No Nest for the Wicket(55)

I drained the mug.

“Come on,” I said to Michael. “Let’s not just sit around waiting until Chief Burke deigns to tell us what he’s found. Let’s do something.”

“Such as?”

“Let’s go inspect Mr. Early’s sheep pasture,” I said, standing up and stumbling in the right direction.





Chapter Twenty-six

“Will Mr. Early like that?” Michael asked, falling into step beside me.

“Possibly not, but if he complains, we’ll say we’re inspecting the wickets to make sure they’re in place in case we play here today. Or to make sure we can find them all to take them away tomorrow. If we run into him, we can inquire about the health of his naked sheep.”

“Or ask how late he and Rose Noire stayed up … talking,” Michael said with a grin.

“Whatever works. Come on.”

We strolled across the road and climbed over the fence into Mr. Early’s pasture.

“What are we looking for, anyway?” Michael asked as we climbed the hillside.

“At the moment, the starting stake.”

“I mean in general. What clue do we hope to uncover here?”

“Well,” I said. “Remember I’m assuming Mrs. Pruitt and the other Dames are more likely suspects than the other two teams.”

“And your family aren’t suspects at all.”

“Mrs. Fenniman channels all her homicidal instincts into eXtreme croquet these days,” I said. “I doubt if Rose Noire has any. Rob might, but he can’t stand blood, so if he’d offed Lindsay, we’d have found him lying nearby in a dead faint.”

“That makes sense,” he said. “And yes, the Morris Mallet Men and the Realtors’ team would have had a harder time getting over to the bog to kill Lindsay. Not impossible.”

“More possible for the students than the Realtors,” I said.

“Are you impugning the Realtors’ fitness?” he asked. “All three look spry enough to scamper over to the other field and back.”

“Not their fitness, but their knowledge of the terrain,” I said. “Remember, we’d already played a game that morning. My team played the Realtors up here in the sheep pasture, and the Dames played the students down in the bog.”

“So both the Dames and the students had all morning to study the lay of the land around the crime scene?”

“Precisely,” I said.

“The Realtors are local, you know,” Michael pointed out.

“Yes, but do you really think Mrs. Briggs or either of the clones have ever clocked much time slogging around in Mr. Shiffley’s cow pasture? Then there’s Mr. Briggs, who wasn’t stuck here all day playing croquet. I like him as a suspect. More than I like Mrs. Pruitt, to tell the truth, though I admit I have ulterior motives in wanting to find him guilty. Ah, here it is. The starting stake. Now look around.”

“Nice,” Michael said.

He was looking at the house. Even the horrors of remodeling did little to dim Michael’s fondness for the house, and I tried to keep seeing it through his eyes.

“Nice view of the house, yes,” I said. “And anyone at the house would have a nice view of the game—especially anyone scampering around on the roof, ripping off old shingles and smashing up rotten boards.”

“I suspect the chief has interrogated the Shiffleys,” Michael said.

“Fat chance of getting him or them to tell us anything,” I said. “So we’ll puzzle things out for ourselves. Let’s find the next wicket.”

“Yes, we’re pretty visible up here,” Michael said, waving at someone below. “Not just from the roof but from most of the yard, too.”

“Not heavily wooded like the bog. That’s why we made Eric referee up here. Not as demanding as refereeing in the other field. Most of the time, we could all see one another. Occasionally, someone would disappear into a gully or over a hill, but most of the time, we could have shouted back and forth to keep the turns moving. The Shiffleys could see most of us pretty much of the time, and I bet they were looking. When we played up here in the morning, every time I glanced down, I’d see one of them gawking and pointing. I doubt if the novelty wore off by afternoon. If they’d seen anyone do anything, Chief Burke would have arrested someone by now.”

“So the people who were playing on this field are off the suspect list entirely?” Michael asked.

“Not entirely,” I said. “But they go way down to the bottom of the list. And I’ll check with Eric to see how the game went. If one or two of them finished particularly early and returned to the house alone, we move them back up the list again.”