One Hoof In The Grave [Carriage Driving 02]

by Carolyn McSparren

  He moved aside so that Don Qui and I could get past him.

  “Sorry, I left my big red nose at home.”

  “Kept the big shoes, I see.”

  “Geoff,” Peggy said from behind me. “I am so glad to see you. We have so much to tell you. Someone tried to run us off the road on our way home yesterday. I think they were trying to kill us.”

  While I washed Don Qui down with tepid water, Geoff lounged against Heinzie’s stall door and listened to Peggy’s story more or less politely.

  “Peggy,” he said, “There’s a bunch of good ole boys who think running a big horse trailer off the road is great sport. You have nothing to show it was personal.”

  “Not personal? How could it not be personal? There’s a sign on the back of the trailer that reads ‘Caution, Horses’ in big letters with the name of the farm.”

  “Probably wouldn’t have mattered to Bubba if you’d been hauling Durocs or Black Angus. Or chickens. Think what fun they’d have had if you’d decanted a couple of thousand Rhode Island Reds on the highway.”

  “They didn’t wait around to see if we went over,” I said quietly. Geoff always picked up on the first sign of female hysteria. “And Bubba usually drives a pickup, not a big, shiny SUV with mud covering the license plate.”

  “The only mud there was on it, by the way,” Peggy chimed in.

  “So say that they were actually out to get you. Why? You might be hurt, but you have airbags.”

  “The horses don’t,” I said. “And airbags wouldn’t have helped much if we’d flipped over on our side.”

  “Airbags that didn’t deploy because we kept going and didn’t hit anything,” Peggy said.

  “The horses might have been killed or so badly wounded we’d have had to put them down.” I shuddered. I’ve never had to do that, but on long trips, I keep not only an extensive first aid kit for horses, but syringes of Acepromazine to sedate an injured horse and enough barbiturate to kill one. And a gun in case the drugs take too long.

  “You say horse people will do anything to avoid hurting horses, so who do you know who’d risk the horses to get at you?” Geoff asked.

  “Maybe after you drive a steel stake through somebody, hurting horses isn’t such a whopping leap,” I said.

  “And preferable to spending the rest of your life in jail,” Peggy added.

  “If all this is true,” Geoff said, “Then someone thinks you either saw something or know something dangerous. What?”

  I led Don Qui to his stall and tossed him some extra hay. “I have no idea. I have to get these guys fed. Can we talk later? Amos said you were spending the night at the Hamilton Inn.”

  “And having dinner at Mama’s. How ‘bout both of you join me?” Mama’s was one of Mossy Creek’s excellent restaurants. Geoff had learned to like it on his last visit to Mossy Creek to clear up my father’s death.

  The last thing I wanted was to have to clean up and stay awake during dinner, but the food would be good, and I wouldn’t have to cook it or clean up after it, a winning combination in my book. We agreed. I’d had fun at our last dinner together in Bigelow before Geoff up and bailed on me. Tonight we would go back to our favorite topic for dinner conversation—murder. And my involvement in it.

  “I’m going to help Merry feed and turn out,” Peggy said. “You go on down and check in to your hotel. Meet you for dinner sevenish?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “I’ll walk you to your car,” Peggy said and slipped her hand under his arm.

  Uh-oh. She wanted to talk. Privately.

  Chapter 14

  Peggy

  Peggy hooked her arm through Geoff’s as they crossed the gravel parking lot to his car. “I’m certain the SUV thing was intentional.”

  “What’s Merry not telling me?” Geoff asked. He leaned against the hood of his Crown Vic, carefully avoiding the antenna farm that announced he was driving an unmarked police car.

  Peggy shook her head. “I don’t think she’s holding anything back on purpose. Maybe she glimpsed somebody or something in the woods after she found Raleigh’s body.”

  “Hell, anybody would feel unseen eyes on them in an open field sitting beside a corpse. No ESP required.”

  “What about Raleigh’s family?” Peggy asked. “Surely they’re more viable suspects.”

  He shrugged. “Not a well-liked man, Mr. Raleigh. His nearest were not his dearest, nor was he theirs. Motive, however, is the least important part of a murder. Cops don’t have to prove motive if they have forensic evidence, which in this case, they don’t.”

  “But don’t juries want to know why somebody got offed?”

  Geoff laughed and shook his head. “Offed? You been watching too many cop shows, Pretty Peggy. See y’all at dinner.”

  Peggy hugged herself against the chill breeze that always arose on top of Hiram’s hill in the late afternoon. She stared after Geoff as he negotiated the turn and disappeared. Geoff hadn’t said as much, but officially, at any rate, that meant Merry was still a suspect.

  Merry finished filling the water trough by the pasture gate, ran her hands down her back and walked over to Peggy. “I might need to spend the night here in case somebody tries to hurt the horses.” She walked over to the stack of logs and roof trusses at the corner outside the pasture. They were supposed to be made into her log house.

  Eventually.

  “I’m sick of sleeping on that cot in the clients’ lounge, when I have to stay here at night,” Merry said. “Why can’t they finish my house so that I can sleep in a real bed? At the rate they’re going, I won’t move in until after Christmas.”

  Peggy knew how much Merry wanted to move into her new cabin, but she would miss having her in the apartment downstairs. She didn’t have to sabotage the construction, however. The contractor was doing a great job of missing deadlines on his own.

  ‘You’ll be moved in by Labor Day,” she said and patted Merry’s shoulder. She was surprised at how tense her muscles felt. “It’s the site prep, the gravel, the grading, the footings and slab and so forth that take the time. All the rain we had in March didn’t help either.”

  Peggy pulled her to her feet. “Come on. You’ll feel better after a shower and a good dinner.” As they walked to their vehicles, Peggy said, “Sooner or later you’re going to have to talk to Geoff. Might as well be tonight. As to the horses, where you are is where the trouble will come, if it comes. The horses should be all right. They are every night. You are safer in your apartment.”

  “Every night doesn’t follow a murder. Which at least one lawman thinks I probably committed.”

  “Geoff doesn’t really think you killed anyone. He’s trying to be—I don’t know—circumspect. You know he likes you.”

  “I thought so for a while. Now that I’m involved in another murder, he’s treating me like just another suspect.”

  “Only until he finds the killer.”

  If he was keeping Merry at arm’s-length again, the way he had when he was investigating her father’s murder, he was just being silly. There was a limit as to how closely he adhered to the GBI regs about personal interaction with suspects and witnesses. Time Merry told him to stop being a stuffed-shirt and get a grip.

  Peggy would leave them after dinner to talk it out. “See you at home,” she said and drove off. In her rear view mirror she saw Merry climbing into her truck, sagging with exhaustion.

  Dammit, Peggy thought, as she whipped around a corner too fast. Life was too short to miss a chance at love. One day her newly-retired husband Ben had been digging in his flowerbeds, enjoying their new home in Mossy Creek. The next he was dead, and she’d never stop missing him, wishing they’d had longer.

  Once they found one another, she and Dick Fitzgibbons had seized the day. Why couldn’t Geoff and Merry?

  Neither of them had a significant other. Well, Merry didn’t. Geoff might have a dozen girlfriends in Atlanta pining for him. They’d both had bad first marriages. These days, near
ly everybody had at least one. Family? Geoff had no children. Merry had her daughter Allie, who never visited, not even at Christmas. She went skiing instead. Merry had joined Peggy’s family for Christmas dinner.

  Peggy’s daughter Marilou might be a control freak, but at least she was there and cared about her mother. And Peggy had a grandchild, her darling Josie.

  Christmas afternoon, Merry had spent alone with the horses. That’s where she always went when she was unhappy or lonely or upset. They didn’t talk back or ask questions.

  Merry couldn’t—or wouldn’t—leave her horses for long. Geoff was always working in Atlanta or elsewhere. Long distance relationships were tough. Both Merry and Geoff needed to rearrange their priorities. Both Peggy and Dick understood that.

  At some point Merry had learned to avoid risking her emotions. She wasn’t a physical coward, Lord knew, but she didn’t like getting her heart bruised. She preferred to act as though she didn’t feel emotional bruises, only physical ones. Responsible for the carriage accident that crushed her mother’s leg, Merry had simply stopped driving, even quit horses entirely for several years.

  She had distanced herself from her father after her mother divorced him, and only reconnected with him just before he died. She dumped her unfaithful husband. Geoff hadn’t exactly hurt her. He’d simply disconnected without explanation.

  In time Merry could overcome her fears. She had returned to horses, then to driving, made up with her father before his death, even forgave Vic. So there was a good chance she and Geoff could get back to where they were. She’d opened up Peggy’s world to horses. Peggy wanted to open Merry’s to a relationship with a real man.

  Ten minutes later, she pulled into her garage as Merry pulled in the driveway behind her. Her knees ached as she climbed the stairs to her back door.

  What the heck. Even a day as tough as this was more exhilarating than sitting in her recliner reading murder mysteries with four cats. The Mossy Creek Garden Club ladies still didn’t understand why her gardening had dropped by the wayside. She didn’t have the nerve to tell them that she’d never been all that fond of gardening in the first place. She preferred her manure straight from the horse.

  Chapter 15

  Monday evening

  Merry

  I’d managed to put off answering questions about Raleigh’s murder throughout dinner at Mama’s restaurant. Now, over coffee, I couldn’t stall any longer. “You’ve read my statement, you’ve asked me the same questions over and over, and neither one of us has learned a doggone thing,” I said. “Maybe someone was standing back in the woods watching when I found Raleigh, but all I can give you is a feeling.”

  “Sitting beside a corpse in the fog might generate weird feelings,” Geoff said. “Didn’t it occur to you that whoever killed him might be waiting to take you out as well?”

  “Why? I was no threat, and I didn’t see another loose stake. Surely if he’d brought a gun or a knife, he’d have used it on Raleigh. Can’t have been easy to kill a man with that stake, even if he was unconscious and lying on the ground right.”

  “Not that hard, actually.” Geoff pushed aside the plate containing the few remaining crumbs from his chocolate cake and picked up his coffee spoon. He stood it straight up with the bowl on the top. “The cervical vertebrae attach at the base of the skull.” He leaned over and poked the spot where my hair stopped growing at the nape of my neck.

  “Hey!” I jerked away.

  “There’s a groove right where the spinal cord rides under the skull. Not that hard to miss if you know what you’re doing. No bone in the way, just a straight shot into the brain.”

  “Thank you, Dr. McDreamy,” I said. “Does that mean that whoever did—that—had medical training?”

  “Luck or good research would work.”

  “The show grounds were crawling with medical people. Doctors with plenty of disposable income, some of them married to their nurses. Then there’s an on-site veterinarian, although she’s not big as a minute. And the EMTs, of course. I’m not sure they’d arrived yet.”

  “Every female equine vet has to be strong,” Geoff said.

  “She is,” Peggy said. “I’d kill to have her abs.”

  “Did any of those people have reason to get rid of Raleigh?” Geoff asked.

  “He may have offended them all at some point, but probably not badly enough to get himself stabbed,” I said.

  “Did he offend you?”

  “Absolutely, but if I stabbed every driver or groom who offended me, the sport of carriage driving would take a major hit.”

  Peggy had been listening to us without comment. Now she laid down her coffee spoon and asked, “Why was he out there at the crack of dawn with his four-in-hand? Isn’t that the big question?”

  “Warming them up,” Geoff asked.

  I shook my head. “Not that early. He wasn’t scheduled to drive his dressage test until late morning. The fog was so thick I couldn’t see his carriage and team until the horses nearly ran over me. Not the best atmosphere to warm up your horses. In the fog, he might have driven into the cable bounding the arena. That could have badly hurt his horses. So, how did someone know he’d be out there? I don’t see how killing him could have been premeditated. Wouldn’t the killer have brought a weapon to do the job? Using that stake was crazy.”

  “So you’re saying a stranger spotted him in the dressage arena driving his horses, knocked him off the box somehow, rolled him over on his face and jabbed a six inch stake into his brain?” Geoff rolled up his napkin and set it beside his plate. “I don’t think so.”

  “He must have arranged to meet someone,” Peggy said. “But why then and there? Wouldn’t it have been simpler to intercept whoever it was by the trailers or in the stable?”

  “Seems better to me,” Geoff said. “But what do I know?”

  “Not much,” I said.

  “Back off, little lady, or I’ll call Stan and tell him to arrest you on general principles.”

  “Fine with me, as long as you take over mucking and feeding and turning out the horses,” I said. “I could use the rest.”

  “I could probably handle the horses, but not that little hellion with the long ears.” He grinned at me. “What was all that about this afternoon?”

  “If the hellion is going to continue to eat my grass and feed, and require shots and worming and have the farrier trim his feet and such, he’s going to have to earn his living.”

  “As what? A Hit Donkey?”

  “He’s going to teach my young students to drive.”

  “You truly are crazy,” Geoff said with a shake of his head. “If you can’t hold him, how can they?”

  “You ought to see him with my granddaughter, Josie,” Peggy said. “The only thing I can figure is that he sees them as allies—just his size. He follows her and her friends around like a Labrador retriever. He even likes Li, Casey’s little girl. She’s too young to drive, of course, but he even endures having his ears pulled if Li’s doing the pulling.”

  “But you’re outside the size limit, apparently,” Geoff said, grinning at me. “And you have to do the training.”

  “We will do fine,” I said with much more assurance than I felt. “After his temper tantrum, he settled down and behaved like a normal equine.”

  “Bet he’ll misbehave just as badly tomorrow—or whenever you plan to drive him again.”

  “Put your money where your mouth is, G-man,” I said. “He may fuss, but I bet you he’ll give in quicker and behaves himself longer.”

  “Even odds? Five bucks?”

  “Five bucks.” I could afford to lose five bucks, and probably would, but I couldn’t let Geoff rag on Don Qui. He was a hellion, but he was my hellion. He’d come a long way since we started working with him in January.

  “Peggy can call the bet. If she agrees he’s better, I’ll give in gracefully,” Geoff said. “If you wind up in the emergency room, I win.”

  “You got it.”

  A
s our waitress poured our second cup of decaf, Peggy said she was exhausted. Before I could stop her, she asked Geoff to drive me home so we could linger over our coffee. If that wasn’t transparent, I don’t know what is.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said, and reached down to my purse.

  Geoff put his hand on my arm. “How about I buy you a brandy down at the Hamilton Inn and you can tell me in detail how Raleigh annoyed you.”

  I glared down at his hand, but by then Peggy was scooting out the door.

  Geoff lifted a finger for the check, but Earline shook her head, pointed at the door and mouthed, “On her tab.”

  He started to get out of his chair, then subsided. “So I owe you both another dinner.”

  “Not me, you don’t. Does that constitute a bribe within the meaning of the act?”

  “Probably. If I have to arrest Peggy for murder, her lawyer will no doubt bring it up.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  He blew out his breath. “No, it’s not. Nothing about this whole mess is funny. Why did everybody hate this guy, anyway?”

  Chapter 16

  Merry

  “I didn’t hate him. I loathed him,” I said as I slid into the booth in the bar at the Hamilton Inn. “Initially, I tried to put his nonsense down to alcohol or ego, but it was more than that. I finally came to the conclusion that he was so miserable that the only pleasure he got in life was to make everybody around him more miserable than he was.”

  “What did he have to be miserable about?” Geoff asked. He pushed my pony of B and B across the table. I took a sip and let the warmth sink down to my toes.

  I don’t drink often, but I have nothing against alcohol per se. Tonight, the liqueur was reaching places that hadn’t really been warm since I spotted Raleigh’s body. I could feel my toes uncurl.

  “You’d think he’d be the happiest man alive,” I said. “He was rich-rich, a mover and shaker in Georgia and beyond, had a beautiful wife, a brilliant daughter, a gorgeous house and barn, magnificent horses—everything a man could want. What’s that old saying? Everything turned to wormwood and ashes in his mouth. I have no clue why. He just got a kick out of screwing everybody’s life up.”