No Nest for the Wicket Read online

  “In short, something happened on that field during the Civil War, but we have only the Pruitts’ version.”

  “We also have the Clarion’s version,” I said. “From 1862 and 1954. Which has some details that aren’t exactly flattering to the colonel, so I believe it more than Mrs. Pruitt’s account.”

  “Yes, but who knows what unflattering details they omitted,” Michael said. “After all, the Pruitts used to own the Clarion.”

  “They did? In 1862 or 1954?”

  “Both. They founded it just before the Civil War and didn’t give it up till one of them ran it into bankruptcy in the sixties. So maybe they published a few negative details that they didn’t dare leave out, because everyone already knew them—but who knows what they suppressed?”

  “We need to find more source material,” I said, nodding.

  “Which means back to the boxes,” Michael said with a sigh.

  I glanced at the photos again before I dug back in. Now that we’d raised so many questions about the real story behind them, I found it easier to resist their pull. Especially the melodramatic one with the scrap of cloth fluttering on the wire. Something about that bothered me. Maybe it was a famous Civil War photo of some other battle. I could ask Joss later.

  The Morris dancers ceased and desisted around 11:30, and we finished the last box shortly thereafter. Apart from the folder that I felt sure was the original source material for the Caerphilly Clarion’s article on the Battle of Pruitt’s Ridge, we didn’t find anything else relevant.

  “Of course, how do we know what’s relevant?” Michael said. “Not being Lindsay, we can’t really guess what she was looking for.”

  We both contemplated the boxes in silence for a few moments.

  “Tell me—” I began, then stopped myself.

  “Tell you what?” Michael said after a second.

  “I was about to ask you to tell me about Lindsay. But it sounds like I’m prying into your past, and I’m not. Just wondering what she was like.”

  “And why someone would have wanted to kill her,” he said. “I understand.”

  “Do you mean you understand what I’m asking, or you understand why someone would want to kill her?”

  “Maybe both,” he said. He looked nostalgic—no, that wasn’t the word for it. More a cross between wistful and rueful, if there was such a thing. He frowned and thought. I waited.

  “When I first met her,” he said finally, “I admired her fierceness.”

  “Fierceness?” Perhaps I’d just discovered the secret of his ability to tolerate Spike.

  “About causes. Against injustice. She was always marching into battle about something—writing letters to the editor, carrying around petitions, organizing demonstrations, telling people off. I remember saying to someone who found her irritating that the world was filled with people who never stood up for anything, except maybe their own self-interest, and she wasn’t afraid to speak out.”

  “Sounds admirable,” I said. I meant it. I wouldn’t have minded meeting the woman he was describing. I wouldn’t have minded it if someone described me that way.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Trouble was, I was seeing her the way I wanted to see her, not the way she was. It wasn’t really about the cause to her. It was all about the battle. She went around looking for things to get mad about. And she always found something. If I believe in something, I try to stand up for it, even if not everyone approves, but there’s big difference between that and reveling in the number of new enemies you create every time you do anything. If you disagreed with her cause, you were a fascist, or an idiot, or a Neanderthal. If you agreed with her cause but not with her methods, you were a wimp or a coward. If you agreed with her on everything, she could still find a way to tick you off.”

  “Sounds uncomfortable.”

  “It was,” he said. “Uncomfortable to be around, at any rate, though she thrived on it. Ultimately self-destructive. I remember when she told me that the history department had decided to get rid of her. She wasn’t upset; she was jubilant. Another big battle she could fight.”

  “Were they? Trying to get rid of her, I mean. Or was she just paranoid?”

  “Nothing paranoid about it,” he said. “They definitely had it in for her. They weren’t even subtle about it. She’d have had a great case against them—in the press anyway. Outspoken radical professor ousted by reactionary administration. Chauvinists punish uppity female. Except by the time it happened, she not only didn’t have any allies; she’d have had leave town to find more than a handful of people who weren’t already enemies.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I wanted to dislike her,” I said. “Out of—I don’t know. Retroactive jealousy, I guess.”

  “She wasn’t hard to dislike,” Michael said with a sigh.

  “She made people unhappy, herself most of all, I suspect,” I said. “But she didn’t deserve to be killed like that.”

  “The problem was, once she got cornered—once it started to look like she was going to lose—she got … Well, she changed. She started thinking in terms of what she could get on people, and how she could use it against them. The affair with Marcus Wentworth—as I said, I think she wanted to use it to blackmail him into saving her job.”

  “Do you think he was the only one? Or do you think she tried with other people?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t seeing much of her by then. And, hell yes, she probably was blackmailing people. Not for money, but to save her job. The last time I saw her before she headed out of town, she was even madder, and talking about getting back at people. Making them pay, making them sorry, ruining their lives. I warned a couple of the people I figured she had it in for. Kept an eye open for any sign that she was doing something like that. After a while, I figured … well, not that she’d calmed down—she was a marathon grudge holder—more that putting her life back together would keep her busy when she first left, and by the time she’d been gone a year or so, I figured she had newer enemies to torment. To tell the truth, maybe I was just relieved that she hadn’t decided I was one of her enemies.”

  “What if something made her decide to come back after her old enemies after all?” I said. “Or what if she’d been harassing or blackmailing some of them all along?”

  And, not that I was going to upset Michael by mentioning this, what if her turning up practically in our backyard wasn’t a coincidence, but part of some plot to cause him trouble?

  “I’m beat,” Michael said after a short pause. “Let’s knock off.”

  “As soon as we pick everything up,” I said.

  “We’re going to lock up, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, but we’re leaving him here to guard,” I said, pointing to Spike. “We don’t want to leave anything on the floor, where he could shred it or pee on it. For that matter, we should get those boxes up off the floor. He could do serious damage if he decided to pee on them.”

  “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.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  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 ou
t 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.