Breeding Ground (31 page)

“That's not true. Booker and I were so poor… we—”

“No idea in hell!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don't say you ‘beg my pardon'. You've hated the sight of me since Spencer looked my way! I wasn't good enough for him, was I? Not for your precious Spencer! He needed somebody cultured, and educated, who'd be an asset in the business world where you cut such a fine figure! Somebody who'd know how to dress, and set a fine table, and kiss the minister's skinny little butt, and make everybody b'lieve that—”

“What did you put in my coffee?”

“In your coffee? Ignorant little me? You think I'm smart enough to figure out something like that?”

“I think you're capable of much more than that that's… deceitful… and destructive.”

“What did you say? I'm sorry. Your voice isn't real easy to understand right now. You think I could've run in your bedroom while you made the coffee and grabbed up your pills? Then put codeine and blood thinner right in your cup – codeine enough to make you pass out while you're sittin' here?”

“I wasn't gone but—”

“I could've spilled my coffee too, don't you think? So you'd leave while I stirred the pills up real good in all that coffee and cream. You b'lieve I'd do that? Just to get back at you for what you did to me!”

“What do you think I did to you, Tara?”

“Drove Spencer away from me! He never would've gone without you pushin' him! Making him turn away, when he loved me truly!”

“I think it's time for you to go.”

“Do you! You think you can make me go? I bet you can't hardly stand up!”

“I can stand up. I'll walk you to the door.”

“Alright. Sure. I'll go. I'll go out the back, like the hired help, and leave you to worry about how long you got with all that codeine and rat poison I put in your cup!”

Two chairs scraped across the wooden floor, and footsteps started down the hall toward the back, two sets – one high heels, one slow and unsteady, moving from wood to stone, by the sound of it, followed by the creak of a door, and Tara's voice getting fainter.

Peggy turned the volume up all the way again and leaned closer to the machine, and then she heard Tara say, “So you think I'd step aside and let you get away with it? I don't let
anyone
stand in my way!”

There was a sound of something large and solid hitting a wall, and a grunt and a squeal maybe, quick and faint, then something just as solid thudding down stairs, from the way it sounded – and a high-pitched scream that got fainter and farther away, and ended as fast as it started.

Tara laughed and said something Peggy couldn't understand. There was another distant sound, possibly more speech. And then high heels snapped back into the office, and cups clinked on a tray, followed by high heels moving away, then clicking across stone.

There were other sounds recorded too, distant noises hard to make out. Water running maybe. Possibly a cup, or a glass being set on a hard surface, closer, probably, than the sound of water. High-heeled shoes again, coming toward the study and going past. Then passing again, and crossing stone, then fading farther away. There might've been the sound of a door opening. There was definitely the sound of it slamming shut.

Then nothing but silence. Till Peggy turned off the machine.

She pulled a box of Kleenex from a drawer and blew her nose and wiped her eyes, as she dialed Earl Peabody's number at the county sheriff's.

Jo tried to reach Earl Peabody again, just after four. Earl was out this time around. And they apologized for him not calling back. So Jo left another message. Hoping he'd call her before she had to leave to meet Alan in Lexington.

Alan got to his office from Cincinnati about four too, and heard about Alice's death from one of the lab techs shortly before five. He almost called Jo, but he'd be seeing her in an hour, so he read through a stack of research reports and left the office about twenty to six.

Buddy was working at Mercer Tate's until close to seven so Jo had to feed the horses grain before she got dressed and left to meet Alan. When Buddy got home, he'd turn them all out so Jo didn't have to take time to do that – which helped, since she'd been distracted all day and felt as though she'd left too many things undone.

Tuffian, the stallion who'd kicked Toss, had a tendency to get impacted and end up with colic, and Toss wanted him to have a hot homemade bran mash at least once a week. So Jo gave him a tiny amount of grain, got everybody else fed, ready to put out for the night, and went back to her house to cook up the mash.

She mixed boiling water with molasses and bran and a handful of oats, and cooked it a minute on the stove, then put it in a plastic pitcher and set it in the basket of her bike so she could get back and forth from his barn fast.

It was five-thirty, and Jo was running late. She hated not being on time, but at least she'd laid out her tan silk suit and everything that went with it. She'd just have to phone the restaurant while she got dressed to leave a message telling Alan she'd be a few minutes late.

Sam and the stallion were alone in that barn, away from the mares and babies and yearlings – the oldest barn with only six stalls, where they stored the tractor and manure spreader in back, past the last of the stalls.

Jo poured the mash through the rectangular feeding hole in the pig wire above Tuffian's feed tub, then pulled up the handle on the well pump in the feed room and filled their buckets with the hose.

When she went back to shut the pump off, she found herself reading the blackboard on the wall where Toss had written his number in Louisville and when he planned to be home, and Buddy listed his schedule at Mercer's and the times he'd need help from Jo – when she noticed that the cabinet door to the right of the blackboard where they kept the medications and syringes hadn't been properly closed. She knew Buddy had told Toss that that's what he'd found when he'd checked the night before.

Jo wondered if he hadn't closed it then or if it had been opened again. She decided to look to make sure nothing had been taken – and saw that one of the big glass syringes wasn't in its box. The bottle of injectable Acepromazine tranquilizer was still where it ought to be, but the level in the bottle was lower than the last time she'd used it.

Then she heard the tractor start up, and the manure spreader attached to it too, that was powered by the tractor engine through the shaft of a Power Take-Off.

Jo thought about Alice. And her own threatening letter. And looked around the feed room for something to use as a weapon.

If
in fact she needed one.
If
there was someone out there other than Buddy, who could've come home early.

She grabbed a two-foot aluminum rod with a heavy sprayer head – the hand sprayer they attached to a hose to shampoo the horses. Then she held her breath and listened for half a minute where she couldn't be seen from the door.

All she could hear was the tractor and the P.T.O. and the grinding of the metal blades at the back of the manure spreader. And she told herself she couldn't just stand there. She had to walk out the door.

As soon as she stepped through, Tara tackled her from the right side of the doorway with a hypodermic in her hand.

She was crazy-looking, red-eyed and vicious, her face wild with fury, and she moved fast, kicking and screaming, dragging Jo toward the manure spreader as Jo struggled to fight her off.

Jo tried to hit Tara with the sprayer rod, while Tara strained to stick the needle in her – anywhere, in an arm, or a leg – as she forced Jo toward the chopping blades.

They were almost to the P.T.O. shaft, spinning behind the tractor, whipping the blades of the spreader that could kill as easily if you fell against them as the shaft itself. And Jo grappled with Tara, tearing at her arms, shoving her away, raising the rod over Tara's head – when Tara plunged the hypodermic into Jo's thigh.

She'd started to push the plunger in when Jo chopped her hand away, using the edge of her left hand the way Tom had taught her to defend herself. She smashed Tara in the head twice with the sprayer rod in her right, striking as hard as she could on the left side near Tara's temple.

She hit her again, a glancing blow that grazed her forehead, because Tara raised her arm and deflected it, just as she fell on the concrete floor in front of Tuffian's stall. He was pawing and thrashing, his head up from his feed tub, his eyes wild and his ears pinned, even when he screamed as Tara landed by his door.

Jo hit Tara's ribs with the rod, under her raised arm, beginning to feel woozy herself, though aware enough to see Tara was stunned – but struggling still to get up. Not able to make it. Thank God. Falling back on the floor.

Jo screamed “NO!” making both Sam and the stallion spin around in their stalls, before she grabbed Tara by the shirt – and with all the strength she could drag out of her own rubbery bone and muscle, she opened the bottom half of Tuffian's door, and shoved Tara into his stall, kicking her in, finally, before she bolted the door.

Tuffian had gone back to eating his bran mash, but he whirled and kicked the back wall of the stall so it sounded as though a bomb had gone off, and the whole barn shuddered. Then he turned his back to Tara and kicked at her twice like lightning. The first kick didn't connect. The second kick did, hitting the side of Tara's right thigh with his right rear hoof. The next kick hit her ribs, not straight on, but with the side of the hoof. And Tara, who'd been trying to get up, was knocked down by the impact. She crawled tight into the corner up against the stall door, begging Jo to let her out in a pinched and terrified whine.

Tuffian kicked out toward her again, but didn't hit her. It was more a warning than a deliberate attack, and then he circled the stall twice, stamped a front hoof in front of his feed tub, and went back to eating.

Tara stayed rolled up in a ball – silent, still, trying to protect herself, barely breathing by the door.

Jo had slid down the empty stall wall across from Tuffian's door, and sat there on the concrete with her legs splayed in front of her, watching the walls melt. Seeing the floor twist and swirl. And Sam's face, hanging over his door, watching her with his ears pricked forward, turned into something that looked like an elephant spewing water out its nose.

She fell over sideways a few seconds later, telling herself to turn off the tractor. To make the spreader stop. But she couldn't make anything move. Not a foot. Not a finger. Not a toe. Every muscle had frozen solid. Or disconnected. Or melted slowly. Like liquid setting up, maybe, slurrying into Jello. Like molten metal running in her veins. Flowing through her brain.

Sounds warped, bleeding together.

Colors pulsed, breathing around her.

And Jo sighed and closed her eyes and swirled around with the room.

At ten after six, when Jo hadn't shown up at the Lafayette's restaurant, Alan called her house. Jo was usually early. So though he probably wouldn't have thought of it with anyone else, with her he wondered if something was wrong.

He knew there were phones in the barns. But no one answered anywhere. And he figured she must be on her way, and told himself not to be silly. Jo was an extremely capable woman, and there was no reason to worry.

Except that Alice Franklin had been murdered.

Which meant that ten minutes later, he called his own house to see if Jo had left a message with Jack. But Jack didn't answer either.

Alan couldn't face standing there doing nothing, and he decided to phone Peggy James and find out when Spencer and Booker were getting back – thinking maybe there was something he could do to help Spencer get through it.

Peggy told him about the Dictaphone, and that Tara had killed Alice, and the police were looking for her everywhere.

Alan sprinted through the hotel lobby, and out across the parking lot, and threw himself in his old blue Dodge – then wove his way entirely too fast through Lexington's rush hour traffic toward Jo Grant's farm, which lay too many miles away at that moment, on the south side of Versailles.

Her truck was in front of the garage, but she wasn't in the house. And Alan drove fast down the gravel lane straight toward the barns.

He passed the first two without slowing at all, having seen Jo's bike parked outside the third on the right, opposite the yearlings'.

She was lying on her side on cold concrete a third of the way down the aisleway, a hypodermic shattered on the floor a few feet past her – between her and the tractor, with a rusty manure spreader grinding behind it in front of the open back door.

Alan straightened Jo up and talked to her, but couldn't get a response. He couldn't have heard if she'd made a sound anyhow, and he laid her down gently, and ran to turn off the tractor.

Then he could hear a horse stamp the floor and snort twice and circle his stall, and some other sound he couldn't place as he sprinted into the feed room and called the operator, telling her to get an ambulance, and Earl Peabody too.

Alan stared at the bottle of Acepromazine that was sitting on the counter, knowing exactly what that was, thinking,
Dear God, please, let her live through this!

He sat down beside Jo then, pulling her up and cradling her on his lap, trying to bring her around. He rubbed her wrists, and stroked her cheeks, and carefully pulled up her eyelids, seeing her eyes rolled back in her head, making him worry more.

He was saying, “Come on, Josie, please! It's Alan, Jo. I'm staying right here. I'm not gonna let you go, ever! You gotta wake up and fight! You hear me?”

He thought he saw her eyelids move. Maybe he hoped, rather than saw. He knew he couldn't be sure, but he wrapped his arms tighter around her and held her up against his chest, rocking her forward and back. Talking to Jo in ways he never would have, if she'd been herself.