Owls Well That Ends Well

by Donna Andrews

I added Sammy and the cousin dressed as a ballerina to the checkout line detail. Michael and Sammy did the heavy work of boxing up the items while Mrs. Fenniman, the ballerina, and the white rabbit continued writing up sales slips.

  I tried to recruit Horace, but the chief had already deputized him to help with the crime scene examination, since Caerphilly only had one part-time evidence technician. Dad, who devoured mysteries and loved the idea of being involved in a real-life crime, kept dashing around, trying to be everywhere at once. I hoped he’d found someone reliable to watch Eric and Frankie. I couldn’t tell if he was seething with jealousy that Horace was participating in the investigation or vibrating with eagerness at the thought of interrogating Horace later. He’d badger me with questions, too, I thought, with a sigh. Dad had convinced himself and almost everyone we knew that I was a brilliant amateur sleuth. Unfortunately, Chief Burke was one of the few holdouts. The more I could keep Dad out from underfoot, the happier the chief would be.

  For that matter, I planned to be as helpful as possible to the chief when I couldn’t stay out of his way entirely. I raced to clear one of our two checkout tables when he asked for some place to serve as a collection point for the evidence they found—so far, only the half-burnt book.

  “You go on down to the barn and get started,” the chief told Horace—who had shed his beloved gorilla suit, apparently in the interest of looking more professional.

  “And be careful,” I said.

  The chief raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Tell all your officers to be careful in there,” I said. “The barn’s old, and run down, and we’re not sure it’s structurally sound. No one was supposed to go in there.”

  “Ah,” the chief said. “That’s the reason for the KEEP OUT signs. Makes sense. Knowing those Sprockets, it’s a mercy the whole thing didn’t fall down years ago.”

  “If Gordon had paid any attention to the signs, maybe he’d be alive today,” I said. “Of course, a whole lot of other people ignored them as well.”

  “Such as?” the chief said, taking out a small notebook.

  “I don’t know all their names,” I said. “Barrymore Sprocket probably knows more than I do—he went in and tried to chase Gordon out, with no success.”

  “We’ll talk to him,” the chief said, scribbling notes. “Right now, just tell me who you saw.”

  “The Hummel lady, for one,” I said, pointing to her. “I don’t know her name, but that’s her, over there in the flowered dress.”

  The chief nodded, and scribbled in his notebook. Why couldn’t he satisfy my curiosity by exclaiming, “Oh, you mean Mrs. So-and-so?”

  “Then there was a man in a gigantic Mexican sombrero,” I said. “He’s probably still around somewhere. And a tall man in a brown jacket. And one of the Gypsies—we have quite a lot of Gypsies, so I’m not quite sure which one. Oh, and Giles might have gone in to talk to him about a book.”

  He couldn’t claim I’d left out Giles. But had my casual manner made Giles seem less suspicious or more? The chief just kept scribbling.

  “Of course, I didn’t necessarily see everyone who went into the barn,” I said. “I was trying to keep the yard sale running. There could have been dozens of others.”

  “Hmm,” the chief said, looking up from his notebook. “Somehow I suspect you didn’t miss much.”

  Just then Horace returned, escorting a uniformed officer who held something in his latex-gloved hands.

  The other owl-shaped bookend.

  “We found it in the barn, sir,” the officer said, placing it on the evidence table. “Appears to be a match for the murder weapon.”

  Of course, Giles picked that moment to stroll up.

  “I didn’t know you were closing so early,” he said, blinking with confusion at the general exodus toward the checkout line. “I don’t suppose—oh, there it is. Have you found the other one as well?”

  He was pointing, of course, at the owl-shaped bookend.

  “Is this yours, sir?” Chief Burke asked, with narrowed eyes.

  “Er … no, not exactly,” Giles said, blinking with confusion. “Not yet anyway. I suppose it belongs to Dr. Langslow. I got it from his table, anyway. I was planning to buy it.”

  I winced. To someone who didn’t know him well, Giles’s stammer and his unwillingness to meet the chief’s eyes probably smacked of guilt. I realized that this was simply his normal behavior when forced to talk to anyone he didn’t know very well about any subject other than nineteenth-century English poetry, but just how well did Chief Burke know Giles?

  “And just what did you do with it in the meantime?” the chief asked.

  “Carried it around with me,” Giles said. “Them, actually—there’s another one someplace. I don’t suppose you’ve found it, eh? Anyway, I’m afraid I threw them down after I lost my temper with that beastly Gordon McCoy.”

  “And one of them struck Mr. McCoy,” the chief said, nodding.

  “Good heavens no!” Giles exclaimed. “Just threw them down—over there in the barn. Although a few minutes ago, when I returned to look—”

  He took a step or two in the direction of the barn and the chief headed him off by stepping in his path, the way a Border collie would guide a large and rather flustered sheep.

  “The barn’s off-limits,” the chief said. “Just what were you and Mr. McCoy quarreling about?”

  “It wasn’t a quarrel,” Giles said. “He offered to sell me a book at an exorbitant price, and I told him I wouldn’t pay that much even if I wanted it, and I already had a copy. And then he said something rude, and I replied in kind and threw the bookends down in a temper. And when I returned later to apologize and reclaim my bookends, I couldn’t find him or them.”

  I sighed. Giles sounded less nervous now, and more like his usual dry, precise self. Unfortunately, under the circumstances, dry and precise sounded more like stuffy and condescending.

  “Is this the book?” the chief said, indicating the Freeman book on the evidence table.

  “Good heavens,” Giles said. “The swine. I didn’t think he’d actually do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Burn it,” Giles said. “He said if I didn’t buy it, he might as well burn it—I thought he was just joking. I never imagined …”

  He reached out to touch the book—I had the impression he wanted to comfort it—but the chief grabbed his arm.

  “Hands off,” the chief said. “That’s evidence.”

  “Evidence?” Giles echoed. “What—?”

  “I hear you have a body for me,” said a voice behind us.

  “Coroner’s here, chief,” Sammy announced, unnecessarily.

  “Body?” Giles looked pale.

  “We’re investigating the murder of Gordon McCoy,” the chief said. “I’m afraid I have a few more questions for you, Professor Rathbone.”

  Giles didn’t faint, but I suspect it was a close call.

  Chief Burke looked up and noticed that the small crowd of kibitzers had grown larger. He frowned.

  “Meg,” he said. “I need a place where I can talk to these people. Someplace more private.”

  “You can use the house,” I said. “The dining room would work. There’s no furniture, though.”

  “Can we have a room with furniture, then?” the chief asked.

  “None of them have furniture yet,” I said. “At least the dining room has a floor. I can haul in one of the card tables and a few folding chairs; we have plenty of those.”

  “That would be fine,” the chief said, and waved his hand as if dismissing me to go set up his interrogation room.

  I’d have been more irritated if I hadn’t seen Mrs. Burke, standing behind him, hands on her hips, and a frown on her face.

  “Henry,” Mrs. Burke began, in a warning tone. “What kind of high-handed stunt are you pulling, shutting down the yard sale like this? Don’t tell me there’s some county ordinance about yard sales that you’ve suddenly decided to enforce.”

 
; “Don’t start with me, Minerva,” the chief said. “It’s not my fault that no-account Gordon McCoy managed to get himself murdered right in the middle of these good people’s yard sale.”

  “Gordon McCoy!” Mrs. Burke exclaimed. “Well, God rest his soul, but if we had to have someone murdered … I suppose there’s no help for it, then; you can’t argue with a murder, can you?”

  With that, she trotted off to take her place in the checkout line.

  I went over to snag a few folding chairs from some of the now-idle sellers.

  As I was picking up the chairs, I overheard someone talking in the checkout line.

  “If I were the chief, I’d take a good look at that wife of his,” a voice said.

  Chapter 10

  I froze so I could hear better, all the while envying dogs their ability to swivel their ears in any direction.

  “His own wife?” a second voice exclaimed. “You can’t really think Minerva—”

  “No, silly, Gordon’s wife.”

  “Carol? I thought she and Gordon split up two years ago.”

  I pretended to find something wrong with the chair I was about to fold, and risked a look over my shoulder. One of the Marie Antoinettes we’d been watching so closely as a possible shoplifter was leaning toward a stout, gaudily dressed Gypsy.

  “It was five,” Marie Antoinette said. “And they reconciled; but now they’ve split up again, and this time it looks permanent.”

  “Very permanent, with him dead and all.”

  “Well, naturally,” Marie Antoinette said. “I mean it was looking permanent, before Gordon was killed. They were fighting over property, and Carol swore he was hiding assets from her.”

  “And was he?”

  “For heaven’s sake, it’s Gordon we’re talking about,” Marie Antoinette said, tossing her fluffy white wig. “Of course he was hiding assets.”

  “Troll,” the Gypsy muttered.

  “But she’s been going about it the wrong way. She should have just hired a private investigator to follow the jerk. But she’s been trying to do it all herself.”

  “Maybe she can’t afford to hire anyone?”

  “Well, that’s possible. But at least she shouldn’t have run around doing things that probably made the judge think she was a nutcase.”

  “What kind of things?” the Gypsy asked.

  “She broke into his house,” Maria Antoinette said. “And got caught.”

  They both shook their heads.

  “So if you ask me, Chief Burke is barking up the wrong tree, hassling that poor Professor Rathbone,” Marie Antoinette continued, jerking her head toward where the chief was still talking to a stricken-looking Giles. “They should look at Carol.”

  “How does killing Gordon help Carol find his hidden assets?” the Gypsy asked.

  “If he’s dead, and they’re still married, she doesn’t need to worry about finding them, silly. They’re all hers now.”

  “Unless he’s hidden them so well that no one ever finds them,” the Gypsy suggested.

  Or unless she was the one who murdered him.

  “Wouldn’t that be something?” Marie Antoinette exclaimed, and they both giggled. I suspected that however much they disliked Gordon they weren’t overly fond of Carol either.

  I folded the chair and turned toward the house. I realized that I might have a very good chance of prying information out of Carol, since I probably had a good idea where Gordon had hidden his assets. Several times, while delivering things to the bin we’d rented at the Spare Attic, an off-site storage place, I’d run into Gordon coming from or going to a nearby bin. He’d looked anxious when he noticed I’d seen him. If I could find Carol, maybe I could trade her this information in return for the inside scoop on what she’d seen in the barn.

  Of course, the ethical thing to do was to tell the chief what the two women had been saying and share my knowledge of Gordon’s storage bin with him.

  Later. Assuming I could pry the chief away from his intense conversation with Giles.

  “Damn!” I muttered.

  “What’s wrong, Meg?”

  I looked up to see that Dad had returned. Alone.

  “Eric and Frankie—” I began

  “Taken care of,” he said, waving genially.

  “Fine,” I said. Giles was still talking to the chief. I shook my head and stuck a folding chair under each arm.

  Giles was pointing toward the barn.

  “Damn the man,” I muttered.

  “What’s wrong?” Dad asked.

  “Someone should tell Giles not to talk to the police without a lawyer,” I said.

  “You think he had something to do with the murder?”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t imagine him having anything to do with the murder, but I don’t think Chief Burke agrees. If Giles doesn’t watch out, he’ll get arrested.”

  “Oh, dear,” Dad said. “He seems like such a nice man.”

  “Very nice,” I said. “And he thinks Michael deserves tenure.”

  “So do I, naturally,” Dad said.

  “Yes, but you’re not on his tenure committee,” I said. “Giles is.”

  Dad frowned.

  “But I thought Giles was an English professor,” he said.

  “He is,” I said. “So is Michael, technically. The drama department, being small, is technically a subgroup of the English department.”

  “How odd,” Dad said. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  I sighed, and rubbed my forehead. The slight headache I’d been trying to ignore suddenly felt worse. I could have sworn I’d explained this to most of my family several times already. Maybe I’d just fretted about it so much that it seemed as if I’d told them.

  “Depends on your point of view,” I said. “If you ask me, most of the English professors—the tenured ones, anyway—are stuffy, pompous bores. Of course, I could be prejudiced by the fact that they all look down their noses at their colleagues in the drama section of the department.”

  “That must be annoying.”

  “Worse than annoying,” I said. “Every year or two, they try to eliminate all but the driest and most academic of drama courses. Which would also let them eliminate all those déclassé theater people like Michael.”

  “Oh, dear,” Dad said. “So Michael’s job isn’t safe?”

  “Well, it is and it isn’t,” I said. “The college administration always reinstates the canceled classes—they’re too popular to kill. But while the administration wants the prestige of having an award-winning theater arts program and the fees the drama classes bring, they could care less if any of the faculty responsible ever get tenure. So far, in the past thirty years, not a single one has.”

  “That doesn’t sound promising,” Dad said, staring at the house as if the connection between Michael’s tenure and our ability to continue paying the mortgage had begun to dawn on him.

  “Doesn’t mean Michael would be unemployed if he didn’t get tenure,” I said. “He’d almost certainly be welcome to stay around indefinitely, as a lecturer or something. On a suitably tiny salary, with no benefits to speak of. That helps the bottom line almost as much as those popular courses he teaches.”

  “The college’s bottom line, you mean.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It wouldn’t help our bottom line at all—not that that’s the most important thing. I could make up the difference with my blacksmithing if I had to, though that would certainly slow down the house project. But if Michael doesn’t get tenure, he might not want to stay on, and it can be hard for someone refused tenure to get a good teaching job anywhere else. And much as he likes acting, it’s teaching he really loves.”

  “So this is where Giles comes in,” Dad said. “He’s pro-Michael.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “When Michael arrived, they took a look at his background—the soap opera stuff, mainly—and made the mistake of assuming he was a lightweight. So they didn’t figure they had to pack his tenure committee with curmudgeo
ns—they gave him a bunch of honest, if slightly pedantic, professors. And so far, Michael has won them over. He has the credentials; he publishes regularly; he’s jumping through all the hoops. His committee loves him—he and Giles have even become friends—but the department is running scared. If Chief Burke arrests Giles and gives the department fuddy-duddies an excuse to force him off the committee, they’ll replace him with one of the hardliners, and Michael will have no chance at tenure.”

  Just then, Chief Burke looked up from his conversation with Giles and frowned at me. I picked up the chairs, waved them, smiled, and then turned toward the house.

  “Don’t worry,” Dad said. “I’m sure there are other suspects.”

  “A whole flock of them,” I said.

  “No, not a flock,” Dad said, frowning. “Ah! I’ve got it! A skulk. Like a skulk of foxes.”

  “A skulk of suspects,” I said. “Works for me. But just in case Chief Burke disagrees, get Michael to call that defense attorney he knows.”

  “The one who represented Rob when he got arrested?”

  “That’s the one,” I said.

  Dad scurried off and I focused on the chairs.

  As I lugged them along, I realized that it had been several weeks since Michael had complained about anything going on in his department. Not a good sign. When he was feeling generally optimistic about how his career was going, he’d vent about small day-to-day irritations. When he thought something was going badly, he clammed up about work. Which was what he’d been doing recently. If I hadn’t been so crazed over the upcoming yard sale, I’d have noticed. I should have noticed.

  I vowed to make up for this as soon as possible, thus fending off a full-scale attack of the guilts that I didn’t have time for right now.

  While I was crossing the soaring front hall, I heard the patter of sneaker-clad feet from the landing above.

  “Bang!” piped a small voice.

  “Argh! You got me!”

  Chapter 11

  I glanced up to the second floor landing and saw Frankie, Chief Burke’s grandson, minus his Darth Vader mask but still swathed in the long black robes, standing at the head of the main stairs, clutching his side. Then he fell over and bumped slowly and noisily down the whole twelve-foot length of the main staircase before landing with a thump in the front hall.