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Authors: Donna Andrews

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“You see why Michael and I haven’t jumped at the chance to join the country club,” I said. “Or the historical society, or the garden club.”
“Quite understandable. The way she treats poor Lucy Butler!”
“Lacie,” I said.
“Whose only fault is that she really needs to speak up for herself more,” Mother continued. “Learn to say no. Someone should take her in hand.”
“I think Mrs. Pruitt already has,” I said, wincing. I could see Lacie’s life being made a living hell, caught between the devil of her habitual servitude to Mrs. Pruitt and the deep blue sea of Mother’s demand that she grow a backbone.
“And why wouldn’t she talk to you about her book?” Mother asked. “Most of the time, you can’t shut her up about her insufferable family’s history.”
“Because she suspects I want to interrogate her about the Battle of Pruitt’s Ridge,” I said. “Which probably wasn’t the glorious Confederate victory Mrs. Pruitt’s book makes it seem. Even I figured that
much out, so you can imagine what a real historian would say.”
“Oh dear,” Mother said. Conflicting emotions fought for control of her face—her dislike of Mrs. Pruitt warring with her sympathy for anyone betrayed by the harsh reality of history. She had forgiven Dad for proving that Isaiah Hollingworth, the ancestor who had gotten her and countless cousins into the DAR, had actually been an infamous Tory, rather than a patriot. Forgiveness came easier, since Dad made his genealogical revelation about the time she’d grown completely bored with the local DAR, thus giving her the perfect escape hatch. She’d spent weeks crafting her resignation speech—and practicing the look of dignified sorrow and resignation with which she’d deliver it.
On the other hand, she still hadn’t forgiven the historians who revealed, to her horror, that the subtle, muted, tasteful Williamsburg colors she was so found of using in her decorating schemes were only subtle, muted, and tasteful because they’d faded in the two centuries since our misguided Colonial forebears had painted their drawing rooms with electric blues, lush scarlets, and garish eggplant purples. I’d made the mistake of taking her to Mount Vernon after they’d repainted the dining room in a verdigris green so vivid, most people stopped to blink when they entered. I thought it was cool. Mother had spent the rest of the afternoon lying down in a darkened room with a cold compress over her forehead, sipping weak tea and muttering things about the father
of our country that would have gladdened the heart of George III.
“Still, she doesn’t have to be rude about it,” Mother said, as if that settled everything. Mother could forgive anything but rudeness. She’d always had a soft spot for distinguished gentlemanly crooks like Cary Grant’s character in
To Catch a Thief.
Several years ago, when she and Dad had a burglary, she complained far less about the loss of their new television set than the fact that the ill-mannered intruder had failed to wipe his feet and left muddy footprints all over her Oriental rug.
Just then, Lacie dashed back in.
“Forgot something,” she said with a nervous giggle. “So silly of me.”
Her own purse.
“Lacie, dear,” Mother said.
I grabbed a glass of lemonade and beat a retreat. Maybe Lacie needed rescuing after all.
Outside, I found that Dad had appropriated two of Farmer Early’s sheep and was trying to teach Spike the rudiments of herding them. At least I assumed that was why Dad was on his hands and knees, yipping like a small dog and pretending to nip at the heels of the sheep. The sheep ignored him. Spike sat with his head cocked to one side, clearly fascinated, but he didn’t seem interested in joining the fray.
“So how’s it going?” I asked.
“Slowly,” Dad said.
“I keep telling him it’s not the barking,” Horace said. “It’s all in the eyes.”
Dad sat back, pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, and mopped his forehead.
“Is that lemonade?” he asked.
“Here.” I handed him the glass. “You need this more than I do.”
“Thanks,” he said. He gulped half the lemonade without stopping, then sat back again to mop more slowly and frown at the sheep.
“Yes, going slowly,” he said. Then, as if afraid he’d sounded too discouraged, he straightened his spine. “Repetition is the key,” he added.
“All in the eyes,” Horace said.
“Repetition,” Dad repeated, with a small frown at Horace. “Repetition and patience.”
And a working sense of humor, I’d have added. One of the sheep contributed some manure to the lawn, a few inches from Dad’s foot. Dad sighed and gazed at it for a few moments, then stood up and tugged at the sheep. It resisted at first, then allowed itself to be led, one grudging step at a time, until they were about six feet away from the manure pile. Dad repeated the process with the second sheep, then drained the lemonade glass.
“Thanks,” he said. “Tell you what. I’ll do another demonstration. Then you pick Spike up and put him right beside me. While I’m still herding. Let him get the idea that he’s supposed to do it, too.”
“Oh, I get to pick him up,” I said. “What have I ever done to you?”
But Spike was enjoying his lesson, or so I deduced from his perfunctory attempt to bite me. I took him closer, where he could get a good look at
what Dad was doing, and Dad once again yipped, bared his teeth, and snapped at the heels of the oblivious sheep.
“Sheep, Spike,” I said in deliberate imitation of the command Rob used to set him in motion against cows. When I set him at Dad’s side, he sat down and curled his lip, as if protesting the smell.
“Rowrrrrrr!” Dad growled, and bent toward the sheeps’ legs again.
One of the sheep kicked him in the head.
It wasn’t a forceful kick; only the tip of the hoof grazed his forehead. But as Dad was so fond of pointing out, the skin of the face and scalp has a rich blood supply, causing cuts to the head to bleed more profusely than cuts anywhere else on the body.
“Oh my God!” Horace said. “Should we call a doctor?”
“I
am
a doctor,” Dad said. “Stay calm.”
Which was precisely what I’d heard him say a hundred times over the years while dealing with the minor injuries his children and grandchildren inflicted on themselves and one another. But usually by the time he said this, he was already staunching the bleeding with something, and now he was just sitting there with blood running down his face.
“Get some ice,” I said, grabbing the handkerchief Dad was holding and pressing it to the cut. “And some dish towels or something.”
Horace ran off.
“What’s wrong?” Rob said. He appeared at my elbow and abruptly disappeared. I heard the small
thump as he hit the ground—Rob usually fainted at the sight of blood.
“Dad, can you hear me?”
“Of course I can hear you,” he said. “Stop shouting.”
“Dish towels,” Horace said, dumping several of them in my lap.
“I actually meant clean ones,” I muttered.
“What’s going on?” Mother had come trailing out of the kitchen after Horace.
“Do you remember what happened to you?” I asked Dad.
“Of course I remember,” Dad said. “The sheep kicked me.”
“One of
those
sheep?” asked Mother. I glanced up and saw that she had put her hands on her hips and was glaring at the sheep. The sheep, as if sensing the presence of danger, suddenly left off grazing and scampered in the direction of their pasture.
“See? It’s all in the eyes,” Horace said.
“Meg, do something,” Mother ordered.
“I am doing something,” I said. “I’m doing the same thing Dad usually does when someone gets hit in the head. He’s not unconscious, and he doesn’t appear to have any short-term amnesia, and his pupils and pulse seem normal, so he probably doesn’t have a serious concussion.”
“She’s right,” Dad said, “That’s exactly what I’d say.”
“But it wouldn’t be a bad thing if you took him in to the ER to make sure,” I added.
“I’ll drive,” Horace said.
“Let’s take my truck,” Randall Shiffley suggested. “That way, he can lie down till we get there.”
“No, no,” Dad said. “It’s only a flesh wound. I’ll be fine. I’ll just sit here quietly for a while. No sense going to the ER on a Saturday night.”
The Shiffleys kept trying to convince Dad to go, but my family knew better. Horace and Randall eased him into an Adirondack chair at the edge of the lawn and Horace bandaged the wound.
“I’ll keep an eye on him,” Horace announced.
“You see?” Dad said. “What do we need the ER for?”
Well, Horace did have a certain amount of medical knowledge. Most of it gleaned from examining dead bodies at crime scenes, but as long as Dad was happy.
I was relieved to see that in all the fuss over Dad, Rob hadn’t been completely forgotten. Michael was checking on him.
“Your brother’s all right,” Michael said.
“That’s a matter of opinion,” I said.
“Ha, ha,” Rob murmured.
Michael returned to what he’d been doing—tending one of the many grills that dotted the yard. Possibly one abandoned by the Shiffleys, who were still hovering, offering rides to the ER.
“Burger?” he asked.
While I was eating, I glanced around the yard and fretted.
“A penny for them,” Michael said.
“Mrs. Pruitt is looking guiltier and guiltier,” I said.
“Wouldn’t ‘more and more guilty’ sound better?” he asked.
“I like guiltier,” I said.
“So what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that for now, she’s on the side of the angels, fighting Mr. Briggs’s outlet mall.”
“So you’d rather Briggs turned out to be the killer.”
“I’d love it if they turned out to be accomplices, but fat chance of that,” I said. “Still, we shouldn’t overlook Briggs.”
I noticed then that Mr. Briggs was strolling about near the edge of the yard.
“I think I’ll have a chat with him,” I said.
“A chat about what?” Michael asked.
“His plans for the neighborhood. His whereabouts Friday afternoon. Stuff like that.”
“Meg—”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be tactful and subtle.”
“Meg, wait,” Michael called. Evidently, he didn’t have much confidence in my tact and subtlety.
 
 
I caught up with Evan Briggs near the edge of the yard, where the ground dropped off rapidly. He was gazing over the landscape, turning his head slowly. I could tell he noticed my arrival, but he didn’t speak.
“Nice view,” I said.
He nodded.
“Beautiful,” I continued. “Unspoiled.”
He didn’t say anything, but I noticed he was watching me out of the corner of his eye, a small frown on his face. It was much the way people watched Spike, once they’d come to know him.
Subtlety wasn’t working, and it wasn’t my forte anyway.
“So do you really want to build the world’s largest outlet mall there?” I asked. “Or is that just a nasty rumor?”
“I’m afraid I can’t talk about our corporate plans,” he said.
“True, then,” I said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, but if it was false, you’d say so, to get me
off your back. If you had any guts, you’d just come out and say it was true. But no, you just say you can’t talk about it. Do you really think everyone who wants to stop you is going to wait around until you’re ready to announce it?”
I was trying to keep my voice calm and civil. He was better at it. Not surprising. I’d seen him at the county board meetings during the squabble over his town house development. People had hurled insults at him and made wild, improbable threats, all of which he’d ignored, as if he hadn’t heard a thing.
“You can’t stop progress, you know,” he said.
“Not everyone considers
development
and
progress
synonyms.”
“You can’t stop development, either.”
“Maybe not, but you can damn well try,” I said. “You can fight it with everything you’ve got.”
“You can try.”
“I will.”
To the casual onlooker, perhaps it looked as if we were having a friendly conversation. We were both smiling, or at least baring our teeth at each other. Mother, whose antennae were more finely tuned to social nuances than most humans, suddenly appeared at my side.
“Meg, dear,” she said. “Are you making Mr. Briggs feel at home?”
“I hope not,” I said. “By the way,” I added, turning back to him. “I don’t suppose you’d be nice enough to tell me who else is against this horrible outlet-mall plan?”
He pursed his lips and glared at me.
“Oh, well,” I said. “I can find out anyway. I mean, I’m sure Mrs. Pruitt is gearing up to fight you, and I could always join forces with her if I had to. I was just hoping for an alternative. She’s not exactly my favorite person in the world, but under the circumstances—”
“Now, Meg,” Mother said in her most soothing tones. “I’m sure Mr. Briggs isn’t up to anything terrible. If you just sit down and talk about things, I’m sure you can reach some mutually satisfactory agreement.”
Briggs startled us both by uttering several words Mother usually pretended not to know.
“I beg your—” Mother began, drawing herself up.
“I don’t know what you people think you’re trying to do,” he snapped. “You’re not going to get away with it. I don’t care what you think you know or who you show it to. Just leave me alone.”
He stomped away.
“What an utter barbarian,” Mother said in her iciest tone. If we were living in the kingdom of Etiquette, where Mother had the power of high and low justice, Evan Briggs would just have forfeited his head. He and the sheep.
“A barbarian, definitely,” I said. “Can you see him as a murderer?”
“Easily,” Mother said. “He chews with his mouth open. Do you think he is?”
“I have no idea.”
“I’m sure you’ll figure out, dear.” She patted my shoulder encouragingly before returning to the lawn—presumably so she could cast withering
glances at Mr. Briggs from closer range and with a larger audience. And hover near Dad.
“That was dramatic,” Michael said. I started slightly. I hadn’t realized he’d followed me and heard part of our conversation with Briggs.
“He’s defensive about something.”
“No kidding,” he said. We both stood gazing, not at the landscape, but at Mr. Evan Briggs.
“Something Mother said set him off,” I said. But why? To me, she sounded like the soul of reason and conciliation. Which ticked me off, but only because she was being reasonable and conciliatory to the man who wanted to turn our rural retreat into a concrete jungle. Why would Briggs react so savagely?
“Maybe it was an accident,” Michael said. “Some phrase that hit him wrong.”
“‘I’m sure you can reach some mutually satisfactory agreement,’” I repeated. “That’s what she said.”
“Why would that annoy anyone?”
“Well, it annoys me because I know she means ‘Stop being rude to your guests or you’ll be sorry later,’” I said. “I have no idea why it would annoy Briggs.”
“‘I don’t care what you think you know or who you show it to,’” Michael said, echoing Briggs’s words. “What does that sound like to you?”
“Like someone telling a would-be blackmailer to publish or be damned. Can you imagine Lindsay blackmailing someone?”
The fact that he thought about it for ten or fifteen seconds before speaking almost answered the question for him.
“Not for money,” he said finally. “But to accomplish something she felt she had to accomplish …”
His voice trailed off and he shrugged.
“To save her job, for example,” I said.
“Yes, if she wasn’t blackmailing Wentworth, she was certainly planning to.”
“How did she feel about development?”
“Anti,” he said. “Which was pretty ironic for someone who considered a town without a major mall beyond the pale of civilization, but we all have our inconsistencies. So yeah, if she were still in town, she’d oppose it. But I can’t imagine she would have cared that much after she left. And what could she possibly have had on Briggs?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “But I intend to keep my eye on him. He’s up to something.”
“Speaking of up to something, here come the sheep again,” Michael said, pointing.
Someone had profited from Dad’s lessons. Two sheep—possibly the two Dad had been using as teaching tools—were scurrying back into the yard, with Duck in hot pursuit, snapping at their heels with her beak and quacking loudly as she came. She chased them to the far side of the yard and down the hill toward the cow pasture, then halted almost precisely at our property line before marching back in the direction she’d come—toward Mr. Early’s pasture.
“Shouldn’t she chase them the other way?” I asked. “Wonder if this has anything to do with Mr. Early’s missing sheep?”
“Do you suppose she’s nesting up in his pasture now?” Michael asked.
“We can take a look tomorrow,” I said. “I have another project in mind for tonight.”
“A project. Dare I hope it’s one that involves champagne, caviar, and perhaps a hot tub?”
“The boxes,” I said. “Let’s go look at them.”
Michael followed me out to the shed. Spike leaped up, growling fiercely, when I reached to open the gate of his temporary pen. When he recognized us, he retreated to his corner to sulk at being deprived of a chance to bite someone. Not that he wouldn’t have bitten us as willingly as an intruder, but he knew we were already wise to most of his tricks.
“It’s getting dark,” I said. “We should take him inside with us before the owls come out.”
Once he finished the treat we used to lure him in, Spike curled up in one corner of the shed with his back to us and we turned to the boxes.
“Still there, all twenty-three of them,” Michael said.
“How can you count that fast?” I asked.
“I don’t have to count,” he said. “I can see that there are still four stacks of five boxes each, plus the three extras.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding. “Higher math. I’m impressed. Yes, still there, all twenty-three of them. We’d better get started going through them.”
“Whatever for?”
“For more information on this.”
I reached into my purse and pulled out the sheaf of photocopies and microfiche copies I’d made at the library.
“Wonderful,” he said as he began leafing through them. “We can use this to help stop the outlet mall.”
“Exactly. But it would be better if we had the original source material, which isn’t in the library.”
“You’re thinking it might be here?”
“Could be,” I said. “Or maybe we’ll find something related. So we’re going to look through these boxes and see what’s here.”
“You didn’t look through them when you packed them?”
“Not really,” I said. “Whenever I found any old papers or photos, I put them in a copier box for the Sprockets. I didn’t inventory them or anything. It was last summer, when I had no idea we’d need to document how critical the Battle of Pruitt’s Ridge was to the outcome of the Civil War.”
“Right,” he said. “You also think these might have something to do with Lindsay’s murder.”
“It’s possible.”
“And that’s why we have to do it tonight.”
“Before Chief Burke figures out the same thing and appropriates them,” I said. “Why, was there something else you’d rather do?”
Just then, we heard fiddle music start up, accompanied, after a few seconds, by the jingling of bells. We both cocked our heads to listen.
“Are the bells getting louder, or am I just getting really tired of hearing them?” Michael said after a few moments.
I peeked out the shed door.
“Not louder,” I said. “More numerous.”
Outside, the Morris Mallet Men had recovered
sufficiently from their poison ivy to give lessons. Apparently, they’d brought plenty of extra bells—enough to equip most of my visiting relatives and the Shiffleys, too.
“Maybe if we fake a power outage,” Michael suggested. He was rubbing his temples as if his head hurt. “I could creep into the basement and flip all the circuits. Shut down their CD or tape player or whatever.”
“No, let them have their fun,” I said. “Besides, I don’t think cutting the power would do any good.”
“The music’s battery-powered?”
“Shiffley-powered. Remember, they were playing all afternoon.”
“That’s right,” Michael said. “Just when I was getting to like them.”
I did like the Shiffleys’ musical performance—or I would have, if not for all the accompanying bells.
“I suppose the bells are essential,” Michael said, echoing my thoughts. “No possibility we could sell them on the concept of stealth Morris dancing.”
“I like that idea,” I said. “Let’s work on it tomorrow. After we’ve done the boxes.”
“Right.” Michael looked back and forth between the door and the stack of boxes, as if trying to decide which was worse, beginning Morris dancers or rummaging through the boxes.
“Let’s get started,” he said, grabbing a box. “What do you want to bet that if we find anything at all interesting, it will be in box twenty-three?”
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