Die Like an Eagle (23 page)

“Well, that other dugout isn't going to repair itself,” I said.

I repaired the other dugout. And then the bleachers. And some hinges and shelves in the Snack Shack. The fence needed a lot of work—in fact, it might have been less trouble to replace it altogether—but with the help of some of Randall's workmen, who had finished with the lights and the parking lot, I made sure it wasn't going to fall down and that there were no dangerous sharp edges and protruding wires that could shred small shins or poke out young eyes.

In the middle of our efforts on the outfield fence, I went back to my car to get another tool and spotted something in the parking lot that brought me to a halt. A pickup truck whose right rear taillight had been broken and then patched with strips of silver duct tape in a neat pattern like a giant asterisk. I'd seen that mended taillight before.

And then I remembered where I'd seen it, and forced myself to keep moving. That was the pickup I'd told Aida about, the one that had been parked at one end of a line of trucks in the parking lot of Biff's scrapyard, and then disappeared by the time Aida and I had returned from our hike to the other gate.

I fetched the tool I'd been looking for, and on my way back to the field I committed the truck's license plate to memory. Then as soon as I got the chance, I took the chief aside and told him about it. I was afraid he'd think I was being overly imaginative, but he took me seriously enough to call Debbie Ann to ask her to run the license number.

“You're sure you saw it out there?” he said, as we stood waiting for Debbie Ann's computer to produce results.

“Reasonably sure,” I said. “One truck looks pretty much like another to me, but the taillight repair was pretty distinctive.”

He was opening his mouth to say something, then paused and listened. He frowned.

“Thank you,” he said. “No, nothing else for now.”

He put his phone back into his pocket and turned the frown on me.

“Keep this to yourself for now,” he said.

I nodded and watched for a few moments as he thought. He looked up, saw me, and smiled slightly.

“This may have nothing to do with the murder,” he said.

“Of course not,” I said.

“But I will be asking Mr. Samuel Yoder the reason for his visit to Mr. Brown's place of business this afternoon.”

He picked up the can of paint he'd been using and headed back to the field. I followed more slowly and peered around as I walked to see if I could spot Mr. Yoder. Yes, there he was out in left field, using a posthole digger. Hard work, I knew, so maybe that accounted for the grim look on his face. Although everyone around him seemed cheerful enough. Mr. Yoder was the only one with an expression on his face like an Old Testament prophet. And in spite of his gray hair and thin frame, he was wielding the posthole digger with impressive ease. Yes, he'd have had the strength to hoist Shep's body and stow it in the porta-potty.

I wondered if the chief would be including Mr. Yoder's truck on tomorrow's to-do list for the blood sniffing dogs.

Not my problem. I shoved Mr. Yoder out of mind and focused back on my work.

By 1:00
A.M.
we'd finished nearly everything we could think of to do, and except for Randall and a few of his workmen, everyone had straggled home. As I fell into bed, I couldn't decide which emotion was strongest—the intense satisfaction of finally getting my hands on the ball field and making it better—or my intense dread of the alarm clock that was going to wake me far too early.

 

Chapter 18

I was back on the baseball field, yelling at Biff. He was carrying a roll of sod out onto the field, and I kept telling him to stop, that it wasn't safe, that if he installed sod right before the game it wouldn't be stable. He ignored me. He set the sod down on the infield, on top of all the old grass and weeds, and began unrolling it. I realized it wasn't good sod—it was just a tangle of crabgrass, stinging nettles, and poison ivy. And then I heard the boys calling “Mommy! Mommy!” and turned to see that they were both sinking into the horrible Biff sod, as if along with the weeds he was unrolling quicksand.

“Mommy! Mommy!” I opened my eyes and found Josh and Jamie bouncing on the bed. Michael was already up and in the shower. “Mommy! Time to get up! It's Opening Day again!”

I forced a smile, and remembered that it had been my idea to start the games an hour earlier. Of course, when I had suggested an 8:00
A.M.
starting time, I had no idea I'd be up past midnight doing manual labor.

“Mommy, where's my baseball pants?” Josh asked.

“I can't find my belt,” Jamie countered.

“Can I have French toast for breakfast?” Josh asked. “While you find my baseball pants?”

“I don't want French toast,” Jamie said. “And—”

“Go downstairs and see what Rose Noire is fixing for breakfast.” Thank goodness for having a resident cousin who not only liked to cook but was an inveterately cheerful morning person. “If you do it nicely, you may ask her if she can fix French toast for those who want it and something else for those who don't. But if she says she's too busy, don't whine. And while you do that I will look for all of your baseball gear.”

The herd stampeded downstairs. While Michael donned his baseball clothes, I took a quick shower and got dressed in jeans and my Caerphilly Eagles t-shirt, all the while playing with my new favorite fantasy—that I could find a way to tag all the boys' baseball gear the way Caroline had tagged Biff's coat and car. In fact, not just their baseball gear—all of their possessions. I could see myself calling the number Caroline had given me and saying, “Hey, can you give me a location on Jamie's right cleat? Great! How about Josh's math homework?”

Of course, that reminded me that I hadn't checked up on Biff lately. I paused in the middle of searching a laundry basket and called the zoo's security desk.

“Hi, Meg,” said a cheerful young woman's voice. “You want a location on those tags?”

“Please.”

“Just a sec.… Yes, they're both down at Percy Pruitt Park.”

“Great. I was wondering … do you keep historical data on where the tags have been?”

“Of course,” she said. “That's really the main purpose of the device—to study the animals' movements.”

“So you could tell me, for example, where the devices went when they left my house Thursday night?”

“Of course. Here we go. They both went straight to Percy Pruitt field, and after half an hour there, to a location near the Clay County border.” She rattled off a set of coordinates, then translated them to a street address on the Clay Swamp Road. I recognized the address of Biff's business. “Then yesterday they went to Percy Pruitt Park at seven forty-five a.m. After that they did quite a lot of wandering around yesterday—do you want the details?”

“Maybe later,” I said. “Just let me know their present location.”

“At Percy Pruitt Park,” she said. “Since about seven a.m. So what is this special project of Caroline's? I'm assuming some kind of application of the device to companion animals instead of wildlife.”

“Just out of curiosity, what makes you think that?”

“Because whatever these critters are, they occasionally travel at speeds in excess of sixty miles an hour. I assume they're traveling in someone's car at those times, because if we have some kind of wildlife here in Caerphilly capable of that kind of speed, I think I'd have heard about it.”

“Good deductions,” I said. “And thanks.”

I'd let Caroline explain what her project was.

And it was a relief that the tracking devices confirmed Biff's alibi. Not that I'd really doubted it—after all, Aida and Vern were pretty reliable. But after seeing Biff's place of business, it had occurred to me to wonder if he could possibly have sneaked out while they were at one end of his scrapyard. If both our local police and the tracking devices thought Biff had stayed put, then Biff was very well-alibied for the time of the murder. I decided that on the whole this was a relief. However much I might wish that we could figure out a way to disentangle Biff from our local baseball organization, I didn't think the spectacle of having the league president arrested for murder was one we wanted to see.

And it was also a relief since I wasn't at all sure how the chief would feel if he found out about our belling the cat, as Caroline had called it. I needed to find out if what Caroline had done was legal, and if not, what kind of penalty she'd face if the chief found out about it. Fortunately, since the tracking device confirmed Vern's and Aida's evidence, this wasn't quite as urgent as it would have been if it had contradicted them, but still … I had the sneaking feeling it was illegal.

And that meant it could still come back to haunt us if an indiscreet zoo staff member gossiped about Caroline's special project. Or if Biff found the device. Or what if some new crime occurred—say that break-in at Shiffley Construction Randall more than half expected—and the tracking devices recorded data that either cleared or implicated Biff.

Festus. I could call him to tell him more about the Yoder farm, work the conversation around to the subject of Grandfather's tracking devices, and jokingly ask what would happen if I decided to tag a few human beings with them.

No, he'd see through that. Better to just ask him point-blank. I entered an item in my notebook to remind me to do that—but later, at what Mother would call a civilized time of day.

I returned to emptying out the laundry basket and found Josh's baseball socks near the bottom, rolled up in Jamie's damp swimsuit. Jamie's baseball pants were draped over the Ping-Pong table in the basement, and since there was a belt already threaded through the belt loops, I deduced that the belt Josh was carrying around actually belonged to Jamie. Although threading the belts through the loops was a major pain, in the interest of preserving harmony I removed the belt so I could pretend to have found it separately.

A good thing we lived so close to the field, because otherwise I'm not sure we could possibly have been among the first there. Michael took the boys to the outfield and started a little fielding practice. I took a stroll around the field, nodding happily at the results of our night's work.

It looked good. Not perfect. There were still more dirt and weeds than grass in the outfield, but at least the weeds and grass were cropped close enough that it was hard to tell them apart. And they'd actually dug up all the grass and weeds that had sparsely dotted the infield and done a fabulous job of leveling and smoothing it. A lush grass infield would have been optimal, but for now, a neat, smooth dirt infield would do just fine. The bleachers and dugouts weren't fancy, but they were structurally sound and as spruced up as they were going to get.

As I watched, a Brown Construction truck turned into the parking lot—a flatbed truck with a battered, mud-colored porta-potty on the back. The truck rattled over to the end of the parking lot where Biff's old porta-potty had stood and backed into position.

“Oh, give us a break,” I muttered under my breath. “As if anyone with a sense of smell is going anywhere near that thing.”

Biff was strolling over to meet the truck, and supervised as four of his workmen wrestled the porta-potty into place—not quite in the same place where the old one had been, but fifteen or twenty feet farther away from the field. It was as if even Biff realized that the odds of anyone using his porta-potty were low, but had brought it out to the field anyway as a gesture of defiance.

Biff stood for a few moments, gazing at his porta-potty in what appeared to be satisfaction. Not a sentiment apt to be shared by many of those who came close to it—I noticed a couple of the workmen, now that they were out of Biff's line of sight, were clowning around, holding their noses and pretending to be about to puke.

Biff turned around to bark an order at them and they all scrambled back onto the truck and vamoosed. Biff began rambling around the field, inspecting everything we'd done the night before and shaking his head as if he found it all sadly unsatisfactory.

Two women were waiting by the Snack Shack: the older woman in the sari who'd been at the Thursday night party—now identified as the elder Mrs. Patel, Sami Patel's grandmother—and Rose Noire. Biff noticed them waiting, but he took his own sweet time coming over to let them into the Snack Shack.

In fact, he kept them waiting at the door of the Snack Shack while he opened up the supply shed and strolled inside.

I could see Rose Noire taking some of the deep, calming breaths she was always telling me to try when things upset me.

Then Biff stormed out of the shed.

“Where the hell are my buns!” he shouted at the first person he saw—which unfortunately happened to be Mrs. Patel. She shrieked, whirled around, and ran away.

I took off running toward the shed.

“You big bully!” Rose Noire stepped into the space Mrs. Patel had vacated and shook her finger in Biff's face.

“We had a whole season's supply of hot dog and hamburger buns in here,” Biff yelled.

“I have no idea where they are, and neither does Mrs. Patel,” Rose Noire yelled back. “Now go over there and apologize to that poor woman!”

Rose Noire was actually shaking her fist at him. Considering that Rose Noire regularly escorted even noxious insects like stinkbugs and cockroaches out into the yard and had been known to apologize to furniture when she bumped into it, Biff had achieved the near impossible feat of making her lose her temper.

But before I could intervene, a tall man—probably a Shiffley—wearing a Caerphilly Flatworms t-shirt stepped to Rose Noire's side and spoke up.

“If you're talking about those moldy old hot dog and hamburger buns on the top shelf, they had a 2013 expiration date,” he said. “I threw them out.”