“Eeeeeee!”
The shriek again, but not as loud now. And coming from someplace outside the barn.
“It’s only an owl,” Michael said, lowering the bicycle pump slightly. “I think.”
“A great horned owl,” Dad said.
“Dad, what happened?” I asked, as I worked at the knot in the rope on his wrists. “Who tied you up?”
Though I suspected I already knew the answer. Glancing around, I saw three plastic milk crates placed upside down, as if someone had been using them for tables or stools. Our cash box lay on the middle one, its lid open and all its compartments bare.
“Sshh!” Dad said, putting his finger to his lips. “Barrymore. Went thataway!”
He pointed to the barn door—the back door, not the one we’d come in.
We heard a clank outside, as if someone had tripped over a saucepan.
Michael and I looked at each other.
“Can you untie your ankles, Dad?” I said. “While Michael and I see if we can catch him.”
Dad nodded cheerfully, though he didn’t lean down to begin working on his feet. Instead, he lay back and stared solemnly up at the rafters, as if looking for something important. I grabbed Dad’s flashlight, but turned it off. No sense letting Barrymore know precisely where we were.
Well, help should be on the way—should damn well be here already, for that matter—and the most important thing was to keep Barrymore Sprocket from doing any more damage, I thought, as Michael and I crept out of the barn.
I heard another faint clang from the far side of the yard sale enclosure. I smiled to myself. Barrymore appeared to be stumbling away from the gate, rather than toward it. Perhaps he’d taken a wrong turn on his way out of the barn.
He’d need to get back to the gate to leave. So maybe we should just make our way to the gate and wait for him to stumble into our hands.
Unless he planned to pull up a couple of the stakes holding the fence to the ground. If he tried enough of them, he might find a couple that were loose enough to give way. Or he could cut a hole in the fence. Maybe that was the noise we were hearing—Barrymore making himself a new gate.
I moved forward, and I could hear Michael, a few feet to my right, following suit.
We had the advantage of numbers. But Barrymore had the advantage of the terrain, I realized, as I knocked over something that sounded like a stack of aluminum pie pans. He was the proverbial needle in the haystack. We probably couldn’t see him unless we got right next to him, and he could easily slip by us while we stumbled in the dark.
Then again, Barrymore couldn’t see any better than we could. Which meant there was always the possibility that we’d all three stumble around the fenced-in area till dawn, like inept players in a giant game of blindman’s bluff.
One of us should watch the gate.
I turned around and headed back, but I must have gotten off course, because after about three feet, I ran into the deer fence.
Over to my left, I could hear Michael getting tangled in a nest of coat hangers dangling from something overhead.
Or was that Michael, knocking over the stack of glass objects to my right?
Long moments of silence followed as we all stood still and tried not to breathe too loudly.
Chapter 42
My eyes had adjusted to the dark. If I got close enough, I could see objects silhouetted against the sky. Not clearly—the sky was only a shade lighter than the objects. But I could see vague shapes looming up ahead of me as I moved around.
Unfortunately, this didn’t help me navigate safely through the clutter, since most of the things lying in wait to trip me crouched close to the ground, where I couldn’t see their silhouettes. It wasn’t even reassuring, since to my overactive imagination most of the looming shapes looked remarkably like thugs wielding cudgels.
I steered by sound, aiming for a point midway between the coat hanger sound and the breaking glass sound.
The figure to my left knocked over a lamp—I heard the light bulb explode on impact with something hard.
The figure to my left tripped over something, fell, and muttered, “Damn!”
I couldn’t tell if it was Michael or Barrymore. And apparently we’d all three stopped to listen.
All I heard was a sheep baaing, as if startled. Closer than I expected. Had the sheep gotten inside the yard sale fence? If they did, they could do a terrific amount of damage. We’d probably have to throw a ton of stuff away.
Yay, sheep.
Just then, I heard someone stumble a few feet ahead and to my left.
“Michael?” I called.
“Over here,” came his voice, from somewhere behind me.
Something slammed into me, hard, and knocked me into a pile of stuff.
“Get him,” I shouted.