Owls Well That Ends Well Part 29

Ahead of us, Carol turned on her own flashlight and started down the first aisle, waving the flashlight from side to side in what appeared to be a pointless fashion, until I realized that she was checking the bin numbers on either side as she went. As she swung the flashlight back and forth, huge chain-link shadows loomed up and subsided around us, along with a variety of other odd shadows, harder to identify and thus infinitely more sinister. Although they'd probably turn out to be odd bits of furniture and little-used skis and exercycles. I wondered, briefly, how much of the stuff at our yard sale had come from these bins or others like them; and how much would end up here after a year or so. Ah, well. Not my problem.

Following Carol would be tricky. The chain-link dividers provided security, but not a lot of cover. Here and there, a bin tenant with a more highly developed sense of privacy-or possibly something definite to hide-had hung curtains of some kind inside their bin, so you couldn't readily see the contents. The curtained-off bins would provide a little cover, but not necessarily enough.

"Let's go," Michael whispered, as the light moved away from us.

"Not yet," I whispered back. "She's on the wrong aisle. She'll figure that out any second now and turn around."

"What if we lose her?" He was visibly twitching to follow.

"We won't lose her," I said. "I know where she's going, and no matter whether she's taking stuff or just doing an inventory, it'll take time. Besides, this is the only exit, unless she wants to smash a few more window panes."

Sure enough, a few seconds later, the swaying light steadied and headed back our way. We pulled back into the shadows of the vestibule and watched as Carol emerged from the first aisle. She checked the numbers at the head of the second and third aisles, and then disappeared, correctly, down the fourth.

"Come on," I whispered, as I slipped out into the open area.

We crept along the aisle, keeping a safe distance behind Carol. Her flashlight beam continued to swing back and forth until she was about two-thirds of the way down the aisle. Then it steadied, and I heard keys rattling. Michael and I stopped and crouched in the shadows about twenty feet away.

"Now?" Michael whispered.

"Not quite," I said.

I waited until I heard the hinges creak as the chain-link door opened. Then I stood up and turned on my own flashlight. Carol froze when the beam hit her. She was holding a key ring in her hands, and had just hooked the open padlock on the chain link of the door.

"Carol, Carol," I said. "Closing time was hours ago."

She shaded her eyes with her hands, trying to see us.

"Chief Burke won't like this," Michael said.

"I bet he will," I said. "He's been looking for the keys that were taken from Gordon's body."

It was only a guess, but I saw from the way she winced that I was right.

"Let's just give him a call," I said.

"Roger," Michael said, taking out his cell phone.

"No, please," Carol said. "Let me explain."

"Okay," I said. "Start explaining."

"Just an idea," Michael said. "But why don't we take the explaining outside? Just in case anyone has already called the cops about Carol's unauthorized entry."

"Good idea," I said. "First, give me Gordon's keys."

I stepped closer to Carol and held out my hand. She balked, but finally surrendered them. I took them from her, using the hem of my shirt, to avoid messing up any fingerprints or leaving any, and got Michael to give me his handkerchief to wrap them in.

Gordon was one of the sneaky few who'd curtained his bin. Not surprising. He had one of the largest-size bins, and while most of the stuff in it was packed in boxes or shrouded under tarps, the few things I could see didn't look like cheap junk. Carol would probably be much wealthier as a widow than she would have been as a divorcee. a.s.suming she wasn't also a murderer. The jury was still out on that.

I closed the door to Gordon's bin and clicked the padlock shut.

"Lead the way," I said to Michael.

We set off, with him preceding Carol and me following. Halfway down the aisle, a sudden thought hit me.

"Stop for a second," I said. "Did I lock up?"

"Yes, of course," Michael said.

"Are you sure?" I said, raising my eyebrows and hoping Michael got the message. "I'm not sure the padlock clicked."

"Well, not absolutely sure," Michael said, looking puzzled, but deciding to agree with me.

"I'm not either," I said. "I'll check; you and Carol wait outside."

I ran back to Gordon's bin, unlocked it, and rummaged around for a few minutes. It didn't take me long to find a box, near the front, with GBP lettered on it with a thick, black Magic Marker. Sure enough, it contained a stack of old, musty poetry books. I opened one at random and saw FROM THE LIBRARY OF MRS. GINEVRA BRAKENRIDGE PRUITT, printed in old English lettering on an ornate Victorian bookplate.

Although I knew I shouldn't take the time, I couldn't resist flipping through a few pages of the book-a fairly conventional poetry anthology from the turn of the century, featuring all the usual names. Suddenly I noticed that someone had been scribbling, in ink, on one of James Russell Lowell's poems. I had to choke back laughter when I realized that the unknown book defacer had been hard at work changing nouns, adjectives, and verbs, transforming Lowell's "What Is So Rare as a Day in June" into the far more pedestrian "What Is So Fine as a Morn in May."

I flipped through a few more pages, spellbound by Mrs. Pruitt's temerity. Surely eminent poets throughout the English-speaking world must have rolled over in their graves when she published these travesties. In fact, so many of them must have been spinning so rapidly that I was surprised no scientist had yet spotted a correlation between Mrs. Pruitt's publication dates and periods of unusual seismic activity.

"Hail to you! Proud student!" (presumably written on the occasion of someone's graduation) would have made the normally blithe spirit of Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley wince. Lord Byron would probably have consulted his solicitor upon reading what she did to "She Walks in Beauty," but I suspect Edgar Allan Poe would only roll his eyes upon reading "Once upon a midnight bleak, while I studied, tired and weak." Then again, maybe he'd have hit her up for beer money. And probably have gone thirsty, judging from her revision of Tennyson's "The Lotus-Eaters" into a tract in favor of Prohibition. ("'Temperance!' he cried, and pointed at the bar, 'My trusty axe will bring that downward soon.'") I snapped the book shut, realizing I'd already spent too much time on it. At least now I had that much more confirmation of Professor Schmidt's story. And since the bin where Michael and I were storing our stuff was only one aisle over and a few bins down, I decided to make sure the box didn't disappear, just in case we didn't have the only set of keys.

After locking Mrs. Pruitt's books in our bin, I hurried out to the parking lot. It suddenly occurred to me that if Carol tried to escape, Michael wasn't the best person to have guarding her. I'd have no qualms about knocking her down and sitting on her if necessary, but Michael might have a sudden attack of chivalry.

Chapter 39.

"All secure," I reported, when I emerged into the parking lot.

Carol and Michael stood face to face, beaming their flashlights at each other. Carol's feet were planted firmly and she frowned at Michael. His back was to me, and he appeared to be pointing something at her, in addition to the flashlight. Okay, I knew he hadn't brought a weapon, but I didn't know about Carol. What if after I'd left them alone, she'd pulled a gun and he'd had to disarm her? Then I relaxed. He wasn't holding her at gunpoint. More like cell-phone-point.

"Carol was thinking of leaving," he said, as I came closer. "But I convinced her to stay and talk to you first."

"If you call the cops, I'll tell them you were trespa.s.sing, too," she said.

"But we were following you, Carol," I said, aiming my flashlight at her face. "And we are bona fide customers. You, on the other hand, appear to have broken into the building and used a stolen key to access someone else's bin."

"It's all mine now," she said.

"Only if you didn't kill Gordon," I said.

"How could I possibly kill him?" she hissed.

"You were in the barn with him," I said.

"I was not!"

"Then why did Ralph Endicott say he saw you leaving?"

"He didn't!

"He did, and he's not the only one who saw you there," I said. "I saw you there myself. So give me one reason to believe you didn't kill him."

"I couldn't have!" she wailed.

"Why not? He cheated on you, and now he was trying to cheat you out of your fair share of the property by hiding half his a.s.sets in there," I said, jerking my head at the building. "Why couldn't you have killed him?"

"Because he was already dead when I got there!"

"Not another one," Michael muttered.

"But you told Chief Burke you talked to him," I said. "You were fairly specific about your conversation. I heard you. Are you saying you lied to the cops?"

She sighed and slumped as if suddenly exhausted.

"I figured if I claimed to have found him dead, they'd think I did it," she said. "Don't they always suspect the person who finds the body?"

"It's not as if you were the only one to find the body," I said. "People spent the entire morning finding it and hiding it again."

"They did? Well, how was I to know that?" she said. "I was standing there, looking at his dead body, and all I could think of was that everyone in town knew how much I hated him. Half of them had heard me threaten him, when I'd lost my temper. I figured if they found me with the body, they wouldn't bother looking for the real killer. I was terrified. Hysterical. So I ran out."

"Without even thinking about what you should do."

"Exactly!" she exclaimed.

"But not before taking his keys."

"Out of his pocket, no doubt," Michael added. "Must have been pretty tough, hysterical as you were. Reaching down, touching the body of a dead man-a murdered man-and hunting around until you found his keys."

"I didn't have to hunt," she said. "I knew he kept them in his right back pocket. He was lying on his face; I didn't even have to move his body."

Despite the dim light, she must have read the look on my face.

"Not much, anyway. Okay, it was pretty awful, having to roll him over like that, but I figured it was my one chance to find out what the b.a.s.t.a.r.d was hiding from me, and where he was keeping it. I'd been trying for over a year, and that d.a.m.ned lawyer of his kept blocking everything I did."

"But why were you still so worried about finding his hidden a.s.sets?" I asked. "You didn't have to worry about losing out on the property settlement. All you had to do was inherit."

Unless he'd made a will that disinherited her, of course. But I had a hard time imagining Gordon being that organized, and I suspected, from the look on her face, that she felt the same way.

"Yeah, whoever killed him did you a big favor," I went on. "Unless you did yourself a big favor."

"I say she looks good for it," Michael snarled, in his best imitation of a hard-bitten PI from a noir flick. I had to pretend to cough to cover my grin, but Carol took him quite literally.

"I didn't do it, I tell you!" she wailed.

"Give us a reason to believe you," I said.

"You won't believe me," she said, shaking her head. "No one will."

"We might if you told the truth about what you did and saw in the barn," Michael said.

"Especially if you saw anything that would help identify the real culprit," I said.

She looked back and forth between the two of us, the flashlight beam moving with her head.

"I saw someone taking something from Gordon's body," she said. "His wallet. And then he slipped out the other door, just as I came in."

"Who was it?" I asked.

"You see!" she exclaimed. "I knew you wouldn't believe me."

"I didn't say I didn't believe you," I said. "I just asked who you saw."

"It was your tone of voice," she said, pouting. "You're using a very hostile, accusing tone of voice."

"That's probably because I feel slightly hostile," I said. "After all, you just admitted that you saw someone leaving the murder scene with Gordon's wallet in his hands and you didn't do a thing about it."

"Why should I?" she said. "It's not as if Gordon ever had much in his wallet worth stealing. Probably a few dollars and his famous rubber checkbook."

"It never occurred to you that the person you saw might have done more than steal the wallet-that he might have been Gordon's killer?"

"Of course," she said. "But what if the chief didn't believe me? And what if the killer did? Do you think I want a cold-blooded killer knowing I'm the only witness who can put him away?"

"So you say nothing, and let a cold-blooded killer roam the streets while an innocent man rots in jail," I said.

"He's not in jail," Carol said. "He's out on bail."

"No thanks to you," I said. "I know why you didn't tell anyone-you just wanted to get a chance to snoop in Gordon's stuff, and you didn't care what happened to anyone else. So who was it?"

"Who was who?"

"Who took Gordon's wallet?" I snapped.

"I don't know!" she said.

She took a step back. Probably because she'd seen my free hand clutch involuntarily into a fist.

"Try again," I suggested.

"I don't know his name."