TheCart Before the Corpse (29 page)

“Poor baby,” I said and ran my hand down his leg to the pastern. I could feel the slight swelling and warmth in the suspensory. He endured the ice pack for ten minutes while I talked nonsense to him. I gave him Bute, an equine analgesic to keep him comfortable, and left him munching hay in his stall, while I bedded down in the clients’ lounge with flashlight, pistol and ice chest. I repeated the treatment every two hours, although he wasn’t thrilled to be waked up.

*

Some idiot had set an alarm clock, something I rarely do. I struggled up from the depths of a naughty dream and felt around for the thing so I could kill it, but I couldn’t find it. My watch said five a.m. I could sleep for another hour, damn it.

Another second and I recognized the sound. Smoke alarm! I rolled out of bed and into my shoes, grabbed my flashlight and went to cut it off, praying that it was a false alarm.

The doorknob wasn’t hot, and the door wasn’t warm. I cracked it and got a face full of oily smoke that stung my eyes and made me cough.

As I stared into the smoke, one of the three bales of hay near the front entrance burst into flames. It sat pressed against the other two, and all three leaned against the wooden front of Heinzie’s stall.

Every decent barn keeps big fire extinguishers close and ready, but I didn’t have a clue where I’d seen Hiram’s. I yanked my shirt up over my mouth and nose, raced to the wash rack, turned the hose on pulled it to the front of the stable with me.

I ran the hose on the burning bale of hay, grabbed the manure rake and pulled it out into the aisle to get it away from the stall front and the other bales before they caught.

The fire sizzled and popped when the water hit it. As it subsided, the smoke increased. I had to force my burning eyes open.

I shot myself in the face with the water, so I could wipe my eyes. Then I went back to dousing the bale.

The flame seemed to be out, but I know hay. It can smolder inside for hours, then suddenly burst into fire again all by itself. I laid the hose on top of the other two bales, dragged over the manure cart, forked the charred hay into it and trundled it outside onto the gravel in front of the stable. If it burned up the manure cart, I could live with it. On the gravel, it wouldn’t burn anything else.

Then I dragged the other two bales away from the wall of Heinzie’s stall.

The wood of the stall front was charred black. Close to flaming. Too close.

Instead of fanning the flame as it had done before, the breeze through the front began clearing away the smoke, blowing it toward the back of the stable.

Where Golden Boy was trapped in his stall unable to get away from it.

The clay floor of the stable had turned into a mud slick from the water I’d run on the hay. I turned too fast and slid shoulder first into the side of Don Qui’s stall. My shoulder felt as though someone had struck it with a baseball bat, but I slid on.

Horses can’t vomit, but they can cough. Golden Boy was doing his best to expel the smoke from his lungs. His eyes streamed the way I felt certain mine did.

As I walked him out, I wiped his eyes with my wet work shirt, then we both stood under the stars and gulped huge quantities of chill spring air until neither of us felt the need to cough.

Desperately afraid of fire, the other horses crowded as close to Golden Boy and me as they could get without jumping the pasture fence.

After I settled him again, I went hunting and finally dug out two fire extinguishers from behind a pile of blankets in the tack room, and another two under the sink in the clients’ lounge. I’d have to speak to Jacob about
that
if he came back. Then I called Geoff Wheeler’s cell phone.

“What time is it?” he grumbled.

“Six. Somebody just tried to burn the stable down with me in it.”

I heard him take a single breath. When he spoke again he sounded wide-awake. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

While I waited I spread a bale of wood shavings on the mud in the aisle, brushed my teeth and downed two diet sodas. My throat felt raw, and the face I saw in the mirror through my bloodshot eyes was streaked with smut. My wet hair drooped in lank tendrils around my face, my shirt and bra were soaked and felt like Golden Boy’s ice pack on my boobs. I stank of smoke.

Nothing stops chores, however. I had just finished putting feed and water in the horses’ stalls when Geoff charged around the corner of the barn, grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me to face him. “You look like hell. You okay?”

“Thank you, Agent Wheeler.”

“Here.” He handed me a giant latte and a couple of sausage biscuits.

“Thank you, and this time I mean it.” He started to sit on one of the two bales of hay remaining in the aisle. “Don’t! You’ll get your rear end wet.”

“Don’t you people believe in chairs?”

“Come on, we can sit on my cot.”

When we were settled side by side, he said, “You sure this wasn’t an accident?”

“Hay baled damp and packed tight can spontaneously combust, but that hay isn’t fresh or damp.” I sucked down half the large latte in one gulp and wolfed down one of my sausage biscuits. “I take back whatever nasty things I’ve said about you.”

“Do I want to know?”

I shook my head but kept eating.

“When you get through stuffing your face, tell me what happened.”

I finished my first sausage biscuit and told him. “Whoever did it must have seen my truck parked out front and known I was around someplace. From here you can’t see headlights coming up the drive, and apparently with the door to the lounge closed, you can’t hear tires on gravel either.”

“Or they parked down the hill and walked up. What about Yoder? Did he know you were spending the night?”

I shook my head. “He left before I decided to stay. I don’t think he’s come back.”

“You wouldn’t have heard him walking across the pasture.”

“The last thing he wants or
says
he wants, at any rate, is for this place to go under.”

“I didn’t smell kerosene or gasoline when I walked in, so they didn’t use an accelerant,” Geoff said. “Good thing. If they’d blocked both ends of the aisle with the fire, you’d have had to break that window over there and crawl out. Assuming you woke up before you died of smoke inhalation.”

Golden Boy would have died. I’d never have been able to reach him.

Until then I’d been chugging right along the way I always do in a disaster, but that hit me. I hunched over and my teeth started chattering.

“Shoot,” he whispered. He set my second wrapped biscuit and the latte on the floor beside him and dragged my sleeping bag up around my shoulders. “You’re freezing. This place got a shower?”

I nodded and pointed toward the bathroom in the corner. “You got any dry clothes?”

I pointed to my duffel. “I wasn’t planning to go home until later.” I shook off his hand. “I’m fine.”
Chatter, chatter.

“The heck you are.” He pulled me to my feet. “Don’t kick over the latte. You can finish breakfast after you’re warm and dry.” He hoisted my duffel and shoved me toward the bathroom. “Stand under that shower until you’re pruney. In the meantime, I’m checking that hay.”

Twenty minutes later my eyes were still red, but I was warm and clean and well-fed. My teeth no longer chattered. I joined Geoff at the front of the barn.

“Do you smoke?” he asked.

“Certainly not. Nobody smokes in a stable. And before you ask, Peggy doesn’t. Jacob chews tobacco.”

He held out a small plastic bag. He was wearing Latex gloves.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The granddaddy of all arson tricks. So old it has a beard. Take a matchbook, close it, but leave the center match outside. Light that match, set it down, walk or run away. The match burns down to the matchbook and ignites the whole book. That, in turn, ignites whatever it’s sitting on.”

“Who’d know that?”

“Most of the known world. All teenaged boys. Doesn’t work unless it’s close to something that will go up readily and has plenty of air circulation.”

“Doesn’t it burn itself up?”

“You’d be surprised how often it doesn’t burn up. My guess would be this one fell down behind the hay after it caught fire and put itself out. No air.”

“Where did it come from?”

“This is the place where the detective says it’s from Sadie’s pool hall and has Sadie’s fingerprints all over it. No such luck. Too charred for prints, and you could probably pick up this brand of matchbook in most of the mom and pop grocery stores in the eastern United States. What good would it do to burn your stable down?” he asked.

“Assuming I wasn’t inside burning to death, no stable, no business.”

“And if you were?”

“My daughter would sell this place in a heartbeat once she inherited.”

“That would make Whitehead very happy.”

“As well as a number of other people, like maybe the governor.”

“He doesn’t do things like that.”

“Of course he doesn’t. He has Whitehead do them for him,” I said. I tugged one of the two remaining bales into the aisle. Hoisting it into the hay cart was going to take some doing since the hay strings that held it together had burned.

“Who else have you teed off?” he asked.

“Nobody.”

“I doubt that.” He brought over the hay cart and hefted as much as he could hold into it. “The tuna casserole was loaded with Ipecac and a powerful laxative. You and Peggy would have been very unhappy if you’d eaten it.”

“But not dead,” I said as I picked up a quarter of the remaining bale.

“Probably not. But in the emergency room or the hospital at least overnight.”

“Leaving nobody to guard Peggy’s place but the cats. Somebody looking for whatever they didn’t find in Hiram’s apartment the night I arrived.”

“Be my guess. What are you hiding?”

We finished loading the first bale and started on the second. It threatened to topple off, but Geoff grabbed and steadied it. “Give me a break. If anybody hid anything, Hiram did it, and I haven’t found it,” I said.

I leaned my forehead against the bars of the stall. After a moment I pushed away and faced him. “Now they’ve gone too far. There was a horse in this stable last night that would have died of smoke inhalation or burned to death. You better get the SOB fast, because if I get to him first, I’m going to kill him.”

Chapter 29

Monday evening, Tuesday

Merry

That evening I called Dick Fitzgibbons in Aiken to bring him up to date. “So, I no longer have a groom,” I said. “With so few horses and all of them in pasture, I don’t have a huge amount of work, but I’m teaching, and that takes time.” I told him about Peggy. “I may have to cancel putting Heinzie to the vis-à-vis on Easter if Jacob doesn’t show up to help drive. Peggy isn’t comfortable doing it alone.”

“How about I drive down on Saturday? I could bring Hiram’s files, spend Saturday night, pass along my great wisdom in finding stable hands, drive with this Peggy on Sunday, and take you both out for dinner Sunday night.”

“I can’t ask you to do that.”
Please God, let him come.

“What else do I have going at the moment? I’ll leave Saturday morning so we’ll have a chance to practice Saturday afternoon and get everything loaded for the trip to Mossy Creek.”

“You are a saint. Shall I make you a hotel reservation at the Hamilton House Inn?”

“I’ll have my secretary handle it. I’ll call if I have a problem. Otherwise, I’ll see you Saturday.”

I hung up feeling a hundred pounds lighter. If Jacob stayed gone, or if Geoff arrested him for Hiram’s murder, I’d simply put an ad in the
Mossy Creek Gazette
and hire somebody else.

*

Geoff and Amos met me at Jacob’s trailer at nine on Tuesday morning. The door was still locked, but trailer-flimsy. Amos had brought a small battering ram of the kind the SWAT teams use for drug busts, but waited for Geoff to give him the nod to go ahead. Geoff rolled his eyes, gave the door a good kick and sent it flying back against the wall.

“All right, be that way,” Amos said and took the battering ram back to his cruiser.

“Stay out here, Merry,” Geoff said. He clicked on a big hand lantern and climbed the steps.

I’ve never known why those CSI types on television use flashlights instead of simply turning the lights on, but that’s what both Amos and Geoff did. They even pulled their guns before they checked the trailer.

“I told you he was gone,” I said from the threshold.

“Go away,” Geoff said. “Don’t you have manure to shovel or horses to groom?”

“As a matter of fact I do.” I turned on my heel and marched off across the pasture. The long grass soaked my boots and jeans nearly to my knees before I got back to the barn. As usual Don Qui met me in the aisle. This morning I had actually locked his door to see how he opened it, but he’d beat me to it. I didn’t even try to sucker him back into his stall, but I kept Heinzie inside since we planned to drive him after Peggy arrived. Don Qui hovered outside his door, but mercifully kept his mouth shut.

Peggy and I had Heinzie put to the large Meadowbrook when Geoff and Amos drove up. They hadn’t come through the pastures, nor gotten their clothes sopping wet. Nooo, they had driven down Jacob’s rutted drive, around by the road and up Hiram’s driveway to the neat parking area outside the barn.

“Hard to tell if he’s taken anything with him,” Geoff told me. “Place is a mess. What kind of housekeeper was he?”

“How should I know? I’ve never been inside his trailer. He kept a neat stable, but that doesn’t equate to housekeeping.
I
keep a neat stable. My house, on the other hand . . . ”

“There’s an old duffel bag in his closet, but it’s full of dirty clothes. He may have taken a couple of suitcases.”

“Razor and toothbrush in the bathroom,” Geoff added. “He left in a hurry.”

“He killed Hiram,” I said flatly. “He lost his nerve and ran.”

“What about his alibi?” Geoff asked.

“Assuming his girlfriend isn’t lying, you said he could have driven out here, killed Hiram and driven back to Bigelow. Or even killed Hiram before he left to see his tootsie on Friday evening.”