Owls Well That Ends Well Part 18

Or maybe I just liked them because they were bare. Only the sleeping bag, pillows, and an alarm clock to mar the beautiful emptiness; and I could roll up the sleeping bag neatly and put it and the pillows in the closet for the day.

Of course, I'd have to wait until Michael got up.

I talked myself out of going down to tidy the kitchen. The itch to tidy was only a symptom. Tidying the already tidy house wasn't what I really wanted.

I wanted to clear the two acres of junk out of our backyard, and I wanted to clear Giles of murder. The junk would have to wait until the police released the scene.

So what could I do about the murder?

I took out my notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe. Which Michael sometimes calls my security blanket. He's not far wrong. It's certainly my way of imposing order on an unruly world. Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I take out the notebook and make sure I've written down everything I have to do or remember. No matter how dauntingly long the list is, I know I'll feel better once I have each task pinned down in ink and captured between the notebook's covers. In the last few months, especially when Michael was away on his acting trips, I sometimes felt the notebook was the only thing that kept me sane.

I'd been scribbling for a long time when Michael finally turned over and yawned.

"Morning," he said, with a sleepy smile.

In fact, a downright inviting smile, and I was tempted to rejoin him in the sleeping bag. Just then the boom lift platform appeared outside the window, carrying half a dozen of my uncles and cousins wearing plaid flannel s.h.i.+rts and toting saws. They waved cheerfully before settling down to the fascinating task of removing the dead oak branch.

Michael sighed and waved back.

"I've put curtains really high on my to-do list," I said. "And meanwhile, I need to ask you something."

"Ask away," he said.

"What do you know about Mrs. Pruitt?"

"Who?" he said, frowning and sitting up.

"Ginevra Brakenridge Pruitt," I said. Shouted, actually; the volunteer lumberjacks had started their chain saw.

"The Poet Laureate of Caerphilly?"

"Is she?"

"Well, not officially," he said. "And I suspect the administration would love to downplay her connection to the college, if it weren't for all that money she left them. The whole student demonstration thing was pretty embarra.s.sing."

"Demonstration?" Caerphilly's students were notoriously apolitical. "When did the students demonstrate, and what did it have to do with Mrs. Pruitt?"

"Back in the late seventies," Michael said. "I wasn't here, but I've heard all about it. They protested against having to sing the school song at graduation."

"Let me guess: Mrs. Pruitt wrote it."

"All five interminable verses," Michael said. "The administration appointed a commission to study the suitability and political correctness of the lyrics, and declared a moratorium on singing it until the commission finished its work. And since the commission's last meeting was held in 1981 ..."

"So that's why we all hum along instead of singing the school song at college events," I said. "I've been meaning to ask."

"In my opinion, which counts for very little around the English department-"

"But a great deal here in the sane world."

"She's unreadable. Not that I've tried recently, but I did, back when I was new on campus, and hoping to make a good impression on people like Schmidt. I know that sounds pretty ridiculous," he said, frowning slightly when I began laughing.

"No," I said, wiping my eyes. "I'm laughing because I tried the same thing, before the first time you took me to a faculty bash. I looked up some of the people you told me were important and tried to bone up on their subjects. I should have remembered Schmidt from that. And you're right. She's completely unreadable."

"So under the circ.u.mstances," Michael said, smiling again, "I imagine the only person in Caerphilly who cares much about Mrs. Pruitt would be Arnold Schmidt."

"The world's leading scholar of her oeuvre," I said, nodding.

"Probably the world's only scholar of her oeuvre," Michael said. "He's built his career on a.n.a.lyzing her work."

Outside the window, the chainsaw sputtered into silence and was replaced by a lively quarrel between several of the amateur tree surgeons over where to make their next incision.

"Would he kill to protect his career?" I asked.

"I don't know," Michael said. "I suppose he might, but I can't imagine how Gordon McCoy could have anything to do with Mrs. Pruitt or Schmidt's career. Gordon doesn't-didn't do anything without a financial motive, remember, and how could you possibly make any money from a long-dead poetess n.o.body reads anymore?"

"Isn't the word 'poetess' rather antiquated?" I asked.

"And Mrs. Pruitt isn't?"

"True. Anyway, Schmidt said Gordon was rumored to have found a cache of Pruitt's papers," I said. "Which he wanted to buy, of course."

"Well, it's not as if he'd have any compet.i.tion," Michael said. "The college certainly wouldn't care. But even at Gordon's prices, he could afford them. No need to kill for that. And I have a hard time imagining Schmidt doing anything violent. For that matter, I have a hard time imagining him doing anything even mildly energetic."

"Hmmm," I said. "Still, I have this feeling he's hiding something."

"Something reprehensible, I hope," Michael said, crawling out of the sleeping bag. "He's one of the department's worst sn.o.bs."

We heard a loud cracking noise outside.

"Timber!" several of the volunteer lumberjacks shouted.

I glanced up at the window, but couldn't see anything except several of my uncles flinching as something-presumably the dead branch-landed below, with a lot of cras.h.i.+ng sounds. Also breaking gla.s.s sounds. Then the uncles glanced up at me with sheepish looks on their faces.

"How bad is it?" I asked, as Michael peered out of the window.

"We'd probably have had to replace that window anyway," Michael said. "Whoever owned the funnel cake truck will be upset, but it's not as if they had our permission to park it on our lawn, so we're probably fine."

"d.a.m.n," 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 a.s.sorted 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 gla.s.s 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?"