The Opium Equation

by Lisa Wysocky

  Published by

  Cool Titles

  439 N. Canon Dr., Suite 200

  Beverly Hills, CA 90210

  www.cooltitles.com

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Applied For

  Lisa Wysocky––

  The Opium Equation

  p. cm

  ISBN 978-1-935270-06-5

  1. Mystery 2. Horses 3. Southern Fiction I. Title

  2011

  Copyright 2011 by Lisa Wysocky

  All Rights Reserved

  including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Book editing and design by White Horse Enterprises, Inc.

  For interviews or information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases,

  please contact cindy@cooltitles.com

  Distribution to the Trade: Pathway Book Service,

  www.pathwaybook.com, pbs@pathwaybook.com, 1-800-345-6665

  Other Books by Lisa Wysocky

  The Power of Horses

  Success Within

  Front of the Class (with Brad Cohen)

  My Horse, My Partner

  Horse Country

  Success Talks

  DEDICATION

  To all of my friends: human, equine, canine, and feline.

  Thank you for all you do for me.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  EPILOGUE

  CAST OF MAIN CHARACTERS

  Cat Enright: A horse trainer near Nashville, Tennessee. She is twenty-nine, single, impulsive, vulnerable, a tiny bit rude, and the owner of a small stable.

  Bubba Henley: Budding juvenile delinquent and ten-year-old son of a neighboring trainer. Cat worries when no one can find him.

  Hill Henley: Bubba’s no-account father and fourth generation Tennessee Walking Horse trainer.

  Glenda Dupree: Retired movie star and neighbor of both Cat, and Hill and Bubba Henley. She’s the kind of person everyone loves to hate.

  Adam Dupree: Glenda’s nephew. He is a failed actor, a songwriter wanna-be, and likes Cat very much.

  Opal Dupree: Glenda’s aged mother. Opal knows a terrible and ancient secret that may help Cat, but her mind wanders.

  Fairbanks: The ancestral antebellum home of the Henley family, now owned by Glenda Dupree.

  Col. Sam Henley: Long dead Civil War-era builder of Fairbanks, and Hill’s great, great grandfather.

  Agnes Temple: Eccentric woman of a certain age with electric blue hair. She owns two horses in Cat’s barn.

  Hank: Cat’s incorrigible Beagle-mix puppy.

  Martin Giles: Local cop. Young, but smart.

  Jon Gardner: Cat’s stable manager and right hand. No one, Cat included, knows exactly where he’s from, which is the way he likes it.

  Darcy Whitcomb: Seventeen-year-old daughter of a prominent dot com entrepreneur. She’s a little spoiled, but Cat loves her like family.

  Carole Carson: Riding student neighbor of Cat’s, and wife of country music super star, Keith Carson.

  Keith Carson: A neighbor and country music superstar. Keith is out touring and has only a very small part in this story, which is too bad as he’s really quite a hunk.

  Robert Griggs: Quiet hospital nurse and a riding student.

  Frog: A trouble-making punk friend of Bubba’s.

  Brent Giles: Martin’s older brother. A small animal veterinarian from Clarksville.

  Buffy Thorndyke: Young reporter with blue blood in her veins and air in her head.

  Sheriff “Big Jim” Burns: An election is looming and the sheriff wants an arrest. Any arrest.

  AT’s Sally Blue: Young, (possibly) psychic, red roan Appaloosa mare bred and owned by Agnes Temple, hence the initials “AT” at the beginning of Sally’s name. Sally is loyal to Cat.

  Peter’s Pride: Tall, older black gelding owned by Darcy Whitmore. Petey is a calming influence on Darcy, but he also likes to play.

  Hillbilly Bob: Bay, aged gelding owned by a local orthopedic surgeon. Cat swaps training fees for treatment of broken bones and has won several championships on Bob.

  Glamour Girl: Fun-loving yearling filly. Gorgeous, but immature and unfocused.

  MAP OF CAT’S NEIGHBORHOOD

  1

  THE ROCK WAS THE SIZE OF a baseball. It missed my driver’s side window by inches, skimmed over the roof of my truck and landed in the ditch. I skidded to a halt and threw open the door. The little menace had it coming.

  The little menace was Bubba Henley, a ten-year-old who lived two farms up from mine. I caught him by the back of his shirt fifty feet up his father’s driveway.

  His father, Hilton Jefferson Henley III was a tall, skinny, balding piece of trash. The first three characteristics were obvious. That last part was my own conclusion. Hill Henley professed to be a trainer of Tennessee Walking Horses, but he really was a bully who cowed his client’s horses into obedience. Did I mention I didn’t like him much?

  Hill’s farm was typical for Walking Horse trainers in Middle Tennessee: small house shadowed by a long barn with a wide aisle that served as an indoor training area. The Henley farm also had a profusion of rebel flags, a tribute to Hill’s “distinguished” Confederate ancestors, a fact he never failed to bring up in any conversation.

  “Bubba,” I said, as I grabbed him by the back of his shirt, “if you throw one more rock at my truck I’ll have you locked up in juvie jail until you’re thirty!”

  “Go ahead, Cat,” he said, calling me by the nickname I’d had since infancy. “Go ahead. I don’t care.”

  And the truth was, he didn’t. Even though a mixture of rain and sleet fell on this cold February morning, Bubba wore only an old Walking Horse Celebration T-shirt, jeans that had long ago seen better days, a filthy Atlanta Braves baseball cap, and tennis shoes with holes along the front and sides.

  Bubba still held the long, narrow wooden twitch (a tool normally used to restrain horses during veterinary procedures) that he used to bat rocks at passing cars. I was so mad at Bubba and his dangerous prank that I could have thrown both Bubba and the twitch across the road. The sad fact is, I doubted his dad would care. Nor would his mother, who had become fed up years ago and left Bubba and Hill for a better life in parts unknown. But, one had to try.

  “I’m going to talk to your dad about this,” I said, as I snatched the twitch out of the hands of the heir to the Henley clan and stalked past the troubled youth toward his house.

  “He ain’t here.”

  “What?” I asked, still walking, not fully hearing.

  “My dad ain’t here,” Bubba shouted. “He took a mare to Shelbyville last night to get bred and he ain’t back yet. He’s been slower than cold molasses in getting back, he has.”

  Shelbyville is a small town an hour’s drive southeast of Nashville and a good hour and a half from our neighborhood
northwest of Nashville. It is the center of the Tennessee Walking Horse industry. Bubba’s voice held a touch of concern, and I guessed, in spite of everything, that he loved his dad.

  This wasn’t the first time Hill had stayed out all night, cruising bars and going home with who knows what. He’d even gotten himself shot once; overslept and the lady’s husband found them. Fortunately for Hill, the husband had poor aim and didn’t hit any vital parts.

  Many Southerners talk about the Civil War, or “The War of Northern Aggression,” as if it were a recent event. Hill was no exception. According to Hill, his ancestors saved our neighborhood from battle during “The War.” But the truth was that the Henley family used every opportunity the war presented to gain from their neighbors’ misfortunes.

  Our area had not seen gunfire because a nearby powder mill supplied gunpowder to both the Union and Confederate armies. As neither army wanted to cut off its supply of ammunition, both stayed clear of battle here. The great statesmanship of the Henley clan had nothing to do with it.

  Not much had changed for the Henley family in the last one hundred fifty years. Hill was out for everything he could get, and it looked as if the latest generation would be no different.

  I sighed and handed the makeshift bat back to Bubba. The kid needed love and counseling––neither of which I could give. Unlike his emaciated father, Bubba carried a few extra pounds, undoubtedly the result of ingesting one too many frozen pizzas. I realized the way to get through to this kid, and prevent my truck from future assault, was through his sizable stomach, so I did the unthinkable and asked if he wanted to join me in town for breakfast.

  Bubba gave my offer serious thought, but declined.

  “I need to stay home and wait on my dad,” he said. “But hey now, if my dad ain’t home by noon, I might wander on over for lunch.”

  “Okay,” I replied, “but you have to promise to leave me, and my horses, off your prank list. Agreed?”

  He nodded his assent, reluctantly, but then perked up. “Maybe I will see you later. A body’s gotta eat sometime, don’t they?”

  Those words would soon come back to haunt me.

  Cat’s Horse Tip #1

  “The best teachers of horsemanship are horses.”

  2

  AFTER LEAVING BUBBA, I HEADED EAST on River Road and zoomed into town at the blazing speed of thirty miles per hour. Well, it was icy. I’d woken this morning to the familiar rattle of my bedroom window just before sleet came and, sure enough, a few hard pings soon fell on the glass. Ice and sleet were not unusual in February in Nashville. Then again, sunny and seventy wasn’t unusual either.

  I wanted to load up on supplies in case the sleet turned into a major ice storm. Worst-case scenario was that my farm was right on the Cumberland River and we could haul water up for the horses, but the nearest store was miles away and we could be iced in. My supply of hot chocolate was running low and I sometimes got cranky if I missed my daily dose. Trust me, no one wanted that to happen.

  If a big storm didn’t develop, I didn’t mind a little bad weather driving. Traveling the Appaloosa horse show circuit I had hauled my six-horse rig through all kinds of weather. Most Nashvillians, I’d found, didn’t like to drive when the weather was cooler than thirty-three degrees, but somehow they could strip grocery shelves bare at the slightest hint of snow. I hoped this early in the morning I’d catch all the hypocrites who claimed never to have left their homes, yet were sure to leave the stores with empty shelves by noon.

  Normally the drive into town was pretty, especially in the spring when, just past the Henley house and continuing a half mile or so, there were scattered fields of wildflowers. But today, ice, sleet, and fog kept any of the fields from being visible.

  I ate a hearty breakfast at Verna Mae’s, a local “Mom and Pop” that featured the mouthwatering Southern specialty of “meat and three,” one choice of meat served with three vegetables and a slice of corn bread. Most meat-and-three’s were only open for the noon meal, which Southerners call dinner, but the food at Verna Mae’s was so good they couldn’t accommodate just the noon crowd. They were open for breakfast, dinner and “supper.” After listening to other diners speculate about the weather, I joined a herd of frantic shoppers at Walmart, and gathered enough food to keep me going for a few days.

  By the time I arrived home at Cat Enright Stables, the sleet had turned into a cold mist and the sun was trying to break through the murky sky. I am, by the way, Cat Enright, owner for the past seven years of said stables. I’m twenty-nine, single, come from mostly Irish stock, and am just beginning to have some national success on the show circuit.

  As I inched up the icy walk to my farmhouse, arms laden with heavy shopping bags, a wriggly half grown puppy burst out of the front doggy door to greet me. I’d found a cold, sodden, shivering Hank sleeping on my porch last November when we returned from the world championships. He is a sweet and happy soul, and it wasn’t long before he moved from the porch into the house. Hank is definitely part Beagle. The other parts are anyone’s guess.

  “Arrrrrr. Rrraaaarrrrr,” wiggled Hank, meaning, “I’m so happy you’re finally home. I’ve tried to be good while I’ve been waiting.”

  I opened the farmhouse door and Hank and I tumbled into the living room. Or what was left of it. While I had shopped, Hank had happily destroyed what used to be my sofa. After my brain registered what my eyes saw, I realized he had taken the foam stuffing out of the cushions and scattered little pieces all over the room.

  “Bad dog! Bad! Dog!” I yelled, shaking my finger at Hank and dropping a bag of groceries in the process. It would have to be the bag with the eggs and pickles in it.

  I was so mad I felt like shaking Hank instead of my finger. But when I approached to toss him out of the house, Hank rolled on his back and wagged his tail. I never could figure out how he could wag his tail so joyfully while he lay upside down.

  “Okay,” I relented. “But you have to help clean up.”

  ” Hank knows I’m a sucker for a tail-wagging dog. He jumped up and contributed to the project by running circles around me, making the tiny pieces of the sofa’s innards airborne in the process. I was too busy grabbing soft white flying objects out of the air to see that Hank’s circles had gradually changed from fun loving puppy romps to something on the more frantic side. Too late, I realized what it meant. I made a mad dash to grab him, but only got half way there before Hank showered his intentions into the furnace’s floor grate.

  That’s when I knew I was having a bad morning.

  This was not the first time Hank had “watered” the furnace, but he had never before been quite so generous. The fragrance of warm dog urine quickly permeated the house. Hmmm. Dog pee in a potentially explosive gas device. I should call the gas company. The lady who answered the phone had a Southern drawl deep enough that I could barely understand her, but she said she could send someone right on out. That was a surprise. With luck, I thought, I would be able to sleep in my own freshly scented bedroom that night.

  I opened the door into the mist and dumped Hank outside, knowing he’d happily make a beeline for the dryness of the barn. Peering into the wet murk, I knew I’d be happy if we had an increase in temperature. With Nashville’s unpredictable weather, that wasn’t impossible. Then again, a hurricane wouldn’t surprise me either. In the meantime, I didn’t want to spend another minute in my now pungent home, so I cleaned up the broken eggs, the pickles, and the broken pickle jar. Then I put the rest of the groceries away, threw on my barn jacket, and followed Hank to the stable.

  At the door to the barn Jon Gardner presided over a snow shovel, aided by an apologetic, tail-wagging Hank. As I approached, Jon put the shovel aside and helped me over a treacherous ridge of ice that had collected in front of the door. He wore a heavy olive-green parka, tan Carhart pants, knee-high muck boots with several colorful layers of socks peeking over the top, and a huge fur-lined cap that looked as if it might have been daily wear somewhere in Siberia.
His liquid brown eyes twinkled in spite of the weather.

  “Well,” I said in lieu of greeting, “you’re the only one I’ve seen this morning who looks as if he’s enjoying all this.”

  I wondered as I spoke if Jon had grown up in a colder climate, as he seemed not to mind ice or snow––though he didn’t seem to mind heat and sun either. Although I’d known him for almost three years, my assistant was still an enigma. He had called one day to say he wanted to take a look at the barn and horses. It was a slow day, so I told him to come on over. Two hours later he was moving his things into the small apartment I’d recently had built in the loft of the barn. Although we now worked together every day, I didn’t know much more about him than I did three years ago, except that I couldn’t get along without him.

  “Some things,” he said with a grin that split the strong features of his face, “ought to be appreciated. The ice, for instance. Turn around.”

  His gloved hands spun me around and I found I was facing a fairyland. The sun had finally broken through just over the roofline of the house, and illuminated both it and the ice covered pasture. It was too beautiful for words.

  When I bought my farm about seven years ago it featured a seventy-year-old run-down farmhouse on twenty acres complete with a tobacco barn that needed a new roof. In the last few years I had done well enough to add to the barn, refence some of the property, paint, build a much-needed covered riding arena, and make minor repairs to the house, but much more needed to be done. In the ice-filtered sunlight, though, the old place looked enchanting.

  I watched until I saw a car making its way slowly up the drive. I’d completely forgotten about my ten o’clock riding class. With a sigh, I turned from the sparkling scene and went into the converted stall we used as an office. I needed some thinking time to prepare for my students.