was fascinated with the mail cart and had been fooling around with changing its path. Why bother to hide the evidence of his pranks?
“For this, you need a secret compartment?“ I said aloud. Then again, maybe he hadn't built me secret compartment; maybe he'd found it and decided to use it. But even I could have found a better collection of things to hide in a secret compartment. “Jeez, Ted. Is that the best you could do? Is that it?“
I peered down into the compartment. Yes, that was it. Well, almost it. I saw a small, triangular white shape – the corner of a piece of paper that was trying to disappear through the crack between the side of the compartment and the bottom.
I grabbed the kitchen knife I'd used to open the trapdoor, and carefully teased the rest of the paper out, before it could disappear into whatever spider-infested crawl space was behind the stairs.
It appeared to be a printout of a computer spreadsheet, like the ones I used to calculate my budget. Down the left half of the paper was a series of words or phrases, like “the Voyeur,“
“the Ninja,“
“Mata Hari,“ and “the Iron Maiden.“ Eleven entries in all, and beside each one were a dozen columns of notes in tiny, barely readable type. Some of the words I could decipher – things like “struck out“ or “no dice.“ But most of it…
“I need more time and better light to deal with this,“ I muttered. Although I figured it would be worth dealing with. From the date on the upper right-hand corner, it had been printed on Saturday – only two days before the murder. And one of the labels on the left was THE hacker. So maybe the printout would help me figure out the meaning of the strange collection of objects I'd found beneath the trapdoor.
I found an empty grocery bag in Mrs. Sprocket's pantry – actually, I found several hundred, but I needed only one – loaded the contents of the secret compartment into it, and stashed it in my trunk.
But after I locked the house back up, I decided to explore the yard a little. The driveway continued behind the house, although I deduced from the three- and four-foot dogwood seedlings in the middle of it that no one had driven that way for several years. I followed the driveway and discovered an enormous weathered barn.
My cell phone rang. Michael.
“So what are you up to?“ he asked.
“I'm not sure,“ I said. “Do you have to be breaking into someone's actual house for it to be burgling? Or would someone's barn count, too?“
“I know I'm going to regret this, but whose barn are you burgling?“
“Ted's. Or his landlord's.“
I wedged the phone between shoulder and ear and explained, briefly, what I'd been doing, while rummaging through my purse for something that would serve as a makeshift screwdriver. The door was secured with a relatively new padlock, but since the screws holding the hasp onto the door were already half-loose, it took only a few minutes to remove the hasp entirely.
“There, I've got it,“ I reported to Michael. “And I bet the police didn't search in here. They couldn't have, unless there's another way in – the padlock was swathed in spiderwebs.“
“You don't think maybe the spiderwebs are a sign that there's nothing worth finding in the barn?“
“Not necessarily,“ I said. “I mean obviously there's no evidence of the murder in here, given the spiderwebs; but there could be something that gives me a clue to why he was killed.“
“Meg, be careful,“ Michael said.
“I will,“ I said. “Stand by, and I'll give you a blow-by-blow description of what I see.“
I began pulling open the barn door. I was wondering if I should fetch the flashlight I kept in my car, when something struck me on the head and I lost consciousness.
I awoke to find myself gazing into the glassy eyes of a moth-eaten taxidermied moose.
“Meg! Answer me!“ it pleaded in a small, hollow voice.
“Yes?“ I said.
Apparently the moose didn't hear me.
“I'll keep her on the line,“ it said, in the same oddly distant voice. “See if you can get a number for the Caerphilly police department…. What?…
The police department? There was something about the police department that I ought to remember. If my head would stop hurting, I might remember.
I glanced around and saw my cell phone lying in the grass beside the moose's cheek.
“Michael,“ I said, grabbing the cell phone. “I'm fine. Don't call the police. Chief Burke would be really angry.“
“Meg! Are you all right? What happened?“
“I'm fine. It was only a moose.“
A brief pause.
“Keep trying to get the Caerphilly police,“ Michael said. Apparently to someone else. “I think she's going to need an ambulance.“
“Michael, I told you, I'm fine,“ I said. “It was only a stuffed moose head.“
“Only a stuffed moose head?“ he repeated. And then, to whoever else was on the other end. “Get the number but don't call yet. Meg,“ he said, more loudly. “Are you sure you're okay?“
Was I okay? What if our deranged killer was following some land of punning weapons motif, I wondered, as I patted the top of my skull. First strangling Ted with a mouse cord, and now assaulting me with a stuffed moose? I winced – by probing my scalp, I had confirmed that, yes, I had a remarkably large lump on the top of my head, and while it didn't appear to be bleeding, touching it made my headache temporarily worse.
I looked around and realized that the killer probably wasn't responsible for my predicament. I was lying at the edge of a small delta of objects that had erupted out of the barn when I opened the door. In addition to the moose, I spotted a crab pot, a rope hammock, several bicycle tires, a badminton net, a headless garden gnome, half a dozen flowerpots, several croquet mallets, a broken toilet, a large wasp's nest – fortunately, unoccupied – and several dozen other less recognizable bits of junk.
“I'm fine,“ I said. “I was opening the door to the barn, remember? A stuffed moose head fell out and beaned me. I have a lump on my head, but I'm fine.“
“Don't go in the barn,“ Michael said. “It could be dangerous to go into the barn.“
“I'm sure it would be dangerous, and I'm not going in there,“ I said. “I'd need a forklift to clear a path before I could even think of going in there. I'll be lucky if I can put back everything that fell out when I opened the door.“
“That's good,“ Michael said. “Don't try to put things back, just get out of there; obviously it's not safe.“
“Okay, okay,“ I said.
“And get your father to look at your head.“
“Okay, I will,“ I said.
I was lying, of course. I stayed long enough to put back the stuff that had fallen out of the barn, which with only one and a half working hands seemed to take forever. But did Michael really expect me to leave it all spread across the lawn, advertising my snooping in case anyone like Chief Burke came back? I was tempted to just stow it all in the basement, on the theory that the police would be so overwhelmed by the magnitude of Mrs. Sprocket's clutter that they'd overlook the fact that some of it was sneaking around when their backs were turned, but decided it was a bad idea. They might have taken photos.
When I got back to the Cave, I tried to settle down and study Ted's collection of artifacts, but then I just put them aside in favor of half an hour with an ice pack and some aspirin.
I did put the portable black light in my purse. Depending on what time the pizza fest broke up, I might come back here afterward, or I might want to go straight from Luigi's to the office. I changed into jeans and a T-shirt that was presentable enough to wear to the restaurant, yet old enough that I wouldn't mind dirtying it up if my snooping
