No Nest for the Wicket Page 8

  “Be happy to,” Graham said.

  “Anything for you,” Tony added.

  Bill and the Shiffleys simply nodded and fell into step behind them, and Michael joined in when he saw the first load heading for the shed. Moving the boxes went quickly—almost too quickly for my purposes.

  “What’s in the boxes, anyway?” someone finally asked while I was counting the boxes to make sure they’d all arrived.

  “Twenty-three. Good,” I said. “No idea—old papers and photographs and stuff. They’re something the dead woman was coming to pick up, so they could be evidence. The chief wants them locked up.”

  They eyed the boxes with greater interest, though I couldn’t tell if anyone’s interest was particularly guilty. They all drifted off while I was securing the padlock. All but Michael, who watched uneasily as I tested to make sure the lock was secure.

  “If one of them is the killer, didn’t you just paint a big target on the side of the shed?” he asked.

  “Hope so,” I said.

  “So should I stick around and keep my eye on the shed?” he asked.

  “Let’s let Spike do it,” I said.

  Long experience helped me avoid getting bitten while transferring Spike from his usual pen by the barn to the pen outside the shed. Michael carried his water and food bowls over while I relocated his bed to a corner where it would be protected from rain and sun by the roof overhang. Then I tossed Spike a couple of his favorite liver treats to reconcile him to the new scenery. He paced up and down his new domain a few times before curling up to nap on the shed’s doorsill, as if he understood that he was supposed to play guard dog.

  “Doesn’t he look cute?” Michael said.

  “Positively angelic,” I said. “Heaven help anyone who tries to get past him.”

  “Yeah, you know he’s in a cranky mood when he looks that cute.”

  “You think we should try another dog trainer when we have time?” I asked. “Since it doesn’t look as if he’s leaving anytime soon.” While Michael’s mother hadn’t formally renounced ownership of Spike, she seemed in no hurry to end the trial separation, whose original purpose was to see if his fur exacerbated her allergies. We’d already had de facto custody for months. Felt like years.

  “We could try,” Michael said. “Might be hard to find one anywhere nearby who hasn’t already heard about Spike.”

  “Even if they’d heard about him, you’d think they’d welcome a professional challenge.”

  “I think twelve stitches is more than a professional challenge.”

  “That guy was overconfident,” I said. “We told him exactly what to expect in the letter.”

  “Thank heavens your mother’s lawyer cousin suggested that letter,” Michael said. “Maybe we should just let Spike be himself.”

  Tony, the redheaded student, came over to lean on the fence. Spike stood up and stalked toward the fence, growling.

  “Yeah, sometimes he’s pretty useful the way he is,” I said.

  “I just came to let you know that lunch is almost ready,” Tony said, backing away from the fence.

  “Not for you, Spike,” I said.

  For some reason, this made Tony nervous.

  “You two go on,” I said. “I want to make a phone call.”

  Tony left, looking over his shoulder at Spike.

  “Top secret?” Michael asked.

  “Only from Tony,” I said. “And Chief Burke, who probably wouldn’t appreciate my snooping, even by phone.”

  “Snoop away,” Michael said. “I’ll save you a place.”

  Since I was feeling paranoid, I retreated to the house to do my snooping in greater privacy, though privacy wasn’t easy to come by. In the living room, several Shiffleys were arguing about whether the existing floor was really structurally sound, and stomping around on various parts of it in their heavy work boots to prove or disprove their arguments. In the kitchen, Mother was supervising part of the lunch preparations. The dark, unheated basement, I had all to myself.

  I thought of calling Kevin, then decided to see what I could learn on my own first. Luck was with me. Directory assistance found two H. Carmichaels in Charlottesville. It had been years since my college days there, but I still had a general grasp of the town’s geography. One H. Carmichael had an address that I recognized as one of the dorms, but the other street address sounded familiar. I was fairly sure it lay in one of the quiet back streets off Rugby Road or Preston Avenue, far enough away from the fraternities to be livable on weekends, yet close enough to the campus to be desirable. The sort of place an ambitious young professor might choose.

  Someone picked up the phone in the middle of the fourth ring and a woman’s voice said hello.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m trying to reach Helen Carmichael from the UVa history department?”

  “Speaking,” she said, her clipped tone suggesting that she wasn’t entirely thrilled to be bothered at home.

  “My name’s Meg Langslow,” I said. I paused for a few moments to see if she reacted. Nothing, so I continued. “I called your department a couple of weeks ago about some documents I’d found.”

  “What kind of documents?” she said, sounding warmer. Evidently saying “documents” to an historian was like saying “craft fair” to me. Or “homicide” to Dad.

  “Twenty-three boxes of stuff that belonged to the former owner of our house,” I said. “Assorted letters, photographs, and papers belonging to people living in the town of Caerphilly between the Civil War and World War One.”

  “Oh, right,” she said. “I remember seeing a message about that. Not my period—I’m working mostly on the Colonial era. But I saw a note about your call on the bulletin board, and when no one snatched it away after a week or so, I passed your information along to a colleague at another college who might be interested.”

  “Lindsay Tyler?”

  “That’s right. Did she ever get in touch with you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Do you mind my asking how you know her?”

  “From graduate school,” she said. “Look, is there some problem? I know she can be—well, not the easiest person to get along with, but …”

  Her voice trailed off. I waited to see what she’d say next, but she was doing the same thing.

  “She called me all right,” I said finally. “Only she pretended to be you.”

  “She what?”

  “Identified herself as Helen Carmichael of the UVa history department, and set up an appointment to come by and pick up the papers.”

  “That’s … incredible,” the real Helen Carmichael said.

  “I gather the impersonation wasn’t your idea, then. Any idea why she did it?”

  “No!” she exclaimed. “Unless—well, she’s not exactly happy about her exile in Pineville. Her word, not mine. I tried reminding her once how few Ph.D.’s get hired anywhere in their field, that just being employed is a badge of honor, and she snapped my head off. That was maybe five years ago, when she first moved there, but I doubt if she’s learned to love the place. Maybe she thought she’d have a better chance of getting the material if you thought she was from a betterknown university.”

  “Or maybe she did some research and found out UVa was my alma mater,” I suggested.

  “Very likely,” Helen said. “Or maybe she thinks she’s so notorious in Caerphilly that you wouldn’t have anything to do with her.”

  “Was she?” I asked. “Notorious, that is.”

  She snorted.

  “What happened, anyway?” I had Michael’s version, but Helen Carmichael might know more about Lindsay’s point of view.

  “Typical Lindsay stunt,” she said. “I don’t remember the details—not that she didn’t tell me about them ad nauseum. All I remember is that she uncovered some data that tarnished someone’s halo a bit—an ancestor of one of the snootier local families.”

  “Probably the Pruitts,” I said.

  “Could be. As I said, I don’t remember details. Anyway, he
r find was completely overshadowed by the battle that followed. Never occurred to her that the local bigwigs would mind her trashing their ancestors. Or that they might have some clout over at the college. They sent her packing.”

  “And she still holds a grudge?”

  A pause.

  “She’s a bit unbalanced on the subject,” Helen said finally. “I think she’d do anything to cause trouble for Caerphilly.”

  “The town, or the college?”

  “Either. Both. Look, why are you asking all this, anyway? Did something happen when she came to collect the papers?”

  “She never showed up to collect the papers,” I said. “Someone killed her first.”

  “Oh God,” Helen muttered. “They were right.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Who was right?” I asked.

  “When we were in grad school, a couple of the students put out a gag yearbook,” she said. “Tasteless, but funny. They named Lindsay most likely to be a justifiable homicide. Of course, that was fifteen years ago, but she hadn’t changed much.”

  I waited for a bit to see if the news of Lindsay’s murder would shake loose any more information, but I was disappointed.

  “Should I get in touch with the local authorities?” Helen asked after a bit, her voice sounding much more formal. “I assume even though she was impersonating me, they know it’s her.”

  “Our local police chief would probably like to hear from you, yes,” I said. I gave her Chief Burke’s number.

  “Thank you for notifying me,” she said. “I’m sorry for … Putting her in touch with you seemed like a good idea at the time. I’m sorry for how it worked out.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Look, did she ever mention any names of people in Caerphilly? People she particularly hated or anything like that?”

  Helen thought about it for a few moments.

  “She liked to make jokes about some guy she went out with,” she said. “Nasty jokes about how she’d like to go back and get even with him. What was his name? Martin? No, that’s not it. Something with an M.”

  Not Michael, I thought with a pang. I wanted to believe she’d long ago gotten over Michael and forgotten him.

  “Marcus!” Helen said. “That’s it.”

  “Marcus,” I said, feeling a flood of relief. “That’s possible. You’re sure that was it?”

  “Definitely Marcus. ‘Marvelous Miniscule Marcus.’ That’s what she used to call him. If someone knocked him off, I’d tell you to look at Lindsay as a suspect. Maybe it was mutual.”

  “You might want to mention that to the chief, then,” I suggested. “Along with anything else you can think of that might help him.”

  “I’ll do that,” she said. “I should tell him that this definitely wasn’t like her normal trips to Caerphilly.”

  “Her normal trips?” I said. “She came here a lot? How do you know?”

  “Every few months, yes,” she said. “A lot more often recently. I know because she usually stayed with me on the way down or back. Sometimes both. It’s a five- or six-hour drive. So she’d call me up and say, ‘Heading down to Toad Bottom—can I still use your couch?’”

  “Toad Bottom?”

  “It’s what she called Caerphilly when she wanted to be insulting. No idea why. Anyway, she didn’t call me this time. So it definitely wasn’t a normal trip.”

  “Unless she planned to call on her way back,” I said. “Did she usually give you much notice?”

  “No, she didn’t,” Helen said. “You could be right. Maybe she was killed before she could call. I suppose we’ll never know. I’d better go call your police chief now.”

  She hung up.

  Interesting. Far from moving on, Lindsay had still been angry at Caerphilly, and this hadn’t been by any means her first trip back since she was fired. Even if Helen Carmichael was overstating how often Lindsay stayed with her—which was possible; some people like to exaggerate their ties to anyone who appears in the news, as doubtless Lindsay would—she must have been back here often. But why?

  “There you are, dear,” Mother said, when I reappeared from the basement. “Perhaps you could see what your cousin Horace is doing, and whether he has to do it right now, when we’re trying to have a nice picnic?”

  It wasn’t really a question. I went outside to look for Horace. I didn’t have to look far. As soon as I stepped out of the kitchen, I almost fell into the hole he was digging.

  He and Sammy were both digging holes. They were about ten feet apart, and at first glance they seemed unaware of each other, as if some instinct to burrow had simultaneously seized both of them and they’d happened, by an astounding coincidence, to choose the same end of our yard. After watching them for a minute or so, I realized that they were very much aware of each other. Given the lethal glances traveling up and down the turf, I decided perhaps I should stay around to make sure neither of them ended up at the bottom of the other’s hole. Or to find out what it was all about.

  “So, getting ready to bury the bodies?” I asked.

  “What bodies?” Sammy said, glancing up with an anxious expression.

  “She’s kidding,” Horace said, sounding slightly condescending. “She forgets that you don’t know our family well enough to understand our sense of humor.”

  “Or maybe he appreciates what calamity magnets we are,” I said.

  “I appreciate your family’s sense of humor a lot,” Sammy said in his most earnest tones. “I appreciate everything about your family.”

  Horace snorted.

  “Almost everything,” Sammy muttered, casting a baleful glance at Horace.

  They both resumed digging. Obviously, something had kicked their rivalry over Rose Noire into full gear. Yet despite their dislike for each other, they were grudgingly cooperating on … whatever.

  “So what are you doing?” I asked.

  Both paused, still bent over their shovels, and glanced up at me, as if this were a difficult or incriminating question.

  “Digging,” Horace said finally.

  After this accurate but profoundly uninformative answer, they returned to work. I pondered my next question. I suspected that if I asked, “What are you digging?” they would answer either “holes” or “dirt.” Tempting to resort to sarcasm—“Are you looking for buried treasure?”—but not useful.

  Perhaps I should have paid more attention in Philosophy 101 when the professor was expounding on the Socratic method. Or studied Chief Burke’s interrogation methods more carefully.

  “Why are you digging?” I asked finally.

  “Your father asked us to,” Sammy said, as if this explained everything. It usually did in our family, but I was one of the rebels.

  They kept digging. Horace, I noticed, was going in for depth—he’d gone nearly two feet deep—and accuracy. His hole was a tidy, precise square, and he was piling the dirt neatly nearby. But he’d excavated only about two square yards of ground. Sammy, on the other hand, had dug down a mere foot, and his hole didn’t have the clean edges of Horace’s, but he’d covered about six square yards of surface.

  I tried again.

  “For what purpose did Dad ask you to excavate this precise portion of our yard on this particular day?”

  “Gardening,” Horace said. He glanced at his hole with satisfaction and began digging up the next foot-wide strip, making his first spade cuts with surgical precision.

  “Gardening,” I repeated.

  Sammy nodded. I felt slightly gratified to see that his slipshod work habits were causing him problems. He’d piled up the dirt too high and too close to the edge of his hole and a small landslide had undone his last ten or fifteen minutes’ work.

  “That’s nice,” I said. “But this isn’t where Michael and I want the garden. We want it it over there,” I said, pointing to the yard beyond the barn.

  They both looked over at where I was pointing, then back at me.

  “Nice spot,” Sammy said.

  “We can dig that u
p, too,” Horace said.

  Too, not instead. They weren’t getting the point.

  “Thanks,” I said. “But we just planned to get one of the Shiffleys in with a Rototiller. Next year. We’re too busy to garden this year.”

  “This isn’t for your garden,” Sammy said. I wanted to ask who else had decided to garden in our yard, but I stopped myself. I’d learned that much from Chief Burke’s interrogations.

  “It’s for Rose Noire,” Horace said eventually. “Your dad thought this would be the perfect place for her herb garden.”

  I should have known Rose Noire would be involved. Dad was quite capable of deciding, unilaterally, that we’d be happy to donate space for a family member’s pet agricultural project, but Sammy and Horace wouldn’t have both volunteered to help for anyone else. The only thing the two had in common was their shared infatuation with Rose Noire.

  “Does she know you and Dad are planning her herb garden here?” I asked.

  They looked sheepish. Evidently not.

  “What if she doesn’t think this spot has the right vibes or feng shui or whatever gardens are supposed to have?” I said. “You could be completely wasting your time! Besides, I think that’s where the Shiffleys were planning on piling the construction materials,” I added, pointing to where Sammy was digging.

  Sammy’s face fell, and Horace smirked slightly.

  “I know that’s where they’ll have to put the scaffolding,” I went on, pointing to Horace’s excavations, which were much nearer the house. Now Horace looked downcast, too. I had no idea where the Shiffleys planned to put the construction materials, or if they even needed scaffolding, but it sounded good.

  “You couldn’t talk them into working someplace else?” Horace asked.

  Sammy looked scornful, probably because he knew the Shiffleys well enough to understand how difficult it was to change their plans once they’d made them.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Even if I did, no power on earth could prevent people from walking all over this patch of ground and trampling anything Rose Noire planted here. Even if the Shiffleys got the message, we’ll have subcontractors and truck drivers delivering materials and such.”