“Hummel lady,” I said, and spelled it. “I don’t know her name, but the chief will know who I mean. Or he can call me if he likes.”
I felt much more cheerful. My conscience was clear. The chief couldn’t accuse me of sneaking around behind his back—well, not as easily, anyway. And, meanwhile, maybe I could get even closer to the truth if I could find Ralph Endicott, the ex-partner. I had a feeling I knew where to look. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been lurking near the fence around the yard sale, scanning the merchandise with his binoculars and scribbling notes in a leather-bound notebook. I needed to get back to the yard sale.
Easier said than done, though. As I was making my way out of town, I thought I spotted Mother, disappearing into a shop. I circled the block again and cruised past the shop at five miles per hour, but I couldn’t see anything, and I drove on, hoping I’d been seeing things. Even the thought of Mother entering that particular shop made me nervous. Not only was it a bastion of chintz and gilding, but there wasn’t a single price tag in the shop, on the theory that if you cared about the price, you couldn’t afford it and they couldn’t be bothered with you.
And then I hit a giant traffic jam that blocked the road leading toward our house for most of the ten miles I had to travel. I thought I was home free when I finally inched past the spot where a replacement funnel cake truck had broken down on its way out to set up operations at our house, but, instead, the traffic got even worse. Not many people were leaving, but the few that did had to fight their way out. Enough cars had parked along the shoulders on either side that the already narrow road was down to a single lane for much of the last two miles, and the arriving cars gave no mercy. Here and there, arguments and even the occasional fistfight broke out. The fields on either side of the road were festooned with stranded SUVs and jeeps whose owners thought they could bypass the traffic by taking to the countryside, only to find they’d misjudged either their vehicles’ ability to traverse deep mud or their own driving skills. Cousin Sidney and his tow truck would be tired but happy by the end of the day.
I finally made it in on the heels of an arriving state police cruiser and scared away a woman who tried to take my parking space when I removed the orange cones. Not bad considering that she was driving a Chevy TrailBlazer that could have eaten my little Toyota for breakfast. But she wasn’t very good at what I called slow motion chicken. Her tank was new and spotless, and my heap showed definite signs of past close encounters with other vehicles, so when I kept moving forward into the space, slowly but inexorably, she eventually wimped out and backed away.
“I was here first!” she shrieked, as I was walking away from my car.
“I live here!” I shouted back.
“And that makes you special?” I heard her mutter.
The whole day was getting out of hand. Some of Michael’s drama students had shown up and were presenting scenes from various plays by Shakespeare, using our front porch as a makeshift stage. The college chamber music ensemble was impatiently awaiting their turn, and from the noises emerging from the house, either someone had held a séance and offended the ghost of John Philip Sousa or the college marching band needed a lot more rehearsal before we let them onto the porch.
Apparently Rose Noir had finished smudging the circumference of the yard sale, and was now putting the finishing touches to her cleansing ceremony from on high, thanks to Everett’s boom lift. I wasn’t sure it was wise to supplement the herbal smoke with scattering dried herbs, but anyone who had stuck it out this long at the yard sale wasn’t about to be put off by showers of potpourri. At most, a few people looked mildly annoyed as they brushed it off their shoulders like fragrant dandruff.
The volunteer vendors now completely filled the front yard and had begun to expand into the field across the road from us. Normally our front yard had a restful view of the field sloping at first gently, and then more and more steeply, up to a tree-crowned ridge. Now we had a ringside view of more ad hoc yard sale participants.
I found Michael observing this phenomenon with alarm.
“Mr. Early won’t like this,” he said. Mr. Early, the farmer who owned the field across the way, was a noted local curmudgeon.
“Maybe he’s out of town,” I said.
“Isn’t October supposed to be a busy time for farmers?” Michael said. “Harvest time, and all that.”
“I think it depends on what you’re growing.”
“What does Mr. Early grow?” Michael asked.
We both squinted at the field for a few moments.