Owls Well That Ends Well(25)

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.





Chapter 10

I froze so I could hear better, all the while envying dogs their ability to swivel their ears in any direction.

“His own wife?” a second voice exclaimed. “You can’t really think Minerva—”

“No, silly, Gordon’s wife.”

“Carol? I thought she and Gordon split up two years ago.”

I pretended to find something wrong with the chair I was about to fold, and risked a look over my shoulder. One of the Marie Antoinettes we’d been watching so closely as a possible shoplifter was leaning toward a stout, gaudily dressed Gypsy.

“It was five,” Marie Antoinette said. “And they reconciled; but now they’ve split up again, and this time it looks permanent.”

“Very permanent, with him dead and all.”

“Well, naturally,” Marie Antoinette said. “I mean it was looking permanent, before Gordon was killed. They were fighting over property, and Carol swore he was hiding assets from her.”

“And was he?”

“For heaven’s sake, it’s Gordon we’re talking about,” Marie Antoinette said, tossing her fluffy white wig. “Of course he was hiding assets.”

“Troll,” the Gypsy muttered.

“But she’s been going about it the wrong way. She should have just hired a private investigator to follow the jerk. But she’s been trying to do it all herself.”

“Maybe she can’t afford to hire anyone?”

“Well, that’s possible. But at least she shouldn’t have run around doing things that probably made the judge think she was a nutcase.”

“What kind of things?” the Gypsy asked.