One Hoof In The Grave

by Carolyn McSparren

  Life had been a damn sight less complicated before he’d met Merry. He could go off on a deep cover assignment and not feel the isolation. He could enjoy working down south or on one of the barrier islands and not wish for an assignment around Dahlonega or Bigelow.

  He’d met her a year ago when her father was murdered outside of Mossy Creek. He’d been instantly attracted to her, but involvement with murder suspects was definitely against Georgia Bureau of Investigation rules.

  And Geoff was a stickler for rules. He had to be. Break the rules, and some defense attorney would have your ass for favoritism and get your airtight case tossed out. Juries did not enjoy wondering about the credibility of a police witness.

  Once Hiram Lackland’s murder had been solved, they’d tried to get together, and even managed a couple of romantic dinners in Bigelow, the county seat for Mossy Creek. Most of the time, however, either he was off on assignment in South Georgia or she was at a horse show.

  Geoff wanted more. Much more. He’d thought Merry did too. If they could find the time. At least the next time they met, she wouldn’t be a murder suspect. He wouldn’t have to hold back.

  He nearly choked when his cell rang as he wolfed down his fourth doughnut. He swigged a mouthful of coffee, still hot enough to singe the roof of his mouth, and lunged for the phone on his kitchen counter.

  He checked the ID. Unknown caller. Not Merry, then.

  Sunday calls were never good, even thought he was officially off duty. He caught it as it started to go to voice mail. “Hello, Geoff? Agent Wheeler? This is Peggy Caldwell from Mossy Creek.”

  His heart sped up. Had something happened to Merry? He hadn’t heard from Peggy since she’d sent him a Christmas card and an invitation to a Christmas party he hadn’t been free to attend. “How badly is she hurt?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Peggy said. “Oh—Merry’s not hurt. I’m sorry if I gave you that impression.”

  “Then why . . .”

  “Can you come? I think she’s about to be arrested for murder.”

  Chapter 8

  Still Sunday –

  Merry

  Sheriff Nordstrom had set up an interview room of sorts in the lounge of the Tollivers’ palatial stable. I felt as though I’d been sitting across from him for days instead of hours. So far I was too exasperated to be frightened, but that would come. The law may be ‘a ass,’ as Dickens’s Mr. Bumble said in Oliver Twist, but it is still the law. It can arrest people, toss them into jail, and send them to prison.

  “Yes, I was sitting on the ground beside Raleigh when Harry Tolliver found me,” I said. “I was feeling for a pulse.”

  “Not driving that stake through his neck?”

  “No, sheriff,” I tried to keep the edge out of my voice.

  This Nordic giant sheriff looked as though he belonged in Minnesota, not Georgia. If he started giving me problems, Peggy would call him a Storm Trooper if we were lucky, and the Gestapo if we weren’t. I doubted that would endear either of us to him.

  “Tell me again how you found him,” Sheriff Nordstrom, probably no relation to the store, said patiently.

  “I found his horses,” I said. “I only started looking for Raleigh after I realized they were without a driver.”

  “And when you discovered him, what did you do?”

  “We’ve been over and over this,” I said and massaged the tight spot I get in the left side of my neck.

  “Humor me.”

  “I knelt down to see what was the matter. I figured he’d been tossed out of the carriage and was unconscious.”

  “When did you realize he was dead?”

  “When I saw that spike.” Boy, did I want to believe that Giles had fallen on it, but I didn’t suggest it. I really wanted the sheriff to come to the conclusion that Giles died in an accident.

  “Then what?”

  “The lead horse harnessed to his carriage darned near stepped on me. I got up and backed the team and the carriage away from the—from Giles. That’s when Harry Tolliver found the horses and then me.”

  “You were on the ground again.”

  I nodded. My head hurt so badly it was about to come off my shoulders. I hadn’t had so much as a cup of coffee. I was hungry, thirsty, and had a caffeine deprivation headache that was going to get worse if I didn’t get a big dose of it soon.

  “I couldn’t just walk away from the man,” I said.

  “Did you try to remove the spike?”

  “Are you kidding? You never pull the instrument out of a stab wound. If you do, you risk letting loose a torrent of blood.”

  “Not if he was already dead. Blood ceases to flow when the heart ceases to pump.”

  “At that point I was hoping he still had some spark of life in him. I didn’t want to cause him to bleed out.”

  “And you know this how? You a nurse? Have a medical degree?”

  That was a new question. I suppose I shouldn’t have said anything about the puncture wound bleeding, but I was tired. “Sheriff, I breed and train horses. They hurt themselves a lot. Occasionally one of them will run into a sharp branch or a broken fence post and drive it into himself. My vet taught me many years ago never to remove any foreign object that might be keeping an artery or a major vein from blowing. So, no, I did not touch the spike. Or the cable or anything else around him, for that matter.”

  “But you touched the carriage?”

  I closed my eyes and ran back over my actions. “Raleigh uses—used—Biothane harness. It’s as shiny as patent leather and should take fingerprints well. Let’s see—I grabbed the leader’s bridle. I touched the coupling rein.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “That’s the rein that secures the two front horses together. I saw the reins were looped over the whip holder, but I didn’t touch them. You shouldn’t find my fingerprints anywhere else.”

  “You and Raleigh had a big fight yesterday, right?”

  I’d already gone over this several times. I proceeded to tell him again about our dunking in the lake and Raleigh’s reaction to it. “Everyone at the party last night will tell you he was charming to Peggy and me. I thought he was a jerk, but that’s no reason to kill him.”

  “We have a witness who overheard you threatening to do just that.”

  “Not recently.” Had I actually threatened to kill him after we left Sarah Beth? “If I did, I wasn’t serious. Everyone says stuff like that.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I didn’t volunteer any information about his trying to curtail my manager’s jobs at horse shows. If it came out, it came out. Nothing I could do about it. But I wasn’t going to bring it up and give Nordstrom more ammunition against me.

  “Sheriff, I’ve been much more forthcoming than I probably should have. I’m hungry, tired, and I have a headache. I have to get home to my other horses, so Peggy and I can load up and head back to Mossy Creek.”

  “Nobody said you could leave the area.”

  “Nobody said I had to stay, either. I have horses at home that need looking after. Unless you have additional questions or plan to charge me with something, I don’t think you can force me to stay.”

  “I could hold you as a material witness.”

  I didn’t know whether he could or not and didn’t want to find out.

  “We’re interviewing everyone . . .”

  “Then letting them go home,” I said. “I heard what you told your deputies.” The only difference between most of them and me was the size of our bank balances and the political influence many of them could wield.

  “One final question. Who might have wanted to kill Raleigh?”

  Lots of people loathed him, but loathing didn’t usually escalate to murder. “In all honesty, I didn’t know the man that well.”

  “But you didn’t like him? Maybe hated him?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t hate, sheriff. It takes too much energy. I seldom go further than dislike.”

  “You planning on leaving the state anyti
me soon?”

  “Not for six weeks. Peggy and I will be driving at a couple of shows, but they’re both in Georgia. Next weekend I have a two-day carriage show and clinic at my place in Mossy Creek. The next time you plan to speak to me, please give me some warning so I can have my lawyer with me.”

  “You think you need a lawyer?”

  “Sheriff, everybody involved in a murder investigation needs a lawyer.”

  I said goodbye to him, opened the door, and walked right into Geoff Wheeler’s chest.

  He grabbed my shoulders, held me at arms’ length, and said, “What the hell have you done this time?”

  I shoved away from Geoff and cracked the back of my head on the frame of the door. My headache went up a couple of notches. So did my blood pressure. “Me?”

  I heard footsteps behind me, then Nordstrom’s voice. “Geoff Wheeler? Where the hell did you come from?”

  Geoff eased me aside and behind him before he stuck out his hand. “Hey, Stan. I promise I’m not intruding on your territory. I was in the neighborhood and picked it up on the scanner.”

  I knew that was a lie. So, I supposed, did Stan the Man. Short for Stanislaus?

  “You know this wo—lady?”

  “Met her and Peggy Caldwell on a case last year.”

  Stan held the door open as an invitation to Geoff to enter. He did and closed it in my face. Oh, lovely. Once the sheriff heard about my father’s murder in Mossy Creek last year, he’d arrest me on general principles. I went to find Peggy, certain that she had called him to come rescue me.

  Chapter 9

  Sunday

  Geoff

  “Why are you really here?” Stan asked Geoff.

  “Kind of a long story.”

  “I have time. Actually, I don’t, but tell me anyway.”

  So Geoff told him about Hiram Lackland’s murder. “Peggy Caldwell and Merry Abbott were completely innocent, if major pains in the neck.”

  “Uh-huh,” Stan said, looking at Geoff curiously. “So when Mrs. Caldwell called you at home, you drove straight here?”

  Geoff held up his hands. “I would never get in your way.”

  “Oh, please, please, please, get in my way,” Stan said. “You have any idea who these people are? Who the deceased was? Who the Tollivers are? I was about twenty minutes from putting in a call to the GBI anyway.”

  “What have you done so far?”

  “Damn all. The pediatrician who passes for a medical examiner in this county came out, took liver temp, and said the guy was probably killed within an hour of when he was discovered. We took pictures, walked the grid around the body, and carted it off to the local funeral home, which has the only facilities around here for corpses. Doc Agostino wants us to send Raleigh to Atlanta for a proper autopsy.”

  “Did he remove the stake?”

  Stan shook his head. “We had to cut the cable running in through it to get it loose. We left about six feet on either side in case there was trace. Had to transport him on his stomach.”

  “How much force would you estimate would be needed to drive that stake home?” Geoff asked.

  Stan shrugged. “No idea, but if you’re asking whether a woman could have done it, a strong one maybe. Like your girlfriend.”

  Geoff rolled his eyes. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “See, what I can’t figure out,” Stan said, “is how the killer got him down on the ground in the first place. Nobody would kneel down and let somebody drive a stake through the base of his skull.”

  “No chance he could have done it himself?”

  “Suicide? Accident? I don’t see how, but I’m willing to be convinced if the medical examiner in Atlanta tells me it’s possible.”

  “I’ve been around these people enough to know they do not get off the driving box for any reason on show grounds. So why would Raleigh get down, wrap his reins around the whip holder, and walk off? Bad enough to leave a single horse, but a four-in-hand?”

  “A cry for help? The pinewoods come right up to the edge of the arena on that side. Anybody could stand in those woods at that time of the morning in a heavy fog without being seen. I just found out about some kind of animal rights prank yesterday morning. Banner, lot of noise. This doesn’t seem like the same sort of thing, but we’re checking it out. So far, nothing.”

  “Any footprints?”

  Stan shook his head again. “Thick pine needles do not take prints. No handy fibers caught up in the needles either.”

  “Huh.”

  “So,” Stan said. “Now that you’re here, how do I make you all official so we can get your CSI team down here?”

  “Make the call. Let them know I’m staying. No telling how long it’ll take the CSI van to get here.”

  “At least you have techs. We have ten deputies to police the entire county, and I’m the only one who’s even seen Quantico.”

  “Make the call,” Geoff repeated and stood. “Call Chief of Police Amos Royden in Mossy Creek if you want a run down on Peggy and Merry. They can be a handful, but the only reason I can think of that Merry Abbott might consider killing someone is if she caught him hurting horses.” He stopped with his hand on the door. “Raleigh didn’t hurt his horses, did he?”

  Stan guffawed. “Not to the best of my knowledge. Man, you ought to see your face. You’re dead serious, aren’t you?”

  “I just came back from an assignment in the Caribbean,” Geoff said with as much dignity as he could muster. “That’s why my face is red. Sunburn.”

  “Riiiiggghhhht.”

  He threaded his way through trucks and trailers until he spotted Merry’s white dually and its attached horse trailer. He didn’t see Merry, but Peggy stood on the step of the tack storage area hanging a set of harness on one of the hooks inside.

  “Need a hand?” he asked.

  She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and said, “Thank God, you came.” She stepped off the trailer and hugged him. Surprised, he hugged her back.

  “I don’t think Stan Nordstrom is going to arrest Merry,” he said when she’d released him. “Not at the moment. Where is she, by the way?”

  “Borrowing a set of VSE harness and a small cart. It folds flat, so we can stow it under the marathon carriage. You can help slide it in and help put the carriage cover on.”

  “What’s a VSE?”

  “Stands for Very Small Equine,” Peggy said and shook her head. “Miniature horses. Worse. Miniature donkeys.”

  “Like Don Qui?” Geoff said. He flashed back to Don Quixote, Merry’s miniature donkey that had tried to stomp and bite him at every opportunity.

  Peggy leaned her hip on the side of the pickup. “Merry is teaching Don Qui to drive.”

  “You’re kidding, right? When did she develop the death wish? Sorry, bad choice of words.”

  “She read up on the breed. Apparently, they have a reputation as kind, easy-going animals . . .”

  Geoff snorted.

  “And she says if he’s going to continue to eat her grain, he’s going to have to pay his way by training students.”

  “Training them to do what? Bail out of a carriage at a dead gallop?”

  “I know, I know,” Peggy said. “But she is bound and determined. So we’re borrowing a miniature Meadowbrook cart and small harness from Juanita Tolliver. Her grandchildren have outgrown their VSEs and graduated to Welsh ponies, so she’s not using it at the moment. We’ve been longeing and long-reining him since February, but we don’t have a small cart.”

  He glanced up.

  “Here she comes. Don’t say a word about Don Qui. She doesn’t want anyone to know until she’s certain he’ll be trustworthy to a cart.”

  Merry had draped the VSE harness around her neck, and balanced the little two-wheel cart behind her. Built of natural wood, it wasn’t much bigger than a dog cart. She walked between the shafts in front as though she were a horse and pulled the cart behind her.

  Since the Meadowbrook cart was entered from the rear, both l
eft hand and right hand seats folded down so driver and passenger could climb through, open up the seats, and sit behind the dashboard and between the two wheels. With the seats down, the cart stood no more than three feet from the ground to the top of the wheels. It probably weighed less than a hundred pounds, but it was cumbersome for a human being to pull. It was one of the few carriages that could be folded flat, so that it would fit into the back of a van.

  When she reached the open door of her trailer, Merry began to collapse the cart. Both Geoff and Peggy hurried to help her. Her face was streaming with sweat despite the cool breeze.

  She glared at Geoff, and said, “Take this harness off me before I trip over the reins and break my neck.”

  He reached for it. “Please might be nice,” he said.

  “I’m not feeling polite. Not after you disappear for months and then barely say hello before you accuse me of murder.”

  “Hey,” he said and draped the harness over his own neck. He reached for one of the shafts, but she shook him off. “I was undercover. I couldn’t call you, and I didn’t accuse you.”

  “You demanded to know what I had done this time. Like I was some sort of serial killer. I’m sure Thor the Wonder Sheriff took note.”

  “He’s letting us go. Don’t pick on the man.” Peggy said.

  A big rig with living quarters nearly as large as Raleigh’s passed them in a fug of diesel fumes.

  “And we’re not giving him time to change his mind,” Merry said. The center ramp on the trailer was already down. Inside, Geoff could see another, larger carriage with its shafts already secured to the roof of the trailer.

  “Is that thing going to fit?” he asked.

  “If you’ll help me get it inside, it’ll slide backwards between the four wheels of the marathon cart with the shafts beside it on the floor.” Merry said. “I’ve already measured.”