Owls Well That Ends Well (3 page)

But the crowning touch was the short chicken wire fence that ran outside the main fence, leaving a small area where we’d turned loose as many dogs as we could round up on short notice. The pit bull had turned out to be a devout coward, the geriatric Doberman slept most of the time, but Spike, Michael’s mother’s dog, more than made up for their shortcomings.

I nodded with approval as Rob used a piece of doughnut to bribe Spike into detaching himself from Mr. Sprocket’s left ankle.

“Meg, I have the signs for the barn,” Dad said.

“Signs?” I echoed. “Why, what are you doing with the barn?”

“Making it off-limits,” Dad said. “So no one will disturb the owls.”

“Fine, Dad,” I said. I’d have plenty of time later to explain that the barn would be my blacksmithing workshop, not a sanctuary for his beloved endangered barn owls. If the owls couldn’t tolerate a reasonable amount of hammering, they could relocate to any of the other run-down outbuildings on the property.

“Oops; there’s the doorbell again,” I said.

I strolled toward the front door, followed by Dad, still chattering about the owls. By now, it was light enough that I could see our caller. He was peering through the glass sidelight to the left of the front door. I deduced from a half-dozen greasy triangular nose marks that he’d already exhausted the possibilities for snooping through the right side.

“Oh, great,” I said. “It’s Gordon-you-thief.”

“Who’s that?” Dad asked.

“Gordon McCoy. He runs the Antique and Junque Emporium on Main Street.”

“Why do you call him Gordon-you-thief?”

“Everyone does,” I said, opening the door. “No, Gordon, you can’t go in early; you’ll have to wait until nine like everyone else.”

Gordon straightened up and smirked at me. You couldn’t call it a smile when his beady eyes weren’t involved at all, and he had an awkward way of trying to open his mouth as little as possible to hide his front teeth, which were oversized and underbrushed. His appearance would improve enormously if you could swap his nearly nonexistent chin with his exaggerated Adam’s apple, and he’d be much more pleasant to have around if he’d stop using aftershave by the quart. I deduced from the red bandanna knotted over his head, the red sash around his waist, the painted-on handlebar mustache, and the single gold clip-on hoop earring that he’d typecast himself as a pirate.

“Shiver me timbers and call off the dogs,” he said, throwing up his hands. “I’ll come clean.”

“Very funny, Gordon,” I said, and started to close the door.

Gordon’s foot got in the way.

“I’m here for the yard sale,” he said, in an injured tone. “And you’ve got all these dogs running around loose.”

“They’re not loose,” I said. “They’re inside a fence, with a BEWARE OF THE DOGS sign.”

“Well, how am I supposed to get in with all those dogs running around?”

“We’ll be removing the dogs when the yard sale starts,” I said. “At nine.”

“But that’s two hours from now,” Gordon complained. “What am I supposed to do for two hours?”

“Go have breakfast somewhere,” I suggested.

“Aw, come on,” he said. “After all I did for you when you were getting ready for this? What’s the harm?”

“See you at nine, Gordon,” I said. I raised my foot and took deliberate aim, as if about to stomp on the foot he still had stuck in the door. He jerked his leg back and I shut the door.

Good riddance.

Chapter 4

“After all he did for you?” Dad repeated. I turned around to find that he had his back to me and was attempting to peer over his left shoulder at me.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Owls can rotate their heads a full 270 degrees,” he said.

“I expect their necks are built rather differently from yours,” I said. “You’ll pull something if you keep trying that.”

“Yes, they have several extra vertebrae,” Dad said, rotating his head and trying to peer over the right shoulder. “Exactly what did Gordon do for you?”

“Beats me,” I said. “He gave us estimates on some of the books and antiques, but since everyone else’s estimates were at least twice what he offered, we didn’t sell him anything.”

“That doesn’t sound helpful,” Dad said.

“What’s more, he missed every appointment he made with us,” I added over my shoulder as I headed back to the kitchen. “And then he’d show up at some maximally inconvenient time and get huffy when we refused to leave him alone in the house. I’m surprised he waited until seven to show up.”

“If you mean the weasel in the pirate costume, he was skulking around the yard earlier,” Rob said.

“How can you say something like that about a perfectly nice animal like the weasel?” I asked.

“The sewer rat in the pirate costume, then,” Rob said. “He was the one who set off the dogs in the first place, but somehow he managed not to get bitten.”

“That’s Gordon,” I said. “How is Mr. Sprocket?”

“Please; Barrymore,” the man in question said, offering me his hand to shake.

“Sorry,” I said. “Mr. Barrymore, of course.”

“No,” he said. “Just Barrymore. Barrymore Sprocket.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, with more enthusiasm than I felt. “Have some doughnuts; I hear the doorbell again.”

As soon as I was out of sight, I dried my now-damp hand on my jeans leg and made a mental note to introduce Barrymore to my cousin Leo, the mad inventor, who might still be looking for guinea pigs to test his revolutionary new antiperspirant hand cream.

“Has this been going on all morning?” Dad said, as I appeared in the hall again. He had perched on the newel post at the bottom of the banister, the better to practice his head-swiveling.

“Only since five-thirty,” Rob called from the kitchen.

“Five-thirty isn’t this morning, it’s last night,” I muttered, on my way to the door. “If it’s Gordon-you-thief again, I’ll kill him.”

A pleasant-looking woman in her fifties, wearing a flowered dress and a flower-decked hat, stood on the doorstep. Overdressed for a yard sale—she even held a pair of white kid gloves in her left hand. If this was a costume, it was too subtle for me. But there was no mistaking her purpose. She had that now-familiar acquisitive gleam in her eye and she clutched a copy of the
Caerphilly Clarion,
open at the classifieds.

“Excuse me,” she said, with an ingratiating smile. “Is this where the yard sale is being held today?”

I pointedly looked past her to the road. Yes, the half-dozen yard sale signs Dad had tacked up several days earlier were still there, and even though it wasn’t quite fully daylight, they were clearly readable even from here. For that matter, while driving up to the house, she could probably have spotted the fenced-in sale area. The multicolored tents and awnings were hard to miss.

I focused on her face.

“Yes, we’re having a yard sale, but it doesn’t open till nine a.m.,” I said.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I did so want to come, but you see, we’re having a luncheon at church today, and I have to be there at nine.”

“For a luncheon?”

“I’m in charge of preparations,” she said. “Anyway, I just wanted to see if you had any little bits of china.”

“Little bits of china,” I repeated.

“Yes,” she said. “I just love little china figurines. But I can’t afford to buy many of them in stores—fixed income, you know. And between church events, and Scout meetings, I just never seem to have a Saturday free for yard sales. So I was wondering—if you had anything like that, maybe I could just slip in and take a peek. I won’t take much of your time, really. And I’d be so grateful.”

By this time, I realized I’d encountered another well-known fixture of local yard sales—the Hummel lady, who’d built her enormous collection for peanuts by using her sharp eye and sharper bargaining skills at flea markets and yard sales. And, of course, by conning her way into yard sales before anyone else.

“Oh, no, I don’t really think we have anything like that,” I said. “Not anymore, anyway. Well, we did find a box of figurines my great-aunt picked up when her husband was stationed in Germany in the fifties, but they weren’t anything fancy. Just these cutesy little kids with lambs and puppies and things.”

Her expression had grown strangely fierce and the fingers holding the newspaper twitched slightly.

“But I sold the whole box for a dollar to a guy who showed up a few minutes ago,” I said. “Sorry.”

“But- but-,” she sputtered.

I had a hard time not laughing at the look of astonishment on her face. Okay, I suppose it was mean of me, but I was running on too little sleep, thanks to the likes of her.

Suddenly I saw her expression change to one of cold rage. She pursed her lips and her eyes narrowed. I stepped back involuntarily, but then I realized she wasn’t looking at me.

She’d spotted Gordon-you-thief, lurking about the yard, craning his neck to see something inside the fence that surrounded the yard sale.

“I see,” she said, in clipped tones, already turning away. “Thanks anyway.”

I stayed to watch for a few moments. Seeing how quick she’d been to jump to conclusions about him, I suspected that she’d encountered Gordon before and that it might be fun to watch her accost him. But, instead, she marched over to the outer edge of the yard and stood there, close to the bushes that separated the yard from the road, staring at him.

I shrugged. Perhaps there would be interesting fireworks later.

“How does this sound?” Dad asked, and then demonstrated an owl’s hoot.

“Fabulous,” I said. “If I were a vole, I’d be terrified.”

“I don’t think it’s resonant enough,” Dad fretted.

When I returned to the kitchen, I found that several more relatives had joined the crowd—out-of-town ones who’d never met Michael before, and were inspecting him as frankly as if he were going on sale along with the eight-track tapes and Ronco gadgets outside. I considered asking Dad for the best group noun for an excessively large collection of family members—a chattering of cousins, or an unkindness of relations? But I stifled the impulse. After all, Mother would probably hear about it if I said anything insulting about her family.

Michael was pretending not to notice. Instead, he was looking with a puzzled expression at the impromptu kitchen table some of the family had constructed by propping the detached bathroom door up on some of the bricks left over from the chimney that had collapsed in September.

“Someone was trapped in the bathroom,” I said.

“Ah,” he said, nodding. “Well, we were planning to demolish the quarter bath anyway.”

He sounded calm about the damage, though I couldn’t tell what his face looked like. He’d donned a mask—Groucho never looked half as good—and began giving Claude and Emma the grand tour of the house. The tour was a lot safer than it used to be, now that I’d cleared all the stuff out. Also a whole lot less interesting, at least with me as tour guide. All the decluttering had temporarily dulled my enthusiasm for the house, so my tour consisted of a series of apologies for the house’s present decrepitude; warnings about what not to touch, walk on, or stand under; and a dispiriting inventory of the repairs needed to make the house habitable.

Perhaps I should tag along more often on Michael’s tour, I thought, as I sipped my coffee. If I listened with my eyes closed, I could almost see our future kitchen, with its deft blend of period charm and modern functionality, instead of the battered, dated 1940s room I was actually sitting in. The formal dining room next door certainly looked a lot better in the candlelight of Michael’s imagination, with all its plasterwork and parquet painstakingly restored. He was particularly effective at evoking a vision of our library-to-be. You could almost overlook the fact that the actual room was boarded off until we could replace the floor that had collapsed into the basement a couple of decades ago.

Dad chimed in with his vision of what we planned to do with the yard, though I seriously doubted if we had room on three acres for free-range cows, sheep, and poultry along with the organic vegetable garden and the orchard of endangered heritage fruit trees.

At least Mother wasn’t around to share her decorating suggestions. Presumably she was still working on her beauty sleep back at the Cave, as Michael and I called the tiny, dank basement apartment we were about to leave behind for the new house.

I tried to tune all this out. Not that I wasn’t, at least in theory, equally excited about all these projects—the ones that didn’t involve livestock, anyway—but the sheer number of them overwhelmed me, and the only thing that kept me from panicking was that they were all neatly jotted down in the notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe, as I called my giant to-do list. Once they were in the notebook, I could manage not to think of them all the time. And this morning, just thinking about them made me tired.

And maybe just a little worried.

People had warned me that buying a house together was one of the most stressful things you could do to a relationship, and renovating it was another, so doing both together probably constituted a death knell for couples less firmly grounded than Michael and me.

At least I hoped we were firmly grounded. We’d only had a few minor arguments so far. Minor because, after one of us had stormed off—me to my rented forge or Michael to his office at the college—the other had quickly gone running after to apologize, and we’d always mended the quarrel quite satisfactorily by bedtime. Then again, so far we hadn’t gotten very far with the renovations. We’d only gotten as far as working through the clutter.

And what’s this “we” stuff? the cynical part of my brain put in. You’re the one doing all the work.

While Michael works two jobs so we can afford it, the kinder, gentler part of my brain replied. Instead of whining, I should be proud of how well he juggled the conflicting roles of drama professor vying for tenure and regular cast member on a syndicated TV show.

The cynic tried to suggest that money wouldn’t be such a problem if Michael hadn’t committed us to buying such a money pit of a house. Kinder-gentler would then protest that if Michael hadn’t taken the house, we’d still be trying to make do with his tiny basement apartment.