Hayburner (A Gail McCarthy Mystery)

by Laura Crum

  "Not really friendly is he?" Clay said.

  "He doesn't like me," I said. "I don't know why."

  Anything else I might have added was drowned out by Hans Schmidt's voice. "So, Dr. McCarthy, I have a list here for you, of antibiotics I gave to your patients." Hans' teeth shone whitely in the still-smoky night air, his silver-gray hair, neatly coiffed, glowed with some inner moonlight. He looked clean, tidy, and unrumpled-a miracle considering the situation.

  I took his list. "Thanks, Hans," I said briefly. Since John had arrived with drugs from our clinic, I hadn't really needed Hans' help. Nonetheless, I had asked, and was now obligated. "I'll have the bookkeeper mail you a check on Monday."

  "I thank you," Hans said, sketching a bow. On him the gesture did not appear as ridiculous as one might expect-his courtly manner and flamboyant good looks made it seem natural. At roughly sixty, Hans was a bodybuilder and a triathlete; he was as aggressively fit as many much younger men. And he knew it.

  Hans put an arm around my shoulders. "And how are you doing, my dear?"

  I wasn't fooled by the pseudo-avuncular stance. Hans was about as avuncular as a great white shark.

  "I'm okay," I said. "Rough night for all of us."

  Hans squeezed my shoulders. "For a lady, especially."

  I stepped quietly out of his arm, looked him in the eye, and said again, "For all of us. But especially for Bart. It's his barn."

  Bart and Clay had been watching this exchange without a word. Now Hans met Bart's eyes and I smiled a little to myself. It was no secret that Bart didn't care for Hans Schmidt. Hans had been practicing in the area less than a year, and he had already convinced several of Bart's boarders to take their horses elsewhere, on the grounds that "horses weren't meant to live in confinement." One couldn't expect that Bart would be pleased.

  The two men held each other's eyes for a long second; I was reminded of rival male dogs, or perhaps, banty roosters. Bart broke first. Half shrugging, he turned and walked away without a word.

  Hans spread his arms. "What can I say? This is what comes of keeping horses in this kind of unnatural confinement."

  I'd had enough. "I've heard the speech," I said. "Save it for someone who hasn't." I turned to Clay. "It's been a long night. I think I'll go home and get some sleep."

  "You'd better do that," he agreed. It seemed to me there was some underlying emotion in his quiet voice, something I couldn't quite place. Grief? Bewilderment? Whatever it was, I was just too tired to sort it out.

  "I'll call you," I said. And left.

  TWO

  Saturday morning dawned bright, clear, and warm. I lay in bed, looking out my window at the blue sky above the brushy ridgeline and wished fervently for clouds and rain. It was early October, and the usual long, dry California summer had been followed by an exceptionally hot, dry fall. There had been no rain as yet, and in the hills of southern Santa Cruz County, this was a big problem.

  Little brush fires were becoming increasingly common; all of us hill dwellers lived in dread that one of these would take off. Last night's barn fire had raised that fear in my mind again. The only thing that would make me feel safe was rain, and plenty of it.

  But there was to be none of that today, judging by the sky. I booted my dog off my feet and rolled out of bed. Roey, the small, red female Queensland heeler I had just kicked in the ribs, stretched and yawned and followed me to the door.

  Letting the dog out, I walked back down the short hall for a cup of coffee. I'd given myself a coffeemaker with an automatic timer for my birthday, and I was really enjoying waking up to the smell of freshly brewed French roast. Not to mention the downright luxury of simply pouring myself a cup, rather than fumbling around in an early-morning daze and then waiting semi-patiently for the much-needed beverage to be ready.

  Pouring the steaming coffee into my blue willow patterned mug, I added sugar and milk and sat down at one end of the couch. From here, I could see out big windows that faced south and overlooked my garden, and further down the slope, the barn and horse corrals. I watched Roey, prospecting about on her morning rounds, looking very much like a small red fox, and noted that a dozen or so chickens were pecking in my vegetable beds.

  The resident pair of banties, Jack and Red, had finally managed to raise a brood. My initial excitement over the tiny, fluffy chicks, hardly any bigger than baby quail, had declined somewhat when Red had decided that her babies needed fresh vegetables. My vegetables. The vegetable garden was fenced, but Red merely flew over, and the walnut-sized chicks just went through.

  "Stupid chickens," I said out loud. But I didn't bother to chase them out. They'd only be back in when I wasn't looking. I'd just have to put up with a few pecked tomatoes and lettuces.

  Sipping my coffee, I stared out over the garden. Tattered, parched, and dusty as it was, to me it was still beautiful. I had devoted much care and attention when I had planned and planted my border, and used mostly drought-tolerant plants. Born and raised on the coast of California, I was familiar with the difficulty of growing classic British garden perennials in our climate, and had focused largely on Mediterranean plants and California natives, both well adapted to deal with my circumstances.

  So the long, wild border that ran beside my drive was thick with rosemary, lavender, santolina, and rockroses, mingling with mounds of still-blooming California poppies, sand verbena, species roses, hardy geraniums, ceanothus, and catmint. And despite the weather and the season, not to mention a complete lack of irrigation, it all looked lively and colorful.

  The vegetable garden was, of course, another matter entirely. Tomatoes, peppers, squashes, and the like needed water and plenty of it. They also needed protection from foraging deer, rabbits, ground squirrels, and other predators. Thus my pretty (but not chicken-proof) grape stake picket fence, adorned with climbing tea roses.

  My eyes rested on the little fenced garden. The only regularly watered area on my entire property, it was a lush green island of tropical-seeming exuberance surrounded by the olive-drab and silver-gray forms of my Mediterranean plantings. Both vegetables and tea roses luxuriated in raised beds filled with a mix of well-rotted horse manure (from my corrals) and compost, and everything I planted there seemed to flourish, including many fragile creatures that would certainly have succumbed in my wild border.

  So, naturally, the vegetable garden was crammed with flowers. Even in October, it blazed with the brilliant oranges of Mexican sunflower, thunbergia, and nasturtium, which contrasted wonderfully with the deep blues of lobelia and morning glory. Cosmos jazzed up the mixture with magenta and creamy white, and the tea roses contributed the more muted colors of their second bloom. All in all, it was a sight to rest the eyes, or I thought so, anyway. The garden, I was finding, gave me endless satisfaction.

  However, I wasn't left to contemplate it for long. A shrill nicker broke into my reverie. Plumber was hungry. Getting up, coffee cup in hand, I stepped out on the porch.

  Rays of sunlight slanted invitingly through the branches of the big blue gum tree on the eastern ridge, and lit the three still-blooming begonias on my bench. Scarlet, watermelon red, and rich peach, their flamboyant selves were just the accent my plain wooden porch needed and they always lifted my mood.

  Carrying my coffee, I headed down the hill to the barn, Roey cavorting at my heels. Three pairs of eyes watched me alertly. My two horses, Gunner and Plumber, nickered happily at my approach, and Daisy the cow lowed plaintively. I fed all three animals a flake of hay, and gave Daisy a pat on the shoulder.

  "Today, old girl, you're going home," I told her.

  Daisy shied away, uninterested in my words and pats, her focus solely on alfalfa hay. I watched the red-and-white Corriente heifer munch and thought that I would miss her. In the year or so I'd owned her, she'd become part of my little animal family.

  But change comes to all, and I felt I no longer needed Daisy. I'd purchased her from Glen Bennett, a rancher friend who had used her for team roping, in order to train
my younger horse, Plumber, to be a rope horse. Daisy possessed the perfect temperament for this, and had allowed me to rope her over and over again without "sulling up."

  But Plumber had learned as much as he could from this enterprise, and now I had a different project in mind. So I'd called Glen.

  "Sure, I'll take her back," he said. "I'll put her in with the bull. See if I can raise some calves out of her." When I made my second proposition, he'd laughed. "I don't know why not," he told me. "Come on up and get him."

  So this morning I was buying a horse. To put it more exactly, I was trading Daisy and some "boot" for an unbroken three-year-old colt.

  It wasn't an entirely unpremeditated decision, though in a sense you could call it an impulse buy. I certainly didn't need another horse. But I'd always wanted to break a colt myself, and the opportunity had never come my way. Now I was going to seek the challenge.

  Walking back down to the barn, I fed the chickens some hen scratch, which got them out of the vegetable garden, at least temporarily, and gave my old cat, Bonner, a bowl of food. Then I sat on a hay bale awhile, sipping my coffee and watching the animals eat.

  Roey snuffled around the haystack, looking for mice. Pale gold early-morning light filtered through the oak trees and dappled the loose straw littered on the barn floor. I could smell the fragrance of wood smoke and ripe apples in the air, the faint and indescribable scent of fall. I smiled. I was happy.

  In its own way, this was a small miracle. For the first six months of this year, I'd been in a long tailspin of depression, which had left me exhausted and miserable, unable to find pleasure in anything. Sadly, it had taken a cataclysmic event-the murder of a friend-to jolt me out of my stupor. That, and therapy, and a well-timed trip to Europe had somehow created the necessary change. Now I found myself reaching out to life again, interested and passionate, and just plain happy.

  At the thought, I stood up. One of the best things about not being depressed was that I had some energy. Calling Roey to come with me, I started the process of hitching the truck up to the stock trailer.

  Two hours later, Daisy was loaded, my breakfast was eaten, and I was ready to go. With Roey grinning happily on the seat beside me, I bumped slowly down my long, graveled driveway and turned left-not an easy maneuver-onto the busy country crossroad I lived on.

  My route took me down Harkins Valley Road; passing the house that belonged to my best friend, Kris Griffith, I grimaced sadly at the prominent "For Sale" sign. Kris had moved to San Diego last month, many long hours away, uprooting herself with a suddenness that had surprised both of us. Divorced, single and at a loose end, it had become clear to Kris that change was what she needed-a new job, a new house, a new life. When the opportunity arose, she'd jumped. I wished her well, and missed her a lot.

  In another mile I passed the Bishop Ranch; I could see the charred rubble pile where the big barn used to be. Some human figures were moving around, but no one I recognized. Tomorrow, I thought, I'll stop in and have a look at my patients.

  Then I was past, with the open, grassy sweeps of Harkins Valley flowing by me and my mind moving on to what lay ahead. Lone Oak and the Bennett Ranch.

  The Bennett Ranch was familiar to me from my teens, a time when I was friends with Glen Bennett's daughter, Lisa. She and I had run wild on the place-still a working cattle ranch of nine hundred or so acres. I'd learned to ride on Glen Bennett's team roping horses, and when I finally talked my parents into letting me buy a horse, Glen had sold me one of his retirees, a gentle dark brown gelding named Lad who was both a baby-sitter and a friend.

  My friendship with Lisa had waned, though, when my parents were killed in a car crash in my eighteenth year. I'd chosen to put myself through college in order to get a veterinary degree and Lisa had married a rodeo cowboy and moved to Arizona.

  We'd met again a couple of years ago, when Lisa, divorced from her cowboy and living on the family ranch, had needed a friend. I'd been there for her as much as I could, and in the process, had renewed my acquaintance with her dad. Now, Lisa was gone again-this time she'd married a man who trained border collies and moved to Oregon-but I was still friends with Glen.

  Slowly I wound my way up into the coastal mountains, my pickup significantly hindered by the combined weight of the stock trailer and Daisy. Hot, dry, and dusty, the air that rushed into my open windows was no comfort, nor did the drab, brownish tan of the grass in the meadows rest my eyes.

  These fields were bright green in late winter and spring, and a bleached silvery gold that rippled and shimmered with every breeze in midsummer. But now the grass was spent and broken, dulled with dust and sparse at that. Clumps of deep green oak trees dotted the empty rolling pastures; the sky was an unrelieved blue.

  Almost an hour after I'd left home, I made it to the town of Lone Oak. A bar/restaurant and a store/gas station with a few houses straggling alongside-that was it. In another minute I was through town and turning into the Bennett Ranch drive. I could see the big weathered gray barns ahead of me-barns that dated from the turn of the last century, and very similar to the Bishop Ranch barn that had burned last night.

  Glen Bennett was standing in front of the biggest barn, brushing a bay horse that was tied to the hitching rail. My horse, I thought with a quick thrill of excitement. My colt.

  I parked my rig in the barnyard and got out. Daisy mooed questioningly from the trailer, and Roey barked a series of short excited yaps at Glen's black-and-white ranch dog. Glen finished pulling a comb through the bay gelding's tail and stepped back, smiling in my direction.

  "Hi, Glen," I said.

  "So, how does he look?" he asked.

  I ran my eyes over the colt. "He looks good," I said. "Real good."

  And he did. Medium-sized for an American Quarter Horse-about 15.1 hands, I thought-and solid dark bay, not a white hair on him, the gelding wasn't pretty; his head was too plain for that. But he was well made and even, everything in proportion, neither overly heavy nor overly light, and he had good bone and nice round feet. Above all, his eye was big and kind and quiet-the sort of horse I liked.

  I'd spotted him when I'd purchased Daisy, and asked Glen about him then. But this was the first time I'd seen him since I'd agreed to buy him; the more I looked, the happier I felt.

  Glen patted the colt on the shoulder. "Say hi to your new owner, Danny."

  "Danny?" I asked.

  "That's his registered name. Dannyboy. We always call him Danny. He was born on St. Patrick's Day." Glen smiled.

  "Oh." I smiled back, liking the name and the horse equally.

  "He's the last one out of my good old mare, you know, Annie," Glen said.

  I nodded; I knew.

  "She died the next year. This one," he rubbed Danny's forehead, "is a full brother to that Chester horse, that Lonny bought, and the two roan mares I rope on."

  I nodded again. I knew. My old boyfriend, Lonny Peterson, was extremely happy with Chester-one of the reasons 1'd been interested in Danny.

  Glen was talking about Smoke, his stallion and the sire of all these horses. I said nothing, just nodded and let him talk. What I was thinking was how old he looked. Glen Bennett, my childhood idol, suddenly just another old man, rambling on, forgetting that his audience had already heard these stories.

  Well, maybe not just another old man. Despite a certain frailty in his stance, and the whiteness of his hair, Glen's eyes were a vivid blue and his voice was strong and animated. In his gestures and body language I could still see the vital cowboy-hatted icon I'd so admired.

  My fascination with the cowboy image was waning, though, as I became middle-aged. Surely, I thought, thirty-seven is middle age. In any case, I was finding the allure of men in big hats and boots less apparent; whether it was maturity on my part or merely the fact that I'd known enough cowboys up close and personal that the mystique had just worn off, I didn't know.

  I did like Glen, though. For all the semi-macho posture that was so much a part of his image, he was a good m
an, and a kind one.

  "How's Pat?" I asked him.

  "Real well," he said, with his swift smile. "We're happy."

  "That's good." I knew that Glen and Pat, his longtime girlfriend, had recently married, and was glad to hear that things were working out. "Do you hear anything from Lisa or Tim?"

  "Both doing well," he said firmly. "Lisa's married a good man this time around. She's fine. And Tim's still training horses over there just a little bit north of Bakersfield. Seems to suit him." Glen met my eyes. "And how are you doing?"

  "Good," I said. "Real good."

  "Been going roping much?"

  "No," I sighed. "I just don't have a lot of free time these days. My job keeps me pretty busy. And then Gunner, you know, that blaze-faced gelding I was roping on, came up lame."

  "Damn." Glen shook his head sympathetically.

  "Yeah. And my younger horse is still pretty green. He's okay to rope on in the pen at home, but I wouldn't want to take him to a competition."

  "You can borrow one of mine."

  "Thanks." That was the thing about Glen; he really meant it. I smiled in appreciation, but added, "I'm afraid I'm just not that motivated. I enjoyed going roping when Lonny and I were together, but competing’s not really a big deal to me. I like taking my horses for a ride through the hills just as well."

  We grinned at each other companionably. I'd known Glen and his family long enough that we were almost more like relatives than friends.

  "So, do you think I'll do all right, breaking this guy on my own?" I stepped up to Danny and stroked his neck.

  "Sure you will," Glen said. "He's a real quiet colt, real easygoing. And all the others were just a piece of cake. No buck in 'em at all."

  "That's good," I said. "I'm not sure I could cope with one that bucked."

  Glen gave me a look. "Of course, I can't guarantee he won't buck at all. You never know. Do you have anyone to help you?"

  "Oh, I can get some help," I told Glen, smiling to myself at the thought of the help I envisioned. Digging in the pocket of my jeans, I produced a folded check and handed it to him. "A thousand dollars," I said. "And Daisy's in the trailer. Promise you'll breed her, now, and not butcher her."