An Owl Too Many Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.”

3
    “ YOU WENT UP ?”
    Haverford’s voice was going up, too. “This guy gets caught in a net, hauled into the tree, and stabbed to death. And you went up?” His voice ended on a squeak.
    “We didn’t know he’d been stabbed,” said Peter. “That high neck on Emmerick’s sweater seems to have absorbed most of the blood. I never noticed the wound in his neck until Miss Binks and the president had gone to get help, leaving Stott and myself to guard the body. As for searching the tree, we may have been a trifle precipitate but I don’t see where we were all that foolhardy. Bear in mind that this didn’t all happen in rapid succession. When the firecrackers started banging, we reacted quite as the—er—perpetrators no doubt expected, trying to shelter ourselves from the apparent shooting, then focusing our attention on Emmerick’s body. Whoever’d been in the tree had plenty of time to get down and away without our noticing.”
    “On a bicycle,” said Winifred Binks.
    “A bicycle? Why, Professor Binks? Did you see