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middle-aged Gypsy, who’d each grabbed one of a pair of brass andirons, and my day really began going downhill.

Chapter 6
    Where were my volunteer helpers, I wondered. Scarlett backed off when I threatened to expel her from the yard sale, but I had to sit on the Gypsy for ten minutes to calm her down. And no one lifted a finger to help me. I had recruited a dozen relatives to help, but apart from my two increasingly demoralized cashiers, none of them were nearby. I hoped they were off taking care of other problems. We had plenty of problems to go around. In addition to squabbles between customers, I was starting to notice squabbles among the sellers, as various people suddenly noticed which priceless treasures their spouses, parents, children, or siblings had decided to unload.
    “She’s selling my high chair,” my forty-something cousin Dermot announced, pointing to his sweet, grayhaired mother as if he’d just spotted one of the FBI’s top ten wanted criminals lurking in our backyard.
    “If you want it, why don’t you just buy it?” I asked.
    “I’m not selling it to him,” Dermot’s mother said. “He’d only stick it back in my garage again.”
    “I don’t have room for it in my apartment.”
    “And I don’t have room for it in my garage.”
    I left them to sort it out. Up and down the aisles, similar battles were being waged over rusting tricycles, battered reclining chairs, and moth-eaten scraps of clothing. If I’d known how traumatic yard sales were for the sellers, I’d have arranged to have a family therapist on hand.
    Mother was being unusually helpful, but she couldn’t be everywhere at once, and she had her hands full dealing with the shoplifters. She knew who all the family kleptomaniacs were and exactly what mix of threat and cajolery to use with each of them. And long experience with the light-fingered members of our clan had given her a second sense for spotting strangers intent on pilfering, whether for professional or psychiatric reasons.
    For once in my life I wished I had more family members like Mother. I could use a dozen more of her, at least.
    I’d assign one just to keep people out of the barn. I didn’t quite share Dad’s passionate concern for the welfare of the nesting owls, but I had other, more practical reasons for declaring the barn off-limits. Including the fact that we weren’t entirely sure parts of it were structurally sound. The last thing we needed to inaugurate our life in the house was a lawsuit from some disgruntled customer who’d wandered in where he had no business being and gotten injured by falling beams or rubble. So I’d posted a variety of threatening signs on the barn doors, everything from “Keep out!” and “No Trespassing!” to “Warning! Falling debris!” and Dad had added his “Keep out! Owls nesting!” signs, which were probably less effective but a lot more picturesque.
    And yet less than an hour into the sale, I saw Gordon ducking into the barn, dragging a large cardboard box. And then he came out empty-handed. Several times. Okay, he probably wasn’t attempting larceny. For one thing, both of the ground floor doors to the barn were inside the fence, and if he tried to lower stuff out of the hayloft door, which did overlook the outside world, someone would surely notice. So he was probably only doing what people had warned me the greedy and inconsiderate customers would do—dragging large quantities of stuff off to one side to sort through at their leisure before returning the unwanted items to the sale area. Not a big problem if they did their sorting and returning relatively soon, but if they waited till near the end of the sale, when you started reducing prices across the board …
    Well, Gordon might be in for a nasty shock. For one thing, we weren’t reducing prices today—this was a two- day event. And for another thing, as soon as I had a moment I planned to slip into the barn, drag out everything Gordon had hidden away