An Owl Too Many (8 page)

By the time Peter got off the phone, the president and Winifred had come in. “The state police are putting out an alert,” he told them.

“Not enough,” barked Svenson. “Shandy, car. Binks, stay.”

“But I—” she began to protest.

“Hold fort. Answer the phone. Calthrop, guard.”

“Yes, sir!”

The young botanist spoke up manfully, no doubt eager to redeem himself after his rather unfortunate showing with regard to the red squirrel. Peter gave Knapweed an encouraging nod and darted out to his car before Svenson could beat him into the driver’s seat.

They’d judged from the direction of the tire tracks on the road that the kidnappers’ car, if in fact it was one, had headed away from Lumpkinton toward the neighboring town of Whittington. That road was never well-traveled, Peter remembered miles of nothing but woods. “Let’s try it,” he said, and Svenson agreed.

They met only a few cars, mooching along at low speeds and carrying only leaf-peepers out to admire what was left of the autumn foliage. There was precious little of that by now, the searchers were able to see a fair way into the woods. It was Svenson who spotted the flash of bright emerald green.

“Stop!”

“By George!”

Peter pulled over to the side of the road, shoved the car keys into his pocket, and got momentarily snared in his seat belt. Svenson charged ahead into the underbrush like a wild boar spoiling for a fight. To his manifest regret, not a malefactor was in sight. Once they got her blindfold off, however, Viola was ever so glad to see them. She couldn’t say so because she still had a gag over her mouth. Both had been ripped from the bottom of her green T-shirt; by now there was little left of the shirt and thus a great deal of Viola on view. She hadn’t been able to remove either the gag or the blindfold because she was tied hand and foot to a tree.

A box elder, Peter noted. Choosing a smooth-barked tree might have shown a modicum of compassion on the part of her abductors, since a more rugose integument could have been tough on her mostly bare back and probably full of ants, but he suspected they’d picked the box elder simply because it was there. He went to work on the ropes and noted with scorn that the knots were all grannies.

“Look at this, President,” he said. “This rope’s just like the ones on the net that trapped Emmerick.”

The president must have been thinking of Sieglinde, he didn’t want to look. All he said was “Ungh,” and went on studying the underbrush for possible clues.

“My sentiments exactly,” snapped Viola, who by now had the gag out of her mouth. “Would you mind postponing the Sherlock Holmes routine till after you’ve finished untying my hands, Professor? If I still have any, that is.”

“Oh, sorry. There, how’s that?”

“I don’t know yet. I can’t feel a thing.” She tried wiggling her fingers and they worked pretty well. “I guess I’ll be okay. I’m just so mad!”

Peter removed his flannel shirt and gallantly assisted her into it. Fortunately he had a wind-breaker in the car, so the President’s sense of decorum didn’t get too stiff a jolt. “Can you tell us what happened?” he asked Viola once they were both decently covered.

“All I know is, I was walking through the woods. Knapweed and I had gone to get that squirrel out of the bird feeder, remember?”

“Urr,” said Dr. Svenson encouragingly.

“Well, Knapweed got kind of carried away out there. God, these botanists! You wouldn’t think it to look at him, I guess it must come from hanging around with the birds and the bees and the flowers all the time. Anyway, I belted him once or twice and told him where to head in; but I didn’t feel like going back to the station with him and having to keep fighting for my virtue till Professor Binks got back, so I decided I’d take a little hike for myself. I figured I’d be okay if I stayed out near the road, but was I ever wrong! Here I am walking along minding my own business and somebody sneaks up behind me and pulls a sock over my head.”

“A sock?” said Peter.

“I don’t know what it was. It felt like a big knitted sock, the kind you wear with hiking boots. I tried to put up my hands and pull it off but he—I think it was a he—had me pinned. I couldn’t do a thing. So the next thing I know, he’s ramming a gun in my back and telling me to be a good girl if I didn’t want to get hurt. Which I didn’t, so I quit trying to kick his shins and he told me to start walking. How did you find me?”

“We noticed signs of a struggle in the woods and tire marks on the road, and—er—came looking.”

“Lucky for me. I don’t know what I’d have—” Viola swallowed a couple of times, pulled Peter’s shirt more tightly around her and went on. “Anyway, he tied my hands and made me get into his car and we drove off. He kept poking the gun at me every so often and warning me not to get cute.”

“Just one man did all this?”

“As far as I know. Maybe there was somebody else in the back seat. I couldn’t see because I still had that thing over my head. You know, now that I think of it, I’ll bet it was a ski mask put on backward. I could breathe fairly well, but there was no way I could peek out from underneath. It came down tight over my face.”

“You couldn’t recognize the person’s voice?”

“Not at all. He talked funny, I think he might have had marbles or something in his mouth.”

“But did he talk? Did he say why he’d taken you prisoner?”

“He kept yelling, ‘What did he tell you?’ I said ‘He who?’ and he said I knew damned well who and to stop trying to be cute or he’d plug me where it hurt. So then I thought of Emory and said was that who he meant and he said damn right he meant Emory and what did he tell me? He said, ‘Did he say where he put it?’ I said I didn’t even know what it was and would he kindly tell me what the hell he was talking about? So we argued back and forth for a while, then he stopped the car and made me get out and pushed me into the woods and tied me up the way you found me.”

“But you didn’t have the—er—mask over your head when we found you,” Peter reminded her. “What happened to it? Did you get a look at his face when he took it off?”

“No,” said Viola. “He tied my hands and feet to the tree first, then he ripped the pieces off my shirt and got behind the tree and reached around. All I saw was the tail of my shirt coming down over my eyes. I tried to turn my head and bite him, but he slapped my face and told me not to get funny. Then he shoved the gag in my mouth and said maybe I’d be ready to talk after I’d had a couple of days out here by myself to think it over. Then I heard him crashing through the brush and the car start up and drive away and I—oh God! I thought I was going to die. I thought some animal would come and g-get me.”

She was starting to fall apart. Svenson wasn’t about to let her.

“Cry later. Talk now. What did Emmerick tell you?”

“He never told me anything!”

“Must have. Yammering type, saw you often. Job? Hobbies? Family?”

“Oh, that. Yeah, Emory did talk a lot. I thought you meant like secrets.”

Svenson waited. Viola shrugged. “Well, he didn’t go much for Chinese food but he was crazy about Italian. Is this what you want?”

“Go on.”

“He claimed he was divorced, and more or less gave me to understand that he wouldn’t be interested in getting married again but he was still interested, if you get what I mean. Only I’ve got this snoopy landlady—it’s next to impossible to rent an apartment around here, so I’m stuck in a rooming house—and Emory was staying at the inn over in Balaclava Junction, which is about the same as boarding in a monastery from the way he described it, so it wasn’t going to work out. Which was okay by me because I wasn’t all that crazy about him anyway.”

Peter weeded out the one salient fact. “Staying at the inn, you say? I wonder whether Ottermole knows that. He’d better take a look at the room. Go ahead, Miss Buddley, did Emmerick discuss any of his alleged colleagues at the Meadowsweet Construction Company?”

“Not that I remember. He asked a lot of questions about Professor Binks.”

“He never mentioned Mr. Fanshaw?”

“Would that be Chuck? Emory talked about this guy named Chuck, but never called him by his full name.”

“Too bad. What did he say about Chuck?”

“He said Chuck owed him money.”

“Really? How did he happen to tell you that?”

“Probably because he’d had a few drinks. Then he said Chuck was a swell guy and he wasn’t worried about the money. I got the idea that it was quite a lot, but Emory might just have been trying to impress me. Look, do we have to keep standing here? What if that guy with the gun comes back?”

“Urrgh!” For the first time that day, Thorkjeld Svenson smiled.

“
DO YOU WANT TO
go straight to your rooming house, Miss Buddley?” Peter hoped she’d say yes, but the ex-captive shook her head.

“Uh-uh. Take me back to the station, if you don’t mind. I need to pick up my car.”

“You’re sure you feel up to driving?”

“I will by the time I get there. I’ll just keep reminding myself how good it’s going to feel to get into a hot bath and a whole shirt.”

What would feel good to Peter would be not having to drive back to the field station; it was getting monotonous. However, noblesse obliged as usual. He got Viola safe inside while Dr. Svenson made a beeline for the telephone. While the state police were being informed that the lost had been found, and in what dire circumstances, Winifred Binks poured Viola a steaming cup of chamomile tea.

“Drink this, then go home and stay there until you’re completely over the shock. Don’t worry about the station, we can manage without you for a few days. Peter, will you drive along behind her to make sure she doesn’t get abducted again on the way?”

“Yes, of course.” Peter had been planning to do it anyway, though he did think young Calthrop might have offered.

Knapweed wasn’t saying much of anything, he’d seemed more surprised than distressed when Viola returned in such a state of disrepair. Peter was still wondering which of their stories about the squirrel incident to believe, or whether the truth lay somewhere in the middle, as was generally the case. Slumped over the worktable, gazing dully down at his flower press, Knapweed was hardly the prototype of the swashbuckling ravisher.

But one never knew. Peter shelved the problem and turned to Dr. Svenson. “Got straightened out with the police, President?”

“Yah. They’re coming. Want to see where Miss Buddley was captured and where we found her. Pick up a clue, maybe. You get her home. I’ll wait for them here. Bum a ride in the paddy wagon, give Sieglinde a laugh.”

Give Sieglinde a fit more likely. Peter was relieved not to be stuck with showing the state troopers around, anyway. He was itching to get back to Balaclava Junction. He wanted a shirt even more than Viola did, she was still wearing his and he couldn’t decently ask for it back. He wanted to collect Ottermole and a warrant and search Emmerick’s room at the inn before somebody else beat him to it.

Unless somebody already had. Dolt that he was, why hadn’t he thought of this sooner? Mainly because he hadn’t known where Emmerick lived until Viola told him, he supposed. That was an explanation, perhaps, but hardly an excuse.

Anybody who’d delactified as many cows in his day as Peter Shandy knew there was no use crying over spilt milk. He switched his mind to the bird who called himself Fanshaw; had Ottermole managed to make him talk? The chief knew enough not to knock a prisoner around, but he could be awfully formidable in that black jacket of his, scowling down at the culprit and working his pocket zippers back and forth. Peter decided he might as well phone Ottermole while Viola was still steadying her nerves with chamomile tea and rehashing her tale to Winifred Binks.

When he mentioned searching Emmerick’s room at the inn, Ottermole laughed. “I’m way ahead of you, Professor. Ellie June Freedom, that’s the innkeeper, was on my ear two hours ago. ‘Chief Ottermole,’ she says in that high-toned voice that sounds like a cat squeakin’ a rubber mouse, ‘one of my guests is missing. Mr. Emory Emmerick did not appear for breakfast and his bed has not been slept in.’

“‘Miz Freedom,’ I says right back, ‘you better go ahead and eat Mr. Emmerick’s boiled egg yourself. You’ve lost yourself a guest.’

“So once she let me get a word in edgeways I told her what happened and she went right up in smoke. ‘Fred Ottermole,’ she says, ‘you come right straight out here and take away the demised’s effects. Respectable guests do not go stravaging around in the middle of the night getting hoisted into trees and having their throats cut. What, pray tell, do you think I pay taxes for?’

Peter was charmed. “Did she really say ‘pray tell’?”

“She sure as heck did. I didn’t say anything back because she’s a second cousin to Edna Mae’s sister’s mother-in-law and I figured I better not start anything, you know how it is. Anyway, somebody’d have had to do something about Emmerick’s stuff anyhow, sooner or later, so I went and got it. Come on down and look it over, any time you want.”

“I’ll be happy to. Who did the packing?”

“I did it myself. Didn’t notice anything to get excited about, but I guess you never know.”

“True enough,” said Peter. “Is there any hope Mrs. Freedom hasn’t yet got around to cleaning the room?”

“Are you kiddin’? She was following me around the whole time I was there, with the vacuum cleaner in one hand and a bucket of hot soapsuds in the other, yammering at me to hurry up so’s she could get the place swabbed out and fumigated. I did manage to search under the bed and behind the dresser, pretending I was just making sure I wasn’t leaving anything of Emmerick’s behind to contaminate the atmosphere, but I didn’t uncover any false beards or incriminating letters. I did find one of those sissy novels about a mean baronet with a terrible secret and a beautiful orphan governess who was really the heiress to a duke’s fortune. Edmund ate a page or two when I brought it back. It made him sick to his stomach.”

“M’yes,” said Peter, “I can see why it might.”

He glanced over at Winifred Binks. She was an orphan, reared from an early age by a strong-minded aunt. She’d have made a rattling good governess; there was no doubt she’d have handled the most saturnine of baronets with finesse and aplomb had the opportunity ever come her way. She could probably have been beautiful if she’d put her mind to it.