Barnstorming (Gail Mccarthy Mysteries) (10 page)

“Anyway, Mac and Blue moved that tree this morning. I guess we never thought of it being evidence, just a nuisance. It was obviously put there by someone who was trying to block the trail to horses. And I guess I told you that Jane and I talked quite a bit about all these trail access problems and how someone, we don’t know who, keeps trying to block the ridge trail. Anyway, I’m sure she saw red when she met that tree. It would have been very hard to move single-handedly, while you were trying to hold your horse with one hand.”

Jeri nodded. “I see.”

“I did wonder, after we saw what I thought was Ross Hart’s indoor agriculture, if he might not be blocking the trail so no one could look right at the light in his obviously new little attic. Did you call on Ross?” I asked.

“I tried,” Jeri said. “No one home. I just worked my way around the subdivision.”

“Learn anything?”

“No, not really. No one heard anything or saw anything. No one remembers the shot. A couple of people said they hiked the trails. Most said they never went up there. It’s as if they all live in their houses and cars.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” I admitted.

“Anyway,” Jeri said, putting my map in a folder, “I’m going back down to the office to find out if the bullets from the poacher’s gun match up. Then I need to question the folks at Lazy Valley Stable and the Red Barn. Can we plan on a trail ride this week?”

“Sure,” I said.

And Jeri Ward let herself out the door and was gone.

The next morning I was seated in the passenger seat of my old vet truck, while Lucy Conners drove us to her first call of the day. This was a horse with an eye which was halfway shut, not too far from my place.

“After that,” Lucy said, “I’ve got to go to the Red Barn. Ross Hart has one he’s trying to sell and the woman who’s buying it wants me to do a vet check. Oh joy.”

I took that in. I knew exactly what Lucy meant about vet checks being no fun. But I was also very curious to observe Ross Hart. Perhaps, just perhaps, I could sneak in a few questions.

Lucy shifted the diesel truck into a higher gear, and the sound took me back in an instant to the many, many times I had driven this pickup to a vet call. For ten straight years I had worked nonstop as a horse vet, driving from barn to barn in this very truck. The thought brought a strange emotion; I almost shivered. Nostalgia and what? Almost revulsion. I couldn’t tease it out immediately.

Lucy turned on McDonald Road and then, very quickly, into a driveway. In another moment we were bumping our way to a small barn. I could see a few fenced paddocks. A man stood in front of the barn, clearly waiting for the vet to arrive. I had never been to this place before—it had been built since my days as a practicing vet—and yet it was all so familiar.

This was my job, this was what I had been trained to do, what I had practiced for so many years. Even as I followed Lucy and was introduced to the man, my mind was running at warp speed on a track of its own. This was something I knew how to do, this was my job.

Watching Lucy examine the gray horse with the half-shut eye, I was already noting what would happen next. First she would stain the eye, tranquilizing the horse if it was needed, and then scan the eye with her pocket light, looking for any injuries or scratches on the cornea. If none were present, she would administer some eye ointment that contained a mix of antibiotics and steroids and perhaps give the horse some Banamine. This was what I would do, anyway.

Lucy proceeded with the exam. The man was holding his horse quite competently; the horse was tolerating having his eye looked at. Nobody needed me. And in that second, I registered the other part of my emotion and named it.

Mixed with the sense of familiarity and nostalgia, the inner certainty that this was my job and I could do it, was almost a flavor of boredom. Been there, done that. I was remembering just how many times I’d driven up to a barn to work on a horse with a half-shut eye, or a colic, or a lameness. Some I could help, some I couldn’t. And then there was the sadness and frustration when I dealt with horses (or owners) who could not be helped, due to a serious condition, lack of money, lack of intelligence, you name it. It was dawning on me that just about the time I’d quit to become a mom, I had been feeling pretty burned out on this job. Somehow I had forgotten that.

It looked as though the gray horse had a healthy cornea; Lucy was giving the owner instructions on doctoring the eye. I watched her talk, taking in the sincerity and warmth in her fine-boned, olive-skinned face, and I remembered this part of the job, too. It was essential to get along with the clients, even the difficult ones, or one wouldn’t have a healthy practice for long. Vets were judged on their ability to be personable as well as their skill in equine medicine. I remembered the distaste I had begun to feel at having to constantly “sell myself” to people. I knew just how to do it, assume that demeanor of kind, competent, in-charge, sympathetic professional, but did I really WANT to do it anymore?

The owner of the gray horse appeared to be a perfectly pleasant individual, but certainly there were plenty of jerks in the horse world and I’d dealt with lots of them. Did I want to go back to this? When I didn’t have to?

Lucy must have noticed my somewhat abstracted expression as I climbed back in the truck. She put the pickup in gear, headed down the driveway, and turned to me.

“Whatcha thinking, Gail? Are you ready to go back to work?”

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I’ve got a lot of mixed emotions.”

I stared at Lucy, whose eyes had gone back to the road. She was much younger than me, in her mid-thirties, and had been working for Santa Cruz Equine Practice for ten years now. A strikingly attractive woman, she had remained single, and as far as I knew, focused on her job.

“How’s it working for you?” I asked. “Do you enjoy it?’

Lucy sighed. “Yes and no. Well, you know. I get sick of being called out in the middle of the night. I can get tired of the people. But I love horses and the job’s never boring. And I need to make a living. If I were in your shoes and could choose if I wanted to work, I don’t know what I’d do.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m really conflicted.” I sighed. “Let’s just see what today brings.” I wondered whether I should tell Lucy about my finding Jane Kelly up in the woods. I had noticed a short article in the paper about the shooting, but there was no mention of my finding the body, though there was a statement that a man had been arrested on probable cause. Apparently Jeri had chosen to keep my name away from the press.

In any case, we were already nearing the Red Barn; there wasn’t time to tell her now.

“What sort of horse are you vet checking?” I asked. “Do you know?”

“Oh yeah. The worst sort. An older gelding, said to be a babysitter. This woman wants him for a husband horse. I think the horse is twenty. How likely is it he’ll pass a soundness exam?”

I shrugged. We both knew the score. Older horses could be great mounts for beginners, but it was very rare to find one that was completely without soundness issues. Prospective buyers wanted the horse to “pass” a vet check, which few older horses could honestly do. In the end, a vet had to pronounce on a gray area—was this horse sound enough to do the job the buyer needed—and how long was he likely to stay sound. This was actually an impossible question to answer, and I, like Lucy, had hated doing vet checks.

“Ross is not gonna be happy with me if I flunk his horse,” Lucy said, with a head shake. “And Ross can be a real butthead.”

“Is that right?” I’d only spoken to Ross Hart a few times; mostly as I was riding past the boarding stable. I really didn’t know him at all. But he had always struck me as a pretty tough customer. Now, remembering his indoor gardening project, I wondered just exactly how tough he might actually be. Hardened-criminal tough? Willing-to-murder-someone tough?

Lucy turned into the drive of the Red Barn boarding stable. I could see Ross at the hitching rail in front of the big barn with a middle-aged woman at his side. Tied to the rail was a tallish bay gelding.

“Here we go,” Lucy said.

I watched her climb out of the truck while putting a friendly, relaxed smile on her face.

Yes, indeed, I remembered that reaction. I found I was pasting just the same sort of smile on my own face. Here I am, your pleasant veterinarian. Inwardly, I shook my head. Did I really want this life back again?

Lucy greeted Ross and the woman and introduced me. Ross and I made cordial mouth noises at each other. I shook the woman’s hand. The whole time I tried to watch Ross, wondering if I was facing a killer.

Ross’s face didn’t reveal much. In his mid-twenties, he was strongly built, with a thick chest. He sported a goatee and his hair was cut very short, in what I took to be a popular style, since I saw it so often. I didn’t actually think that it flattered anyone.

Certainly not Ross Hart. His somewhat heavy, fleshy face was not improved by the little goat beard and almost shaved head. His small eyes had a closed, guarded expression, and his mouth was hard. He looked me over without interest and turned to the middle-aged woman beside him, smiling as he untied the bay gelding from the rail.

“Ace, here, is just what you need for your husband,” he said in a genial tone. “This horse has been packing beginners for years and he can sure pack one more. I’ve taken people all over these hills on this horse.” And he waved his hand at the ridge behind us.

I glanced at Ace and thought that the fairly high-withered, swaybacked animal looked as if he might be near the end of his working life, but Ross’s comment opened the door for a question I wanted to ask.

“Do you ride these trails much?” I asked innocently.

“Sure, when I have time,” Ross said. ‘Why do you ask?” And for the first time his eyes met mine with a certain keeness in them.

“I was riding back there Saturday,” I said, “and I thought I saw you.”

A long silence greeted this remark. Ross appeared to be studying me carefully. I had the impression he was weighing things up in his mind, uncertain how best to answer. “Did you?” he said at last.

“Well, I thought so,” I said. “Jonah Wakefield said he’d seen you, so I guessed it was you I saw. Riding a sorrel horse, loping along up the swingset trail, in the late afternoon,” I added.

Ross Hart very clearly looked as if he’d like to ask me what the hell business it was of mine, but was unsure of the wisdom of this course.

“Might have been me,” he said finally. “I was up there not too long ago on a sorrel colt.”

“This would be day before yesterday,” I said. “The day Jane Kelly was shot back there,” I added, and watched his face.

The eyes narrowed and the lips tightened, that was for sure. The middle-aged lady launched off on “how awful” it was and how she’d read about it in the paper and of course she knew Jane on account of Jane used to board here. Ross Hart said nothing. His eyes watched me in a very wary way.

The horse-buying woman was concluding that Jane had probably been shot by accident by someone who was after deer. I nodded and watched Ross. Ross watched me. Stalemate.

Finally Lucy interrupted, saying that she had several more calls this morning. Ross immediately began leading the bay gelding down to the dirt parking lot where Lucy liked to do soundness exams—the same place I’d always done them many years ago. I trailed after the little group, soundness the last thing on my mind.

Ross Hart had clearly been unwilling to admit he was out riding on the trails Saturday, and yet I thought he had been. Why would Jonah Wakefield lie? And Jane herself had said that she had seen Ross, and “if looks could kill, I’d be dead.” And less than an hour later she had been dead.

Just as I was contemplating this, a somewhat harsh voice behind me brought me back to the present.

“That’s a damn good old horse.”

I turned to find myself face to face with Tammi Martinez, the current manager of the Red Barn. I blinked. I simply wasn’t used to tattooed women in halter tops at nine in the morning on an October day. Now that I thought about it, I had never seen Tammi when she wasn’t wearing some sort of skimpy top that bared either her shoulders or her midriff or both. In this case it was both. The top, or lack thereof, revealed several tattoos, which I guessed was the point, more or less. Why have the tattoos if no one could see them?

On the other hand, Tammi was not a particularly young woman—I guessed her age to be somewhere around forty. Certainly she was slender enough that the tight jeans and minimal top did not look totally incongruous, but they weren’t entirely flattering, either. The phrase “mutton dressed up as lamb” came to mind.

Of course, I reminded myself, this was really sour grapes on my part. I was big-framed, with wide shoulders and hips, and the older I got the more pounds seemed to want to attach themselves to my sturdy framework. On top of this, I felt no need to flaunt myself as an object of desire to any males in the vicinity. Thus my sturdy cotton cargo pants, comfortable but not fashionable, and a loose linen T-shirt.

“Hey Gail,” Tammi greeted me. “Are you back at work?”

I’d known Tammi in the peripheral way one knows veterinary clients and other local horse folk for many years. “Not yet,” I said. “I’m just thinking about it. I’m riding with Lucy today, that’s all.”