No Nest for the Wicket(7)

“The other team in the sheep pasture I don’t know at all,” I said. “Three students from some college.”

“You don’t know which one?”

“We had teams sign up from five different colleges,” I said. “I forget which one this is, but you can ask them.”

“So this eXtreme croquet isn’t just a bunch of lunatics fooling around?” he said, sounding baffled. “It’s an organized sport?”

“Not well organized,” I said. “Some guys in Connecticut invented it—or at least popularized it. But the tournament was Mrs. Fenniman’s idea. She couldn’t even get many of the family to play with her, so she announced a tournament, and suddenly we had seven other teams.”

We fell silent as we climbed the steep slope that marked the approximate boundary between the three acres Michael and I owned and Mr. Shiffley’s pasture, which surrounded us on three sides. Now that we’d stopped talking, I heard fiddle music coming from our backyard.

“Not the best time for a party,” the chief said, puffing slightly.

“They don’t know about the murder yet,” I said. Just then, we heard a cheer from the lawn above.

“Hmph,” the chief snorted, as if to say that he’d change that pretty darn soon.

The last few feet of the path were so steep that the previous owners had put in a set of rustic stone steps, though they were in such disrepair that they weren’t much of an improvement over the muddy path. The chief sped up slightly; many people did, in fact, to get the last stage of the hill over as quickly as possible and reach the level ground of our backyard. As he put his foot on the bottom step, a figure leaped into our view at the top of the hill.

“Yee-haw!” the figure shouted, springing into the air and waving a cudgel.





Chapter Four

Chief Burke’s hand darted inside his jacket, a reflex left over from his days as an urban police officer. Fortunately for the man at the top of the stairs, the chief no longer carried a gun. Not that he’d have had much luck drawing it with the cast on his arm.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I know him.” Which probably didn’t reassure Chief Burke that much. Fortunately, something must have convinced the chief that the figure was harmless, because he relaxed slightly. Perhaps, like me, he recognized the cudgel as a croquet mallet, though considering the crime scene we’d just left, it might have been shortsighted to consider a croquet mallet reassuring. There was nothing reassuring about his unearthly cry, a cross between a rebel yell and a yodel, that stopped us in our tracks with our mouths open, but following up this bloodcurdling sound with a smirk and a guffaw definitely reduced its effectiveness. Most likely, the chief figured a truly dangerous madman would charge down the steps instead of leaping up into the air and clicking his heels together to make all the bells strapped to his shins ring as loudly as possible. Then, as soon as his feet hit the ground, he bounded off like a kangaroo on fast forward.

“What the dickens is going on up there?” the chief asked as he raced up the steps.

“It’s a player from the students’ croquet team,” I said, following him.

“Craziest damn fool kind of croquet I’ve ever seen,” the chief said. He had paused at the top of the steps and was frowning down at our lawn.

“It’s not croquet,” I said. “It’s Morris dancing.”

“Morris dancing,” the chief repeated.

“It’s a form of English folk dancing,” I said. “They put on traditional costumes, including about a million bells on their shins.”

“I know what Morris dancing is,” the chief said. “Not that I’d call that much of an example. Why are they doing it here, practically in the middle of my crime scene?”

He wasn’t hurrying to stop the spectacle, though, and I had to admit that I felt a certain morbid fascination with the Mountain Morris Mallet Men’s performance.

I’d already seen the costumes—white shirts, black knee breeches, and brightly colored X-shaped suspenders decorated with ribbons and rosettes—since they’d insisted on wearing them to play croquet in. Along with their bells—dozens of brass bells sewn in rows to pads that looked like truncated hockey shin guards.

All three students were prancing in a circle, lifting their knees as high as possible, then bringing their feet down sharply to get the maximum amount of noise out of the bells. They started out holding their croquet mallets in both hands, but as they worked up speed, they began waving the mallets overhead and whacking them together in time with the music.