Owls Well That Ends Well (23 page)

Not a very mature thing to do, of course, but it helped me stay polite when I had to encounter them in person. And probably a lot safer to do today than during the week. The assistant dean had once dashed into the hall when I was sticking out my tongue at his door, and as part of my effort to convince him that I was doing wrinklepreventing yoga facial exercises, I’d ended up standing on my head in the faculty lounge for nearly half an hour. One of those days when I went home wondering if perhaps the best thing I could do for Michael’s career was not to overcome my commitment phobia and make an honest man of him but to disappear completely from his life.

Though even my absence probably wouldn’t help him snag an office here in the oldest, most prestigious part of the building. Professor Schmidt, of course, had a prime space, only three doors down from the beastly department chairman.

“Professor Schmidt!” I called, and knocked loudly before turning the knob. Which didn’t budge. I frowned at the door for a few seconds, and then, as I turned to leave, my eye fell on a framed enlargement of a photo of Mrs. Pruitt that hung beside his door, as if to remind passersby of the importance of the poet on whom he was the world’s foremost expert.

Fashions in photography had certainly changed over the years. The picture was a full-length portrait of Mrs. Pruitt sitting in a chair, with an elaborately swagged drapery and a potted palm behind her. Although sitting wasn’t quite the word—she was perched rather precariously, as if she had only briefly alighted for the photographer’s benefit, and would be off on another flight of poetic fancy in a few seconds. I kept expecting the chair to fall or break. And she should have just looked at the camera, smiled or frowned, and have done with it. Let the viewer see what she looked like without hamming it up. Instead, she was holding a slim book in one hand while she gazed soulfully at the ceiling, her other hand raised to place a single finger to her lips in a gesture clearly designed to suggest deep thought while slightly obscuring several of her chins.

Perhaps in its time it was considered a splendid likeness, and inspired droves of people to buy her books, but now it just looked silly. I could see why Professor Schmidt had to keep busy erasing the mustaches and sarcastic comments that each succeeding class of English students felt inspired to draw on the glass covering the photo. I hadn’t bothered to study it before, and wouldn’t today if not for the possibility that there might be some tenuous connection between Mrs. Pruitt and Gordon’s murder.

But whatever the connection was, I wouldn’t learn it from Ginevra’s primly pursed lips, so I shrugged and moved on to the less exalted wing of the building where Michael had his office.

Also locked, though this was uncharacteristic. Of course, he’d probably started locking it since he’d begun keeping an ever-increasing amount of stuff in it, stuff that we’d moved out of our old basement apartment but couldn’t yet take to the house.

Help was at hand, though. I glanced down the hall and saw that Giles’s door was open. With any luck, he’d have a copy of the faculty directory.

When I reached his doorway, I saw Giles hard at work on a large stack of official Caerphilly College forms. I recognized the distinctive pale blue paper the administration liked to use—Michael swore it was so passing bureaucrats could tell at a glance if a faculty member was allowing the forms to pile up on his desk.

“Giles, Giles,” I said. “You’re hopeless.”

He started at my voice, and then looked slightly relieved to see it was only me.

“Hopeless?” he repeated.

“Here we go to all the trouble of implicating you in the most shocking crime Caerphilly has seen in generations, all for the sake of enhancing your public image as an edgy, hip kind of guy,” I said. “And you go and ruin it all by spending your Sunday chained to a desk doing paperwork?”

“Oh, is that what all this is in aid of?” Giles said, with an expression that I’m sure he intended as a smile, though it came off as more of a grimace. “If it’s all the same, I’d just as soon return to my old image as a boring fuddy-duddy.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “Speaking of which, may I borrow your faculty directory? I need to track down a suspect.”

“By all means,” Giles said, astonishing me by pulling the directory out of a pile of stuff without much hunting. “Looking for anyone in particular?”

I was opening my mouth to explain when the phone rang.

“Sorry,” he said, gesturing to the phone. “It’s the department chairman. I really ought to …”

“Want me to leave?” I asked, reaching for my purse.

“No, no,” he said, with his hand over the mouthpiece. “Please don’t; I want to ask you something, and he’s probably just calling about tomorrow’s faculty meeting. Dr. Snyder,” he said, into the phone. “How are you?”

Unfortunately, Giles was wrong. For the next fifteen minutes, I heard his side of what was obviously a chewing-out by his department head. Not fair, really; it wasn’t Giles’s fault that the police unjustly suspected him of murder. Still, I felt bad, being present to witness his embarrassment. I made a motion to leave at first, but Giles waved me back into my seat. I pretended to be absorbed in the faculty directory for ten times as long as it took me to find and copy down Professor Schmidt’s address, and when I grew tired of rereading the names of the stuffed shirts who had it in for Michael, I turned to the nearest bookshelf and feigned an intense interest in its contents.

Though once I made the effort to focus on the titles of the books, I found they were rather interesting. I deduced from the few authors’ names I recognized—E.C. Bentley, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and S.S. Van Dyne—that I was seated next to Giles’s collection of Golden Age mystery writers. I scanned the shelves for R. Austin Freeman and found him right at my elbow.

I’d seen these books before, of course, at least a dozen times when I’d visited Giles’s office. But without the added interest of being associated with a murder, they hadn’t particularly attracted my attention. Like most of the books in that section of the shelves, they were rather nondescript. So many faded linen bindings in muted shades of blue, brown, green, and red, with the occasional battered dust jacket, and now and then an empty space where a book was in use. The gentle patina of dust over everything further softened the colors. The whole effect was oddly soothing, rather like the bookshelves of some of my elderly relatives—except that many of Giles’s books were neatly wrapped in plastic Brodart covers to protect them, while my relatives’ vintage libraries were allowed to fade
au naturel
. I counted forty-eight volumes by Freeman, though some of them seemed to be different editions of the same title. The English and American editions, I suspected. I’d have opened a few to check, but I wasn’t sure how Giles felt about people handling his treasures. Maybe I was overreacting to the protective plastic covers, but they did seem calculated to repel casual inspection.

I found myself wondering if he read them or just collected them, and also how much he treasured them for their own sake and how much for what he thought they said about him—that despite his rather mild and pedantic manner, he wasn’t a stuffy old dinosaur like so many of the department’s faculty. That he was, in fact, hip and cool, though in a low-key, bookish manner.

It worked for me. I liked Giles’s office almost as much as his study. Apart from the familiar, comforting presence of the books, I liked the bits of academic clutter he had scattered about. Here a Civil War vintage sword—the English Civil War, of course—there a Tudor coin, or a battered piece of pottery that Julius Caesar might have held. Whenever I grew impatient with Giles, I reminded myself that underneath the slightly stiff exterior was the man with the wit and erudition to create this office.

Perhaps I appreciated his office all the more today because usually an even layer of dust covered everything, and today, the dust had clearly been heaved around by the police search. I saw clear spots and spots where the dust had been piled up like a snowdrift by moving objects around. Nearly every knickknack stood near but not precisely on the clear spot where it had been resting for months or years before the police arrived. Strangely enough, this added to the room’s charm.

Okay, it was clutter, but there’s clutter and clutter. Not all clutter was created equal. Even with the signs of the police search, I liked Giles’s clutter. Classy, academic clutter. No more useful than any other clutter, perhaps, but I still had a hard time condemning it.

When I had the time—after the yard sale was over and Giles cleared of murder charges—I’d have to do some long hard thinking about my definition of clutter. And probably talk the subject over with Michael. I didn’t want the house to be a place to keep our stuff while we went out to get more stuff, or however George Carlin had defined it. And I needed to make sure Michael felt the same way. If he didn’t—

“Sorry about that,” Giles said, when he was finally able to hang up. “Apparently I’m not Dean Snyder’s favorite underling today.”

“Here’s hoping we can change that, and quickly,” I said. “Have you seen Professor Schmidt today?”

“Arnold Schmidt? Not that I recall,” Giles said. “Dare I hope that you’re about to pin the guilt on him instead of me?”

“It’s a possibility,” I said. “Remember the woman in the flowered hat who identified you to Chief Burke as the person who was entering the barn as she left?”

“The dame who fingered me?” he said, in a bad imitation of an American gangster’s accent. “You bet I remember her.”

“She lied,” I said. “Not about seeing you, but about talking to Gordon. I suspect he was already dead and locked in the trunk when she went into the barn.”

“Good show!” Giles exclaimed. “If you can prove that, perhaps Chief Burke will start looking for the real killer!”

“I’ll try,” I said. “And since Arnold Schmidt was just leaving when she walked in—”

“Oh, please let it be him,” Giles said. “He’s the most insufferable snob in the department.”

“I’ll keep you posted,” I said.

“Please do,” Giles said. He returned to his paperwork, looking almost cheerful.

I felt a momentary twinge of irritation. Was Giles doing anything to help himself, or just sitting back and waiting for me to clear him? He could at least have offered to help me find Schmidt. The way Michael would, if he weren’t back at the yard sale, trying to keep it under control while simultaneously humoring Mother.

Then I realized I was being too hard on Giles. Not fair to expect a mild-mannered, reclusive English professor to turn into Sam Spade in a pinch, even if he was a vintage mystery fan. And definitely not fair to compare him with Michael. Giles needed rescuing. And the next step was to tackle Schmidt.

Of course, first I had to find Schmidt.

Chapter 29

I headed toward Westlake, where Professor Schmidt lived. Like much of Caerphilly, it had been built in quaint, mock-Tudor style, but in Westlake the houses were closer to manors than cottages, and the lawns were so impeccable that I suspected the owners made their gardeners manicure the grass blades with nail scissors. A very posh neighborhood filled with astronomical mortgages and the department heads and professors emeriti who could afford them. Even full professors probably steered clear of Westlake unless they were independently wealthy or had a spouse with a well-paying job. Michael and I hadn’t done much house hunting there, partly because we could never have afforded it, and partly because the houses there hardly ever went on the market anyway.

My route led through a part of Caerphilly I’d seen far too often since Mother’s arrival a week ago, since it contained most of the town’s antique stores. Including Gordon McCoy’s Antique and Junque Emporium, though that was on the very fringes of the district, merging into a neighborhood of stores where normal people shopped and restaurants that served iceberg lettuce instead of its snooty Italian cousins. Out of curiosity, I took the street that went past Gordon’s shop.

How strange. Three of Caerphilly’s small supply of police vehicles were parked outside the Antique and Junque Emporium, along with the chief’s blue Chrysler. Had the epicenter of the murder investigation moved from our house to Caerphilly, unnoticed by the crowds hovering around the yard sale? And for that matter, unnoticed by the various print and broadcast journalists?

I cruised past the shop at about ten miles per hour, but I didn’t see anyone, so I circled the block and came round again. Still nothing to see, so this time, as soon as I turned, I parked the car on the empty side street. If it hadn’t been for the police cars, I might have thought I was in one of those science fiction flicks where the heroine wakes up to find that everyone else has left the planet.

I strolled up to the front of the store, nonchalantly, and peered in the open door.

Gordon’s front room was just as I remembered it, a cluttered warren without any apparent theme or organization. Priceless antiques stood next to items I’d have assumed were tacky pieces of junk except that their presence in Gordon’s stock meant they were actually valuable collectibles. Chinese brush paintings hung beside painted velvet renditions of bullfighters and paint-by-number oils of puppies and kittens. Rare art pottery and Ming vases shared shelf space with vintage Coke bottles. Enameled samovars and hookahs shouldered a humongous scale model of the Starship Enterprise, and tiny bronze Degas ballet dancers loitered in corners with the sort of elaborate, special edition Barbie dolls that would probably run away screaming if a small child ever tried to pick them up.

There were at least a dozen more rooms much like this one, though the most obscenely expensive stuff lived in the front room, where Gordon could show it off. And where it might catch the eye of a passing collector.

Come to think of it, that was the theme—stuff Gordon could sell for obscenely high prices.

Though one room always felt different—the one where Gordon kept the used and rare books. I remembered it as way in the back, so I had to go through five or six other rooms to reach it, but perhaps deep in the heart of the shop would be a more accurate description. Was it only my bias that made this room feel like a serene oasis in a chaotic jumble? Or did it reflect how Gordon felt about the books? Endicott, his former partner, did say books were Gordon’s first love.