Owls Well That Ends Well (28 page)

Perhaps the wrong thing to say in front of a hypochondriac.

“I can feel my throat closing up,” Rob said, clutching his Adam’s apple with one hand while still scratching with the other. “I’m going to die, aren’t I? Killed by a sheep overdose.”

“You’ve probably outgrown some of your sensitivity,” I said.

“I’ve got my bag up at the house,” Dad said. “Come on; I’ll give you a shot of antihistamine.”

“Should we call an ambulance?” Michael asked. I noticed that he was scratching his arms, too. And for that matter, so was I. They were starting to itch rather fiercely. Power of suggestion, or was prolonged contact with live lanolin factories bringing out an allergic reaction in those of us who’d never had a problem before?

Dad and Rob had begun trotting toward the house, and most of our volunteer helpers trailed after them. I hoped Dad wouldn’t run out of antihistamine, given how many hypochondriacs we had in the family.

Chapter 35

“Should I go find some more sheep?” Sammy asked.

“Not just yet,” I said. “Can I borrow your bullhorn?”

“Sure,” Sammy said. “It’s in my car.”

“I’m sure you know what you’re doing,” Michael said, as we followed Sammy to the police cruiser. “You always do. But just how is a bullhorn going to retrieve any sheep?”

“It won’t,” I said. “But they will.”

I pointed at the people still milling about the premises. Fewer than before, of course, but still far too many of them.

“We’re offering a bounty of twenty dollars per sheep,” I added.

“But that would cost—”

“In the form of a gift certificate redeemable at next weekend’s continuation of the yard sale.”

“I bow to your ingenuity,” he said.

Ten minutes later, the yard was empty of all but the customers checking out. And many of them were jostling with impatience to get out and join the sheep hunt.

“I certainly hope you’re not counting this sheep bounty as a yard sale expense,” Barrymore Sprocket said.

“We’ll talk about it later,” I said.

“Because I certainly can’t authorize—”

“Later!” I snapped.

Barrymore retreated, still grumbling.

“Meg,” Michael said, sounding worried. “What if someone tries to bring in ringers to claim the bounty?”

“What, you mean like goats or cows?” I said. “I think we’d notice.”

“No, like someone else’s sheep.”

“Are there many other sheep around?”

“Oh, yes,” Sammy said. “I can think of at least a dozen other farmers in the county who have sheep. Not as many as Early, of course.”

“Then how are we supposed to tell them apart?”

“Well, most of the farmers don’t have Lincolns.”

Since the only vehicle I’d ever seen Mr. Early driving was an enormous battered pickup truck, I assumed this was a brand of sheep.

“Okay, how can we tell Lincolns from other sheep?” I asked.

“They’re bigger than most sheep,” he said. “And they have longer wool. And they’re kind of square.”

“You can’t blame them,” Michael said. “It’s hard to stay up with all the trends, stuck out here in the country they way they are.”

Sammy blinked once and then focused on me.

“Square-shaped,” he said, carefully. “You know, blocky and rectangular, rather than round and—”

“Right,” I said. “Fleece-covered tanks. I’m sure this all makes sense to a farmer, and maybe it would to us if we had a couple of non-Lincoln sheep around for comparison, but we don’t, so how can we tell if our bounty hunters are bringing us Mr. Early’s sheep or rustling someone else’s sheep?”

Sammy blinked.

“You could always look at the ear tags,” he suggested, as if talking to a small child.

Sure enough, all the sheep were sporting bright yellow plastic ear tags. I winced when I saw that they’d been permanently attached to their ears with a sort of plastic grommet, but then reminded myself that it was probably no worse than having one’s ears pierced.

And each tag had a unique number, along with Mr. Early’s name.

“So all we have to do is write down each tag number, and we’ll know which sheep we have,” I said. “And if anyone found a sheep with any other ear tag, they’d know it wasn’t Mr. Early’s and they wouldn’t bring it here.”

“Unless they were city slickers who didn’t know any better like—like a lot of these tourists,” Sammy said, looking at Michael and me as he spoke. “Of course, you could get locals cutting off the tags and trying to pretend the animals had lost them. Which happens, but not too often because there are pretty stiff penalties for stealing livestock, so—”

“Sammy,” I said. “I have a great idea! Why don’t you stay here and check in the sheep as people return them. I doubt if any sinister sheep rustlers would try to fence hot sheep with you in charge, and if they did, you could arrest them!”

“Okay,” Sammy said. “But I think it would be a good idea to give them each a receipt, with the ID numbers of the sheep they turn in marked on it. Down at the station, we always like to give people a receipt when they turn in lost or stolen property.”

“Excellent idea,” I said. “And we’ll keep a carbon, so we can make sure no one tries to sneak any sheep out one end of the pasture and then bring them in the other to earn more than one bounty for them, which is what I bet a few people would try if we didn’t keep track.”

“I would never have thought of that,” Michael murmured.

“No wonder you hate faculty politics so much,” I said. “You have no sense of deviousness. Come on—let’s do a census of the sheep we already have.”

Easier said than done. While the ear tags were a vivid yellow that was hard to miss, reading the numbers on them required us to get closer than the sheep liked—close enough to get kicked or butted, especially since by the time we finally caught up with our quarry, we were usually too tired to take evasive action. The captive sheep, which I had previously dismissed as the most dim-witted and sedentary members of the flock, proved remarkably deft at eluding us on their home ground.

From the amount of sheep dung waiting to surprise the unwary passerby in the flat part of the pasture, I deduced that the sheep must spend a lot of time hanging out there, which probably accounted for my remembering that I’d seen them. Once they escaped from the flatlands to the slope beyond, as half of them did before we could get their numbers, the dung gave way to sneaky hidden rocks, all accompanied by patches of thorns and brambles, conveniently placed so you could hardly help landing in them when you tripped over the rocks.

We never would have gotten the last two sheep identified if Dad hadn’t returned from tending Rob and used his powerful birding binoculars to read the tags from afar. He offered to search the rest of the pasture for any sheep that might be still lurking out of sight, and we gratefully took him up on it.

“What’s Eric doing?” Michael said, pointing. I broke into a run, with Michael and the lanky Sammy behind me. One of the sheep appeared to be dragging my nephew behind him. At least it was moving too slowly to be dangerous. Though why Eric didn’t simply let go of the sheep’s tail I couldn’t imagine.

Until I got closer and realized that Eric was trying to rescue Spike, who had chomped onto the sheep’s left hind leg and refused to let go. Or perhaps Eric thought he was rescuing the sheep from Spike. Since the sheep appeared calmly oblivious to her two hitchhikers, I suspected Spike had nothing but a mouthful of wool. His readiness to let go when Michael grabbed him confirmed my suspicion.

“You’re letting my sheep go!” Eric wailed, as I picked him up and tried to dust him off.

“Don’t give up the sheep,” Michael said, nodding.

“I’ll take it back to the pasture,” Sammy said. He captured the sheep and strolled off leading it with an ease that astonished me. How long did you have to live in the country before you learned how to do things like that?

“What on earth were you doing?” I asked Eric.

“Spike was helping me catch the sheep,” Eric said. “Good dog.”

Since Spike’s only previous encounter with sheep had been in a culinary context, I didn’t approve of casting him in a real-life remake of Lassie.

“That’s nice,” I said aloud. “But Spike’s pretty fierce. Maybe we should keep him away from the poor sheep.”

Just then, Spike proved my point by biting Michael.

“Okay,” Eric said. “I’ll take him back to his pen.”

Before I could stop him, he reached out and picked up Spike. Spike not only refrained from biting, he curled up in Eric’s arms and behaved angelically all the way back to his pen. Though I did suspect he was smirking at me and Michael.

Michael went off to solve the traffic jam by removing as many sheep as possible from the road, while I returned to the checkout table.

An hour went by. Maybe two. Or maybe it was only ten minutes. All my running around after sheep and suspects had worn me out, and I was starting to make embarrassing mistakes in simple arithmetic.

“I think a dollar is too much for this,” a woman announced, thumping a large, ungainly ceramic object on the table in front of me.

I studied the object. It appeared to be a cross between a candelabrum and one of those strawberry pots with ten or fifteen different holes for the plants to stick out. Perhaps it was intended to be a vase in the shape of a stylized octopus. Whatever it was, someone had painted it in color combinations even a kindergartener would find gaudy.

“I agree,” I said. “But that’s the price.”

“Can’t you reduce it to fifty cents?” she said. “Since it’s the end of the day and all?”

I thought of explaining that it might be the end of the day, but the yard sale would probably be continuing next weekend. But that would probably start a long discussion.

“Okay, on one condition,” I said.

She snapped to attention.

“You can have it for fifty cents if you go out and find something else on sale for a dollar that’s just as large and hideous,” I said. “If you can do that, I’ll give you both things, two for fifty cents. Otherwise it stays a dollar.”

She frowned for a second. Then she picked up the vase or statue or whatever it was and raced back out into the yard sale.

“But it has to be something really hideous, remember,” I called after her. “And I get to decide if it’s hideous enough!”

The next customer stepped up and plunked two large cardboard boxes on the table. But instead of efficiently emptying her boxes so I could add things up, she handed me a plate. A rather ordinary china plate.

“How much for this?” she asked.

I turned the plate over. Yes, it had a price tag.

“Fifty cents,” I said.

“Can you do twenty-five for it?”

I looked at her two large boxes. And then at the long line of people waiting to check out. Waiting and watching.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “But I tell you what—”

I broke the plate over my knee and handed her the larger half.

“I can do twenty-five for this,” I said.

Apparently she wasn’t in the mood for bargaining. She ignored the proffered plate, unloaded her two boxes without attempting to dicker, and paid the total in silence.

I left the two halves of the plate at my elbow, just to keep people motivated.

A long afternoon.

“Hello, dear.”

I glanced up to see that my next customer was Mother, carrying the hideous lamp shade, its garish colors glowing in the afternoon sunlight like some strange tropical fungus.

“Where were you planning to use that?” I asked, pointing to the lamp. And then I braced myself, hoping that the answer wouldn’t be “In your living room, dear.”

“Good heavens,” Mother exclaimed. “You really didn’t think I’d use that on a lamp!”

“Isn’t that usually what one does with lamp shades?”

“But not one this vile,” Mother said, recoiling from the lamp shade, as if the possibility of using it for interior decoration was a new and profoundly disturbing notion.

“Then why are you buying it?”

“For my costume, dear,” she said. She placed the lamp shade on her head and struck a pose. The lamp shade was so huge that it dwarfed her slender figure. She really did look like a tall floor lamp afflicted with the ugliest of all possible shades.

“Oh, I see,” I said, trying to sound merely enthusiastic rather than profoundly relieved. “Is Dad going as a lamp, too?”

“We didn’t think it quite suited,” she said. “He’s wearing Eric’s old warped skis and going as a rocking chair.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “You always think of the most unusual costumes.”

Mother beamed at that. And it wasn’t a lie, either. How nice to have reached the age where I found my parents’ enthusiasm for wearing outlandish costumes endearing; as a child, of course, it had been only one of many reasons I’d found them mortally embarrassing.

“How’s it going?” Michael asked, appearing in front of me instead of a customer. I glanced over and saw that Mrs. Fenniman and Rob were helping the next customer drag a small mountain of boxes over to my table. I took a deep breath.

“We’re getting there,” I said, nodding at the large pile of sales receipt carbons on the table.

“How about the sleuthing?” he asked, in an undertone.

“Well, it obviously hasn’t been going anywhere for the last several hours.”

“If you needed to get away from the sale, you should have told me,” he exclaimed.

“There’s nothing more I can do before sundown anyway,” I said. “But if you’d care to help me with a surveillance this evening.”

“I would be delighted,” he said, with a bow. “Who are we tailing?”

“Carol McCoy,” I said.

“The grieving widow?”

“She’s not grieving,” I said. “She’s probably celebrating Gordon’s demise, and she may have caused it.”

“Then I dislike her on principle.”

“Because she might be a murderer?”

“Because she’s contributing to your unreasonably negative view of matrimony, which is an honorable estate, and so forth. You look beat. Why don’t you knock off now? I can finish up, and you can take a hot bath, and maybe even a nap.”

“You’re just trying to get on my good side,” I said.

“Always,” he said, with a smile.