Owls Well That Ends Well

by Donna Andrews

  “Frankie!” I exclaimed, racing to his side. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, frowning with impatience at this typically annoying grown-up interruption.

  “It’s your turn to be the detective,” Eric called from the top of the stairs.

  “Is there an adult around here … taking care of anything you need?” I asked.

  “Rob,” Eric said, racing up the stairs toward the third floor.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  Frankie leaped up from the floor, pointed toward the living room, and ran off after Eric.

  Evidently Dad’s definition of someone reliable to watch the boys differed greatly from mine. Rob lay on the floor of the living room with his Harpo hat pulled down against the glare from the enormous front windows. He had a tiny portable TV on his stomach and was watching a football game.

  “You’ll need cable,” Rob said. “Assuming you can even get cable here in the back of beyond. You may have to get a satellite dish. You might want to think about that before you decide whether you’re actually moving way out here.”

  Did he really think we were likely to change our minds at this point?

  “Aren’t you supposed to be babysitting the boys?” I asked aloud.

  “They’re fine,” he said, as he fiddled with the miniature TV’s rabbit ear antenna. “Having a great time.”

  “Ya got me!” Eric yelled, and then I heard something bumping down the stairs from the third floor. I stuck my head back out into the hall. Not content with a single flight of stairs, when he finally hit the second floor landing Eric improvised a series of picturesque twitches and convulsions that propelled him to the head of the main stairs and then over the edge of the top step for another histrionic descent.

  “A great time.” I echoed, when the noise of Eric’s descent had subsided.

  “Kids are pretty resilient at that age,” Rob remarked, eyes still glued to the tiny snow-filled screen.

  “And you call this watching them.”

  “I told them not to leave the house.”

  “And you think that will stop them?” I said. “Would it have stopped you at their age?”

  “I told them we’d have Popsicles at one,” Rob said. “They won’t go far. They show up every ten minutes or so to ask how much longer till one.”

  “Clever,” I said. Of course, no one had ever accused Rob of being stupid. An underachiever with no common sense, perhaps, but definitely not stupid. “What happens after one?”

  “I’ll figure something out,” Rob said. “Maybe I’ll shove a watermelon in the refrigerator and tell them it’ll be ready to cut at two.”

  “You don’t have to keep them in the house, you know,” I said. “Just out of trouble.”

  “In the house is better,” Rob said. “Did you know those two were running a protection racket?”

  “Eric and Frankie?”

  “Demanding a quarter to keep an eye out and prevent Everett from picking up the portable toilets while people were inside.”

  “Those rascals!” I said. “They were there when I told Everett he was banned from the yard sale if he even tried to pick up another toilet.”

  “Little thieves,” Rob muttered. “No Popsicles for them until I get my quarter back.”

  “Just keep them out of the dining room,” I said, heading back out into the hall. “Chief Burke’s using it for his interrogations.”

  “Roger,” Rob said.

  I deposited the chairs and went outside to liberate a reasonably empty table. One of the card tables from the picnic area would do, I decided.

  “You do realize that costume is a slur on devout Paganism,” I heard a voice say at my elbow. I turned to see a small, plump woman dressed in flowing pastel tie-dyed robes and wearing several pounds of ankhs, peace symbols, pentagrams, yin-yang signs, and other assorted amulets around her neck.

  I was about to ask her what devout Pagans had against Groucho, until I realized she wasn’t talking to me but to Aunt Josephine, in her traditional witch costume. A bit stereotypical but effective, since even in ordinary dress Aunt Josephine bore a strong resemblance to the movie version of the Wicked Witch of the West.

  “I beg your pardon,” Aunt Josephine said, looking down her long, pointed nose at the woman. “Were you casting aspersions on my personal appearance?”

  I left them to it. Aunt Josephine was quite capable of defending herself verbally, and for all I knew, equally capable of turning her attacker into a toad.

  I made my way to the far end of the fenced-in area, past the line of people waiting to check out. I nodded with satisfaction to see that many of them were still avidly perusing the tables at a distance—some of them were even taking notes. Or were they watching the police? Probably both. I collided with one woman dressed as a pregnant angel, who had inched forward a good six feet from her assigned place in line to stare avidly at one of the tables of books.

  “Sorry,” she said, straightening her halo, which had been knocked askew. “My fault. Any idea when they’ll let us get on with it?”

  “I wish I knew,” I said.

  “Damned shame if they arrest that professor,” she said. “Doesn’t look like the type who would hurt a fly. Of course, it’s a damned shame they have to arrest anyone. Ought to give whoever did it a medal for performing a public service.”

  “I take it you weren’t fond of Gordon-you-thief,” I said.

  “Gordon-you-thief!” she exclaimed. “That’s perfect.”

  “You’ve bought books from him, too?”

  “Competed with him, actually,” she said. “I’m a bookseller. Used to go on the occasional booking expedition with him, until I found out what he was like. Do you know what he did to me?”

  She stopped peering at the books and turned to me.

  “We were visiting a couple of used bookstores—the kind where they don’t really know what’s valuable, and you can pick up something for a few bucks that’s worth much more. In the first one, he told me the parking meter was about to run out, but he could use some more time—so how about if he fed the meter another hour’s worth of quarters, and then after that hour we could go on to the next store, a mile or two away. But the minute we walked into the second store, the owner said, ‘Gordon, what’s wrong—did you forget something? You just left a couple of minutes ago.’”

  “Sneaky,” I said, shaking my head.

  “That was the last time I went booking with him.”

  “So it wasn’t just his customers who might want to kill him,” I said. “Any other dealer who knew him would, too.”

  “Definitely,” she said, with a laugh. “Maybe I should work on my alibi.”

  She turned away and resumed her long-distance book scanning.

  “You want to know who I think killed him?” she said, over her shoulder. “Ralph.”

  “Ralph?”

  “His ex-partner,” she said. “Ralph Endicott.”

  “They didn’t part on good terms?”

  She laughed.

  “Have you seen him here today?” I asked.

  She straightened up, shaded her eyes with one hand, and scanned the crowd.

  “Over there by the lemonade stand,” she said. “The tall man in the brown corduroy jacket and jeans.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I smiled to myself. I recognized Ralph, the ex-partner, as one of the people who’d gone into the barn, presumably to see Gordon.

  I stopped off long enough to point out the bookseller and the ex-partner to Sammy as possible suspects, then wrestled the card table into the house and lugged it into the dining room. Of course the dining room was the only logical choice for the chief’s interrogations. With a house full of relatives, we weren’t giving up access to the refrigerator, so the kitchen was out. The living room didn’t have a door to close it off from the hallway, only a wide, open archway, so even if we convinced Eric and Frankie to rehearse their Tarzan yells and hyena laughs outdoors so the chief would have peace and quiet, h
e wouldn’t have much privacy. No, the dining room was the place.

  Especially since the chief probably didn’t know that we had a dumbwaiter running from the basement up to the dining room and then on to the master bedroom above. A dumbwaiter that carried sounds reasonably well. I set the table right in front of the dumbwaiter door, then went to the kitchen, filled a pitcher with ice water, and set it on the table, with a couple of glasses. A nice hospitable touch to make it less likely that the chief would move the table.

  I was about to check to see if the dumbwaiter door was latched—it had an unnerving habit of drifting slowly open if we left it unlatched—when I heard the chief coming down the hall, so I hurriedly leaped away and was standing across the room, gazing out the window, when the chief entered.

  “Will this do?” I asked.

  “Just fine,” the chief said. “Where’s your phone, anyway? My cell phone’s not getting great reception out here.”

  “We don’t have one yet,” I said.

  “I’d have thought you’d find a phone pretty useful, all the time you’ve been spending out here,” he said, frowning.

  “We did,” I said. “And so did the Sprockets. After paying several hundred dollars in long distance charges that we knew but could not prove were made by various visiting Sprockets, we had the line disconnected.”

  The chief frowned and nodded.

  “Sounds about par for the course with those Sprockets,” he said. “Can’t tell you how relieved I was that none of them were moving in here.”

  Considering how much I annoyed the chief, that certainly said a lot about the Sprockets.

  “Anything else you need?” I asked. “Shall I fetch anyone?”

  “Sammy can do that,” the chief said. “Don’t worry; if we need anything, we’ll let you know.”

  He smiled, and stood in the center of the room, motionless, in what I deduced was a subtle hint that my presence was no longer needed.

  I walked out of the room slowly, looking behind me as I went, in a deliberate show of reluctance. Of course, I hadn’t really expected the chief to let me stay, but he’d be suspicious if I didn’t at least try to lurk nearby.

  I decided to check outside to make sure no one needed me before taking up my eavesdropping vantage point. And if the chief saw me outside, all the better.

  Outside, I saw that the fenced-in area was nearly empty—of people, that is; the Army of Clutter was still there in all its glory. Two acres, covered almost entirely with stuff. Tables piled high with stuff. Boxes filled with stuff. Aisles and rows and huge messy clusters of larger stuff. Enough racks of clothes to stock a department store, if any of the garments were still in style and in reasonable condition. Several thousand books, though that number would probably shrink to several hundred if we didn’t count duplicate copies of The Da Vinci Code and a handful of other recent bestsellers. Three or four houses’ worth of furniture, some of it actually sound enough for use. All lying peacefully in the autumn sunshine, undisturbed except for the small area where the local evidence technician was industriously photographing the contents of a table while Cousin Horace meticulously dusted the contents of the adjacent table for fingerprints.

  I hoped that there was something special about those particular tables. If they followed the same process with the whole two acres, Michael and I would have to bequeath the chore of finishing the yard sale to our grandchildren.

  The job of clearing out the customers was going much faster. Michael and his checkout crew were nearing the end of the line, and most of the open space inside the fence, along with the corner we’d planned to use as a picnic area, now contained neat, orderly rows of boxes, each carefully labeled with the name of the person who’d either bought the contents or would be buying them, if they bothered returning when the police allowed us to open again. The uniformed officers were progressing more slowly with questioning the departing customers, but still making visible progress. As I watched, they let two uncostumed people go free, while an officer escorted a Nixon up to the house—presumably for further questioning by the chief.

  Of course, that didn’t mean that our lawn was in any danger of becoming deserted. Most of the people who’d been allowed to leave the yard sale area were still hanging around outside the fence, watching the police, and window-shopping. I wondered if the police inside found the circle of impassive Nixons, Draculas, and Grouchos as unnerving as I did.

  From the size of the crowd I suspected some of the people milling around our yard had only arrived after news of the murder spread through the county. Especially the ones wielding cameras and binoculars. The cousins who’d been running the concession stand inside the fence had scrounged up more grills and food, and were doing a brisk business. The occasional squeal of feedback emanated from the side yard, where the as-yet-unnamed band formed by one of Eric’s older brothers was tuning up and preparing to satisfy their largely unfulfilled passion for playing to a live audience. Apparently the medical examiner had departed without allowing Dad to accompany him, and Dad had consoled himself by organizing an owl pellet dissection project. Several dozen children and teenagers and even a few bemused adults were diligently hacking and sawing on owl pellets with disposable plastic knives borrowed from the concession stand. Mother, by contrast, was circulating like the hostess at a floundering party, apologizing for the disruption and urging people to have some lemonade while they waited for the yard sale to reopen.

  The press had arrived in force. I recognized the reporter from the Caerphilly Clarion, and the crews from the local TV and college radio stations stood out in the crowd because of all the equipment they were lugging. I had to chase several of the television trucks out of the side yard, though not before they had destroyed what little resemblance it had to a grassy lawn.

  “Ah, well,” Michael said, when he saw me staring at the impressive new ruts. “We probably needed to rototill that part of the lawn anyway. By the way, is that one of the uncles who shouldn’t be wandering around by himself?”

  “Uncle Ned? Not that I know of,” I said, looking over at the uncle in question. “Why, what’s he been doing?”

  “Coming up and spouting gibberish at me,” Michael said.

  “Oh, that’s not gibberish,” I said. “Farsi, Arabic, and I think I heard he’d taken up Mandarin. He’s testing to see if you react. Always on the lookout for foreign spies, Uncle Ned.”

  “Probably not a good time to practice my French or Vietnamese, then,” he said.

  “No, and probably just as well to keep him away from Giles,” I said. “Uncle Ned still hasn’t forgiven the British for burning the White House in the War of 1812.”

  “Right,” he said, nodding. “Should those people be climbing on the fence?”

  Dozens of people were spread-eagled against the deer fencing, like bugs on a windshield, as if pressing every square inch of their bodies as close as possible to the barrier would get them inside faster. We’d had a cat once who did that with screen doors when she wanted to come inside. She’d even leap up to plaster herself as high on the door as possible, the better to be seen, which hadn’t done a whole lot for the condition of our screen door. Sure enough, one of the onlookers started to do much the same thing, but the deer fencing began to collapse under his weight, and Michael went over to help the uniformed officers remove him from the fence.

  Cousin Everett was doing a brisk business with the boom lift, sending small groups of people up on the platform and then waving them gently over the yard sale area. Hard to tell, at this distance, whether they were reporters, avid bargain hunters scoping out the merchandise, or just thrill-seekers, but he had dozens of people waiting in line for their turns.

  Everett had apparently found time, before he began giving rides, to deposit a party of volunteer roofers on top of the house. As I watched, several of my uncles rolled back one of the tarps, ready for another attempt to patch the last of the roof leaks. I suspected we’d eventually have to break down and replace the entire roof. But th
e longer we postponed that, the better we would be able to afford it. In the meantime, the uncles were having fun; they’d found a productive use for all the leftover shingles everyone had in their garages and sheds, and I had decided that the random mixture of shingle colors gave the house a festive patchwork look.

  But none of this chaos was bringing us any closer to getting rid of our mountains of stuff, I thought, with a sigh.

  “Meg?”

  I turned to see Cousin Horace and a uniformed officer standing behind me.

  Chapter 12

  “Horace,” I said. “How’s the forensic examination going?”

  “Now, Meg,” he said. “You know I can’t reveal confidential information.”

  “I wasn’t asking for confidential information,” I said. Not yet, anyway. “I just asked how it was going. If you want to cheer me up, tell me you’re almost finished and we can restart the yard sale soon.”

  “You don’t want me to lie to you, do you?”

  I sighed.

  “We’re supposed to get some reinforcements from Richmond,” he said. “More technicians to help us process the crime scene. But even when they get here, it’ll go a lot faster if we aren’t interrupted by all those people hanging on the fence and knocking it down. Not to mention trying to sneak under it.”

  “Fat chance doing that,” I said. “Did you see the length of the pegs Dad used to tack the bottom down? We’ll be lucky if we ever get some of them up; we’ll probably have to cut the damned fence away.”

  “Yeah, we expect when they figure out they can’t pull it up, they’ll start trying to cut it,” Horace said. “We were wondering if you could help us keep them away.”

  “Me?”

  “Well, you did it before the yard sale started,” Horace said.

  “Wasn’t me,” I said. “But I’ll go get Spike. Find a bullhorn or something and tell the crowd to step behind the outer fence, or I won’t be responsible for the consequences.”