No Nest for the Wicket(8)

“Now there’s a concussion waiting to happen,” the chief said, shaking his head.

“True,” I said. “But your victim wasn’t Morris dancing when she met her end. I’d have noticed the bells.”

It was the bells that got to you. I’d thought the weeks of construction had made me immune to noise pollution, but I’d been ready to strangle all three students long before we hit the croquet field. I’d have tried to persuade them to doff their bells if not for Mrs. Pruitt.

“You simply cannot permit them to wear those ghastly bells,” she had informed me halfway through this morning’s prematch breakfast.

“There’s nothing in the rules to prevent them,” I said. I knew because Mrs. Fenniman and I had spent an hour studying her dog-eared copy of the rules, looking for a precedent to ban the bells. “You could refuse to take the field until they remove them.”

Mrs. Pruitt smiled and inclined her head toward me in gracious thanks for my support.

“Although that would count as a forfeit,” I added.

Her usual glare returned.

“Do you have any idea how annoying those bells are?” she snapped.

“Yes,” I said. “They’re sleeping in our barn, you know; which wouldn’t be as bad if Michael and I weren’t camping out there ourselves during the construction.”

“Do they sleep in the bells?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “As far as I can tell, they don’t actually sleep. They’re college students, remember?”

“Do you mean you can’t do anything about the bells?”

“They’re only doing it to annoy us. If we ignore it, we’ll annoy them back. Throw them off their game.”

“Hmph,” Mrs. Pruitt said, and strode off. I noticed afterward that she was being unusually gracious to the students. The students, for their part, took pains to shuffle their legs and tap their feet as much as possible in her presence. As soon as breakfast ended, I had sent them all down to the cow pasture to annoy one another while my team played a relatively straightforward match against Mrs. Briggs and the clones up in the sheep pasture.

In a just world, the Mountain Morris Mallet Men would have gone home after the Caerphilly Dames defeated them in the morning game, but the rules Mrs. Fenniman had devised for this tournament called for a complex multiple-elimination system. At least by beating the clones, my team got to play the Dames in the second match, which meant that I hadn’t heard the bells all afternoon.

Although come to think of it, if we’d lost the morning game, I’d have been up in the sheep pasture, and someone else could have found the murdered woman.

I also realized that Mrs. Pruitt and her team had had two chances to learn their way around the playing field that contained the crime scene. My team and the Morris men had had only one—an interrupted game in our case—and Mrs. Briggs and the clones hadn’t been there at all. Not that I knew of anyway. Should I mention this to the chief?

Maybe later. He was frowning at the Morris men.

“You didn’t hear any bells while you were playing?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “But they’re not permanently attached. If one sneaked down to our field to murder someone, he’d have taken off his bells.”

The chief nodded.

“Of course, that would imply premeditation,” I said.

He ignored me. Or maybe he was fascinated by the Morris dancing. All the other males in the backyard were. My nephew Eric was already imitating the dancers, fortunately with a plastic toy baseball bat rather than a croquet mallet. Dad was observing them with the rapt attention our family found alarming, because it usually signaled that he’d found a new hobby. Joan of Arc and Napoléon were slackers compared to Dad in pursuit of a new hobby.

The Shiffleys were variously leaning against the side of the barn or squatting on their ankles, elbows on their knees, a position they seemed to find comfortable and could hold indefinitely, probably due to long years of practice. I wasn’t quite sure why they liked to do this—perhaps to make people like me feel like city slickers.

They were tapping their feet and nodding their heads to the music. It was a lively tune played on a fiddle and an accordion—one of those songs that had migrated over to the Shenandoah Valley with early English and Irish settlers and taken root so thoroughly, you were surprised to find it had been born on the other side of the Atlantic.

“Co-ol,” my brother, Rob, said behind me. “It’s like a mating dance for Santa’s reindeer!”

I glanced back and saw the rest of the croquet players straggling up the hill, escorted by two of the chief’s deputies and Cousin Horace.