothing that would stump a cryptographeror even Miss Double-six if she had caught them; the letters of the alphabet were numbered 1 to 26. One day, while her back was turned, Qwilleran tossed a wad of paper over his shoulder: 13-9-19-19 8-5-1-20-8 8-1-19 2-9-7 20-5-5-20-8. Arch decoded it and laughed so hard that he choked and was sent into the hall for a drink of water. Forty years later, he still quaked with internal laughter whenever he saw someone with prominent dentition.
And now, after all those years, Qwilleran had a cat who was interested in double-sixmost of the time. That was the name of Nick's boat; did it mean that Koko wanted to go home? Or did the twelve pips signify the letter L? And if so, what did the letter L have to do with anything? Kao K'o Kung had some obscure ways of communicating. Often it was merely a matter of nudging Qwilleran's thought processes. In this case, nothing clicked.
The morning plate of meatloaf was still untouched, and Qwilleran's determination to win the argument struggled with his humane instinctsand lost. Just because he had been impulsive enough to pay for ten pounds of meatloaf up front, he could not let them starve. He opened a can of boned chicken. The breakfast that the Siamese had ignored was carried to the trash cans for the strays.
Nick was there, working on the foundation of the building. "Mildew's a problem," he explained. "I'm taking a week of my vacation and trying to catch up on the maintenance ... Say, Qwill, does the music from Five Pips bother you?"
"It's a little mind-numbing when she practices technique, but I've learned to wear ear plugs for catfights, fog horns, and finger exercises."
"I had to speak to her about smoking this afternoon," said the hard-working innkeeper. "I was repairing one of her porch screens and saw a saucerful of butts. She thinks she's a privileged character because Exbridge pays her rent .. . How about you? Is everything okay?"
"So far, so good. Tonight I meet with my undercover man. Right now I'm on my way downtown for something to eat."
At the hotel he waited for the Comptons to come out of the small auditorium where Lyle had delivered his lecture on "Bloody Scotland." The superintendent of schools had a perverse sense of humor that Qwilleran enjoyed, and Lisa's agreeable disposition was a foil for her husband's orneriness.
She said, "We had a good crowd, with lots of young people. They like blood, and Lyle always pours it on: the massacre at Glen Coe, the atrocities of the Highland Clearances, and the slaughter at the Battle of Culloden."
They took a booth in the Buccaneer Den and ordered burgers, and Qwilleran said, "You talk about the farmers being cleared out of the Scottish Highlands and replaced by corporate flocks of sheep. It wouldn't surprise me if the natives were driven from Breakfast Island and replaced by something like corporate oil wells."
The cynical jest appealed to Lyle. "That would be a juicy rumor to start on the mainland! All I'd have to do is whisper confidentially to my next-door neighbor that XYZ has struck oil behind the swimming pool, and in two days it would be all over Moose County, and Don Exbridge would be denying it in the headlines. Of course, no one would believe him!"
"It would be just like you to do it, too," said his wife, "and that's really sick!"
"I'll tell you what's sick, sweetheart. It's sick what XYZ did with the new elementary school building. It's lousy construction! They keep patching it up, but what we really need is one good tornado, so we can start again from scratchwith a different builder."
Lisa said, "Be careful what you wish for; you may get your wish! The weatherman says there's a peculiar front headed this way." Then the food was served, and she said, "It's so dark in here, I can't tell whether this is a burger or chocolate cake."
"That's because people patronize bars for illicit trysts, graft payoffs, and subversive plotting," her husband informed her. "Nice people like you should eat in the coffee shop."
After a while, Qwilleran asked him if he remembered a student named Harriet Beadle, an islander who attended high school on the mainland.
"No, but we've had a pack of Beadles from the island. Another common name is Kale. Another is Lawson. They're all descended from survivors of the same shipwreck, supposedly. They work hard to get good grades, and some even earn scholarships. Those one-room schools aren't all bad."
"How do the other students treat diem?"
"They taunt them about their so-called pirate ancestry, and there are some bloody fights. And who knows whether it's true or not? But I'll tell you one thing for sure: The islanders know more about ecology than we do. They grow up with a respect for the earth and the elements."
Over coffee Lisa asked about Polly.
"She's in Oregon, visiting an old college chum."
"Great country out there!" said Lyle. "Let's hope she doesn't decide to stay. She's a great librarian."
"Everybody loves her," said Lisa.
"Nobody loves a school superintendent. I'm on everybody's hit listboard of ed, taxpayers, and parents."