No Nest for the Wicket Read online

  “She was wearing gloves,” Dad said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “All the Dames were. Didn’t protect the rest of their bodies, though.”

  “So the killer is someone with a poison ivy rash, someone immune to poison ivy, someone who was wearing gloves, or someone with excellent personal hygiene,” Michael said. “I must say, that narrows the field nicely.”

  “And it seemed so promising,” Dad said.

  He shook his head and strolled out of the barn, looking so downcast that I’d have been upset if I hadn’t known that he’d find something to be excited about in another five or ten minutes.

  “So the poison ivy isn’t an important clue after all,” I said. “Maybe something else is.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll show you,” I said, and led the way to the corner of the barn where we stacked the recyclables.

  It was empty.

  “Damn.”

  “What’s wrong?” Michael asked.

  “Didn’t we have a whole stack of newspapers out here?”

  “Yes, the ones I was supposed to take to the recycling center last weekend,” Michael said. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just that taking your father and your nephew around to those farm stores Saturday—”

  “Where are they?”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m getting on top of this decluttering thing. They’re gone.”

  “Gone? Damn.”

  “Why damn?”

  “I needed something from one of them.”

  “Ah,” he said. “If that’s the case, they’re not really as gone as all that. Not beyond recovery, that is. In fact—”

  “You still have them? Where?”

  “Trunk of my car.”

  “Show me.”

  The trunk of his car and the passenger seat. Naturally, the issue of the Caerphilly Clarion I wanted was nearly at the bottom of the stack.

  “That’s it,” I said when I spotted the picture of Mrs. Pruitt and Mrs. Wentworth in their costumes. “The very issue.”

  I sat down on the ground to thumb through it while Michael packed the newspapers again—this time into the truck, which made more sense anyway.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked, after a minute or two.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m looking for, so it’s difficult to tell when I’ve found it.”

  “If you don’t know what you’re looking for, then why this particular issue?”

  “Lindsay had a copy in her purse,” I explained. “She must have brought it along for a reason. I’m just hoping I’ll recognize whatever it is when I see it.”

  “And?”

  “Let’s go into town and get a pizza,” I said.

  “I think that’s a non sequitur.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “I just flipped past an ad for Luigi’s and realized that I’m starving. Let’s go get a pizza.”

  “There’s enough food for an army here,” he said. “With all these guests, shouldn’t we stick around?”

  “Play host and hostess? Tell me you’re kidding.”

  “I was thinking more of making sure none of them burns the place down,” he said.

  “True,” I agreed. “But I’m tired of picnicking with relatives and suspects.”

  “I’ll fetch some food and we can eat in the barn,” he said. “If anyone tries to join us, I’ll chase them out. I don’t know about Spike, but I was paying attention during your father’s sheep-herding lessons.”

  “You’re on. No eggs, though, okay?”

  “Your wish is my command,” Michael said, making a deep bow.

  “While you’re getting the food, I’m going to go through this paper,” I said, waving it triumphantly as I retreated to our bedroom stall. “I have the feeling that the critical clue we need is somewhere within these pages.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  “Breakfast,” Michael announced, entering the stall with a plate in each hand. “What’s wrong?”

  I sighed.

  “So maybe the critical clue isn’t as obvious as I thought it would be,” I said.

  I stared balefully at the rumpled sheaf of newsprint.

  “No clues at all?” he asked, setting a plate beside me.

  “Plenty of them. Entirely too many clues.”

  “Run them down for me,” he said, sitting down and digging into his own plate.

  “Okay. Front page—Mrs. Pruitt and Mrs. Wentworth in costume, with a long article about the historical society’s plans for this year’s Caerphilly Heritage Days, which we know caught Lindsay’s eye.”

  “Because it was on the cover,” he said, nodding.

  “Because she marked it,” I said. “See?”

  I pulled out my cell phone and called up the photos I’d taken of the purse. You could just barely see it, but someone—presumably Lindsay—had scribbled several exclamation points in the margin beside the photo of Mrs. Pruitt.

  “Besides, listen to this. ‘The society is also exploring the possibility of staging a reenactment of the Battle of Pruitt’s Ridge at the town’s sesquitricentennial in 2008, according to Mrs. Wentworth.’”

  “So maybe if Lindsay had a bee in her bonnet about the battle, that inspired her to come and confront someone from the society,” Michael said.

  “Interesting that it’s Mrs. Wentworth bragging about the battle, not Mrs. Pruitt,” I said.

  “Isn’t that an important enough clue for you?”

  “I would be if there weren’t so many other clues in this issue,” I said. “There’s also a piece in the article on the town council meeting, saying that a presentation on Mr. Evan Briggs’s proposed commercial-development project had been postponed for a few months.”

  “The outlet mall?”

  “Presumably,” I said. “Here’s the article about the eXtreme croquet tournament.”

  “Yes,” Michael said. “I remember how furious Mrs. Fenniman was that they didn’t put it on the sports page.”

  Although I didn’t mention it to Michael, this issue of the Clarion was also the one that first officially described Michael and me as an engaged couple. Just a passing reference in an article listing “Professor Michael Waterston and his fiancée, Meg Langslow,” among the attendees at a faculty dinner, but it had triggered an orgy of congratulatory calls and cards, not to mention numerous interrogations about where and when the wedding would take place—all of it reinforcing my determination to insist that we elope.

  However dramatic an effect that one sentence had on my life, surely it wasn’t nearly as important to Lindsay. She might not even have read it—might not even have noticed the coincidence that she was picking up the boxes of documents from her former boyfriend’s fiancée.

  Unless her reason for visiting had been to inspect me, not to pick up the boxes. What if she’d come out of jealousy or curiosity, and whoever killed her had assumed she was here for some other reason?

  Not something I’d mention to Michael. Even if he had been her reason for coming to get the boxes, he wasn’t the reason she died—that lay in the killer’s motives.

  “Why so thoughtful?” Michael asked.

  I was searching for an answer when we heard a knock on the stall door. Unusual—most people just barged in.

  A head peeked over the door.

  “Ms. Ellie,” Michael said. “How are you?”

  “Fine, thanks,” she said. “I think Dr. Langslow was looking for you just now. Wanted you to help round up some sheep.”

  “Not again,” Michael said, but he didn’t look too put out as he left the barn. It worried me sometimes, how much he enjoyed all the little agricultural tasks we were learning.

  “Hello, Meg,” she said, turning to give me a brisk business-like hug.

  Either she’d come straight from her conference or she dressed every day as if going to work—her clothes elegant, tailored, and businesslike, except for the familiar purple running shoes, which had been my first cl
ue that I’d like her.

  “I’m disappointed,” she said. “I thought you were having croquet all day.”

  “It’s probably starting up later this afternoon,” I said.

  “Lovely sport.”

  “If you don’t mind the company.”

  “Yes, I hear you’ve got the cream of Caerphilly society playing.”

  “I have no idea why,” I said. “The game of eXtreme croquet doesn’t really seem like their kind of pastime.”

  “Perhaps they thought you said eXtreme crochet and they’re too embarrassed to back out,” she said with a smile. “Anyway, Jessica said you asked for me.”

  “I did, yes. I wanted to ask you some questions. About local history. Specifically, the Battle of Pruitt’s Ridge.”

  “The Battle of Pruitt’s Ridge,” she repeated. Her voice sounded odd.

  “I have a million questions,” I said. “For starters, do you know any other references? I only have the article from the Caerphilly Clarion. Mrs. Pruitt took all the information in her book from that—and left out any information that wasn’t flattering to the Pruitts, which doesn’t exactly surprise me. Who knows how much the Clarion left out, for fear of offending the Pruitts. Not to mention the fact that I have every reason to believe that the Pruitts made the battle up, or exaggerated it way out of proportion and—What’s wrong?”

  She had turned slightly away from me and her shoulders were shaking. Was she upset? Perhaps someone in her family had died in the battle, but that was a hundred and fifty years ago. Even in Virginia, people these days didn’t react quite that personally to the Late Unpleasantness, as many preferred to call the Civil War.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  She turned back and looked at me over her glasses.

  “Is there somewhere private we can talk?”

  “My office,” I suggested, pointing to it.

  She nodded, then strode off. I could barely keep up with her, which was slightly embarrassing—she was a good six inches shorter than I was and had to be around seventy-five, unless she’d gotten her master’s in library science at an age when most people were still in kindergarten.

  All the while, I kept wondering what I’d done to upset Ms. Ellie. Not only upset her but cause her to give me the librarian look—the one that quashed unruly patrons in an instant, and informed you without a single word that she knew perfectly well it wasn’t your brother who had spilled chocolate syrup on The Black Stallion’s Return. The look still worked on me, even though I liked Ms. Ellie and considered her a friend, damn it.

  I followed her into the tack room and shut the door.

  “The Battle of Pruitt’s Ridge,” she said. I could see that her face was twitching slightly; obviously, the very idea of the battle aroused some strong emotion. “What got you interested in that?”

  “I think it might have something to do with the murder,” I said. “Or with Mr. Briggs’s outlet-mall project. Or both. Look, if this is a touchy subject …”

  She burst out laughing. Not a few giggles, but a long, hearty belly laugh. After a few seconds, she plopped down in my desk chair and leaned back, the better to enjoy it.

  “Oh, dear,” she said finally, wiping her eyes. “I know you’re serious; it’s just that—”

  She relapsed into chuckles. I sat down in Michael’s chair to wait until she could talk again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “No, there aren’t any other references. As for the original source documents—do you want to know the true story of the Battle of Pruitt’s Ridge?”

  I nodded.

  “There wasn’t a battle.”

  “It’s a local legend?”

  “It’s a complete and utter fake, that’s what it is.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I made it up.”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  She sat back and waited for my reaction.

  “You made it up,” I repeated. I probably sounded skeptical. After all, I’d seen the documents.

  “Me and a couple of my friends—all gone now, bless them; it was more than fifty years ago. We were at the annual town Fourth of July celebration—July 4, 1953—waiting through all the speechifying till the fireworks began, and Mayor Pruitt—that would be Henrietta’s husband’s grandfather, not the Civil War-era one—was carrying on about the town’s long and distinguished history, and the Pruitt’s long and distinguished service to the town, and I just got fed up. I cooked up a plot to get back at all those stuffy old town fathers, and when I told my friends about it, they all jumped at the chance to help.”

  “So you made up the story of a fictitious battle.”

  “We didn’t just make up a story,” she said, shaking her head and smiling. “We documented it. My friend Grant immersed himself in Civil War history for weeks, finding a way to weave our fake battle plausibly into the real fabric of events. My brother Blair took the photographs—we wanted some authentic-looking photos to document the event, because everyone knows the camera doesn’t lie, right?”

  “Of course not,” I said. I wasn’t sure whether to feel embarrassed or angry as I remembered the emotion I’d felt while handling the fake photos.

  “He did a superb job,” Ms. Ellie said, almost as if reading my mind. “He studied Civil War-era photographic techniques, learned to re-create them—you can’t imagine how many hours of research and experimentation went into making those two dozen photos. Edwina did the costumes—we needed clothes that looked as if people had gone to war in them. Normal wear and tear, gunpowder stains, things like that. And the makeup—we didn’t want anyone to recognize the people in the photos. I did the documents. Writing all the letters in different period handwritings, creating the phony newspaper accounts and the official documents—and artificially aging them and the photos, so they really looked old. If we’d done it as a living-history project, we’d have gotten straight A’s—you can’t imagine how much we learned. Then we had Grant write up a paper about the battle for one of his classes—he was a history major at the college. Had a class with a professor who was one of Mayor Pruitt’s buddies. We knew if we could fool him, he’d show it to the mayor.”

  I realized my mouth was hanging open. All Ms. Ellie’d ever said about her life before retirement was that she’d spent four decades in a boring government desk job. I’d heard wild rumors that she had been a CIA field operative in Latin America, a DIA expert on the Middle East, or an FBI agent who had infiltrated the Mafia, but I’d always assumed these rumors were false, and that like so many other librarians, she’d developed her fierce will and combative manner from a lifetime of defending the written word against neglect, censorship, and dwindling acquisition budgets. Now …

  “So the prank worked?” I asked aloud.

  “Too well,” she said. “Grant was waiting to hear back from his professor, and the next thing we knew, there was an article on the front page of the Clarion, all about a fabulous new discovery in local history. From the article, you’d think the professor had done all the discovering, with a little minor legwork from Grant. They’d already invited some distinguished Civil War historian to examine the new artifacts, and contacted the Park Service about an archaeological dig to pinpoint the site of the battle. I suspect it was one of the historians who blew the whistle.”

  “Well, the point was to embarrass Mayor Pruitt publicly,” I said.

  “This got too public. We didn’t realize how much the mayor would do to get back at us. Now I wonder how much he really could have done and how much was just bluster—though when you think about it, in a small town in the 1950s … water under the bridge anyway. We agreed to help hush it up and they dropped all the various charges and disciplinary actions. They didn’t kick any of us out of college—Grant went on to become a historian, and Paul a lawyer, so I suppose they’re just as happy it never came out. Edwina married a stodgy botany professor and turned respectable on me. I suspect, if they ever told anyone else about it when they were older, they were happy to
pin the blame on me. Ellie the troublemaker.”

  “If it was all hushed up, how come Mrs. Pruitt is going around bragging about it?”

  “Mayor Pruitt hushed it up a good deal too well. Never told any of his family the whole story, I suspect. So after he died, there was no one to warn Henrietta Pruitt off when she set her troops digging around in the Clarion’s archives and they found the original article.”

  “The Clarion never printed a disclaimer or correction?”

  “They just pretended it never happened,” she said with a chuckle. “I think a few people at the college remembered something. Not the whole story, just that there was some unpleasantness. Made it hard for Henrietta to get anyone in the department interested in studying it.”

  “So she did it herself. And blew it.”

  “Did it herself?” Ms. Ellie said, laughing. “Henrietta Pruitt? Of course not. She and Claire Wentworth never actually do anything. They just delegate to their underlings at the historical society—none of whom have any actual training at historical research. There was some talk five or six years ago about getting a historian to do a new, expanded edition, but I imagine she had a hard time finding anyone.”

  Five or six years ago—about the time Lindsay Tyler had come to town.

  “I assume none of Mrs. Pruitt’s underlings would have had enough training to recognize all your photos and documents as forgeries?”

  “I doubt if they even saw them,” Ms. Ellie said. “I certainly didn’t have them, not that I’d have shared them if I had.”

  “Do you know what did happen to them?” I already knew, but I wondered if she did.

  She shrugged.

  “Smoke and ashes, if the mayor got his hands on them,” she said.

  “How many other people know this story?” I asked.

  “Two or three people I’ve told over the years,” she said. “Not sure why I’m telling you now—maybe because I’m getting along. Want someone to know about it. Or maybe because I’m getting tired of hearing Henrietta Pruitt bragging about her husband’s fictitious heroic ancestors. They had a photo of her in her Southern belle’s ball gown on the front page of the Clarion the other day. Humbug!”