“Dr. Blake!” Ambrose Driscoll had bounded to his feet and was staring with awe at the new arrival. “What an honor to meet you! I can’t tell you how much I admired your article in Audubon magazine on the plight of the Blue-throated Macaw!”

“Thank you, thank you,” Dr. Blake said, shaking hands vigorously with Dr. Driscoll. “Are you a birding man yourself?”

“Only an amateur, compared with you,” Dr. Driscoll said.

“Dr. Driscoll is too modest,” I said. “He has a life list of over eight hundred birds.”

Dr. Driscoll beamed with delight.

“Yes—814, to be precise,” he said. “How kind of you to remember.”

“Marvelous!” Dr. Blake exclaimed. “We need more concerned birders—if only I could interest these young people in the cause!”

I sat back to let my grandfather charm the Driscolls and enlist them in his legion of supporters who would write letters to Congress and checks to the Montgomery Blake Foundation whenever their leader rallied them. I’d spotted something interesting.

Blake was dressed in his customary garb—cargo pants, cotton shirt, and fishing vest, all in muted earth tones, and hiking boots. He wasn’t wearing his pith helmet, but the pockets of his vest bulged, as usual, with random bits of junk and gear. All of this was perfectly normal—he wore the same outfit whether he was slogging through the jungle, appearing on CNN to denounce some corporation’s environmental record, or sipping wine at the bar of the Caerphilly Inn.

But behind him I could see the door to the hotel lobby. As Blake was holding forth in his most charming manner, I saw Dad stick his head in, look left and right, and then duck back out. And then I saw him creep past the doorway in the most dramatically furtive manner imaginable. And he was wearing an over-the-top outfit similar to Dr. Blake’s.

A few moments after Dad disappeared, Dr. Blake wished us all a good evening and shook hands all around. I followed him to the door.

“What are you and Dad up to, anyway?” I asked Dr. Blake.

“Up to?” He was wearing his most innocent expression. It wouldn’t have fooled Timmy.

“Just try to stay out of trouble for a while,” I said. “I’m a little tied down with Timmy right now. If you two get arrested, I can’t just take off and drive down to North Carolina again in the middle of the night to bail you out.”

“That was an unusual situation,” Dr. Blake said. “How were we supposed to know the police were going to stage a raid on the cockfight the very night we were filming it?”

“You could have considered the possibility and had a local lawyer on call,” I said. “In fact, here.”

I pulled out my notebook, tore out a page, flipped to a page near the front, copied a couple of names and phone numbers, and handed the loose sheet to him.

“What’s this?”

“Defense attorneys. Relatives of Mother’s. If you get arrested, give one of them a call, mention that you’re a Hollingworth cousin, and they’ll take care of it.”