Horse Sense (Dunbarton Mysteries Book 2)

by Valerie Tate

  “Why didn’t your parents buy you a pony? Money wasn’t a problem then.”

  “Grandmother didn’t approve. She felt it was too dangerous. And since she had the money... I understood why. She wasn’t doing it to be mean. She was afraid I’d get hurt. But some part of me never really forgave her all the same.”

  It seems we all carry around inside of us, unfulfilled dreams and desires. Some day he would tell her about the boy who wanted to fly – all the way to the moon and back.

  “Do you want to watch the video again?” he asked her.

  “Yes, please.”

  Chapter 2

  Three months later.

  “Damn!...Not again!!...Bloody Hell!!!”

  Chris was supposed to be relaxing in the newly completed conservatory, enjoying the warm, end of May sunshine and the view of their pond. This did not sound like relaxing!

  Alicia walked through the French doors. Chris was sitting hunched over the coffee table, his face a dark cloud of anger as he poured over the instruction manual of his new smartphone, a birthday present from Alicia. She had given him his choice of phones and he had picked one of the newest models. It didn’t seem to be bringing him much pleasure.

  “What’s the problem, honey?”

  “I don’t know. I follow the steps in the manual but nothing seems to work! I think it must be defective. I’m going to return it.”

  “Perhaps you should just ask them to show you how it works, after all, it is the newest model,” she suggested trying to be diplomatic. The narrowing of his lips told her that he would rather suffer the frustration of trying to figure it out himself than the blow to his ego of asking the twenty-something ‘kid’ in the electronics store for help. “Or, you could ask someone who already has one. Do any of your friends have one?”

  “No. I’m the first. I think they should make these more user friendly. You shouldn’t need an engineering degree to download a ringtone.”

  Alicia forced herself to keep a straight face. Chris always prided himself on keeping up to date with all of the latest electronic gadgets.

  “You know, I always say, if you want to know how anything to do with computers, phones or other electronic devices, ask any 12 year old. They know everything. You could ask Jason Simpson down the road. He’s 12. I’ll bet he could show you how it works.” She shouldn’t have said it. She knew it the minute it came out of her mouth, but it was too late. The look of outrage on his face was priceless. If she knew how the video on the phone worked she’d have recorded it!

  “I think I know more than a 12 year old child.” There was a distinct chill in his voice.

  “Of course you do. I was just joking. I know you’ll figure it out.” Sometimes you have to lie to save your marriage.

  “I really came in to tell you that I called Hugh this morning about the other half of your present.” Hugh Jameson was the newly appointed Regional Director of the Animal Protection Society. Formerly their top investigator, he had been given the promotion following the death of the previous Director. He had been instrumental in their finding Marmalade and was now considered one of their best friends. Hugh and his wife, Emily, lived on the APS farm purchased with the donation made by the Marmalade Fund and together they spent their days caring for abandoned and abused animals of all types and sizes. “I told him that we would like a male Jack Russell puppy if one was ever turned in at the shelter and he said he would keep his eyes peeled.”

  “Thanks, honey.” Although they had Horace, Alicia knew that at heart Chris was a dog person and so the second part of his present was to be the JR puppy. They had decided to try to rescue one rather than go to a breeder since there are always so many cast-offs needing loving homes and they didn’t mind waiting until the right one came into the shelter.

  Alicia could see a truck coming through the gates at the road.

  “Tony just arrived. I’m going out to the barn to see his plans.” She turned to go and get her jacket.

  “OK. I’m going out for a few minutes.” Chris grabbed his phone and the instruction manual.

  “Where are you going?”

  He smiled sheepishly. “To see if Jason is home.”

  Laughing, they went their separate ways.

  The restoration of the house was finally finished and the long-anticipated work on the barn was about to begin. They had already booked a company to put in the paddocks but May had been unusually wet and they wanted to wait until things had dried up a little so that the trucks wouldn’t tear up the grass any more than necessary.

  Tony and Hank were already in the old barn discussing the plans when she got there. They had already determined that the structure was solid and the beige, brown and rose fieldstone foundation walls that echoed the house would be lovely once they were sandblasted. They would need to replace the roof and some of the sections of barn board but that wouldn’t be obvious once the barn was painted.

  Inside the barn, however, was a different story. Dark, dank and depressing, full of rotting timbers, it would have to be gutted which actually made the restoration easier. With nothing worth saving, they could start from scratch.

  “Designing a working stable really isn’t my line of expertise,” Tony admitted, “so I contacted a company in the Toronto area that specializes in both new facilities and restorations. They’re called Euro-Style Equestrian Design. I’ve made a note of their website plus the ones they recommended for stalls, windows etc. There are lots of pictures of different styles and layouts. I think your best bet is to look all of them over and then we can talk about what you want. A lot depends on how much you want to spend. We can get to work on the outside and the roof and clear everything out while you do that. Also, you should decide whether or not you might want to add an arena at some point. If you think you might, then we have to work that into the design so that you can add it on with access from the barn while not blocking any windows.”

  Suddenly, in her mind, the small stone barn with three or four stalls, a tack room and feed room was turned into a facility with wash stall, viewing room and full-sized arena. But she was a realist. An arena would have to wait, perhaps quite a while. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to design a barn that would accommodate one in the future. They were discussing that and looking at some stall design brochures when her phone rang.

  “Excuse me for a minute. It’s my friend, Alex, you know, the one I told you about, who competed at the Olympics last summer.” The men nodded wryly. They knew. Alex and her wonderful horse had been a frequent topic of conversation.

  “Hi, Al! What’s up?” She listened for a moment, the smile fading from her face. “Don’t worry. We’ll be there some time after dinner. See you then.”

  Three hours later, with Horace safely ensconced at her parents’ house in town with his good friend, Marmalade, and luggage in the back, Chris and Alicia found themselves on the road to King Township.

  “What exactly did she say?” Chris asked, for the umpteenth time.

  “I told you. She said, ‘The colt is grey.’”

  Chris shook his head in exasperation. “Is that code for something?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “Well, then, what does it mean?”

  “It means, as the great Sherlock Holmes would say, ‘the game’s afoot, my dear Watson’!” she replied, and then gave him the brilliant smile that always meant trouble.

  Chapter 3

  “It means,” Alex explained, sitting in her living room later that evening, “that the colt couldn’t possibly be by Danzig. It means that I’ve been had! But the question is, by whom?”

  They had arrived before sunset at Alex’s beautiful family farm in the rolling hills of King township between Nobleton and King City. Home to million dollar and even multi-million dollar horse farms and country estates and an ecologically significant natural landscape, King has been fighting an ongoing battle against the ever-encroaching urban sprawl that has characterized the Greater Toronto Area, known locally as the GTA, for the past
twenty years.

  Alex’s home was named Avalon Farm after the mystic isle where Arthur went for healing following the final battle that ended the dream of Camelot and four lines from Tennyson’s poem, the ‘Idylls of the King’ describing it were engraved on a large chunk of granite beside the main entrance to the farm.

  Avilion

  Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,

  Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies

  Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard-lawns

  And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea,

  Those lines beautifully embodied the farm as they first saw it in the last rose-tinted rays of the setting sun on that warm May evening. Alicia had been there many times in the past, but was always moved by the beauty of the setting. For Chris, seeing it for the first time was a revelation.

  A long, narrow, tree-lined drive led through electronically-controlled gates, across a stone bridge that spanned a meandering stream, and past immaculate lawns framed by white rail fencing. Fountains sprayed upwards on either side of the bridge in the ponds created by the slow-moving water of the stream and cattails waved in a gentle breeze.

  The house crowned the drive. It was a wide, white frame country house with a wrap-around covered verandah and gables across the front of the second floor. A stone chimney climbed the east side of the house and there was a three-car garage on the west. A trellis at each corner of the porch supported roses not yet in bloom and baskets of petunias hung from the over-hang. Someone definitely had a green thumb because wide bands of gardens full of early-blooming perennials lined the flagstone walk and the front of the verandah on each side of the stairs.

  Behind the house, a barn and arena were visible, set amidst rolling acres of white-railed paddocks surrounded by rows of shade trees which were just coming into leaf.

  Chris heard Alicia give a little sigh but he didn’t know if it was of happiness or envy. Then she turned and smiled at him.

  “A penny for them,” he said, smiling back.

  “I was just thinking that we need to come up with a really perfect name for our place. It’s going to be so beautiful when we’re finished.”

  Not envy! “We will,” he assured her, thankful as always that she was as happy with their life together as he was.

  Chris parked at the end of the stone walk in front of the house. As they got out, the front door opened and Alex flew down the steps and hugged Alicia ferociously.

  “Thank you! Thank you!! Thank you for coming so quickly!!!”

  Alex had what Alicia always thought of as the ideal dressage rider’s body – not too tall, with long slender legs, balanced and toned and, like a dancer’s, surprisingly muscled. She had a glossy cap of chestnut hair framing her face and her skin was already lightly bronzed from all of the hours riding in the outdoor ring.

  A mixture of dogs followed her, different sizes, different breeds, all smiling and wagging and eager to say hello.

  Alex’s mother, Julie, an older version of her, waited at the door. “Come in before the bugs eat you alive. We wait all winter for the warmer weather and as soon as it arrives, so do the bugs.” It was the Canadian lament, along with ‘eight months of winter and four months of road construction’, and other versions to that effect.

  An hour later, after getting settled in one of the spare rooms, they were sitting down to coffee and cake in the family room that over-looked a covered patio and Alicia had asked the million dollar question.

  “What does ‘The colt is grey.’ mean? Is that code for something?”

  Alex laughed and relaxed a little. “You always make me feel better! No, it’s colour genetics. Let me start at the beginning.

  “You remember that a year ago I entered a lottery to buy a straw of frozen semen from a top dressage stallion, Danzig, who had died suddenly on the way to the breeding shed?” Alicia and Chris nodded. It wasn’t something they were likely to forget. “Fortunately the stallion owners had a good supply of frozen semen and they decided to offer it for sale to be used for only the best mares so as not to dilute the gene pool. Those who wished to purchase a straw had to apply and send all of the breeding and competition histories of the mares. They were looking for mares who were top competitors and also Elite Hanoverians. My mare, Brindisi, is both and so I was allowed to purchase one straw for $20,000. I know that would be peanuts for a top Thoroughbred but it is an unheard of price for a dressage stallion. I didn’t care. It was worth it to have the opportunity to have a Danzig foal and bring his bloodlines to Canada. Danzig was the top dressage horse in the world when he died.

  “Because Brin and I were short-listed for the Olympic team she couldn’t carry the foal herself so last April, after inseminating her with the semen, we transferred the fertilized egg to a surrogate mare and she carried the foal. It was a very expensive procedure but it was worth it to get a foal of that caliber.

  “Two months ago my colt was born. He was perfectly beautiful and I was thrilled. I was a little surprised that he was chestnut like Brin because Danzig was bay and he was known to be prepotent which means he passed his physical characteristics on to his babies. We say stallions like that ‘stamp’ their progeny. He was also known for passing on his incredible movement and temperament which is why I was willing to pay that much for the semen. However, Brin also comes from a strong genetic line and so I didn’t think anything of it until a couple of weeks ago when the baby started to shed his foal coat. He was grey underneath!” She said that as if it explained everything.

  Chris and Alicia looked at each other and then back at Alex.

  “Alex, honey,” Alicia said, “we still don’t understand what that means.”

  “It means,” Alex explained carefully, to the clearly uninitiated, “that it is impossible for a chestnut mare and a bay stallion to produce a grey baby. Even though grey is dominant, one of the parents has to be grey in order to have a grey foal. But just in case there was some freakish genetic mutation, I sent a DNA sample to be checked and sure enough, he doesn’t match Danzig. He’s by a young stallion called Par Hasard and while Par Hasard is well-bred with a decent performance record, his semen is priced at $2000 and not the $20,000 that I spent.

  “It means,” she went on, her voice rising, “that the colt couldn’t possibly be by Danzig! It means that I’ve been had! But the question is, by whom? So I want to find out how this happened. I want to find out who is responsible?” She said it vehemently, her slim frame vibrating with tension, and then threw herself back onto the sofa cushions and took a deep, calming breath.

  “Wow! An international scam. How cool is that?” Alicia said gleefully.

  “Cool?” Alex jumped back up again. “I’m out thousands of dollars and I’ve been made to look a fool and you think it’s ‘cool’?” Her voice ended in a high-pitched squeal.

  “It’s cool because you want us to help you figure out who did it. You do want us to help, don’t you?” Alicia looked crestfallen at the possibility she had misunderstood the reason for Alex’s SOS.

  “Of course I want you to help!” Alex, said somewhat mollified. “That’s why you’re here. I want to hire Chris to be my lawyer so that you two can do what you do and figure out what happened.”

  “You don’t need to hire me to do that,” Chris protested. “Of course we’ll help you.”

  “I want to,” Alex said, earnestly. “You are going to be spending a lot of time away from your office and your clients if you help me with this and I don’t want you to have any difficulty with your partners. Also, as my lawyer, you’ll have the right to ask questions, shake things up and generally nose around.”

  “Nosing around is what we do best,” Alicia said, trying to make her friend smile and succeeding.

  “I remember!” Alex laughed and then said soberly, “I also remember it almost got you killed!”

  “Well not this time. This time we’ve been taking Tae Kwon Do! This time we’ll be ready for them, whoever ‘them’ is!” Alicia oozed self-confidence in
her new skill and privately hoped they would have the opportunity to test it.

  Chris looked askance at his wife. “Hopefully it won’t come to that,” he said. “After all, it’s a fraud and not murder this time.”

  “The other thing I’m worried about is the Summer Festival, Ali. This is heading into your season.”

  A little more than a year ago, Alicia had begun the herculean task of starting a summer theatre in Dunbarton. Her group, calling themselves the Behind the Footlights Club, was producing plays to be performed during the summer months. Following a successful first season, the Town Council had decided to renovate a pavilion by the lake and turn it into a venue for plays and concerts and giving the festival a home.

  “I’ve got that all worked out. Thankfully, I’m not in either of the plays we’re doing this year. We decided not to bite off too much since this is only our second season and the first with the Theatre Pavilion. It may not be completed before August so we might have to use the Town Hall again.

  “We picked just two plays and my friend Miranda is co-directing with me. The first play is a psychological thriller written by a newcomer to Dunbarton. She has adapted a story she had published in Ellery Queen Mystery magazine. It’s called Deadly Quintet. The second play we’re doing in August is a comedy, Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward. Next year we have plans to stage four plays – two at the Pavilion and two at the Town Hall.” Alicia pulled herself up short. She could go on for hours about her plans for developing the Summer Festival but it wasn’t the time for that.

  “Anyway, I phoned Miranda on the way here and she is willing to run all rehearsals for the time being. We have high school students selling tickets at the Town Hall. The posters are up all over town and we have a website. I’ve brought my laptop and with an internet hook-up I can keep on top of the administrative side of things. I might need to go back for a couple of days to check on progress with the theatre but I’ll play that by ear. Also, on the last two Saturdays in June we are committed to putting on a scene from each of the plays at the band shell in the park as part of our Pipe Band parade and concert but that’s a long way off and I can go home for those if it happens we’re still here. So, it’s all worked out and we’re all yours for as long as you need us!”