An Owl Too Many (16 page)

“It’s only half, President. I stuck in an extra ice cube to create the illusion of plenitude.”

“Ungh.” Svenson drained the glass at a swallow and set it down. “Tired, Shandy. Getting old. Kick the bucket one of these days.”

“As will we all. What you need is a square meal under your belt. Did you eat this noontime?”

“Can’t remember. Goddamn reporters bugging me all day, looking for fresh corpses. Told ‘em read the
Fane and Pennon.
Yesus, there’s your phone. Must have tracked me down. Don’t answer.”

“I’ll have to. I told Winifred to phone me if—hello?”

“Oh, Professor Shandy!” For a moment, Peter couldn’t sort out the voice from the wails, then he realized this was Viola Buddley. “They took her! Professor Binks! She’s gone.”

“WHO TOOK HER? WHERE
did they go? Get hold of yourself, Miss Buddley. Or let me talk to Calthrop. Is he there?”
^J

“He’s on the f-floor. I think he’s dead.”

“Oh my God! Miss Buddley, listen. President Svenson and I will be out there as fast as the Lord will let us. Have you phoned the Lumpkinton Police?”

“N-no.”

“Then do so at once. Lock the doors till they get there and make yourself a cup of tea or something.”

Thorkjeld Svenson was hacking at the cheese, slapping together big cracker sandwiches for them to eat on the way. Peter nodded, broke the connection, and redialed.

“Hello, Mrs. Swope. Is Cronkite home? Peter Shandy calling.”

Mrs. Swope knew better than to ask why. She had her son on the wire in no time flat.

“What’s up, Professor?”

“You’re closest to the field station, you’d better get over there fast. Winifred Binks has been kidnapped. Viola Buddley’s alone with Calthrop. He may be dead. The president and I are starting now. I told Buddley to call the Lumpkinton police, but God knows when they’ll show up.”

“I’m on my way.”

Peter slammed down the phone and reached for the telephone pad. “Swope’s on his way. No, Jane, you can’t come this time. I’m leaving a note for Helen. When will Sieglinde and the girls get home?”

“God knows. Around nine, I hope.”

“I’ve told her to call your house. Let’s go. Damn shame I put the car away.”

Peter was struggling into his mackinaw, running to keep up with Svenson’s giant strides. He’d barely got buttoned up when they were at Charlie Ross’s, into the car, and on the road. There would have been no point in alerting Ottermole, the field station was outside his territory.

Drat, he wished there’d been time to eat a decent supper, no telling what they were getting themselves into. Peter took some of the president’s crackers and cheese to munch as he drove, snatching a bite when he hit a stretch where it was safe to take a hand off the wheel. At the rate he was traveling, that wasn’t often. He prayed they wouldn’t get stopped for speeding; it would be just like those Lumpkinton morons to waste time hauling him over instead of hiking their carcasses out to the station.

Luckily, they didn’t. He smoked into the parking lot. Swope was waiting. The Lumpkinton police hadn’t shown up yet. The ambulance from Clavaton had come and gone, Swope had called them the second he arrived. Calthrop had been bleeding from the nose and ears and having some kind of seizure. His scalp was lacerated and swollen, his color was awful. The paramedic was fairly sure his skull was fractured.

“What about Miss Buddley?” Peter asked.

“She’s okay, more or less. I’ve given her about a bucketful of chamomile tea. It calmed her down some, only she keeps having to—here she is.”

Viola was able to talk coherently enough now. What she had to tell was horrendous but not all that helpful.

“Knapweed was at the table where he always sits, messing around with his weeds. Professor Binks was at her desk writing a nasty letter to Mr. Sopwith. He never did return her call. I’d gone out to check the bird feeders. I was on my way back when somebody jumped out of the woods, grabbed me from behind, and pulled some kind of blindfold down over my eyes. Then they rammed me against one of those maples beside the parking lot and tied me up.”

“Was this the same chap who got hold of you yesterday?”

“How should I know? I couldn’t see anything. I was yelling and kicking and trying to get away, but it didn’t do any good. I think it was more than one this time. They ran into the station, I could hear the gravel scrunching and Professor Binks yelling ‘How dare you?’ That’s the first time I ever heard her raise her voice. Then I heard them dragging her out to the parking lot.”

“Exactly what did you hear?” Peter asked her.

“Well, I heard Professor Binks making noises. She was going ‘mf, mf, mf,’ as though somebody had a hand over her mouth. And there was a lot of gravel being scuffed around. She wasn’t going without a fight, I can tell you that.”

“I’m sure she wasn’t. You said there were more than one. How many more?”

“At least three, I should think. Two for the rough stuff and one to drive the car. They must have had one close by, I heard it drive up as soon as they got her outside. Then they cussed and banged around awhile, getting her into it.”

“They didn’t hurt her?”

“I don’t think so. I heard somebody say, ‘Hey, take it easy. Don’t damage the merchandise.’ I heard the doors slam and they took off like a bat. Some gravel spurted up and hit my leg, that’s how close they were to me. It didn’t hurt because I had my boots on, but it scared the hell out of me.”

“Ungh,” said Dr. Svenson. “What then?”

“Once they were gone, I began struggling to get free. I guess they hadn’t tied me so tight this time; after a while I managed to loosen the rope a little and then it was easy enough. I was furious with Knapweed for not coming to help me, so I came charging in to blast him out and here he was on the floor, all bloody. I thought I was going to pass out, but I knew I had to get help, so I called you. Then Cronkite came and made me drink all that tea and—I guess that’s it.”

“Didn’t you call the Lumpkinton police?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. Maybe I did pass out. I’m just so damned sick and tired of being tied to trees!”

“I called the police right after I’d called the ambulance,” said Cronkite. “They claimed they hadn’t got any call, but you know them. They said half the guys were on their supper hour and they’d send somebody along when they got back. Doesn’t that frost you?”

“Urrgh!” said Svenson. “Which tree?”

“The one with the rope around it,” snapped Viola. “What the hell difference does it make? I never want to see another tree, all I want is to get out of Balaclava County and never come back. I’m resigning as of this minute.”

“Can’t. Nobody else to run the place. Assign you a security guard. Resign when we get Binks back here.”

“And how long is that going to take? You don’t know who snatched her, or where they took her, or what they plan to do with her. Look what happened to Knapweed! She and he could both be dead by now.”

“Bah. Get me the college. Extension five.”

Viola started to protest, swallowed her words, and obeyed. Peter wasn’t surprised, he knew what the president was doing. Viola was working herself up to another fit of hysterics, understandably enough. Having a small task to perform would switch her mind back to the commonplace, help her to pull herself together. By the time she’d put the president’s call through, she was calm enough to follow Peter’s suggestion that she go wash her face and fix her hair, though he privately considered it unfixable.

While Viola was fixing, Svenson was making arrangements for two of the college security guards to come out to the field station, and Peter was wondering what to do next, a Lumpkinton police car finally showed up. Two uniformed officers came in, viewed with interest the bloodstains in the lobby where Knapweed had fallen, asked a few inane questions, took a few useless notes, poked around a bit, regretted the lack of clues, expressed their sympathy to Viola when she came out of the bathroom looking slightly more disheveled than when she’d gone in, had their pictures snapped by Cronkite Swope, and took their leave.

They did promise to put out a bulletin, though they were not sanguine of results since Viola hadn’t given them any description of the kidnap car, its driver, or any of the other passengers except Winifred Binks; who was no doubt either lying under the rear seat rolled up in a blanket or else locked in the back of a closed van. They favored the van, or possibly a recreational vehicle of the smaller type.

“The hell of it is, those dolts are right,” Peter groaned as the pair drove away exuding an air of duty done. “Confound it, there’s got to be something!”

The police had turned up nothing in the parking lot except churned-up gravel and a piece of rope under one of the slim maples where Viola had said it would be. This piece matched the rope that had been used to tie her up during her previous abduction, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. It was ordinary nylon clothesline, the sort that could be bought in any housewares department or filched from somebody’s backyard. Peter wondered where the blindfold had gone.

“Oh, I remember now,” said Viola, “I carried it back into the station with me. It was my own bandanna, I’d had it twisted around my head and they shoved it down over my eyes. Then when I saw Knapweed all bloody I tried to—he—I think I used it to wipe my hands.”

“All right, Miss Buddley, take it easy. Did you throw the bandanna in the wastebasket?”

“I don’t know. Want me to look?”

“No, don’t bother. Not to be sexist, but could we persuade you to make some coffee? President Svenson and I never got any supper.”

“Oh sure. I don’t mind. It’s only chicory and dandelion, though. Professor Binks’s special mixture.”

“That’s fine with us.”

Peter dropped to his hands and knees and began exploring the indoor-outdoor carpeting that covered the lobby floor. After yesterday’s rain, it was filthy with tracked-in mud and gravel, but not the sort of surface to take clear footprints. Cronkite was crawling, too, but neither of them found anything except a few dried leaves of the northern bedstraw over by the table and a cheap disposable pen lying under Professor Binks’s desk.

“Winifred must have dropped this when they grabbed her,” said Peter. “She’d never have been sloppy enough to leave it here.”

“Maybe it belonged to one of the kidnappers,” Cronkite suggested.

Thorkjeld Svenson grunted a negative. “Standard issue. College storerooms. Bought two hundred gross. Special price. Waste not, want not.”

“M’yes.” Peter had been investigating Winifred’s desk drawers. “I don’t see any other pen here; ergo, this is more likely than not the one she’d been using. Miss Buddley, you mentioned on the phone that she’d been drafting a letter to Sopwith.”

“It’s on her desk.”

Ordinarily Peter wouldn’t have dreamed of reading somebody else’s correspondence, but this was no time for niceties. “Gad, she wasn’t pulling any punches. This letter could make Sopwith a likely candidate as kidnapper, if it weren’t for the fact that he hasn’t yet seen it.”

“But anybody could have kidnapped Miss Binks just for her money,” said Cronkite Swope. “She’s so darned rich.”

“She’s committed a major portion of her inheritance to the station,” Peter objected. “That’s been well publicized. You ought to know, Swope, you wrote the articles.”

“Yeah, but people don’t always believe what they read in the papers. Anyway, they may figure she’s made a lot more since then.”

“Ungh,” said Svenson.

Peter caught his meaning. “Granted Winifred has quite likely accrued as much more by now as she’d given away, but how is the criminal underworld to know that?”

The president snorted.

“All right, President, I concede your point. Debenham may be less discreet than he appears. Sopwith is almost certainly either a knave or a fool or both, judging from the way he’s mishandling that Lackovites business. Furthermore, I suppose all the Binks Trust dealings get fed into some confounded computer, which means they could be accessible to any electronic pirate who knows how to push the right buttons.”

“So?”

“So if this is an ordinary run-of-the-mill kidnapping, we’ll surely get a ransom demand fairly soon. Somebody will have to stay here at the station all night, just in case.”

“Well, it’s not going to be me,” Viola burst out.

“I’m in no shape to hang around here waiting for somebody to heave a brick through the window with a note tied to it.”

Peter had an idea that such melodramatic methods were out of date, though from the way this lot went around lashing buxom wenches to trees, one couldn’t be sure. “I expect they’ll just telephone,” he said mildly, “but we certainly wouldn’t expect you to stay, Miss Buddley. Who’s coming, President?”

“Bulfinch and Mink.” These were two of the Campus Security regulars: capable, intelligent men who could handle anything short of an artillery bombardment without turning a hair. “Any chance of keeping this out of the papers, Swope?”

“Gosh, Dr. Svenson, I don’t know. I don’t have to call in now, anyway, we won’t be going to press till early morning. But what with the ambulance coming out here and hauling Calthrop off with a fractured skull, the story’s bound to leak in fifty-seven different directions. I bet that night nurse at Clavaton Hospital’s already been on the phone to Aunt Betsy Lomax, and you know what that means.”

“URR.”

“WELL, I HAD
to tell the ambulance guys what happened,” Viola Buddley interrupted. “They were asking me all these questions, as if they thought I was the one who hit him.”

“So it seems kind of useless for the
Fane and Pennon
to sit on the story,” Cronkite went on, “unless we get a message from the kidnappers saying they’ll do something awful to Miss Binks if we talk. They didn’t say anything to you about keeping it quiet, did they, Viola?”

“They never said anything at all to me, just grabbed me and blindfolded me and t-tied—”

She was working herself up to another fit of hysterics, it was high time to break up the meeting. “Swope,” Peter said, “why don’t you take Miss Buddley home?”