Owls Well That Ends Well (33 page)

“Don’t worry!” Rob called. “I’ve got him!”

He had climbed into the cab of the boom lift, started its motor, and was slowly swinging the arm and extending it, aiming the raised platform at the hay loft door. Was he planning to catch Barrymore, crush him against the side of the barn, or just scare him silly? Whatever he planned, the sight of the boom lift platform creaking and lurching toward the barn was pretty terrifying. Barrymore, who had climbed halfway down the rope, began climbing up again, a lot faster. He looked scared and he didn’t even know, as I did, how singularly inept my brother was with mechanical objects. How well could Rob possibly have learned how to operate the boom lift?

The platform hit the side of the barn a few feet below Barrymore. The barn stayed in place, though I could hear bits of rubble falling inside, and the impact threw Barrymore off balance. He fell six feet onto the platform, and Rob immediately raised the arm, taking the platform higher and higher until it was perched forty feet above the ground at the end of the fully extended arm.

“Good job,” I said, and ran back inside to make sure Spike and Dad had survived the falling rubble.

Dad was lying peacefully, legs still bound, and I deduced from how loudly Spike was barking that he was still safe under the plastic milk crate.

“Are you okay?” I asked Dad, as I started to untie his legs.

“It was amazing,” Dad said. “I’ve never seen a great horned owl that close.”

“I’ve never wanted to,” I said. “After I untie you, can you patch my cheek?”

“Are you okay?” Michael asked, running back in. “You’re bleeding.”

“She’ll be fine,” Dad said, peering at my face. “It’s only a superficial laceration. Though we should clean that wound as soon as possible. Owls eat a lot of carrion, you know.”

“Thanks for sharing that,” I said, as I finished untying Dad’s feet. “There; you’re free again. Let’s fix my wound.”

“Should I call 911 and tell them to send an ambulance?” Michael asked.

“No, but call and ask Debbie Anne why the heck none of the police have arrived yet,” I suggested.

“Wasn’t that cool?” Rob asked, strolling into the barn.

“Very cool,” I said. “Why aren’t you keeping your eye on Barrymore?”

“Relax,” Rob said. “He’s forty feet in the air in the boom lift. He’s not going anywhere.”

As if on cue, we heard the boom lift’s engine start again.

“I turned that off,” Rob said, in a puzzled voice.

“And Barrymore’s probably turned it back on,” I said, heading for the door.

“How could he?” Rob protested. “He’s up on the platform.”

“There’s another set of controls up on the platform,” I heard Dad saying as I ran out. “So you can maneuver it from up there.”

“There is?” Rob said.

Michael and I sprinted for the gate, but Barrymore had already swung the platform away from the barn and toward the driveway, lowering the boom arm as he went. By the time we cleared the gate, he was already climbing off the platform, and by the time we reached Michael’s car, Barrymore’s car had disappeared over the crest of the hill. At least I hoped he’d taken his own car. Odds were any car he stole would belong to one of my more easily annoyed relatives.

“We could go after him,” Michael said, running around to the driver’s side and trying, in vain, to shoo away the sheep that had curled up next to his door.

“We could let Chief Burke and his men go after him,” I said. “Where is Chief Burke, anyway?”

“Not answering his phone, last time I tried,” Michael said.

“Sorry about that,” Rob said, strolling up. “I didn’t know about the controls on the platform.”

“What are you doing here anyway,” I asked. “I thought you were in town, having pizza.”

“I brought Dad his pizza,” Rob said. “Did you know that Luigi’s doesn’t deliver this far out of town? You may want to rethink this living out in the wilderness thing.”

“At last!” I exclaimed, seeing a caravan of three police cars speeding toward us.

“What in tarnation is going on out here?” Chief Burke exclaimed, leaping out of his car.

“Barrymore Sprocket attacked Dad, stole the yard sale proceeds, and went thataway,” I said. “Incidentally, he’s probably also Gordon McCoy’s killer.”

“Went thataway?” the chief repeated. “Blue Honda Accord? We’ll cite him for reckless driving when one of my officers catches him. He must have been going over a hundred when he passed us. Pity we didn’t know what he was up to.”

“If you’d gotten here sooner …” I began.

“We’d have been here fifteen minutes ago if some blasted farmer hadn’t let his silly sheep get out and wander all over the road again,” Chief Burke said. “If I find out who’s responsible, I’ll throw the book at the lazy rascal.”

“We tried to call your cell phone,” Michael put in. “But we didn’t get an answer.”

“Stupid sheep,” the chief said. “Where’s Dr. Langslow?”

“In the barn,” I said.

The chief stormed off toward the barn.

“What’s with him?” I asked Sammy. “He doesn’t usually lose his cool like that.”

“He dropped his cell phone while we were chasing the sheep off the road,” Sammy explained, “and one of the sheep stepped on it. He’s that provoked.”

“So what’s with the sheep, then?” I asked. “I thought people had brought them all back. Were these someone else’s sheep?”

“No, they were Mr. Early’s sheep,” Sammy said, with a frown. “Are you sure the gate was closed?”

“Who knows?” Michael said. “And even if it was, I wonder if maybe our volunteer fence menders didn’t fix it as well as they thought they did.”

“A sheep fix?” I suggested. They ignored me.

“Well, maybe it will cheer up the chief if the sheep slow Barrymore Sprocket down,” Michael suggested.

From the direction of the barn, we heard a crashing noise, followed by a reproachful baa.

“Blast that sheep!” the chief exclaimed.

Chapter 43

Things were quieting down again. The police were mostly gone, and a couple of neighboring farmers rounded up by Sammy fixed the break in a fence and put the sheep back in their pasture again.

The yard sale was battened down for the night—in fact, for the five days it would have to wait until its continuation next weekend. When my relatives began arriving back from Luigi’s, quivering with excitement and curiosity about the night’s events, I channeled their energy into rigging up some floodlights, hauling as much of the yard sale stuff as possible into the barn, and covering the rest with tarps.

When we finally finished that, everyone else drifted off to bed, but I was still too wound up to sleep.

“What’s wrong?” Michael asked, when he came down to the kitchen to see why I was still up, sitting at my laptop.

“I just remembered that the truck from Goodwill was supposed to get here at eight A.M. tomorrow,” I said. “To take all the unsold yard sale stuff. I just called and left a voice message apologizing for the short notice, and asking to reschedule for next Monday. I should have called sooner; they may still show up.”

“Then we’ll tell them to come back next week,” he said. “Don’t worry; they probably heard the news. They’ll figure it out.”

“And I e-mailed an updated version of the ad to the
Caerphilly Clarion,
asking them to run it again this Friday,” I said, drawing a line through the item in my notebook. “And also an updated announcement to the college radio station. Can you think of anything else we need to do?”

“Nothing we need to do tonight,” he said. “Let’s worry about it tomorrow.”

“I don’t want to worry abut anything tomorrow,” I said. “I just want to sleep late tomorrow. In fact, never mind late. I just want to sleep.”

“Sounds fine.”

“And then do nothing for the rest of the week.”

“Also fine,” he said. “Or maybe we could do something fun.”

I nodded. I was shutting down the laptop. I hadn’t thought of anything urgent that needed doing, and sleep was becoming really appealing.

“Maybe before your parents leave town we could go out to that antique mall with your mother and—”

“Do we have to do that this week?” I asked. “Shopping isn’t usually something I do for fun, especially shopping with Mother, and right now the idea sounds only slightly less horrible than taking a bus tour of the lower three circles of hell.”

“But your mother—”

“Will live if she has to go antiquing by herself.”

“Fine,” he said. He sounded irritated. “Just blow her off.”

“Michael—”

“Couldn’t you at least take an hour or two to look at what she’s found?” he asked. “I only spent the whole past week hauling her around town, and listening patiently to every crazy idea she came up with and then trying to talk her out of them all without hurting her feelings. And trying to explain what we wanted instead.”

“It never occurred to you just to tell her that what we want is to be left alone to do things ourselves?”

“She’s your mother, dammit,” he said. “I was trying to be nice to her.”

“Can’t we be nice to her, and also tell her nicely that we don’t need a decorator right now?”

“Have you even looked at her drawings? The latest ones—the ones she’s done this week, based on what I’ve been telling her?”

“No; she hasn’t mentioned any drawings.”

“She probably figures you’ll reject them without even looking at them. Why do you have to be so negative? She’s only trying to help.”

“Oh, and that’s supposed to make me feel better? That she’s only trying to help; she doesn’t actually set out to drive me crazy?”

“Forget it,” he said, turning and striding out of the room. Something about his tone scared me.

“All right,” I called after him. “If it’s so damned important, I’ll look at them!”

“Don’t put yourself out on my account,” Michael snapped back. His steps clattered down the stairway, and then I heard the front door slam.

I walked out into the hall, and then noticed that several of the visiting relatives were peering out of the doors of their rooms, and Mrs. Fenniman had crept halfway down the staircase from the third floor.

I ducked back into the room and closed the door before any of them could ask what was wrong, where was Michael going, and had we had a fight. I hoped my relatives wouldn’t come knocking on my door, trying to cheer me up by sympathizing with me and reviling Michael. Or telling me Michael was right and I was a fool for arguing with him. Worst of all, some might take Michael’s side and some mine, and we could end up with an all-night debate up and down the hallway. Which, knowing my family, is probably what would have happened if it hadn’t been past two A.M. already.

Should I go after Michael? Not until I was sure I had my own temper firmly under control, or I’d only make it worse. Luckily, I hadn’t heard his car start. I went over to the window. He wasn’t in the driveway. Maybe he’d just gone out to the barn to cool off.

I took a deep breath and decided I was calm enough to cope, so I opened my door and peered out. The lurking relatives had vanished. I emerged and went downstairs to the kitchen. I peered out the kitchen window, but I couldn’t see anyone out back. More to the point, I didn’t hear the inevitable noise Michael would have made, trying to find his way through the remaining clutter to the barn.

Then I spotted something on the door-turned-table, near the leftover pizza and the now-empty cash box. One of Mother’s design notebooks.

I could feel my temper heating up again. But my curiosity kicked in, too. I walked over and opened it.

On the first page, in Mother’s neat printing, were the words, “Preliminary designs. For discussion only. Subject to client review. No work to begin until client signoff obtained.”

Okay, maybe Mother had gotten the message after all. I stifled a small inclination to feel guilty and flipped the page.

The first sketch was obviously a design for the master bedroom. I stared at it, transfixed.

Not because it was horrible. It wasn’t. It wasn’t bad at all. In fact, I rather liked it. It didn’t really look like one of Mother’s designs. It was way too simple, and there wasn’t a square inch of chintz in sight. I could see elements of Japanese, Mission, and Arts and Crafts styles in it, but it wasn’t completely any of those things. It was simple, serene, uncluttered, and beautiful. And at the same time, I could tell there was a lot of storage space hidden away under the serene surface, which was a really smart idea. Michael and I still had plenty of stuff, and I didn’t see us getting rid of it all, no matter how much of a convert I’d become to simple living and spare, minimalist décor.

I had to hand it to Mother. She’d come up with exactly the kind of design we’d have done ourselves, if either of us had had the time to work on it. Or the talent.

Of course, if we told her to go ahead with her design, there was always the issue of whether it would look like this when she finished adding all those little touches that occurred to her along the way. And whether we could talk her into something equally to our liking for the several dozen other rooms in the house. And whether we could afford even this room. And how long we’d have her underfoot, and whether any of us would survive with our sanity intact.

Not to mention my belief that, given a chance, Michael and I could do something with the place that suited both of us just fine. It might take longer and it might not be as breathtakingly beautiful as Mother’s design, but it would be our home, done by us, not merely a beautiful house that someone had decorated for us. Assuming we survived as an us. And then—

But why let quibbling spoil a beautiful moment of guilt? I owed Mother an apology. But first, and more important, I owed Michael one.

I’d been so focused on one urgent cause after another—emptying the house, organizing the yard sale, rescuing Giles—that I’d been losing sight of the real reason I was doing all this. That it was all supposed to be for us.

It would serve me right if Michael decided he’d had enough of the grouchy, hyperactive Meg he’d seen in the last few months, the commitment-phobic Meg who changed the subject every time he tried to talk seriously about our future together, the—