Owls Well That Ends Well (18 page)

“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 she 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?”

“I think if you took a look at what she has in mind—”

“Could we talk about it later,” I said. “I’m pretty tired.”

“Sure,” he said. But I sensed something off in his tone. I felt a sudden flash of anger—not at him, though. And not really at Mother. At life, which keeps throwing stuff at us at the wrong moment. I took a couple of breaths and swallowed the impulse to snap at him.

“Sorry,” I said aloud. “I know it’s important. Too important to talk about when I’m so tired I’m not really coherent. Not to mention so cranky I wouldn’t blame you if you let me walk home.”

“I understand,” he said. “I just thought, while she’s up here, that this might be a good chance for you and your mother to do some bonding.”

“Bonding?” I echoed. “Mother and I don’t need bonding. Mediation, occasionally, or possibly therapy. Have you been spending too much time in the psych department?”

“Just a thought,” he said.

But he meant well, I knew. He just hadn’t figured out yet that Mother and I could squabble noisily over everything under the sun without being really mad at each other. He and his mother hardly ever raised their voices, but when they did—look out. Mother and I rarely saw eye to eye, but we understood each other.

“Maybe we could do something nice for Mother when the yard sale is over,” I said aloud. “Like that antiquing trip she’s been talking about.”

“Good idea,” he said. And this time I could hear the hint of a smile in his voice. More like the normal Michael. A few seconds later he reached out and took my hand. A nice gesture, however transient, since his car had a standard transmission, and he’d probably have to downshift in a minute or two. Still—another quarrel averted. Or was it only postponed?

Part of the problem was our difference of opinion on how to handle my parents when they came up with the sort of peculiar ideas my family specialized in, particularly when it came to how other people should run their lives. Michael favored humoring them as long as possible, while I thought it worked better if you set them straight immediately. Humoring them only hurt their feelings more in the end, not to mention creating a very real danger that they’d go out and do whatever strange thing you were trying to talk them out of.

And the house caused more of these conflicts every week.

Damn the whole house project anyway. I wondered how we could possibly get safely through the next few months, or even, God help us, years of repairs and renovations.

Of course, looking on the bright side, next to surviving the house with our relationship intact, proving Giles innocent of murder looked remarkably easy.

Despite the late hour, as we approached the house we could see lights blazing on every floor. And when we got closer, I heard shrieking from somewhere in the house. Barrymore Sprocket stood on the front step, smoking a cigarette.

“There you are,” he said, as I ran toward him. “They’ve all been looking for you.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He shrugged, and just then another chorus of shrieks rose up, so I raced past him into the house, and then up to the third floor, where the shrieking came from.

Chapter 23

I arrived in time to see a dozen of my relatives, clad in bathrobes and bedroom slippers, stampede past the head of the stairs, all shouting variations on “Watch out! Here it comes!” as they passed. They all vanished into the last two rooms along the corridor, slamming the doors behind them.

Here what comes? The hall looked empty from where I stood—I’d stopped two steps below the third floor landing. I stuck my head into the hall and peered up and down. Nothing.

“What is it?” Michael asked from the second floor landing.

“No idea,” I said. “But something has them scared.”

“So I gathered from Barrymore,” he said, arriving at my side. “But he hasn’t a clue what.”

We couldn’t see anything ominous from our post, so we stepped out into the hall. No fearsome monster appeared to threaten us. The corridor was an empty line of closed doors, except for the last door on the right, which hung open.

“Shall we check there?” Michael said.