No Nest for the Wicket Page 12

  “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.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  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.”
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br />   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?”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  It wasn’t quite that bad. We hit pay dirt in box nineteen. Not that we didn’t find a great many strange and interesting things in the first eighteen boxes. Hundreds of old photos, the kind where everyone begins to look alike because they’re all frowning from the effort of sitting still long enough. Hundreds of old letters that we didn’t read—half of them were cross-written, to save paper, and most were in fading ink on fragile paper. Newspapers we didn’t dare open for fear they’d crumble. We weren’t looking for contents yet, just dates. Anything from during or shortly after the Civil War we studied carefully and put aside in a special stack—a small stack. Most of the stuff was from the late 1800s through the 1920s.

  “Hey, that’s still pretty old,” Michael said when I complained about this. “Probably a great research project here. I recognize most of the last names—old Caerphilly families. And all the newspapers and documents are local.”

  “Fodder for a real history of Caerphilly,” I said. “Something a lot more accurate than Mrs. Pruitt’s version.”

  “You thinking of writing it?” he asked.

  “Not on your life. “That’s a job for a real historian. But I have changed my mind about giving them to someone from UVa or Caerphilly. Caerphilly didn’t care, and UVa sicced Lindsay on me, though I suppose that’s Helen Carmichael’s fault, not UVa’s.”

  “Then what are you going to do with it all?” Michael asked, eyeing the stack of boxes.

  “Give it to Joss, if she wants it,” I said. “If she’s serious about studying American history, well, here’s a motherlode of original source material she can cut her teeth on.”

  “Keep it in the family,” Michael said, nodding. “Good plan.”

  I’d hit a dull patch in box nineteen—a bunch of documents from the mid 1950s and early 1960s, which made them about a century too new to be useful at the moment. Still, I kept on methodically. After all, I’d made no effort to arrange things by date, only to gather all the papers of possible historical interest in the boxes.

  At the bottom of the box I’d begun to call the “Eisenhower archive,” I found it—a nondescript manila file folder, but when I opened it, I discovered the original photograph of Col. Jedidiah Pruitt and his wife and daughter.

  I opened my mouth, but before I could tell Michael, I became transfixed by the photo. Not so much by the contents—though it was easier, in the original, to get some idea of their personalities. The colonel looked smug and self-satisfied, less interested in his wife or the new addition to his family than in preening for the photographer. At first glance, his wife looked demure, with her lace bonnet and downcast eyes. Demure, and surprisingly young for someone who’d had fourteen children. Doubtless she’d started having them at an age when modern girls aren’t even allowed to baby-sit. After studying her for a few minutes, I decided her eyes weren’t downcast after all. She was glaring sideways at the colonel’s hand, which lay on her shoulder with such a casual, proprietary air, and I didn’t think her gaze looked particularly affectionate.

  “So I’m voting for her as most likely to become a self-made widow,” Michael said, looking over my shoulder.

  “Do you blame her? That’s baby number fourteen she’s holding.”

  “Justifiable homicide, then,” he said. “I take it that’s the heroic Colonel Pruitt?”

  “Or not. The jury’s still out on whether the battle was much of a victory.”

  “Still—fascinating.”

  I agreed. Michael perused the folder’s contents—the rest of the photos, the fragile clipping from the 1862 Clarion, and the equally fragile letter that mentioned the burning of the Shiffley distillery. I lapsed back into my fascination with the photo of the colonel and his wife. I realized I didn’t know anything else of their history. I didn’t know if the colonel had survived the Civil War, thoug
h odds were he had, since she went on to have three more children. Had his wife lived to a ripe old age or died in childbirth with the seventeenth child? What was her name, anyway? It bothered me, not having anything to call her but Mrs. Pruitt. The more I looked at her, the more annoyed I became with how little I knew about her. Mrs. Pruitt, wife of the colonel, who gave birth to seventeen children—surely there was more to her life than that?

  And while the colonel looked like a Pruitt—round-faced and already running to jowls beneath the bushy beard—I couldn’t remember seeing an echo of her features in any of the modern Pruitts I knew. I figured I should check the family genealogy, though, because her strong, sharp features looked familiar. Probably many old local families were descended from the determined-looking colonel’s lady.

  “What’s wrong?” Michael asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong. It’s just amazing to think that they could have held these very photos over a hundred and forty years ago. We’re touching pieces of history.”

  “We’ve been touching pieces of history for several hours now,” Michael said, yawning. “You only just noticed? About half a ton of history by now. I’ve got little crumbly bits of history all over my hands and clothes. Or does it only count as history if someone’s put it in a book?”

  “It counts, but I don’t get excited right now unless it’s history we can use to fend off the outlet mall,” I said, putting the manila folder carefully aside.

  “Well, let’s hurry and search the rest of the history for more useful bits,” Michael said, reaching for another box. “You realize that these photos, fascinating as they are, don’t to a thing to prove or disprove Mrs. Pruitt’s story of the battle.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s only one photo of the battle—the aftermath, anyway. We might prove it’s Mr. Shiffley’s pasture those bodies are lying in, but even that would be hard. We have no idea if it really was taken in July 1862. Could have been anytime during the Civil War, and some Pruitt assumed it was their pet battle and labeled it decades after the fact.”

  “You’re right,” I said, nodding. “Furthermore, we know Jedidiah Pruitt existed, but not his rank, or even that he was in the Confederate army—he’s wearing civilian clothes in the photo. Naming his daughter Victoria Virginia could have been a generic patriotic act rather than a commemoration of a particular battle.”