Owls Well That Ends Well by Donna Andrews Read Free Book Online Page B

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 assigned 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