The Stable Affair

by Jessica Andersen

  Dante hung up the phone and slid out of bed, gloriously naked, but Sarah was too distracted to appreciate his considerable assets. She didn’t like his sudden withdrawal, the hardness to his jaw and tension in his neck and shoulders that hadn’t been there just a moment before.

  “What is it? What’s wrong? Is Ellie okay? Is something wrong with one of the horses?”

  He nodded yes then shook his head no. “Yes, Ellie’s fine. No, it wasn’t anything about the horses. It was Daniel. He’s found something he wants you to look at. Get dressed, we need to meet him across the street at that fish place.”

  Without a backward glance, Dante shut himself in the bathroom.

  Sarah sat alone in the narrow bed and the musk of their lovemaking hung heavily in her nostrils. What had happened? One minute she and Dante were twined around each other, drowsy with their joining, and the next minute he was far away from her, separated by far more than a bathroom door.

  What had she done wrong?

  Chapter Ten

  “What do you know about injections given to your clients after they received their test results?”

  Sarah paused with a glass of ginger ale halfway to her lips. “Excuse me?”

  Daniel repeated himself and then leaned back on the slippery faux leather bench seat of the booth they’d been assigned by the perky, gum-chewing hostess. Dante sat next to Sarah and their bodies touched at shoulder and hip but he seemed no closer to her than he’d been in the hotel room. Inexplicably, she felt like crying.

  “I can’t think of any reason to give a shot after test results. For the most part, the diseases we tested for at the lab weren’t the kind of thing you’d treat that way, that’s why the bad results were so scary. Why do you ask?”

  “Because of something I came across in those computer files you gave me, the ones you dumped from BoGen’s network.”

  Sarah was surprised. “There was something in the test results? Are you sure? I didn’t find anything and I’ve been over them dozens of times.” She was trying to concentrate on Daniel’s questions and ignore Dante’s stillness, but there was a hollow, leaden feeling in the pit of her stomach. Was her new lover regretting their intimacy already? Had it not been as shattering, as life defining for him as it had been for her? Why was he shutting her out so completely now?

  Daniel shook his head. “No, not in the results files. I don’t know enough about the science to understand those screens. You also downloaded your personal email files, remember?”

  “Oh, right. I had planned on sorting through those and mailing some of my friends with my new address. I guess I just never got around to it.” In the excitement of a new job, a new home and a fresh romance, Sarah’s old friends at the lab had fallen by the wayside. She’d have to make a point to call some of them when she got home.

  Daniel pulled a folded sheet of paper out of his jacket pocket and shot a worried look at his Dante. “I took the liberty of doing some of the sorting for you. I came across one message that you’re going to find very interesting.” He passed the paper across to Sarah.

  “Hmm. It looks like this was forwarded to my account from Schuyler Tyler’s account; we used to trade mail pretty frequently because our account names are so similar. I don’t recognize the address it came from though, DDVRS at the local web server isn’t one of my usual correspondents and it’s a pretty old message. Schuyler must’ve had it in her files for a while before she forwarded it.”

  Dante jerked his head around and looked wildly to Daniel for confirmation. The email was from his personal account. His sister had used it from time to time when he’d been out of town.

  Sarah stilled. “It’s from Susan.” She scanned the paper silently then began to read aloud, shakily at first. “Dear Sarah, I wanted to thank you again for your love and support during this whole testing thing. I know you would have done anything in your power to avoid giving me bad news, but I couldn’t have heard it from anyone else. I wanted to thank you for that. The boys in the lab tried to help too, but I’m beginning to think I’m having a reaction to that injection they gave me. It’s like my brain is churning along on overdrive, and that I’m thinking too many things at once. I just mention this in case someone at the lab asks why I called. I was hoping I could get in to see one of the doctors in the next day or so. If you could get me an appointment, I’d appreciate it. Call me.” Sarah paused. “There’s a postscript: By the way—he’ll be here next month.”

  “What was that last bit about?” Daniel was curious, obviously wondering if there was another player in the game.

  Sarah gave a strangled little laugh. “Oh nothing. Like I said, Susan and I had become friends of a sort. We went out for a cup of coffee or a drink a few times—that’s one of many reasons it hit me so hard for them to think I had been careless with her test. Anyway, she had become convinced that I’d be a good match for her brother. She always said she’d set me up with him on a sort of blind date the next time he was in town. I guess he worked out of the country a lot and she thought it was time for him to settle down and start a family. She said she’d like to have me for a sister.”

  Dante made a strangled noise in his throat that sounded like a death rattle. “Excuse me, I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

  Sarah and Daniel both watched him bolt to the rear of the restaurant, but when Sarah drew a breath to quiz her companion about Dante’s strange behavior, the big man jumped quickly back into their conversation. “Okay, I guess I understand that part—girl talk. But what do you think she meant about the injection she received? Did she ever make that appointment?”

  Sarah tried hard to remember the days immediately preceding Susan’s death. In retrospect they were mostly a blur. “I don’t think so. If she did, she didn’t poke her head into my office to say hello like I would have expected her to do. As far as the injection, all I can think is that maybe she got upset after she left me. Perhaps one of the doctors felt that it was appropriate to give her a sedative.”

  “Could such an injection give her the symptoms she describes?”

  Sarah stared into her soda as Dante returned to the booth and slid onto the other bench, the one opposite her. “I can’t see how, unless she had some sort of weird allergic reaction, but that seems awfully farfetched.” She frowned into her drink until an idea came to her. “Hey! Matt’s coming down tomorrow to see the show. Why don’t we ask him if he knows anything about a shot?”

  The men shared a glance and Dante said, “Uh, Sarah? How well do you really know Matt?”

  Apparently his brief retreat to the men’s room had settled Dante enough that he was speaking to her again. Sarah just wished he had said something more loverlike. “We’ve been friends since I first started working at the lab. Why?”

  “Well, we were just wondering how much you should really trust him. What if he was involved in the cover-up? He could be playing along just to misdirect our investigation.”

  Sarah shook her head violently. “Impossible! Matthew was one of the few people that stood up for me at the hearing. He put his own job and reputation on the line to see that I was put on an indefinite leave of absence rather than being fired outright.”

  In the bathroom, Dante had stared at his own reflection in the mirror and saw the face of his sister. He didn’t regret making love to Sarah. She was such a part of him now that regretting their love would be like being sorry for breathing. But he needed to focus on Susan now, needed to lay her memory to rest. To do that, he needed to protect their little group. “That first day Bender came to see you at the farm, you didn’t know he was coming, did you?”

  Sarah bristled. “No, but he’s my friend. He’s always welcome to visit.”

  “He never had before. When did you first access Boston General’s network from the farm?” Dante was relentless. He’d already worked the timeline out on his own, but needed her to come to the same conclusion.

  Sarah thought back. “The day…” She bowed her head. “A couple of days before Matt ca
me to the farm, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he came because of that.”

  “You’re absolutely right.” Daniel nodded. “That could be nothing more than sheer coincidence. In fact I think we may be looking at this from the wrong angle. Instead of arguing about who isn’t involved, why don’t we figure out who is involved?”

  Sarah gave a slightly hysterical laugh and leaned her weary body on the greasy table. “Involved in what? We keep talking about this as if it’s some huge conspiracy, but what do we really know for certain? If you think about it, almost all of this could be explained away as a series of coincidences. A client kills herself because of a bad result that we later discover was incorrectly read and I lose my job because of that mistake, which triggers a latent streak of paranoia and I start seeing shadowy figures watching me from the bushes.”

  Dante was unimpressed. “What about the man you saw in Newcastle? What about the fire?”

  “Maybe the grooms were smoking in the loft and the tack room again. Or perhaps some relative or ex-lover of Susan’s is after me, bent on revenge.” Sarah shuddered. “I hadn’t even thought of that one before, it’s kind of chilling if you think of it.”

  “I’d rather not,” Daniel said dryly. “Let’s just say for the sake of argument that Susan was killed for a reason, and that you were used as a pawn in the cover-up. Who in the lab would have had the most to lose if things went wrong with the testing program? Who runs the whole show?”

  Sarah envisioned pale, lidless eyes over a predatory beak and tried not to shudder again. “Gordon Seville. They call him The Doctor.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Doctor Seville, but we may have a slight problem.” Matt’s voice was faint and Gordon could hear a commotion in the background. The faint hubbub irritated his sensitive ears and he was tempted to hang up.

  “Matthew, I can barely hear you. Where are you?” The Doctor fiddled with an expensive ivory paperweight in the shape of an elephant. It had just arrived, smuggled to him by a colleague who was using a fellowship at an African AIDS clinic as a front for his more lucrative activities.

  “Sorry, Doctor. I’m on a payphone at the horse show. I just talked to Sarah and she asked me if I knew anything about an injection Susan St. Pierre might have received following her test results.”

  Gordon’s fingers tightened spasmodically around the elephant until its tusks drew blood from his soft palm. “I beg your pardon?”

  “The shots. She knows about them, so do Riley and Devers.”

  The Doctor’s voice was deadly. “How?”

  The relief in Matt’s voice clearly indicated that he was happy to be miles away from the lab at that moment. “Susan sent Sarah an email when she started feeling badly. In it she suggested it might have something to do with the injection we gave her and asked if Sarah could help her get an appointment to be looked at.”

  “When did Miss Taylor receive this email? I thought we cleared all her correspondence around that time.”

  “Riley found it tucked in the stuff she downloaded off the network the other week. I guess it had gone to another account and had just been forwarded internally. It must’ve slipped past the guard dogs.”

  Gordon ground his teeth in frustration. He hated working with idiots, and was beginning to believe that his computer staff was crawling with them. “What did you tell her about the injection when she asked you?”

  Matt grunted. “I told her that the blood work on Susan had showed she was a bit anemic, so you gave her a bit of a booster so the anemia coupled with the shock she’d received wouldn’t suppress her immunities. She seemed to buy that.”

  “What about the others?”

  “I didn’t see Riley, but Devers was hovering around Sarah like she was made of spun glass and kept glaring at me. I think the menfolk would like to omit me from their cozy little group but that Sarah won’t let them.”

  The Doctor smiled slightly. If Dante was getting that close to Miss Taylor, it was probably time to move to the next step. “Good.”

  There was a pause as if Matt wasn’t quite sure what to make of that response. “So should I stay here?”

  “They’ll be down on the Cape for another day or so?”

  “Correct, there’s still another two days of horse show for them to get through, not that I understand the attraction. Five hundred brown horses running around in circles and jumping over jumps seems rather pointless to me.”

  “Then you can come back up here.” Seville calculated rapidly in his head. “I have two important assignments for you.”

  “Yes?”

  “First, I want you to fire the entire computer staff and tell human resources to replace them. There is no excuse for that email getting through to Miss Taylor.”

  “And second?”

  The Doctor stroked the elephant’s smooth back. “I want you to deliver a little present to that farm so Miss Taylor will receive it when she returns from the horse show. I think it’s about time to break up our budding romance.”

  It was especially hard for Sarah to pack away the banners and ribbons when Capeside drew to an end. If she closed her eyes she could summon up every moment of the last five days although they had passed in a flash.

  Ellie had won her purple ribbon the second day, finishing seventh in the equitation. She had been denied her green one though when Finnegan won the leadline suitability. The child seemed content with her blue ribbon and the stuffed horse she was given as a trophy, although Sarah did overhear her trying to trade her blue ribbon for a green one at the in-gate.

  Noble had continued to march around like the trooper he was and Sarah was convinced that he’d make it to the Jumper Classic next month. She planned one more big show with him before then—Grosvenor Farms next week.

  And then there was Dante. Sarah heard herself sigh and was momentarily disgusted. But what the hell? He was worth sighing over. They’d both been busy, but they’d managed more than a few stolen moments for necking in the tack stall or behind a convenient outbuilding. They were constantly interrupted, and their frustration had built unbearably until the previous day. Dante had marched over and grabbed her in the middle of a conversation with the course designer, said he wanted to talk to her about Ellie, and dragged her back to where the trailers were parked.

  Back in the dressing room of the gooseneck, he had been sure not to lean against the locked door while he took her standing up, pressing her back amidst the bridle racks until they both erupted almost instantaneously.

  With barely a word between them, they had straightened each other’s clothing and returned to work.

  Sarah paused in her packing to let the warm memory of that experience bloom in her stomach. She really wasn’t ready for this show to end, wasn’t ready to go home and get back to reality.

  Dante had shrugged off his brief melancholy, but she saw the shadow pass over his face every now and again and knew that there something was bothering him. He’d been sweet and kind and loving to her, but they had not discussed a future. It was as if he didn’t believe that they could have one.

  She looked up as a shadow fell across her and a now-familiar trickle of need fluttered through her.

  He propped himself up against a shabby tent post and folded his arms casually. “What are you doing tonight?”

  “What, after we get the horses home and settled down? I had planned on sleeping for a couple of days. Why?”

  “I have to file some paperwork in Boston for Ellie’s formal adoption, so I was going to drive in now and stay the night. I was thinking that you might like to come with me. We could go out for that dinner date you keep promising me that never seems to happen, then we could spend the whole night together in a nice hotel.”

  Sarah laughed. “What, nicer than the St. Peters’ or the Seaside Roach Motel? Impossible.”

  “While your choices do have their own unique and very rustic charm, I was thinking that clean sheets and smaller silverfish would be a pleasant change.” Dante grinned at her, flashing tho
se dimples, and Sarah was sunk. Besides, she wanted some time alone with him to talk seriously about a few things.

  “Okay. Let me fix it with Tilda.”

  As they drove toward Boston from the Cape, Sarah and Dante talked about nothing in particular. By unspoken consent they stayed away from heavier subjects until Dante asked about Jay.

  Sarah concentrated on her driving. “What do you want to know about him?”

  Dante shrugged. “I guess I was just wondering what he was like, what kind of a relationship you two had. Daniel has wondered whether Fontaine might have been involved in whatever’s going on over at that lab.” He braced himself for her anger and was surprised when she nodded.

  “I’ve wondered the same thing myself now and again. Not,” she continued forcefully, “that he’d ever have done anything unethical, but I can’t help thinking that The Doctor might have taken advantage of Jay without his realizing what was going on.”

  “The Doctor?”

  Sarah nodded. “Seville. He liked for us to call him that, it really fed his ego. When he started on at the lab about a year before Jay died, Gordon really liked to throw his weight around, liked his people to be a bit scared of him. Jay actually recruited him as a collaborator for these long shot experiments we were doing as a side project in the lab. Jay came up with most of the ideas and Gordon found the money to fund it. When Jay died, Gordon pretty much ended up running the whole show.”

  A warning bell went off in the back of Dante’s head. “What kind of experiments were they doing?”

  “Nothing weird like genetically engineered fetuses if that’s what you’re thinking. Jay had some ideas about ways to make gene therapy work on certain inherited diseases. It was really long-term stuff. He was making the vectors for when a functional delivery system was developed.”