Stork Raving Mad: A Meg Langslow Mystery (A Meg Lanslow Mystery)

it’s already Wednesday. How soon is he arriving?”
    Michael glanced at his watch.
    “In about half an hour.”

Chapter 2
     
    Actually, the beat-up sedan carrying our latest guest pulled up just twenty minutes later, almost precisely at the stroke of ten. A slender, dark-haired young man of medium height stepped out. Ramon Soto—I recognized him from seeing some of the rehearsals. A pretty, dark-haired young woman sprang out of the front passenger seat and ran around to the driver’s side so that she and Soto almost bumped heads in their haste to open the left rear door and assist a bent, gnarled figure out of the car and up the steps.
    I saw this from upstairs, where I was in the middle of getting dressed, which seemed to take longer every day.
    I sat back down on the bed and resumed trying to put on my shoes in spite of the fact that I couldn’t see my feet—hadn’t seen them in months. My cousin Rose Noire bustled in, looking, as usual, like a New Age Madonna, thanks to her long, flowing, cotton-print dress and her frizzy mane of hair.
    “Look what I found for you!” she said. She was holding out a two-foot parcel wrapped in a length of mud-brown stenciled cloth and tied at several points with bits of raffia.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “Open it and see. Oh, wait—it might be too heavy for you.”
    She set it down on the table and began unwrapping it herself. Ever since she’d learned of my pregnancy, Rose Noire had alternated between urging me to exercise, for the good of the babies, and deciding I was too fragile to lift anything heavier than a teacup. As she struggled with the bits of raffia, I gave thanks that she was in the latter mood at the moment.
    “Ta da!” she exclaimed, lifting a large object out of the cloth. It looked like a statue of a heavily pregnant woman with the head of a hippopotamus.
    “What is it?” I repeated.
    “It’s Tawaret! The Egyptian goddess who protects women during pregnancy and childbirth.”
    “She looks like a pregnant hippopotamus,” I said. “A very irritated pregnant hippopotamus.”
    Rose Noire, to her credit, refrained from pointing out that at the moment I looked rather like a hippopotamus myself.
    “She takes the form of a hippopotamus to protect young children from demons,” she said instead, as she handed me the statue.
    Yes, even demons would probably avoid tangling with a goddess who looked like that.
    As Rose Noire swooped down to help with my shoes she chattered with enthusiasm about Tawaret’s powers, her importance, and even her marital history. Apparently, after first marrying Apep, the god of evil, then Sobek, the crocodile god, she became the concubine of Set, who must have been more important, since Rose Noire didn’t bother to explain who he was. And I didn’t dare ask, for fear of setting her off again. It waslike listening to someone talk about characters in a soap opera I didn’t watch.
    “Do you need anything else?” she asked.
    I started guiltily. I’d been turning the statue around to study it and not liking what I saw. Tawaret was stout, with pendulous breasts, a bulging abdomen, frowning brows, and an open-mouthed snarl that revealed a large collection of sharp teeth. Her figure probably did resemble mine at the moment, but her expression reminded me of my Great Aunt Flo, who was so fond of telling me about ghastly things that had happened to women friends during childbirth and pregnancy. Not a happy association.
    Perhaps my fleeting impulse to drop the statue showed on my face.
    “I’ll just put her here where you and she can get acquainted,” Rose Noire said. She took Tawaret back and cleared a space for her on the dresser—which wasn’t an easy task. In addition to Michael’s and my relatively modest collection of grooming supplies, the dresser already held a large collection of pregnancy-related books, CDs, videos, statues, charms, amulets, herbs, organic stretch-mark creams, aromatherapy vials, and other gewgaws—most of them courtesy of Rose Noire, who seemed a great deal more enthusiastic about the whole pregnancy process than I was.
    Of course, she wasn’t living through it.
    “Meg?”
    I looked up to see Rose Noire frowning slightly at me. I was zoning out again.
    “Do I look presentable?” I asked. “I don’t want to embarrass anyone when I go downstairs to welcome our latest guest.”
    Rose Noire tweaked, tugged, and patted bits of hair and clothing that had looked perfectly fine to me, then