Barnstorming (Gail Mccarthy Mysteries) (11 page)

Tammi narrowed her eyes at Lucy, who was watching Ace trot in a small circle. Even from a hundred feet away, I could see the slight bob of his head that indicated the horse was not entirely sound. I knew Tammi could see it, too.

“I damn sure hope Lucy does not talk Estelle out of buying that horse,” Tammi said, in a low, fierce whisper. “Ross needs the money bad. We need the money.”

“We?” I said on a questioning note.

Tammi seemed disposed to confide in me, why I didn’t know. “Ross and I are renting that A-frame house up the road,” she said. “Rent’s due tomorrow and the landlord wants twenty-five hundred a month. Neither Ross or I make all that much money running this place and training horses. He needs to sell this horse to Estelle. That damn Lucy better not queer the pitch. That horse is perfect for what Estelle wants to do with him.” I had the impression Tammi was hoping I might influence Lucy towards passing the horse.

My mind was running on a different track. Tammi and Ross were renting that house together. This was news to me. I had heard they were an item, but not that they were living together. Maybe the indoor gardening was a joint project—a way to supplement their income. I tried another question.

“Running a boarding stable must be tough in this economy. I heard you lost a client Saturday.”

Tammi’s eyes shot to mine. “You mean Jane?” she said, and I did not miss the suddenly wary tone in her voice. It reminded me of the look in Ross’s eyes when I’d brought the subject up.

“Didn’t Jane used to board here?” I asked innocently.

“Used to,” Tammi said sharply. “Used to is right. She hauled her horse out of here last week. Took the mare to Lazy Valley is what I heard. She still owed us a month’s board.”

“Really?” I said, on a questioning note.

Tammi was quite apparently bubbling over with pent-up emotion. “That damn Jane was a pain in the butt. Don’t tell anyone I said so now that she’s dead. Always complaining about something. She thought she should be the trainer here, instead of Ross. She was always hassling him, too. She was nothing but a troublemaker.” Tammi took a quick breath. “Of course, I’m sorry somebody shot her.”

Tammi did not sound sorry at all. On the other hand, I reflected, it would be hard to collect a month’s board from a dead woman. Tammi and/or Ross had no real motive to kill Jane. Unless, of course, Jane had discovered their agricultural project and threatened to blow the whistle on them. That might constitute a motive. And Ross had apparently been riding back there when Jane was shot.

Tammi seemed to realize she’d said too much. “I need to go turn horses out,” she announced abruptly, and wheeled around and went back to the barn.

I meandered down the hill toward Lucy, Ross, and the potential horse buyer, who were grouped in a half circle, looking at the bay gelding. Ace stood with his head down, calm and quiet, waiting for his fate to be decided.

I felt sad as I watched the old horse. This was something I had grown to hate about the horse business. The way older horses who had done a good job their whole lives were treated as disposable sporting equipment, dumped when their working life was done, often ending up at the local auction yard, to be sold to kill buyers who shipped them to slaughter in Mexico and Canada, under horrific conditions. It just didn’t bear thinking of. My own horse, Sunny, had been saved from just such a fate. But there were countless other horses out there, just as sweet, who went to a miserable end. I couldn’t rescue them all. I hated it.

Did I even want to be around this anymore? I watched Lucy explain to the woman that Ace could probably pack her husband at the walk and trot; he had some arthritic issues, but most older horses did have some of these. There was no way to know how long he’d stay sound enough to ride. The woman looked doubtful. Ross offered to lower the price.

And no one, I reflected, was talking about what would happen when the horse wasn’t ridable. Ross, I felt sure, would simply send poor Ace to the sale. Would this woman care enough for a horse she would have owned a few years at most to bear the expense of retiring him? Pretty doubtful.

I closed my eyes for a minute, not wanting to see the kind, quiet, stoic expression in the eyes of the bay horse. You can’t, Gail, I told myself.

I currently supported three horses who were retired and turned out to pasture in the Sierra foothills, besides the three horses I kept at home. I simply could not afford any more old horses. How in the world, I wondered for the first time, could I go back to this job? I would bring home a horse a week.

The horse-buying woman said she needed to think about it. Lucy shook hands and turned away. I could hear Ross talking, saying he could arrange cheaper board if the woman wanted the horse as I followed Lucy back up the hill to the truck.

“Yuck,” I said, once we were back in the cab and headed out the driveway.

“Yep,” Lucy agreed. “I hate doing vet checks on old horses. Almost as much as I hate euthing horses.”

Lucy’s words brought yet another picture to my mind. Virtually the last call I’d made as a practicing vet. Shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve, a woman I knew pretty well; her yearling warmblood colt had gotten scared by fireworks and tried to jump out of his corral. He didn’t make it. The woman had found him on the ground, having half impaled himself on a post. He was breathing but unresponsive. I still remembered the frantic phone call. I was pregnant at the time and staggering out of bed at one in the morning to head out to a dire emergency seemed almost more than my increasingly fragile emotional system and increasingly bulky physical self could stand.

I’d reached the colt within twenty minutes, when a brief exam had made it clear that he was checking out. The woman had not hesitated, asking me to put him out of his suffering. Both our eyes had filled with tears as I administered the kill shot. I knew very well that she had no children and had saved for two years to buy the expensive young warmblood; he was her baby. And now, due to a freak chance, she was losing him at what should have been the beginning of his life. Even though I knew better than to take vet calls personally, in my interesting condition, it was all too much. The next morning I’d announced to Jim, my boss, that I needed to take a break.

“Yeah,” I said slowly, still lost in my train of thought. “Euthing horses is always sad. Even when it needs to happen.”

“I always hope I’m doing some good by reducing the amount of suffering they go through,” Lucy said.

“And you are,” I said automatically. This was what I had told myself, too, while I was doing the job. And, often, it was true.

“So where are we off to now?” I asked.

“Lazy Valley,” Lucy said. “Doug Martin has a horse that’s come up lame.”

“Doug Martin?” I knew I sounded surprised. “He was Jane Kelly’s boyfriend.”

“Was he? She was the woman who got shot, out trail riding, right?” Lucy asked. “I assume that was some kind of accident?”

“Nobody knows,” I said. I decided not to mention that I had found the body. Somehow I just didn’t want to chat about it. I did, however, want to talk to Doug Martin.

I watched the landscape move by outside the truck windows, and wondered just how Doug Martin would be taking Jane’s death. They’d only recently reunited, apparently. And what about Sheryl Silverman? My shoulders twitched a little at the thought of her. I could not get the picture of Sheryl’s furious face out of my mind.

Rolling hills, dotted with oaks and pines, slid by outside the pickup; part of my mind registered that this was my familiar ridge, that I rode and hiked all year long. Today, though, my thoughts were elsewhere. As Lucy made the turn into Lazy Valley’s long driveway, I hardly looked at the dirt trail that came down the hill to join the pavement, even though I’d ridden that path many times. This was where the swingset trail emerged.

My eyes scanned the numerous barns and corrals that made up the Lazy Valley setup. This was a much bigger boarding stable than the Red Barn. They had perhaps a hundred horses.

Lucy drove without pausing through the various barns and shedrows and arenas and parked near the last sizable barn. I could see Doug Martin sitting on a bench in front of it. Two women were talking to him. Sheryl Silverman and another woman I knew slightly named Trish O’Hara. Trish was holding a black horse by the bridle reins. Lucy and I got out of the truck and went to join them.

I have to admit I stared at Doug Martin and Sheryl Silverman with outright curiosity. Doug was talking, his handsome, fine-featured face quite animated. From what I could hear it sounded as if he were assuring Sheryl and Trish that Jane’s death was an accident, that the police had arrested “some guy who was trying to poach a deer.”

Lucy greeted the group; I smiled and nodded and watched faces. Doug, I thought, must be at least ten years younger than Jane had been. I put Jane’s age at roughly fifty, the same as me. Doug might be forty, or even younger. He was an attractive guy, who always seemed to have a different woman with him. His charm lay perhaps as much in his boyish, unaffected manners, as his regular, even features. At the moment he was giving the group of us a sad, but still charming smile.

Lucy had just expressed her sympathy about Jane. Doug shook his head. “I still can’t believe it happened,” he said. “She was my good gal; I depended on her. She was always there for me.”

I noticed that Sheryl’s mouth thinned to a hard line when Doug said this, but her lips instantly relaxed into a gentle pout when he looked her way. Hmm. Now this was interesting. It looked like Sheryl might be trying to get Doug back, now that Jane was out of the picture.

Sheryl wasn’t looking at me; she barely seemed aware that I was there. Her gaze was fixed on Doug, her big eyes, carefully darkened with product, held a sympathetic, friendly expression, as Doug described how he was looking after Jane’s horse, dogs, and home. I couldn’t hold back a tiny one-shoulder twitch as I remembered the black anger in this same woman’s face Saturday afternoon when I’d mentioned seeing Jane.

Trish said, “I was planning to go ride the trails this morning, but now I just don’t know if I should go up there. Coal’s really good about everything, and I always felt perfectly safe on my own, but not if somebody’s going to shoot at us.”

“I’m sure that was an accident,” Sheryl broke in. “Nobody would do that on purpose. I’m not scared to ride up there.”

Silence greeted this remark. After a minute Trish sighed and tightened her cinch. “I guess I’m headed out,” she said. “Come on, Coalie.”

Trish mounted and rode off; Doug got up and said quietly to Lucy, “I’ll go get that horse. I think he’s got an abscess.”

Lucy followed Doug into the barn. And Sheryl and I were left face to face. I watched a string of half-hidden emotions play across her quite pretty features. “Did the cops talk to you yet?” was what she finally said.

“Yes,” I said. “I found Jane’s body.”

“You did?” From the sound of her voice I could tell that this wasn’t yet common knowledge. Well, it would be now. But I didn’t see any point in lying about it.

“Did you tell them you saw me out riding?” Sheryl demanded.

“Of course I did. I was asked to describe everyone I met that afternoon.”

“Oh.” Sheryl was assimilating this. “I guess you didn’t have a choice.”

“No. I had to tell them exactly what I saw. It wasn’t personal.” I decided not to mention that I had spoken to Jane and heard the story of the Jane/Doug/Sheryl triangle. Best not to go there. “Have the cops questioned you yet?” I asked.

“No.” Sheryl looked doubtful. “Will they? Haven’t they arrested someone?”

“I think they’ll question everyone who might have seen Jane,” I said mildly. “Did you see her out riding Saturday?”

“No,” Sheryl answered, a little too quickly. “You told me you’d seen her. That’s the only reason I knew she was out there somewhere. I never saw her.”

“Did you hear the shot?” I asked. “I did.”

Sheryl’s eyes narrowed and her chin lifted. It looked as though she was trying to decide how to answer this. “I might have,” she said finally.

“I’d tell the cops the truth,” I offered.

“I did hear a loud noise,” Sheryl said. “Not too long after I saw you. I didn’t think of it as a shot. Maybe a car backfiring down on the road.”

“Where were you when you heard the noise?”

“Riding down through the eucalyptus trees, going toward the high school.”

I thought about that. It made sense. If Sheryl had kept riding after I saw her, and was headed towards the high school aiming to take what we called the long, flat trail back to Lazy Valley, that might be about where she would be when the shot was fired. She would have been on the other side of the ridge from the gun, and it was quite possible it had not sounded so loud where she was. Perhaps she might have mistaken it for a backfire.

Sheryl was looking at me and I could see doubt written all over her face. She clearly wondered what I knew and wasn’t game to ask. I saw her eyes shift to the middle distance and looked where she was looking. Juli Barnes and Jonah Wakefield were walking in our direction.

I glanced over my shoulder into the barn. Doug was holding a bay horse, while Lucy bent over its right front hoof, digging with her hoof knife at the sole. Looked like Doug was right and the horse had an abscess. Neither of them seemed to need my help. And I wanted to talk to Jonah Wakefield.