Unbridled

by D. Jackson Leigh

  Anna sits back. “Wow. You’ve got quite a mess, don’t you?”

  I hang my head. “I tried to quit the book, but my editor already has about twelve chapters of it and says I have to fulfill my contract.”

  Dorine takes my hand and squeezes it for support. I swallow my rising emotions.

  “I intended all along to find the real killer to stop the rumors that Marsh did it and managed to wiggle out of any criminal charges. It’s almost wrecked her career—and her personal life, I think.” I straighten my shoulders and lift my chin. “I still intend to clear her, even if she never takes me back.”

  Alisha lifts an eyebrow and points out the elephant in the room. “You love her.”

  “I do.” I meet her eyes so she can see the truth in mine. “I’m sort of stuck right now. I know I’m close, but I’m still looking for the key that will unlock this whodunit. I’m afraid I’m too involved to see it clearly, especially if the unthinkable happens and I find evidence that Marsh is guilty. I need a fresh pair of eyes looking over my shoulder.” I shift my gaze to Anna. “I was hoping to persuade Anna to go with me to Southern Pines tomorrow to see the location where it happened and talk to people who might have been around then. I know it’s really short notice, but you were incredibly helpful on the book-club-murder story.”

  “I can.” Anna answers so quickly, she actually talks over my last few words, then catches herself and looks uncertainly at Alisha. “If it’s okay with you, honey.”

  “Alisha, you’re welcome to come, too. I mean, I’ll pay for two rooms anyway.”

  Alisha is shaking her head. “I had one coworker fly out West to meet her first grandbaby. Before her plane’s wheels touched down in Denver, another coworker was taken to the hospital and ended up getting an emergency appendectomy. There’s no way I can leave work this week.” She turns to Anna. “But you go, baby. Lauren’s right. You’re good at this sort of stuff.”

  Anna gives Alisha a quick kiss before looking at me again. “What time do we leave in the morning?”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  We’re hardly on the highway before I confess the rest of my story, that I caught Marsh with another woman. Anna’s response isn’t what I expect.

  Instead of consoling me, she blurts out her own confession. “I told Alisha that I’ve…that we’ve slept together.”

  I stare at her for a few seconds before returning my eyes to the road. “And she still let you come with me?”

  “She knows how head over heels I am for her. So, no. She’s not afraid we’ll sleep together again.” She hesitates before continuing. “She also said she could see how in love you are with Marsh.”

  My cheeks heat a bit. “You have a very perceptive lady.”

  Anna looks shyly down at her hands folded in her lap. “She’s really special.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’m still going to get separate rooms for us. We can get connecting ones if the hotel has two available so we can brainstorm, but I haven’t been sleeping well lately and often get up in the middle of the night to answer email or write, then go back to sleep for a few hours. I’d just keep you up, too.”

  Anna’s voice is soft. “Whatever is most comfortable for you is fine.” She flashes a smile that brightens our somber discussion. “Now tell me more about the fictional account of all this that you’re writing.”

  * * *

  The Carolina Horse Park is actually about twenty miles from the better hotels of the Southern Pines-Pinehurst area, so we check into one of those “by Marriott” places in a small town closer to the park.

  The horse park is an amazing two hundred and fifty acres, with three show-jumping rings, a show-jumping-slash-dressage arena, barns totaling nearly three hundred horse stalls, and at least six steeplechase courses, plus a driving course for horse carts, not golfers.

  I had called ahead to explain that I wanted to use the park as one of the settings in the new mystery I was writing and asked if anyone would be around to give us a tour and answer questions. The guy who answered the phone wasn’t very enthusiastic but said he’d pass the request along. The woman who called back was on their board of directors and thrilled to personally accommodate us. I have no delusions that there’s a mystery reader behind every bush, but she must have at least googled me. True to her word, a petite, silver-haired woman was waiting for us at the announcers’ building.

  “Ms. Everhart, it’s so nice to meet you.” She reminds me of Barbara Stanwyck, the tough matriarch in the old television western The Big Valley. “I’m Victoria Banks. We spoke on the phone earlier.”

  I shake the hand she offers me. “Thank you so much for letting us take up your time.” I gesture to Anna. “This is Anna, a friend who is helping me with research for my current project.”

  The two women shake hands and exchange pleasantries, and then Victoria pretty much recites the info we’ve already viewed on the park’s website, with a little history thrown in.

  “Now, what can I show you first?”

  I scan the area, and Anna takes a yellow legal pad from her shoulder bag, both of us acting out the agreed pretense of simply casing the site. Anna, bless her, begins to draw a rough map of the park. “We’ll want to estimate some distances between things, so I can get the timing right in my story, but we can add them later.”

  “I have just what you need.” Victoria strides over to her Mercedes G-Class SUV, opens the back, and retrieves a range finder from her golf bag. She holds it out to Anna, but I take it instead.

  “Of course. I don’t know why I haven’t thought to use one of these before.” I hold the device that looks like a small, sleek pair of binoculars up to my eyes. “These are perfect.” I give Victoria a beaming smile as I hand them over to Anna. “I’ll have to get a pair of these for myself.”

  “Oh, keep those,” Victoria says. “I’ve got a dozen of them. They’re like reading glasses. You can never find a pair when you need it, so you buy enough to keep one in every room of your house and another for the car.”

  I laugh. “That’s very generous. Thank you so much.”

  Actually, I learned from a psychiatrist friend that people will be more open with you when they believe you’re indebted to them. Someone who owes you would never betray you, right? It’s an old scammer’s trick, my friend told me.

  “We should look at the stables first,” Anna says.

  “Yes.” I agree.

  “This way,” Victoria says.

  The stables are long, shed-row-style facilities lined up parallel to each other and perpendicular to a large, grassy quad. Half are on one side of the quad and half on the other side, with about thirty feet between each stable. Rather than an interior corridor like Marsh’s stable, the stalls of rough-cut oak open from the outside, with a six-foot roof overhang that shelters them from direct sun or rain. Thick boards go all the way to the roof on the back side to separate the stalls from the ones on the other side.

  “I’m sorry. This isn’t how the stables were described to me. I was told the barns had a center aisle, and the stalls opened only to the inside.”

  “Oh, you want to see the new stables with premium stalls. Well, they’re not really new. I guess those barns are four or five years old. They’re the last ones.” She gestures for us to follow her, and we walk past three other barns to reach one of the two fancy ones. “They were built about five years ago with donations from the people who own the top-tier horses and come for the international and national shows. They wanted barns with security. Some of those horses are worth more than a million dollars, you know.”

  “Really?” Anna distracts Victoria as we had planned so I can poke around. “I know racehorses can cost a lot, but I had no idea.”

  Victoria scoffs. “I personally think horse racing is disgraceful. They run those poor animals at top speeds before they finish growing. That’s why so many break down on the track. A
top-tier dressage horse is usually at least eight years old.”

  “Eight years?”

  “That’s because we don’t ride them before they’re at least three, and it takes that long to train them. As you can imagine, dressage takes a lot more training than just letting horses run fast around a track.”

  Anna apparently has hit a nerve with Victoria, and she’s on a rampage about an equestrian sport she considers gauche. It’s perfect cover to free me to explore. I walk down the corridor, looking into the stalls. No rough-cut boards in these. The inside is lined with finished oak, and the top half features vertical bars of black metal. These are nice, like the stalls in Marsh’s barn. The barn smells of the wood chips, sweet feed, and leather.

  I spy a security camera at one end of the long corridor. Midway down the corridor are a tack room and a walk-in, closet-size security office with a half-bath. The office consists of only a small desk, a trash can, and a computer wired to the security network for the two premium barns. The tack room is large and designed sort of like a pro-sport locker room, with each open locker wide enough for a standard tack trunk and two wall-mounted saddle brackets aligned vertically on one side. The other half above the trunk has a short shelf with space below to hang clothing. Each locker is numbered to correspond to a specific stall in the barn. I’m surprised I can see no security camera in this room, considering how much the saddles and bridles cost. There’s a large window on the outside wall and several ventilation fans to keep mold from forming on the oiled saddle leather.

  I’m by the window when I hear Anna’s and Victoria’s voices grow closer. I turn around, intending to rejoin them, when I realize I can stand by the window in the tack room and see right into the horse stall across the aisle—all the way into it if the stall door is open. Curious. My writer brain files this fact away as a possible plot point.

  “What do you think?” Anna looks at me expectantly when I step out of the tack room.

  I stand in the stall across from the tack room and point. “When you slide this stall’s door back, you can see all the way through the tack room and out the window.” The tack-room door is as wide as an exterior door, I assume to allow for large trunks.

  Anna raises an eyebrow. “I can see several possibilities for that fact in your story.”

  I grin because I can tell our minds are running along the same track. I’m honestly looking for ideas for the book’s plot as well as searching for clues to who killed the horse Marsh is blamed for.

  Victoria looks from the window to where I am in the stall. “Too bad nobody was outside that window that awful night the Parker horse was killed.”

  Anna and I exchange surprised looks.

  “You were on the park’s board then?”

  “Oh, yes. It was terrible. These premium barns were finished just in time for the international show. Actually, the stables were finished, but we were still deciding what horses should get priority in booking these stalls. I mean, you don’t want a junior equestrian’s twelve-hundred-dollar pony stabled here while a later booking comes in from someone with a million-dollar Olympic prospect, and all you have left are the basic stalls in the other barns.”

  “What about security?” I asked. “Do you have guards patrolling the grounds at night? And who hires them—the board or the event organizers?”

  “Oh, no. Just like the sound system at the judges’ building, we have a minimal security system the event organizers can make use of, but we decided from the outset that the legal pitfalls of the park providing security guards were too great. If the event organizers want security guards and to use our simple system of two cameras in each barn, they have to hire their own guards and sign an agreement that we’re not responsible for anything that results from unreported problems with the security hardware, or within a reasonable twenty-four-hour repair period should the system become inoperable. We’re a nonprofit, not a wealthy corporation, but we do have several attorneys on the board who ensure we’re protected should something catastrophic happen.”

  “So the event sponsors hired the guards the night the Parker horse was killed?”

  “Yes. We all felt terrible, of course, about what happened.” She shakes her head. “I think everyone would have been less devasted if a person had been killed, rather than such a highly trained, beautiful horse.”

  My gut tells me she’s hit on a truth at the heart of the dark deed. “We’ve run across several different rumors about who might be responsible. There may be more rumors we don’t know about. Can you tell me what you’ve heard?”

  Victoria studies me, suspicion creeping into her expression for the first time. “I’m not going to end up quoted on some true-crime television show, am I?”

  “Absolutely not by talking to us.” For once, I’m truly glad for the celebrity my success has brought. “You know who I am. I write fiction. I don’t rehash unsolved murders on B-level television. In fact, I hate those shows. They’re filled with sensationalist innuendo.”

  Victoria nods but still hesitates before she spills what she’s heard. “I guess the main rumor is that Marsh Langston killed the horse to please Maggie Talmadge, who owned the next-best horse in the field. Maggie had pretty much groomed Marsh as a rider, and God knows what else, since Marsh was a young teen.”

  Whoa. What? “What did you mean by ‘God knows what else’?”

  “I have always heard whispers that Maggie has a kinky sexual appetite and always has a young woman or young man under her wing. She’s a spider who uses her horses and money to lure them into her web.”

  I don’t like thinking of a young Marsh under the spell of some rich sexual predator. “What other rumors?”

  “Oh, things people wrote off pretty quickly as hogwash. Kate Parker had her own horse killed for the insurance money. Nobody believed that, of course. Kate, like her mother was, is a horsewoman through and through. She loves her horses like they’re her children.”

  “I haven’t met her but have heard her referred to as Saint Kate.”

  Victoria chuckles. “No doubt. She’s given money to just about every horse-rescue group and charity on the East Coast. I heard they asked her to run for governor once, but she turned them down.”

  Anna is writing furiously while Victoria is talking, but I’m thinking we haven’t turned up anything that really helps us clear Marsh. I glance at my watch. Time to begin disengaging from our chatty hostess.

  “I want to thank you so much. Actually seeing a place like this helps me be authentic in my fictional setting. And those are some interesting rumors, uh, theories.”

  “Oh, two more ideas stuck around for a while. Some said the security guard was one of the young men Maggie supposedly mentored and was angry because she up and married some rich guy. They theorized that he meant to kill Maggie’s horse in the next stall but mixed up the stall numbers.”

  Something niggles at my brain, a thought not yet fully formed. “And the last theory?”

  “Some said Maggie killed the horse because she wanted Marsh to ride her horse, not Kate’s, in the competition. Kate’s horse had already won the first two legs of the competition—dressage, and cross-country. He was a shoo-in to win the show-jumping and the entire event the next day.”

  Anna is scribbling this information down, and I’m thinking it over when a vibration at my hip makes me jump. Then my phone begins to ring in my back pocket. I smile my embarrassment but frown when I look at the screen. Few people have my personal cell number, and Caller ID identifies the caller as an international number. I answer anyway.

  “Hello?”

  The voice is female but deep, with that warm quality that makes you want to trust it—like James Earl Jones or Cate Blanchett sound.

  “Kate Parker. I’m calling for Lauren Everhart. Do I have the right number?”

  My heart leaps. “Yes! Ms. Parker, thanks so much for calling.”

  Ann
a and Victoria both pause their quiet conversation when I identify who’s calling.

  “It’s Kate, please. And I couldn’t avoid it. My wife’s a bigger fan of yours than Skyler is, and that’s saying a lot. Besides, Skyler told me what you’re up to, and she’s right. We should have kept at it until we found who did kill Jakobi. That was my horse. We’ve let Marsh down by not following through.”

  I turn my back to them and lower my voice. “I’m actually here at the horse park, and Victoria Banks is giving my assistant and me a tour. Do you mind if I put you on speaker?” Her answer will tell me how much she trusts Victoria. And how much I can trust any information Victoria gives me.

  “Vic is there? Go right ahead.”

  I turn back to my companions and change the setting on my phone. “Okay. You’re on speaker.”

  “Vickie, you old trickster. Are you still charming boys, or have you found a silver-haired fox like yourself to den up with?” Kate’s previously smooth voice booms over the phone.

  Victoria grins, her blue eyes glinting. “I see Laura’s still sanding away at your rough edges, you old dog.”

  “She says I’m a lost cause. We’ll call you when we’re back and set up a time to come down and play golf.”

  “That would be wonderful. I’ll look forward to it.”

  “But that’s not why I called, Ms. Everhart.”

  “Please. It’s Lauren. I’m guessing Skyler told you why I wanted to talk to you?”

  “Can you tell me what you’ve found out so far?”

  “It’s easier to tell you where we’re stuck. I need to find two people I think are key to this case, if not suspects. I’m trying to track down Maggie Talmadge and the security guard assigned to the barn that night. I got his name from the police report, but it’s a dead end. He’s disappeared.”

  “Yeah. That’s pretty much why I stopped looking into it. I was about to hire a private detective to find him, but Marsh was so hurt, she just wanted it to go away.”