No Nest for the Wicket (17 page)

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Authors: Donna Andrews

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“She’s poisoned!” Lacie shrieked.
“Nonsense,” Dad said. “It looks like an ordinary epileptic seizure. Briggs, has she ever had one before?”
“Yes, but we thought the medication was working. Until—Shouldn’t we take her to the hospital?”
“Right now, let’s just make sure she doesn’t injure herself,” Dad said. “Michael, could you get a pillow?”
“Right,” Michael said, and ran for the barn.
“If you’d all give us some room—she needs air,” Dad said, glancing up at the rest of the crowd. “Air and a little quiet.”
He was frowning at Lacie, who stood with her eyes wide and her hands pressed over her mouth, making noises ranging from loud whimpers to the occasional shriek—not something likely to hasten Mrs. Briggs’s recovery. It was starting to get to me.
“Lacie,” I said. “Lacie!”
She didn’t react. I considered administering a brisk slap to the face—a bad idea, since my ironwork
makes me stronger than most women. Before I had the chance, Mother grabbed Lacie’s arm.
“Lacie, dear,” she said in an icy tone that had the same effect my slap would have. “Let’s get out of the way and let Dr. Langslow deal with this, shall we? Rob, help her, will you?”
Mother and Rob literally dragged Lacie to the other side of the yard, her feet leaving small ruts in the ground as they went.
Everyone else took Dad’s hint—even Eric, who ran to Dad’s car to fetch his medical bag. Michael delivered the pillow. Dad extracted the name of Mrs. Briggs’s doctor from her husband, and I found his number, gave his weekend emergency service a message, and left Dad’s cell-phone number. Then I rejoined the rest of the guests.
“Will she be all right?” one of the Suzies asked.
“Dad’s taking care of her. I’m sure she’ll be fine,” I told her.
“He was afraid this would happen,” the other Suzy said.
“Yes,” the first Suzy chimed in. “That’s why he had us keep an eye on her during the game.”
“Had you keep an eye on her?”
“Not during the morning game,” she said. “He stayed for that—she can’t drive, you know, so someone has to take her anywhere she wants to go. Since her seizures started up again, he mostly takes her himself. But he had an appointment in the afternoon—he had to leave before lunch ended. He made us promise never to let her out of our sight.”
“And we didn’t,” the second said.
“Didn’t help our game much,” the first added. “Not that we had much of a chance of winning to begin with.”
“Helping May was more important,” Suzy two said with a firm nod.
“Do you know where he went?”
The Suzies shook their heads.
“It must have been important if he left May to do it,” one of them said.
Important to him. I glanced across the yard again. An honor guard of Shiffleys was carrying Mrs. Briggs toward the driveway, with Mr. Briggs hovering anxiously over her and Dad scrambling along behind, his oversized headband/bandage askew. If the ER got much more business from our parties, they’d send the county health department over to shut us down as a public menace.
“We should go down and see if they need anything,” one of the Suzies said.
The other one nodded.
“We’ll see you later,” the first one said. I watched as the two of them meticulously deposited their trash and recyclables in the appropriate containers before bustling off on their errand of mercy.
“You look glum,” Michael said as he joined me. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh, I just like it better when people stay in their pigeonholes. Mr. Briggs was a lot easier to hate when he was merely a despoiler of the countryside and not also the caring husband of a sick wife. And the clones. They’re reasonably nice people. I should make an effort to learn their names or something.
Even though we’re destined to end up squared off on opposite sides of the mall battle.”
“Life’s messy,” Michael said. “Come have some brunch. The Shiffleys are pretty good cooks.”
Everyone was subdued after the Briggses’ sudden departure. Except for Dad, who was busy reassuring everyone that Mrs. Briggs would be fine—I deduced as much from the fact that he hadn’t gone to the hospital with her—and relating anecdotes about epilepsy and other seizure disorders, which was bound to give us a lively afternoon if any of my more impressionable hypochondriac relatives were listening.
When the inevitable stray sheep showed up, we found that Spike had learned something from Dad’s sheep-herding lessons after all. Not something we wanted him learning, unfortunately. He’d figured out that if you sneaked up behind the sheep and nipped their heels just right, they’d leap into the air in a fair imitation of Morris dancers before kicking at him. Unfortunately, he’d also discovered that people, currently more plentiful than sheep, reacted just as amusingly and didn’t kick with such gusto. I exiled him to his pen and left a message on the answering machine of yet another dog trainer who’d been recommended to us.
Even more unsettling, Mother was up to something. She’d been sitting for an hour, talking to Lacie. If anyone came near, she lowered her voice and gestured imperiously for privacy. The one scrap of conversation I overheard wasn’t encouraging.
“Your loyalty is admirable, Lacie dear, but you have yourself to consider … .”
That was all I’d caught, but it was enough. Mother was trying to drive a wedge between Mrs. Pruitt and her minions. Foment rebellion in the lower ranks of the Caerphilly Historical Society. I was slightly relieved when, after getting a call on her cell phone, Lacie scurried out to her car and drove off, but the damage was probably already done.
I was so busy worrying about what Mother was up to that I was caught off guard by a shift in the direction of Dad’s attention.
 
 
“Meg,” Dad said, “what are we going to do about the Shiffleys?”
“Why? What do we need to do about them?” I asked, sitting down beside him at one of the picnic tables. “Are they causing a problem?”
“No,” Dad said. “But they’re here.”
Which counted as a problem in my book, though I didn’t want to say it. Not where any of the Shiffleys might hear me, and that could be almost anywhere. Most of them were still harmlessly occupied with their grills, fixing bacon, eggs, and grits for all comers, but earlier I’d had to break up an argument between two of them over some aspect of the suspended roof repairs. I wouldn’t have bothered, no matter how loud they got or how wildly they gesticulated, if they hadn’t chosen to stage their argument three stories over my head, on the framework of two-by-fours that would eventually support the new roof. Fortunately, they’d kept their balance better than their tempers.
“They don’t have to be here,” I said aloud. “I
suppose Chief Burke told them not to leave town, or something of the sort, but I’m sure he didn’t mean that they had to stay here camped in our backyard. Not that they’re not welcome to camp here if they want to,” I added, for the benefit of any lurking Shiffleys. “But they don’t have to be, so I don’t see why we need to entertain them or anything like that.”
“I wasn’t talking about entertaining them,” Dad said. “But even though they can’t work on the house until the chief okays it, we must have plenty of things we could have them do.”
And pay them for doing, of course.
“Such as?” I asked.
“Well … for example, what about the pond? We could ask them to find a way to make it hold water. I know you don’t want to have to go up and fill it every day the way I’ve been doing and—Oh my God! Duck!”
I admit, I started slightly when he shouted that, and I was pleased to see that Tony and Graham hit the ground and scrambled under the picnic table as efficiently as if they’d drilled for weeks. Unnecessary, but if they planned to keep playing eXtreme croquet—or, for that matter, hang around my family for the rest of the day—it was nice to see they’d paid attention and picked up a few useful survival skills.
“At ease,” I said to them. “What about Duck, Dad?”
“Where are my shoes?” he said. He scurried around, looking for them in a variety of improbable places. “I need to get up to the pond right away. With all the excitement yesterday, I forgot to fill it.
The water was low yesterday morning; it’ll be nothing but mud by now. Poor Duck.”
“She’ll be fine,” I said, handing him the shoes, which had been hidden in plain sight on one of the picnic benches. “Ducks do like swimming, but it’s hardly a life-or-death issue if they can’t. She can cope.”
“It’ll make her crankier, though,” Rob said. “She’s already pretty hard to live with.”
“Hard to live with,” Tony said. “Try vicious.”
“That’s only temporary,” Dad said, looking up from his effort to untangle a knot in one of his shoelaces. “Because she’s gone broody.”
“Ah,” Graham said, but Tony looked puzzled.
“It just means she’s laying eggs,” I explained. “Duck lays eggs all the time, so in her case, it means she’s sitting on the eggs, instead of just laying them and leaving them around everywhere for people to step on.
“And she gets cranky and takes it out on anyone who comes near her nest,” Rob added.
“Can you blame her?” Rose Noire said. “She’s only expressing her maternal instinct and protecting her eggs from harm.”
“I guess you’ll have baby ducks pretty soon, then,” Graham said.
“Not unless Duck has found a drake while none of us was looking,” Rob said.
“So what do you do with the eggs, then?” Tony asked.
“Eat them, I should think,” Graham said.
“I’m a vegetarian,” Rose Noire announced. “I don’t eat any eggs.”
“No one in the family has the heart to eat Duck’s eggs,” I said. “We usually put them in the refrigerator and argue for a while about whether someone should cook them or not. Eventually, when we’re pretty sure they’ve gone bad, someone finally gets up the nerve to throw them out.”
“Would anyone get upset if someone did eat one of the eggs?” Graham asked.
“Why—would you like one?”
“No, but I think that’s part of what the Shiffleys are scrambling out there on the grill.”
“They’re scrambling Duck’s eggs?” Dad asked, looking up. “Oh dear.”
“Calm down,” I said. “We’ve said for years that someone should.”
“Yes, but those weren’t very fresh,” Dad said. “I’m not sure they’re safe to eat.”
“The Shiffleys have noses, Dad. If they don’t use them, it’s not our fault. It’s not as if we set out to poison them.”
“‘Poison them’?” Graham echoed. “What would happen if you ate them?”
“That would depend on the poison,” Dad said. “For example, salmonella—”
“Don’t coach him, Dad. You remember what happened when you gave that talk about the bubonic plague at the last family reunion. Besides, we need to see about the pond.”
I hustled Dad out of the barn before his enthusiastic and graphic descriptions of salmonella poisoning could affect the obviously impressionable minds of the two Morris Mallet Men. The minute he
got outside, he dashed off at top speed toward the pond. I followed, but I didn’t catch up with him until we were nearly at the pond, where the slope of the land grew steeper and slowed him down even more than me.
“Dad—about the pond,” I said between pants. “I know you were trying to do the best for Duck and Eric, but I’m not sure we need quite such a large pond.”
“Gives you room for expansion,” he said.
“Yes, but I’m not sure we have any plans to expand our duck population.” I dropped into a walk, since were almost at the top of the slope. “Besides, I’m not sure the Shiffleys are experts in pond making. I mean, they did this one, right? Which doesn’t hold water. I was thinking we could ask the nearby farmers who did their ponds, then get some bids from seasoned pond makers. Determine how large a pond we can afford. Approach the whole pond project logically.”
“Oh dear,” Dad said. He was gazing out over the pond, no doubt digging in his heels to argue.
“I don’t mean to sound negative,” I said. “But if we have the Shiffleys do anything with the pond, I really think we should just have them fill in this one, and then we can start all over later.”
“No, we can’t fill this one in just yet,” Dad said.
“Why not?” I asked.
Instead of answering, he pointed toward the pond, which had shrunk to a puddle about the size of a bathtub, surrounded by a sea of mud.
A few feet away from the puddle, the handle of a croquet mallet was sticking up out of the mud.
 
 
“Don’t touch it!” I called out to Dad, who was squelching through the mud toward the mallet. “I’m calling Chief Burke.”
“I won’t touch it,” he said, stopping about two yards from it. “I’m just going to look at it.”
“I think the chief would be happier if we looked at it from over here, instead of messing up the mud around it with footprints.”
Dad didn’t answer, but he stopped six feet away from the mallet.
“Obviously, it wasn’t stuck here,” he said. “Someone threw it in the pond while it was full.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because mine are the only footprints in the mud,” he said. True. The only human footprints anyway—oddly enough, I saw countless hoofprints around the outer edge of the mud circle, the parts that had probably been exposed since the day before. Sheep prints, by the size of them. Maybe our yard was only a side attraction en route to the irresistible lure of the duck pond.
“Besides, look at this,” Dad called.
I paused in the middle of dialing, sighed, and squelched over to his side. The head of the mallet was embedded in the mud, and nearby was half a cinder block. Someone had stripped a vine of its leaves, tied one end to the mallet and threaded the other end through the cinder block.
“To make sure it sank, of course,” Dad said, nodding. “What’s that buried in the mud behind the cinder block?”
Dad leaned as far as he could to the left, and I did the same thing to the right—to avoid making any more footprints than we already had. Then I finally gave up and took a few steps. Chief Burke would be furious anyway.
“A woman’s purse,” I said, leaning forward as far as I could. “With things spilling out of it.” I could see a wallet, and a folded newspaper.
“Here,” Dad said, handing me his pocket bird-watching binoculars. I raised them to my eyes, adjusted the focus dial—
And saw Mrs. Pruitt. Not the real thing, but her picture staring out from the newspaper. I could see her face, and a frill of black lace along her cheek.
I remembered the lace—part of an ornate bonnet, festooned not only with the lace but also with ribbon, feathers, and jet beads: Mrs. Pruitt’s overelaborate interpretation of what a well-dressed lady of the Confederacy would wear.
“It’s a copy of the
Caerphilly Clarion,
” I said. “The one from a few weeks ago with the article on
what the historical society was doing for this year’s Caerphilly Heritage Days.”
“So if this is Lindsay Tyler’s purse …” Dad began. “Which we’ll know once we examine the wallet—”
“We won’t be examining anything,” I said, pulling out my phone again. “I’m calling the chief.”
“I meant ‘we’ in a more general sense,” Dad said.
“Yeah, right,” I said. “Chief Burke? I think we’ve found something you’ll want to see.”
Yes, the chief wanted to see it, and he wanted to see it undisturbed. If we had found a body, I’m not sure anything in the world could have kept Dad from examining it, citing his medical skills as justification. Fortunately, I had greater expertise about croquet mallets and women’s handbags. Not all that much greater, but enough to keep Dad entertained while the police rushed to the scene.
The mallet didn’t keep him interested for long. I could see enough of its head to confirm that it was an ordinary mallet, rather than one of the special eXtreme croquet mallets that had a distinctive wedged face, used for lofting your ball out of bogs and sand traps. Dad, after close study, announced that the killer had used a cow hitch to attach the vine to the mallet and a mere granny knot to tie it to the purse strap.
“Fascinating,” I said. “I’m sure those details will break the case for Chief Burke.”
“It wasn’t even tied to the cinder block,” he said, shaking his head with disappointment at the killer’s
shoddy workmanship. “Just threaded it through the hole in the block.”
“Considering how hard it would be to tie any kind of knot with a vine, I think the killer did pretty well,” I said.
The purse proved more useful as a delaying tactic. I subjected it to close inspection through the binoculars, then doled out my findings one tidbit at time. By the time we finally heard sirens approaching, I was running out of tidbits.
“Either a Gucci or a Fendi,” I said. “Or maybe a Coach.” Not that I knew what any of those brands looked like. I hadn’t shopped for purses in over a decade. Whenever my purse started wearing out, I’d hunt down the leather worker who made it—we attended the same craft shows—and have him make another one just like it. But since Dad had no idea what the various brands looked like, either, he nodded solemnly at the information.
One detail I did notice, though—about the newspaper, not the purse. I could see a mailing label stuck to the upper right-hand side. A slightly mudspecked label, but I could still read Lindsay’s name. Her name, and a Pineville, West Virginia, P.O. box.
“She subscribed to the
Clarion,
” I said.
“Is that significant?”
“Probably,” I said. “It proves that she didn’t just come back from time to time; she was actively keeping tabs on the town.”
“Or someone in it,” Dad said.
I nodded and handed the binoculars to Dad so he
could take a turn. The sirens were getting closer. Just for the heck of it, I pulled out my cell phone and took a few photos of our find. Still life with cinder block, croquet mallet, and designer handbag. Dad beamed his approval, so I leaned over, held the phone as close to the tableau as possible, and snapped a few more. Then the sirens stopped, and I stuck the phone back in my pocket. Dad was peering intently through the binoculars and I was looking nonchalant as Chief Burke, still puffing from the hill, joined us.
“We didn’t touch anything,” Dad said, beaming at the chief as if our self-restraint was something remarkable. Actually, for Dad, it was.
“I can see that,” the chief said. “Why don’t you wait for me down at the house?”
“Don’t you want us to tell you how we found it?” Dad asked.
“Down at the house.”
“Come on, Dad,” I said, tugging gently at his arm.
Dad looked so despondent that even Chief Burke must have felt sorry for him.
“Unless there’s something important you need to show me that can’t wait,” he said.
Dad’s face fell slightly. Obviously, he couldn’t think of anything urgent.
Maybe I could.
“There is one thing,” I said.
They both looked at me.
“I realize that this is evidence, and Horace or whoever processes it will use gloves and all.”
“Naturally,” the chief said. He glanced at his watch, as if wondering what was taking Horace or whoever so long.
“You might want to take extra care with the vine,” I said.
“The vine,” the chief repeated.
“Look at it,” I said, handing him Dad’s little binoculars. He frowned at them; then, making it obvious that he was humoring me for now but wouldn’t much longer, he lifted them to his eyes and focused on the tableau before us.
“Very nice,” he said. “I can even read the fine print on the newspaper. Must be useful for birding.”
He took the binoculars away from his eyes and held them out to me.
“Never mind the newspaper,” I said. “Look at the vine.”
The chief wielded the binoculars again. Dad didn’t move his feet, but he leaned over so far that I had to grab him to keep him from falling facedown in the mud.
“Oh my God!” Dad exclaimed. “You’re right! Good catch!”
“Right about what?” the chief growled.
“It’s a poison ivy vine,” I said.
“How can you tell without the leaves?” the chief asked.
“Those hairy little roots all up and down the vine are a dead giveaway,” I told him. “The vines are just as virulent as the leaves.”
“More so,” Dad said, nodding. “You realize what this means.”
“You don’t need to worry,” the chief said. “It’s evidence; we’ll handle it with gloves.”
“The urushiol could have spread to the purse, or the cinder block,” Dad said. “For that matter, be careful with the water it’s soaking in.”
“And the outside of any gloves you use to touch the stuff, or any boots you use to wade in and retrieve it,” I added. “You’re missing the more important part—what this tells us about the killer.”
“The killer will have a rash on his or her hands,” the chief said, nodding. “Got it. Here’s Horace. Why don’t you wait for me down at the house? Don’t tell anyone about the poison ivy. We’ll hold that back.”
“But—” Dad began.
“Down at the house,” the chief repeated.
“Come on, Dad,” I said. “We can tell the chief more about it later. I assume I should tell Mrs. Fenniman that the croquet tournament is off again.”
“It was never on again in the first place,” the chief said. “I told her
maybe
you could start up again,
if
I was sure we’d finished with the crime scene.”
“No argument from me,” I said.
“But this means—” Dad began.
“Come on, Dad.”
I grabbed Dad’s arm and steered him back down the hill. He managed to keep silent until we were halfway down; then he couldn’t hold it any longer.
“He’s not getting it!” he exclaimed. “The killer might have a rash on his hands. But the skin on the palm of the hands and the soles of the feet isn’t that sensitive. He might not react there.”
“True,” I said. “But the killer wasn’t just touching the poison ivy; he—or she—was tying knots. I think you’d end up rubbing it all over the back of your hands if you were tying knots.”
“Would you?” Dad asked.
“I’m pretty sure you would,” I said. “Let’s try it with some twine.”
We adjourned to my office in the barn, where I pulled out the ball of twine I kept with the wrapping and mailing supplies. When Michael walked in a few minutes later, we were still sitting around tying knots and bickering.

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