Owls Well That Ends Well (6 page)

“And does anyone have any idea who she is, and what her worthless husband looks like?”

“No,” Michael said. “But I know who’s selling the
Playboys
. Your cousin Everett.”

“Can you talk to him?”

“Sure,” Michael said. “I’ll tell him to keep his
Playboys
under the counter with the
Penthouses
and
Hustlers
.”

“Good grief,” I said. “I thought all he had was forty years of
National Geographic
.”

Just then I heard a loud altercation nearby. Not the first of the day, by any means, but the voices sounded familiar, so I waded through the crowd to see what was going on.

“It’s mine!”

“No, it’s not!”

“Yes, it is!”

“I saw it first!”

“But I touched it first!”

“Liar!”

“Thief!”

“Let go!”

“Take that!”

Typical. I’d heard so many quarrels already today that I’d given up intervening unless the participants came to blows, which these two seemed about to do.

And to my dismay, I realized that the latest combatants were two of my aunts—elderly, respectable women who didn’t hesitate to rap my knuckles at Thanksgiving dinner to correct minor flaws in my table manners.

They were playing tug-of-war over an antique purple cut-velvet piano shawl with foot-long fringe. Not tugging very hard, of course, since the material was fragile; but both of them were obviously determined not to let go. Aunt Gladys, her stout form encased in a vintage beaded opera gown, had both ring-encrusted fists clamped firmly around her end of the shawl and looked as if even the boom lift would have trouble dislodging her. In a fair fight, I’d have bet on her. But Aunt Josephine didn’t fight fair. Looking uncannily authentic in her wicked witch costume, complete with a pointed hat and a toy cat wired to her shoulder, she was only holding the shawl with one hand while with the other she whacked Aunt Gladys in the derriere with her broomstick, throwing in an occasional kick to the shins for good measure.

I took a deep breath and was about to wade in on my one-woman peacekeeping mission when a streak of black-and-white fur appeared and launched itself at the shawl. Spike. He couldn’t quite leap high enough to reach the shawl, but he managed a good mouthful of the swaying fringe. My aunts watched in horror as he hung suspended from the shawl for a few seconds and then dropped when his weight ripped the fragile fabric in half.

“Sorry,” Rob said, running up and clipping the leash back onto Spike’s collar—an easier task than usual, with Spike’s fangs muffled in fringe. “I was taking him over for his hamburger, but he got loose.”

“A Solomon among dogs,” I said. “Does either of you want this?”

I held out the remaining half of the shawl. Both aunts shook their heads. They gathered up their dignity along with the objects they’d apparently dropped in the fray and strode off without looking back.

“Bring the other half back when Spike finishes with it,” I told Rob. “Maybe Aunt Minnie can use it for her quilting.”

“And who’s paying for that?” said a woman at a nearby table. Presumably the wounded shawl’s owner.

While I was settling up, my irritation surged again when I spotted someone else going into the barn. The latest in a long series of someone elses who’d been shuffling in and out of the barn.

This one I even recognized—the Hummel lady. Apparently she’d decided to skip out on her church luncheon after all. I’d also seen a man I suspected I’d recognize when he no longer wore a cartoon-sized sombrero. And a tall man in a brown jacket and a Dracula mask. One of the Gypsies—we had about a dozen, since it was one of the easiest costumes for a woman to throw together at the last minute; this one was tall and slender and less gaudy than most. Even poor Giles. Perhaps he’d decided to talk to Gordon-you-thief about the Freeman book after all.

“We have a problem you need to deal with,” Barrymore Sprocket announced, stepping into my path so I either had to notice him or kick him.

I counted to ten before answering. And then I continued on to twenty. Sprocket had been reporting problems for me to deal with all morning, and creating more problems than he solved. He’d fingered two people as professional shoplifters casing the joint. By the time I’d drummed it into his head that his two suspicious characters were not only cousins of mine, but off-duty police officers I’d drafted to help with security, everyone at the sale had also gotten the message, thus seriously undermining their effectiveness as undercover operatives. He’d pitched a major fit when a small Groucho broke a cheap vase, and mortally offended the child’s mother, who changed her mind about buying several hundred dollars’ worth of stuff. When he’d reported that one of the portable toilets was out of toilet paper, I’d told him where we kept the extra supply and assigned him to janitorial duty. He’d been making himself scarce since. I should have known it was too good to last.

“What now?” I asked, through gritted teeth.

Chapter 7

“That Gordon person is hiding stuff in the barn,” he said. “He’s got boxes and boxes of stuff in there and—”

“Did you tell him the barn is off-limits?” I asked.

“Yeah, but he wouldn’t listen to me,” he said, shrugging. “He said you told him he could use it.”

“He’s lying,” I said.

“Well, then maybe you should go and tell him to get out,” Sprocket said, with a shrug. “He won’t listen to me.”

Who would, I thought, but I decided it wouldn’t help to say it.

“I’ll deal with it as soon as I can,” I said aloud. “Of course, I could deal with it now if you could take over doing something for me for a few minutes.”

As I expected, he disappeared as I finished my sentence.

But he was right; I needed to deal with it. Or find someone who could. I finally escaped from the checkout and made it as far as the SPOOR table, where Dad had just finished signing up one of the Nixons as a new member.

“Thank you!” Dad said. “And as promised—everyone who signs up today gets a dozen genuine owl pellets.”

He handed the new SPOORite a baggie full of something, and they shook hands, laughing.

Dad had a whole bowl of the somethings on the table. I picked up one and examined it. It was lumpy and gray and vaguely resembled the remarkably unappetizing organic trail mix he was fond of making during his health food kicks.

“What is this, Dad?” I asked when his customer had gone. “Some kind of special, nutritionally balanced owl kibble? I have to tell you, Michael and I aren’t up for cosseting our owls with an expensive special diet. Free-range owls, that’s what we want.”

“Very funny,” Dad said. “You don’t mean to tell me that I never taught you and Rob about dissecting owl pellets when you were kids?”

“Not that I recall,” I said. I glanced at the pellet uneasily and dropped it back in the bowl. “Why is that so interesting?”

“Because you can tell exactly what an owl’s been eating from the pellets!” Dad exclaimed.

“Oh,” I said, wiping my hand on my jeans. “Pellets are droppings.”

“Not precisely,” Dad said. “Owls regurgitate rather than excrete them. But the principle’s the same. See, here’s an example of a pellet that contained the entire skeleton of a vole!”

Dad was flourishing a sheet of poster board to which he’d glued dozens—perhaps hundreds—of tiny rodent bones, along with a lot of little tufts of ratty-looking fur. Glancing behind him, I could see that he had at least a dozen more owl pellet posters.

“Fascinating Dad—but right now, we have an owl crisis. Gordon-you-thief keeps sneaking into the barn. I’m sure he doesn’t mean to upset your fledgling owls, but—”

“I’ll go and talk to him immediately,” Dad said.

He put a sign on his chair that read OWL BE RIGHT BACK and hurried over to the barn.

“Excuse me,” someone said, tugging at my elbow. “I think a quarter apiece is too expensive for these.”

I turned to find a middle-aged version of Goldilocks standing at my side, pointing her porridge spoon at a collection of tiny china owls on one corner of the SPOOR table.

I stifled the impulse to say that I agreed and would give her a quarter to take the whole lot of them off our hands. Then an evil thought hit me.

“I could let them go at three for a dollar,” I said, feigning reluctance.

“Okay,” Goldilocks said. She snatched up the whole collection, all twelve of them, handed me four dollar bills, and hurried off, as if afraid I’d retract the offer. A second too late, I realized that I’d just broken my own rule about giving everyone receipts.

“Aunt Meg?”

I looked down to see my nephew Eric dressed as Superman. He was staring at Goldilocks’s retreating back with a puzzled look.

“Aunt Meg, three for a dollar—”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “I’ll explain it to you later. Or your grandfather will when he gets back—do you want to watch his table for him?”

“Okay,” Eric said, with a grin. Then he stood behind the counter, puffed out his chest so the “S” showed to better advantage, and assumed a serious, responsible expression.

On my way back to the checkout counter, I ran into my cousin Basil. Or possibly Basil’s identical twin, Cyril. No one in the family could tell them apart and I’d given up trying after I figured out that no matter what you called one of them, he’d claim to be the other twin anyway. At any rate, he was trying to shove an enormous box of stuff along in front of him by kicking it, while carrying a moose head in each arm.

“Let me help you with that,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said, as I divested him of the moose heads. “That’s my pile over there.”

He indicated a huge pile of stuff over by the fence. Enough stuff to fill a two-bedroom apartment, which was what Basil and Cyril had. But their lair was already crammed to the ceiling with books, computer equipment, war-gaming paraphernalia, and assorted junk. Where could they possibly put all this stuff? Not to mention that every item he’d collected was either broken, perfectly hideous, or both.

“What in the world are you doing with all this stuff?” I asked.

I tried to keep my dismay from showing, but apparently I failed.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “We’re getting rid of it all really soon.”

“Getting rid of it?” I echoed. “Then why buy it in the first place?”

“You know that TV show that comes to your house and organizes it?”

“Yes,” I said. Actually, I knew of several such shows, and watched them all religiously, a guilty secret I hid from everyone but Michael. I hoped it was a phase I’d grow out of once we unloaded Mrs. Sprocket’s clutter.

“We want to get on that show,” he said. “But the first thing they do is make you get rid of half of your stuff. And we don’t want to get rid of anything; we just want them to organize us.”

“I see,” I said. “So you’re trying to put enough extra stuff in your house that they won’t touch yours.”

“Exactly,” he said, beaming.

While I wanted to ask, what if they didn’t get on the show, I hated to spoil his fun.

“Good luck with it,” I said instead, and left him with his loot.

Back at the checkout area I found to my relief that Mrs. Fenniman and Michael had taken over as cashiers. Michael would remain calm and genial no matter what the customers said or did, Mrs. Fenniman took no guff from anyone, and both of them could do a halfway decent Groucho voice to go with their masks. Things were looking up.

In fact, I suddenly realized that I was feeling cheerful again. Dad would take care of Gordon-you-thief, and in the meantime, I was surrounded by people made very, very happy by the yard sale.

“Meg, this is wonderful!”

I turned and saw my twenty-something cousin Rosemary, from the Keenan branch of the family. I had a quick moment of panic, because I couldn’t immediately remember what I was supposed to call her these days. Morgana? Ecstasy? Cassandra? She’d been through all of those, but I didn’t think any of them were current. Rob had taken to calling her simply “Not-Rosemary.” She had changed her name five or six times in the last decade, usually to symbolize some new breakthrough she felt she’d achieved in her path to wisdom or enlightenment or however she currently defined her goal. Not-Rosemary had never met an Eastern religion or a new age fad she didn’t like, and she always dressed to enhance her already uncanny resemblance to the Woodstock-era Joni Mitchell.

I reminded myself that I didn’t actually have to call her anything at the moment. And even if someone she didn’t know joined us, a free spirit like Not-Rosemary wouldn’t expect a formal introduction.

“Wonderful?” I repeated. “I’m not sure how wonderful it will be, but I hope it’s productive.”

“Oh, it will be,” she said. “Look at the blessing you’re giving all these people.”

“Blessing?” I echoed, distracted by a passing shopper. I wasn’t quite sure how much of a blessing it was to tempt anyone into buying a surplus milking machine and a dozen vintage 1960s troll dolls.

“Are you familiar with feng shui?” she said. “It’s the ancient Chinese art of placement. The literal translation is ‘the way of wind and water,’ and—”

“Yes, you gave Mother a book about it for Christmas, remember,” I said. Although considering the effect the book had had on Mother, I would have guessed the literal translation of feng shui was “Come, let us drop everything and rearrange the furniture another seventeen or eighteen times before dinner.”

“Clutter is very significant in feng shui,” she said. “At least in dealing with Western homes. If you want to feng shui your house, the first thing you should do is get rid of clutter.”

“Really?” I said, with genuine interest. Had Not-Rosemary finally taken up a fad that I could relate to?

“Yes,” she said. “Clutter is bad. Blocks the house’s chi—the energy flow—and can also hold negative energy from past residents, or past owners of the clutter. If you ask me, clutter is probably the root cause of half the problems in our culture.”

“I see,” I said. I was glad to see that she’d finally stopped blaming television and refined sugar, since I rather liked both of those.

“So look at what your yard sale will accomplish,” she said. “What a wonderful energy clearing! Imagine all the bad karma and negative energy everyone’s getting rid of!”