An Owl Too Many (2 page)

“Urrgh!”

“Oh yes, of course. First things first.” She leapt for a limb and swarmed up the tree.

“Binks!” If there was by chance an owl still left in the area, Svenson’s roar would surely have discouraged it from lingering. “Come back here!”

“I’m just looking.”

Her voice fluted down from far overhead. This tree, Peter noted, was an oak, still clinging to the leaves it would continue to hold long after the maples and birches were bare. It was at the top of another giant oak that he’d first met Miss Binks; he wasn’t at all surprised she’d made such excellent time climbing this one. The really astonishing development was that net.

He shone his flashlight again on Emmerick, trussed up like a supermarket turkey. The engineer had had time enough by now to get his wind back; why wasn’t he breathing? Then Peter realized he wasn’t going to breathe, not ever again. And Miss Binks was up there alone. Or not. Peter grabbed for that same branch, pulled himself up, and scrambled to meet her.

The moon kindly obliged by coming out from behind its veil of clouds, the pair of them were able to search the oak fairly well. They found the makeshift contrivance that had been used to launch the rockets, they found signs of burning and a few scraps of paper from the fireworks, but that was all.

So the spooky whiteness had been no snowy owl, merely a ruse to lure them here. Emmerick’s unseemly behavior along the way had been due to his anticipation of the stupendous practical joke that was going to be played on this bunch of stuffed shirts from the college. He might well have engineered the fireworks display himself.

But if he was in on the joke, how had he got caught in the net? It would seem he must have had an accomplice up in the tree to fire off that opening salvo. Had his partner decided to turn the joke on Emmerick? There’d been something pretty damned selective about the way that net had managed to snare only one of four people who were still bunched up close together. Had it been dropped from above, or laid on the ground? Had Emmerick fallen from the tree because the ropes gave way or had he been deliberately dropped? And was it really supposed to have been a joke?

There must be marks up here that would give them information, if only they had enough light to see by. This flashlight was about as much help as a lightning bug. Peter snapped it off and stuck it in his pocket.

“We may as well go down, Miss Binks, before the president bursts a blood vessel. We’re wasting our time, we’ll have to get the state police out here with searchlights. If this was meant to be a joke, it’s backfired very badly. I’m quite sure Emmerick’s dead.”

“OH DEAR,” SAID WINIFRED
, “how very distressing. Mr. Emmerick was a tiresome man, in my opinion, but one would not have wished him so bizarre and untimely an end. I wonder what on earth that explosive retiarius thought he was going to catch. The net must have been rigged with some kind of automatic tripping device, wouldn’t you think?”

“It’s possible,” said Peter. “I hope I wasn’t it.” He didn’t pause to elaborate. Dr. Svenson was still bellowing for them to come down; perhaps he was irked because they hadn’t tossed him a culprit to mangle. For a college president, he did have a rather wide streak of the berserker in him. Anyway, there really was nothing more to be done until they had lights; the police must be called without further delay.

Winifred was the fleetest of foot among them, but Peter wasn’t about to let her go alone with a retiarius loose in the woods. He himself was second fastest but was damned if he’d be pried away from the scene of the crime. Dan Stott would be no earthly use, he’d get to ruminating somewhere along the way and forget what he was going for. Svenson himself would have to act as Miss Binks’s bodyguard, and who better? Peter slid down the last ten feet of trunk and got straight to business.

“President, you gallop on back and get hold of the state police. Miss Binks, you’d better go with him as guide, you know all the shortcuts. Tell them to bring some portable searchlights and a stretcher, and to keep their confounded sirens turned off. We’ve had all the noise we need for one night.”

“Ottermole?” barked Svenson.

Peter shook his head. “We’d never find him, he’s already out owling. Anyway, he hasn’t the equipment we need.”

Fred Ottermole, Balaclava Junction’s own chief of police, comprised fifty percent of the force’s strength, not counting part-time help and unpaid deputies, of whom Peter was one. Peter couldn’t recall which territory the chief had been assigned to and didn’t care. Ottermole was a good man in a scrap, but when it came to detecting, owls and litterers were his forte. He might as well stay with the hunt.

“This way, Dr. Svenson.”

Winifred Binks darted off between the trees in what would seem to be the wrong direction but assuredly was not. The president followed without question, knowing she couldn’t get lost in the woods if she tried. Professor Stott remained where he’d been standing ever since he’d seen Emory Emmerick snatched up into the oak. After due deliberation, he uttered.

“Peter, I believe we may now say with confidence that the apparition of a snowy owl was a mere ruse to gain our, or probably Mr. Emmerick’s, attention. Though the outcome of the adventure has been far more deplorable than I anticipated, I cannot say that I was ever wholly sanguine about the probability of a satisfactory sighting. Shortages of
Nyctea scandiaca’s
accustomed prey occur cyclically, as a rule in a span of five to seven years. To the best of my recollection, only three and a half years have elapsed since a snowy owl was observed by one Mr. Wendell White of Durham, Maine, attacking a raven on a byroad connecting Route 9 to Route 136. Mr. White got out of his pickup truck and rescued the raven from the owl on the ground that the raven was a local bird and he didn’t hold with foreigners coming in and trying to take over. One sees the force of Mr. White’s argument.”

“Many in Balaclava County would feel the same way,” Peter agreed. “I suspect our so-called owl may in fact have been nothing more than a bunch of white feathers tied to a fishing pole. Some wisenheimer was running along beside us, sticking it up in the air every so often to keep us moving toward the net.”

“Your brain is more agile than mine, old friend, I would not have thought of a fishing pole. Indeed, the runner himself must have been inordinately agile to have traversed so irregular a terrain without alerting any of us to his or her presence. Your own ears are exceptionally keen, Peter, and your perceptions acute. Those of our esteemed colleague Winifred Binks are even keener, as I believe you will concede.”

“I certainly will, Dan, and you’ve raised an interesting point. I suppose the lure could have been slung on something like a trolley wire and was being pulled along just fast enough to keep it ahead of our party. Or else the runner was keeping his distance, casting the lure like a trout fly and reeling it back.”

“That would not have been easy to do in these woods,” Daniel Stott objected. “Would there not have been great risk of the line’s being fouled on a branch or the lure’s getting caught in the undergrowth?”

“Maybe there were crooks stationed all along the way with separate casting rods. Drat! I wish they’d get here with those searchlights.”

Peter knew he was being unreasonably impatient. The president and Miss Binks couldn’t even be out of the woods yet, much less have got to a phone and alerted the state police. He and Stott would be here alone for at least an hour, probably longer. They might as well make what use they could of the time.

“Dan,” he said, “hold the flashlight for me, will you? I want to take a closer look at Emmerick.”

“By all means,” his friend agreed. “Poor fellow, to have met an untimely demise through a mistimed and ill-judged Halloween prank.”

“Think so?” Peter was down on his knees beside the grotesque bundle of netting, trying to get a better look without disturbing the body. “Shine the beam down this way, will you? M’yes, I can see well enough now. This would have had to be one hell of a Halloween prank, Dan. I can see blood on the sweater. It looks to me as if somebody’s shoved the point of a damned great big hunting knife into the back of Emmerick’s neck.”

“Right at the base of the skull, thus effecting his instant demise,” Stott agreed after careful scrutiny of the ugly wound. “We must be thankful that the poor fellow did not suffer. You speak of a hunting knife, Peter. That would have required a sharp blow by a powerful hand. Might we not also consider the possibility of a hunting arrow, a javelin, or a bolt from the sort of harpoon gun used by scuba divers?”

“We might,” Peter conceded, “though it would have taken some fancy shooting to hit a vital spot by moonlight with the target up a tree, bundled into a net. Unless the hit was plain fool luck.”

“The element of luck cannot be discounted, Peter. Moreover, a harpoon bolt would have a line attached by which it could be retrieved even from a distance. The same might conceivably be true of an arrow or a spear, might it not?”

“I suppose so.” Peter wasn’t too sold on the arrow, javelin, or harpoon concept, and Dan Stott noticed.

“In any event, we are agreed on the element of premeditation and the likelihood of a human agent, are we not? Unless some kind of infernal device was set up in the tree which was triggered by Emmerick’s sudden rise. Do you think that possible?”

Peter shrugged. “Miss Binks and I didn’t find one, but we could easily enough have missed it. I’d far rather believe in an infernal device than in the possibility that somebody’s over there in the bushes right now, aiming a harpoon gun at us.”

“Surely you do not seriously entertain such a possibility?” Daniel Stott asked the question only after due consideration. “It would seem to me that should further mayhem have been intended, this would have had to be effected while our party was still all together, since the would-be perpetrator would not have known in advance which of us would go for help and which would stay behind. Had the plan been to wipe us all out, I venture to suggest that live bullets would have been used instead of firecrackers.”

“Good thinking, Dan.”

“Thank you, Peter. I am, however, still nonplussed as to why Mr. Emmerick was stabbed after he had already been trapped in the net. Though,” Dan added after further pondering, “I also fail to see whether there would have been any point to his having been stabbed first.”

“I can’t see that, either. Besides, it doesn’t fit with what Miss Binks told me. She claims Emmerick dashed to the front of the line just before the fireworks went off, and tried to take her with him. You must have noticed him, Dan, you were next in line to the president.”

“I was indeed, but I cannot truthfully say that I observed the occurrence. I was wholly preoccupied with the aberrant behavior of the snowy owl, as I then still supposed it might be. I believe I was weighing the alternative possibility of an albino
Tyto alba pratincola,
although I had no substantial grounds on which to do so. But for a member of the group to have advanced himself ahead of our leader was a serious breach of owl-count etiquette. Had Mr. Emmerick not been made aware of our accustomed protocol?”

“Certainly he had; I explained the rules to him very carefully, in words of one syllable insofar as possible, before we started out. I couldn’t imagine why he wanted to come in the first place. Now, of course, I realize it was because he thought the net and the fireworks were a practical joke and wanted to be in on the fun.”

“Peter, you say Miss Binks told you of Emmerick’s movement. Did you yourself not see it happening? You were directly behind him, were you not?”

“I didn’t see him pass the president. I was flat on my face at the time. I’d tripped over a root. Or thought I had. In retrospect, I wonder if it mightn’t have been Emmerick’s foot that tripped me.”

“A viable hypothesis, in my opinion. I must say I myself found Mr. Emmerick’s behavior quite incomprehensible in one who was neither a member of the faculty nor even a fellow townsman. His absurd pronouncements betrayed his abysmal ignorance of the Strigiformes, his forwardness amounted at times almost to rudeness. Can you account for his having forced himself upon us as he did, Peter?”

“Dan, I cannot account for one damned thing that’s happened tonight. So where do we go from here?”

“Since we cannot in point of fact go anywhere at all until our reinforcements arrive, I see only one course open to us.” Stott began fishing in the capacious pockets of his Norfolk jacket, bringing out squarish, thickish bundles carefully wrapped in foil. “Here, old friend, have a sandwich.”

Iduna Stott’s sandwiches were always expertly engineered and nutritionally balanced. The one Peter opened first had been started with slices of home-baked rye bread and honey-cured ham, progressing thence to smoked turkey, sage cheese, fresh tomato, cucumber, lettuce, and alfalfa sprouts, all subtly enhanced by a mustard dressing whose secret recipe Iduna had promised to will to the college’s home arts department should she ever get around to shuffling off her mortal coil.

Dan’s trove also included a thermos of hot tea. With this and the sandwiches, plus a few fig squares, apples, and chocolate cookies along with a swig apiece from Peter’s brandy flask by way of
bonne bouche,
the two old friends whiled away the time pleasantly enough, although Emmerick’s by now stiffening corpse was not the companion they would have chosen for an al fresco picnic. They even managed to add a pair of barred owls and a more exciting long-eared
Asio otus wilsonianus
to their checklist before Miss Binks and Dr. Svenson showed up with a fairly long arm of the law in tow.

“Did you bring the floodlights?” was Peter’s greeting.

“Battery lanterns.” The officer in charge held up the one he’d been using to light the path. It was a fairly impressive affair with a bulb half the size of an automobile headlight. “We understand you’ve had an unfortunate incident here.”

“M’yes, you could say that. My name is Shandy, by the way, and this is Professor Stott. I assume Professor Binks and Dr. Svenson have explained how we watched one of our group get caught up in a net, hauled up into this tree here, then dumped back on the ground. He’s also been stabbed in the neck.”