The Clincher

by Lisa Preston

  The old man was another can of beans from the young fellows. He was good and sure with his nippers and rasp and had an eye that put away need for trim gauges and hoof levels. I don’t use them either, mind. I use the horse’s foot as my guide. But the young guys just starting out like ’em. Experience doesn’t like gadgets. Pastern angles flowed right into the hoof when the old-timer was done and he had all the old cowboy ways that made me remember being a six-year-old, watching the ranch shoer while I played at shoeing, a rasp in my chubby little hands.

  The old shoer where Daddy had been working kept fresh nails in one pants cuff and wrung-off points in the other, which is exactly how this grizzled guy did it here for the crowd. The young buck would likely never, never reach the old man’s level of proficiency. I would try.

  For a teacher, the old man wasn’t much for talking. He grinned some questions over to me. One owner wanted us shoers’ thoughts on a vet putting a horse with a mild lameness on enough bute to make a rideable mount.

  “Some vets would,” I allowed. I saw Nichol easing into the back of the crowd, his piece of talking over and done with.

  “What would you do?” someone else in the audience asked me.

  “I think pain is what tells us to try something else. Maybe a horse who’s hurting needs to rest but if we mask that pain, he doesn’t know to settle down.”

  The old shoer liked my advice, but also clearly enjoyed that I was willing to buck a vet’s recommendation. This wasn’t lost on Nichol as we headed back to Cowdry.

  “Vets masking pain to make a horse rideable? You boned me,” he said, grinning like the fool I expect he was raised to be.

  Boned him? In his dreams.

  We talked horses and horse feet and trucks and everything. We talked about Patsy-Lynn. We gabbed the whole ride home, and the talking helped me think. I shared what the sheriff’s Suit Fellow told me at the funeral reception, that Patsy-Lynn’s death wasn’t accidental.

  Nichol thought out loud. “The police think there was a fight inside the garage?”

  My sigh was a quarter-miler, but Nichol had the Expedition going well over seventy. “At first,” I said, “I thought it was an accident. When I realized they thought—”

  But I couldn’t say it, that in the beginning, the police seemed to think I’d had something to do with it.

  Finally, I said, “Well, I think folks want it over, cleared up and done with. The sheriff’s men seem to be looking at just about everybody in town, asking everyone—her husband and the banker and Guy included—to give interviews or fingerprints or blood samples. And apparently, the old man refused to provide a blood sample.”

  “That’s not good,” Nichol said. “Damning. Pretty typical, I think, for a woman murdered in her own home to actually not be the victim of a stranger but rather her, oh, family.”

  “Her husband. You can say it. I know.” I fixed my gaze straight down the interstate.

  Nichol rubbed his jaw and we drove in an uneasy silence.

  Finally, Nichol wanted to know, “Did they ask you for a blood sample?”

  I nodded, but got distracted from asking him the same question when he fired again right away.

  “Did they ask you anything unusual?” Cinnamon scent filtered toward me.

  “Such as?”

  “Something that only you would know?”

  “They wanted to know about a truck that was heading up Oldham lane as I was leaving that afternoon.”

  “Someone was going to the Flying Cross just as you left the day she died?” Nichol’s voice held wonder.

  “Oh, good for you,” I said, to let him know he wasn’t breaking new legal theory here.

  “Harper Junior?” Nichol suggested.

  “Nah, he was on the road. The detective said something about surveillance cameras and receipts to back that up.”

  “Makes sense that they could get all that, but have they yet?”

  My mind was back in the Harper garage, the day of the funeral, deputies asking me about the truck I’d passed when I left the Flying Cross the day Patsy-Lynn died.

  In my mind, I was driving Ol’ Blue on Oldham lane right after I last shod for Patsy-Lynn. The dude on foot with the leather cowboy hat had his back to me once I passed him. Before that, the big, dark American truck—

  I remembered the dually truck going around the man on foot, coming at me.

  “What are you thinking?” Nichol asked.

  I squinted, unable to remember the driver, but still annoyed with the way he took his share of lane out of the middle of the road, making me scoot my rig to the shoulder. I could hear it well, the way the engine—a gasoline engine—revved, spun down as the clutch went in, and revved again in the next gear.

  Nichol was looking at me and I stared back ’til he kept his eyes on the road better.

  In a few miles he let out a breath and said, “It sounds like the sheriff’s department is interested in this guy you’re living with.”

  “I’m not really living with him. I rent there.” Man, I felt like a traitor.

  Nichol wasn’t going to let it lie. “How carefully did you vet your landlord? What do you know about him?”

  “I know that the person driving that truck up to the Harper’s the afternoon Patsy-Lynn died wasn’t Guy. And the dude walking up at the same time, that had to be Manny. Manny Smith. Manuel. Patsy-Lynn thought he stole from her. Ted, Patsy-Lynn’s barn-help, didn’t seem to think so.”

  “Ted was at the Flying Cross with her when you left?”

  I nodded. “And I have the impression that Ted and Manny are more than a little friendly.”

  My nod kept up with Nichol’s next observation.

  “I imagine the police are looking at Ted pretty hard.”

  Chapter 22

  MY MONDAY STARTED EARLY. FIRST THING, I pulled the jeans out from under my garage cot and studied on the vials in the baggie I’d swiped from Patsy-Lynn’s tack room. The drug labels were partly missing. Only the letters sterone enantitate remained.

  Before climbing into my clothes, I threw my wool blanket on the cold concrete garage floor and crunched a half-thousand each push-ups and sit-ups. A shoer needs core strength, it’s not all in the arms and thighs. When I was fourteen, my stomach looked like a humongous beach ball. Now it’s ribs and abs.

  Guy was gone. Must be an early day at the Cascade if he beat me out of the house. He’d made himself scarce when I got back last evening, still pouting about me going to Corvallis with Nichol.

  I pulled a dining chair over to Guy’s kitchen computer. His internet connection was slow as Christmas, but I had to get this drug thing figured out and dealt with, sure enough. I typed in the part of the drug name left on the vial’s ripped labels. Didn’t like the answer that came up, but didn’t have time to keep clicking because someone whipped a diesel rig up and honked outside. I pushed the baggie in my pocket and went to the door, saw Dixon Talbot in the driver’s seat, and was not at all interested in inviting him in. I tugged on my Blundstones and went to kick the day in the teeth.

  “Called you the other night,” Talbot said. “Guess you were at Weatherby’s. Talked to your little houseboy.”

  Well, here’s an idea to grab hold of, I thought, feeling a surly coming on. Guy’s taller than you by a long shot, don’t call him little. And the Friday night I was at Weatherby’s? Talbot knew where I was and I knew where he wasn’t. “Called the house here, huh? How’d you get my number?” The landline was listed under Guy’s name in the phonebook.

  “From one of your . . .” He looked away and shrugged. “One of your cards.”

  I eyed him and took a step back, considering the whole picture. Could it have been Talbot’s rig coming to the Flying Cross when I left Patsy-Lynn? I walked right to his driver’s window and peeked.

  Definitely stick shift. Talbot raised his eyebrows, calm enough. Maybe he’d thought I was looking to see if he had a bunch of my business cards on the truck seat.

  Talbot launched into the next b
one he had to pick. “You were sniffing around the Solquist place.”

  I parted my lips and paused, needing time before my mouth faucet leaked. “I was, uh . . .” I thought some more, fast as I could. “I was curious about their missing horse. I didn’t even know you were their shoer.”

  Was he? Had he been the Harpers’ former shoer, too?

  When Patsy-Lynn hired me, I hadn’t given any thought to who was her shoer before me. I should have. But isn’t a year a long time to wait if you’re going to chew someone out for stealing your client? And getting fired isn’t exactly a motive for murder either.

  Talbot shook his head. “You just don’t go sniffing around horse owners like that.”

  This noise from a man who was probably trying to ruin me. I wondered if he’d deny tearing down my business cards, too. Was that why he was so tetchy about me being around the Solquists’ little piece of land? I was about to point out a few things when he took to accusing me some more.

  “You undercut us.”

  “Huh?”

  Talbot pointed a finger at me, not quite like we were fixing to battle, but near enough. “You came into town, shoeing at a low rate. You undercut us established shoers.”

  “I, I . . .” I had. Strictly speaking, I had started on the cheap side, but I’d been new to the area and still fairly new to shoeing and . . . “I didn’t mean to.”

  He barked a laugh making that giant Adam’s apple bounce. “How do you not mean to do something like that?”

  “I really didn’t mean to undercut. I started where I did because it seemed like the right thing to do. I mean, gosh.”

  “Gosh?” he mimicked, as if not cursing somehow made me laughable. Fact is, I can out-mouth a rude trucker, but I like to believe I’ve moved beyond that.

  “Last week,” Talbot said, “I happened to give Winston Harper’s boy a lift. He told me he might be looking for a new shoer. Know what I said?”

  I shook my head, on account of my crystal ball being broke and all.

  “I said shopping shoers wasn’t good for owners, horses, or shoers. I shoe for the Frichtlers now, but I knew when I took the account that they were already shopping around, I wasn’t taking food off another shoer’s table.”

  “I never took anything from your table. I never took anything. I’m just trying to make it. And I was never trying to work for the Solquists. I didn’t even know who shod for them. Is it you?”

  Talbot glared and still wouldn’t give me an answer. “You know I shod for Weatherby and Schram.”

  Schram sort of followed after I’d done the short-notice call-out for Weatherby, not my fault.

  “I was new when I came to Cowdry,” I explained, trying to get Talbot back to his other complaint. “That’s why I started a little on the low end when I came here.”

  I made it sound like an apology and I did feel humble about it now. Really, I hadn’t meant to step on anyone’s toes, but looking back from where we stood, Dixon Talbot was right. I should not have underpriced my work. I’d been wrong. “I’m sorry.”

  Couldn’t this go both ways? Was he sorry for throwing away my business cards? For ripping off my hood ornament? Why couldn’t I ask him? And what really mattered here? I cleared my throat and stood tall. “Did you bust up the vet’s office with a rounding hammer? Leave it there?”

  Talbot’s snort was so hard and sudden, spit flew. “That’s ridiculous. My rounding hammer cost over two hundred dollars. My tools are my livelihood.”

  “Me, too.” I should have asked Deputy Paulden to let me study the hammer left at the vet’s office. I could have figured out if it was a cheapie, like the kind that comes in a lay kit, or the real deal, like a working shoer would own. The nippers that come in those forty-dollar kits aren’t worth using as a doorstop. My nippers alone cost well over a hundred bucks.

  “I got no beef with that guy who replaced Doc Vass,” Talbot said as he got back in his truck. He spun out.

  Squeezing time between clients to go and ask Nichol the real question became my priority. I tended to Charley and Red and got gone.

  * * *

  Looking sharp with my glued-on anvil hood ornament, I parked Ol’Blue at the barn of my first client, one of those book-smarty-pants types who reads lots of little things, but does hardly a handful. I’d shod for him last fall and thought his hoofpick needed to get out of the tack room. He’d not called me out to work on his horse again ’til last week. I suspected he’d pulled the shoes for winter and not had a proper barefoot trim put on. His horse’s feet were struggling, grown out of what I reckon were his first shoes of the year and maybe his first hoof picking, too. The earth side of those feet had black goo and a rude stench. I trimmed away all the necrotic hoof, made gentle mention of cleaning up the horse’s bedroom, and heard some unnecessary advice.

  “Paring the frog down too much can make a horse thrushy.”

  Someone had been reading his junior 4-H pamphlets. Not enough, obviously, but he’d read the part that would make the thrush my fault. His horse lived in mud and manure up to its eyeballs. Sloppy conditions, that’s the main cause of soft, smelly feet.

  And sloppy thinking’s been the cause of every bit of trouble I ever had, so I’d better locate a noodle wrench and tighten up my noodle. I tried to get this owner thinking about cleaning up his horse’s house, then turned my mind back to cleaning up my world as I took the client’s check—he didn’t want to schedule the next appointment—and moved out. There were things to consider.

  Spartacus’s laminitis came on so suddenly, putting him in such pain when his front feet started dying right out from under him. Sure, it can happen for no great reason, but generally a body can point a finger at something like overfeeding. I thought about stuff that other people knew, little things. A lot of folks knew a bit about what’s going on in Cowdry, I decided, including me. At my next shoeing appointment, I was quiet and fast and got paid by check.

  Instead of an early lunch, I went to the bank and made a deposit, mostly so I could pause at Abby’s daddy’s office door to ask things that were none of my business.

  Keith Langston didn’t seem to find it too awful strange, my questions about this restaurant proposal of Guy’s and how that notion got on with the Harpers.

  “I think his son has some heartache with the idea,” Langston said. “Maybe feels his father’s spreading himself too thin, so we’ll see what Harper wants to do now.” He confirmed that he and Guy and Harper had been meeting on the restaurant deal at the old pizza place the day Patsy-Lynn died, and they were fixing to meet again.

  “Is Abby still sick?” I asked.

  “So she says.” Clearly, Keith Langston didn’t believe his little girl.

  * * *

  On my way to the vet’s office, I passed the blooming apple trees at the edge of town. Our winters aren’t cold enough—the tree planters from fifty years ago came to find out—to force much fruit from an apple tree. All over left-central Oregon are well-intentioned trees that don’t bear well, aren’t productive. It’s sort of sad and sweet at the same time. Plants, both natural and introduced, along with history, tell the tale of a land. The landscaping trees in front of Nichol’s brick office were English hawthorns standing tall against native sword and deer ferns.

  The frizzy-headed gal at the vet’s front counter, she was a transplant, introduced, I bet, from California. Too sun-streaked and tan. I thought back on that clerk at the sheriff’s office. With her dark eyes and plain hair, she might be at least part homegrown.

  “Do you need to make an appointment to see the veterinarian?” Frizzy asked, seeing I had no critter with me. But Nichol came out, walking a woman and her poodle to the door, and he waved me back to the treatment room.

  I thought of Nichol as an introduced plant too, then I realized it’s Guy who’s all interested in plants and horticulture. Seems Guy’s interest had rubbed off on me. I wasn’t even thinking about what kind of horse someone would be.

  Nichol raised his eyebrows, while
he waited for me to speak, as if my noodle was loose. I got it tightened up and jumped in. “Where would a body, you know, pass off some steroids and such?”

  His eyeballs about came out of their sockets.

  “You want steroids?”

  “No, looking to get shed of some.”

  “What are you talking about?’ Nichol folded his arms over his chest, facing me.

  “Forget I mentioned it,” I said.

  “Do you want me to forget my business was broken into?” He waved an arm around the office. “This office wasn’t just vandalized. Stuff was stolen.”

  “Really? Like what?”

  “Like drugs.”

  “Oh,” I said, “Oh, shit. Oops. I mean, oh—”

  “Can you be more articulate?”

  Obviously not. What’s the matter with him anyways? Can’t he see this is as articulate as I get when I find out drugs were stolen from the vet’s office and there’s some in my pocket? I reached into my jeans and yanked out the baggie of vials.

  “Were these them?”

  Nichol leaned forward and took the baggie, eyeing me and it with equal care. “Could be, but the lot number is scraped off.”

  “Why would the lot number be scraped off?” Maybe I’m not such a hot horseshoeing detective. “To make it harder to trace?”

  Nichol nodded.

  “Part of the drug name’s scraped off, too,” I said.

  “But there’s enough there for me to know it’s testosterone. And if the person in possession plans to use the contents, there’s no reason to leave part of the name on the vials. It would actually be a liability since these are a controlled substance.”

  “So why would someone leave part of the name on?”

  “To prove the contents, in case you wanted to sell the drugs.” Nichol cleared his throat hard. “Where’d you get these?”

  “From the Harpers’ tack room, the day we were there for Spartacus’s laminitis.”

  He whistled. “We saw a little ’roid rage then, I think.”