“Harry, these animals are tetched,” Miranda finally sputtered.
“No, we’re not. We know what’s in Orion’s stall. We’ve known for days, but we haven’t been able to tell you. You’re on track now. GO TO THE STABLE!” Mrs. Murphy lifted her exquisite head to heaven and yowled.
Harry stood up and walked over to the cat who eluded her grasp. “Calm down, Murph.”
“Maybe she’s got rabies.” Miranda drew back.
“You say that any time an animal gets excited. She’s cutting a shine. Aren’t you, Murphy?”
“No, I am not.”
“Me neither. Listen to us,” Pewter pleaded.
“Murphy, I’m exhausted. Can I stop now?” Tucker continued circling the humans.
“Sure.”
The dog conveniently dropped by the tea trolley where some crumbs had fallen on the rug.
Rick clapped his hands on his knees. “Well, I’m going over to Mim’s to see if she’ll let us dig up that stall. Which stall was it?”
Cynthia checked her notes. “Orion’s.”
“Hallelujah!” Mrs. Murphy declared.
47
The cold crept into the stable. At first nobody noticed, but as Harry, Miranda, and the two animals stood watching Rick Shaw’s team dig into Orion’s stall, the chill crept into their bones.
When the sheriff’s crew arrived, they surveyed the fourteen-foot-square stall and didn’t know where to start, so Tucker began digging at the spot. The humans followed suit because Cynthia Cooper remarked that dogs, thanks to their keen noses, could smell things humans could not.
Mrs. Murphy grew tired of sitting on the center aisle floor, so she climbed into the hayloft where, with Rodger Dodger, Pusskin, and the mice, she gazed down as the humans labored. Spadeful after spadeful of crush-or-run and then clay was carefully piled to the side.
Mim, her shearling jacket pulled tightly around her, joined the humans. “Anything?”
“No,” Harry answered.
“You don’t think this is some kind of nutty tale on Mickey’s part—a wild-goose chase?” she asked.
Rick, arms folded across his chest, replied, “I’ve got to try everything, Mrs. Sanburne. Don’t worry, we’ll put everything back just as we found it.”
A car pulled up outside, the door slammed, and a haggard Arthur Tetrick strode into the stable. “Mim?” he called out. “Are you out here?”
“Here.”
Arthur shouted as he walked up. “I’ve gotten Chark released! He’ll fly home tomorrow. An ambulance will bring up Adelia on Thursday if the doctors agree.” He noticed the digging. “What’s going on?”
“We don’t know exactly,” Mim answered.
Harry shivered.
“Why don’t you go back to the tack room,” Miranda suggested. “You don’t have enough meat on your bones to ward off the cold. Not like I do.”
“No. I’ll walk around a bit.” Harry jiggled her legs and walked up and down the aisle. Tucker walked with her.
“You racking up brownie points, Tucker?” the tiger hollered.
“Oh, shut up. You can be so green-eyed sometimes.”
That made Rodger Dodger and Pusskin laugh because Mrs. Murphy had beautiful green eyes.
One of the officers hit something hard. “Huh?”
Rick and Cynthia drew closer. “Be careful.”
The other two officers carefully pushed their spades into the earth. “Yeah.” Another light click was heard.
They worked faster now, each shovelful getting closer until a rib cage appeared.
“Oh, my God!” Mim exclaimed.
“What is it?” Arthur pushed his way to the edge, saw the rib cage and a now partially exposed arm as the men feverishly dug.
Arthur hit the ground with a thud.
“Wuss.” Mrs. Murphy turned her nose up.
48
Charles Valiant appeared far older than his twenty-five years. Dark circles under his eyes marred his handsome appearance. He’d eaten nothing since Addie’s fall. Neither Fair nor any of his friends could get him to eat. BoomBoom took a turn with him as did everyone. She spoke passionately of Lifeline, leaving him some literature, but he was far too depressed to respond.
Fair sat with him in the living room of the little cottage on Mim’s estate. Harry boiled water for a cup of instant soup. Mrs. Murphy and Tucker quietly lay on the rug.
“Chark, you’ve got to eat something,” Harry pleaded.
“I can’t,” he whispered.
A knock on the door propelled Fair out of a comfortable old chair. He opened the door. “Arthur.”
A subdued Arthur came inside, quickly shutting the door behind him. He forced a smile. “Well, we know one thing.”
“What?” Fair’s blond stubble made him look like a Viking.
“It can’t get any worse.”
Harry said nothing for she thought it could indeed get worse, and if the killer weren’t apprehended soon, it would.
“Charles, Adelia will be fully recovered before you know it. She’ll be home before the week is out. Please eat something so she doesn’t worry about you,” Arthur reasoned.
“He’s right,” Fair said.
“Well, I stopped by to see how you’re doing.” Arthur held out his hand. “I nearly forgot. Congratulations on coming into your inheritance. I know you’ll use it wisely.”
“Oh,” Chark’s voice sounded weak, “I’d forgotten all about it.”
“This troublesome time will pass. All will be well, Charles. And as for Adelia”—he folded his hands together—“perhaps she is right. She needs to go her own way and be her own person. I truly believe things will work out for the best.”
“Thanks, Arthur.” Chark shook his hand.
“Well, I’d better be on my way.”
“I’ll walk you to your car.” Harry opened the front door, asking as they walked, “Do they know yet who it was in Orion’s stall? I mean conclusively?”
Arthur shook his head. “No, but I think we all know.” A strangled cry gurgled in his throat. “To see her like that when I thought never to see her again . . .” He collected himself. “I will advise Mim on an excellent criminal lawyer, of course.”
“Why?” Harry innocently asked.
“The body was found on her property. I should think she’ll be a suspect and possibly even arrested.”
Harry’s voice rose. “Has everyone lost their minds? Marylou Valiant was one of her best friends.”
“Most murders are committed among people who are family or friends.” He held up his hands. “Not that I, for one minute, think that Mim Sanburne murdered her. But right now, Mim is in a vulnerable position. Go inside before you catch your death.”
Harry walked back into Chark’s cottage, closing the door tightly behind her, and thought about the phrase “catch your death”—as though death were a baseball hurtling through the azure sky.
49
Mrs. Murphy left the stable at six-thirty in the morning, cutting across the hay fields . . . she needed time to herself to think. She brushed by some rattleweed, causing the odd metallic sound that always startled city people upon first hearing it. The light frost, cool on her pads, would melt by ten in the morning, lingering only in areas of heavy shade or along the creek bottom.
A deep, swift creek divided Harry’s farm from Blair Bainbridge’s land, property that had once belonged to the family of the Reverend Herbert Jones. Murphy hoped Blair would return soon, because she liked him. As a model he was one of that growing number of Americans who made a lot of money at his job but preferred to live somewhere lovely instead of in a big city. He was often on the road, though.
She stopped at the creek, watching the water bubble and spray over the slick rocks. Mrs. Murphy, never overfond of water, liked it even less when the mercury was below 60°F. She bent over the deep bank, for there were quiet pools, and if she stayed still she could see the small fish that congregated there. She’d watched Paddy, her ex, catch a small-mouth ba
ss once, a performance that must have heated up her ardor for him although now she couldn’t understand what she had ever seen in that faithless tom. Still, he was handsome and likable.
A flip of a tail alerted her to the school of fish below. She sighed, then trotted to where Jones’s Creek, as it was known, flowed into Swift Run and thence into Meechum’s River.
The scent of fallen and still dropping leaves presaged winter. They crunched underfoot, which made hunting field mice a task. She followed the twists and turns of Jones’s Creek, admiring the sycamores, their bark distinctive by the contrasts of gray peeling away to beige. She startled ravens picking grain out of a cornfield. They hollered at her, lifted up over her head, circled, and returned after she passed.
Another ten minutes and she reached the connection where the creek poured into Swift Run. A big willow, upturned in last week’s rains and wind, had crashed off the far bank into the river. A lone blue heron, a silent sentinel, was poised about fifty yards downstream from the willow.
As Mrs. Murphy was on the opposite shore, the heron, enormous, worried not at all about the small predator. Then again, the bird was so big that if Mrs. Murphy had swum Swift Run and catapulted onto her back, the heron could have soared into the air, taking the cat with her.
She looked up from her fishing, giving Mrs. Murphy a fierce stare. The heron’s methods depended on stillness followed with lightning-fast reflexes as she grabbed a fish—or anything else that caught her fancy—with her long beak.
The tiger cat sat and watched the great bird. An odd ripple of current under the willow’s trunk drew her gaze away from the heron. The water would strike the obstacle and whirl around it, the obstacle would roll a bit, then the water would break free on its way downstream.
She walked along the bank to get a better look, reveling in her good eyes, so much better than human or dog eyes. She focused and another little gusher of water lifted up the obstacle. An arm broke through the surface and then sank again. Another hard rain and the corpse would be free from the branches of the willow.
Mrs. Murphy, fur fluffed out, watched. The next surge of water pushed the body up a bit farther, and she saw what was left of Linda Forloines’s face. The eyes and nose were gone, courtesy of hungry fish and crawdads. The face was bleached even whiter and bloated, but it was Linda Forloines without a doubt. Mrs. Murphy remembered her from when she had worked at Mim’s stable.
She trotted back to her original spot and called out to the heron, “I’m sorry to disturb your hunting. Is this your territory?”
“Of course it’s my territory,” came the curt reply.
“Do you know there’s a dead human back at the willow?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how long it’s been there?”
The heron cocked her head, her light violet-crested plume swept back over her head. “Not quite a week. There’s another body one mile from here as I fly, more miles on the ground. That one is stuck in a truck.” She snapped her long powerful beak. “I wish they’d have the decency to bury their dead.”
“The murderer was in a hurry,” the cat called over the creek.
“Ah.” She stretched her graceful neck to the sky then recoiled it. “They exhibit a strange penchant for killing one another, don’t they?”
“A genetic flaw, I suppose.” Mrs. Murphy also thought human violence most unanimal-like. After all, she and her kind only killed other species, and then for food, although she had a difficult time resisting dispatching the occasional mouse for sport.
The heron spread her wings, exposing each feather to the warming sun. “Oh, that feels good. You know, if I felt like it, I could fly right over there and pick you up by your tail.”
“You’d have to catch me first,” Mrs. Murphy countered.
“You’d be surprised at how fast I can fly.”
“You’d be surprised at how fast I can zig and zag.” Mrs. Murphy’s toes tingled. She unsheathed her claws. “Tell you what. I’ll get a head start and you see if you can catch me. Don’t pick me up, though, because I haven’t hurt you—why hurt me? Just a game, okay?”
“All right.” The heron flapped her wings while still standing.
Mrs. Murphy took off like a shot. She raced along the edge of Jones’s Creek back toward the cornfields as the heron lifted off to her cruising altitude. She ducked into the cornfields, which infuriated the crows, who soared up like pepper dashed into the sky. They saw the heron approaching and complained at the top of their considerable lungs.
The heron swooped low over the corn calling, “No fair.”
“You never said I couldn’t seek cover.”
The crows dive-bombed back into the corn, forgetting for a moment about Mrs. Murphy, who leapt forward, nearly swatting one iridescent black tail.
“HEY!” The crow clamped its yellow beak together, then zoomed out of there, the others following.
The heron circled, landing at the edge of the cornfield, eyes glittering. Mrs. Murphy walked to the end of the corn row. She was maybe ten feet from the huge creature.
“You could run out and attack me before I could get airborne,” the heron taunted the cat.
“Maybe I could, but why would I want to pull feathers from a bird as elegant as yourself?” Mrs. Murphy flattered her. She knew that gleam in the eye, and she didn’t trust the heron even though she wasn’t on the bird’s customary menu.
The compliment pleased the heron. She preened. “Why, thank you.” She stepped toward Mrs. Murphy, who didn’t back into the corn row. “You know that dead woman back there at the willow?”
“I know who it was. No one I care about, but there’s been a rash of murders among the humans.”
“Um. My mother used to tell me that she could give me a fish or she could teach me how to fish. Naturally, I was lazy and wanted her to give me the fish. She didn’t. She swallowed it right in front of me. It made me so mad.” The big beak opened, revealing a bright pink tongue. “But I got the message, and she taught me how to fish. If you don’t know how to fish you look at everyone as a free meal or you become bait yourself. I expect that dead thing back there couldn’t fish.”
“Partly true. She liked fishing in troubled waters.” The cat intently watched the heron. Those huge pronged feet looked out of place in the cornfield.
“Ah. Well, I enjoyed talking to you, pussycat. I’m going back to my nest.”
“I enjoyed you, too.”
With that the heron rose in the sky, circling once. Mrs. Murphy walked out of the cornfield, then made a beeline back to the old barn as the heron made a wider circle and cawed out to her below. Even though she felt the heron wouldn’t attack, the sound of that caw pushed her into a run. She flew, belly flat to the land, the whole way home.
“Why, Mrs. Murphy, you look as though you’ve seen a ghost,” Harry said as Murphy careened into the barn, her eyes as big as billiard balls.
“No, just Linda Forloines.”
Tucker tilted her head. “Not in the best of health, I presume.” Then she laughed at her own joke.
“She was useless in life. At least she’s useful in death.”
“How?”
“Fish food.”
50
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Miranda paced, her leather-soled shoes sliding along the worn shiny floorboards of the post office.
The old railroad clock on the wall read 7:20. Darkness had enveloped the small building. The shades were drawn and only a glimmer of light from the back room spilled out under the back window. The front door, kept unlocked, every now and then opened and closed as Crozet residents, on the way home from work or to a party, dashed in and picked up their mail if they had been unable to get there during the day.
As a federal facility, a post office, no less, the front part of the building where the boxes were had to be kept open to the public. The back was locked, and the crenellated door was pulled down to the counter much like a garage door, and locked from behind.
“
I’ll be at your choir show a tad late,” Harry said.
“You shouldn’t be here alone. Not with a killer on the loose.”
“She’s right,” Mrs. Murphy, Tucker, and Pewter echoed.
Pewter, seeing the light, had sauntered in from next door. “Market’s open until eleven, but still someone could sneak in here and he’d never know. He’s too busy watching television.”
“Harry, come on. You can do this tomorrow.”
“I can’t. I’ve got this one little hunch.”
“If you’re not at our choirfest by intermission, I am calling Rick Shaw. Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
With reluctance, Mrs. Hogendobber closed the door, and Harry locked it behind her.
Working with the mail meant she saw every catalog under the sun. She knew of three hunting catalogs, five gun catalogs, which also featured knives, and one commando catalog for those who envisioned themselves soldiers of fortune. If the police hadn’t traced the knives that the killer used, it might very well be because they had confined themselves to local stores.
She started calling. Since all the catalog companies had twenty-four-hour 800 numbers, she knew she’d get someone on the end of the line.
An hour later she had found Case XX Bowie knives for over $200, replicas of sabers, double-edged swords, saracens, and even stilettos, but not the kind she wanted. She’d spoken to college kids moonlighting, crusty old men who wanted to discuss the relative merits of government-issue bayonets, and even one aggressive man who asked her for a long-distance date.
The two cats nestled into the mail cart, since there wasn’t anything they could do to help. Tucker fell asleep.
Having exhausted her supply of catalogs, Harry had hit a dead end. She couldn’t think what to do next. She’d even called a uniform supply company on the outside chance someone there might be a cutlery enthusiast, as she put it.
“Call L.L. Bean. They know everything,” Mrs. Murphy called out from the bottom of the mail cart.
Murder, She Meowed Page 21
