An Owl Too Many (3 page)

“Well, that’s an interesting development. I’m Sergeant Haverford. Is this your man? You haven’t moved him?”

“Oh no, that’s exactly how he landed. We just—er peeked under the net with our flashlight.”

“I see. Let’s have a couple more lanterns over here.”

Two of Haverford’s men stepped forward. The battery lanterns made a big difference, it was easy enough to see the dried blood and the gaping slit.

“Commando tactics,” Haverford remarked. “Neat job. We understand from Dr. Svenson that his name was Emory Emmerick and he was an engineer helping to set up a television station for the college. Had you known Mr. Emmerick long, Professor Shandy?”

“No, not at all until he showed up last week and introduced himself to the steering committee as the site engineer. We were surprised to see him, as a matter of fact, because there was still nothing for him to do and won’t be, I gather, until the subcontractors are ready to pour the foundations. However, Emmerick seemed to feel it was important for him to get the lie of the land, as it were. We assumed he knew what he was doing.”

“‘We’ meaning this steering committee you mentioned? Who’s on the committee?”

“Of the present company, Professor Binks and myself. Plus some other members of the faculty, of course.”

“Including Dr. Svenson?”

“Certainly. As president of the college, Dr. Svenson is an ex-officio member of all committees.”

“I see. How well have you people been getting along with Mr. Emmerick?”

“Well enough, I suppose.”

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”

“It’s just that, since he couldn’t get on with his own job, he tended to be a bit too ready to get involved in other people’s,” Peter replied.

“Such as how?”

“Such as inviting himself along tonight, for one thing,” Winifred Binks put in. “Mr. Emmerick seemed to think owl counting was some sort of campus frolic instead of serious ornithological research. Even before that quite terrifying grand finale with the fireworks, he’d been talking too much and too loudly and offering stupid observations that showed he knew virtually nothing about owls. Am I not right, Professor Stott?”

“One is loath to speak ill of the dead, but there remains the fact that he confused
Aegolius acadica acadica
with
Aegolius funerea richardsoni,”
Stott confirmed in a tone from which he had not succeeded in eliminating a note of rebuke. “Not being myself a member of the field-station steering committee, I had held small converse with Mr. Emmerick before this evening. My initial impression was that his acquaintance would not be one I should care to cultivate further.”

“So what you’re saying is that Mr. Emmerick had already started making enemies at the college. Can you give me any names, Professor Shandy?”

“Of course I can’t.” Peter was beginning to fray around the edges. “Emmerick hadn’t made enemies. We thought of him as a pest, not a menace. We knew he wasn’t going to be around long, and we also knew that if he got to be too much of a nuisance, it was quite within our power to ship him back to his bosses and get them to send somebody who’d mind his own business and leave us to manage ours as we saw fit; which we’d certainly have done if he’d survived tonight’s caper. Er—speaking of business, I expect Professor Binks told you that she and I searched the tree.”

“She did mention it. I assume what she meant was that you shone a flashlight up through the branches.”

“Oh no. We climbed the tree and shone the light—er—laterally.”

“You climbed the tree?” Haverford looked to be about thirty-five years old, and a few inches over six feet. He smiled tolerantly down on their two graying heads. “How did you manage that?”

“Easily enough.” Winifred Binks reached up to the same branch she’d used the first time, swung herself over it in a neat flip, and was forty feet in the air before Haverford could wipe the grin off his face. “If you’re coming up, Peter,” she called from the top, “bring one of those lanterns so we can take a better look this time.”

Peter held out his hand. “May I, Sergeant?”

“You’re going up there with her? Like that?”

“It’s how we generally go. I might point out that Miss—er—Professor Binks and I are not only experienced climbers but also trained naturalists. We’d both have recognized unusual damage to the tree and would have been careful not to make it any worse. We couldn’t see too much because our light wasn’t strong enough, but we did find the place where the net crashed down through the branches, for whatever good that might do. If you’d like to go up yourself or send one of your men, we’ll be happy to serve as guides.”

“Thanks, Professor.” Haverford didn’t grin this time. “I think the best thing for us to do now is leave a guard around the tree and come back with ladders and search dogs in the morning. Can you get your friend down out of there all right?”

“Certainly.” Peter raised his voice a little. “Come on down, Miss Binks. The sergeant’s decided to wait for daylight.”

Less than a minute later, Winifred Binks was on the ground. “I daresay you’ve made the right decision, Sergeant Haverford, though I’m sure Professor Shandy and I could have managed well enough with those nice lanterns of yours. I did notice a wisp of transparent fishline tied to a branch.”

Haverford made a strange gurgling noise, Professor Stott nodded.

“Then that supports your conjecture, Peter. Professor Shandy,” he explained to the sergeant, “has proffered the hypothesis that what we hoped was a snowy owl may in fact have been merely a bunch of white feathers pulled along on some mechanism analogous to a trolley wire. Do you not find this reasonable, Professor Binks?”

“Oh yes, certainly. An alternative possibility might have been someone running along parallel to the path with the lure on a pole; but it’s not easy to move silently through the woods at night unless one is on a well-marked path, as we were. And not even then if you’re in a hurry. We were walking briskly, we naturally didn’t want to miss the chance of a definitive spotting. A snowy owl would have been a real coup. Pity, but there it is. You weren’t planning to leave poor Mr. Emmerick here till morning too, I trust?”

“Oh no,” the inspector reassured her. “We’ll take him with us when we go. Let me just try to get straight about this net. Which of you was nearest to Mr. Emmerick when he got caught in it?”

Thorkjeld Svenson, who’d been chewing a handful of trail mix, gulped and growled, “I was.”

“Do the rest of you corroborate that?”

“Of course we do.” Winifred Binks sounded as though she found Sergeant Haverford a trifle slow in the intellect. “Dr. Svenson is our group leader, his place is always in front. Mr. Emmerick had had that explained to him before we started, but he either forgot the rule or chose to disregard it. If he hadn’t suddenly taken that notion to dart ahead—dear me!”

Haverford pounced like a hawk owl on a mouse. “Wait a minute, Professor Binks. You’re saying Dr. Svenson should have been in front; do you mean he should have been the one to get caught in the net?”

Peter stifled a snort. If they’d meant to catch Svenson, they should have dug a tiger pit.

Winifred Binks must have been thinking much the same thing, she shook her head violently. “I’m not offering any conjectures, Sergeant, I’m merely attempting to sort out the facts. The net was only big enough for one person. The question is whether they—I say ‘they,’ though of course it may have been only a single he or she—intended to snare a particular member of our group, or just the first one who happened along. You’ll note that a fair number of dead leaves are caught up in the net along with Mr. Emmerick’s body. This indicates to me, though of course I may be wrong, that the net had been spread across the path and camouflaged so that it wouldn’t be spotted before somebody stepped into it. How anybody could have mistaken Mr. Emmerick for Dr. Svenson is a question I’m not prepared to answer.”

“Maybe they didn’t know Dr. Svenson by sight, but just that he’d be the first in line,” one of the other officers ventured.

“That would mean we’re dealing with a set of paid assassins,” said Peter. “Can you think offhand who’d want to put out a contract on you, President?”

“Anybody.”

Svenson was being overmodest. Fearsome though he might appear, and indeed often was, Thorkjeld Svenson was admired by many, revered by some, and loved by a surprising number, of whom Peter Shandy and Daniel Stott were two, although either would have been hideously embarrassed to say so. Through weal, through woe, through sun and storm and general cussedness, each to each had held the steadfast fraternal devotion of a Damon to a Pythias, a Roland to an Oliver, a Mason to a Mason, an Elk to an Elk: Peter was more shaken than he ever wanted to be again at the thought that it might have been Svenson bundled up inside this depressing tangle of cords. He wished he hadn’t been so flip about the putative contract.

The hell of it was, that stab in the neck would have made some sense if the trappers had been under the impression that they’d snared the president. Thorkjeld Svenson’s reputation as a warrior in the old berserker tradition was too well known for even a squad of hired retiarii not to have had some inkling of what they’d be running up against. But why then the fireworks? Why the net at all? Why the stabbing? Why not an elephant gun from a safe distance?

Through an often bizarre concatenation of circumstances, Peter had come to be regarded as Balaclava County’s apology for Renfrew of the Mounted. Sooner or later, a small voice from some other dimension was murmuring, he was going to get stuck with this mess.

The hitch was, the state police would be perfectly willing to go on with the case, but only to the extent that Chief Ottermole asked them to. Ottermole was not one to let outsiders hog any glory that might be hoggable. As soon as he found out what had happened, he’d insist on taking charge, relying mainly on local talent for whatever help he needed. And when Fred Ottermole thought of local talent, he thought first of P. Shandy.

That was a bridge to be crossed when they got to it. Right now Haverford was saying, “I know you folks want to get home, but I’d like to get statements from all of you while everything’s fresh in your mind.”

“That’s quite all right, Sergeant,” replied Winifred Binks, at whom Haverford’s semi-apology had been mainly directed. “We were planning to stay out all night, anyway. President, will you go first?”

“You, Binks. Emmerick was your man.”

The outdoor life, while good for the soul, tends to be rough on the complexion. Haverford stared from the youngish, dapperly clad male body, which had by now been extricated from the net and laid out on the stretcher, to the spare, gray-haired woman whose wrinkled face was almost as thoroughly tanned as her ill-made deerskin suit. “You and he were—er—ah—?”

Winifred Binks took his flounderings calmly. “What President Svenson means, Sergeant, is that I’m the one responsible for having brought Mr. Emmerick to Balaclava. It was my idea to build the television station.”

“Binks’s money, too,” Svenson barked.

“Binks’s? You’re—you’re not the missing heiress to the Binks estate?”

Winifred shook her head. “I was never missing, Sergeant; I was merely too uninteresting to be kept track of until the media discovered that Grandfather was dead and I’d inherited his money. Nor am I all that interesting now, I’m afraid. There’s not much I can tell you that hasn’t already been said, except that when Mr. Emmerick rushed to the head of the line, he tried to take me with him.”

“How was that?”

“He’d been walking behind me. As he came up to my side, he took hold of my arm and started urging me forward.”

“Did he say anything?”

“I believe he whispered something like ‘Let’s move up.’ I assumed he’d got the childish notion of being first to spot the snowy owl and wanted me along as co-witness. The evidence of a single spotter is not accepted in the owl count, you see, there must be at least two. Since Mr. Emmerick knew I was also doing my first owl count, he apparently thought I’d be willing to help him confound the experts.”

“Did you say anything to him?”

“No. I did take a few steps forward, mainly to regain my balance. He’d practically knocked me off my feet trying to hustle me along. Needless to say, I wanted no part of his nonsense, so I pulled away and got back into line behind Professor Stott. This all happened very quickly, you know. I’m not sure Mr. Emmerick realized immediately that I wasn’t still with him. Once he’d bolted past Dr. Svenson, I saw him turn his head as if he might be looking around to see where I was. Then all at once he was up in the air and into the tree.”

“Just like that, eh?”

“Oh yes. For a moment I was quite nonplussed. Then I realized that Mr. Emmerick must have been caught in a snare because nothing else made sense. I heard him cry out—we all did—”

“What did he say, Professor Binks?” By now Haverford’s address was almost reverential. “Can you remember?”

“No. One couldn’t have heard what anybody said, that was when the firecrackers started banging. They made a horrendous noise, we thought they must be guns, so we threw ourselves down to dodge the bullets. After a bit—it seemed forever but probably wasn’t more than a few seconds—Peter—Professor Shandy—caught on that there weren’t any. By that time, the skyrockets were starting, so we knew it was a trick. We blamed Mr. Emmerick for setting them off, he’d been acting the clown all along, as I believe I mentioned a while back.”

“Yes, you did say he’d been disruptive.”

“He’d been a pest. We were furious, not so much at having been made fools of, though of course one never likes being scared out of one’s wits for someone else’s amusement, but because the noise would have frightened off the owls and ruined our count. Really, that was an unconscionable thing to do, no matter who did it.”

“I couldn’t agree more, Professor Binks. So then what happened?”

“Good question. Peter, what happened next?”

“Well—er—a couple of us began berating Emmerick, assuming he was up in the tree. Then it dawned on me that what I’d thought was a boulder in the path was in fact Emmerick trussed up in a net, as you saw him earlier. That reminded me of a heavy thud I’d heard just as the explosions began and I concluded he’d either fallen or been dropped out of the tree. At first I thought he’d had the wind knocked out of him, then I realized he was dead. So Miss Binks and I went up to see what we could find.”