“Horace,” I said. “How’s the forensic
examination going?”
“Now, Meg,” he said. “You know I can’t
reveal confidential information.”
“I wasn’t asking for confidential
information,” I said. Not yet, anyway. “I just asked how it was
going. If you want to cheer me up, tell me you’re almost finished
and we can restart the yard sale soon.”
“You don’t want me to lie to you, do
you?”
I sighed.
“We’re supposed to get some
reinforcements from Richmond,” he said. “More technicians to help
us process the crime scene. But even when they get here, it’ll go a
lot faster if we aren’t interrupted by all those people hanging on
the fence and knocking it down. Not to mention trying to sneak
under it.”
“Fat chance doing that,” I said. “Did
you see the length of the pegs Dad used to tack the bottom down?
We’ll be lucky if we ever get some of them up; we’ll probably have
to cut the damned fence away.”
“Yeah, we expect when they figure out
they can’t pull
it up, they’ll start trying to cut it,” Horace said. “We were
wondering if you could help us keep them away.”
“Me?”
“Well, you did it before the yard sale
started,” Horace said.
“Wasn’t me,” I said. “But I’ll go get
Spike. Find a bullhorn or something and tell the crowd to step
behind the outer fence, or I won’t be responsible for the
consequences.”
Spike was exiled to his pen beside the
barn, though they’d shut the doggie door we’d installed in the barn
wall, which would have let him go inside to spy on the crime scene.
He seemed bored, and almost glad to see me. At least he only bit me
once while I was snapping the leash onto his collar, and even that
was rather perfunctory. The Doberman and the pit bull, who’d been
cowering at the far side of the pen, looked quite relieved to see
him go.
“Attention, ladies and gentlemen,” came
Horace’s amplified voice. “We’d like you to step back behind the
short outer fence. Please step behind the outer fence, or Meg won’t
be responsible for the consequences.”
Titters ran through the crowd, and rose
to a crescendo when I appeared, half-pulled by the eager Spike.
When we’d opened up the sale, we’d simply moved part of the outer
fence aside. I made sure the ends were closed off so Spike couldn’t
escape, leaving a long crescent-shaped area for him to run in. I
lifted him inside and let him have the full length of the leash. He
lunged toward the nearest people who’d ignored Horace’s command,
barking and snarling in his best Exorcist
fashion. Only my weight at the other end of the leash slowed him
enough to keep the first few malingerers from being bitten, and
after that, people got the message. As Spike hurtled along, the
path
cleared magically before us. Well, before him. A few people stepped
back in after we passed, but when we got to the far end of the run,
I undid the leash and declared open season on anyone who ignored
Horace’s very reasonable request. Spike quickly cleared the open
space and then trotted up and down inside, defending his territory
against invaders.
“That should work,” Horace said. “See,
I told you Meg would know what to do,” he added to the other
officer, as they headed back to the gate.
“Just give us our yard sale back as
soon as possible,” I huffed after them.
Michael spotted me, and came over to
talk through the fence.
“Great idea,” he said. “And I promise,
I won’t tell Mom what you’re doing with her dog.”
“She said he needed more exercise,” I
said, still panting. “Best exercise in the world, running. Look how
lean and fit greyhounds are. You seem to have everything under
control.”
“We should be finished with the
customers in half an hour,” he said. “Then I thought I’d take your
mother into town to keep her entertained—want to
come?”
“Keep her entertained how?” I asked.
Call me suspicious, but I had a hard time imagining what
entertainment Mother could find in Caerphilly. The town didn’t have
that many elegant shops and restaurants to begin with, and she’d
already exhausted the charms of those in the past week while
staying with us.
“She has some new ideas for decorating
the house,” he began.
I winced.
“I’m not in the mood to talk about
decorating with Mother,” I said, trying to keep my tone light. “If
you want
to take her, that’s fine; just please don’t bring back any stuff
right now. I’m not sure I could take adding any more clutter before
we get rid of all the junk that’s already here for the yard
sale.”
“She was talking about paint colors,”
he said. “I don’t think that’s apt to involve much
clutter.”
“Paint’s fine,” I said. “I like paint.
We could decorate entirely with paint. If we painted the various
rooms with really beautiful colors, we wouldn’t even need all that
much furniture. Just elegant, uninterrupted expanses of
color.”
“Uh … right,” Michael said. “I’ll tell
her to suggest some nice self-sufficient colors. If you’re not
interested in going, maybe I can just drop her off and pick her up
later.”
“She should be used to that,” I said.
“It’s what Dad always does. And I really think someone should stay
here to keep an eye on things.”
“And snoop,” Michael said,
nodding.
“I’m not snooping,” I said, in as
dignified a manner as I could manage.
“Well, maybe you should start,” he
said. “I like Chief Burke, but I have this sinking feeling he’ll
take the path of least resistance and arrest Giles, and even if the
attorney gets him off, it won’t help his career any.”
“Or yours,” I said.
“True,” Michael said. “Though my
career’s not as important as clearing Giles.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But it all
amounts to the same thing, so I plan to provide the police with
whatever unofficial assistance I can.”
“Good,” he said. “Happy snooping. I’ll
be back as soon as I can.”
With that, he returned to inventorying
the departing
customers’ junk collections and I headed back to the
house.
I found Barrymore Sprocket and several
of my relatives sitting around the makeshift kitchen table, eating
hamburgers and mountains of potato salad while Rob doled out
Popsicles to Superman and Darth Vader.
“This interruption won’t help the yard
sale,” Barrymore said, through a mouthful of burger. “Weeks of
preparation and advertising, all at great expense, and now
this!”
“Yes, I’m so sorry,” I said. “If I’d
been thinking, I would have scheduled the murder for some other
weekend.”
“Rescheduling the yard sale will double
the expenses,” Sprocket grumbled. And diminish the Sprocket
pirates’ haul, since they took their ten percent of the net
profits.
“Actually, this will probably help the
yard sale,” Rob said, as he unwrapped a grape Popsicle for himself.
“No amount of advertising could possibly match the publicity value
of a really juicy murder.”
He’d been saying that a lot
recently—repeating something I’d said to him, some months before,
when a murder had occurred on the premises of his computer game
company. He’d become convinced that the notoriety of the murder had
contributed significantly to the success of Lawyers
from Hell II, the game they’d released shortly thereafter. I
made a mental note to drop by his office and see if his muttering
about the publicity value of homicide was making any of his
employees nervous.
For now, I let Barrymore Sprocket
ponder Rob’s words while I headed for the stairs. With all those
people sitting around the kitchen, I’d probably need to snag the
dumbwaiter at the top of its route, in the master bedroom. Even my
family might start asking questions if I disappeared into the
basement for several hours.
As I passed the dining room, I could
hear the chief talking to someone, but the old plaster walls were
thick and reasonably sound-resistant. In the living room I saw a
random collection of witnesses and suspects, some in costume and
others in civilian clothes. About half of them were sprawled on the
floor, while the other half stood, leaned, or paced up and down the
room, all under the watchful eye of a police officer.
Upstairs, I slipped into the master
bedroom, closed the door, and tiptoed over to open the dumbwaiter
door. I’d hoped that the sound would travel up the shaft. It did,
but not well enough for me to hear more than one word in ten. The
intermittent hammering from the roof didn’t help, either. Ah,
well—I hadn’t expected it to be that easy.
When we’d found the dumbwaiter, during
one of our tours of the house before buying, I’d considered it a
useless though harmless toy. But Michael had been enchanted, and
now I was glad he’d spent an entire afternoon replacing its frayed
ropes—one of the few actual repairs the house had received so
far.
When I tried tugging the rope, I did
find myself wishing Michael had oiled the pulley at the top while
he was at it. But the pulley was way up in the attic, and I hoped
if Chief Burke heard its squeak, he’d just mistake it for part of
the hubbub outside. Or, more likely, assume we had bats in our
belfry literally as well as figuratively.
I pulled the dumbwaiter up, slowly, so
it wouldn’t bang around in the shaft. On the third try, I found a
way to fit myself in the dumbwaiter and still leave my arms free to
reach outside and tug on the ropes. Luckily for me it was an
oversized dumbwaiter. I wondered if in some bygone era the
Sprockets had been legendary for the size and splendor of their
dinner parties—I had a hard time imagining even a restaurant
needing a dumbwaiter quite so large.
I lowered the dumbwaiter, hand over
hand, until its top was only a foot above the bottom of the door,
which gave me as little distance as possible to cover if I had to
get out of sight quickly. I could still hear fine. And while the
doors that opened from the shaft into the dining room were closed,
they didn’t fit all that well, and the right panel had a number of
cracks and splits, so I could even see out, though at the moment
the only thing in my field of vision was the chief’s leather coat,
slung over the back of one of the folding chairs.
Apparently I arrived in the middle of
an interesting interrogation.
“And you expect us to believe that!”
the chief exclaimed.