TheCart Before the Corpse (7 page)

I had assumed he’d shake my hand, but he swung a couple of halters at me instead. “You are her.”

“Yep. I’m her.” I said cheerfully with a sardonic glance over my shoulder at Peggy. Jacob Yoder was obviously not one of life’s great gentlemen. Close up I could see two day’s growth of gray stubble along his jaw. His face was deeply lined and leathery from the sun, and his eyes were as red as pickled beets.

The hand holding the halters shook. Unless I was very much mistaken, Jacob Yoder was the poor equivalent of the rich alcoholics I saw around the show grounds. He was just getting around to feeding the horses because he had the grandfather of all hangovers and probably had used the hair of the dog to get him going. An alcoholic, ill-tempered, aging stable-hand wasn’t what I’d been hoping for.

I
did
, however, need him badly right now. So I smiled my most cheerful smile (always a reach for me), took a couple of the halters and followed him to the five-bar gate that closed off the pasture from the barn. He’d passed me the largest and the smallest halters. Don Qui and the Friesian. The Friesian was a piece of cake. He lowered his massive head and stuck his nose into the halter. I followed Yoder across to the barn and inside where the first stall doors on either side of the center aisle stood open.

“Heinzie is in that one,” he said, pointing to the second stall on the left. The stable lay in shadows, so I couldn’t tell much about it, but it looked well constructed if not posh. I took care of Heinzie, who dove happily into his morning grain, while I went back for Don Qui.

“The jackass comes in with Heinzie,” Jacob said. “Does not like to wait.”

Now he tells me.
I’ve had some experience with miniature donkeys. They are classified in carriage driving among the VSE’s ‘very small equines,’ miniature horses and the like. They are generally driven in teams of two, because the only way to train a young donkey to drive is to hitch him up with an experienced donkey. The minute I walked up to him, Don Qui stuck his nose into the dirt so that I had to bend double to get the halter down to him. Just as I pulled it over his nose, he swung his head straight into my gut hard enough to knock the wind out of me, whirled past me, trotted out of the pasture and into the barn. I ran after him but needn’t have bothered. He knew which stall he was supposed to be in and went directly into it.

“Knucklehead,” Jacob said as he shut the stall door.

I bit my tongue, although I suspected ‘knucklehead’ was intended for me rather than the donkey.

As a show manager, I’ve learned to make snap judgments about people. I’m usually right. I need to know at once who’s going to be a pain in the ass. I did not like Jacob Yoder.

“We must speak,” he said with a glower. It would seem he didn’t like me either. I started running down a list of stable hands I knew who might be free to come work down here until I could get things organized and know where I stood.

I wondered if Peggy had already driven away, but she was leaning on the pasture gate looking out over the property.

“Are those all the horses, Mr. Yoder?” I asked.

He nodded. “One is not a horse.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

He dropped his eyes first. I’d seen plenty of Jacob Yoders. He’d take every advantage and be as rude as he thought he could get away with, right up to the point where he might get fired. If reprimanded, he’d go all innocent and work very hard for a day or a week until he thought he was flying under the radar again.

Hiram would have pegged him faster than I did. So why had he hired the man?

“Would you show me around the place after we put the horses back out?” I asked. That gave me forty minutes or so to check out Hiram’s workshop in the old barn. Although I wasn’t looking forward to it, I had to see where he was found, and I wanted to do it with Peggy. I couldn’t in good conscience keep her hanging around while I went exploring the land with Jacob.

He nodded and walked back into the stable with his hands in the pockets of his overalls.

Peggy came to me, and we walked around to the parking area. “What a charmer,” I whispered.

“I asked Hiram once why he hired the man. He said he felt an obligation to him and that he was an excellent worker when he put his mind to it.”

“Yeah. I’ll bet he is.”

“No, I mean it. Except for hiring a contractor to erect the outside of the new stable, he and Hiram did most of the work on this place themselves in less than six months. I suspect he’d work fine so long as Hiram worked right beside him.”

“But the minute he was alone, he’d go sit under a tree and drink his moonshine, or whatever I smelled on his breath.”

We had reached the broad double doors of the barn that stood facing the parking area. A padlock had been locked through the hasp that closed the double doors.

“Do you have the key?” I asked Peggy.

“Hiram kept the extra keys on peg boards at the back of the workshop,” Peggy said and pulled a padlock key from the pocket of her jeans. “Since the police didn’t see fit to declare this a crime scene, I made it my business to take them before I left.”

“Did he have a spare apartment key?” I asked, remembering that someone had used a key to get in to burgle the place.

She shook her head. “Not an extra one. I assume the police didn’t find his key ring either on him or in the truck, and I don’t think he kept anything but his truck and house key with him. He was amazingly neat for a man.”

My eyebrows went up.

Peggy unlocked the padlock and moved it to hang off one side of the door. “Can you handle this?”

“I don’t have much choice.” I took a deep breath and stepped into the dark interior. Peggy followed and turned on banks of fluorescent lights hung from the heavy roof rafters.

Because of moisture, woodworm, termites and encroaching vegetation, very few old barns survive in
my
part of the south without constant maintenance. Either this one had been maintained well over the hundred or so years since it had been built, or Hiram had done a great restoration job.

The floor was dirt, but swept and raked clean. Tools hung from pegboard along the right wall over a worktable built of plywood on sawhorses. Along the left wall hung a half dozen sets of harness that looked clean and freshly oiled.

I carefully kept my eyes away from the four-wheeled vis-à-vis carriage that leaned on one axle in the center of the room. Beyond it stood two carriages in various states of repair. Unrepair, actually. Both looked like antiques. One was a dogcart, built high up above a wicker area that could be used to carry dogs. From here I could see the wicker was a mess. The other looked like an aged doctor’s carriage, the sort country doctors drove to house calls.

Extra shafts, wheels, seats and other pieces lay or stood in ranks against the rest of the walls.

I saw no cobwebs and little dust. All the electric and hand tools were clean. Those that hadn’t been hung on the pegs lay in neat rows on the worktable.

I had moved slowly around the walls of the workshop and now had no option but to look at the vis-à-vis in the center. I started with the side that still had both its wheels. It needed paint. The leather upholstery needed cleaning and conditioning at the very least. Since it was cracked with age, it really should be replaced, but Hiram could certainly have driven it as it was.

So what had he been doing with the wheel? If I wanted to believe the cops about it being an accident, the only thing I could think of was that he must have been repacking the bearings.

Yoder might know. Hiram must have just gotten started, unless someone had removed the container of axle grease he would have used.

I took a deep breath and walked around the side that canted.

The EMTs had leaned the iron wheel against the side of the carriage after they’d moved it off Hiram’s chest, and the entire area was scuffed by multiple footprints and knee prints. I suspected Peggy had been the one to place the shop towel over the area where Hiram’s head would have lain.

She was watching me. I pointed to the towel. “You?”

She nodded. “I came back in after they moved him to the ambulance. I could still see . . . the stain. I didn’t want to.”

“I don’t want to either.” I dropped to my knees. I don’t pray much, but I did say a silent prayer that wherever Hiram had wound up, he’d have horses to drive and ride. For Hiram and me there could be no paradise without horses.

Like father, like daughter. I wanted to cry, but my eyes stayed hot and dry. “I promise I’ll fix this,” I whispered.

Peggy’s fingers clutched my shoulder. “No, we’ll fix this.”

*

After Peggy drove away, I found Jacob Yoder lounging on a bale of hay outside the new stable. He’d already let the animals back into the pasture, but I saw no sign that he’d mucked their stalls. Maybe he was expecting me to do it.

When he saw me, he stood up with a sigh that started somewhere around his dirty work boots.

“I’m meeting the sheriff in Bigelow shortly,” I said. “I’ll be back after that. I’ll pick up a couple of cheeseburgers and fries on my way. We can eat and talk. Okay with you?”

“Triple cheeseburger. Big fries, big Coke,” he said. No ‘thank you’ or ‘nice of you to think of me’ and certainly no offer to pay his share.

“Fine.” I turned away.

“Hey,” he called after me.

“Yes?”

“You keeping me on or what?”

I longed to tell him to get his mangy ass off the property, but that would be counter-productive. Besides, there was a chance he either had killed my father himself or knew who did. I didn’t want him disappearing on me. I could at least give him a chance to prove Hiram was right about him.

“Do you live on the place?” I asked as I turned back to him.

“Yonder across the pasture in the trees. Hiram and me did up an old trailer so it’s just about fit to live in. It’s over there where it is not so hot.”

“What do you do for water and plumbing?”

“Bathroom and shower in the stable. Reservoir on the trailer for water. Drive it across the pasture in the back of my truck.”

“I see. That means Hiram used you as a caretaker as well as a . . . ” What? Groom? Handyman? Stockman? I had a suspicion that whatever I called him wouldn’t sit well with him.

“Yes. We have worked long and hard to fence, build the arena and complete the inside of the stable. Then Hiram goes and gets . . . dies. Not a right thing.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Will you sell or stay?”

“I haven’t had time to give any thought to what will happen, but for the moment, consider that nothing will change. Probating wills takes a long time.” That was assuming that I was Hiram’s heir and executrix. Maybe his will was what the burglar had been after last night. If so, he hadn’t found it. I knew from a couple of Hiram’s emails to me that his will was with his lawyer unless he’d moved it recently.

Unless he’d changed his mind and left everything to Peggy or Jacob, the whole shebang (and the entire headache) was mine. Including the bills and mortgage payment.

“I am paid every other Friday. I do not stay Friday night or Saturday here. I return late Sunday,” Jacob said.

I nodded. I’d check to see if Peggy agreed with that, but for the moment, I had to accept what he said.

As I walked off again, he said to my back, “That woman she locked the workshop back when she left?”

Actually, I had padlocked it behind Peggy and me and kept the key. No sense in letting him know I had the means to open it, so I simply nodded.

“I might need tools.”

“I see all the equipment you’ll need to muck stalls and sweep the aisle. I should be back before you do much more.” If he did that.

I left him grumbling. There had to be a very good reason for Hiram to hire this man as his only helper and to put up with him for six months. I wondered if Peggy knew any of the background of that ‘obligation’ Hiram had talked about.

Thirty minutes later I walked into the sheriff’s office in Bigelow.

Sheriff Campbell was nothing like the cliché southern small town sheriff. He was shorter than I am, thinner than I am, shaven bald and as smartly tailored as a South American dictator. He wouldn’t need pepper spray. All he had to do was aim the reflection from that shiny badge in a perp’s eyes to blind him for life.

I had fed horses a couple of hours ago, but I was cleaner than most working farmers. When I walked into his office, he stood, wrinkled his nose almost imperceptibly, and shook my hand. I don’t know what he’d been expecting, but I wasn’t it.

“I am sorry for your loss, little lady,” he said.

Nobody’s called me that since my mother entered me in a pony lead line class when I was three. I wore a pink tutu, howled my head off and won sixth place. I liked the pony. It was the tutu I couldn’t stand.

I managed a weak smile. “You said you wanted to talk to me? Have me sign some paperwork?”

“First off, you got any identification? Purely a formality.”

I pulled out my Kentucky driver’s license. I did not show him the carry permit for the pistol I keep in the center console of my truck. I drive horse vans long distances by myself. Even if I didn’t need protection, I have to be able to put a horse out of its misery if it’s hurt in an accident on the highway. I know that’s an unpalatable thing to think about, but it’s a fact of life. Part of the unspoken contract we have with the animals in our charge is not to allow them to suffer needlessly. So far I’ve never had to do it and I pray I never do.

“All right, Ms Abbott. Seems you’re who you say you are. Terrible accident.”

“I’d like copies of the police and medical examiner’s reports, please.”

He blinked and humphed. “Now, you don’t want to do that. You need to remember your daddy the way he was.”

“I need to know what happened to him more.”

“Old man out there on a Saturday morning working all alone. Tire fell on him. Iron, antique thing. Heavy. Freak accident.”

“In Kentucky the reports of accidental deaths are public records. I assume that’s true in Georgia. So may I have copies please? I’ll be happy to wait while someone runs them off for me.”

His ears had turned an amazing shade of puce, but he was still playing nice with me. “Ordinarily, takes a week or so for the records to be available for request.”