Owls Well That Ends Well

by Donna Andrews

  This one I even recognized—the Hummel lady. Apparently she’d decided to skip out on her church luncheon after all. I’d also seen a man I suspected I’d recognize when he no longer wore a cartoon-sized sombrero. And a tall man in a brown jacket and a Dracula mask. One of the Gypsies—we had about a dozen, since it was one of the easiest costumes for a woman to throw together at the last minute; this one was tall and slender and less gaudy than most. Even poor Giles. Perhaps he’d decided to talk to Gordon-you-thief about the Freeman book after all.

  “We have a problem you need to deal with,” Barrymore Sprocket announced, stepping into my path so I either had to notice him or kick him.

  I counted to ten before answering. And then I continued on to twenty. Sprocket had been reporting problems for me to deal with all morning, and creating more problems than he solved. He’d fingered two people as professional shoplifters casing the joint. By the time I’d drummed it into his head that his two suspicious characters were not only cousins of mine, but off-duty police officers I’d drafted to help with security, everyone at the sale had also gotten the message, thus seriously undermining their effectiveness as undercover operatives. He’d pitched a major fit when a small Groucho broke a cheap vase, and mortally offended the child’s mother, who changed her mind about buying several hundred dollars’ worth of stuff. When he’d reported that one of the portable toilets was out of toilet paper, I’d told him where we kept the extra supply and assigned him to janitorial duty. He’d been making himself scarce since. I should have known it was too good to last.

  “What now?” I asked, through gritted teeth.

  Chapter 7

  “That Gordon person is hiding stuff in the barn,” he said. “He’s got boxes and boxes of stuff in there and—”

  “Did you tell him the barn is off-limits?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but he wouldn’t listen to me,” he said, shrugging. “He said you told him he could use it.”

  “He’s lying,” I said.

  “Well, then maybe you should go and tell him to get out,” Sprocket said, with a shrug. “He won’t listen to me.”

  Who would, I thought, but I decided it wouldn’t help to say it.

  “I’ll deal with it as soon as I can,” I said aloud. “Of course, I could deal with it now if you could take over doing something for me for a few minutes.”

  As I expected, he disappeared as I finished my sentence.

  But he was right; I needed to deal with it. Or find someone who could. I finally escaped from the checkout and made it as far as the SPOOR table, where Dad had just finished signing up one of the Nixons as a new member.

  “Thank you!” Dad said. “And as promised—everyone who signs up today gets a dozen genuine owl pellets.”

  He handed the new SPOORite a baggie full of something, and they shook hands, laughing.

  Dad had a whole bowl of the somethings on the table. I picked up one and examined it. It was lumpy and gray and vaguely resembled the remarkably unappetizing organic trail mix he was fond of making during his health food kicks.

  “What is this, Dad?” I asked when his customer had gone. “Some kind of special, nutritionally balanced owl kibble? I have to tell you, Michael and I aren’t up for cosseting our owls with an expensive special diet. Free-range owls, that’s what we want.”

  “Very funny,” Dad said. “You don’t mean to tell me that I never taught you and Rob about dissecting owl pellets when you were kids?”

  “Not that I recall,” I said. I glanced at the pellet uneasily and dropped it back in the bowl. “Why is that so interesting?”

  “Because you can tell exactly what an owl’s been eating from the pellets!” Dad exclaimed.

  “Oh,” I said, wiping my hand on my jeans. “Pellets are droppings.”

  “Not precisely,” Dad said. “Owls regurgitate rather than excrete them. But the principle’s the same. See, here’s an example of a pellet that contained the entire skeleton of a vole!”

  Dad was flourishing a sheet of poster board to which he’d glued dozens—perhaps hundreds—of tiny rodent bones, along with a lot of little tufts of ratty-looking fur. Glancing behind him, I could see that he had at least a dozen more owl pellet posters.

  “Fascinating Dad—but right now, we have an owl crisis. Gordon-you-thief keeps sneaking into the barn. I’m sure he doesn’t mean to upset your fledgling owls, but—”

  “I’ll go and talk to him immediately,” Dad said.

  He put a sign on his chair that read OWL BE RIGHT BACK and hurried over to the barn.

  “Excuse me,” someone said, tugging at my elbow. “I think a quarter apiece is too expensive for these.”

  I turned to find a middle-aged version of Goldilocks standing at my side, pointing her porridge spoon at a collection of tiny china owls on one corner of the SPOOR table.

  I stifled the impulse to say that I agreed and would give her a quarter to take the whole lot of them off our hands. Then an evil thought hit me.

  “I could let them go at three for a dollar,” I said, feigning reluctance.

  “Okay,” Goldilocks said. She snatched up the whole collection, all twelve of them, handed me four dollar bills, and hurried off, as if afraid I’d retract the offer. A second too late, I realized that I’d just broken my own rule about giving everyone receipts.

  “Aunt Meg?”

  I looked down to see my nephew Eric dressed as Superman. He was staring at Goldilocks’s retreating back with a puzzled look.

  “Aunt Meg, three for a dollar—”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “I’ll explain it to you later. Or your grandfather will when he gets back—do you want to watch his table for him?”

  “Okay,” Eric said, with a grin. Then he stood behind the counter, puffed out his chest so the “S” showed to better advantage, and assumed a serious, responsible expression.

  On my way back to the checkout counter, I ran into my cousin Basil. Or possibly Basil’s identical twin, Cyril. No one in the family could tell them apart and I’d given up trying after I figured out that no matter what you called one of them, he’d claim to be the other twin anyway. At any rate, he was trying to shove an enormous box of stuff along in front of him by kicking it, while carrying a moose head in each arm.

  “Let me help you with that,” I said.

  “Thanks,” he said, as I divested him of the moose heads. “That’s my pile over there.”

  He indicated a huge pile of stuff over by the fence. Enough stuff to fill a two-bedroom apartment, which was what Basil and Cyril had. But their lair was already crammed to the ceiling with books, computer equipment, war-gaming paraphernalia, and assorted junk. Where could they possibly put all this stuff? Not to mention that every item he’d collected was either broken, perfectly hideous, or both.

  “What in the world are you doing with all this stuff?” I asked.

  I tried to keep my dismay from showing, but apparently I failed.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “We’re getting rid of it all really soon.”

  “Getting rid of it?” I echoed. “Then why buy it in the first place?”

  “You know that TV show that comes to your house and organizes it?”

  “Yes,” I said. Actually, I knew of several such shows, and watched them all religiously, a guilty secret I hid from everyone but Michael. I hoped it was a phase I’d grow out of once we unloaded Mrs. Sprocket’s clutter.

  “We want to get on that show,” he said. “But the first thing they do is make you get rid of half of your stuff. And we don’t want to get rid of anything; we just want them to organize us.”

  “I see,” I said. “So you’re trying to put enough extra stuff in your house that they won’t touch yours.”

  “Exactly,” he said, beaming.

  While I wanted to ask, what if they didn’t get on the show, I hated to spoil his fun.

  “Good luck with it,” I said instead, and left him with his loot.

  Back at the checkout area I found to
my relief that Mrs. Fenniman and Michael had taken over as cashiers. Michael would remain calm and genial no matter what the customers said or did, Mrs. Fenniman took no guff from anyone, and both of them could do a halfway decent Groucho voice to go with their masks. Things were looking up.

  In fact, I suddenly realized that I was feeling cheerful again. Dad would take care of Gordon-you-thief, and in the meantime, I was surrounded by people made very, very happy by the yard sale.

  “Meg, this is wonderful!”

  I turned and saw my twenty-something cousin Rosemary, from the Keenan branch of the family. I had a quick moment of panic, because I couldn’t immediately remember what I was supposed to call her these days. Morgana? Ecstasy? Cassandra? She’d been through all of those, but I didn’t think any of them were current. Rob had taken to calling her simply “Not-Rosemary.” She had changed her name five or six times in the last decade, usually to symbolize some new breakthrough she felt she’d achieved in her path to wisdom or enlightenment or however she currently defined her goal. Not-Rosemary had never met an Eastern religion or a new age fad she didn’t like, and she always dressed to enhance her already uncanny resemblance to the Woodstock-era Joni Mitchell.

  I reminded myself that I didn’t actually have to call her anything at the moment. And even if someone she didn’t know joined us, a free spirit like Not-Rosemary wouldn’t expect a formal introduction.

  “Wonderful?” I repeated. “I’m not sure how wonderful it will be, but I hope it’s productive.”

  “Oh, it will be,” she said. “Look at the blessing you’re giving all these people.”

  “Blessing?” I echoed, distracted by a passing shopper. I wasn’t quite sure how much of a blessing it was to tempt anyone into buying a surplus milking machine and a dozen vintage 1960s troll dolls.

  “Are you familiar with feng shui?” she said. “It’s the ancient Chinese art of placement. The literal translation is ‘the way of wind and water,’ and—”

  “Yes, you gave Mother a book about it for Christmas, remember,” I said. Although considering the effect the book had had on Mother, I would have guessed the literal translation of feng shui was “Come, let us drop everything and rearrange the furniture another seventeen or eighteen times before dinner.”

  “Clutter is very significant in feng shui,” she said. “At least in dealing with Western homes. If you want to feng shui your house, the first thing you should do is get rid of clutter.”

  “Really?” I said, with genuine interest. Had Not-Rosemary finally taken up a fad that I could relate to?

  “Yes,” she said. “Clutter is bad. Blocks the house’s chi—the energy flow—and can also hold negative energy from past residents, or past owners of the clutter. If you ask me, clutter is probably the root cause of half the problems in our culture.”

  “I see,” I said. I was glad to see that she’d finally stopped blaming television and refined sugar, since I rather liked both of those.

  “So look at what your yard sale will accomplish,” she said. “What a wonderful energy clearing! Imagine all the bad karma and negative energy everyone’s getting rid of!”

  She drifted off, beaming cheerfully at everyone she passed. I wonder if it would eventually occur to her that the sellers couldn’t get rid of their cosmically blighted stuff unless some other poor soul bought it. Did the buyers get the seller’s negative energy along with the stuff, or did being sold reset an item’s karma count to zero?

  But she had helped me realize why the sellers were so happy: they were removing unwanted burdens from their lives. Okay, some of them thought it was more about making money than dry cleaning their chi, but surely even they were starting to feel not just richer but lighter and freer.

  I had a harder time understanding why the buyers were so happy, but as Mother frequently remarked, I hadn’t inherited her shopping gene. I decided to assume that everything the customers were carrying around would meet some long-felt want. Better yet, some dire need that their perilous finances would never have allowed them to meet if not for our yard sale. That would solve the karma count problem, too.

  Of course, I kept spotting the occasional person who threatened to overturn my newly created illusion—what long-felt want or dire need could my elderly aunt Catriona have for a fully functional crossbow and a video on firming her buns? I pushed the thought out of my mind.

  And I also saw a few people who seemed genuinely upset by something. I tried to suppress the urge to go and ask them what was wrong. No matter how much I wanted everyone to have a lovely time at the yard sale it wasn’t my responsibility to make it happen. I couldn’t fix everyone’s problems. I shouldn’t even try.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked Cousin Morris a few minutes later.

  “I think it’s over,” he said, his words slightly muffled because his head was buried in his hands. “The passion has gone out of our marriage.”

  Too much information, I thought, and scrambled for the right thing to say. Cousin Morris was a pleasant, mild-mannered man with gently receding hair and a gently growing tummy. Cousin Ginnie, his wife, was responsible for the tummy. She was a plump, cheerful woman whose life revolved around cooking, thanks to her career as the dessert chef for an upscale Williamsburg restaurant. They were older than I was—in their fifties—but I was fond of Morris and Ginnie, and never passed up their dinner invitations. Still, I didn’t think of them as close friends. Why was Morris confiding in me? Or was he going around saying the same thing to everyone he met? That didn’t sound like Morris.

  And I had to admit that if I had to pick a word to describe their marriage, “passion” wouldn’t be the first thing that came to mind. It wouldn’t come to mind at all. “Comfortable, though slightly boring” would have been my diagnosis—the sort of relationship so many married people fall into after a while. Did this have anything to do with my inexplicable reluctance to take the plunge with Michael? The fear that we’d eventually settle into comfortable-but-boring?

  Cousin Morris didn’t seem either comfortable or bored at the moment. He looked miserable. He had raised his head to stare at something.

  I followed his glance, and my jaw dropped. I knew Cousin Ginnie had taken a table for the yard sale but, until now, I hadn’t inspected her wares—the most incredible collection of racy lingerie I’d ever seen outside of a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue. As I watched, she took a pouf of black and fuchsia lace from a shopper half her age, demonstrated that the young woman had been holding it upside down, and gestured, with the same sweet smile she used when urging you to have another scoop of freshly whipped cream on your chocolate soufflé, toward the small tent that served as a dressing room.

  “Oh, my,” I said.

  “You see,” Morris said, shaking his head. “It’s as if she’s auctioning off our marriage, one romantic moment at a time. I thought she loved my little presents.”

  “Oh, they’re all presents from you?” I said.

  “So many wonderful Christmases, birthdays, anniversaries,” he intoned.

  “That’s very sweet,” I said.

  “Mother’s Days, Valentines Days, Easters, Halloweens, Thankgivings, Fourth of Julys, May Days, April Fool’s Days, summer and winter solistices …”

  I had to admire Cousin Morris’s romanticism, though if I were Ginnie, I’d have tried to channel him into a more diverse range of gift ideas. Still, his heart was in the right place, I thought, as he progressed from holidays to special occasions.

  “ … and graduations, and back-to-school weeks. Promotions, and awards, and of course as a welcome home whenever I return from a trip …”

  Every trip? Morris spent about half his work life on the road.

  “I think it’s wonderful,” I said. “But don’t you think that perhaps she might have decided she has too much … um …”

  “How can you have too much love?” Cousin Morris asked, sounding slightly shocked. He pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose vigorously.

  I wanted to
suggest that even if you couldn’t have too much love, you could definitely have too many black lace negligees trimmed with marabou feathers. But before I could figure out how to say it tactfully, he wandered off, still shaking his head and muttering softly.

  I should do something, I thought, but nothing came to mind, so I made a mental note to worry about it later. Considering what a hard time I had remembering mental notes just now, this amounted to the same thing as deciding not to worry about it, only with less guilt.

  As I turned to leave, I noticed a nun shopping at Cousin Ginnie’s booth. Of course, given the costume discount, she probably wasn’t a real nun, but it was still disconcerting to see her perched on the counter, her habit hiked up well over her knees as she tried on a pair of fishnet stockings.

  “Everything going okay?” I asked Michael, when I arrived back at the checkout counter.

  “Just dandy,” Michael said. “Your out-of-town relations will never grow bored while I’m around. In the past hour alone they’ve asked if I’ve ever been married before, was I breast-fed, and what were my College Board scores.”

  “Good grief,” I said. “Just tell them to mind their own business.”

  “I just say ‘not recently’ or ‘I don’t remember,’ whichever fits my mood,” he said. “That keeps them happy.”

  “Apart from that, how’s everything going?”

  Mrs. Fenniman shook the cash box at me. I took this to mean it was filling up. Michael, who had a much better sense of my priorities, pointed to a man staggering away from the checkout counter with three large boxes of stuff. I smiled. Yes, stuff was leaving. Lots of stuff.

  I took a deep breath. Maybe everything would turn out fine after all.

  “Meg?”

  I turned to find Dad and a man I didn’t recognize, carrying a large trunk toward the cashier’s table. I noticed several customers already in line glaring at them, and heard a few mutinous comments about people waiting their turns. In fact, the whole crowd was beginning to mutter.