The Stable Affair

by Jessica Andersen

  “Yes, we use it to wash the big blades when we’re body clipping in the fall and spring. I had just filled the jug the other day. Usually it’s in the flammables cabinet behind the outdoor ring, but it was inside because we have a couple to clip this week. Do you think it could have tipped over and been lit accidentally?”

  “Perhaps, but not in two places simultaneously. Besides, the alarm didn’t go off because it had been professionally disarmed in such a way that it didn’t signal the fire station that it was off line. The police and an arson team will be here this morning. Until then, I suggest that you consider two things: who might want to hurt your horses or strike out at you personally, and why they targeted those two particular areas. The second part may just have been convenience, but it wouldn’t hurt to think about it.”

  Sarah turned away. She didn’t need to think about it—she knew. The fires had been aimed at her, either as a warning or a threat. Somehow, somewhere, the people at BoGen were convinced that she could hurt them. They had searched her rooms time and again and apparently hadn’t found what they sought, so they decided to destroy the evidence.

  Sarah’s trunks were stored in the attic of the broodmare barn, her show stuff in the employee’s tack room off the shed row. If she hadn’t awakened, would they have burned the house down as well? Perhaps.

  Instead of terrifying her, the thought enraged Sarah. The fire they set had killed an innocent, gentle horse, and wounded and terrified several others. A foal was orphaned by their actions, and would probably die as well. Had they lit the farmhouse next, Sarah’s aunt could’ve been hurt or worse.

  “That’s it. This time they’ve gone too far.” Sarah stomped into Tilda’s office and slammed the door hard enough to knock several calendars off the wall.

  She yanked a bottom drawer open and snatched up her personal address book. Flipping to the letter “B,” Sarah found Matt’s home number and punched it in, noticing that it was not the same number he’d left on her machine a few days previously. “Matthew? It’s me, Sarah. I need you. Can you come to the farm right now? No, not for that. This isn’t a date, it’s a council of war.”

  Sarah’s call had hardly prepared Dante for the sight that greeted him when he arrived at Pruitt Farm, and he blessed her for suggesting he leave Ellie with Mrs. Phillips until they could clean the farm up a bit.

  The whole place was a sodden, dispirited shade of gray, and the farm’s workers and volunteers from surrounding facilities moved listlessly about, beginning the Herculean task of cleaning up after the fire. Dante was chilled to see two buildings roped off with police tape.

  “Hey man, what’d you stick your nose into this time?”

  Surprised to hear the familiar voice, Dante turned to see Daniel Riley walking toward him from behind the yellow and black tape. “Riley! Not that I’m sorry to see you, but what’re you doing here?”

  Daniel shrugged and lowered his voice. “A buddy at the sheriff’s department knew I had been asking around about Sarah Taylor a bit, so when the call came through, he let me know about it.”

  “What call, the fire department?”

  “Nope, the arson squad. Somebody torched two parts of this farm very deliberately, and guess who’s stuff was stored in both of those places?”

  “Sarah’s.”

  “Yep. Your Miss Taylor.” Daniel raked sooty fingers through his hair, leaving it standing on end. “What does that do to your theories, my friend?”

  Dante shook his head. “In a way, I guess this is good news. If she was playing along with whoever’s in charge, there wouldn’t be any reason for them to be bothering with her, right? But in a way it’s bad news, because it means there’s something very wrong going on here, and if what I suspect is true, then they’ve already killed once. Sarah could be in real danger and we don’t have a clue what’s going on.”

  “Well then, we should probably talk to your lady. Where is she?”

  “She’s not really my… well, never mind. I haven’t seen her yet, she’s probably busy with the horses.” Dante stiffened as he saw a familiar form duck into the farmhouse. “Uh-oh.”

  “What?”

  “I think things just got more complicated. The guy that just went into the house?”

  “Yeah? What about him?”

  “That was Matthew Bender.”

  Dante expected Sarah to look uncomfortable when he walked into the kitchen and found her and Bender close together at the little table, but she didn’t. She looked determined.

  “Dante! Good, you’re here. You remember Matt? I thought you might.” Sarah felt a twinge of guilt as Dante glared at the other man. “I’m sorry I went back on what we agreed the other day, but I need both of you to help me.”

  She broke off and looked inquiringly through the screen door. “Yes? If you’re looking for the other investigators, they’re down by the main barn.”

  Daniel let himself into the kitchen. “Actually, I’m here with him.” Daniel indicated Dante with a jerk of his thumb. “And if you’re needing help I’d like to sit in.” Suiting action to words, he pulled out a plain chair and sat at the table opposite Sarah.

  Sarah was slightly at a loss. Who was this man and why did he act as if he had any right to sit right down at her kitchen table? He seemed to sense this because he stuck a big hand over the table. “Daniel Riley, Miss Taylor. Formerly with the sheriff’s department, now an occasional helper of damsels in distress.”

  She shook the big man’s hand tentatively, and Dante summed it up with, “If I’m trusting you that this guy is necessary,” he indicated Bender with a jerk of his chin. “Then you can trust me that Daniel can be very, very useful.”

  Sarah shrugged. “Fine.” She looked at each of the three men then laid her hands on the table as if to draw strength from the sturdy wood. “I need your help.”

  She waited until each of the men had nodded before she continued. “First, I want to warn you all that none of what I say here is to leave this room. I especially do not want my aunt and Bob to know about it. I do not want them involved. I tried not to involve anybody else. I was hoping this would all just go away, but it hasn’t so I was hoping that you two… uh… three would be able to help.”

  She looked at Matt, who was sitting quietly at the table. “Matt, I asked you here because you already know most of the story and I’m hoping that you’ll have some new insights based on what’s happened since I came here. I think there’s something happening at the lab that affects not only my life, but also our customer’s safety.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ll get there in a minute.” Sarah looked at Dante next and he grinned slightly, one of those smiles that didn’t quite reach his cobalt eyes. “I’d rather not involve you because you have a child, but I’m hoping that you’ll see something that those of us closer to the lab have missed. Besides, I was afraid you’d never speak to me again if you saw me with Matt.”

  “A distinct possibility.”

  Sarah turned her attention to the latest addition to her little group. “I have no idea why you’re involved, but I don’t know you well enough to feel bad about putting you in danger if you’re of a mind to help.”

  Daniel smiled. “Sounds fair. For those of us who have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, why don’t you start at the beginning, okay? Bender can feel free to jump in at any time if he remembers something you don’t.”

  Without even realizing that Daniel had subtly taken charge of the moment, Sarah complied. She stared at her hands on the table as she began. “Last winter, they said I killed a woman.” When Matt made an inarticulate sound of protest, she clarified, “Actually, they said I made a mistake that made her kill herself, but the upshot was the same. She was dead, I lost my job, and Boston General paid out to the family on a malpractice suit. That should’ve been the end of it, but not long after that I started to notice little things that weren’t quite right.”

  Dante’s fingernails were pressing marks into his palms as he t
ried not to react. This was what he wanted to hear, wasn’t it? He had started this whole mad plot to discover how Susan had really died, right? So why was he feeling so hollow at this final moment? Why did it feel so wrong?

  Daniel stepped into the silence, urging Sarah to talk as he would any witness or suspect. “What kinds of things?”

  She shrugged. “Little things. I’d see the same man on the corner across from my condo every night for a week then he’d be gone for a few days then back again. The stuff in my rooms would be changed, just a little. A chair would be moved away from the marks it had made in the rug, or pictures would be a little askew—that kind of thing. It was a series of little, subtle things that I could excuse if I tried hard enough. I talked to my ex-boss about them one time, and he prescribed some tranquilizers and sent me to a therapist who tried to convince me that paranoia was a normal reaction—I felt so guilty about Susan’s death that I subconsciously wanted somebody to punish me.”

  Daniel nodded. “Sounds kind of reasonable. What made you think otherwise?”

  “I didn’t, not for a while. In retrospect, I was using a whole lot of energy trying to explain these incidents, trying to pretend them away. Even just last week I had decided that I liked my life here and that I was going to give up any idea of going back to my old job. I thought that would be the end of it.”

  She nodded at Matt. “I told Matt I wasn’t going to see him again and I even thought about deleting all the files I have on Shelly’s computer here.” Matt sat up and looked interested at her mention of the files. “Then there was this fire. The cops say it was definitely arson, and the two primary targets were places I had my old stuff stored.”

  Sarah tipped her eyes up to the ceiling and remembered choking smoke and almost paralyzing waves of heat. “Now that I think about it, when I was in the shed row trying to get all the horses out, I could swear that the tack room door was open and some of my stuff was on the floor outside like it had been tossed there before they set the fire.”

  Dante’s head came up at that. “You went in a burning building to save a bunch of horses? What kind of a stupid stunt was that? You could’ve been killed!”

  Sarah had heard enough of this already that day. “Shut up and be grateful, one of the horses I saved was the very expensive pony that you just leased and have not yet insured, buster. You’re about twenty thousand dollars worth of lucky I saved Finnegan, so I wouldn’t complain if I were you.”

  When Dante drew breath to reply, Daniel stepped in. “I think we’re getting a bit off track here, people. Now, Sarah. For the sake of argument let’s say that somebody’s out to get you and that it has something to do with this incident at your place of work. Why don’t you tell us about that first, then Bender can add whatever he thinks might be helpful.”

  Before she began, a small part of Sarah thought it odd that Daniel Riley would call Matthew by his last name when she was sure they hadn’t been properly introduced.

  “Well, to get started, I think I should explain that Matt and I worked together at a genetic testing lab at Boston General. The Unit is a pretty autonomous entity within the hospital and runs some gene therapy research on the side.”

  Daniel wasn’t quite sure what gene therapy might be, but he knew something about the testing. He had gone with Dante when he got his Huntington’s test, which had been mercifully negative. “What kinds of things does the lab test for?”

  Sarah shrugged. “Whatever genetic test you can name. We do karyotypes, which are blown up pictures of a person’s forty-six chromosomes. Using either visible or fluorescent stains we can figure out which chromosomes are which, and whether there are any pieces missing or pieces extra in a given individual. That’s how you look for conditions like Down’s Syndrome, which comes from an extra copy of chromosome twenty-one, or Turner’s Syndrome, which is caused by a missing X chromosome.”

  Matthew broke in, “And we can do any DNA-based test you can name. We can test for the breast cancer gene BRCA-1, a couple of kinds of early onset glaucoma, and any of the triplet repeat diseases like spinocerebellar ataxia, fragile X, and, of course, Huntington’s Disease…” He trailed off awkwardly.

  Sarah nodded. “Yeah, that’s the one that got me in trouble.” She looked at Daniel and Dante. “How much do you know about Huntington’s?”

  Dante stiffened and Daniel replied, “Some. A friend’s father died of the disease a few years ago and I did some research. It starts in late middle age and begins with a change in personality and erratic behavior as the person’s brain begins to deteriorate. This is followed by progressive loss of the person’s ability to control their own body until their death, often many years after the disease began.” He remembered the horror of watching Dante’s father crumble from the man he had once been.

  Sarah nodded. “That’s pretty correct, except that the disease doesn’t always start that late. It can begin as early as childhood because of the genetic defect that causes it. If you’ll bear with me for a moment, I’ll try to explain the genetics of Huntington’s and how the test works.”

  Matthew looked bored but the other two nodded and she began, “Everybody has two copies of every gene in every cell, one on each of two paired chromosomes except the X and the Y, which determine sex and don’t match. Everyone has two copies of the Huntington’s gene; that’s normal. But there’s a stretch of DNA in that gene that is a repeat of the nucleotides CAG over and over again. Normal people have between eight and twenty of these repeats and that’s okay.”

  She waited until Dante and Daniel nodded before she continued. She had the sneaking suspicion that they already knew parts of this. “In some people, when the sperm or the egg that goes on to make that person is formed, the machinery that replicates the DNA slips a bit and the CAG repeat gets bigger, over twenty CAGs. That’s bad. The person gets Huntington’s Disease when they’re forty or fifty like Daniel here said.”

  Daniel nodded. “So what happens when somebody gets it earlier?”

  “Huntington’s shows what’s called ‘anticipation.’ Sometimes when the bad gene is passed on to a child the repeat gets bigger. The bigger the repeat, the earlier the onset, the more severe the symptoms, and the quicker the course of the disease.” Sarah shuddered, remembering the faces of the Huntington’s positive people she’d counseled over the years.

  Matthew stepped in again. “The test we do at The Unit is basically a series of steps designed to allow a scientist to visualize that part of the gene and determine if the polyglutamine tract—that’s what it’s called because all those CAGs encode the amino acid glutamine—if that tract is expanded or not in each blood sample we test.”

  Sarah nodded. “Then my job was to read the results and pass them on to the person. I’d counsel them right then, and if it was bad news I’d refer them to other counselors or therapists.” Dante made a muffled noise and she looked over at him in surprise.

  “Dante? Are you feeling okay? You don’t look well.” In fact he looked as if he was about to vomit.

  “I’m fine.” Even his voice sounded strangled, but he waved for her to continue.

  “One of my clients was a woman named Susan St. Pierre. She had come to us for Huntington’s testing because she had a family history of the disease and she wanted to know her own status before she had any more children. She had one daughter at the time.” That daughter was now without a mother thanks to what happened at the lab. “We took her blood and used machines to count the number of CAGs she had on each copy of the gene.”

  Dante shifted restlessly and Daniel touched his arm in a gesture that Sarah found oddly comforting. She continued, “Susan and I became friends. She came in for a few pre-testing counseling sessions and we met for lunch once or twice and for a few beers after work. When she tested positive for the disease, I was the one who gave her the bad news. I talked to her for an hour and when she left she seemed calm. I made her promise to call one of the grief counselors I recommended and gave her my home number again.” She reme
mbered her feeling of impotence as she watched Susan leave the lab. All their fancy machines and hundreds of volumes of knowledge weren’t enough to halt this disease yet.

  “Did you hear from her again?” Daniel’s voice was thick with an emotion that Sarah didn’t quite understand.

  She nodded. “As a matter of fact I did. She called me at home a few days later and left a message on my machine asking me to call her back. On the phone she seemed very cheerful, almost manic, but when I returned her call there was no answer.” She paused and stared off across the kitchen as if the others weren’t there.

  “Sarah? Are you okay?” Daniel didn’t want her to lose the rhythm of her story, didn’t want to give her time to overthink her words.

  “Yeah, I’m fine now I guess. I was just imagining the phone ringing in her house. Just ringing and ringing when I tried to reach her. Was she already dead then? Nobody knows. She had a daughter. She kept promising to bring a picture for me to look at, but we never got around to it. I always wondered where her daughter was when Susan killed herself.”

  “With her grandmother.” Dante’s abrupt words startled Sarah. He had been all but silent through her recital.

  “Excuse me?”

  Daniel broke in before Dante’s slip could cause trouble. “Or with some other relative probably. No mother would keep her child at her side when she was contemplating such an action, would she?”

  “Hmm. Probably not. Anyway, it wasn’t until a day or so after her message that I was called into Gordon’s office and told that Susan had killed herself and that the autopsy had failed to replicate our results. He pulled her chart up on our computer and her results were negative, just like at the autopsy. They said I read the wrong chart and gave her somebody else’s test results.”

  Matt chimed in. “Normally, none of us would have believed that Sarah would make a mistake like that, she was always very careful with her clients and drove some of us nuts checking and cross-checking our results.”