“Have you heard anything more about that great horned owl sighting?” Dad asked Sammy.
“No, but I’ve asked the night shift to keep their eyes open,” Sammy said.
“For an owl?” I asked.
“Night time is when you find them out, owls,” Sammy said.
“Not just an owl,” Dad added. “A great horned owl!”
“Cool!” Eric said.
“Is this a good thing or a bad thing?” I asked.
“Depends on your point of view,” Dad said. “It’s a fascinating species, of course, and like the barn owl, endangered, so in theory it’s a good thing, spotting one. But not so close to the barn.”
“It could eat Sophie’s fledglings,” Sammy said.
“It could eat Sophie!” Dad exclaimed. “They’re two to four times the size of full-grown barn owls.”
“Can someone take Spike inside now?” I asked.
“Poor Sophie!” Eric exclaimed, looking very worried. “We have to do something!”
I deduced from Dad’s silence and the solemn look on his face that there wasn’t much we could do to save Sophie from becoming some larger owl’s dinner if she were unlucky enough to encounter one.
Inside the barn, I was relieved to see that Spike was fine. Dad, Eric, and Sammy hurried over to the far corner, where the owls had their nest high up in the rafters, while I followed more slowly, studying my surroundings. The barn was going to be my forge—my workspace. I felt possessive about it. I felt a stab of guilt when I realized that I harbored some resentment toward Gordon. Okay, I could blame him for trespassing, but it wasn’t his fault he’d gotten murdered in the barn. And was it selfish to hope that his murder wouldn’t affect my ability to work here?
But looking around, I felt reassured. I probably couldn’t get past what had happened here until the chief had arrested someone for Gordon’s murder—arrested the real killer, that is, not poor hapless Giles. But the barn already felt like home again. More so than the house, I realized, with a pang of guilt. In fact, while my decluttering labors had dimmed my appreciation for the house, they hadn’t touched my love of the barn.
Perhaps because the barn didn’t need much more work. No one expects a blacksmith’s forge to look like a House Beautiful photo shoot. All I had to do was move my tools and equipment into the least ramshackle end of the barn and I was set. The odd falling board or shingle wouldn’t hurt my iron and tools. They’d survive if the whole barn fell down on them, which two expensive structural engineers had separately warranted wouldn’t happen.
I’d planned to set up my forge Monday, as soon as I packed off the unsold yard sale debris to charity or the dump. Maybe I should still do that, even though we might not be finished with the yard sale. I’d be a lot easier to live with after a few hours of pounding on things with my hammer.
I stood with my eyes half closed, appreciating the barn, while the owl fanciers, having reassured themselves that Sophie hadn’t fallen victim to a hulking feathered bully, began searching the barn floor beneath the nest. For pellets, I assumed.
I suspected Dad was prolonging our stay in the barn so I could examine the place for clues, but I wasn’t sure there were any to find. I saw all the stuff Gordon had accumulated, neatly arranged along one wall, much of it still dusted with fingerprint powder. We’d have to clean the powder off before we put the stuff back on sale. If they even let us sell it.
And if the police dusted the entire two-acre collection for prints, maybe I should just call Goodwill now.
“Sammy, they’re not dusting everything for fingerprints, are they?”
“No, mostly just the stuff in here,” he said.
“That’s good,” I said. “So why aren’t Horace and the rest still working on the stuff outside?”
“They will be tomorrow,” Sammy said. “Right now, they’re searching the suspect’s house.”
“For what?” I asked. “They have the murder weapon.”
“Yes, but they haven’t found the victim’s keys and wallet.”
Aha! So they were the mysterious missing items I’d overheard Horace mention.
“And they won’t find them at Giles’s house, I can tell you that,” I said.
Sammy shrugged.
“They have to search, anyway,” he said. “You’ve got to be thorough in a murder investigation.”
I decided to suppress my honest opinion of the investigation so far. Instead, I drifted to the corner where they were searching and looked up toward the owls’ nest.
Sophie sat on a rafter, gazing down at us. Her face, with its heart-shaped ruff of white feathers and long, flat beak, looked deceptively mild. I was relieved to see that she wasn’t bobbing her head. I’d seen her do it once, when I was up in the hay loft clearing things out some weeks before, and thought it rather cute how closely she resembled one of those bobble head dolls. Only later did Dad break the news to me that I’d probably gotten closer to her nest than she liked, and that the head bobbing was a sign that she was getting ready to attack.