One Hoof In The Grave [Carriage Driving 02] (21 page)
Read One Hoof In The Grave [Carriage Driving 02] Online
Authors: Carolyn McSparren
He would suggest one simple, relatively inexpensive security measure to Merry. A steel farm gate with a keypad could easily be swung between those two boulders, and another with a padlock could be hung at the bottom of the old road around the curve.
A human being on foot could still slip past the gates and walk up the hill, but no cars or trucks could enter. No one could leave with anything heavier than a screwdriver. The gates could be opened in the morning for clients and construction crews, then locked at night after everyone left.
He’d talk to Peggy first thing in the morning. He figured Merry would take the suggestion better coming from her. Otherwise, she might decide he was interfering.
Which he was, but he’d be damned if anything was going to happen to either of those women on his watch.
Peggy
In case Merry decided to sneak back to the farm as she’d done the previous night, Peggy parked behind Merry’s truck in the driveway. The two women certainly didn’t live in one another’s pockets, but during the year since Hiram’s death, and since Peggy now spent so many hours out at the farm, they’d slid into an easy symbiosis.
Peggy would truly miss Merry’s company after she moved to her new house out at Lackland Farm, but they’d still see one another. She felt a kinship with Merry she’d never attained with Marilou, her own daughter.
Normal, probably. Mothers wanted their children to life the lives they hoped to have lived themselves, but perfected in ways that they had not managed. Children wanted to live their
own
lives, however different the drummer they marched to.
Marilou wanted her mother not to make waves, to color within the lines, to be the utterly conventional woman she had never been and could never be. Her husband, Ben, had understood. He’d cheerfully baled her out when she’d been arrested in protest marches back in the sixties. God, she missed him.
Peggy’s discovery of horses and her talent for driving had forced Marilou to admit that her mother was out of her control. It drove her nuts, which secretly pleased Peggy immensely.
Peggy saw the answering machine light blinking when she walked into the house, because Sherlock, fascinated by the blinking light, lay with his head on it. Three messages, two of which were from sales people. The third, however, was from her granddaughter Josie. Now, if there were only a way to speak straight to Josie without listening to Marilou.
There wasn’t, but eventually, Josie came on the line. “Gram, when can I come out and drive Don Qui?” She sounded wildly enthusiastic.
“Not for a while, baby. He’s a handful right now.”
“Not with me, he wouldn’t be. He loves me and Li.”
Actually, he did, but Peggy doubted that would translate into loving being put to a cart. She tried to explain to Josie without success.
“Then, can I come drive Golden? You could ride with me.” In the background, Peggy heard Marilou telling the child how busy they were with the end of the school year, etc., etc., etc.
“You’ll be coming out to the show on Saturday and we have the clinic on Sunday, but maybe . . .”
Marilou’s voice came on the line, “Moooother, we have Sunday school and church and dinner with the Bigelows. I want you to come to dinner too.”
“Tell Josie I said if not this weekend then after school next weekend. School’s almost out, so she can spend some time with me at the farm this summer.”
“It’s too dangerous . . .”
Peggy hung up on her, but gently. Peggy had been raised practically guilt free. She still couldn’t figure out what she’d done to screw up Marilou.
Peggy poured herself a glass of sherry and settled into her wing chair to watch the news. All four cats draped themselves on and around her, even before she located the remote.
The lead story was the bizarre death of one of Georgia’s wealthiest and most socially prominent businessmen. The script the newsman read from made the entire carriage driving weekend sound like a Roman orgy organized by Dionysians with too much money and too little morality. That most of them were old enough to need Viagra and estrogen for an orgy didn’t make it into the news.
Someone had leaked the incident with the animal rights banner and the bullhorn. So far, no organized animal rights group had taken credit for it, so it was either a splinter group or an individual.
Peggy closed her eyes and prayed they wouldn’t include the story of her dunking the carriage in the lake.
They didn’t. Marilou would have pitched a fit over that.
Since the media had been kept off the Tollivers’ property, they had to be content with aerial shots from their helicopters. Peggy realized that the thick pine forest grew right up to the edge of the road down to the pond and even closer to the southern and eastern edge of the dressage arena.
In the dense fog, the killer could have dispatched Raleigh, stepped back into the woods a few paces, then slipped around the far end of the arena and emerged among the trailers by the stable, unnoticed and unremarked.
Would a white face show among the pines like the Cheshire cat? Would light hair without a cap?
Both Dawn and Sarah Beth had blonde hair. Dawn was tan, but Sarah Beth’s skin was literally milk-white. In either case, simply turning away from the dressage arena to face into the trees would have rendered anyone standing there invisible.
Merry had sworn she’d seen no one. Someone didn’t believe that. Maybe they ought to hunt up a hypnotist to regress Merry to see if she could remember someone or something else.
Peggy laughed and scared Marple off her lap. The little cat sat at her feet and glowered before climbing back up and curling into a tight little ball again.
“As if,” Peggy said, stroking the soft fur. “I can just see Merry allowing herself to be hypnotized.” Something had to give, and quickly. Last night could have been deadly if the cellar hadn’t already been half filled with dirt and sand to cushion Merry’s fall, or if that snake had been a copperhead or water moccasin.
Come to that, one of Merry’s bullets might have ricocheted off the cellar wall and killed her.
Or the horses could have gotten out and been hurt.
Nope, Geoff was a good man and a great investigator, but he didn’t know either the horses or the horse people. Time to insinuate themselves into the investigation. They’d managed to catch Hiram’s killer. Granted, they’d almost gotten themselves killed in the process, but this time they’d be smarter.
But how? Peggy eased the newspaper from under Marple’s rear end, eliciting a grumble. She read the front page story of the murder. Nothing new. Then she checked the obituary page, which ran eight column inches on Raleigh’s accomplishments in business. She put it aside to go over later with Merry and Dick Fitzgibbons, who’d gone to high school with Raleigh.
The viewing was Tuesday evening in St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church down the road from Raleigh’s farm. The funeral was Wednesday morning at eleven, followed by interment in the adjacent cemetery. Followed, no doubt, by funeral baked meats for the chosen few invited back to Raleigh’s mansion afterwards.
Time to drag out the funeral dress she hadn’t worn since Hiram’s funeral. She doubted neither she nor Merry would receive an invitation to the reception after the funeral, but she doubted anybody would actually kick them out if they attended.
And eavesdropped on every interesting conversation they could.
Geoff would have a cat fit, but there wasn’t much he could do except arrest them ahead of time. If he found out they were going.
Geoff
On his way to interview veterinarian Gwen Standish the following morning, Geoff stopped by Merry’s farm to make certain nothing new had happened during the night. He found Merry in the arena driving Heinzie, the giant Friesian, in the complicated pattern of an advanced dressage test. Don Qui stood quietly in the pasture, but didn’t take his eyes off his friend.
“That’s an improvement,” Geoff said, waving at Don Qui. “Last year that dumb donkey would have had to be in the arena trotting beside Heinzie or be screaming his lungs out.”
“It’s taken him a year to trust that Heinzie isn’t going to be kidnapped the instant his back is turned. I don’t know how I’m going to manage when I take Heinzie to a show.”
“You planning to do that any time soon?”
“Maybe next month, but I have to get Don Qui put to first.”
“Put to what? A wrecker?”
“You remember the cart for Very Small Equines I borrowed from the Tollivers?”
“The one stashed under the big marathon carriage?”
She nodded. “We’re going to haul it out, unfold it and hitch Don Qui up. Maybe this afternoon. Want to watch?”
“Absolutely. You need somebody to call the ambulance to pick up your remains. But I’m afraid I won’t get back in time. I’ve got actual interviewing to do.”
“Good luck, and I mean that sincerely. I’ll never be totally free of suspicion so long as nobody else has been convicted of the crime. Raleigh may have done with his death what he couldn’t do with his computer—compromise my livelihood. Who’ll hire a show manager who kills competitors?”
Her tone was light, but Geoff could tell how serious she was.
“Can I come up?” Geoff asked. She looked surprised, but nodded. He climbed up into the carriage. At her command Heinzie walked on.
“I have a suggestion,” he said. “You may not like it, but listen first.”
“Ooookay.”
He told her about the gate locks and Amos’s suggestion about the CCTV.
He expected ‘yes, but.’ Instead, she thought for a moment, then said, “The guys are coming after lunch to pour the concrete slab for my house. Finally. I’ll bet they’d set some heavy posts at the gates in the leftover concrete. I’m not so sure I can afford the CCTV.”
“Think about it. Now, how do you stop this thing?”
Gwen Standish ran her
equine practice out of a metal office building. Several paddocks separated by white board fences carved the property into small paddocks. Two were occupied by bay horses. In the parking lot stood a white panel van with ‘Standish D.V.M.’ on its side plus a couple of pickups.
Inside, Geoff found a small reception area manned by a tubby young woman wearing scrubs printed with pink unicorns. She smiled up at him, revealing perfect teeth that only good orthodonture or good genes could create, and a single dimple on the left side of her mouth. She had a pretty face surrounded by fluffy hair nearly the color of the unicorns. She wore a plain wedding band, so some man appreciated her voluptuous body and good nature.
The nametag on her desk read Meghan Farnham, Veterinary Technician. “Oh, hey,” she said, after she read the card he handed her. “Gwen’s expecting you. She said to come on back.” She pointed to a metal door beside her desk.
Inside he found that the working part of the small clinic looked remarkably well-outfitted with computer terminals and equipment he couldn’t identify, but that appeared new—no dings or scratches—and state-of-the-art. Off to one side was a well-equipped dispensary with a row of locked cabinets above. That must be where the legend drugs were kept.
Through a big interior window he saw a full surgical theatre with a tilt table which he guessed had to be large enough to rotate a horse.
In the center of the examining area, a gray mare stood patiently while the woman, who must be Gwen Standish, ran an ultrasound device over the horse’s abdomen. She glanced over her shoulder at him and gave him a ‘one minute’ sign.
Raleigh’s barn manger Brock hadn’t been kidding when he said Gwen Standish wasn’t as big as a minute. He guessed she was under five feet tall. Although there wasn’t an excess ounce of flesh on her body, ropy muscles stood out in her arms and shoulders.
