Owls Well That Ends Well

by Donna Andrews

  “Damn,” I muttered.

  “I’ll go down and deal with it,” he said, reaching for his jeans. “So what are you planning to do today?”

  “That depends on Chief Burke,” I said. “If the crime scene people finish early enough, we might reopen the yard sale. But I’m not optimistic. At a minimum, it would be nice if they could finish processing all the boxes of stuff people collected, so we could get those off our hands.”

  “Seems reasonable.” Michael said. “But not urgent.”

  “What if people change their minds?” I said. “What if they don’t come back to pay for the stuff they’ve collected? What if they don’t even come back to pick up what they’ve already bought, and we have to hunt them down to get them to haul it away?”

  “Oh … I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” he said.

  He was gazing out of the window. I walked over to take a look.

  “Good grief,” I exclaimed. We had at least as many people milling around in the front yard as we’d had inside the yard sale at its peak the day before. And they seemed to be spillover from the back and side yard. I strolled into the dressing room (and future master bathroom), whose window looked out over the side yard, including part of the yard sale area. Yes, wall-to-wall people.

  Of course, they weren’t all prospective customers. The trucks from the local affiliates of all three networks had returned, and with no one awake to fend them off they’d driven over the front lawn to get to the yard sale, leaving large ruts behind them. Good thing we hadn’t done much landscaping yet.

  Someone had put Spike out to resume his security duty, and half a dozen teenage boys had invented a new sport—climbing over the fence, running along as Spike literally nipped at their heels, and then leaping back to safety at the last minute. Caerphilly’s answer to running with the bulls at Pamplona, and not a whole lot safer, if you asked me. Though the crowd enjoyed it, and for lack of anything interesting on the murder front, several of the news teams were busy filming it.

  “Well, let’s look on the bright side,” I said. “I’m sure we can think of one.”

  “If the chief lets us reopen the yard sale today, we’ll have an overflow crowd all ready to dash in and buy souvenirs,” Michael suggested.

  “And if he doesn’t let us reopen for days?”

  “The crowds will be even bigger when it hits the National Enquirer.”

  “Oh, and the college will love that,” I said. “Professor Turned TV Star Hosts Murder.”

  He winced.

  “Maybe I should stay out of sight until the reporters leave,” he said.

  “Good idea,” I said. “Or wear your mask again, anyhow. But at least the circus out there has one bright side.”

  “And that is?”

  “The only way I can think of to help Giles is to create reasonable doubt of his guilt,” I said.

  “Well, there’s always fingering the real culprit.”

  “Yes, that would be nice, but creating reasonable doubt will be hard enough,” I said. “So we need to poke a few holes in the stories of the other people who went into the barn. What Dad calls our skulk of suspects. And I’ve already spotted one of them in the crowd. Make that two. Chances are the whole skulk is here.”

  “And if some of them aren’t?”

  “I would find that highly suspicious and would try to find out why they are avoiding us, when I do catch up with them—which shouldn’t be all that hard in a small town like Caerphilly.”

  “So who will you start with?” he asked.

  “Depends on who is here,” I said. “But I think I see the person I’d like to start with. Over there by the Sno-Cone truck—the woman who was trying to buy the trunk. See you later.”

  I dashed downstairs and out into the yard.

  Dad occupied our front porch-turned-stage, giving his spiel on the importance of owls in the ecosystem. Not that you could hear much of what he was saying over the boombox, which was playing The Fabulous Thunderbirds’ version of “Who Do You Love?” while a chorus line of assorted owl-costumed SPOOR members performed a ragged but enthusiastic imitation of the Rockettes. Either Dad’s fellow SPOOR members had shed their reticence overnight or Dad had recruited some more uninhibited owls, probably from the ranks of my family.

  Nearby, having removed the offending branch, my lumberjack uncles had moved on to boarding up the broken window and shaking their heads over the remains of the funnel cake truck. The boom lift was once more swaying gently overhead, its four-person cargo equally divided between people busily snapping photos of the forensic crew at work and people staring greedily down at the piles of unbought stuff. Though apparently Chief Burke had forbidden Cousin Everett to take his customers directly over the crime scene today, because the platform was only wobbling along the edges of the fence. The ride would probably still offer some excitement, since Everett had delegated running the boom lift to Rob, whose ineptness with mechanical objects was legendary.

  I saw Michael, on his way to join the crowd around the funnel cake truck, waylaid by Cousin Bernie, the most obsessive of the family’s genealogists, who never really felt he knew someone until he had inspected at least half a dozen generations of his family tree. Cousin Bernie still regarded my father with profound suspicion because, through no apparent fault of his own, Dad had been orphaned as an infant. After a glass or two of wine at family gatherings, Bernie was often found staring balefully at Dad and muttering, “The man could be anyone.”

  I wondered how Bernie would react when he learned that Michael had spent nearly forty years on the planet without ever feeling the need to track down all sixteen of his great-great-grandparents.

  I left them to it and looked around for the would-be owner of the trunk. As luck would have it, not only was she still loitering by the Sno-Cone truck, she came running over when she saw me.

  “There you are!” she exclaimed. “There’s no one else around here who can answer my question.”

  “I’d be happy to try,” I said. “If you’d tell me what your question is?”

  “Where can I pick up my trunk?” she said.

  Chapter 25

  “Your trunk,” I repeated.

  “The locked trunk I bought yesterday,” she said.

  Wasn’t she getting ahead of herself? I didn’t recall that we’d completed the sale yesterday. Not to mention the small detail that the trunk was evidence in the murder investigation. Was she serious?

  “You mean the one the body was in?” I asked.

  “That’s the one,” she said. “Where is it? My husband is waiting in the van.”

  “I’m afraid you can’t pick it up yet,” I said, frowning.

  “How dare you—”

  “No one can pick anything up until the police say so,” I said.

  “And when will that be?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “When Chief Burke tells me, I’ll spread the news.”

  “This is unacceptable,” she said.

  “Tell it to the chief,” I said, through gritted teeth.

  “I need the trunk now!” she said, stamping her foot.

  “Sorry. Not much I can do.”

  “But what am I supposed to do when my auction ends?” she wailed.

  “Your auction?”

  “I’ve got it up for auction on eBay,” she said. “I’ll need to ship it to the buyer in eight days.”

  She must have deduced how I felt about the idea from my face—I certainly didn’t say anything.

  “It’s my trunk!” she said. “I can do anything I want with it.”

  “It will be your trunk when and if you buy it,” I said. “In the meantime—”

  “How much was it?” she asked, pulling out her wallet.

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t remember,” I said. “And right now figuring out who owns it is academic, don’t you think?”

  “Academic?” she echoed.

  “After all, I doubt if the police will be finished with it for a long time,” I s
aid.

  “How long?”

  “Certainly not until after the trial,” I said, with a shrug. “They’ll want it as evidence.”

  “Oh, dear,” the woman said.

  “In fact, a lot of times they hang on to the evidence until after all the appeals are finished,” I said. “It could be years.”

  She actually whimpered.

  “But don’t worry,” I said. “As soon as the police give it back, I’ll let you know. Tell me—did you see anyone else in the barn when you found the trunk? Leaving the barn, perhaps?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” she said. “I thought you said it’s mine?”

  “It’s yours when the police let us sell it, yes—you were the first one to bring it to the cash register. But if we knew more about what happened in the barn, maybe that would speed up what the police are doing. So did you see anyone else in the barn?”

  “Who should I have seen?” she asked.

  I stared at her. Was she completely clueless, or shamelessly eager to perjure herself in return for the trunk? Or possibly both?

  I decided I was wasting my time. She probably wouldn’t have noticed anything that didn’t have a price tag on it, and even if she had, no sane person would believe a word she said.

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’ll let you know about the trunk when I hear from the police.”

  In the front yard, the SPOOR contingent had segued into a new number—The Four Tops doing “Reach Out,” with the whole audience joining in to mangle the first words of the chorus into “Owl Be There.”

  On my way to check out their choreography, I passed Michael, still trying to escape from Cousin Bernie.

  “But you can learn so much from knowing your ancestors,” Bernie was exclaiming.

  “He’s right,” I said. “Like finding out that two of our Hollingworth ancestors had been hanged as horse thieves—so reassuring to know I could blame all my little peccadilloes on hereditary criminal tendencies. Which reminds me—Michael, Mother was looking for you.”

  “Right,” Michael said, looking immensely grateful. “I’ll go find her right away.”

  “The man doesn’t even know his maternal grandmother’s maiden name,” Bernie said, staring at Michael’s departing back with horror.

  “I’m sure he can look it up if he needs to,” I said.

  “He said perhaps he’d take an interest in ancestors when he had some prospect of becoming one himself,” Bernie went on.

  “Sounds sensible to me.”

  “For all you know, he could have hereditary lunacy in his family!” Bernie exclaimed.

  “Probably does,” I said. “He gets along so well with all of our clan.”

  “He could be anyone,” I heard Bernie mutter, as I turned away.

  By the time I reached the front yard, the SPOOR crew had wrapped up their final number and were receiving a well-deserved standing ovation. The mild-mannered barbershop quartet in pastel-striped jackets and jaunty straw hats waiting nearby for their turn on the stage looked quite morose. I understood how they felt. Dad and the Owlettes were a hard act to follow. In fact, most people were heading away from the stage and out into the shopping area.

  The shopping area that wasn’t even supposed to exist. Cousin Rosemary and the quilting aunt were back, along with most of the other volunteer vendors from yesterday afternoon, and a lot of new recruits. In fact, a secondary yard sale had grown up to take the place of the one the police hadn’t finished with. It was still slightly smaller than the official yard sale, but that would probably change if the police didn’t wrap up their forensics soon. The early birds had set up their tables along the front walk while the late arrivals had to content themselves with secondary aisles on either side.

  About half of the vendors were people who already had tables inside the regular yard sale and most of the rest were people I’d turned down when it became obvious that our two-acre site was already overcrowded. Looking at the stuff people had brought out for the original yard sale, I’d have bet you couldn’t possibly find a card table’s worth of unwanted junk anywhere in Caerphilly, but obviously this crew was up to the challenge. As I stood and stared, openmouthed, three more cars drove up and disgorged people who promptly erected more card tables and covered them with clutter. Although, considering how brisk sales were at some of these tables, some people’s notions of junk and clutter obviously differed greatly from mine.

  Or perhaps the buyers were vehement environmentalists, determined to find some good use for everything their neighbors would otherwise throw away.

  Along with the people cleaning out their attics, I noticed several women selling homemade jams, jellies, and assorted baked goods, and a man hawking miniature replicas of old-fashioned outhouses, complete with the traditional half moon cut in the door. If they were intended to serve some practical purpose, I couldn’t figure it out, and they certainly weren’t the kind of decorative knickknack I’d want to bring home, but people were buying them enthusiastically.

  They were buying Cousin Ginnie’s lingerie just as enthusiastically, from the number of those distinctive lavender and silver bags I kept spotting.

  “This is better than the county fair!” I overheard one woman say to another.

  “So does this go on every weekend?” the second woman asked.

  I didn’t stick around to hear the answer.

  “Meg? Why so gloomy?” came Rob’s voice from behind me.

  “Oh, nothing much,” I said, turning to find that, unlike most of the attendees, my brother had worn his costume again today. “Our yard’s become a flea market, and the woman who fainted yesterday when we found Gordon’s body in the trunk has recovered enough to badger me so she can auction it off on eBay, that’s all.”

  “She’d make a bundle,” Rob said. “You’re not letting her have it, are you? You could sell it yourself.”

  “Rob!” I exclaimed. “Do you have any idea how tacky this is?” Perhaps being a successful entrepreneur was having a bad effect on Rob’s character.

  “Come to think of it, they probably wouldn’t let you, anyway,” Rob said. “They usually make you take down something if anyone gets offended by it.”

  “Bravo,” I said.

  “But I still don’t see why you don’t sell all this stuff on eBay,” he said, waving his hand vaguely at the sale area. “Might be a lot less trouble.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t have to have this whole huge mob scene,” he said.

  I sighed, and tried to answer reasonably. And articulately. After all, perhaps there was some logical reason why he hadn’t paid attention the first twenty times I’d explained this.

  “No,” I said. “I’d only have to photograph all the stuff, answer questions about it, pack it all up for shipment, and haul it down to the Post Office or UPS.”

  “Oh,” Rob said. “Sounds like a lot of work.”

  “And, of course, some percentage of the packages would bounce back when people decided they didn’t get what they thought they were buying. No thanks. At least here, everything is nonreturnable and people provide their own transportation.”

  “Okay, I suppose you’re right,” Rob said. “But you could make a lot more money.”

  “Money isn’t everything,” I said. “There’s my sanity to think of.”

  “A bit late, if you ask me,” Rob said, sniggering.

  “Later,” I said, with the dignity one develops after twenty-five years of ignoring a younger brother. Just then I saw a camera flash several times, and glanced up to see that one of the news photographers was taking pictures of me and Rob against the background of Cousin Ginnie’s new booth. Rob sniggered and struck a more dramatic pose. I winced. Did I really want the Caerphilly Clarion to run a photo of me and Harpo Marx, apparently discussing the relative merits of a leopard-print nightie and a red lace one?

  And Cousin Ginnie’s new booth—amazing. The police still had her original booth and its remaining c
ontents locked up with the rest of the yard sale and yet here she was again, with a booth just as large and well-stocked as the original. She was just handing over change to a customer, along with one of the lavender bags Michael had mentioned, with little silver metallic hearts stamped all over it. A rather large bag.

  “Meg!” she called cheerfully. “Want to come and try a few things on?”

  “Um … maybe later,” I said. “Nice bags.”

  “Aren’t they? I did the hearts myself with a rubber stamp. I think they add a nice touch.”

  “Very nice,” I said. Also very distinctive. I had seen a lot of them around the sale. Was it prudish or sensible of me to think that if I bought something from her, the first thing I’d do was hide the bag?

  “You’d look great in this,” Ginnie said, holding up a piece of black lace that didn’t look large enough to fit a Barbie doll. “It stretches,” she added, seeing my expression.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “Don’t wait until all the best stuff is gone!” she exclaimed, waving the wisp of lace at me. “Just the thing to keep that young man of yours interested.” I stifled the impulse to tell her we were doing just fine in that department.

  “That reminds me,” I said. “What’s wrong with Morris?”

  “Morris? Nothing that I know of. Why?”

  “He seems upset; that’s all,” I said.

  “I admit, he hasn’t been himself lately,” she said, frowning slightly. “And I can’t for the life of me figure out why.”

  “I think he’s upset about your selling off your … clothes.”

  “You mean all these fripperies?” she said, waving at the rack to her right. “I told him I was going to.”

  “Yes, but I think he sees it as some kind of rejection.”

  “Rejection?”

  “I was talking to him earlier,” I said. “He was quite morose.”

  “Well, that explains a lot,” she said. “I’ve been wondering what was eating him. A couple of months back I had to tell him to please slow down on the fripperies, just until I could clear out space for new stuff.”

  “You do have a lot of, um, fripperies,” I said.

  “Mercy! I’ve got at least this much more at home,” she said, laughing. “After thirty years, I’ve got closets full of the stuff, and none of it something I can get a lot of day-to-day use out of.”