No Nest for the Wicket(3)

She raised her mallet. I closed my eyes and tried not to wince at the sharp crack that sent my ball flying.

I plunged into the thornbushes to find it while Mrs. Pruitt played on. I dodged poison ivy, cow pies, protruding roots, and the bleached and scattered bones of a sheep.

Suddenly, I found myself perched on the edge of a steep bank, looking down at a gulley filled with more thornbushes and, by way of a change, lots of sharp, pointy rocks.

“I think I’ll take a detour,” I muttered. But before I could retreat, the bank crumbled, and I found myself sliding down toward the thorns and pointy rocks.

My mallet hit me in the stomach when I landed. For long seconds, I lay with my eyes closed, fighting to breathe.

“Meg! Turn!” my radio said.

I opened my eyes to answer and found myself staring into a pair of blue eyes. Strands of long blond hair fell around them, partly obscuring the woman’s face but not the eyes, which stared at me with unnerving intensity.

“Are you all right?” I wheezed, shoving myself upright.

No, she wasn’t.

Someone had bashed in the back of her head.





Chapter Two

I jumped when the radio crackled again.

“Meg? Your turn,” Rob said.

“Not now,” I muttered, although not into the radio.

I squirmed farther from the corpse while fumbling in my pocket for the cell phone, and whacked myself in the stomach again with my own mallet.

My mallet. I glanced at it, and then at the dead woman’s head. Maybe I was jumping to conclusions. Maybe she’d just fallen, as I had, and been less lucky. Hit her head on one of the rocks.

I inched over so I could see her head wound. Then I held my own croquet mallet as close to it as I could.

Looked like a match to me.

For a horrible moment I wondered if I’d done this accidentally when I fell. No, my mallet showed traces of mud and leaves—more than traces—but no blood. I took a deep breath and checked the woman’s wrist. No pulse, and while she was still warm, she definitely wasn’t body temperature. She’d been dead before I fell.

But not long before. Which meant the killer might still be nearby. I dropped her wrist, scooted away until I had my back against the bank of the gulley, and flipped open the cell phone to call the police.

Debbie Anne, the dispatcher, shrieked and dropped the phone when I told her why I was calling. In a few seconds, Chief Burke was on the line.

“You’re reporting what?”

“A murder,” I said. “Female, blond hair, blue eyes, late thirties. Tall, I think, though that’s hard to tell—she’s lying down. Not someone I know.”

“You’re sure she’s dead?”

I glanced up and met the blank blue eyes.

“Yeah, someone bashed her head in,” I said. “But send an ambulance if you don’t believe me.”

“And you have no idea who she is?”

“I don’t know her, and I haven’t searched her for an ID.”

“Keep it that way,” he said. I nodded. Though now my curiosity was aroused—most women carried a purse, but when I stood up and scanned the area, I didn’t see one.

“The ambulance is on the way,” the chief said. “And I’m sending a couple of deputies to secure the scene—just where is the scene, anyway?”

“Somewhere in Mr. Shiffley’s cow pasture,” I said. “The boggy part, near the stream. Have the deputies stop at the house and someone can probably lead them up here. Dad, or maybe one of the other players.”

“Other players?” the chief asked. “Good Lord, please tell me you’re not out there playing paintball again.”

“Not paintball,” I said. “Croquet.”

“In Fred Shiffley’s pasture? What’s wrong with your backyard?”

“Too tame,” I said. “This isn’t normal croquet. It’s eXtreme croquet. You have to play it in extreme conditions. Mr. Shiffley’s pasture’s perfect—plenty of hills, trees, rocks, quicksand, thornbushes, poison ivy—”

“Something your family invented?” the chief growled.

“Actually, something Mrs. Fenniman read about in Smithsonian magazine,” I said. “Extreme sports are very big these days, you know.”

“Sounds damned strange to me,” he muttered.

I agreed, but family loyalty kept me from saying so.

“Fred Shiffley know you’re doing this?” he asked.

“We have his permission,” I said. “In writing.”

Which was true. Dad got along beautifully with the neighboring farmers. I wasn’t sure whether his endless curiosity about every detail of farm life had won them over or his free medical advice, but he’d charmed them into letting us play—not just Mr. Shiffley but also Mr. Early, who owned the nearby sheep pasture, where another croquet game was currently going on.