No Nest for the Wicket (13 page)

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Authors: Donna Andrews

BOOK: No Nest for the Wicket
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“You really think he’d do that?”
Spike chose that moment to lift his head, look over at us, and heave a deep sigh, as if hurt by our distrust. Then he curled up again into a tighter ball.
“You’re right,” Michael said. “We definitely need to get all the boxes out of his reach.”
Luckily, we happened to have a supply of cinder blocks in a nearby shed. In fact, we happened to have quite a lot of miscellaneous building materials left over from various construction and repair projects the previous owners had undertaken and usually left unfinished. We eventually decided that a base of three cinder blocks put the boxes high enough that Spike would have a hard time doing any damage to them.
As soon as we opened the door to leave, Spike switched from looking aloof and disdainful to looking pitiful and abandoned.
“Why does he do that when he knows we won’t fall for it?” Michael said as we strolled toward the barn.
“Because he knows we’ll still feel guilty enough to give him extra liver treats,” I said. “At least I did.”
“If it’s confession time, so did I,” Michael admitted. “If we have kids, we’ll have to work harder on not letting them play one of us off against the other.”
I made a noncommittal noise. Not that I was opposed, in theory, to the notion of children, but I didn’t really want to think about taking on any more long-term projects until we had the house fit to live in again.
“Of course, most children aren’t as devious as Spike,” Michael said.
“You really haven’t paid enough attention to my nieces and nephews, have you?”
“I have,” he protested. “They try, but they don’t quite match Spike. Though what they lack in deviousness, they make up for with vocabulary and opposable thumbs.”
“And many children grow up to be college students,” I added. By March, Michael was usually feeling somewhat jaundiced about the intelligence and sanity of each year’s crop of students.
“With luck, they outgrow that, too,” he said.
Our resident collection of college students were all asleep when we crept past them to our bedroom stall. At least they were asleep until Michael tripped over a large stack of bells they’d left lying around, but that was their own fault.
As I drifted toward sleep, I found myself thinking about the photos. My little bits of history. I didn’t
want to trust them to the shed, so I’d brought the manila folder with me and hidden it in plain sight, along with several dozen similar folders holding paint samples, brochures about different brands of windows, appliance warranties, and other detritus of the house remodeling. I was looking forward to pitching the whole collection out—well, all except for the warranties—when the house was finished. But Mrs. Sprocket, from whom we’d bought the house, wouldn’t have pitched out anything. She’d have shoved the whole collection into a twenty-fourth copier-paper box, and perhaps in a hundred years some historian might find it a fascinating resource on early-twentieth-century domestic architecture. How much of our collection was just as random—stuff saved simply because it had been gathered? Or worse, stuff left in Mrs. Sprocket’s house because no one else had any use for it?
Not something I needed to know, but that didn’t stop my brain from fretting about it for an annoyingly long time before I finally dropped off. I’d been asleep no more than half an hour when Spike’s barking woke us.
 
 
The whole idea of putting Spike and the boxes in the shed together was to catch anyone who went after the boxes. I kept reminding myself of that when the barking began and I rummaged around for my shoes.
“Wake up!” I hissed to Michael. “Spike’s barking.”
“Wha?” he muttered.
“Someone’s after the boxes!”
“S’three,” Michael said. He had one eye open and was looking at the clock.
“Yes, three A.M.,” I said. “That’s when burglars strike.”
Through Spike’s barking, I could hear another sound, one that didn’t quite register. I ran to the barn door, stepped out—
Straight into the path of a stampede of naked sheep.
Okay, they weren’t all naked. Only half a dozen of them. Two or three more had been partially sheared, and the remaining dozen or so still had their wool. Most were trotting briskly back in the direction of Mr. Early’s pasture—probably a subterfuge, as Mr. Early’s sheep never went home of
their own accord—but a few were already peeling off in various directions. Going to pay a call on Mr. Shiffley’s cows, perhaps, or down to the creek to skinny-dip.
The small pen outside the shed, where Spike spent the day quietly snoozing, now contained several large piles of sheared wool, along with a remarkable amount of sheep manure.
Inside the shed, Spike was still barking fiercely, and I could see his head popping into view every few seconds—the windows were too high for him to look out, so he was jumping up, hoping to catch a glimpse of what was happening outside.
But I was seeing the back of his head. He was trying to see out of the window at the back of the shed.
I ran around the shed. No one there, but I found a screwdriver lying below the window, and I could see signs that someone had tried to pry out the iron grille I’d put over the window. Fat chance making much progress on that before morning. I’d done a solid job on the installation.
“Good boy, Spike,” I said. I repeated it several times, in the hope he’d get the notion that “good boy,” in this context, meant “All right; you warned us about the burglar; so shut up already.”
“What’s going on?” Michael asked from the front of the shed.
I strolled around to join him.
“Spike detected an intruder.”
“It took him this long to let us know about it?” Michael said, gesturing to the piles of wool.
“Whoever did the shearing was someone Spike
didn’t consider an intruder,” I said. “He didn’t bark until someone tried to break in through one of the back windows.”
“Thereby startling not only Spike but also the sheep thieves?”
“I don’t think they were stealing the sheep,” I said with a sigh. “I don’t even think they planned to steal the wool. They—”
“What the hell are you doing to my sheep?”
Mr. Early had appeared. He had obviously dressed hastily. His plaid shirt was unbuttoned. He hadn’t bothered to tie the high-topped tennis shoes he was wearing instead of the usual work boots. And was that a glimpse of leopard-print boxer shorts I was seeing above the waist of the hastily donned jeans? I tried not to stare. Luckily, he was without the shotgun he sometimes carried when alarmed over the fate of his flock. In his disheveled condition, he looked less intimidating than usual, and I was surprised to realize that he wasn’t really an old codger. He wasn’t much older than Michael. Mid-forties at most.
“We just got here ourselves,” I said. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“What the hell?” Mr. Early said. He walked up to the fence around the pen and stared at the piles of wool, then over at the several naked sheep, which, true to form, had drifted back into our yard and were grazing peacefully a few feet away.
“I thought it was the perp who returned to the scene of the crime, not the victims,” Michael murmured.
“Well, that’s a new one,” Mr. Early said finally. “Usually they just take the whole sheep.”
“What’s wrong? Meg, Michael, are you all right?”
Rose Noire crossed the yard at a dead run. Rose Noire, who had driven back to town several hours ago, along with Mrs. Fenniman, who was staying at her apartment.
“We’re fine,” I called. “Go back to sleep.”
“Is everyone all right?” she called. She hardly stopped to look at us before clamoring over the fence, lifting up an armful of the wool, and gazing at it in wonder, as if only by touching it could she even begin to fathom the sudden miracle of its presence. Even if Mr. Early noticed the little bits of wool clinging to her clothes when she arrived, he’d have a hard time proving she hadn’t just acquired them.
“What happened here?” she said, letting the wool sift out of her arms.
“Someone sheared Mr. Early’s sheep without permission,” I said.
“And did a damn careless job of it,” Mr. Early grumbled.
“‘Careless’?” Rose Noire repeated. “Oh, surely not. They’re not hurt, are they?”
“I don’t see any blood,” I said. “So I imagine the sheep are fine.”
“Well, that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?” she said. “As long as the sheep are happy. And oh! Look!”
We all turned to see what she was pointing at. Just another naked sheep, as far as I could see.
“What’s wrong?” Mr. Early said, frowning and squinting. He patted his shirt pocket then pursed his lips and squinted harder. I suddenly suspected that he usually wore contacts, hadn’t had time to put
them in before dashing out of the house, and for some reason didn’t want to put on the glasses I could see sticking out of his shirt pocket.
“Look at him!” Rose Noire exclaimed, clasping her hands with enthusiasm.
“Her,” Mr. Early said. “That’s a ewe.”
“You don’t usually get to see the shape of their bodies with all the wool,” Rose Noire said. “The wool’s beautiful, of course—but look at her! What a noble animal!”
The sheep in question raised her head just then and looked at us, as if acknowledging Rose Noire’s praise. To me, she looked distinctly odd and scrawny, but I could see Mr. Early’s face take on a gleam of pride.
“They’re Lincolns,” he said. “Largest breed in the world. Longest wool, too.”
“Magnificent!” Rose Noire said. She scrambled deftly back over the fence and drifted over to admire the sheep.
“About those fleeces,” Mr. Early said. He was looking at Rose Noire, not the piles of wool.
“Why don’t you let us clean up?” I said. “We’ll gather up the fleeces and drop them off at your place in the morning.”
Mr. Early nodded and stumbled off after Rose Noire.
Enter Mrs. Fenniman.
“What’s going on?”
“Help us gather up the fleeces,” I said.
“Why?” she asked.
“So you, too, will have an excuse for being covered
with little tufts of wool,” I said. “Hurry, while Rose Noire is distracting Mr. Early.”
“Hmph,” she said. “Those sheep are filthy. Ought to be a law.”
“There is,” I said. “It’s called larceny. He sells the wool, you know, and can get a lot more for it if it’s cut off properly instead of hacked off by amateurs.”
“I may never look at another piece of gabardine,” she said, but she helped us pick up the fleeces. Rose Noire, in the meantime, helped Farmer Early collect his sheep and went off to help him take them home, still chattering nonstop.
Michael fetched a tarp and we gathered up the fleeces and loaded them in the back of the pickup. We still said “the pickup” instead of “his pickup” or “our pickup,” because we were still maintaining the fiction that the battered ten-year-old truck we’d recently acquired was something we’d be getting rid of when we finished the construction. I’d already figured out that, while he’d never give up his convertible, Michael got almost as much pleasure out of hauling things around in the pickup—including things that would have fit quite nicely into the convertible’s almost nonexistent trunk.
“One of us can drive the stuff over in the morning,” Michael said, though obviously he was dying to do it. Hauling actual farm paraphernalia in the pickup!
“Fine,” I said, turning to Mrs. Fenniman. “Do you need a place to stay, or will you be heading back to town now?”
“Hmph,” she said. “Rosie’ll be needing a ride.”
“She’ll charm Mr. Early into giving her one,” I
said. “Or if she doesn’t, we’ll look after her when she turns up.”
“Hmph,” she said again getting into her car. “That old codger.”
Evidently, Mr. Early’s impersonation of a grizzled curmudgeon had fooled most people.
“Hide the rest of the evidence,” I said.
“‘Rest of the evidence’?”
“Whatever you used to do that,” I said, gesturing to the fleeces.
“Already did. Under your hedge.”
“I’ll get them,” Michael said, heading for the hedge.
“You didn’t happen to notice anyone else when you were fleeing, did you?” I asked.
“Like who?”
“Like whoever set Spike off.”
She shook her head and started the car.
“No one else there,” she said. “We just made too much noise and woke him.”
She drove off.
She sounded so definite that I found myself checking to make sure the screwdriver was still tucked securely in my back pocket.
“Found them,” Michael said. When we got back to the barn, I found out that “them” included not only a pair of battery-operated home hair-cutting tools but also two sets of nifty night-vision goggles, which we couldn’t resist testing.
“Cool,” Michael whispered. “These would be really useful for … doing chores at night. Stuff like that. We should get a set.”
“We just did,” I said. “Two sets. They were abandoned by the unknown intruders who viciously denuded Mr. Early’s sheep, remember?”
“Very cool,” Michael said. He was tilting his head and looking at the ceiling, fascinated by some effect he saw.
I put on my set. Yes, I could see fairly well, though all the colors vanished into a luminous gray-green tone. I crept out of the stall and peered down the barn at sleeping students. They appeared to be sleeping quite soundly. So soundly that they’d missed the entire ruckus with the sheep? I hadn’t thought to check on them when I’d dashed out, and now I’d never know whether they’d slept through the whole thing or used the diversion created by the sheep to steal back into the barn and feign sleep.
Michael tired of playing with the goggles quickly—after all, it was almost four o’clock in the morning—and we went back to sleep. I made sure my goggles and my shoes were handy, though. Spike was quiet now, and I doubted that whoever had tried to break into the shed would do it again tonight, but just in case.

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