Owls Well That Ends Well

by Donna Andrews

  Our original plan was to ferry Giles back to his car, but he looked so beat that Michael suggested that we just take him home and worry about the car tomorrow. Giles didn’t protest.

  Though when we arrived at his small, mock-Tudor house, he insisted on inviting us in for sherry and, despite the late hour, I didn’t protest. I wanted to hear Giles’s side of the story. And I didn’t mind finally getting to see Giles’s study, where Michael had spent so many happy hours. I understood Michael’s point that Brits were more reserved than Americans, and didn’t invite people to their homes as readily, but I thought it was about time.

  Giles went to fetch the sherry and Michael collapsed into a shabby but comfortable-looking green plush armchair while I prowled around exploring. Giles had four of the chairs clustered together in the center of his study—the walls being completely occupied by more square feet of bookshelves than most town libraries could boast. Giles’s book collection still overflowed the shelves. Stacks of books marched along the base of the bookcases, and more mountains of books occupied every open space. Small mounds surrounded each armchair, and here and there large Indian brass trays balanced on book stacks of suitable height to form side tables, while battered corduroy cushions thrown atop low heaps of books took the place of footstools.

  Comfortable clutter, I found myself thinking. Earlier in the day, I’d have called that an oxymoron, but Giles’s study reminded me that not all clutter was irretrievably bad, and suggested that maybe some collections of things, however large and apparently disorganized, didn’t qualify as clutter. Should I feel guilty for having a double standard about clutter?

  Since nearly every square inch of wall space was occupied by books, Giles had improvised a way to display the decorations most people hung from picture hooks. He’d used those hooks designed to hold Christmas stockings on a mantel without driving a nail into the wood to suspend various objects from the front of the bookshelves. Two silver stars supported a small oil painting, a team of brass reindeer towed a pair of antique dueling pistols affixed to a polished wooden board, and a series of framed certificates of appreciation from various arcane societies floated beneath a series of brass letters spelling out the cryptic message ACNE ELOPE. I puzzled over the sequence for several minutes before realizing that he’d combined the letters in two sets of holiday hooks, one reading PEACE and the other NOEL.

  Now, I settled into another faded green chair and waited for the sneezes. Giles’s study reminded me of his office, which I had seen before. I always sneezed half a dozen times shortly after entering his office until my nose adjusted to the prevailing atmosphere of book dust and left me alone. I expected his study would have the same effect.

  “I want our library to look like this,” I said, when I’d gotten past the sneezes.

  Our future library, that is. Right now most of our books were packed in boxes and stored in Michael’s office at the college, in the Cave, or at my parents’ house. But we’d already designated one huge room on the ground floor as the library, with an adjacent room for Michael’s office. It had the potential to look just as cool as this, I thought, looking around. In fact, even cooler.

  To my surprise, Michael only looked around wistfully and nodded. Odd. Normally I was the one who would have trouble visualizing what the library could look like once we replaced the missing floor, mended the waterdamaged ceiling, and put new glass in all the boarded-up windows. Was he just tired, or was something else wrong?

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” Giles said, for the hundredth time, as he came in carrying three reasonably clean sherry glasses. “Bail bonds, criminal defense attorneys—I’m afraid it’s all rather foreign to me.”

  “No problem,” Michael said, accepting a glass of sherry.

  “Always happy to share our vast personal experience with the criminal justice system,” I added, as I held out my hand for a glass.

  “Er … right,” Giles said, handing me the sherry.

  We sipped in silence for a few minutes, while Giles wandered about the study, making minor corrections to how various books and knickknacks were arranged, muttering something about jackbooted thugs as he did so. Not really fair—the room looked in very good shape for a place the police had just finished searching from top to bottom. And he was lucky that they hadn’t felt it necessary to use fingerprint powder.

  I wondered briefly how long one should wait before asking one’s host how his arrest had gone, and then decided to dive in. If Giles hadn’t gotten used to my impatient nature by now, it was time he learned.

  “I’m amazed that they actually arrested you,” I said, which I thought was a pretty tactful opening.

  “I don’t blame them,” Giles said. “You have to admit, the evidence looks bad for me.”

  “But what about motive?” I asked. “I mean, can you really imagine someone killing someone else over a book?”

  “Well, yes,” Giles said. “I can imagine it.”

  Chapter 22

  “Giles!” I exclaimed.

  “Your lawyer will probably be happier if you don’t go around saying things like that,” Michael suggested.

  “I don’t condone it,” Giles said, sounding uncharacteristically melancholy. “It’s abhorrent to consider taking a human life for any reason, but for a mere material object? Unspeakable. But unimaginable? No. I can imagine it. A great deal more easily with a book than with some other object. Isn’t that strange?”

  “Not really,” Michael said. “You value books. I’m not sure you care about any other material objects.”

  “But not that book,” Giles said, in something closer to his normal precise manner. “For one thing, I already have a copy of The Uttermost Farthing, thank you very much. The copy Gordon found isn’t even in particularly good condition. You can see that just by looking at it.”

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  “True,” Giles said, looking pained. “I wonder if there’s enough left to judge the condition. For all I know, they only have my word on its poor condition before he tried to burn it. Stupid thing to do. It was badly worn and discolored, but it would have done for a reading copy. Though not at the price he was asking for it.”

  “What was he asking?” Michael said.

  “Eight hundred dollars,” Giles said, with some heat. “Outrageous, even if it were in mint condition. He’d have been overcharging to ask fifty for it, the blackguard.”

  He blinked suddenly, as if he’d surprised himself with the strength of his emotion. He’d certainly surprised me. Normally Giles didn’t go much beyond mild indignation.

  He shook his head and sipped his sherry.

  “I don’t know why the poor blighter annoys—annoyed me so much,” he said, in something closer to his normal dry tone of voice.

  “I do,” I said. “I heard him say he’d found a book you wanted on someone’s dollar table.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” Giles said. “That’s his business. Buying books cheaply and selling them for as much as he can get. He has a right to make a living. Why should I resent the fact that he has the time and energy to go book hunting and the expertise to recognize a valuable book when he finds one?”

  “Annoying that you didn’t get to the dollar table first,” Michael said.

  “But that’s not his fault,” Giles said.

  “Says you,” I put in. “You didn’t see him shoving his way to the head of the line.”

  “He happened to get to that table first,” Giles said. “And however annoying it would be to pay full price when he’d paid a dollar, I could afford it. If I’d wanted the book in the first place, and I didn’t. So I feel bad about resenting him so much.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “He didn’t have to gloat.”

  “Gloat?” Michael said.

  “If Gordon had been a decent salesman, he would have glossed over the fact that he only paid a dollar for the book. But he didn’t. He was gloating. Hell, if Gordon had been a really good salesman, he’d have hidden the fact that
he got it at a yard sale at all.”

  “How could he, when we were at the yard sale?” Giles asked.

  “He could have just bought it and taken it to his shop. What if he’d told you that he found it in another bookstore, and paid more than he should have, but he knew it was one you wanted for your collection? You’d feel differently then, wouldn’t you?”

  “If you ever open a used book store, I shall be very skeptical of every word you utter,” Giles said, with a pained look.

  “There’s a reason she does so well at craft shows,” Michael said.

  Giles nodded. I noticed that his face wore the forced smile that generally meant he was trying to ignore some ghastly and peculiar bit of American barbarism. I felt a fleeting twinge of irritation and realized, in one of those painful moments of self-knowledge, that I was intent on rescuing him less for his sake, or even for Michael’s, but for my own satisfaction. Once I cleared him, he’d damn well have to be grateful to me. Not that I planned to gloat or anything.

  “Getting back to the murder,” I said. “Have you remembered seeing anyone in the barn apart from the Hummel lady?”

  Giles shook his head.

  “Well, I’ll start with her tomorrow,” I said.

  “She seems an unlikely suspect,” Michael said. “Would someone really kill another human being for a Hummel figurine? Or even a whole box of them?”

  “Beats me,” I said. “Of course, I don’t even know why people would pay any money for them.”

  “You dislike Hummel?” Giles asked.

  “I don’t have anything in particular against Hummel,” I said. “Or Fiesta Ware. Or Depression glass. Or old books or seventy-eight RPM records or mint nineteen-fifties-era Barbie dolls or any of the other material possessions people collect. I just don’t get it. Sorting through Edwina’s Sprocket’s stuff for the last two and a half months makes me want to get rid of the things I have, not go out and buy more.”

  “The sense of profound estrangement from the material world,” Giles said, nodding. “In the Middle Ages, people who experienced it would give away all they had to join a convent.”

  “Or, in the nineteen-sixties, a commune,” Michael added. “Having a yard sale’s the twenty-first-century equivalent. Much less extreme.”

  “But much less satisfactory,” I said. “At least when the police interrupt it less than halfway through, before even a fraction of what we need to get rid of has been sold.”

  “If only I’d stayed home,” Giles muttered.

  “And miss all those bargains?” Michael exclaimed.

  Giles laughed ruefully, and I looked at Michael with a frown. I wasn’t sure he was kidding. I’d heard of sane people who developed gambling fever after a trip to Vegas. What if Michael developed an unhealthy obsession with yard sales as a result of ours? I had a sudden vision of him coming home weekend after weekend, covered with dust and smelling of book mold, bearing random objects that had caught his wandering eye. Faded plaster garden ornaments. Ramshackle bits of furniture that he would announce needed only a bit of work to make them good as new. Quaint vintage grocery tins and bottles, still reeking pungently of their original contents.

  No. I was thinking of Dad. Not Michael.

  Though I’d long since deduced that one thing I loved about Michael was that he shared some of Dad’s more charming enthusiasms and eccentricities, without going overboard on them.

  Yet. Was he going to age into Dad-hood? I suddenly felt a rare surge of sympathy for Mother.

  I shook myself and returned to the conversation. Or the lack of conversation. Giles and Michael were both staring into their sherry.

  “Poor blighter,” Giles muttered.

  He sounded rather melancholy. Perhaps even sad. How ironic that the only person who seemed the least bit sad over Gordon’s murder was the one Chief Burke had arrested for it.

  But then, underneath Giles’s irritation with Gordon, I sensed that they shared a deep love of books. That was one of the reasons I’d kept trying to work with Gordon when I was selling the valuable books to dealers. Every so often something—maybe just the way he’d touch an old, rare volume—would remind me that the man really did love books.

  Of course, the next second he’d do something that proved his love of books took second place to his lust for money, so I’d eventually given up trying.

  For that matter, the love of books was one of the reasons I kept trying to get to know Giles better—that and the fact that Michael liked him. So, despite my impatience, I followed their example, and sipped my sherry in silence for a few moments.

  Giles was looking around his study, as if memorizing it.

  “I shall miss all this,” he said, finally.

  “What do you mean, miss all this?” Michael asked.

  “They won’t want me around,” Giles said, taking a rather large sip of sherry—more like a gulp. “You know how they are about any kind of notoriety.”

  “Tell me about it,” Michael said, gulping his sherry as well. Michael’s brand of notoriety was to appear on national television every week, wearing tight black leather pants and a black velvet robe in his role as Mephisto, the lecherous sorcerer on a cheesy television show. It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it paid a lot better than being an assistant professor. I suspected the administration might almost prefer a nice respectable murderer.

  At least now I could feel reasonably sure that worry over tenure, not anything I’d done, was causing Michael’s down mood.

  “But Giles, you’re tenured,” I said aloud.

  “They’ll find a way,” Giles said, staring into his sherry. “Put me on administrative leave. Assign me all the eight A.M. freshman survey classes. Force me into retirement.”

  “No, they won’t,” Michael said, reaching over and clapping Giles on the shoulder. “We’ll find some way to prevent it.”

  “Chief Burke’s the one who could prevent it,” I said. “If he’d just hurry up and find the real killer, instead of wasting time on Giles.”

  “So we’ll find the killer instead,” Michael said.

  “How?” Giles asked.

  “I’m sure Meg will think of something,” he said.

  From we to me, I thought. I was tempted to say something sarcastic, but Giles reached over and grasped my hand.

  “Thank you,” he said. “If you knew how much … I mean, I can’t possibly explain … I mean.”

  “Please, you don’t have to thank me,” I said. And I wished he’d stop trying. Much as I’d wanted to break through his dry exterior, I found I didn’t enjoy seeing normally taciturn Giles struggling with the unfamiliar task of expressing an emotion. What should have been moving only felt horribly embarrassing for both of us.

  Besides, I hadn’t actually done anything yet.

  Giles fell back into his chair and stared into his sherry again.

  “We should be going,” I said. “After all, we have a long day of sleuthing ahead of us.”

  “Right,” Giles said.

  “She’s right,” Michael said. “To say nothing of the yard sale.”

  He and Giles stood up and headed for the front door.

  Before following them into the foyer, I hung back long enough to do a bit of quick redecorating, changing ACNE ELOPE to ENLACE POE, something I’d been itching to do the whole time I’d been here. I wondered how long it would take Giles to notice.

  “Sorry you have to do all this,” Michael said, as we pulled out of Giles’s driveway.

  “All this yard sale stuff or all this proving Giles innocent stuff?” I asked.

  “Both.”

  I nodded. I was sorry, too, but anything I said would only sound like complaining. I leaned back against the headrest and closed my eyes.

  “I wonder how many divorces this yard sale will cause,” I said, and then wondered if it was wise to drop something quite that ominous into the conversation. So, I told him about Morris and Ginnie.

  “Good grief,” Michael said. “When I saw the booth, I assumed s
he had one of those home selling franchises. Like Tupperware, only with lingerie.”

  “No, it’s all from her own wardrobe,” I said. “I can’t imagine selling that stuff.”

  “So you side with Morris, then?”

  “No,” I said. “I understand why she wants to declutter, but I wouldn’t set up a booth at a yard sale to do it. And I can’t imagine anyone buying the stuff.”

  “Why not?” Michael asked.

  “Secondhand lingerie?”

  “It all looked brand-new to me,” Michael said. “After all, they’re not the sort of garments you’d keep on for long, and given how large a collection she has, I doubt if she wears any one piece very often.”

  “Still, it’s the idea. Who could possibly be buying it all?”

  “Just look for the lavender bags with silver trim,” Michael said. “You can’t miss them.”

  “And you know this because … ?”

  “I’m highly observant,” Michael said. “I would never think of insulting you with secondhand lingerie.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “But I’m worried about Morris.”

  “If you like, I could talk to him,” Michael offered. “Try to get him to see it as a positive thing. That what matters is the whole experience—buying the presents, opening them, putting them on, and taking them off. Not the actual garments.”

  “Precisely,” I said. “That would be great.”

  He nodded.

  “Wonder if Ginnie takes returns,” he said, after a few moments.

  I smiled faintly at the joke. At least I hoped it was a joke. We rode for a couple of minutes in silence, and I was close to falling asleep when he spoke up again.

  “I was really hoping you could come with your mother and me tomorrow,” he said. “But I suppose it will have to wait for a while.”

  A long while.

  “Your mother really does have some interesting ideas for the house.”

  Had I ever mentioned to Michael that “interesting” was what Mother had taught us to say instead of nasty words like “ugly” or “hideous?”