“Damn,” I muttered. A little too
loudly.
“What is it?” the chief said, looking
back at me.
“This is turning into a zoo,” I said,
waving at the crowd of rubberneckers and interrupted shoppers,
pretending that they rather than the book had inspired my
exclamation. “I don’t suppose you’d let us collect their money so
they could all haul their stuff away.”
The chief lowered his head and peered
disapprovingly over his glasses.
“And you’re positive none of their
stuff is evidence?” he said.
“It was just a thought,” I said. “How
about if I get my volunteers to go down the line and box up
everyone’s stuff—we’ll have the carbons of the sales slips for an
inventory. And then we can store everything until your officers are
finished with it, and you could question people and get them out
from underfoot.”
He looked at me suspiciously, then
nodded.
“That should work,” he said, sounding
faintly surprised that I’d come up with a good idea. “Get Sammy to
help
you,” he added, as a tall, gangling young redheaded officer strode
up, still trying to button one of his uniform cuffs.
Help me or make sure I didn’t pull
anything?
I added Sammy and the cousin dressed as
a ballerina to the checkout line detail. Michael and Sammy did the
heavy work of boxing up the items while Mrs. Fenniman, the
ballerina, and the white rabbit continued writing up sales
slips.
I tried to recruit Horace, but the
chief had already deputized him to help with the crime scene
examination, since Caerphilly only had one part-time evidence
technician. Dad, who devoured mysteries and loved the idea of being
involved in a real-life crime, kept dashing around, trying to be
everywhere at once. I hoped he’d found someone reliable to watch
Eric and Frankie. I couldn’t tell if he was seething with jealousy
that Horace was participating in the investigation or vibrating
with eagerness at the thought of interrogating Horace later. He’d
badger me with questions, too, I thought, with a sigh. Dad had
convinced himself and almost everyone we knew that I was a
brilliant amateur sleuth. Unfortunately, Chief Burke was one of the
few holdouts. The more I could keep Dad out from underfoot, the
happier the chief would be.
For that matter, I planned to be as
helpful as possible to the chief when I couldn’t stay out of his
way entirely. I raced to clear one of our two checkout tables when
he asked for some place to serve as a collection point for the
evidence they found—so far, only the half-burnt book.
“You go on down to the barn and get
started,” the chief told Horace—who had shed his beloved gorilla
suit, apparently in the interest of looking more
professional.
“And be careful,” I said.
The chief raised an eyebrow at
me.
“Tell all your officers to be careful
in there,” I said. “The barn’s old, and run down, and we’re not
sure it’s structurally sound. No one was supposed to go in
there.”
“Ah,” the chief said. “That’s the
reason for the KEEP OUT signs. Makes sense. Knowing those
Sprockets, it’s a mercy the whole thing didn’t fall down years
ago.”
“If Gordon had paid any attention to
the signs, maybe he’d be alive today,” I said. “Of course, a whole
lot of other people ignored them as well.”
“Such as?” the chief said, taking out a
small notebook.
“I don’t know all their names,” I said.
“Barrymore Sprocket probably knows more than I do—he went in and
tried to chase Gordon out, with no success.”
“We’ll talk to him,” the chief said,
scribbling notes. “Right now, just tell me who you
saw.”
“The Hummel lady, for one,” I said,
pointing to her. “I don’t know her name, but that’s her, over there
in the flowered dress.”
The chief nodded, and scribbled in his
notebook. Why couldn’t he satisfy my curiosity by exclaiming, “Oh,
you mean Mrs. So-and-so?”
“Then there was a man in a gigantic
Mexican sombrero,” I said. “He’s probably still around somewhere.
And a tall man in a brown jacket. And one of the Gypsies—we have
quite a lot of Gypsies, so I’m not quite sure which one. Oh, and
Giles might have gone in to talk to him about a book.”
He couldn’t claim I’d left out Giles.
But had my casual manner made Giles seem less suspicious or more?
The chief just kept scribbling.
“Of course, I didn’t necessarily see
everyone who went into the barn,” I said. “I was trying to keep the
yard sale running. There could have been dozens of
others.”
“Hmm,” the chief said, looking up from
his notebook. “Somehow I suspect you didn’t miss
much.”
Just then Horace returned, escorting a
uniformed officer who held something in his latex-gloved
hands.
The other owl-shaped
bookend.
“We found it in the barn, sir,” the
officer said, placing it on the evidence table. “Appears to be a
match for the murder weapon.”
Of course, Giles picked that moment to
stroll up.
“I didn’t know you were closing so
early,” he said, blinking with confusion at the general exodus
toward the checkout line. “I don’t suppose—oh, there it is. Have
you found the other one as well?”
He was pointing, of course, at the
owl-shaped bookend.
“Is this yours, sir?” Chief Burke
asked, with narrowed eyes.
“Er … no, not exactly,” Giles said,
blinking with confusion. “Not yet anyway. I suppose it belongs to
Dr. Langslow. I got it from his table, anyway. I was planning to
buy it.”
I winced. To someone who didn’t know
him well, Giles’s stammer and his unwillingness to meet the chief’s
eyes probably smacked of guilt. I realized that this was simply his
normal behavior when forced to talk to anyone he didn’t know very
well about any subject other than nineteenth-century English
poetry, but just how well did Chief Burke know Giles?
“And just what did you do with it in
the meantime?” the chief asked.
“Carried it around with me,” Giles
said. “Them, actually—there’s another one someplace. I don’t
suppose you’ve found it, eh? Anyway, I’m afraid I threw them down
after I lost my temper with that beastly Gordon
McCoy.”
“And one of them struck Mr. McCoy,” the
chief said, nodding.
“Good heavens no!” Giles exclaimed.
“Just threw them down—over there in the barn. Although a few
minutes ago, when I returned to look—”
He took a step or two in the direction
of the barn and the
chief headed him off by stepping in his path, the way a Border
collie would guide a large and rather flustered sheep.
“The barn’s off-limits,” the chief
said. “Just what were you and Mr. McCoy quarreling
about?”
“It wasn’t a quarrel,” Giles said. “He
offered to sell me a book at an exorbitant price, and I told him I
wouldn’t pay that much even if I wanted it, and I already had a
copy. And then he said something rude, and I replied in kind and
threw the bookends down in a temper. And when I returned later to
apologize and reclaim my bookends, I couldn’t find him or
them.”
I sighed. Giles sounded less nervous
now, and more like his usual dry, precise self. Unfortunately,
under the circumstances, dry and precise sounded more like stuffy
and condescending.
“Is this the book?” the chief said,
indicating the Freeman book on the evidence table.
“Good heavens,” Giles said. “The swine.
I didn’t think he’d actually do it.”
“Do what?”
“Burn it,” Giles said. “He said if I
didn’t buy it, he might as well burn it—I thought he was just
joking. I never imagined …”
He reached out to touch the book—I had
the impression he wanted to comfort it—but the chief grabbed his
arm.
“Hands off,” the chief said. “That’s
evidence.”
“Evidence?” Giles echoed.
“What—?”
“I hear you have a body for me,” said a
voice behind us.
“Coroner’s here, chief,” Sammy
announced, unnecessarily.
“Body?” Giles looked pale.
“We’re investigating the murder of
Gordon McCoy,” the chief said. “I’m afraid I have a few more
questions for you, Professor Rathbone.”
Giles didn’t faint, but I suspect it
was a close call.
Chief Burke looked up and noticed that
the small crowd of kibitzers had grown larger. He
frowned.
“Meg,” he said. “I need a place where I
can talk to these people. Someplace more private.”
“You can use the house,” I said. “The
dining room would work. There’s no furniture, though.”
“Can we have a room with furniture,
then?” the chief asked.
“None of them have furniture yet,” I
said. “At least the dining room has a floor. I can haul in one of
the card tables and a few folding chairs; we have plenty of
those.”
“That would be fine,” the chief said,
and waved his hand as if dismissing me to go set up his
interrogation room.
I’d have been more irritated if I
hadn’t seen Mrs. Burke, standing behind him, hands on her hips, and
a frown on her face.
“Henry,” Mrs. Burke began, in a warning
tone. “What kind of high-handed stunt are you pulling, shutting
down the yard sale like this? Don’t tell me there’s some county
ordinance about yard sales that you’ve suddenly decided to
enforce.”
“Don’t start with me, Minerva,” the
chief said. “It’s not my fault that no-account Gordon McCoy managed
to get himself murdered right in the middle of these good people’s
yard sale.”
“Gordon McCoy!” Mrs. Burke exclaimed.
“Well, God rest his soul, but if we had to have someone murdered …
I suppose there’s no help for it, then; you can’t argue with a
murder, can you?”
With that, she trotted off to take her
place in the checkout line.
I went over to snag a few folding
chairs from some of the now-idle sellers.
As I was picking up the chairs, I
overheard someone talking in the checkout line.
“If I were the chief, I’d take a good
look at that wife of his,” a voice said.