Owls Well That Ends Well(58)

“She’s unreadable. Not that I’ve tried recently, but I did, back when I was new on campus, and hoping to make a good impression on people like Schmidt. I know that sounds pretty ridiculous,” he said, frowning slightly when I began laughing.

“No,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I’m laughing because I tried the same thing, before the first time you took me to a faculty bash. I looked up some of the people you told me were important and tried to bone up on their subjects. I should have remembered Schmidt from that. And you’re right. She’s completely unreadable.”

“So under the circumstances,” Michael said, smiling again, “I imagine the only person in Caerphilly who cares much about Mrs. Pruitt would be Arnold Schmidt.”

“The world’s leading scholar of her oeuvre,” I said, nodding.

“Probably the world’s only scholar of her oeuvre,” Michael said. “He’s built his career on analyzing her work.”

Outside the window, the chainsaw sputtered into silence and was replaced by a lively quarrel between several of the amateur tree surgeons over where to make their next incision.

“Would he kill to protect his career?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Michael said. “I suppose he might, but I can’t imagine how Gordon McCoy could have anything to do with Mrs. Pruitt or Schmidt’s career. Gordon doesn’t—didn’t do anything without a financial motive, remember, and how could you possibly make any money from a long-dead poetess nobody reads anymore?”

“Isn’t the word ‘poetess’ rather antiquated?” I asked.

“And Mrs. Pruitt isn’t?”

“True. Anyway, Schmidt said Gordon was rumored to have found a cache of Pruitt’s papers,” I said. “Which he wanted to buy, of course.”

“Well, it’s not as if he’d have any competition,” Michael said. “The college certainly wouldn’t care. But even at Gordon’s prices, he could afford them. No need to kill for that. And I have a hard time imagining Schmidt doing anything violent. For that matter, I have a hard time imagining him doing anything even mildly energetic.”

“Hmmm,” I said. “Still, I have this feeling he’s hiding something.”

“Something reprehensible, I hope,” Michael said, crawling out of the sleeping bag. “He’s one of the department’s worst snobs.”

We heard a loud cracking noise outside.

“Timber!” several of the volunteer lumberjacks shouted.

I glanced up at the window, but couldn’t see anything except several of my uncles flinching as something—presumably the dead branch—landed below, with a lot of crashing sounds. Also breaking glass sounds. Then the uncles glanced up at me with sheepish looks on their faces.

“How bad is it?” I asked, as Michael peered out of the window.

“We’d probably have had to replace that window anyway,” Michael said. “Whoever owned the funnel cake truck will be upset, but it’s not as if they had our permission to park it on our lawn, so we’re probably fine.”

“Damn,” I muttered.

“I’ll go down and deal with it,” he said, reaching for his jeans. “So what are you planning to do today?”

“That depends on Chief Burke,” I said. “If the crime scene people finish early enough, we might reopen the yard sale. But I’m not optimistic. At a minimum, it would be nice if they could finish processing all the boxes of stuff people collected, so we could get those off our hands.”

“Seems reasonable.” Michael said. “But not urgent.”

“What if people change their minds?” I said. “What if they don’t come back to pay for the stuff they’ve collected? What if they don’t even come back to pick up what they’ve already bought, and we have to hunt them down to get them to haul it away?”

“Oh … I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” he said.

He was gazing out of the window. I walked over to take a look.

“Good grief,” I exclaimed. We had at least as many people milling around in the front yard as we’d had inside the yard sale at its peak the day before. And they seemed to be spillover from the back and side yard. I strolled into the dressing room (and future master bathroom), whose window looked out over the side yard, including part of the yard sale area. Yes, wall-to-wall people.

Of course, they weren’t all prospective customers. The trucks from the local affiliates of all three networks had returned, and with no one awake to fend them off they’d driven over the front lawn to get to the yard sale, leaving large ruts behind them. Good thing we hadn’t done much landscaping yet.