Sun Kissed (13 page)

The men entered the stall to help cross-tie the stallion, a method Tucker hated to use, because he couldn’t imagine it being very comfortable for the horse. But a little discomfort was better than a life-threatening injury if the animal suddenly went loco again.

When Tucker had finished doctoring the stallion’s legs, Samantha hurriedly applied the wraps, which were actually braces that covered a goodly length of leg and were hinged at the elbows and points of each hock. They would help to shield the stallion’s already lacerated appendages from further harm.

When they had finished with the horse, Tucker turned to Samantha and asked, “Where’s the four-year-old that had the diarrhea?”

In only a few minutes Tucker was drawing more blood samples, a lump of dread swelling in his chest. Unlike Blue Blazes, Tabasco exhibited clinical evidence of poisoning. He was lethargic. His pulse was weak. The whites of his eyes were mildly jaundiced and bloodshot, the last hinting at compromised vascular integrity. The young stallion’s capillary refill was also slow. Tucker didn’t like the looks of this. He didn’t like it at all.

“When he had the diarrhea, was there any blood in the feces?” he asked.

“Yes,” Samantha replied. “Quite a lot of blood.”

“Was it particularly watery and foul?”

“Yes,” she confirmed. “I’ve never smelled anything like it.”

Though the evidence indicated a deliberate attempt on someone’s part to harm Samantha’s horses, Tucker kept rejecting the possibility. As a vet, he occasionally treated poisoned animals, but he would never understand the mentality of an individual who could do something so cruel.

Rather than upset Samantha unnecessarily, he decided to wait until he could study the blood panels before voicing his suspicions aloud.

S
amantha felt oddly numb as she watched Tucker Coulter join two pieces of aluminum conduit and drive one end of the tubing into the earthen floor of the stall. His confident manner should have soothed her, but the events of the night had rubbed her nerves raw. Even now, as she tried to focus all her concern on Tabasco, a part of her listened for Blue, who might go berserk again without warning.

As though he sensed her thoughts, Tucker glanced over his shoulder at her. “We’ll hear if he starts to act up.”

Samantha nodded and tried to smile, but in a way no one else could really understand, her whole world had come under siege. Earlier, when she’d gone to bed for what she’d believed to be the night, her concerns had all been focused on Tabasco. Now two stallions were gravely ill. Other women her age had husbands and children to consume their lives, but she had only her horses.

Desperate for anything that might distract her from the ache of worry that had centered in her chest,
Samantha inclined her head at the conduit the vet was piecing together. “What’s that you’re assembling?” she asked.

“My version of a portable IV-fluid tree,” he explained as he worked. “I learned to make these a couple of years ago when I volunteered at some relay races upstate, and I’ve kept one or two in my truck ever since. They do the job just about anywhere, come apart in a snap, and can be stored under the seat of my truck until I need them.”

“So you think Tabasco needs IV fluids?”

“In cases of severe diarrhea, hydrating the patient is pretty much standard procedure.”

Samantha wasn’t fooled by his noncommittal tone. He clearly had an idea what was wrong with her horse. He just hadn’t chosen to share his suspicions with her yet.

“You know, Dr. Coulter, I—”

“Tucker, please.” He flashed her a quick smile.

At any other time, or in any other place, Samantha might have been impressed by how darkly handsome he looked in the bright illumination of the overhead lights. His hair lay over his forehead in glistening chocolate waves, and his skin had the rich, deep tones of melted caramel, striking such a contrast to his eyes that they looked electric blue.

“Tucker, then.” Samantha moistened her lips, temporarily at a loss as to what she’d meant to say. “I, um, can understand your reluctance to tell me very much at this point. It has to be difficult to make diagnoses without any test results or data. But I’m dying here. These horses are more to me than just business inventory. You know? They’re my babies.”

He rifled through a pile of stuff that he’d brought in from his truck. When he straightened with a clip in his hand, his blue eyes flicked toward her, the expression in them so intense that her heart missed a beat.

“I’ve noticed you’re very fond of your animals.” He stepped over to attach the clip to the top of the aluminum pole, the muscles that roped each side of his spine bunching and rippling under his green shirt with every flex of his arms. “And it’s certainly not my aim to keep you in an agony of suspense. I just hate shooting my mouth off before I know all the facts.”

Samantha hugged her waist and realized she was trembling. “I understand; really I do. But from a purely personal standpoint, I’d rather hear your best guess, even if it’s wrong, than be left in limbo, imagining the worst.”

“I’ll second that,” her father said from behind her.

At the sound of her dad’s voice Samantha nearly jumped out of her skin. Why, she didn’t know. She’d heard Frank and Jerome arrive at the stall gate moments before and shouldn’t have been startled.

“I’ll cast my vote with theirs,” Jerome inserted. When Samantha sent him a grateful look, he smiled reassuringly. ”Your brothers are watching Blue Blazes. If he starts getting twitchy, they’ll holler.”

Tucker moved to Tabasco’s head to insert an IV catheter into the stallion’s jugular vein. “Before I answer any of your questions, I have a couple more of my own.”

“Fire away,” Samantha replied. “If I can’t answer them, I’m sure Jerome can.”

“Can you clearly remember the day this horse first got sick?” Tucker asked.

Samantha thought back. “I think so. Is there something particular you’re curious about?”

Tucker rested a large hand on the stallion’s shoulder. “I’m just wondering if Tabasco was put out to pasture that day—or possibly the day before.”

Samantha couldn’t recall, and sent her foreman an imploring look.

“He came down sick last Sunday morning,” Jerome supplied. “I know it was Sunday because Samantha stayed home from Mass that morning to watch after him and speak to the vet.” The older man cleared his throat. “With so many horses, we pasture them on a rotating schedule according to their stall numbers. Tabasco is put out to graze on Sunday afternoons and on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. When he came down sick that morning, he hadn’t been put out to graze yet.”

“So for nearly three days prior to falling ill, he wasn’t outside at all?” Tucker paraphrased.

“He was outside, just never out to graze,” Jerome corrected. “On nonpasture days, we put the horses on the walker for at least an hour, and we also let them out into their paddocks for fresh air.”

Tucker nodded as if he were filing away each tidbit of information. “When you took Tabasco out to put him on the walker, is it possible he might have been tethered for a few minutes before or after, maybe next to a building, where he could have grazed on weeds or clumps of grass along the foundation?”

“I suppose that’s possible,” the foreman agreed. “There’s lots of times when I take a horse off the walker
that I’ll tether it for a few minutes while I finish doing something else.”

“Do you spray weeds and unwanted grass around the foundations of the outbuildings with any herbicides or pesticides?” Tucker asked.

“Never,” Jerome answered unequivocally. “We just cut the weeds back. If I saw anyone spraying any kind of chemical anywhere on this ranch, I’d fire him or her on the spot.”

“How about pigs?” Tucker flicked a look at Samantha. “Have you ever raised any on this ranch?”

Bewildered by the question, Samantha shook her head. “No, why do you ask?”

“I was just wondering if there might be an outdated bag of swine feed tucked away and forgotten near the horses’ grain.”

Samantha’s father folded his arms atop the gate and broke into the conversation again. “You thinkin’ these horses got into some arsenic? I’ve never heard of arsenic makin’ a horse go berserk.”

Tucker taped the large-bore catheter to Tabasco’s neck. “I don’t think Blue got into arsenic. His symptoms have my mind going in another direction entirely. But Tabasco here, I believe he’s gotten into a poison of some kind.”

“Arsenic?” Samantha’s thoughts immediately turned to the Cary Grant film
Arsenic and Old Lace,
and how quickly the old ladies’ victims had perished. “But Tabasco fell ill over a week ago.”

“Small amounts of arsenic aren’t always instantly fatal,” Tucker told her. “That isn’t to say small amounts
can’t do plenty of damage, but they aren’t necessarily an immediate death sentence, either.”

Samantha pressed a hand over her pounding heart. “Are you sure Blue Blazes didn’t get poisoned, too?”

“His symptoms are different. In my professional opinion, for what it’s worth without lab reports to back it up, I don’t think he ingested a poison, per se. I do believe there’s a possibility that this horse has, though.”

“How could that happen?” Samantha looked to Jerome. “We’re so careful.”

Tucker suspended a bag of IV fluids from the pole and adjusted the drip. “Even if you’re extremely careful, it does happen,” he assured her. “Is it possible that any of the wood in these buildings or any of your fence posts were treated with CCA?”

“No,” Jerome said. “This place is only eight years old, and we knew the dangers of CCA when we poured the foundations. We went out of our way to make sure all the wood for the buildings and fences was arsenic free.”

Tucker patted Tabasco’s shoulder. “He’s a great horse. I love his temperament.”

Samantha was too shocked to appreciate the compliment. “There’s no way this horse could have eaten or drunk anything containing arsenic.”

Tucker examined the horse’s eyes again. “Could be I’m wrong, then. He’s a little jaundiced, and his eyes are bloodshot. His cap refill is a little slow as well, and he’s dehydrated. But a lot of different conditions can produce the same symptoms. I won’t know for sure what’s going on with him until I see his blood panels.”

He crouched down to sort through his satchel, then
sighed and pushed erect. “That said, with your permission, I’d like to start treating this horse for arsenic poisoning. The drugs I’ll use shouldn’t hurt him if I’m wrong, and they’ll help a great deal if I’m right.”

Samantha was relieved to finally have a vet on board who recognized a problem and was willing to act. “You definitely have my permission.”

“Good.” A hint of a smile warmed Tucker’s eyes as he met her gaze. “Would one of you mind coming out to my truck and holding a flashlight for me? I need to get some medicines out of my fridge.”

“You have a fridge in your truck?” Jerome asked with surprise.

“AC/DC. I try to keep a broad range of medications on hand, and a few need to be refrigerated. It saves me from having to drive back to the clinic every time I need something out of the ordinary.”

Samantha turned to follow him from Tabasco’s stall. Just as they exited and closed the gate, Blue Blazes screamed. Tucker hurried back for his satchel, and together they ran the length of the arena, her father and Jerome jogging behind them.

As Tucker prepared another injection for Blue, Samantha stepped close to the cross-tied stallion and spoke softly, trying to calm him down. For the first time since Blue’s birth, her voice failed to soothe him. The realization brought tears to her eyes. Of all her horses he was her most beloved, maybe because he had been her very first Sage Creek foal. Others had been born on her ranch before Blue, but their dams had belonged to her father and had been pregnant when Samantha bought them.
Without any advice from anyone, she had handpicked Blue’s dam and sire, using her knowledge of horses and genetics to produce not only a gorgeous blue roan, but also a champion.

In some way she couldn’t explain and might never completely understand herself, this stallion defined her as an individual. He represented everything that she’d worked so hard to become—a world-class breeder of exquisite quarter horses.

“Is it safe to give him so many of these shots?” she asked Tucker. “The sedative doesn’t seem to be working very well.”

“Xylazine is a short-action drug, so normally it only lasts for about twenty minutes.” A vial in one hand, a syringe in the other, Tucker glanced up at her from where he crouched over his bag. “The Dormosedan usually gives it more wallop, but it doesn’t seem to be doing the job effectively with him.”

Samantha picked up on what he hadn’t said. “I asked if the shots are safe, and you haven’t answered my question.”

His jaw muscle ticked. “Relatively safe.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that I’m guessing each time I load the syringe. The drugs aren’t working like they normally do. To keep him calm, I’m having to give more frequent injections and at stronger doses than I’d usually expect for a horse this size. I can only hope I don’t screw up and give him too much.”

Samantha didn’t like the sound of that. “You can only
hope? I’m sorry, but that doesn’t inspire much confidence.”

“Until I have some test results to look at, my hunches are all I’ve got,” he told her flatly. “Any vet who tells you different is lying through his teeth.”

No one knew better than Samantha how important sound intuition was when it came to working with horses. In the not-so-distant past, before the advent of computer databases, Internet searches, telecommunication, and high-tech diagnostic equipment, much if not most of animal medicine was a guessing game, and out in the field it probably still was. Time and again she’d seen her father visually examine a horse, make a call, and save the animal’s life by taking the right action in the nick of time.

“I know that doesn’t sound very scientific,” Tucker went on, his tone apologetic, “but there you have it. Veterinary medicine has come a long way over the last twenty years, but much of the diagnostic equipment is stationary, primarily because most vets can’t afford the portable versions. I carry more equipment with me than the average vet, but even so, every time I go out on a call, it’s still mostly guesswork. It’s only later, after I’ve returned to the clinical environment and can review the results of the tests, that I know for sure if I guessed right.”

Looking into his unwavering blue eyes, Samantha felt no need to ask how often Tucker Coulter guessed wrong. She ran a trembling hand along her stallion’s neck. “What are your instincts telling you about Blue?”

He gave her a sharp look. “Truthfully?”

“Of course, truthfully. If I didn’t want an honest answer, I wouldn’t have asked.”

He searched her gaze for a long moment and then nodded. “If he were my horse, I’d try another drug, one that’s a complete long shot. I have absolutely no data to justify my reasoning, but if my suspicions are correct and my instincts are sound, it would work a hell of a lot better than these sedatives and would also be much safer.”