Things were quieting down again. The police
were mostly gone, and a couple of neighboring farmers rounded up by
Sammy fixed the break in a fence and put the sheep back in their
pasture again.
The yard sale was battened down for the
night—in fact, for the five days it would have to wait until its
continuation next weekend. When my relatives began arriving back
from Luigi’s, quivering with excitement and curiosity about the
night’s events, I channeled their energy into rigging up some
floodlights, hauling as much of the yard sale stuff as possible
into the barn, and covering the rest with tarps.
When we finally finished that, everyone
else drifted off to bed, but I was still too wound up to
sleep.
“What’s wrong?” Michael asked, when he
came down to the kitchen to see why I was still up, sitting at my
laptop.
“I just remembered that the truck from
Goodwill was supposed to get here at eight A.M. tomorrow,” I said.
“To take all the unsold yard sale stuff. I just called and left a
voice message apologizing for the short notice, and asking to
reschedule for next Monday. I should have called sooner; they may
still show up.”
“Then we’ll tell them to come back next
week,” he said. “Don’t worry; they probably heard the news. They’ll
figure it out.”
“And I e-mailed an updated version of
the ad to the Caerphilly Clarion, asking
them to run it again this Friday,” I said, drawing a line through
the item in my notebook. “And also an updated announcement to the
college radio station. Can you think of anything else we need to
do?”
“Nothing we need to do tonight,” he
said. “Let’s worry about it tomorrow.”
“I don’t want to worry abut anything
tomorrow,” I said. “I just want to sleep late tomorrow. In fact,
never mind late. I just want to sleep.”
“Sounds fine.”
“And then do nothing for the rest of
the week.”
“Also fine,” he said. “Or maybe we
could do something fun.”
I nodded. I was shutting down the
laptop. I hadn’t thought of anything urgent that needed doing, and
sleep was becoming really appealing.
“Maybe before your parents leave town
we could go out to that antique mall with your mother
and—”
“Do we have to do that this week?” I
asked. “Shopping isn’t usually something I do for fun, especially
shopping with Mother, and right now the idea sounds only slightly
less horrible than taking a bus tour of the lower three circles of
hell.”
“But your mother—”
“Will live if she has to go antiquing
by herself.”
“Fine,” he said. He sounded irritated.
“Just blow her off.”
“Michael—”
“Couldn’t you at least take an hour or
two to look at what she’s found?” he asked. “I only spent the whole
past week hauling her around town, and listening patiently to every
crazy idea she came up with and then trying to talk her out of them
all without hurting her feelings. And trying to explain what we
wanted instead.”
“It never occurred to you just to tell
her that what we want is to be left alone to do things
ourselves?”
“She’s your mother, dammit,” he said.
“I was trying to be nice to her.”
“Can’t we be nice to her, and also tell
her nicely that we don’t need a decorator right now?”
“Have you even looked at her drawings?
The latest ones—the ones she’s done this week, based on what I’ve
been telling her?”
“No; she hasn’t mentioned any
drawings.”
“She probably figures you’ll reject
them without even looking at them. Why do you have to be so
negative? She’s only trying to help.”
“Oh, and that’s supposed to make me
feel better? That she’s only trying to help; she doesn’t actually
set out to drive me crazy?”
“Forget it,” he said, turning and
striding out of the room. Something about his tone scared
me.
“All right,” I called after him. “If
it’s so damned important, I’ll look at them!”
“Don’t put yourself out on my account,”
Michael snapped back. His steps clattered down the stairway, and
then I heard the front door slam.
I walked out into the hall, and then
noticed that several of the visiting relatives were peering out of
the doors of their rooms, and Mrs. Fenniman had crept halfway down
the staircase from the third floor.
I ducked back into the room and closed
the door before
any of them could ask what was wrong, where was Michael going, and
had we had a fight. I hoped my relatives wouldn’t come knocking on
my door, trying to cheer me up by sympathizing with me and reviling
Michael. Or telling me Michael was right and I was a fool for
arguing with him. Worst of all, some might take Michael’s side and
some mine, and we could end up with an all-night debate up and down
the hallway. Which, knowing my family, is probably what would have
happened if it hadn’t been past two A.M. already.
Should I go after Michael? Not until I
was sure I had my own temper firmly under control, or I’d only make
it worse. Luckily, I hadn’t heard his car start. I went over to the
window. He wasn’t in the driveway. Maybe he’d just gone out to the
barn to cool off.
I took a deep breath and decided I was
calm enough to cope, so I opened my door and peered out. The
lurking relatives had vanished. I emerged and went downstairs to
the kitchen. I peered out the kitchen window, but I couldn’t see
anyone out back. More to the point, I didn’t hear the inevitable
noise Michael would have made, trying to find his way through the
remaining clutter to the barn.
Then I spotted something on the
door-turned-table, near the leftover pizza and the now-empty cash
box. One of Mother’s design notebooks.
I could feel my temper heating up
again. But my curiosity kicked in, too. I walked over and opened
it.
On the first page, in Mother’s neat
printing, were the words, “Preliminary designs. For discussion
only. Subject to client review. No work to begin until client
signoff obtained.”
Okay, maybe Mother had gotten the
message after all. I stifled a small inclination to feel guilty and
flipped the page.
The first sketch was obviously a design
for the master bedroom. I stared at it, transfixed.
Not because it was horrible. It wasn’t.
It wasn’t bad at all. In fact, I rather liked it. It didn’t really
look like one of Mother’s designs. It was way too simple, and there
wasn’t a square inch of chintz in sight. I could see elements of
Japanese, Mission, and Arts and Crafts styles in it, but it wasn’t
completely any of those things. It was simple, serene, uncluttered,
and beautiful. And at the same time, I could tell there was a lot
of storage space hidden away under the serene surface, which was a
really smart idea. Michael and I still had plenty of stuff, and I
didn’t see us getting rid of it all, no matter how much of a
convert I’d become to simple living and spare, minimalist
décor.
I had to hand it to Mother. She’d come
up with exactly the kind of design we’d have done ourselves, if
either of us had had the time to work on it. Or the
talent.
Of course, if we told her to go ahead
with her design, there was always the issue of whether it would
look like this when she finished adding all those little touches
that occurred to her along the way. And whether we could talk her
into something equally to our liking for the several dozen other
rooms in the house. And whether we could afford even this room. And
how long we’d have her underfoot, and whether any of us would
survive with our sanity intact.
Not to mention my belief that, given a
chance, Michael and I could do something with the place that suited
both of us just fine. It might take longer and it might not be as
breathtakingly beautiful as Mother’s design, but it would be our
home, done by us, not merely a beautiful house that someone had
decorated for us. Assuming we survived as an us. And
then—
But why let quibbling spoil a beautiful
moment of guilt? I owed Mother an apology. But first, and more
important, I owed Michael one.
I’d been so focused on one urgent cause
after another—emptying the house, organizing the yard sale,
rescuing Giles—that I’d been losing sight of the real reason I was
doing all this. That it was all supposed to be for us.
It would serve me right if Michael
decided he’d had enough of the grouchy, hyperactive Meg he’d seen
in the last few months, the commitment-phobic Meg who changed the
subject every time he tried to talk seriously about our future
together, the—
Of course, that was the moment when I
heard a car door slam, followed by his engine starting and the
screech of tires as he roared out of the driveway and down the
road.
I raced back up to our room, found my
purse, and ran down to my car. And then lost valuable time when I
had to run back in to ransack the house for ten minutes, till I
found where I’d dropped my keys instead of putting them in my purse
where they belonged.
I headed for town. I didn’t need to
rush—I had no chance of overtaking him now. Even in his usual good
temper, he’d race along the long, empty road to town. And catching
up with him while he was still angry wouldn’t be productive anyway.
And it wasn’t as if I’d have to wander around looking for him. If
it were day, he could have gone to the gym, or the faculty lounge,
or even Luigi’s for a beer. But this time of night about the only
place he could go was his office. If he drove around for a while to
cool off, he’d eventually end up there.
Caerphilly didn’t exactly roll up the
sidewalks at dusk, but at two-thirty on a Sunday night (or Monday
morning), it was almost eerily deserted. I didn’t see another car
the whole way into town. I heard one, several streets off, when I
was nearing the campus, but since it was too noisy for Michael’s
well-tuned car, I found myself relieved
when it faded in the distance. After all, Barrymore Sprocket, who
had seemed so harmless and turned out to be a cold-blooded
murderer, was still at large somewhere. Though surely somewhere far
from Caerphilly, if he had any sense.
Not a single car parked in front of
Dunsany Hall, but then Michael could have parked in the adjacent
faculty garage. I didn’t have a card for that, but I did have the
key code to get into the building. I took the front steps two at a
time, punched in the code, and slipped inside. I walked softly and
didn’t turn on the lights. I didn’t want Michael to hear me coming
and storm off again.
And maybe with a fugitive at large it
was better not to advertise my presence in a deserted
building.
For that matter, maybe I should have a
weapon ready, in case I ran into Barrymore Sprocket. A quick search
through my purse and pockets produced nothing particularly useful.
For want of something else, I fished out Rose Noire’s bottle of
“Eau de Meg” scent. It was small enough to throw but hard enough to
hurt if it hit, and I didn’t much care if I broke it. Perhaps, if I
held it menacingly, I could convince someone that it was mace. And
I loosened the top, so I could throw the contents more easily.
Self-defense through aromatherapy—it might not stop an attacker but
at least the menthol and eucalyptus might slow him down for a few
useful seconds.
Clutching the small bottle and looking
over my shoulder every few seconds, I tiptoed down the
hall.