No Nest for the Wicket Page 17

  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.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  “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.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  “Yes,” I was saying. “So it’s theoretically possible to tie a knot without touching any of the more sensitive parts of the hand, but it requires a real conscious effort. Not something a normal person would do if he doesn’t know he’s holding a poison ivy vine.”

  “I must have missed something,” Michael said. “I was coming to share the glad tidings that Chief Burke has foun
d the murder weapon and you’ll all get your blunt instruments back tomorrow, and I find you plotting some kind of masochistic macramé with poison ivy vines.”

  “The chief didn’t mention poison ivy?” I asked.

  “Oh, dear, does he have it, too?”

  “No, but the killer might.” I explained about the vine. Yes, the chief had said not to tell anyone, but Michael wasn’t a suspect, and he’d overheard half the story anyway.

  “So it’s possible the killer will have a poison ivy rash,” Michael said as he watched Dad’s demonstration of how to tie a cow hitch using only the less susceptible tips of the fingers. “Seeing how often most people wash their hands, though, isn’t that one of the least likely places to get it, even if you’re exposed? I mean, washing soon enough after exposure prevents inflammation, right?”

  “True,” Dad said. “So the killer might not have poison ivy at all.”

  His shoulders slumped.

  “Or the killer might have poison ivy someplace he touched before washing his hands,” I said.

  “The students,” Dad murmured. “Two of them have it all over their shins. If they touched their shins before washing their hands—”

  “While putting on their damned Morris bells, for example?” I suggested.

  “Last time I looked, almost everyone who played in the cow pasture had poison ivy,” Michael pointed out. “The clones and Mrs. Briggs don’t, but they only played in the sheep pasture. Mrs. Wentworth has a touch on one ankle, and Lacie got it on her face—probably tripped and fell in a patch.”

  “Meg and Rob don’t have any,” Dad pointed out.

  “Only because you’ve trained us all our lives to recognize the stuff,” I said.

  “What if the killer’s someone like me, who doesn’t react to it?” Michael said. “And yes, I know that immunity to poison ivy can wear off at any time, and I don’t tempt fate by picking bouquets of the stuff. But even if I recognized the vine, I’d take the chance if I had to hide the murder weapon in a hurry, needed something to tie the cinder block on with, and knew I’d never reacted before.”

  “Bill,” I said. “The quiet one. He said poison ivy didn’t bother him. And I haven’t noticed Mrs. Pruitt complaining.”