Hayburner (A Gail McCarthy Mystery) (20 page)

Now what was that supposed to mean? I stared at Clay, feeling flattered and unnerved at the same time. No one that I had dated as casually as I had Clay had ever seemed this determined. I wouldn't have said I was the type to inspire such a feeling.

But here I was, finishing my sauteed salmon over rice in front of a quiet man who had just announced his intention to keep pursuing me despite the fact that I had chosen his rival.

Once again Clay spoke as if he could intuit my thought. "You don't need to worry. I won't bother you. Or your new boyfriend. I just want you to know I'll be there. If you ever change your mind."

"All right," I said.

Something about his tone was disturbing me. The words were reasonable enough, but his face was so calm, his voice so even. It just didn't feel right. I wanted a change of subject, and quickly.

"So how are things at home?" I asked him. "How's your mom? Is Bart going to be able to rebuild the big barn?" I knew I was babbling, but Clay took my questions as smoothly as he had taken my earlier statement.

"Mom's been tired lately. It's hard on Bart. But it does look like the insurance company is going to come through, so Bart ought to be able to build some kind of a barn."

"That's good. They'll pay in a case of arson, then."

"Apparently. As long as you're not the arsonist."

"Makes sense."

I took the last bite of my salmon just as my cell phone rang. I'd warned Clay I was on call; he nodded in understanding as I excused myself and answered the phone.

It was the answering service, naturally. A colic, of course. Up in the wilds of the San Lorenzo Valley, a good hour away. I found I was actually delighted.

Saying a hasty good-bye to Clay, and leaving a fifty-dollar bill to cover the meal, I went out and got in my truck. Alone in the dark parking lot, behind the steering wheel, I heaved a deep sigh of relief.

I never would have imagined that I'd prefer a colic call to a dinner date, but Clay's reaction had been unsettling. I started the truck with an odd little frisson along my nerves. I was glad to be getting away.

Monday morning Jim was back at work. Closeted in his office an hour before anyone else was due in, I was relieved, exasperated, and apologetic, all in turns.

"The thing is," I said, "nothing I do seems to help. The guy is determined to hate me."

I was overstating the case, probably. But then, I'd had a month of John Romero's sulkiness to deal with on my own. Who could blame me for dramatizing the situation a little?

Jim, apparently. "We need him, Gail. Can't you just manage to get along with him?"

This was a predictable reaction. Jim wasn't interested in dealing with emotional issues on the part of his employees. However, I was no longer merely an employee.

"Maybe we could find someone else. Someone I could get along with. Or maybe Hans Schmidt is going to steal enough of our business that we won't need a third vet."

"I don't think so." Jim gave me a hard-edged glance. "Hans Schmidt won't be stealing our business for long."

"Why's that?"

"I know Hans from way back and he's no horse vet. He doesn't know jack about horses."

"You're kidding."

"Nope. Hans is strictly a small animal vet. Practiced for years up in San Francisco. His daughter's the one who's into horses. She got him down here, encouraged him to expand his business into large animals, too. But he's really afraid of horses. People will notice after awhile. Horse owners aren't dumb." Jim laughed, a short, sharp bark. "Once the women get over being charmed by him, anyway."

"You really think he's afraid of horses?"

"Hell, yes. He practically knocks one out just to float its teeth. He won't do any sort of work on any horse, no matter how gentle, without sedating it until it's staggering."

"Is that right?"

I was surprised, but I knew better than to disbelieve. Jim might be a hard-driving dynamo of a boss, with very little sympathy for his employees' personal problems, but he was a deeply knowledgeable vet, and his harsh assessment of another veterinarian was likely to be accurate. I'd known Jim for many years now; he was seldom wrong. Often rude, perhaps, but usually right.

"Hans Schmidt will be lucky to stay out of jail, anyway," Jim added grimly. "That'll take care of our problem."

"What do you mean?"

"All that animal rights stuff he's involved in. It landed him in jail before. A few years ago. I forget exactly why. Ask him; he'll probably tell you. He's proud of it." Jim rubbed his close-shaven jaw with its deep dimple, his short, stubby fingers clean and callused. "I think he burned a barn down or something."

"What?" I must have sounded as shocked as I felt, because Jim's eyes whipped to my face.

"Yeah, a barn, or maybe it was a laboratory. I can't remember. Somewhere that animals were 'held captive,' anyway. You know the rhetoric."

"I sure do. Hans has spouted it at me himself, many a time. But Jim, I guess you don't know, since you've been gone." And I told him about the arsonist in Harkins Valley.

"Wow," he said. "That's hard to believe. But you say they've caught the guy."

"They've got a guy, yeah. And he seems like an obvious candidate. He's been at all these fires; I've seen him, just staring like he was completely enthralled. It's creepy. But hell, Hans has been at all these fires, too. And I'm pretty sure the fire investigator and the detective don't know he has a record of arson."

"Well, he wouldn't advertise it under the circumstances, would he?"

"No," I agreed.

"Unfortunately, I don't think this sounds like Hans and his buddies. Wouldn't they leave large notices that the barns were burned in order to free the animals? Much as I'd enjoy seeing him behind bars," Jim added.

"I don't know," I said. "Hans is getting some benefit out of these fires, himself. Or his daughter is. Some of the horses in the barns that burned have been moved to Quail Run Ranch."

"Oh-ho," Jim grinned his brief, triangular grin.

"Right," I said. "I wonder."

We stared at each other for a moment. Jim shrugged. "Try to get along with John," was all he said. Then he was out the door.

"Right," I said again to the empty air.

NINETEEN

My week progressed as my weeks usually did. Busy. Damn busy. I found no opportunities to talk to John, not that it would necessarily have helped if I had, judging by my last attempt. The man was clearly avoiding me, anyway.

Neither did I find an opportunity to see Blue. We were both working hard and getting in late-no time or energy for dinner dates or their aftermath. Most nights he called me, though. We talked about the weekend.

I thought about the weekend-a lot. And I thought about Friday night. I had the urge to call Jeri and ask how the investigation was progressing, but I resisted.

Reminding myself that it wasn't my business, and I did have plenty of business of my own, I kept my curious fingers off the phone. But I wondered. I wondered a lot. I listed the other boarding stables in Harkins Valley off in my mind. There were at least half a dozen of them. I wondered if Jeri would consider mounting some kind of guard.

If I could think of this sort of thing, so would she, I reminded myself. It was hardly rocket science, more like adding two plus two and getting four.

Friday morning did not begin auspiciously, at least for me.

My first call was to a jumping horse that was suffering from a mysterious lameness, "somewhere high in the rear end." Oh no, I thought, when Nancy gave me the word. These were always the hardest sorts of lameness to diagnose.

This case didn't turn out to be any easier than I'd expected. The horse was a ten-year-old chestnut gelding named Reddy, a good and useful hunter over fences. His owner, a woman in her twenties, reported that the horse had seemed to her to be "moving funny behind," but she could detect no obvious lameness. Then, yesterday, he'd fallen with her while jumping a two-and-a-half-foot fence.

"I'm all right," she said, wincing and rubbing her left shoulder. "But there's definitely something wrong with him. He's never fallen before, and he can jump twice that height. Easily."

"All right," I said. "Let's jog him in a few circles."

Reddy knew how to longe and he trotted freely around us in both directions at the end of a long line. As his owner had said, he had no easily detectable lameness, but he did seem to be moving his hind legs stiffly.

I watched him for several minutes and then sighed. "This is a hard one," I told the woman frankly. "I'll do the spavin test on him, just to make sure, but I think his hocks are fine. He's not stifled, and he doesn't appear to have a dropped hip. Other possibilities are his back, particularly the sacroiliac joint, or some kind of pulled muscle in his rump. Or it could be a disease called EPM that's caused by a parasite."

The woman shook her head, looking as baffled as I felt. "So, where do we start?"

"Spavin test and some blood work, to see if it's EPM," I said. "Confine him in a small pen or stall and give him complete rest for a couple of weeks, in case it's a muscle or a back thing. By the way," I asked her, "is there any possibility it's the result of a traumatic injury?"

She shook her head. "Not that I know of. He fell with me after he started doing this."

"Does he pull back?" I asked.

"Yeah, he does from time to time." We looked at each other, and I saw the proverbial light bulb click on behind her eyes. "You know, he pulled back real hard, less than a month ago. He was tied to the trailer when I was at a show and something scared him, I'm not sure what. I saw him pull back, though. He was tied solid and he sat back on the lead rope as hard as he could for a full minute."

"What happened?" I asked her.

"The lead rope broke and he went over backward," she said. "He got right up and seemed fine, so I never thought about it again. But ..."

"That could have done it," I said. "Horses can hurt their spinal cords that way."

"If that's the cause," she asked, "what's the diagnosis?"

"I'm not sure," I said honestly. "Back injury, to be glib. Just like in humans, backs are difficult to diagnose. I'd give him two weeks' complete rest, and if he's not better we may need to x-ray his back. We'll have to sedate him for that and lay him out flat; it's not an easy procedure with a horse. Another possibility is a chiropractor."

"They have those for horses?" She laughed.

"Yeah, they sure do. And acupuncturists and homeopathic practitioners, too. I can give you the names of a couple of equine chiropractors who have good reputations," I said.

"Do you believe in that stuff?"

"I don't know enough about it to make a judgment," I told her. "I have seen some horses with chronic problems that did seem to get better under some of these alternative therapies. Those horses might have gotten better anyway, I don't know. But if I had a horse with an obscure back problem, I'd probably consult both a chiropractor and an acupuncturist before I tried anything too invasive in the way of Western medicine."

"Really?"

"Sure, Western medicine is great for acute conditions; it has no peer, in my opinion. But long-term chronic conditions can be problematic. Allergies, back pain, that sort of thing. I think alternative therapies are definitely worth looking at there."

"All right. I'll consider that."

I finished up my exam, drew some blood, and gave the woman the numbers of the two equine chiropractors I thought well of. My cell phone rang as she was writing them down.

"Judith Rainier has a colic," Nancy said. "Can you go?"

"I can leave right now," I said. "Tell her I'll be there in twenty minutes."

Taking my leave of Reddy and his owner, I headed for Harkins Valley and Judith's place. Sandwiched between two fancy horse operations, the Rainier family ranch was decidedly humble in comparison. Both the old barn and the little house looked worn down and weary, and the pastures were fenced with sagging strands of less-than-desirable barbed wire fence. The whole place had the look of one that nobody had put any money into for twenty years.

This might be true, as far as I knew. Judith had inherited the place from her parents long ago, and I didn't think she had any spare cash to use on ranch improvements. A single mom with two daughters, she held down a full-time job and seemed to put most of her income into her children's various horsey pursuits.

I drove along the narrow, bumpy, deeply rutted driveway to find Judith and her daughters waiting for me out at the barn. "It's Mabel. She's colicked," the older one said, as I got out of the cab.

I knew the two girls apart by sight, but could never remember their names. The older daughter had a long blond braid and was deeply attached to her horses. However, I couldn't remember who Mabel was. I looked to Judith for enlightenment.

"Jamie's old barrel racing horse," Judith said. "She's twenty-two. We found her out in the field this morning, lying down. We think she's colicked."

"Let's go have a look," I said.

Following the girls out through a wire gate, I noticed at least a dozen horses peering over the fences at us. "Are these all yours?" I asked Judith.