An Owl Too Many (11 page)

“Ottermole,” he said, “how would you describe Fanshaw?”

“Huh? What do you mean, how?”

“Height, weight, age, complexion, eye color, clothing, the usual. Would you say he was a tall man?”

“Not specially, I mean not what you’d really call tall. More tall than short, I guess. How about average?”

“Um. Was he heavy or slim?”

“Gosh, I didn’t notice. Sort of in between, wouldn’t you think?”

“I expect I would, because I wouldn’t know what else to say. Was he light or dark or in between?”

“Kind of—I don’t know. Average?”

Peter didn’t even try for eye color. “Can you recall any distinguishing features?”

“Well, he didn’t have a bushy red beard or a big scar down the side of his face, I’d have remembered something like that. I think. You know, Professor, it’s a funny thing. I remember Fanshaw well enough now that I’ve read my notes and all, but I can’t seem to recall one damned thing about him. Do you think it’s on account of him hypnotizing me?”

“I don’t know, Ottermole, but he didn’t hypnotize me and I can’t seem to picture him, either. Let me call Miss Binks, she has eyes like a hawk’s.”

Winifred Binks was there, she had a clear general impression of Mr. Fanshaw, but when it came down to specifics, she couldn’t quite put her finger on a single detail. She asked Knapweed Calthrop to help her out; he did no better than she. Winifred found the circumstances very provoking, and Peter could not but agree.

“
HYPNOTIZED
?”

The conch shell on the whatnot vibrated audibly. Jane Austen, who’d been peacefully making bread on the president’s knee, leapt two feet straight in the air, then rushed to Peter for solace. Being conversant with the courtesies due a sensitive feline, Dr. Svenson apologized.

“Sorry, Jane. Shouldn’t have yelled. But Yesus, Shandy!”

“I couldn’t agree more, President. Naturally one doesn’t expect such melodramatic occurrences in one’s own bailiwick. I was more than a trifle nonplussed, myself.”

“And you don’t nonplus easily, dear,” said Helen Shandy. “Shall I mix you a Boomerang?”

“Sit still, my love. I’ll do it.”

“No, you’ve been up half the night and tearing around un-hypnotizing people all day. I haven’t done anything more strenuous than flip through the library card catalog.”

Helen set down her own glass, on which she’d made little progress so far. A Balaclava Boomerang is, as Helen well knew, not the sort of drink to be approached too boldly. Its principal ingredients are homemade cherry brandy and home-hardened cider. Only cherries and apples grown within the purlieus of Balaclava County produce the desired results in the manufacture of the ingredients, therefore Boomerangs are never served anywhere else and then only by those favored few who are able to obtain (a) the requisite ingredients and (b) the secret formula.

Helen’s research into the annals of the Buggins family had confirmed that the Boomerang was an invention of Belial Buggins, a nephew of Balaclava Buggins, the college’s founder. Belial had also been the reputed father of Hilda Horsefall, now married to Dr. Svenson’s Uncle Sven; Dr. Svenson might be said thus to have acquired a family interest in the Boomerang. This could explain his expressed willingness to have another now with Peter. Since alcohol works on the human body in direct proportion to the body’s size, Svenson could easily have managed half a dozen, but he never drank more than two. The president was fully conscious of his position and the responsibility incumbent upon him to set a good example to the young minds under his charge. If he hadn’t been, his wife would have reminded him.

Sieglinde herself would normally have been among those present, for she and Helen were close friends. This weekend, however, she was babysitting her Olafssen grandchildren while daughter Birgit and her husband Hjalmar were off to collect a trophy awarded them by the National Raspberry Growers’ Association for their outstanding contributions to the field of rubiculture. Since both Birgit and Hjalmar were Balaclava graduates and former students of Peter Shandy, this ought to have been the prime topic of conversation, but today Peter had too much else to talk about.

“I called Cronkite Swope to see about the photographs he took of Fanshaw, and he says there isn’t one where the man’s face shows clearly. He managed somehow to keep his head turned away from the camera every time. And the eeriest part of all is that when we tried to get up a description of Fanshaw for the state police to track him down, not one of us could remember what the bugger looked like.”

Peter shook his head. “The best Swope could come up with was that Fanshaw reminded him of a statistic. Forty-two-and-a-half-percent-of-the-population sort of thing. He said Fanshaw looked like half a percent. All I can think of is that chap who played tennis in
The Thirty-Nine Steps
and showed up again in
Mr. Standfast.”
Peter was a keen student of the works of John Buchan. “You know, the one who was always turning out to have been somebody else. He had that same sort of bland, characterless face which can resemble anybody at all or nobody in particular. Change his clothes, slap on a false mustache—”

“People like that don’t have to resort to artifice,” Helen argued. “They just think themselves into the role and Bob’s your uncle. What you’d better do is find out whether Count von Schwabing sired any illegitimate sons during his early period, while he was committing all those unnameable crimes he got thrown out of Germany for.”

“This would have to be a grandson,” said Peter. “Anyway, members of the nobility didn’t get thrown out for siring bastards. He’d have had to do something really unnameable, like cheating at cards or shooting a fox.”

“Ungh,” grunted Dr. Svenson. “Sounds to me more like The Shadow.” The second Boomerang never made Dr. Svenson garrulous, but it did tend to loosen his vocal cords a little. “Power to cloud men’s minds. Not women’s, though. Women’s minds don’t cloud.”

“Sometimes they do,” Helen told him kindly, “but I can’t imagine that Winifred Binks’s ever does. And you say she doesn’t remember either, Peter? That really is uncanny. Unless it’s just that you were all tired out from what happened at the owl count?”

“Ottermole wasn’t in our group,” Peter argued, “though I grant you he stayed with the owl count straight through to the finish. But Budge Dorkin didn’t participate, and he can’t remember, either. In his and Ottermole’s cases, it could be post-hypnotic suggestion, I suppose, but that wouldn’t account for the rest of us. Drat, it’s humiliating to realize one’s faculties are so easily numbed.”

“Bemused, I should say,” Helen modified. “Like when the magician holds out the hat and it looks empty to you but the bunny’s in there all the time. I wonder whether they use he bunnies or she bunnies?”

“I expect they choose dumb bunnies, so the critters won’t know enough to put up a squawk when they get crammed into the false bottoms. Can’t you look it up somewhere? Librarians are supposed to know all this stuff.”

“That’s right, embarrass me in front of Thorkjeld and get me kicked off the staff so I’ll have to stay home and darn your socks. I see through your chauvinist machinations, Peter Shandy, and you needn’t think I don’t. Thorkjeld, you’ll stay and have a bite to eat with us?”

“Sorry. Gudrun and Frideswiede are cooking supper. Wish me luck.”

Dr. Svenson finished his drink and took his departure. Realizing how hungry he was, and how enticing was the scent of pot roast wafting from the kitchen, Peter went to set the table. Helen took the hint.

“Poor darling, you must be starved. Did you get any lunch?”

“A moldy crust and a sip of water. Brackish, with tadpoles.”

“Ah, good. There’s a lot of nourishment in tadpoles, I believe. Shall we turn on the evening news?”

Peter groaned. “Let’s not. I don’t feel up to any more catastrophes today. Drat, I wonder if we should have left Miss Binks to stay out there by herself tonight.”

“But Winifred’s not by herself, is she? I thought that young botanist was parking in her spare room as a perquisite of office.”

“As an alternative to being paid a living wage would be the more accurate rendering. We don’t aim to palter away Grandsire Binks’s millions on lavish stipends for weedy post-graduates. Calthrop will get his doctorate out of us if he keeps on the way he appears to be going, and maybe a full-time teaching position if he shows enough of the right stuff. So far there’s been barely a glimmer, but one never knows. Miss Buddley claims he attempted to force his attentions on her this morning.”

Helen elevated an eyebrow. “Did he really?”

“Good question. Calthrop maintains it was Miss Buddley who made the running. In any event, the denouement was that she stalked away in a huff and got herself abducted.”

“Peter! You didn’t tell me that.”

“Sorry, my own, I assumed the president would have.”

“A specious excuse if ever I’ve heard one; you know what a prude Thorkjeld is. Actually he hadn’t been here all that long before you came home. We were still talking about Emory Emmerick. So what happened to Miss Buddley? Is she still missing?”

“No, we found her.” Peter filled in the details of the kidnapping and its aftermath. “She was in a state of considerable disarray, having been gagged and blindfolded with strips torn from her upper garment. I had to lend her my shirt in order to spare the president’s blushes.”

“Noble soul! I hope she has the decency to give it back. Had Miss Buddley any idea why they snatched her?”

“She’s of the opinion that there was only one snatcher. He appeared to think she was in possession of some piece of information Emmerick had given her, and insisted she divulge it. She was unable to do so, having no idea what he was talking about. He remained of the opinion that she was just being ornery, and left her tied to a tree out along the Whittington Road for rumination and reflection.”

Helen shivered. “The poor woman, she must have been scared stiff. Is she all right now?”

“She complained of ant bites and nervous strain but seemed little the worse for her adventure, barring the shirt.”

“You know, Peter, it strikes me as more than a bit remarkable that Miss Buddley should go strolling or flouncing, as the case may have been, through the woods just as a kidnapper happened along. Doesn’t that make you wonder a bit?”

“This whole affair makes me wonder more than a bit,” he replied. “One conjectures that the kidnapper did not in fact just happen along, but had been lurking nearby in hope of an opportunity.”

“But how would he have known where she was going to be?”

“Maybe he planted a tracking device in her hiking boots. Would there be perchance another morsel of turnip in the pot?”

“Of course, dear. Allow me.”

“With pleasure.” Peter pulled the horseradish jar closer and ladled another dollop on his plate. “In point of fact, my love, it’s not outside the bounds of possibility that Miss Buddley may be telling the exact truth, as she sees it, about her adventure. She’d been on friendly terms with Emmerick. He’d taken her out to the Bubble night before last. They danced up and down the bowling lanes, she told me. If this other chap had been there spying, he could easily enough have got the impression that Emmerick was seizing the opportunity to whisper something other than sweet nothings into her shell-like ear.”

“Are her ears in fact shell-like?” As a librarian, Helen always preferred to be sure of the facts.

“Don’t digress, my love. We may be getting somewhere here, though I can’t imagine where. Emmerick must have been involved in something fairly dire, wouldn’t you think? Otherwise, why should anyone go to all that trouble to kill him? Why it happened the way it did is more than I can fathom, but there has to be some kind of explanation.”

“Such as that whoever pulled him up in that net was someone who wouldn’t have been able to get close to him any other way?” Helen suggested.

“Gad, I hadn’t thought of that angle. Somebody with a horrendous case of halitosis, you mean? Or someone who was allergic to Emmerick’s dandruff and would otherwise have given himself away by sneezing before he’d had his chance to plunge in the fatal weapon, whatever it may have been?”

“Of course, dear. That’s the only reasonable explanation.”

“Which is?”

“Whichever you prefer,” Helen conceded generously. “I was thinking more along the lines of a prosthesis or a sprained ankle.”

“As well you might, but how would a person with a prosthesis or a sprained ankle have climbed down from the tree and made his getaway before Winifred and I could get to him? Why wouldn’t they just shoot Emmerick from a distance, or sneak into his room and load his toothpaste with strychnine?”

“Because the murderer couldn’t shoot straight and was fresh out of strychnine? Or because he had a consuming hatred for Emmerick and wanted the satisfaction of killing him hand-to-hand? Or hand-to-neck, in this case. Peter darling, I know you’ve been tootling back and forth to the station all day and you must be sick of it, but do you think we might just buzz out there one more time and see whether Winifred might like to come back with us for the night? I know I’m being fluttery and feminine, but—”

“I’m feeling fluttery, too, if you want to know,” Peter admitted, “and since when did I raise any objection to your femininity? Shall we go right now?”

“Unless you want dessert? It’s only fruit and cheese.”

“Then let’s save it for Miss Binks.”

“Darling, why can’t you bring yourself to call her Winifred? She’d much rather you did.”

“I know that, Helen. It’s just that she reminds me so much of my fourth-grade teacher. I’ll gird up my loins and try to remember not to be intimidated.”

“Do. You’re a big boy now, you know. Come on, let’s get these dishes cleared up.”

Working together, they had the kitchen tidy in next to no time. Jane Austen expressed justifiable displeasure at the prospect of being left alone again, so they invited her along for the ride. This time Helen drove and Peter gave his full attention to Jane, who’d developed a taste for motoring. She liked best to sit on Peter’s shoulder with her tail across his face like a ringed mustache, making comments about the scenery as they went along.