Owls Well That Ends Well

by Donna Andrews

  “This isn’t your typical yard sale,” I said.

  “Or that so many people would be out this early,” he added, looking around as if the crowd unnerved him as much as Dr. Gruber’s plight.

  I had to smile. Giles’s tall form, loosely draped, as always, in tweed and corduroy, was hunched protectively and his eyes behind the thick glasses blinked and watered as if unused to this much brightness. Seeing Giles out-of-doors always reminded me of the scene at the beginning of The Wind in the Willows where Mole emerges into the sunlight.

  “A bit overwhelming,” I said, and Giles nodded in agreement. He looked half ready to bolt back to his car. I suppressed a sigh of exasperation. How had Michael ever befriended such a recluse? I’d spent the first six months I’d known Giles convincing him that it was okay to call me Meg rather than Miss Langslow. Though come to think of it, perhaps I’d only gotten him to drop the Miss. I couldn’t remember if he’d ever actually called me Meg.

  Friends had warned me that it could be hard work, getting your significant other’s male friends to accept you, but I hadn’t expected the process to be quite so much like coaxing a small nocturnal animal out of its hole.

  Though that reminded me: I had bait today. I fished around in my pocket until I found a small slip of paper I’d stuck there.

  “Here,” I said, handing it to Giles. “I jotted down a map of which tables are selling books.”

  “Ah, thanks,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll find that helpful.” I hoped so. Sooner or later, I was sure, I could break through Giles’s reserve and turn polite acceptance into real friendship.

  “It’s only fair,” I said. “You were an enormous help dealing with Edwina’s library. Without you, we’d have put a lot of valuable books out for the yard sale.”

  Giles nodded absently and turned his attention to the map. Well, so much for bonding with Giles today.

  I heard a small commotion to my right, and turned to see Gordon-you-thief, attempting to drag two oversized boxes through the crowd.

  “Hey, Guiles,” Gordon called. It took me a second to realize that he was talking to Giles, and mispronouncing his name, with a hard “G” rather than a soft one.

  “I think he’s calling you,” I said to Giles, in an undertone.

  “Maybe if I ignore him he’ll go away,” Giles said, through clenched teeth.

  “No such luck,” I said. “He’s headed this way.”

  “Hey, Guiles,” Gordon repeated, coming up to stand in front of Giles with his back toward me. “Glad I ran into you.”

  “Hello, Gordon,” Giles said, edging back slightly.

  “You’re still collecting R. Austin Freeman, right?” Gordon said, taking a half step to close up the distance between them.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “R. Austin Freeman’s an early-twentieth-century mystery author,” Giles said turning to me and, not accidentally, edging farther away from Gordon. “His protagonist was both a lawyer and a doctor—sort of a late-Victorian Quincy. I’ve been collecting his books for years. My collection’s nearly complete, though,” he said, turning back to Gordon and stepping away slightly when he realized that Gordon had again closed the gap to what was, for Giles, uncomfortably close quarters.

  I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or feel sorry for Giles. I’d done this dance with Gordon myself, backing away half a step at a time as he kept inching closer than I found comfortable. At first, I’d assumed that we just had very different senses of personal space, but eventually I’d realized that Gordon did it deliberately, to keep people off balance in a negotiation.

  Or perhaps just to annoy them. At any rate, once I knew what he was doing, I’d figured out how to stop him. Whenever he tried to crowd me, I’d step even closer and peer down my nose at him. At 5’ 10”, I was a good five or six inches taller than Gordon, and he didn’t like having to crane his neck to see me.

  I was tempted to try it on him now, and rescue Giles, but Gordon was already turning away.

  “Still, you might want to take a look at what I found on the dollar table over there,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “I bet you’ll want it when you see it in the shop.”

  He sauntered off, still smirking.

  Giles sighed.

  “The maddening thing is, I probably will want whatever he’s found,” he said. “The bastard has a damned good idea what’s in my collection.”

  “He sold you most of it?” I guessed.

  “No, only a few, and those some years ago. As soon as he finds out you’re collecting something, the prices start creeping up. More than creeping, really. Skyrocketing. I usually do better elsewhere. But he stops by my office from time to time. That’s where I keep my detective fiction collection, you see. And the science fiction and fantasy stuff. To annoy the old fuddy-duddies who look down their noses at genre fiction.”

  I fought to hide my smile. To look at him, you’d take Giles for a fuddy-duddy himself. I had a hard time imagining that beneath his stodgy tweed beat the heart of a rebel. A pedantic rebel, perhaps, and one who preferred to keep his rebellion subtle enough to avoid offending the administration.

  “So while Gordon’s in your office, he sneaks a peek at your shelves.”

  Giles snorted.

  “Sneaks a peek! I came back from a class one day and found him taking a detailed inventory. Not only which books, but in what condition. So he could be on the lookout for better copies that might tempt me to trade up.”

  “At sky-high prices,” I said. This was a longer and more natural conversation than I could ever remember having with Giles. Perhaps I should bone up on this Freeman person. Or was our shared dislike for Gordon the stronger bond?

  Giles nodded.

  “The only Freemans I’m missing are a few relatively rare ones. I suspect he’s found one of those or perhaps what he thinks is a better copy of one I already have.”

  “So he’ll probably be extracting more money from you soon,” I said.

  “Not necessarily,” Giles said. “Last fall, I made a resolution not to deal with Gordon anymore. I decided it spoils my enjoyment of the books, just knowing they’ve passed through his hands. Haven’t been in his shop for over a year now.”

  “Maybe he hasn’t found anything after all, then,” I said. “Maybe he’s just trying to lure you back into his den of literary temptation.”

  “Let’s hope I have the strength of will to resist, then,” Giles said.

  “Get thee behind me, Gordon!” I said.

  Giles chuckled at my joke, though as usual I couldn’t tell if he found it funny or just wanted to be polite. I wondered, suddenly, if I wasn’t the only one making an effort to become friends. Perhaps, in spite of thinking me entirely too boisterous and independent, Giles was, in his own stuffy way, making heroic efforts to get to know me. Or perhaps I was just overreacting to his normal British reticence. No way to tell.

  “Well, I suppose there’s a chance Gordon has overlooked a few books worth owning,” he said. “Be seeing you.”

  I was surprised to see him stop briefly at the table where Dad, still in his great horned owl disguise, was selling off Edwina Sprocket’s collection of owl tchotchkes to benefit SPOOR. I hadn’t pegged Giles for a birdwatcher or a collector of ceramic owls. But I had to smile when I saw him pick up a pair of owl-shaped bronze bookends and tuck them in the crook of one arm before heading off toward the books.

  Just then, a squabble broke out between Scarlett O’Hara and a middle-aged Gypsy, who’d each grabbed one of a pair of brass andirons, and my day really began going downhill.

  Chapter 6

  Where were my volunteer helpers, I wondered. Scarlett backed off when I threatened to expel her from the yard sale, but I had to sit on the Gypsy for ten minutes to calm her down. And no one lifted a finger to help me. I had recruited a dozen relatives to help, but apart from my two increasingly demoralized cashiers, none of them were nearby. I hoped they were off taking care of other problems. We had ple
nty of problems to go around. In addition to squabbles between customers, I was starting to notice squabbles among the sellers, as various people suddenly noticed which priceless treasures their spouses, parents, children, or siblings had decided to unload.

  “She’s selling my high chair,” my forty-something cousin Dermot announced, pointing to his sweet, grayhaired mother as if he’d just spotted one of the FBI’s top ten wanted criminals lurking in our backyard.

  “If you want it, why don’t you just buy it?” I asked.

  “I’m not selling it to him,” Dermot’s mother said. “He’d only stick it back in my garage again.”

  “I don’t have room for it in my apartment.”

  “And I don’t have room for it in my garage.”

  I left them to sort it out. Up and down the aisles, similar battles were being waged over rusting tricycles, battered reclining chairs, and moth-eaten scraps of clothing. If I’d known how traumatic yard sales were for the sellers, I’d have arranged to have a family therapist on hand.

  Mother was being unusually helpful, but she couldn’t be everywhere at once, and she had her hands full dealing with the shoplifters. She knew who all the family kleptomaniacs were and exactly what mix of threat and cajolery to use with each of them. And long experience with the light-fingered members of our clan had given her a second sense for spotting strangers intent on pilfering, whether for professional or psychiatric reasons.

  For once in my life I wished I had more family members like Mother. I could use a dozen more of her, at least.

  I’d assign one just to keep people out of the barn. I didn’t quite share Dad’s passionate concern for the welfare of the nesting owls, but I had other, more practical reasons for declaring the barn off-limits. Including the fact that we weren’t entirely sure parts of it were structurally sound. The last thing we needed to inaugurate our life in the house was a lawsuit from some disgruntled customer who’d wandered in where he had no business being and gotten injured by falling beams or rubble. So I’d posted a variety of threatening signs on the barn doors, everything from “Keep out!” and “No Trespassing!” to “Warning! Falling debris!” and Dad had added his “Keep out! Owls nesting!” signs, which were probably less effective but a lot more picturesque.

  And yet less than an hour into the sale, I saw Gordon ducking into the barn, dragging a large cardboard box. And then he came out empty-handed. Several times. Okay, he probably wasn’t attempting larceny. For one thing, both of the ground floor doors to the barn were inside the fence, and if he tried to lower stuff out of the hayloft door, which did overlook the outside world, someone would surely notice. So he was probably only doing what people had warned me the greedy and inconsiderate customers would do—dragging large quantities of stuff off to one side to sort through at their leisure before returning the unwanted items to the sale area. Not a big problem if they did their sorting and returning relatively soon, but if they waited till near the end of the sale, when you started reducing prices across the board …

  Well, Gordon might be in for a nasty shock. For one thing, we weren’t reducing prices today—this was a two- day event. And for another thing, as soon as I had a moment I planned to slip into the barn, drag out everything Gordon had hidden away there, and put it back out for anyone who wanted it.

  Unfortunately, every time I set out toward the barn, some new crisis intervened. A lost child. A lost purse. More scuffles between overeager Grouchos and Nixons.

  I caught Eric and one of his little cousins charging admission to the portable toilets and ordered the young entrepreneurs to exercise their capitalistic instincts by helping Cousin Horace at the hamburger stand.

  “You’d be amazed what you can find at yard sales,” I overheard one woman telling another. “On Antiques Road Show, people are always bringing bits of junk they bought at yard sales and finding out they’re worth thousands of dollars.”

  “That’s true,” the second woman said. Just then they spotted my shadow. They hunched protectively over the table in front of them and glared at me until I moved on. I fought back a smile. Would it reassure them to know that I was not a competitor? That I had no intention of buying anything at the yard sale, and particularly not from that table, which was filled with some of the worst junk I’d cleared out of Mrs. Sprocket’s attic? Probably not. And I certainly didn’t want to discourage them by mentioning that seventeen keen-eyed antique appraisers had already turned up their noses at the contents of that particular table. For all I know, if I’d called an eighteenth dealer he might have spotted a hidden treasure among the clutter. Perhaps the cracked chamber pot had once stood in the servants’ quarters in Monticello, or perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt had crocheted the toilet paper roll covers as part of the war effort. I wished them luck.

  Cousin Deirdre, the animal rights activist, had begun splashing paint on every moth-eaten fur coat and taxidermied mongoose in sight. I confiscated her paint and explained to the unhappy fur owners that she only used nontoxic washable paint, but most of them didn’t calm down until Mother promised to see that Deirdre reimbursed their cleaning costs.

  “Meg, we’re out of Spike’s dog food!” Rob exclaimed, appearing at my elbow while I was trying to calm an elderly lady whose sense of decency had been violated by her discovery that one of the booths was selling back issues of Playboy.

  “Get him a hamburger from Horace,” I said.

  “Okay,” Rob said. “How does he like them?”

  “Ask him,” I said.

  “Roger,” Rob said, turning to go.

  “While you’re going that way,” I called after him, “Could you tell that man with the grandfather clock that he doesn’t have to carry it around the whole time he’s shopping; we’d be happy to keep it behind the checkout counter for him.”

  “I’ve already told him that, twice,” Rob said. “He says he doesn’t mind carrying it.”

  “Let me rephrase that. Tell him if he whacks one more person in the head with the clock, I’ll take it away from him and kick him out of the yard sale.”

  “Roger.”

  I returned to my irate customer.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said. “I’m not sure we have the right to keep someone from selling his Playboy magazines, but if you can point out the booth, I’ll ask him to keep them out of sight.”

  “Hmph,” the woman snorted, as she turned and marched away. After a few feet, she stopped and turned back, hands on her hips.

  “And don’t let me catch you selling any of that trash to that worthless husband of mine!” she shouted.

  I turned to the checkout counter. The white rabbit and the ballerina looked stricken. Michael, standing nearby, wore the intensely solemn look that always meant he was trying not to crack up.

  “And does anyone have any idea who she is, and what her worthless husband looks like?”

  “No,” Michael said. “But I know who’s selling the Playboys. Your cousin Everett.”

  “Can you talk to him?”

  “Sure,” Michael said. “I’ll tell him to keep his Playboys under the counter with the Penthouses and Hustlers.”

  “Good grief,” I said. “I thought all he had was forty years of National Geographic.”

  Just then I heard a loud altercation nearby. Not the first of the day, by any means, but the voices sounded familiar, so I waded through the crowd to see what was going on.

  “It’s mine!”

  “No, it’s not!”

  “Yes, it is!”

  “I saw it first!”

  “But I touched it first!”

  “Liar!”

  “Thief!”

  “Let go!”

  “Take that!”

  Typical. I’d heard so many quarrels already today that I’d given up intervening unless the participants came to blows, which these two seemed about to do.

  And to my dismay, I realized that the latest combatants were two of my aunts—elderly, respectable women who didn’t hesitate to rap my knuckles at T
hanksgiving dinner to correct minor flaws in my table manners.

  They were playing tug-of-war over an antique purple cut-velvet piano shawl with foot-long fringe. Not tugging very hard, of course, since the material was fragile; but both of them were obviously determined not to let go. Aunt Gladys, her stout form encased in a vintage beaded opera gown, had both ring-encrusted fists clamped firmly around her end of the shawl and looked as if even the boom lift would have trouble dislodging her. In a fair fight, I’d have bet on her. But Aunt Josephine didn’t fight fair. Looking uncannily authentic in her wicked witch costume, complete with a pointed hat and a toy cat wired to her shoulder, she was only holding the shawl with one hand while with the other she whacked Aunt Gladys in the derriere with her broomstick, throwing in an occasional kick to the shins for good measure.

  I took a deep breath and was about to wade in on my one-woman peacekeeping mission when a streak of black-and-white fur appeared and launched itself at the shawl. Spike. He couldn’t quite leap high enough to reach the shawl, but he managed a good mouthful of the swaying fringe. My aunts watched in horror as he hung suspended from the shawl for a few seconds and then dropped when his weight ripped the fragile fabric in half.

  “Sorry,” Rob said, running up and clipping the leash back onto Spike’s collar—an easier task than usual, with Spike’s fangs muffled in fringe. “I was taking him over for his hamburger, but he got loose.”

  “A Solomon among dogs,” I said. “Does either of you want this?”

  I held out the remaining half of the shawl. Both aunts shook their heads. They gathered up their dignity along with the objects they’d apparently dropped in the fray and strode off without looking back.

  “Bring the other half back when Spike finishes with it,” I told Rob. “Maybe Aunt Minnie can use it for her quilting.”

  “And who’s paying for that?” said a woman at a nearby table. Presumably the wounded shawl’s owner.

  While I was settling up, my irritation surged again when I spotted someone else going into the barn. The latest in a long series of someone elses who’d been shuffling in and out of the barn.