An Owl Too Many Read Online Free PDF Page B

ruminated met with little favor. Since they were also insistent that he’d never once stepped out of line, there wasn’t much Haverford could do but table the question.
    “All right, I guess we won’t be needing you people any longer tonight. You aren’t any of you planning to leave town in a hurry?”
    “Hadn’t better,” snarled the president. “Classes.”
    “Oh, right. Then I expect we can find you at the college if Chief Ottermole requests our further assistance.”
    Peter said they’d be looking forward to it, and the two groups parted company. Most of the policemen headed back the way they’d come, two stayed to guard the tree. The owl counters walked on the way they’d been heading for half a mile or so, but none of them spotted so much as a regurgitated pellet of mouse fur, and not a hoot was to be heard. After a while, Dr. Svenson voiced what was by now the consensus of the group.
    “Hell with the owls. Let’s go home.”
    They were a silent lot as they followed Winifred Binks’s lead back to where Peter had parked his car. He automatically headed back toward the college, since most of his passengers lived within its purlieus, then realized he was being less than courteous to the lone female member, who lived miles out of town. To cover his gaffe, he said, “I’ll just drop the others, Miss Binks, then run you back to the station.”
    “Indeed you will not,” Winifred protested. “I’ll get a security guard to let me into the gym, and doss down on one of the tumbling mats.”
    After a certain amount of argy-bargy, she agreed to the pull-out sofa in the Shandys’ upstairs den. Truth to tell, Peter was glad not only that he wouldn’t have to make the long drive but also that Miss Binks would be safe under his roof instead of out on a thirty-mile tract in the middle of nowhere. He managed to get her settled without waking his wife, then climbed gratefully into the conjugal bed.
    Considering how late it was by then, Peter had expected to sleep like one of the logs he’d spent so much of the night clambering over. Instead he lay wide awake, thinking about the many who might still be out there owling. He hoped none of them had got tangled up with a phantom netter.
    Or netters. How many hands would have been needed to run that operation? One could have done it, maybe, if the person was strong enough. Hauling Emmerick up into the tree would have been the hardest part. Maybe that was why he’d got dropped so fast; whoever had pulled him up couldn’t hold him any longer. Could that mean the netter had been a woman, or a young kid? Or that the netter had tried to hold him with one hand while stabbing him with the other?
    It wasn’t as though Emmerick had been a big man, he’d been a few inches shorter than Peter himself, and Peter was no giant. Say five feet six or so, about Winifred Binks’s height. He’d no doubt weighed twenty or thirty pounds more than she; her mostly vegetarian diet kept her weight down, although the muscles developed by her arboreal habits made her look heftier than she was. Emmerick had not been noticeably muscular, he mightn’t have been able to put up much of a fight even if he hadn’t been pinioned by the net. Easy to stab, then; maybe hard to hold.
    And so what? Peter dozed off at last and had a not particularly amusing dream about Emory Emmerick, dressed in Miss Binks’s deerskins, being chased through the woods by an unidentifiable absent-minded professor with a minnow net. He woke gummy-eyed and heavy-headed, wondering why the sun was so high and why Helen wasn’t here beside him. Then he heard her talking to somebody downstairs, and remembered.
    The time was half past eight, at least he hadn’t wasted the whole morning. Not that it mattered much, this being Saturday; but he might as well get up. Peter didn’t feel obliged to put on the dog for Miss Binks, she’d seen him in far worse shape than this. Four minutes, later, unshaven but showered and more or less