Behind the Bonehouse

by Sally Wright

  BEHIND THE BONEHOUSE

  by

  Sally Wright

  Copyright © 2016 Sally Wright

  All rights reserved.

  Print Edition ISBN: 978-0-9827801-5-2

  Print and eBook layout by eBooks By Barb for booknook.biz

  Because of Frank’s grasp of chemical engineering,

  and Caroline’s eleventh-hour idea,

  and Rod Morris’s experienced editing

  it became a better book.

  LIST OF CHARACTERS

  Benoit, Camille – French woman; friend of Jack Freeman; painting restorer; member French Resistance in WWII

  Buckout, Frank – Woodford County Kentucky Coroner

  Cathcart, Terence – IRS investigator

  D’Amato, Frankie – stable worker; enemy of Buddy Jones

  Eriksen, Vincent – janitor at Equine Pharmaceuticals

  Franklin, Booker – (Charles); founder, Blue Grass Horse Vans; Spencer, Richard and Martha Franklin’s father

  Franklin, Spencer – VP Manufacturing Blue Grass Horse Vans; Jo and Alan Grant’s friend

  Franklin, Richard – Spencer’s brother; President Blue Grass Horse Vans

  Franklin, Martha – Spencer’s sister; VP Blue Grass Horse Vans

  Franklin, Alice – Booker’s dead wife; childrens’ mother

  Freeman, Jack – former OSS member; landscape designer; friend of Jo and Alan Grant

  Freeman, David – Jack’s father; escaped Russia 1918; physician

  Freeman, Eloise – Jack’s mother; injured in escape from Russia; former pianist

  Grant, Tom – Jo Grant Munro’s dead brother; former OSS member; Alan Munro’s friend

  Hardgrave, Kevin – lab technician, Equine Pharmaceuticals

  Harrison, Bob – vet, pathologist; founder Equine Pharmaceuticals

  Harrison, Brad – Bob’s son; Accounting Manager, Equine Pharmaceuticals

  Honeycutt, Garner – Bob Harrison and Alan Munro’s attorney

  Jones, Buddy – Breeding Manager at Mercer Tate’s farm; friend of Jo and Alan Munro

  Jones, Becky – Buddy’s wife

  Lawrence, Art – equine supply distributor in Canada

  Lebel, Jean Claude – WWII French Resistance leader killed by a traitor in Tours during WWII

  Miller, Annette – Equine Pharmaceuticals lab secretary

  Miller, Mack – well known Thoroughbred trainer

  Morgan, Butch – Production Manager, Equine Pharmaceuticals

  Morgan, Frannie – Butch’s wife; insurance company manager

  Munro, Alan – VP Science and Technology Equine Pharmaceuticals; Jo Grant Munro’s husband; OSS member during WWII

  Munro, Jo – Jo Grant Munro; architect; co-owner broodmare care business with her uncle Toss Watkins; mother of Ross Munro; sister of Tom Grant

  Munro, Ross – Jo and Alan’s son

  Nagy, Jean – lab technician, Equine Pharmaceuticals

  Nevilleson, Elinor – neighbor of Carl Seeger

  Peabody, Earl – Woodford County Sheriff (also called Stump)

  Peabody, Cassie – Earl’s wife

  Phelps, Pete – Woodford County Deputy under Earl Peabody

  Reynard, Henri – member French Resistance in Tours during WWII

  Russell, Ridgeway – Booker Franklin’s attorney

  Seeger, Carl – Laboratory Director, Equine Pharmaceuticals

  Seeger, Jane – Carl’s wife; librarian at University of Kentucky

  Shafer, Virgil – farmer who calls Alan to his farm

  Smalls, Charlie – groom at Claiborne Farms; Esther Wilkes’s twin brother

  Smith, Doug – Equine Pharmaceuticals employee in packaging department

  Tate, Mercer – owner of stud farm where Buddy Jones works

  Thompson, Cecil – laboratory supply distributor

  Trasker, Mertie Mae – finds Booker Franklin in Midway

  Treeter, Mary – Booker Franklin’s part time housekeeper

  Watkins, Toss – Jo’s uncle; partner in broodmare care farm

  Wilkes, Esther – Carl and Jane Seeger’s part time housekeeper

  Zachman, Greg – Fisher Scientific salesman

  THE GATE

  When I was lying in the hospital three months or so ago, after the boys and their children had gone home, Alan came back and kissed my forehead, and said, “It’s time you wrote it down.” He handed me a spiral notebook. Which I set on the bedside table without saying a word.

  I didn’t have to ask what he meant. Even after I’d finished writing Breeding Ground, when I wanted to tell a whole lot more of what we’ve watched here in horse country, this memory wasn’t one I could touch. And what you won’t look at festers, especially since I’d been putting off lancing it for a good many years with conscious intent.

  Once I got home, and got stronger again, I got busy with every other part of my life. Till one night I dreamt about the river, and woke up sick and sweating, and it came to me, the way it always has, when I’ve made a decision in my subconscious mind, that the time had come to get it done.

  It started thirty-two years ago, months before the wounding in the river, when the Woodford County Sheriff Alan and I saw as a friend stood right here on the family farm saying words that tore our lives asunder without looking us in the eye.

  It’d grown out of something we’ve all had happen—lies getting told about you by someone with implacable intent. Malicious intent, in this case, because it was no misunderstanding. It was someone setting out to twist the truth toward his own perverse purpose. It was his word and deeds against ours, which has always been part of living in this world, and will be till the last of us gets over being human.

  I’d just turned thirty-four when it happened, and I didn’t have the experience then to put it in perspective. I need to try now, while I still can, because the disease that’s started eating into me makes delay a kind of denial.

  I’ll describe what happened like a novel, the way I did in Breeding Ground, slipping myself in like any other character, writing scenes I wasn’t part of from interviews and supposition. I’ll put in excerpts from my journal too, because they show what it was like from one minute to the next.

  But if I can’t convey what work means to both of us, the rest won’t make much sense. How it’s more a cause and a calling, for Alan and me—and Spencer, too, who’s still our best friend today. But then those who actually love what they do have been given one of life’s great gifts.

  And yet work led directly to the death that bred the danger we faced. The stress that comes from outside and in. The expectations and ambition. The greed and pride that flesh is heir to compounded in one unsatisfied soul, in this case in an equine lab that brought out the best and the worst.

  I’ll have to talk about 1963, a year before the murder, and tell more about equine medicine than I ever imagined I would. I’ve got to explain what Jack and Spencer faced in their separate worlds (especially Spencer whose life had pinned him inside himself nearly as efficiently as ours). Because they both noticed what I couldn’t, and helped make the way through.

  But when worry had us on the run, when I was caring for our first son, without knowing hardly anything about how to do it well, there was still peace in quiet moments when my mind would finally wander away from it, even if my throat stayed tight and my heart seemed to rattle my bones. Sometimes it came when I worked on an architectural plan for one of my historic restoration projects. Sometimes it came when I tended the broodmares Uncle Toss and I boarded on the farm, feeding and brushing and filling their buckets. Mostly it settled in the center of my soul when I rode Sam, or laid my head on his shoulder, or kissed the side of his chestnut chin, or patted Emmy, our big boxer-mutt, and watched them both w
hen they faced their own pain with patience and quiet good will.

  That’s the peace I understood. There was more, thank God, beyond human understanding I still can’t begin to describe to someone who hasn’t been taken up short by meeting it face-to-face.

  Jo Grant Munro

  December 10, 1996

  Rolling Ridge Farm

  McCowans Ferry Road

  Versailles, Kentucky

  1 9 6 3

  CHAPTER ONE

  Wednesday, July 3rd, 1963

  It was five in the morning, and Alan Munro was alone, again, in the lab at Equine Pharmaceuticals. He’d just looked at the notes in the formulation notebook Carl Seeger, Equine’s lab director, had entered the day before, and he tossed a red lab crayon on his desk with a look of deep disgust. He rubbed his eyes with both hands, and leaned back in his chair—then pushed himself up and limped, slightly, less the longer he walked, to the research corner in the back of the plant.

  He’d converted a fifty-four gallon drum into a mixing tank they could use to develop the proper methods for converting a beaker-size experimental batch of his new horse de-wormer paste into an intermediate batch, before they moved to a commercial size tank.

  This latest mixture was way too thin, and the solids hadn’t properly dispersed in the methylcellulose, and as Alan read the batch sheet he muttered words he’d almost never used since he’d come home from World War II.

  At 8:35 Alan walked into the main lab and asked Carl Seeger if he could speak to him for a minute.

  Carl was weighing white powder on a double pan balance, and he didn’t look up before he’d slid the powder off one pan into a large glass beaker and replaced the brass weights from the other in their wooden rack. “I’m busy right now, Alan. I should be free in an hour or so.” He spoke calmly and quietly, his thin mouth tucked under a wispy mustache, his pale brown eyebrows pulled down in concentration, half-hiding his small hazel eyes.

  “It’s important, Carl. We need to go out to the plant. You need to see the problems we’re having with the de-wormer formulation.”

  “Alan, I’m the laboratory director. I’m not part of the production team. My work is in the lab.” He looked up at Alan then, who was half a foot taller, and smiled for a second, before reaching for a black-lidded bottle.

  Alan Munro didn’t answer right away. He saw the lab secretary back by his office look up from her typing, and the two lab techs at the bench on his right pause and wait for him to speak. “I’d like you to join me in my office.”

  Carl laid a thin metal mixing spatula on the black stone bench top, then clipped a pen in the pocket of his clean white lab coat before he followed Alan into Alan’s office at the front end of the lab and waited for him to close the door. “I don’t appreciate being talked down to. I have a degree in chemistry, and I direct the lab, and I’ve been here longer than you.”

  “This is not a matter of who has what title, Carl, it’s—”

  “Then what is this about?”

  “Our job, all of us together, is to produce excellent equine medications that benefit horses and their owners. That requires outstanding formulations, plus the ability to scale them up to consistent commercial size batches.”

  “And you’ve concluded that I disagree?”

  “No. I didn’t say that. The point is we have to have both. If we have a formula that sets us apart from all our competitors but we can’t manufacture it consistently, it’ll put us out of business. If we have the most sophisticated production methods in the world and no high-performing distinctive formulations, we’ll go under just as quickly. We all have to work together, without barriers between departments, to make both possible.”

  “I’m responsible for the lab. Butch is responsible for the plant.”

  “And you both work for me. And right now we’re going to go out in the plant and consult with Butch.”

  The three of them stood uneasily by the scale-up tank. Carl was the shortest, narrow shouldered and sedentary looking. Butch Morgan was an inch or two taller, stockier with a pockmarked face, but dark eyed and good looking. Alan—by far the tallest, broad shouldered and strong boned, and dark haired too, like Butch—was leaning over the three-foot-high metal barrel dipping a two-foot aluminum ladle past the twelve-inch stirrer into a thin colorless liquid clotted with irregular lumps.

  Butch answered Alan’s questions about the speed of the stirrer, and the order in which the raw materials had been added, and Carl spoke when spoken to. They discussed possible causes and adjustments that might be made—led through it step by step by Alan asking questions when he could, so he didn’t look any more like a dictator than he could help.

  Then he smiled and said, “I know scale-up is difficult. It’s like telling someone who cooks for four to make stew for two hundred and fifty on a stove they’ve never seen.”

  “Butch and I have encountered the concept.” Carl smiled condescendingly.

  And Alan swallowed what he wanted to say. “Equine’s never made a paste, and this one’s demanding. The consistency has to be perfect so it can be sealed in a cardboard tube, and then get pushed out with a plunger into a horse’s mouth. A de-wormer like this has never been done by anyone, and the—”

  “So you’ve said before.” Carl stared straight at Alan, his eyes cold and hard.

  “It’s important enough to repeat. You know how they treat worms in horses today?”

  Carl didn’t answer, and Butch shook his head.

  “A vet shoves a ten-foot tube through a horse’s nose and pumps the medication into his stomach with a hand pump. It can be fatal, even with a vet positioning the tube, and calling in a vet’s expensive. Not only does the parasiticide in our product kill worms more effectively than anything else available today, if we can market this de-wormer as a paste a horse owner can safely administer, we’ll revolutionize the horse world, and give Equine a market advantage.”

  Carl and Butch glanced at each other.

  And Alan tried again. “We’re going to have to buy an entirely different mixing system. A big S-shaped Sigma blade blender with a special tank that rotates so the paste can be dumped out. We’ll have to design and build a completely new assembly line, which means Bob Harrison’s investment’s going to be huge, and we have to get this right. It’ll be very interesting and important work, and you both can really contribute.”

  Neither one of them said anything. And Alan asked them to work on the tasks he’d already sketched out and report back at three.

  They did. Reporting little progress. Shortly before a thunderstorm rolled in, and the power went off after a lightning strike that seemed to shake the earth.

  That led Bob Harrison, the founder and president of Equine Pharmaceuticals, to visit each department and wish everyone a happy Fourth of July, and suggest they go home early.

  Alan stepped out into the short side hall at his end of the lab, right after Bob had gone back to his office, to put mail in the outgoing box on the wall—and found Carl and Butch at the corner near reception with their heads together talking to Bob’s son, Brad, who ran the accounting department (but gave Alan the impression that he saw himself as a masterful manager, waiting for a chance to show what he could do).

  They stopped talking when they saw Alan. Then Brad nodded, and walked off toward the front door, to the right beyond reception.

  Vincent Eriksen, tall and thin and nearly crippled by shyness, who cleaned all of Equine every night, was standing in the doorway to his supply room across from the door to the lab, filling a cart with supplies. Alan stopped and talked with him a minute before he walked toward the others to wish them a good Fourth.

  Before he got to them, Carl said, “Butch and I have been talking. Before you were hired, Bob worked with us directly managing the transition from the lab to production. If you don’t feel able to do it on your own, why don’t you bring Bob in to fix the scale-up?”

  “It’s a bigger issue than that. It’s not just this one scale-up today that’s imp
ortant. It’s that we all need to learn to do it now—to develop the ability to do this easily as a part of everyday business. It’s not healthy for an organization to have one or two Mr. Fix-Its who solve every problem.”

  Carl smiled and said, “No? I thought speed was the issue.”

  “Not speed alone. And Bob shouldn’t be bothered with it. There’re too many things only he can do. The formulating and fermenting of the vaccines and antibiotics. Field testing them too, with the UK vets. Horse care products and simple medications aren’t as interesting to him, and we need to master this ourselves. Chemical manufacturing processes are beginning to change more rapidly now, and this will help us keep up.”

  “My responsibility is the lab.” Carl wasn’t looking at Alan, but staring off toward reception.

  But Butch looked at Carl, before he glanced at Alan. “My responsibility is to take the formulas I get from the lab and manufacture the way I’m told.”

  “Precisely.” Carl nodded and crossed his arms across his belt. “Again, as I said before, if you can’t do it, and if speed in scale-up is—”

  “Believe it or not, I have a great deal of experience with scale-up in pharmaceuticals, as well as formulation. But me being a dictator would end up being harmful. This is an opportunity for all of us to learn and develop.” Alan stopped, and made himself smile, before he said, “Anyway, have a good Fourth. Hope you’ve got power at home.”

  Butch said, “You too.”

  Before Carl said, “Goodnight,” and started toward the front door, with Butch following behind.

  Alan sighed, then smiled at Vincent, and walked back into the lab.

  Friday, July 12th, 1963

  The following Friday night, Alan and his wife, Jo, went out to dinner in Lexington—Jo in a black linen suit with the skirt left half unzipped, and her tan silk blouse hanging loose to postpone the sewing of maternity clothes. Her pecan colored hair was wrapped on the back of her head so the curly ends swirled on one side, and Alan smoothed a stray end, before he sat down across from her.