Free An Owl Too Many by Charlotte MacLeod Page A

pulled over to the side of the road, shoved the car keys into his pocket, and got momentarily snared in his seat belt. Svenson charged ahead into the underbrush like a wild boar spoiling for a fight. To his manifest regret, not a malefactor was in sight. Once they got her blindfold off, however, Viola was ever so glad to see them. She couldn’t say so because she still had a gag over her mouth. Both had been ripped from the bottom of her green T-shirt; by now there was little left of the shirt and thus a great deal of Viola on view. She hadn’t been able to remove either the gag or the blindfold because she was tied hand and foot to a tree.
    A box elder, Peter noted. Choosing a smooth-barked tree might have shown a modicum of compassion on the part of her abductors, since a more rugose integument could have been tough on her mostly bare back and probably full of ants, but he suspected they’d picked the box elder simply because it was there. He went to work on the ropes and noted with scorn that the knots were all grannies.
    “Look at this, President,” he said. “This rope’s just like the ones on the net that trapped Emmerick.”
    The president must have been thinking of Sieglinde, he didn’t want to look. All he said was “Ungh,” and went on studying the underbrush for possible clues.
    “My sentiments exactly,” snapped Viola, who by now had the gag out of her mouth. “Would you mind postponing the Sherlock Holmes routine till after you’ve finished untying my hands, Professor? If I still have any, that is.”
    “Oh, sorry. There, how’s that?”
    “I don’t know yet. I can’t feel a thing.” She tried wiggling her fingers and they worked pretty well. “I guess I’ll be okay. I’m just so mad!”
    Peter removed his flannel shirt and gallantly assisted her into it. Fortunately he had a wind-breaker in the car, so the President’s sense of decorum didn’t get too stiff a jolt. “Can you tell us what happened?” he asked Viola once they were both decently covered.
    “All I know is, I was walking through the woods. Knapweed and I had gone to get that squirrel out of the bird feeder, remember?”
    “Urr,” said Dr. Svenson encouragingly.
    “Well, Knapweed got kind of carried away out there. God, these botanists! You wouldn’t think it to look at him, I guess it must come from hanging around with the birds and the bees and the flowers all the time. Anyway, I belted him once or twice and told him where to head in; but I didn’t feel like going back to the station with him and having to keep fighting for my virtue till Professor Binks got back, so I decided I’d take a little hike for myself. I figured I’d be okay if I stayed out near the road, but was I ever wrong! Here I am walking along minding my own business and somebody sneaks up behind me and pulls a sock over my head.”
    “A sock?” said Peter.
    “I don’t know what it was. It felt like a big knitted sock, the kind you wear with hiking boots. I tried to put up my hands and pull it off but he—I think it was a he—had me pinned. I couldn’t do a thing. So the next thing I know, he’s ramming a gun in my back and telling me to be a good girl if I didn’t want to get hurt. Which I didn’t, so I quit trying to kick his shins and he told me to start walking. How did you find me?”
    “We noticed signs of a struggle in the woods and tire marks on the road, and—er—came looking.”
    “Lucky for me. I don’t know what I’d have—” Viola swallowed a couple of times, pulled Peter’s shirt more tightly around her and went on. “Anyway, he tied my hands and made me get into his car and we drove off. He kept poking the gun at me every so often and warning me not to get cute.”
    “Just one man did all this?”
    “As far as I know. Maybe there was somebody else in the back seat. I couldn’t see because I still had that thing over my head. You know, now that I think of it, I’ll bet it was a ski mask put on backward. I could