“Meg!” Mrs. Fenniman called. “Where’s the key to the cash box. We need to lock up.”
“Meg!” Dad shouted. “What channel is CBS on up here? And when do they have the local news? We have to watch it tonight; they just interviewed me about SPOOR!”
“Hey, Meg,” Rob said, appearing at my side. “I’ve got the lawyer on the phone. He’s having trouble finding his way here—can you come and talk to him?”
“Meg, dear,” Mother said, on my other side. “Are you sure you don’t want to come shopping with me? It’s for the house.”
“Aunt Meg! Come look what I found in my owl pellet!” Eric called.
For a moment, I seriously considered running back inside, crawling down the dumbwaiter shaft, and dumping myself out at Chief Burke’s feet. Maybe he’d arrest me for interfering with his investigation and I could spend the rest of the day in a nice, quiet jail cell.
Chapter 17
By the time I’d turned over the cash box key, sent Dad to guide the lawyer, given Mother my regrets, admired a small rodent skull that Eric had found, and allowed Sammy to ink and print my fingers, another dozen small crises had piled up, and I thought I’d never have a chance to continue what Michael called my snooping. Then I noticed a particular face appear in the circle surrounding me. Professor Schmidt. Just the person I wanted to talk to, although it looked as if I might have to solve a dozen other people’s problems before I got the chance.
“Dad,” I said, when he reappeared from his conversation with the lawyer. See if you can help some of these people. I’ll see what I can do for Professor Schmidt; he’s been waiting a long time.”
Schmidt didn’t even thank me for letting him jump ahead of the others who had, technically, been waiting longer than he had.
“Someone has blocked my car in!” he exclaimed.
“Okay,” I said. “Do you have the make and model and license plate number?”
He frowned.
“It’s an SUV,” he said. “Black. Or maybe dark blue.”
“Show me.”
He turned and headed toward the road, and I followed. I resisted the urge to say how idiotic it was, coming to complain about the SUV blocking him in without bringing full information. After all, it gave me a chance to get him away from the crowd and extract some information.
“So, the police finally let you go?” I said, with deliberate casualness.
“Finally let me go?” he said, starting. “What do you mean by that?”
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” I said. I tried to look innocent, though I knew that wasn’t my forte. “I just assumed they’d question you pretty closely.”
“Me?” he said, looking even more alarmed. “Why?”
“I thought you were Giles’s competitor for the rare book Gordon found. Isn’t that why you were in the barn, talking to him?”
“Good heavens no,” he said, with an exaggerated wince. “From what I heard, it was a mystery book. I’m a professor of literature!”
His tone reminded me of my great-aunt Hester, whose complete lack of firsthand knowledge about pornography hadn’t diminished her passion for condemning it. As far as the family could tell, a Wonder Woman comic and a few mildly titillating historical romances were the closest things she’d ever seen to an obscene book. I wondered if Professor Schmidt’s knowledge of mysteries was equally sparse.
“That’s odd,” I said. “I overheard that you were trying to buy a book from Gordon.”
“Papers, not books,” he said.
“Papers, then,” I said. “And they had nothing to do with Giles’s mysteries?”
“It was about Mrs. Pruitt,” he said, with injured dignity.
“Mrs. Pruitt,” I repeated, trying to sound both encouraging and noncommittal while racking my brain to think who Mrs. Pruitt might be.
“Mrs. Ginevra Brakenridge Pruitt,” he said, in a withering tone.
“Oh, that Mrs. Pruitt,” I said. “I thought you meant someone living.”
“I am the world’s leading scholar of Mrs. Pruitt’s oeuvre,” he said, sounding slightly offended.
Ginevra Brakenridge Pruitt was a late-nineteenth-century poet whose name had been largely (and justifiably) forgotten outside her hometown of Caerphilly. She’d probably have been forgotten here as well if she hadn’t inherited a whacking great fortune from her robber baron father and doled out large portions of it to the college over the years in return for naming buildings after her and various members of her family.
“I heard a rumor that Gordon had acquired a cache of Mrs. Pruitt’s papers,” Schmidt went on. “I wanted to find out if it was true.”