No Nest for the Wicket (20 page)

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Authors: Donna Andrews

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She stared into space for a few moments.
“Wonder if we did break any laws back then? I imagine the chief will let me know if we did.”
“I’m sure there’s a statute of limitations,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, pulling herself together. “On everything but murder. You need any more information, you call me.”
“The chief’s the one with the investigation.”
“Him too,” she said as she stood up to go. “You know, if you really want to get rid of the socialites, you should tell them about croquet’s unsavory reputation.”
“Unsavory? According to whom?”
“It was banned in Boston in the 1890s,” she said. “Several prominent clergymen denounced it for encouraging drinking, gambling, and philandering. Men and women playing on the same field. The occasional bare ankle exposed to the leering eyes of the spectators. Young couples disappearing into the shrubbery in search of lost balls. Shocking. I haven’t heard of a game that led to a murder before.”
“Nice to know we’re original here.”
She smiled slightly.
“Yes,” she said. “Well, nice seeing you.”
I watched as she strode out, spine as erect as ever.
Her story would doubtless inspire Chief Burke to take a closer look at any connection between Lindsay
and the Caerphilly Historical Society. Which wasn’t necessarily good. For one thing, much as I disliked Mrs. Pruitt, I wanted her on the loose, leading the charge against the outlet mall, not locked up on trial for murder. Besides, if Mrs. Pruitt dumped all the actual work of preparing her book on Lacie and her other underlings at the society, odds were that she’d shift the suspicion, as well.
Just then, I heard a commotion outside. Now what?
 
 
I strode to the barn door and saw that Mrs. Fenniman had returned from church and was standing in the middle of the lawn, waving her croquet mallet around as she talked to the dozen or so people around her. Surely she hadn’t taken the mallet to church?
“You should have seen it!” she crowed. Something dramatic, I gathered from the expressions on the faces around her.
“Seen what?” I asked.
“Chief Burke showed up at Trinity Episcopal,” she said. “There was Reverend Riggs on the top step, shaking hands with the departing parishioners, and Burke on the bottom step, lying in wait for Henrietta Pruitt.”
“He was there to arrest her?” Dad asked.
“No, he had a warrant to search the historical society’s office. Came to pick her up to let him and his men in.”
“Wonder what happened that made him go through all the trouble of getting a warrant on a Sunday,”
I mused. Was he already planning the raid on the historical society when we’d called to tell him about the pond?
“Maybe he had it already and was waiting for the right moment to serve it,” Michael suggested.
“No, he got it late this morning,” Randall Shiffley put in. “Saw Aunt Jane.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding. Judge Jane Shiffley would be the logical source for a warrant against the historical society. Every other judge in town was either a Pruitt or married to a member of the historical society.
“He may not have been here that long,” Randall said, “but the chief knows what he’s doing.”
“How did Mrs. Pruitt react?” I asked Mrs. Fenniman.
“That’s the rich part,” she said. “She skipped church! She’s on the lam!”
“No she’s not,” Horace put in. “She’s here in the kitchen.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Fenniman said. “Well, that’s as good as being on the lam, isn’t it?”
“Don’t think she knows about the search warrant yet,” Horace said. “If you want to tell her …”
He shrugged his shoulders, as if disavowing any responsibility for the consequences.
“Shouldn’t we tell the chief she’s here?” Michael asked.
“He got one of the other members to let him into the historical society,” Mrs. Fenniman added. “A whole troop of them went along to keep an eye on things.”
The chief must have loved that.
“That accounts for it,” Horace said. “Mrs. Pruitt’s hopping made because the other ladies haven’t arrived to help with lunch.”
“That’s right, they volunteered to do today’s lunch,” I said. “Not that anyone’s that interested in lunch yet, after all that breakfast.”
“Mrs. P. had a few things to say about that, too,” Horace said.
“So we have an irate Mrs. Pruitt in our kitchen,” I said. “Should I go try to calm her down?”
“Your mother’s taking care of it,” Horace said.
Given how Mother felt, I was willing to bet that instead of calming Mrs. Pruitt, she was graciously, tactfully, politely pouring pounds of salt in her wounds. Might as well leave them to it.
“Wonder how long Claire and Lacie will be tied up down at the historical society,” Mrs. Fenniman said. “Because I was thinking of getting the game started again.”
“Does the chief know that?” I asked.
“Yes, I asked him over at the church.”
“Give Claire and Lacie enough notice, then,” I said. “No fair saying the game starts in ten minutes and anyone not ready to play is disqualified.”
“Says who,” she grumbled.
“Says me. I’ll complain to the board of regents if you try it.”
“It was just a thought,” she said, shrugging. “If you don’t trust me, you notify them.”
“I’ll do that,” I said. “I think I’ll check with the chief, too.”
“Hmph. Don’t even trust your own family.”
Less than anyone, I wanted to say, but I held my tongue and dialed.
“I’m busy,” the chief said when he answered his cell phone. Maybe I was behind the times and answering phones with “hello” had become an anachronism.
“I know,” I said. “But Mrs. Fenniman said you’d given permission for us to restart the tournament, and I want to make sure we’re not going to get arrested for tampering with a crime scene. Is she telling the truth this time?”
“Just stay away from the brier patch,” he said. “And the pond.”
“We’ll make sure there’s crime-scene tape around the brier patch and the pond,” I said, looking pointedly at Mrs. Fenniman.
“That’s easy enough,” she said. “Come on, Horace, you can help me.”
“I’ll gather up the competitors,” I said, strolling toward the kitchen door. “By the way, have you by any chance seen Lacie Butler and Claire Wentworth today? I know how to find my team and Mrs. Pruitt, but—”
“Mrs. Pruitt?” he said. “You’ve seen her today?”
“At the moment, she’s sitting in our kitchen drinking lemonade,” I said, peering through the kitchen window. Mother smiled and waved at me. I waved back. From the look on Mrs. Pruitt’s face, I could almost imagine she’d poured her glass of lemonade before Mother added the sugar.
“Keep her there,” the chief said.
“Are you going to arrest her?” I asked. “No sense getting ready to play if one of the teams will be short a player.”
“At the moment, I just want to talk to her,” he said. “Do you think you can keep her there without mentioning that fact?”
“No problem,” I said. “I’ll even knock her down and sit on her if you like.”
He hung up without replying. Did silence really imply consent?
 
 
As I expected, Chief Burke kicked Mother and me out of the kitchen the minute he arrived. I’d have minded more if Mrs. Wentworth and Lacie Butler hadn’t arrived in the chief’s wake. If I couldn’t overhear what he said to Mrs. Pruitt, at least I had a chance of finding out what had happened down at the historical society. An even better chance, since Mother’s curiosity was roused. The police officer never lived who could extract more information than Mother when she put her mind to it.
Lacie was obviously excited; even through the poison ivy I could see that her face was flushed and her eyes glittered. She looked like one of my nieces or nephews on the sugar high they always got when their Uncle Rob was in charge of them for more than five minutes. I suspected Lacie’s exhilaration had a less innocent origin—had Mother convinced Lacie to do something to trigger the chief’s raid on the historical society?
“But what were they looking for?” Mother asked with an air of wide-eyed innocence that suggested
she had a very clear idea what the police were after.
Lacie shrugged helplessly, as if abandoning any pretense at understanding the strange and mysterious whims of the law.
“Someone told Chief Burke that Henrietta had been exchanging letters and e-mails with Lindsay Tyler,” Mrs. Wentworth said.
“Goodness!” Mother exclaimed. “Why ever would they think that?”
“She was a nutcase,” Mrs. Wentworth said. Presumably, she meant Lindsay, not Mrs. Pruitt. I noticed she didn’t deny the correspondence. “It was a mistake ever inviting that woman to join the society. A mistake hiring her at the college in the first place. I should have told Henrietta that at the time.”
“Mistakes you rectified five years ago,” I said. “Only I gather she didn’t go quietly.”
“No, but she didn’t have much of a choice, did she?” Mrs. Wentworth said. “Then she reappeared a few months ago, making the most preposterous demands and accusations. Even threats.”
“Reappeared?” Mother said. “You mean at your meetings?”
“No, no,” Mrs. Wentworth said quickly. “Or we would have recognized her when we saw the picture. But making phone calls, writing letters, sending e-mails.”
“To Henrietta, of course,” Lacie put in. “Since she was president. We mostly heard about it from her.”
“Yes, of course,” Mrs. Wentworth said. “It all fit in with what we’d seen of Lindsay when she was here.”
“So we’d have no reason to doubt that Henrietta was telling the truth,” Lacie said.
“As far as we knew, she was handling the situation appropriately,” Mrs. Wentworth said. “By completely ignoring Lindsay.”
“That’s what we assumed she was doing,” Lacie said. “I know I had no idea …”
She let her words trail of and shrugged.
“So what did they find?” Mother asked.
“Who knows?” Mrs. Wentworth said.
“I heard—” Lacie began, then stopped, as if she’d gone too far.
“Heard what, dear?” Mother said. “We won’t tell a soul.”
“I heard they found some e-mails in the office computer that proved Henrietta had arranged to meet Lindsay the day of the croquet match.”
“Where did you hear that?” Mrs. Wentworth demanded.
“The police officers were talking to each other,” Lacie said, shrinking back. “I don’t really think they noticed I was there.”
She shrugged and smiled ruefully, as if to suggest that she was used to people not noticing her existence.
“Oh dear,” Mother said. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“If that’s true …” Mrs. Wentworth murmured. “I wonder who told them. To search the historical society’s offices, I mean.”
“We may never know,” Mother said, shaking her head sadly. “The police can be so secretive.”
“Isn’t it more important to focus on the future?” Lacie said. “On what we can do to help Henrietta?”
“Or how to limit the damage her arrest will do to the historical society,” Mrs. Wentworth said.
“Yes, of course,” Lacie said.
“If you like, I’ll suggest to Mrs. Fenniman that we postpone the tournament for a bit,” I said. “Until either Mrs. Pruitt is available to play or your team can find a substitute.”
“I thought the board of regents had ruled that any player committing a homicide during the course of a game automatically disqualified his or her team from the tournament,” Mrs. Wentworth said, frowning.
“Only if the victim is another player, remember?” I said.
“Good idea to have a game plan if Henrietta needs to step back from her normal responsibilities,” Mrs. Wentworth said, more to herself than any of us. “I’ll make a few phone calls. Line up a few people.”
“Very wise,” Mother said.
“Lacie,” Mrs. Wentworth said. “Do you have the membership directory?”
“In my car,” Lacie said. “Why?”
“Go and fetch it. We need to start making some plans.”
Lacie blinked and frowned, then got up and left. She didn’t look as desperately eager to please as she once had—how frustrating to think you’d achieved a revolution and realize you’ve only traded one tyrant for another. If, as I suspected, Mother had encouraged the worm to turn, and Lacie had steered the police
to Mrs. Pruitt, Mrs. Wentworth might get a nasty surprise if she had any skeletons in her own closet. Or any more cracked Delft chamber pots.
I decided I didn’t need to stay while Mrs. Wentworth plotted her palace revolution. If Chief Burke was really releasing the croquet field, surely he’d have no objection to our restarting work on the house.
I strolled out into the yard and spotted something. A car had just pulled up and the town’s leading criminal defense lawyer stepped out—the same one we’d hired when my brother had been briefly arrested on suspicion of murder not long ago. Tossing me a perfunctory, preoccupied greeting, he hurried toward the back door with his briefcase tucked under his arm, looking like a football player going for a touchdown. He was admitted into the kitchen. I watched for a few minutes, and he didn’t reemerge, so I assumed he was also Mrs. Pruitt’s lawyer.
So should I find the Shiffleys and ask how soon they could start work again? Or should I talk to Michael first? Discuss the notion that we might want to go slow on the renovations until we got more information about what was happening with the mall project? Especially considering there was almost no chance Evan Briggs would be arrested for the murder, and every likelihood Mrs. Pruitt would be.
I strolled into the tack room/office and sat down at my desk, still pondering.
“Meg?” I looked up, to see Rob standing in the doorway, holding a laptop computer. “Can I show you something? It could have something to do with—well, you know. The murder and all.”
“Okay,” I said. “New laptop?”
“No, it’s Bill’s laptop.”
“What are you doing with Bill’s laptop?”
“I borrowed it,” he said. “Really. He wanted me to look at his résumé. I asked him if I could keep it to show it to someone else from Mutant Wizards.”
“His résumé? I’m surprised he let you have the laptop instead of just printing it or e-mailing it.”
“It’s not a normal résumé,” Rob said. “He does computer animation, and he has this animated résumé—pretty cool stuff, really. Hey, I didn’t lie—you’re on the board, and I can show you the résumé—here.”
He set the laptop down on my desk and, after peering at the screen for a few seconds, pressed something. Little cartoon ferrets ran onto the screen.
“That’s nice,” I said as the ferrets formed a conga line and danced offscreen again. “I gather that isn’t what you came here to show me.”
“No,” he said. “When I was trying to restart the résumé—watch this part with the kangaroos; it’s a hoot—I hit the wrong button by mistake and opened his e-mail. I wasn’t being nosy, really, but I was looking at the screen, and you know how certain words just pop out at you?”
“For heaven’s sake, just spill it,” I said. “What did you see in his e-mail?”
“He’s been e-mailing Lindsay Tyler,” Rob said. “A lot. Like I was trying to get out of his e-mail, and instead I opened this folder full of e-mails to her.”
“Show me,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. Then he hesitated. “Um … I’m not really sure I know how to stop this thing.”
“Want me to do it?”
“Sure,” he said. “Or we could just wait till it ends. It only takes about ten minutes, and there’s this part near the end with the wombats—”
“Let me see that,” I said, grabbing the laptop. “Before Bill comes looking for his laptop.”
My computer skills, though limited, were enough to let me stop the résumé and open Bill’s e-mail. After several minutes of poking around, I found the e-mails to Lindsay—237 of them, hidden in a folder named “Accounting 101 study group.”
“Yuck,” Rob said. “That would have been the last folder I’d’ve looked in.”
“I think that’s the idea,” I said. “It would be the last folder a lot of people would look in.”
Yes, Bill had definitely been e-mailing Lindsay. I paged through, scanning the messages—he’d gathered both sides of their correspondence into the Accounting 101 folder. It began in late September, with Bill politely addressing her as “Professor” or “Dr. Tyler.” She’d sought someone to help her with a computer problem. One of Bill’s computer-science instructors had recommended him. By October, he was calling her Lindsay, and either he’d solved her computer problems or they’d taken a backseat to discussions of books, movies, music, worldviews, personal histories—I recognized the familiar rhythm of the mating dance. I could pinpoint almost to the day when they’d consummated their relationship in November, and guessed long
before Bill did that she was using him for something. It took me awhile to learn what—obviously the e-mails were only a small part of their relationship by that time. Bill was clearly upset about something she was asking him to do—something he carefully avoided mentioning in the e-mails. Something computer-related—he kept pointing out that he couldn’t do it from his own machine. That only a few dozen people used the school computer lab. That it wasn’t safe.
My jaw dropped when I came to Lindsay’s next e-mail.
She was asking him to break into computer systems: Caerphilly College’s network, Evan Briggs’s corporate system, the county records, even the Caerphilly Historical Society.
She also had definite ideas about where he should attack his targets from. Most of them from the Caerphilly Public Library or from a Kinko’s in Caerphilly—not the one the students used, but one a few doors down from Evan Briggs’s office. Or from the historical society—she offered to give him a key to the offices.
“Even if they do suspect what’s happening, they won’t come looking for you. They’ll blame someone local. Once we’re sure you’ve gotten everything useful, it wouldn’t be a bad idea if you did let them see that someone had hacked into their systems.”
Was this part of what Lindsay’d been blackmailing people with—evidence that indicated they were committing computer crimes? Evidence she’d arranged for Bill to plant, so she could stir up contention
and muddy the waters by letting the various victims blame one another for the intrusion?
Were the e-mails incriminating Mrs. Pruitt even real?
A pity Jessica, the library aide, hadn’t noticed who’d used the library computers while she was on duty. Probably Bill, and maybe if they’d arrested him weeks ago, things might have played out differently.
“Turn my computer on,” I said to Rob. “We need to make a copy of these.”
“You mean your printer, right?” he said.
“No, the computer,” I said. “I mean an electronic copy, not a printout. I’m going to find the mail files and copy them. Push the button on your right. Your other right.”
“Wow, you know how to do that?” Rob asked. “Copying the files, I mean?”
“I’ll figure it out,” I said. “Or we’ll call Kevin.”
I returned to reading. Bill gave in. He made several weekend trips to Caerphilly. I nodded when I read Lindsay’s e-mail suggesting that he register for the eXtreme croquet tournament. He’d have a legitimate reason to be in Caerphilly, instead of having to sneak around. Maybe he could make some local contacts. Find a way to get into the college computer lab.
But Bill was getting cold feet. Or maybe beginning to suspect that Lindsay was more interested in his computer skills than in him. His e-mails sounded increasingly paranoid. Paranoid alternating with just plain angry. He wasn’t going to do it. He’d do it, but this was the last time. He wasn’t going to do it, and what’s more, he’d report her.
Nothing to indicate if he knew that she’d be coming to Caerphilly at the same time he’d be here for the tournament. The e-mails ended the Wednesday before the tournament began. No telling what mood he was in by the time he’d arrived here. To judge from the last few e-mails, he’d been capable of a dozen mood swings in the intervening two days.
From the tone of her last few e-mails, Lindsay was getting tired of putting up with him. Her last e-mail pointed out that he had more to lose than she did. If she turned him in to the college or the local police …

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