Owls Well That Ends Well(51)

Giles went to fetch the sherry and Michael collapsed into a shabby but comfortable-looking green plush armchair while I prowled around exploring. Giles had four of the chairs clustered together in the center of his study—the walls being completely occupied by more square feet of bookshelves than most town libraries could boast. Giles’s book collection still overflowed the shelves. Stacks of books marched along the base of the bookcases, and more mountains of books occupied every open space. Small mounds surrounded each armchair, and here and there large Indian brass trays balanced on book stacks of suitable height to form side tables, while battered corduroy cushions thrown atop low heaps of books took the place of footstools.

Comfortable clutter, I found myself thinking. Earlier in the day, I’d have called that an oxymoron, but Giles’s study reminded me that not all clutter was irretrievably bad, and suggested that maybe some collections of things, however large and apparently disorganized, didn’t qualify as clutter. Should I feel guilty for having a double standard about clutter?

Since nearly every square inch of wall space was occupied by books, Giles had improvised a way to display the decorations most people hung from picture hooks. He’d used those hooks designed to hold Christmas stockings on a mantel without driving a nail into the wood to suspend various objects from the front of the bookshelves. Two silver stars supported a small oil painting, a team of brass reindeer towed a pair of antique dueling pistols affixed to a polished wooden board, and a series of framed certificates of appreciation from various arcane societies floated beneath a series of brass letters spelling out the cryptic message ACNE ELOPE. I puzzled over the sequence for several minutes before realizing that he’d combined the letters in two sets of holiday hooks, one reading PEACE and the other NOEL.

Now, I settled into another faded green chair and waited for the sneezes. Giles’s study reminded me of his office, which I had seen before. I always sneezed half a dozen times shortly after entering his office until my nose adjusted to the prevailing atmosphere of book dust and left me alone. I expected his study would have the same effect.

“I want our library to look like this,” I said, when I’d gotten past the sneezes.

Our future library, that is. Right now most of our books were packed in boxes and stored in Michael’s office at the college, in the Cave, or at my parents’ house. But we’d already designated one huge room on the ground floor as the library, with an adjacent room for Michael’s office. It had the potential to look just as cool as this, I thought, looking around. In fact, even cooler.

To my surprise, Michael only looked around wistfully and nodded. Odd. Normally I was the one who would have trouble visualizing what the library could look like once we replaced the missing floor, mended the waterdamaged ceiling, and put new glass in all the boarded-up windows. Was he just tired, or was something else wrong?

“I don’t know how to thank you,” Giles said, for the hundredth time, as he came in carrying three reasonably clean sherry glasses. “Bail bonds, criminal defense attorneys—I’m afraid it’s all rather foreign to me.”

“No problem,” Michael said, accepting a glass of sherry.

“Always happy to share our vast personal experience with the criminal justice system,” I added, as I held out my hand for a glass.

“Er … right,” Giles said, handing me the sherry.

We sipped in silence for a few minutes, while Giles wandered about the study, making minor corrections to how various books and knickknacks were arranged, muttering something about jackbooted thugs as he did so. Not really fair—the room looked in very good shape for a place the police had just finished searching from top to bottom. And he was lucky that they hadn’t felt it necessary to use fingerprint powder.

I wondered briefly how long one should wait before asking one’s host how his arrest had gone, and then decided to dive in. If Giles hadn’t gotten used to my impatient nature by now, it was time he learned.

“I’m amazed that they actually arrested you,” I said, which I thought was a pretty tactful opening.

“I don’t blame them,” Giles said. “You have to admit, the evidence looks bad for me.”

“But what about motive?” I asked. “I mean, can you really imagine someone killing someone else over a book?”

“Well, yes,” Giles said. “I can imagine it.”





Chapter 22

“Giles!” I exclaimed.

“Your lawyer will probably be happier if you don’t go around saying things like that,” Michael suggested.

“I don’t condone it,” Giles said, sounding uncharacteristically melancholy. “It’s abhorrent to consider taking a human life for any reason, but for a mere material object? Unspeakable. But unimaginable? No. I can imagine it. A great deal more easily with a book than with some other object. Isn’t that strange?”