Don Qui took instant exception. He stood straight up on his hind legs, then plunged forward kicking as high as possible with his rear end. Startled, Geoff dropped the lines, and Don Qui took off at the donkey version of racing gallop with the lines flying behind. Merry took two hobbling steps after him before she gave up.
Geoff had run track in college and still ran to keep in shape, but the lines flying behind the donkey eluded his grasp when he reached for them.
Peggy stepped out in front of Don Qui with her arms up. “Whoa, dammit!”
As the donkey zigzagged to avoid her, Geoff caught one of the lines and hauled him around in a circle so tight he nearly fell over before he stopped. Donkey and man stood facing one another, both gasping from the exertion. Geoff turned to Merry, who stood in the center of the arena with both hands on her back and eyes tight against her obvious pain. Or the pain of losing the bet.
“So, who wins the bet?”
“Call it even,” Peggy said. “Could have been operator error.”
“Take your five dollars,” Merry said.
“Buy me a drink tonight and call it even,” Geoff said.
“I can’t drink with all the crap I’m taking.”
“Yeah, but I can.”
“We can’t quit yet,” Merry said. “He has to get it right first.”
That took a while. He had mastered going straight ahead, but seemed to have difficulty turning in either direction without bucking. Eventually, with Peggy holding the longe line and Geoff working the lines properly, he managed to circumvent the arena. Since it was eighty meters by forty, that was a creditable distance for a small creature.
By the time they finished, Merry stood in the center while Peggy and Geoff did the actual work. Everyone except Merry was drenched with perspiration, when she finally called a halt to the exercise.
“Remind me not to do this again,” Geoff said they walked into the stable.
“No good deed goes unpunished,” Peggy said. She looked at Merry. “You look a little gray around the gills. How badly do you hurt?”
“Bad enough. I need another dose of pain meds.”
“How’s your wrist?” Geoff asked.
“Not too bad. Feels as if I have fifty small paper cuts.”
“Eeew!” Peggy said. She put Don Qui on the wash rack, and she and Geoff stripped him of his harness.
He looked over at Merry, his face suddenly serious. “I got info from Atlanta over my cell on my way out here. The Governor’s fancy chums? One of them was Giles Raleigh. He owned a twenty per cent interest in the limited partnership that holds title to the other side of your mountain.”
Merry sank back against the wall. “God, no. I had no idea. The only one I’ve ever met, the one who tried to intimidate me into selling, is the governor’s pet Jack Russell terrier, Whitehead. Giles never mentioned it.”
“Do they still want to buy your place?” Geoff asked.
Peggy took the harness across to the tack room, washed the bit and hung it all up from its harness rack.
“Nobody’s bugged me about it for a long time. Once the water report about the arsenic in the ground water on that side of the hill came out, and the construction of high-dollar vacation homes went to hell in the recession, I assumed they’d given up the idea of developing it.”
“Or were hanging onto it until prices went back up,” Peggy said from the doorway of the harness room. “So what happens to Raleigh’s twenty per cent now?” She took Don Qui’s lead rope and led him into his stall.
“Haven’t seen the will yet,” Geoff said. “Merry, what say Peggy shows me how to get these guys fed and watered and bedded down. You drive home and get some rest.”
“Are you supposed to do chores for suspects?” she asked.
“She’s not a suspect. You are.”
“Okay, you got a deal.” She held up a hand at Peggy. “Yes, I can drive. I’m not totally spaced out. If you don’t mind, I’m going to nuke a diet meal and go to bed.”
“Do you want me to feed you, Geoff?” Peggy asked.
“I owe you a meal, Peggy, not the other way around. Give me a rain check. I’m meeting Amos Royden at the Hamilton Inn. I need to bounce some ideas off him.”
“Promise me you’ll stay home,” Peggy said to Merry. “Shall I spend the night out here?”
“With the pasture gate and all the doors secure, I think the horses should be okay. If we do get burgled, anything inanimate can be replaced.”
Geoff toted and fetched while Peggy fed and watered, then watched her drive down towards the road before he climbed back out of his Crown Vic.
He had come to know this place fairly well during the investigation into Hiram’s murder. He had thought at the time that with no one actually living on the place until Merry’s house was built, it needed better security. He locked tack, feed, and clients’ room in the stable, then shut the stable doors and chained them.
The big double doors to the old barn that Hiram had converted to his workshop were heavy, thick, and securely padlocked. A burglar would be most likely to go for the workshop. A junkie could fence power tools easily.
Finally he checked to be sure all the doors on Hiram’s white dually and trailer were locked.
Someone could break in—there was always a way in if you had the time, the tools, and the desire—but he hoped the average burglar would pass the place by for an easier target.
The willingness of Merry’s intruder to employ violence bothered him. He hadn’t hesitated to use a two by four on Merry and toss her into that cellar. He might have clubbed her across the skull and killed her. He hadn’t.
Geoff couldn’t be positive the incident on the highway had been more than road rage or drunken rednecks, but the bruise on Merry’s back didn’t lie.
Assuming the two incidents were connected, then connected to what?
The road down the hill lay in shadow, making it even more hair-raising a drive. He took his time. At the foot of the hill, he paused between the two big boulders that marked the entrance before he turned left to drive back to Mossy Creek.
He would suggest one simple, relatively inexpensive security measure to Merry. A steel farm gate with a keypad could easily be swung between those two boulders, and another with a padlock could be hung at the bottom of the old road around the curve.
A human being on foot could still slip past the gates and walk up the hill, but no cars or trucks could enter. No one could leave with anything heavier than a screwdriver. The gates could be opened in the morning for clients and construction crews, then locked at night after everyone left.
He’d talk to Peggy first thing in the morning. He figured Merry would take the suggestion better coming from her. Otherwise, she might decide he was interfering.
Which he was, but he’d be damned if anything was going to happen to either of those women on his watch.
Chapter 21
Peggy
In case Merry decided to sneak back to the farm as she’d done the previous night, Peggy parked behind Merry’s truck in the driveway. The two women certainly didn’t live in one another’s pockets, but during the year since Hiram’s death, and since Peggy now spent so many hours out at the farm, they’d slid into an easy symbiosis.
Peggy would truly miss Merry’s company after she moved to her new house out at Lackland Farm, but they’d still see one another. She felt a kinship with Merry she’d never attained with Marilou, her own daughter.
Normal, probably. Mothers wanted their children to life the lives they hoped to have lived themselves, but perfected in ways that they had not managed. Children wanted to live their own lives, however different the drummer they marched to.
Marilou wanted her mother not to make waves, to color within the lines, to be the utterly conventional woman she had never been and could never be. Her husband, Ben, had understood. He’d cheerfully baled her out when she’d been arrested in protest marches back in the sixties. God, she missed him.
Peggy’s discovery of
horses and her talent for driving had forced Marilou to admit that her mother was out of her control. It drove her nuts, which secretly pleased Peggy immensely.
Peggy saw the answering machine light blinking when she walked into the house, because Sherlock, fascinated by the blinking light, lay with his head on it. Three messages, two of which were from sales people. The third, however, was from her granddaughter Josie. Now, if there were only a way to speak straight to Josie without listening to Marilou.
There wasn’t, but eventually, Josie came on the line. “Gram, when can I come out and drive Don Qui?” She sounded wildly enthusiastic.
“Not for a while, baby. He’s a handful right now.”
“Not with me, he wouldn’t be. He loves me and Li.”
Actually, he did, but Peggy doubted that would translate into loving being put to a cart. She tried to explain to Josie without success.
“Then, can I come drive Golden? You could ride with me.” In the background, Peggy heard Marilou telling the child how busy they were with the end of the school year, etc., etc., etc.
“You’ll be coming out to the show on Saturday and we have the clinic on Sunday, but maybe . . .”
Marilou’s voice came on the line, “Moooother, we have Sunday school and church and dinner with the Bigelows. I want you to come to dinner too.”
“Tell Josie I said if not this weekend then after school next weekend. School’s almost out, so she can spend some time with me at the farm this summer.”
“It’s too dangerous . . .”
Peggy hung up on her, but gently. Peggy had been raised practically guilt free. She still couldn’t figure out what she’d done to screw up Marilou.
Peggy poured herself a glass of sherry and settled into her wing chair to watch the news. All four cats draped themselves on and around her, even before she located the remote.
The lead story was the bizarre death of one of Georgia’s wealthiest and most socially prominent businessmen. The script the newsman read from made the entire carriage driving weekend sound like a Roman orgy organized by Dionysians with too much money and too little morality. That most of them were old enough to need Viagra and estrogen for an orgy didn’t make it into the news.
Someone had leaked the incident with the animal rights banner and the bullhorn. So far, no organized animal rights group had taken credit for it, so it was either a splinter group or an individual.
Peggy closed her eyes and prayed they wouldn’t include the story of her dunking the carriage in the lake.
They didn’t. Marilou would have pitched a fit over that.
Since the media had been kept off the Tollivers’ property, they had to be content with aerial shots from their helicopters. Peggy realized that the thick pine forest grew right up to the edge of the road down to the pond and even closer to the southern and eastern edge of the dressage arena.
In the dense fog, the killer could have dispatched Raleigh, stepped back into the woods a few paces, then slipped around the far end of the arena and emerged among the trailers by the stable, unnoticed and unremarked.
Would a white face show among the pines like the Cheshire cat? Would light hair without a cap?
Both Dawn and Sarah Beth had blonde hair. Dawn was tan, but Sarah Beth’s skin was literally milk-white. In either case, simply turning away from the dressage arena to face into the trees would have rendered anyone standing there invisible.
Merry had sworn she’d seen no one. Someone didn’t believe that. Maybe they ought to hunt up a hypnotist to regress Merry to see if she could remember someone or something else.
Peggy laughed and scared Marple off her lap. The little cat sat at her feet and glowered before climbing back up and curling into a tight little ball again.
“As if,” Peggy said, stroking the soft fur. “I can just see Merry allowing herself to be hypnotized.” Something had to give, and quickly. Last night could have been deadly if the cellar hadn’t already been half filled with dirt and sand to cushion Merry’s fall, or if that snake had been a copperhead or water moccasin.
Come to that, one of Merry’s bullets might have ricocheted off the cellar wall and killed her.
Or the horses could have gotten out and been hurt.
Nope, Geoff was a good man and a great investigator, but he didn’t know either the horses or the horse people. Time to insinuate themselves into the investigation. They’d managed to catch Hiram’s killer. Granted, they’d almost gotten themselves killed in the process, but this time they’d be smarter.
But how? Peggy eased the newspaper from under Marple’s rear end, eliciting a grumble. She read the front page story of the murder. Nothing new. Then she checked the obituary page, which ran eight column inches on Raleigh’s accomplishments in business. She put it aside to go over later with Merry and Dick Fitzgibbons, who’d gone to high school with Raleigh.
The viewing was Tuesday evening in St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church down the road from Raleigh’s farm. The funeral was Wednesday morning at eleven, followed by interment in the adjacent cemetery. Followed, no doubt, by funeral baked meats for the chosen few invited back to Raleigh’s mansion afterwards.
Time to drag out the funeral dress she hadn’t worn since Hiram’s funeral. She doubted neither she nor Merry would receive an invitation to the reception after the funeral, but she doubted anybody would actually kick them out if they attended.
And eavesdropped on every interesting conversation they could.
Geoff would have a cat fit, but there wasn’t much he could do except arrest them ahead of time. If he found out they were going.
Chapter 22
Geoff
On his way to interview veterinarian Gwen Standish the following morning, Geoff stopped by Merry’s farm to make certain nothing new had happened during the night. He found Merry in the arena driving Heinzie, the giant Friesian, in the complicated pattern of an advanced dressage test. Don Qui stood quietly in the pasture, but didn’t take his eyes off his friend.
“That’s an improvement,” Geoff said, waving at Don Qui. “Last year that dumb donkey would have had to be in the arena trotting beside Heinzie or be screaming his lungs out.”
“It’s taken him a year to trust that Heinzie isn’t going to be kidnapped the instant his back is turned. I don’t know how I’m going to manage when I take Heinzie to a show.”
“You planning to do that any time soon?”
“Maybe next month, but I have to get Don Qui put to first.”
“Put to what? A wrecker?”
“You remember the cart for Very Small Equines I borrowed from the Tollivers?”
“The one stashed under the big marathon carriage?”
She nodded. “We’re going to haul it out, unfold it and hitch Don Qui up. Maybe this afternoon. Want to watch?”
“Absolutely. You need somebody to call the ambulance to pick up your remains. But I’m afraid I won’t get back in time. I’ve got actual interviewing to do.”
“Good luck, and I mean that sincerely. I’ll never be totally free of suspicion so long as nobody else has been convicted of the crime. Raleigh may have done with his death what he couldn’t do with his computer—compromise my livelihood. Who’ll hire a show manager who kills competitors?”
Her tone was light, but Geoff could tell how serious she was.
“Can I come up?” Geoff asked. She looked surprised, but nodded. He climbed up into the carriage. At her command Heinzie walked on.
“I have a suggestion,” he said. “You may not like it, but listen first.”
“Ooookay.”
He told her about the gate locks and Amos’s suggestion about the CCTV.
He expected ‘yes, but.’ Instead, she thought for a moment, then said, “The guys are coming after lunch to pour the concrete slab for my house. Finally. I’ll bet they’d set some heavy posts at the gates in the leftover concrete. I’m not so sure I can afford the CCTV.”
“Think about it. Now, how do you stop this thing?”
Gwen Standish ran her equine practice out of a metal office building. Several paddocks separated by white board fences carved the property into small paddocks. Two were occupied by bay horses. In the parking lot stood a white panel van with ‘Standish D.V.M.’ on its side plus a couple of pickups.
Inside, Geoff found a small reception area manned by a tubby young woman wearing scrubs printed with pink unicorns. She smiled up at him, revealing perfect teeth that only good orthodonture or good genes could create, and a single dimple on the left side of her mouth. She had a pretty face surrounded by fluffy hair nearly the color of the unicorns. She wore a plain wedding band, so some man appreciated her voluptuous body and good nature.
The nametag on her desk read Meghan Farnham, Veterinary Technician. “Oh, hey,” she said, after she read the card he handed her. “Gwen’s expecting you. She said to come on back.” She pointed to a metal door beside her desk.
Inside he found that the working part of the small clinic looked remarkably well-outfitted with computer terminals and equipment he couldn’t identify, but that appeared new—no dings or scratches—and state-of-the-art. Off to one side was a well-equipped dispensary with a row of locked cabinets above. That must be where the legend drugs were kept.
Through a big interior window he saw a full surgical theatre with a tilt table which he guessed had to be large enough to rotate a horse.
In the center of the examining area, a gray mare stood patiently while the woman, who must be Gwen Standish, ran an ultrasound device over the horse’s abdomen. She glanced over her shoulder at him and gave him a ‘one minute’ sign.
Raleigh’s barn manger Brock hadn’t been kidding when he said Gwen Standish wasn’t as big as a minute. He guessed she was under five feet tall. Although there wasn’t an excess ounce of flesh on her body, ropy muscles stood out in her arms and shoulders.
One Hoof In The Grave [Carriage Driving 02] Page 14
