“If you mean the weasel in the pirate costume, he was skulking around the yard earlier,” Rob said.
“How can you say something like that about a perfectly nice animal like the weasel?” I asked.
“The sewer rat in the pirate costume, then,” Rob said. “He was the one who set off the dogs in the first place, but somehow he managed not to get bitten.”
“That’s Gordon,” I said. “How is Mr. Sprocket?”
“Please; Barrymore,” the man in question said, offering me his hand to shake.
“Sorry,” I said. “Mr. Barrymore, of course.”
“No,” he said. “Just Barrymore. Barrymore Sprocket.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, with more enthusiasm than I felt. “Have some doughnuts; I hear the doorbell again.”
As soon as I was out of sight, I dried my now-damp hand on my jeans leg and made a mental note to introduce Barrymore to my cousin Leo, the mad inventor, who might still be looking for guinea pigs to test his revolutionary new antiperspirant hand cream.
“Has this been going on all morning?” Dad said, as I appeared in the hall again. He had perched on the newel post at the bottom of the banister, the better to practice his head-swiveling.
“Only since five-thirty,” Rob called from the kitchen.
“Five-thirty isn’t this morning, it’s last night,” I muttered, on my way to the door. “If it’s Gordon-you-thief again, I’ll kill him.”
A pleasant-looking woman in her fifties, wearing a flowered dress and a flower-decked hat, stood on the doorstep. Overdressed for a yard sale—she even held a pair of white kid gloves in her left hand. If this was a costume, it was too subtle for me. But there was no mistaking her purpose. She had that now-familiar acquisitive gleam in her eye and she clutched a copy of the Caerphilly Clarion, open at the classifieds.
“Excuse me,” she said, with an ingratiating smile. “Is this where the yard sale is being held today?”
I pointedly looked past her to the road. Yes, the half-dozen yard sale signs Dad had tacked up several days earlier were still there, and even though it wasn’t quite fully daylight, they were clearly readable even from here. For that matter, while driving up to the house, she could probably have spotted the fenced-in sale area. The multicolored tents and awnings were hard to miss.
I focused on her face.
“Yes, we’re having a yard sale, but it doesn’t open till nine a.m.,” I said.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I did so want to come, but you see, we’re having a luncheon at church today, and I have to be there at nine.”
“For a luncheon?”
“I’m in charge of preparations,” she said. “Anyway, I just wanted to see if you had any little bits of china.”
“Little bits of china,” I repeated.
“Yes,” she said. “I just love little china figurines. But I can’t afford to buy many of them in stores—fixed income, you know. And between church events, and Scout meetings, I just never seem to have a Saturday free for yard sales. So I was wondering—if you had anything like that, maybe I could just slip in and take a peek. I won’t take much of your time, really. And I’d be so grateful.”
By this time, I realized I’d encountered another well-known fixture of local yard sales—the Hummel lady, who’d built her enormous collection for peanuts by using her sharp eye and sharper bargaining skills at flea markets and yard sales. And, of course, by conning her way into yard sales before anyone else.
“Oh, no, I don’t really think we have anything like that,” I said. “Not anymore, anyway. Well, we did find a box of figurines my great-aunt picked up when her husband was stationed in Germany in the fifties, but they weren’t anything fancy. Just these cutesy little kids with lambs and puppies and things.”
Her expression had grown strangely fierce and the fingers holding the newspaper twitched slightly.
“But I sold the whole box for a dollar to a guy who showed up a few minutes ago,” I said. “Sorry.”
“But- but-,” she sputtered.
I had a hard time not laughing at the look of astonishment on her face. Okay, I suppose it was mean of me, but I was running on too little sleep, thanks to the likes of her.
Suddenly I saw her expression change to one of cold rage. She pursed her lips and her eyes narrowed. I stepped back involuntarily, but then I realized she wasn’t looking at me.
She’d spotted Gordon-you-thief, lurking about the yard, craning his neck to see something inside the fence that surrounded the yard sale.
“I see,” she said, in clipped tones, already turning away. “Thanks anyway.”