As I watched, I felt a brief pang. Of what I wasn’t quite sure. Regret, perhaps, that someone so talented had so foolishly wasted his life. Or maybe self-doubt—I’d gotten to like Steele, thought I knew him, only to have him completely fool me and turn out to be a crazy killer. And I felt anger, definitely. Lots of anger.
I sighed.
“Feeling sorry for him?” Michael asked.
“No, just mad at myself for not seeing through the louse sooner,” I said.
“He put on a good act,” Michael said. “I’m just hoping they don’t broadcast his trial on Court TV. If they do, he’ll get proposals and propositions from dozens of impressionable women who can’t see past the handsome exterior to the warped mind inside.”
“Well, maybe the videotape will help,” I suggested.
“What, the part where he’s doing his Cyrano de Bergerac number up and down the stage in boots and that linen shirt with the long, flowing sleeves women seem to like so much?” Michael said. I glanced up to see that he was staring at Steele with a rather fierce frown on his face.
“Well, no; but maybe they caught a shot of him with the tranquilizer dart in his rump,” I said. “Or maybe—what’s that?”
That was the sound of glass shattering, as a luggage cart burst through one of the plate glass windows to the left of the hotel entrance. In the wake of the luggage cart, a throng of monkeys and parrots spilled out of the newly created opening and scattered. The parrots mostly fluttered toward the bushes while the monkeys scrambled to the roof.
To my delight, one of the monkeys raced over to Steele and tried to use him as a ladder. Steele brushed it away with his cuffed hands and then tried to kick the poor thing. He missed, and landed a solid kick on his nephew’s shin instead. But the crowd saw where he’d aimed the blow, and the police had to hurry Steele into the waiting police car when the crowd began pelting him with pine cones and empty soda cans.
“That was most satisfactory,” Michael pronounced, as we watched the car carrying Steele drive off.
“Yes,” I said, though I was looking at last night’s hapless newlyweds, apparently reunited and strolling hand in hand through the crowd. She now wore an Amazon guard outfit, and he looked quite dashing in a replica of the costume Walker wore on the show.
Back at the hotel entrance, the animal control officers had found ladders and were leading parties of Amazon guards and bellhops up onto the roof, in pursuit of the monkeys. You could tell already that the monkeys really liked this new game.
Parrot retrieval was proving less difficult, largely because most of the birds seemed to have grown fond of Dad, and would emerge from the bushes when he coaxed them. Although the process would probably take a lot less time if someone could persuade Dad to concentrate on capturing the birds. Then again, perhaps after a few hours, even Dad would grow tired of strolling around with a gaudy parrot on each shoulder, posing for the photographers, and muttering “Avast!” and “Shiver me timbers!”
“At this rate,” Michael said, “I think it highly unlikely that much will be happening for the next hour or two.”
“You call that nothing?” I asked, pointing to the chaos in front of the hotel.
“Nothing official,” he said. “Nothing that’s listed on the convention program. In short, nothing that urgently requires our presence. Under the circumstances, what do you say we—”
“There you are!” Maggie said, coming up between us and grabbing one of us with each arm. “You’re not just going to stand around wasting time, are you?”
“Actually—” I began.
“Come on then,” she said, dragging us back toward the hotel. “We need to catch those poor creatures for once and for all before they hurt themselves. It could take all night. And I’m not taking no for an answer; we need all the help we can get!”
Turn the page for an excerpt from Donna Andrews’s next
Meg Lanslow mystery
Owls Well
That Ends Well
AVAILABLE IN HARDCOVER THIS WINTER FROM ST. MARTIN’S MINOTAUR
When the doorbell rang, I stumbled to the still-dark window and poured a bucket of water where the front porch roof would have been if it hadn’t blown away in a thunderstorm two weeks ago.
“Aarrgghh!” screamed our visitor. A male voice, for a change.
Ignoring the curses from below, I poured another gallon jug of water into the bucket, added a scoop of ice cubes from the cooler, and stationed it by the window before crawling back into the sleeping bag.
“I have an idea,” Michael said, poking his head out from under his pillow. “Next time let’s just hire someone to do this.”
“There won’t be a next time,” I said. “We are never, ever having another yard sale.”
“Works for me,” Michael said, disappearing under the pillow again.
Within thirty seconds I heard the gentle not-quite-snores that told me he was fast asleep.
A point in Michael’s favor, the non-snoring. The list was long on points in Michael’s favor and very short on flaws. Not that I normally keep ledgers on people, but I suspected that after several years together, Michael was tiring of my commitment phobia and working up to a serious talk about the M word. And no matter how much I liked the idea of spending the rest of my life with Michael, the M word still made me nervous. I’d begun making my mental list of his good points to defuse my admittedly irrational anxiety.
Not something I needed to worry about right now. Now, I needed to sleep. I settled back and tried to follow Michael’s example. But I didn’t hear a car driving away, which probably meant our caller was still lurking nearby. Perhaps even trying to sneak into the yard sale area. I wished him luck getting past our security. But odds were he’d eventually ring the doorbell again. Or another early arrival would. If only someone had warned me that no matter what start time you announce for a yard sale, the dedicated bargain hunters show up before dawn.
My family, of course, had been showing up for days. Every room that had a floor was strewn with sleeping bags, and my more adventurous cousins had strung up hammocks in some of the floorless rooms.
From downstairs in the living room, I heard the thumping of Cousin Dolores’s morning aerobics and the resonant chants Cousin Rosemary emitted while performing her sun salutations. Perhaps this morning they would both keep to their own separate ends of the living room. If not, someone else would have to restore peace between East and West today.
Michael was definitely fast asleep again. What a wonderful gift, being able to fall asleep like that. I felt envious.
Just envious? the cynical side of my mind asked. Not even a teeny bit resentful? I mean, it’s no wonder he can sleep so soundly. He hasn’t spent every waking moment of the last two months getting ready for this weekend.
In late August, we’d bought The House—a huge Victorian pile, three stories high plus attic and basement, with three acres of land and assorted outbuildings, including a full-sized barn equipped with a resident pair of nesting owls. The only way we’d been able to afford it was to take the place “as is,” which referred not only to the property’s run-down condition, but also to the fact that it still contained all of the late Edwina Sprocket’s possessions. And Edwina had been a hoarder. The house had been merely cluttered, the attic and basement downright scary, and the barn…apparently when the house became overcrowded, she’d started shoving things into the barn. When she’d run out of space on the first floor of the barn, she’d placed a ramp up to the hay loft and begun pouring junk in from above. She’d filled the barn and moved on to the sheds by the time she’d finally died, leaving her various grand-nieces and grand-nephews with a hideous clearing-out job that they’d avoided by selling the place to us. As is. With a clause in the contract entitling them to ten percent of whatever we made by selling the contents.