TheCart Before the Corpse

by Carolyn McSparren

  “So don’t screw up. Find the right killer, make the case and get the SOB out of Mossy Creek.”

  “Amos, you do not need me. You are a fine officer.”

  “I am not an investigator. I’m a keep-the-peace policeman. I’m the kind of cop that when somebody says, ‘round up the usual suspects,’ I know who they are, where they are, and what they probably did. Not this time. I’m out of my depth and out of my league. Damn it, Geoff, I want this guy. You can get him.” He paused. “Besides, you owe me.”

  Wheeler leaned back in his desk chair and propped his shoes on the edge of his metal wastebasket. “I knew you’d bring that up sooner or later. How long before we’re even? Blackmail is a crime.”

  “What blackmail?”

  Silence. Finally, Wheeler said, “All right. I’ll give it ten days max. If I can get my superiors to agree, and if you’ll promise me that your mayor will cover my ass.”

  “I’ll call her this minute. I can almost guarantee she’ll call the powers that be at the GBI herself. Wait a couple of hours before you bring this up to your superiors. Thanks, Geoff.”

  “Up yours, old friend,” Wheeler said and hung up the phone.

  He swiveled in his chair and aligned his telephone carefully with the edge of his desk blotter. A cluttered desk meant a cluttered mind, and a cluttered mind missed things. His colleagues called him a fuss-budget. They also said he had a ramrod up his back. They could call him anything they liked so long as he made cases that stood up in court.

  Amos’s case should be relatively simple. Chances were the man had been killed either by a friend, family member, or employee. From the crime scene Amos had described, an opportunistic killing seemed a remote possibility.

  Normal people really did want to confess if given the chance. He was a genius at convincing them he truly understood why they had done what they had done.

  He didn’t.

  Most killers fell into a kind of no-man’s land, where the inability to control a sudden rage led to a bloody corpse on the floor. Those people were generally appalled at what they had done. They tried to hide, of course. Nobody ever really wanted to pay for crimes committed, but sooner or later they broke and confessed.

  He hoped the killer of this man in Mossy Creek would be one of those.

  His gut told him otherwise.

  Chapter 9

  Monday Morning

  Merry

  “I’ve got time to drive out to Hiram’s place and check on those horses before I meet Sheriff Campbell in Bigelow,” I said to Peggy. “Just tell me how to find it.

  “I’ll drive you. You won’t find it yourself,” she said. “Not without MapQuest, a GPS and the triple A.”

  “You don’t want to get stuck with me,” I said. “I have to meet Sheriff Campbell, but I’ll probably spend the rest of the day at the farm.”

  “Then I’ll drive my own car and you can follow me in your truck. That way I can turn you over to Jacob Yoder and come home to wait for the locksmith to change the locks on Hiram’s your apartment.”

  “May I take you to dinner tonight? Give me a chance to see some of Mossy Creek.”

  I expected her to hem and haw, but she accepted readily. “I’d be delighted. We have a good restaurant in Mossy Creek that doesn’t cost a fortune or serve tall food.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Those stacks of puff pastry, one sixth of a zucchini and an ounce of steak drenched with brown goo in the center of a big white plate. Always makes me want to stop at Wendy’s on the way home. No tall food at Mama’s. You’ll like it.”

  Sounded like my kind of place. We climbed into our respective vehicles and drove out of town to see where my father had died.

  Fog still lay in the hollows as we left Mossy Creek and drove along a two-lane back road between thick woods. This high the trees were not yet fully leafed—two weeks behind where they had been in Tennessee—but gave off a green glow.

  This was pretty country. Property around Aiken and Southern Pines is so expensive that only the rich-rich can afford land, but this looked like a reasonable alternative, especially if Hiram had found flat land on top of his hill. It was on a general line from Southern Pines down to Ocala and Wellington, Florida, where most of the full-time horse people spent a couple of months each winter. Easy to drop off and pick up horses for training and carriages for repair or restoration.

  Easy, as well, to pick up a load of drugs in south Florida and drop it off in Atlanta. I shook my head. I refused to think of Hiram as a drug mule until I was forced to.

  The curvy back road was impossible to drive fast. Good thing, since deer bounded across in front of Peggy’s car twice. Once, a half dozen good-sized does bounced from the bank on one side and disappeared instantly on the other down a narrow trail between the trees. Then a doe with a pair of dappled fawns sprinted across and into a fog bank on the downhill slope. I even saw a cock pheasant strolling along the grass verge with his tail dragging in the gravel. He barely turned his head as we passed.

  For the last few years, I’ve lived in fastidiously groomed flat country in Kentucky. This place with its wild woodlands, hills and dells called to me. I could feel my shoulders relax, even though I was going to the site of my father’s death.

  “You did good, Hiram,” I whispered. I was happy he’d been able to enjoy his farm for a few months. He should have had years. If things had worked out between us, we might have shared those years. “Whoever did this, I hate you!” I snarled and hit the steering wheel.

  Ahead of me Peggy’s right turn signal came on, and she slowed. At first I couldn’t see where she planned to turn, then I saw a pair of thigh high boulders marking either side of a gravel drive that curved up and seemed to disappear into the forest. Peggy was right. I’d have driven right by if she hadn’t showed me where to turn.

  The drive followed the twists and turns at the edge of the hillside. On the right, the trees and underbrush walked straight up out of sight. On the left—without a sign of a guardrail, mind you—I could stare down into a shallow valley. We drove over a drainage pipe laid under the road that allowed water to cascade from a small waterfall and down into a stream that I could barely glimpse through the trees at the bottom. If that causeway ever gave way, the road would give way as well, marooning anyone at the top of the hill.

  Surely there must be another way down.

  Just when I had decided we were driving up Mt. Everest, Peggy turned a final curve, and the road flattened out into a large gravel parking area in front of a big old barn, freshly painted red and sporting a new metal roof. This must be the barn where Peggy found Hiram.

  I pulled in alongside her car. On the left edge of the parking area a white diesel crew cab four-by-four truck was parked, and past the truck, nose facing out, stood a thirty-foot extra tall, extra wide, aluminum gooseneck stock trailer. Neither truck nor trailer was new, but looked well tended. The trailer had a wide side door that could be used to load carriages. Hiram’s truck, Hiram’s trailer. He always took good care of his trucks and trailers.

  Where were the horses? Where was this Jacob Yoder?

  As I climbed out of my truck to join Peggy, a scream of pure rage rent the air, and I jumped a foot. Took me a second to realize what I’d heard. A donkey bray is like nothing else in the universe. Some of them start off with a series of grunts like a lion gearing up to roar, then they let fly. Some, like this one, started off at top decibel level and kept on. And on.

  “That’s Don Quixote, known as Don Qui,” Peggy said as she disappeared around the left side of the barn. “That’s his ‘where in Sam Hill is my breakfast’ bray.”

  An instant later he was joined by the whinnies of several horses.

  “I thought you said this Jacob Yoder was looking after them,” I said.

  “He was certainly supposed to. Hiram will kill him . . . Sorry, I keep forgetting.”

  Beyond the original barn, which, from the height of its eaves, looked as though it might at one time hav
e been used to dry tobacco, I saw Hiram’s new stable across a track that ran at right angles behind the old barn. The stable was gleaming tan metal with a brass ventilation cupola on top.

  Standing in the paddock beside it, five equines stared at us with baleful dark eyes. The smallest and obviously the most annoyed was Don Qui, three feet of miniature donkey with ears nearly as long as his face. He cut off in mid-bray when he saw us and glared, certain he’d gotten his point across.

  Next to him stood a tubby Halflinger pony, gold with a flowing flaxen mane and tail. Then came a pair of dark bays approximately sixteen hands high. Morgan, maybe, or Standard bred off the trotting track, or even some sort of European warmblood. The final horse dwarfed the others. Solid black with flowing mane, and probably feathered hooves hidden in the dewy grass, he stood at least seventeen hands and undoubtedly tipped the scales around a ton. His back was as broad as the average loveseat. Had to be a Friesian.

  “They should have been fed hours ago,” I said. “They swear they haven’t been, but horses lie like rugs when it comes to food. Where is this Jacob person, anyway?”

  “I am coming, blast you,” said a gravelly male voice. A moment later a man I assumed was Jacob Yoder stepped out of the new stable. Since he stopped dead when he saw Peggy and me, he’d been damning his charges and not us.

  He had several halters and lead ropes over his shoulder. I couldn’t see his face because of the long-billed baseball cap he wore, but Central Casting would have hired him to play Ichabod Crane in a heartbeat. I probably weighed more than he did, and he stood at least six four. His bib overalls hung on him like faded blue elephant skin.

  “Morning,” I said and walked to him with my hand outstretched. “Could you use a hand getting them in?”

  I had assumed he’d shake my hand, but he swung a couple of halters at me instead. “You are her.”

  “Yep. I’m her.” I said cheerfully with a sardonic glance over my shoulder at Peggy. Jacob Yoder was obviously not one of life’s great gentlemen. Close up I could see two day’s growth of gray stubble along his jaw. His face was deeply lined and leathery from the sun, and his eyes were as red as pickled beets.

  The hand holding the halters shook. Unless I was very much mistaken, Jacob Yoder was the poor equivalent of the rich alcoholics I saw around the show grounds. He was just getting around to feeding the horses because he had the grandfather of all hangovers and probably had used the hair of the dog to get him going. An alcoholic, ill-tempered, aging stable-hand wasn’t what I’d been hoping for.

  I did, however, need him badly right now. So I smiled my most cheerful smile (always a reach for me), took a couple of the halters and followed him to the five-bar gate that closed off the pasture from the barn. He’d passed me the largest and the smallest halters. Don Qui and the Friesian. The Friesian was a piece of cake. He lowered his massive head and stuck his nose into the halter. I followed Yoder across to the barn and inside where the first stall doors on either side of the center aisle stood open.

  “Heinzie is in that one,” he said, pointing to the second stall on the left. The stable lay in shadows, so I couldn’t tell much about it, but it looked well constructed if not posh. I took care of Heinzie, who dove happily into his morning grain, while I went back for Don Qui.

  “The jackass comes in with Heinzie,” Jacob said. “Does not like to wait.”

  Now he tells me. I’ve had some experience with miniature donkeys. They are classified in carriage driving among the VSE’s ‘very small equines,’ miniature horses and the like. They are generally driven in teams of two, because the only way to train a young donkey to drive is to hitch him up with an experienced donkey. The minute I walked up to him, Don Qui stuck his nose into the dirt so that I had to bend double to get the halter down to him. Just as I pulled it over his nose, he swung his head straight into my gut hard enough to knock the wind out of me, whirled past me, trotted out of the pasture and into the barn. I ran after him but needn’t have bothered. He knew which stall he was supposed to be in and went directly into it.

  “Knucklehead,” Jacob said as he shut the stall door.

  I bit my tongue, although I suspected ‘knucklehead’ was intended for me rather than the donkey.

  As a show manager, I’ve learned to make snap judgments about people. I’m usually right. I need to know at once who’s going to be a pain in the ass. I did not like Jacob Yoder.

  “We must speak,” he said with a glower. It would seem he didn’t like me either. I started running down a list of stable hands I knew who might be free to come work down here until I could get things organized and know where I stood.

  I wondered if Peggy had already driven away, but she was leaning on the pasture gate looking out over the property.

  “Are those all the horses, Mr. Yoder?” I asked.

  He nodded. “One is not a horse.”

  “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

  He dropped his eyes first. I’d seen plenty of Jacob Yoders. He’d take every advantage and be as rude as he thought he could get away with, right up to the point where he might get fired. If reprimanded, he’d go all innocent and work very hard for a day or a week until he thought he was flying under the radar again.

  Hiram would have pegged him faster than I did. So why had he hired the man?

  “Would you show me around the place after we put the horses back out?” I asked. That gave me forty minutes or so to check out Hiram’s workshop in the old barn. Although I wasn’t looking forward to it, I had to see where he was found, and I wanted to do it with Peggy. I couldn’t in good conscience keep her hanging around while I went exploring the land with Jacob.

  He nodded and walked back into the stable with his hands in the pockets of his overalls.

  Peggy came to me, and we walked around to the parking area. “What a charmer,” I whispered.

  “I asked Hiram once why he hired the man. He said he felt an obligation to him and that he was an excellent worker when he put his mind to it.”

  “Yeah. I’ll bet he is.”

  “No, I mean it. Except for hiring a contractor to erect the outside of the new stable, he and Hiram did most of the work on this place themselves in less than six months. I suspect he’d work fine so long as Hiram worked right beside him.”

  “But the minute he was alone, he’d go sit under a tree and drink his moonshine, or whatever I smelled on his breath.”

  We had reached the broad double doors of the barn that stood facing the parking area. A padlock had been locked through the hasp that closed the double doors.

  “Do you have the key?” I asked Peggy.

  “Hiram kept the extra keys on peg boards at the back of the workshop,” Peggy said and pulled a padlock key from the pocket of her jeans. “Since the police didn’t see fit to declare this a crime scene, I made it my business to take them before I left.”

  “Did he have a spare apartment key?” I asked, remembering that someone had used a key to get in to burgle the place.

  She shook her head. “Not an extra one. I assume the police didn’t find his key ring either on him or in the truck, and I don’t think he kept anything but his truck and house key with him. He was amazingly neat for a man.”

  My eyebrows went up.

  Peggy unlocked the padlock and moved it to hang off one side of the door. “Can you handle this?”

  “I don’t have much choice.” I took a deep breath and stepped into the dark interior. Peggy followed and turned on banks of fluorescent lights hung from the heavy roof rafters.

  Because of moisture, woodworm, termites and encroaching vegetation, very few old barns survive in my part of the south without constant maintenance. Either this one had been maintained well over the hundred or so years since it had been built, or Hiram had done a great restoration job.

  The floor was dirt, but swept and raked clean. Tools hung from pegboard along the right wall over a worktable built of plywood on sawhorses. Along the left wall hung a half dozen sets of harness tha
t looked clean and freshly oiled.

  I carefully kept my eyes away from the four-wheeled vis-à-vis carriage that leaned on one axle in the center of the room. Beyond it stood two carriages in various states of repair. Unrepair, actually. Both looked like antiques. One was a dogcart, built high up above a wicker area that could be used to carry dogs. From here I could see the wicker was a mess. The other looked like an aged doctor’s carriage, the sort country doctors drove to house calls.

  Extra shafts, wheels, seats and other pieces lay or stood in ranks against the rest of the walls.

  I saw no cobwebs and little dust. All the electric and hand tools were clean. Those that hadn’t been hung on the pegs lay in neat rows on the worktable.

  I had moved slowly around the walls of the workshop and now had no option but to look at the vis-à-vis in the center. I started with the side that still had both its wheels. It needed paint. The leather upholstery needed cleaning and conditioning at the very least. Since it was cracked with age, it really should be replaced, but Hiram could certainly have driven it as it was.

  So what had he been doing with the wheel? If I wanted to believe the cops about it being an accident, the only thing I could think of was that he must have been repacking the bearings.

  Yoder might know. Hiram must have just gotten started, unless someone had removed the container of axle grease he would have used.

  I took a deep breath and walked around the side that canted.

  The EMTs had leaned the iron wheel against the side of the carriage after they’d moved it off Hiram’s chest, and the entire area was scuffed by multiple footprints and knee prints. I suspected Peggy had been the one to place the shop towel over the area where Hiram’s head would have lain.

  She was watching me. I pointed to the towel. “You?”

  She nodded. “I came back in after they moved him to the ambulance. I could still see . . . the stain. I didn’t want to.”