“You really think he’d do that?”
Spike chose that moment to lift his head, look over at us, and heave a deep sigh, as if hurt by our distrust. Then he curled up again into a tighter ball.
“You’re right,” Michael said. “We definitely need to get all the boxes out of his reach.”
Luckily, we happened to have a supply of cinder blocks in a nearby shed. In fact, we happened to have quite a lot of miscellaneous building materials left over from various construction and repair projects the previous owners had undertaken and usually left unfinished. We eventually decided that a base of three cinder blocks put the boxes high enough that Spike would have a hard time doing any damage to them.
As soon as we opened the door to leave, Spike switched from looking aloof and disdainful to looking pitiful and abandoned.
“Why does he do that when he knows we won’t fall for it?” Michael said as we strolled toward the barn.
“Because he knows we’ll still feel guilty enough to give him extra liver treats,” I said. “At least I did.”
“If it’s confession time, so did I,” Michael admitted. “If we have kids, we’ll have to work harder on not letting them play one of us off against the other.”
I made a noncommittal noise. Not that I was opposed, in theory, to the notion of children, but I didn’t really want to think about taking on any more long-term projects until we had the house fit to live in again.
“Of course, most children aren’t as devious as Spike,” Michael said.
“You really haven’t paid enough attention to my nieces and nephews, have you?”
“I have,” he protested. “They try, but they don’t quite match Spike. Though what they lack in deviousness, they make up for with vocabulary and opposable thumbs.”
“And many children grow up to be college students,” I added. By March, Michael was usually feeling somewhat jaundiced about the intelligence and sanity of each year’s crop of students.
“With luck, they outgrow that, too,” he said.
Our resident collection of college students were all asleep when we crept past them to our bedroom stall. At least they were asleep until Michael tripped over a large stack of bells they’d left lying around, but that was their own fault.
As I drifted toward sleep, I found myself thinking about the photos. My little bits of history. I didn’t want to trust them to the shed, so I’d brought the manila folder with me and hidden it in plain sight, along with several dozen similar folders holding paint samples, brochures about different brands of windows, appliance warranties, and other detritus of the house remodeling. I was looking forward to pitching the whole collection out—well, all except for the warranties—when the house was finished. But Mrs. Sprocket, from whom we’d bought the house, wouldn’t have pitched out anything. She’d have shoved the whole collection into a twenty-fourth copier-paper box, and perhaps in a hundred years some historian might find it a fascinating resource on early-twentieth-century domestic architecture. How much of our collection was just as random—stuff saved simply because it had been gathered? Or worse, stuff left in Mrs. Sprocket’s house because no one else had any use for it?
Not something I needed to know, but that didn’t stop my brain from fretting about it for an annoyingly long time before I finally dropped off. I’d been asleep no more than half an hour when Spike’s barking woke us.
Chapter Twenty-four
The whole idea of putting Spike and the boxes in the shed together was to catch anyone who went after the boxes. I kept reminding myself of that when the barking began and I rummaged around for my shoes.
“Wake up!” I hissed to Michael. “Spike’s barking.”
“Wha?” he muttered.
“Someone’s after the boxes!”
“S’three,” Michael said. He had one eye open and was looking at the clock.
“Yes, three A.M.,” I said. “That’s when burglars strike.”
Through Spike’s barking, I could hear another sound, one that didn’t quite register. I ran to the barn door, stepped out—
Straight into the path of a stampede of naked sheep.
Okay, they weren’t all naked. Only half a dozen of them. Two or three more had been partially sheared, and the remaining dozen or so still had their wool. Most were trotting briskly back in the direction of Mr. Early’s pasture—probably a subterfuge, as Mr. Early’s sheep never went home of their own accord—but a few were already peeling off in various directions. Going to pay a call on Mr. Shiffley’s cows, perhaps, or down to the creek to skinny-dip.