Chapter 6.

Where were my volunteer helpers, I wondered. Scarlett backed off when I threatened to expel her from the yard sale, but I had to sit on the Gypsy for ten minutes to calm her down. And no one lifted a finger to help me. I had recruited a dozen relatives to help, but apart from my two increasingly demoralized cashiers, none of them were nearby. I hoped they were off taking care of other problems. We had plenty of problems to go around. In addition to squabbles between customers, I was starting to notice squabbles among the sellers, as various people suddenly noticed which priceless treasures their spouses, parents, children, or siblings had decided to unload.

"She's selling my high chair," my forty-something cousin Dermot announced, pointing to his sweet, grayhaired mother as if he'd just spotted one of the FBI's top ten wanted criminals lurking in our backyard.

"If you want it, why don't you just buy it?" I asked.

"I'm not selling it to him," Dermot's mother said. "He'd only stick it back in my garage again."

"I don't have room for it in my apartment."

"And I don't have room for it in my garage."

I left them to sort it out. Up and down the aisles, similar battles were being waged over rusting tricycles, battered reclining chairs, and moth-eaten sc.r.a.ps of clothing. If I'd known how traumatic yard sales were for the sellers, I'd have arranged to have a family therapist on hand.

Mother was being unusually helpful, but she couldn't be everywhere at once, and she had her hands full dealing with the shoplifters. She knew who all the family kleptomaniacs were and exactly what mix of threat and cajolery to use with each of them. And long experience with the light-fingered members of our clan had given her a second sense for spotting strangers intent on pilfering, whether for professional or psychiatric reasons.

For once in my life I wished I had more family members like Mother. I could use a dozen more of her, at least.

I'd a.s.sign one just to keep people out of the barn. I didn't quite share Dad's pa.s.sionate concern for the welfare of the nesting owls, but I had other, more practical reasons for declaring the barn off-limits. Including the fact that we weren't entirely sure parts of it were structurally sound. The last thing we needed to inaugurate our life in the house was a lawsuit from some disgruntled customer who'd wandered in where he had no business being and gotten injured by falling beams or rubble. So I'd posted a variety of threatening signs on the barn doors, everything from "Keep out!" and "No Trespa.s.sing!" to "Warning! Falling debris!" and Dad had added his "Keep out! Owls nesting!" signs, which were probably less effective but a lot more picturesque.

And yet less than an hour into the sale, I saw Gordon ducking into the barn, dragging a large cardboard box. And then he came out empty-handed. Several times. Okay, he probably wasn't attempting larceny. For one thing, both of the ground floor doors to the barn were inside the fence, and if he tried to lower stuff out of the hayloft door, which did overlook the outside world, someone would surely notice. So he was probably only doing what people had warned me the greedy and inconsiderate customers would do-dragging large quant.i.ties of stuff off to one side to sort through at their leisure before returning the unwanted items to the sale area. Not a big problem if they did their sorting and returning relatively soon, but if they waited till near the end of the sale, when you started reducing prices across the board ...

Well, Gordon might be in for a nasty shock. For one thing, we weren't reducing prices today-this was a two- day event. And for another thing, as soon as I had a moment I planned to slip into the barn, drag out everything Gordon had hidden away there, and put it back out for anyone who wanted it.

Unfortunately, every time I set out toward the barn, some new crisis intervened. A lost child. A lost purse. More scuffles between overeager Grouchos and Nixons.

I caught Eric and one of his little cousins charging admission to the portable toilets and ordered the young entrepreneurs to exercise their capitalistic instincts by helping Cousin Horace at the hamburger stand.

"You'd be amazed what you can find at yard sales," I overheard one woman telling another. "On Antiques Road Show, people are always bringing bits of junk they bought at yard sales and finding out they're worth thousands of dollars."

"That's true," the second woman said. Just then they spotted my shadow. They hunched protectively over the table in front of them and glared at me until I moved on. I fought back a smile. Would it rea.s.sure them to know that I was not a compet.i.tor? That I had no intention of buying anything at the yard sale, and particularly not from that table, which was filled with some of the worst junk I'd cleared out of Mrs. Sprocket's attic? Probably not. And I certainly didn't want to discourage them by mentioning that seventeen keen-eyed antique appraisers had already turned up their noses at the contents of that particular table. For all I know, if I'd called an eighteenth dealer he might have spotted a hidden treasure among the clutter. Perhaps the cracked chamber pot had once stood in the servants' quarters in Monticello, or perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt had crocheted the toilet paper roll covers as part of the war effort. I wished them luck.

Cousin Deirdre, the animal rights activist, had begun splashing paint on every moth-eaten fur coat and taxidermied mongoose in sight. I confiscated her paint and explained to the unhappy fur owners that she only used nontoxic washable paint, but most of them didn't calm down until Mother promised to see that Deirdre reimbursed their cleaning costs.

"Meg, we're out of Spike's dog food!" Rob exclaimed, appearing at my elbow while I was trying to calm an elderly lady whose sense of decency had been violated by her discovery that one of the booths was selling back issues of Playboy.

"Get him a hamburger from Horace," I said.

"Okay," Rob said. "How does he like them?"

"Ask him," I said.

"Roger," Rob said, turning to go.

"While you're going that way," I called after him, "Could you tell that man with the grandfather clock that he doesn't have to carry it around the whole time he's shopping; we'd be happy to keep it behind the checkout counter for him."

"I've already told him that, twice," Rob said. "He says he doesn't mind carrying it."

"Let me rephrase that. Tell him if he whacks one more person in the head with the clock, I'll take it away from him and kick him out of the yard sale."

"Roger."

I returned to my irate customer.

"I'm sorry, ma'am," I said. "I'm not sure we have the right to keep someone from selling his Playboy magazines, but if you can point out the booth, I'll ask him to keep them out of sight."

"Hmph," the woman snorted, as she turned and marched away. After a few feet, she stopped and turned back, hands on her hips.

"And don't let me catch you selling any of that trash to that worthless husband of mine!" she shouted.

I turned to the checkout counter. The white rabbit and the ballerina looked stricken. Michael, standing nearby, wore the intensely solemn look that always meant he was trying not to crack up.

"And does anyone have any idea who she is, and what her worthless husband looks like?"

"No," Michael said. "But I know who's selling the Playboys. Your cousin Everett."

"Can you talk to him?"

"Sure," Michael said. "I'll tell him to keep his Playboys under the counter with the Penthouses and Hustlers."

"Good grief," I said. "I thought all he had was forty years of National Geographic."

Just then I heard a loud altercation nearby. Not the first of the day, by any means, but the voices sounded familiar, so I waded through the crowd to see what was going on.

"It's mine!"

"No, it's not!"

"Yes, it is!"

"I saw it first!"

"But I touched it first!"

"Liar!"

"Thief!"

"Let go!"

"Take that!"

Typical. I'd heard so many quarrels already today that I'd given up intervening unless the partic.i.p.ants came to blows, which these two seemed about to do.

And to my dismay, I realized that the latest combatants were two of my aunts-elderly, respectable women who didn't hesitate to rap my knuckles at Thanksgiving dinner to correct minor flaws in my table manners.

They were playing tug-of-war over an antique purple cut-velvet piano shawl with foot-long fringe. Not tugging very hard, of course, since the material was fragile; but both of them were obviously determined not to let go. Aunt Gladys, her stout form encased in a vintage beaded opera gown, had both ring-encrusted fists clamped firmly around her end of the shawl and looked as if even the boom lift would have trouble dislodging her. In a fair fight, I'd have bet on her. But Aunt Josephine didn't fight fair. Looking uncannily authentic in her wicked witch costume, complete with a pointed hat and a toy cat wired to her shoulder, she was only holding the shawl with one hand while with the other she whacked Aunt Gladys in the derriere with her broomstick, throwing in an occasional kick to the shins for good measure.

I took a deep breath and was about to wade in on my one-woman peacekeeping mission when a streak of black-and-white fur appeared and launched itself at the shawl. Spike. He couldn't quite leap high enough to reach the shawl, but he managed a good mouthful of the swaying fringe. My aunts watched in horror as he hung suspended from the shawl for a few seconds and then dropped when his weight ripped the fragile fabric in half.

"Sorry," Rob said, running up and clipping the leash back onto Spike's collar-an easier task than usual, with Spike's fangs m.u.f.fled in fringe. "I was taking him over for his hamburger, but he got loose."

"A Solomon among dogs," I said. "Does either of you want this?"

I held out the remaining half of the shawl. Both aunts shook their heads. They gathered up their dignity along with the objects they'd apparently dropped in the fray and strode off without looking back.

"Bring the other half back when Spike finishes with it," I told Rob. "Maybe Aunt Minnie can use it for her quilting."

"And who's paying for that?" said a woman at a nearby table. Presumably the wounded shawl's owner.

While I was settling up, my irritation surged again when I spotted someone else going into the barn. The latest in a long series of someone elses who'd been shuffling in and out of the barn.

This one I even recognized-the Hummel lady. Apparently she'd decided to skip out on her church luncheon after all. I'd also seen a man I suspected I'd recognize when he no longer wore a cartoon-sized sombrero. And a tall man in a brown jacket and a Dracula mask. One of the Gypsies-we had about a dozen, since it was one of the easiest costumes for a woman to throw together at the last minute; this one was tall and slender and less gaudy than most. Even poor Giles. Perhaps he'd decided to talk to Gordon-you-thief about the Freeman book after all.

"We have a problem you need to deal with," Barrymore Sprocket announced, stepping into my path so I either had to notice him or kick him.

I counted to ten before answering. And then I continued on to twenty. Sprocket had been reporting problems for me to deal with all morning, and creating more problems than he solved. He'd fingered two people as professional shoplifters casing the joint. By the time I'd drummed it into his head that his two suspicious characters were not only cousins of mine, but off-duty police officers I'd drafted to help with security, everyone at the sale had also gotten the message, thus seriously undermining their effectiveness as undercover operatives. He'd pitched a major fit when a small Groucho broke a cheap vase, and mortally offended the child's mother, who changed her mind about buying several hundred dollars' worth of stuff. When he'd reported that one of the portable toilets was out of toilet paper, I'd told him where we kept the extra supply and a.s.signed him to janitorial duty. He'd been making himself scarce since. I should have known it was too good to last.

"What now?" I asked, through gritted teeth.

Chapter 7.

"That Gordon person is hiding stuff in the barn," he said. "He's got boxes and boxes of stuff in there and-"

"Did you tell him the barn is off-limits?" I asked.

"Yeah, but he wouldn't listen to me," he said, shrugging. "He said you told him he could use it."

"He's lying," I said.

"Well, then maybe you should go and tell him to get out," Sprocket said, with a shrug. "He won't listen to me."

Who would, I thought, but I decided it wouldn't help to say it.

"I'll deal with it as soon as I can," I said aloud. "Of course, I could deal with it now if you could take over doing something for me for a few minutes."

As I expected, he disappeared as I finished my sentence.

But he was right; I needed to deal with it. Or find someone who could. I finally escaped from the checkout and made it as far as the SPOOR table, where Dad had just finished signing up one of the Nixons as a new member.

"Thank you!" Dad said. "And as promised-everyone who signs up today gets a dozen genuine owl pellets."

He handed the new SPOORite a baggie full of something, and they shook hands, laughing.

Dad had a whole bowl of the somethings on the table. I picked up one and examined it. It was lumpy and gray and vaguely resembled the remarkably unappetizing organic trail mix he was fond of making during his health food kicks.

"What is this, Dad?" I asked when his customer had gone. "Some kind of special, nutritionally balanced owl kibble? I have to tell you, Michael and I aren't up for cosseting our owls with an expensive special diet. Free-range owls, that's what we want."

"Very funny," Dad said. "You don't mean to tell me that I never taught you and Rob about dissecting owl pellets when you were kids?"

"Not that I recall," I said. I glanced at the pellet uneasily and dropped it back in the bowl. "Why is that so interesting?"

"Because you can tell exactly what an owl's been eating from the pellets!" Dad exclaimed.

"Oh," I said, wiping my hand on my jeans. "Pellets are droppings."

"Not precisely," Dad said. "Owls regurgitate rather than excrete them. But the principle's the same. See, here's an example of a pellet that contained the entire skeleton of a vole!"

Dad was flourishing a sheet of poster board to which he'd glued dozens-perhaps hundreds-of tiny rodent bones, along with a lot of little tufts of ratty-looking fur. Glancing behind him, I could see that he had at least a dozen more owl pellet posters.

"Fascinating Dad-but right now, we have an owl crisis. Gordon-you-thief keeps sneaking into the barn. I'm sure he doesn't mean to upset your fledgling owls, but-"

"I'll go and talk to him immediately," Dad said.

He put a sign on his chair that read OWL BE RIGHT BACK and hurried over to the barn.

"Excuse me," someone said, tugging at my elbow. "I think a quarter apiece is too expensive for these."

I turned to find a middle-aged version of Goldilocks standing at my side, pointing her porridge spoon at a collection of tiny china owls on one corner of the SPOOR table.

I stifled the impulse to say that I agreed and would give her a quarter to take the whole lot of them off our hands. Then an evil thought hit me.

"I could let them go at three for a dollar," I said, feigning reluctance.

"Okay," Goldilocks said. She s.n.a.t.c.hed up the whole collection, all twelve of them, handed me four dollar bills, and hurried off, as if afraid I'd retract the offer. A second too late, I realized that I'd just broken my own rule about giving everyone receipts.

"Aunt Meg?"

I looked down to see my nephew Eric dressed as Superman. He was staring at Goldilocks's retreating back with a puzzled look.

"Aunt Meg, three for a dollar-"

"Yes, I know," I said. "I'll explain it to you later. Or your grandfather will when he gets back-do you want to watch his table for him?"

"Okay," Eric said, with a grin. Then he stood behind the counter, puffed out his chest so the "S" showed to better advantage, and a.s.sumed a serious, responsible expression.