The Litter of the Law (19 page)

Harry said, “I couldn’t possibly afford my farm today. It’s kind of crazy.”

“Prices go up and down,” said Wesley, “but when it comes to beautiful farms in Virginia, they have held steady despite all. Now, I’m not saying I’ve sold a lot lately, mind you, but we are in a better position than most of the country.”

“Not the boom towns,” Neil pressed.

“Like Oklahoma City?” Fair asked. “You know, it’s exciting when something hits like the boom in the Dakotas and Oklahoma. Hope, energy, jobs, but you wonder how it will all turn out down the road.”

“Honey, that’s true for everything.” Harry smiled, then focused on Neil. “How about fertilizer samples? Just enough to, say, put on three small patches, four feet by four feet. I’ll make little squares back behind the sunflowers.”

“Be happy to. I know if you have a good experience and endorse my products, others will follow.” Neil was right about that. “Have you thought about what you would be growing?”

“Have.”

Tazio and her boyfriend, Paul Diaz, joined them. As Paul rode and trained Big Mim’s horses, Tazio had realized she’d better learn to ride.

To Paul’s credit, he was studying architecture, and the two, on his weekday off, would drive to Richmond, Washington, and other places to look at buildings constructed at different periods in our history. He found he liked it, just as Tazio found she liked riding.

“She’s going to move up to Second Flight,” Paul bragged of Tazio, referring to the foxhunting group closer to the action.

Tazio rode in the back on an adorable babysitter of a horse, but as she gained skill and confidence, she would move up a notch.

“Never doubted that for a minute,” Fair told her.

“How’s it coming for the Halloween Hayride?” Neil asked.

“Frankenstein will be ready,” said Tazio. “He’ll snap the restraining belts, climb off the table, attack the good doctor”—she nodded at Wesley—“then run out the door.”

“I’m scared already,” Harry said.

Neil laughed. “It’s going to be the scariest hayride ever, and we will raise a bundle. I’m committed to that and others are, too.”

“I think a room in the library should be named for Hester,” Harry thought out loud.

“You’re right, honey,” Fair agreed.

“After the hayride, we can bring it before the library board. I’m getting excited about this.” Neil smiled.

“You get excited about anything that makes money,” Wesley teased him.

“Profit motive. Built this country,” Neil fired back.

Big Mim, who had left the group, sailed back into their conversation, changing the subject. “Given the dryness, not a bad hunt. We do need rain, though. Desperately.”

“That we do,” Fair said. “The ground is so hard it’s like running on brick.”

“Tazio,” Big Mim addressed the architect, who looked stunning in hunt kit, “you’ve been over there at the school buildings. Are they salvageable?”

With a big grin, Tazio replied, “They are in great shape. The real expense in fixing them up would be plumbing, heating, air-conditioning. But those buildings were solidly built, well sited,
and there’s not even a leak in those roofs. You could actually still use the huge cast-iron furnaces.”

“Good,” Big Mim said. “Lot of history there.”

“I wish older people would write down what they lived through—the good, the bad, and the ugly,” Harry said with some emotion. “History books can be dry or filled with speculation about this world force and that armament technology. I want to hear what people who lived through it all thought and felt.”

“Good point.” Tazio rested her hand on Harry’s shoulder for a moment.

“Speaking of knowing, the TV reporters and the newspaper say that Hester was shot,” said Neil. “And so was that fellow you found in the Morrowdale field. But how and where were they shot, exactly?” he asked, not realizing that Harry might not wish to recall any of this.

“I don’t know,” she replied.

Fair stepped in. “When we found the scarecrow, he was fully dressed. Hester was, too. No wounds were evident.”

“Neil, I don’t really
want
to know,” Harry lied. Cooper had told her they were shot through the heart. Cooper had also told her the sheriff’s department was withholding the exact M.O. “They’re both gone, a young man and a neighbor. That’s enough.”

Neil shrugged. “I guess I get too curious. Too many crime shows on television.”

“It’s always so antiseptic, those shows. No faces frozen in horror.” Tazio reached for Paul’s hand. “What I want to know is why our society is so enthralled by crime and violence. Why can’t we be enthralled by beauty, harmony, or perfect proportion?”

“Because they demand sensitivity.” Fair surprised them by coming right out with this. “Anyone can see a beautiful sunrise or hear great music, but not everyone can
feel
it. Yet everyone can feel violence.”

“I never thought of that,” Wesley remarked.

“And I suppose everyone can kill,” Tazio said, “but how many people can compose a symphony?”

“I’m not sure everyone can kill,” Neil replied. “Then again, I don’t want to find out.”

To change the subject, Harry asked Tazio, “That old slip of paper you found—did you by any chance check to see if it was a student? I mean, I wonder if they have the old rolls.”

“I didn’t find out yet.”

“What was the name?” Wesley was nosy.

“Walter Ashby Plecker,” Tazio answered.

L
ater that afternoon, after Harry finished her barn chores, she set up shop at the computer in the tack room. Outside, the sun was already setting as Simon, the possum, peeped over the hayloft.

Patrolling the barn’s center aisle while the horses munched away, Mrs. Murphy heard the possum’s squeak.

“Murphy?”

“What, Simon?”

“What does she do in there? I see that bluish light. She sits there for hours! It’s unnatural for people to sit still that long.”

“Ha.”
Pewter, faking her patrol, stopped to look up.
“Millions of people sit on their butts for weeks and years. After a while, part of them is in the next zip code.”

“Look who’s talking,”
sassed Tucker, plonked down on an aisle tack trunk.

For a fat girl, Pewter could move. She flew down the aisle, jumped onto the tack trunk, batted the corgi with an extended claw, then leapt off in an attempt to flee the barn, Tucker in pursuit.

“I loathe violence.”
Simon closed his eyes.

“Mmm,”
was the tiger cat’s reply, since she often considered batting Pewter, as well as Tucker. Well, more Pewter than Tucker—she could reason with Tucker.

Heavyset though she was, Pewter easily flummoxed the dog. She could zig and zag so quickly that Tucker would skid out trying to catch her. Then Pewter would run straightaway, Tucker would make up lost ground, and once again the cat would turn. She even stopped dead in her tracks, faced the onrushing dog, then soared right over Tucker, who by now was barking nonstop.

“I hate you!”
barked the corgi.
“I really, really hate you.”

“Peon!”
Pewter gleefully tormented the dog.

“What now?” Hearing the clamor, Harry pushed away from the computer and walked outside. “All right, you two. Calm down.”

“Kill. I want to kill!”
Tucker practically foamed at the mouth.

“Bubble Butt, Tailless Wonder!”
Pewter was merciless as she climbed a gum tree, then spread out on a lower branch like a courtesan, tail swaying to and fro.
“You’ll never catch me,”
she taunted.

“You have to sleep sometime.”
Tucker stood on her hind legs, reaching as high as she could with her front paws on the thick ridged bark.

“I sleep with one eye open,”
Pewter called down in a singsong voice.

“What a liar she is,”
laughed Mrs. Murphy, now with the human.

Grabbing Tucker by her rolled leather collar, Harry pulled the enraged dog away from the tree. Pewter watched from above, enjoying the spectacle.

“Tucker, leave it,” Harry ordered.

“Really, Tucker,”
Mrs. Murphy counseled.
“She’s not worth this much emotion.”

Tucker stared imploringly at Harry.
“You don’t know how awful she is. You don’t know how I suffer.”
She thought a moment, searching for further damning ideas.
“I think she’s a member of a Confederate underground. She’s gray, you know. She wants to restore the old ways. She’s really, really awful.”

Mrs. Murphy laughed, while poor Simon, who had run to view this chase from the opened upper hayloft door, wrung his front paws.
“Tucker, she would be the same no matter if it was the old days or these days,”
he said.

“She’d be worse. I know it.”
Tucker still stared at Harry, who reached down to pat her silky head.

As though singing an aria, Pewter meowed,
“She can dish it out but she can’t take it.”

“Pewter, that’s the worst screeching ever,” Harry insulted the cat. “Now, here’s the deal. If you don’t behave, it’s lockdown. Separate rooms. Closed doors. No treats. Hear that? No treats.”

Tucker growled low.
“I’d starve to get even.”

“I wouldn’t.”
Pewter hastily backed down the tree, circled Tucker so she would be behind Harry, then rubbed the human’s legs while purring mightily.

“How can she fall for this?”
Crestfallen, Tucker lowered her head.

“Because she likes me better.”
Pewter kept rubbing.

“I can’t concentrate when you all carry on like this,” Harry complained. “Too much noise. If we were in the house, God only knows what would have been smashed to bits. Now come on. Settle down.” She turned to go back to the barn.

Dutifully, Tucker stuck by the human’s heels while Pewter, in a flash of glory, or so she thought, raced ahead, tail straight up. She paused for a moment, then Mrs. Murphy zoomed up next to her and the two cats chased each other, in good fun, to the barn.

Harry loved watching animals play. “Tucker, cats are, well, cats. They’ll chase each other, play-hiss, howl—it’s just dumb stuff. You, being a sober and responsible dog, are above it.”

Tucker considered this and thought for a fraction of a moment that maybe Harry did understand. To some extent, she did. Anyone
who lives with cats figures out soon enough they will do what they want.

Back in her tack room chair, Harry wiggled to get comfortable. The lamp she was using until she could buy the Italian light bulb—which is how she thought of it—couldn’t shine its light as precisely as the designer one, but it was okay.

Tucker flopped at her feet. This made Harry happy because she always enjoyed reporting her progress to the dog, who invariably perked her ears at Harry’s voice.

“Tucker, I have gotten into the county records for students, but the records for Random Row are spotty at best. I’m trying to find a student’s name that was on a piece of paper in the teacher’s desk.” She scrolled through the years. “The years before 1918 aren’t even entered. They microfilmed the written records back in the 1960s. Maybe the handwritten records are in a forgotten vault somewhere in the county building.” She kept clicking the mouse. “Oh, hey, they actually scanned them in. The handwriting is beautiful. I can’t make some of this out, but there does not appear to be a student named Walter Ashby Plecker.”

Missing his wife, Fair walked into the barn, looked up, and saw Simon. “Hey, fella.”

“Hey,”
said Simon, then scuttled away.

Fair entered the tack room. “Simon is such a scaredy-cat. ’Course, most possums are.”

“It helps if you feed him.” Harry leaned her chin on her hand. “Molasses on bread or molasses in the snow.”

“I know, but when am I going to have time to feed a possum? When do you have time?”

She smiled up at him. “I do it every day.”

“Feeds us, too,”
Shortro, the athletic Saddlebred horse in the stall next to the tack room, called out.

Tomahawk, Harry’s beloved Thoroughbred, also nickered.
“We love Harry,”
he declared.

All the horses agreed, and up in his nest even Simon squeaked,
“Me, too.”