One Hoof In The Grave

by Carolyn McSparren

  “He’s nearly ready to put to the little Meadowbrook,” I said and held a carrot for him to nibble, even though he still wore his bridle and harness. Not a good practice to start, but he deserved it. “Good boy, Don Qui.”

  “You mean I missed it?” Geoff said from the stable.

  “You certainly did,” Peggy said. She rubbed her back and leaned over with her hands on her knees. “You can do it next time. It’s a darned sight more work than I thought it was. I refuse to believe that all this time all he’s needed to sweeten his temper was a job.”

  Chapter 24

  Tuesday night

  Merry

  Geoff and I had been exiled from Peggy’s kitchen to her library, so that she and Dick could toss the salad and serve the spaghetti. We were having an early dinner since we were all four driving to Raleigh’s farm for the ‘viewing.’

  In the old days, the custom was to set the coffin up on trestles in the parlor so that friends and neighbors could come and pay their respects, have a drink and a bite to eat. I would have expected Dawn and Sarah Beth to prefer the funeral home, but the two women had opted for the old fashioned model.

  No doubt they’d hired a caterer from Atlanta instead of their church’s Funeral Ladies, the local group that generally handled the local catering. I’d used our local Funeral Ladies to cater my father’s viewing and reception. The food had been fine. Other things—not so much.

  In the old days before embalming, custom demanded that some member of the household—preferably male—sit up all night with the deceased to be certain he didn’t come back to life. That’s why it’s called a wake. God forbid Raleigh should sit up, point his finger at his killer, and howl ‘j’accuse.’

  “What do you mean you’re having a horse show next weekend?” Geoff slammed his beer down on the side table in Peggy’s library. Marple, the little gray female who sat on his shoulder, snapped to attention, and only settled after giving his ear a smack. Geoff sounded personally offended. “Are you asking to get yourself killed?”

  “I’m hoping to make enough money to help buy Casey Blackshear a para-carriage and maybe put a down payment on a set of harness as well. I am not going to get killed. The place will be crawling with people.”

  “So was the Tollivers’ place.”

  “I have low PVC fences around my dressage arena, not steel cable and stakes.”

  “The stake was a weapon of opportunity. Everywhere I look in that stable of yours I see lethal weapons. Then there’s always the usual—guns, knives.”

  “I have my own guns and knives. I can defend myself from an enemy.”

  “It’s not your enemies who concern me,” he said.

  “Come and get it,” Dick called.

  I was afraid I wouldn’t be welcome at Raleigh’s wake. I was wrong. Sarah Beth spied Peggy and me as we entered the enormous foyer of Raleigh’s mansion and flew over to embrace us both as though we were long lost sisters.

  “I was so afraid you wouldn’t come,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry about what you had to go through finding—him—and all that questioning. It must have been dreadful.”

  She looked fabulous. Grief, if that’s what it was, certainly agreed with her. For the first time I saw what Peggy had seen—the glow of pregnancy. And since Raleigh’s death, she seemed downright happy about it. Maybe now abortion was no longer an option. I wondered whether the baby would carry Raleigh’s DNA. Somehow I doubted it. But whose? Could be a business associate or someone from the carriage-driving world. Sarah Beth had plenty of opportunity to hop into bed with other men. Maybe she didn’t even know for certain whose child she was carrying.

  And what would her pregnancy do to Raleigh’s will? In old British law a legitimate child born within nine months of the death of the putative father received a full inheritance. The same in the United States? No idea.

  Sarah Beth spotted Geoff behind me and her face fell. “What are you doing here? Can’t you leave us alone?”

  “Afraid not, Mrs. Raleigh, but I’ll try not to bother you tonight.” He stepped around us as though we hadn’t all driven over in Dick’s big Lincoln. She watched his back with narrowed eyes. But not eyes filled with fear. Or at least I didn’t think so. She was annoyed, but not scared.

  The look on Dawn’s face when she spotted him, however, was deer-in-headlights. Or maybe raccoon-scared-spitless-by-rattlesnake. She clung to the arm of just about the best-looking guy I’d seen in twenty years. Obviously Armando Gutierrez, the polo player. No wonder she was willing to risk the wrath of Raleigh to keep him.

  Sarah Beth called them over to introduce us. Dawn wasn’t precisely chilly, but she showed none of her stepmother’s warmth towards us.

  Armando, however, did. He was not only handsome, with a lean muscular body, he had kind eyes and a brilliant smile in his sun-bronzed face. We shook hands. His was even more callused than mine.

  “This is Armando Gutierrez, Merry Abbot, Mrs. Caldwell,” Dawn said. “My fiancé.” Her chin went up about as far as Peggy’s eyebrows, but we both offered best wishes to them.

  One is never supposed to offer congratulations to the bride. It implies she has successfully bagged her prey. In this case, I longed to break with tradition since Armando had definitely been bagged and tagged, and damned fast too.

  Then Peggy stomped on my instep, and I shut my mouth.

  “There’s food in the dining room and a bar in the living room,” Sarah Beth said.

  With a line of mourners—or gloaters, depending on your point of view—stacking up behind us, we moved on while Sarah Beth and Dawn greeted Dick Fitzgibbons and some other people I didn’t recognize.

  “I need a drink,” Peggy whispered. “Fiancé indeed. Talk about your funeral baked meats serving as the marriage feast. I wonder if Sarah Beth is planning to remarry.” Peggy said. “And who.”

  Past the bar, Brock was leaning down talking to Gwen Standish, the vet, in low tones. He looked unhappy. She looked mutinous. I had met her briefly at a couple of shows and knew she was Raleigh’s vet, but I didn’t know her socially. She had an excellent reputation as to skill. Ethics—not so much.

  Brock glanced up and caught my eye. A moment later he half-dragged Gwen out into the hall and toward the door of the conservatory beyond.

  “What’s that all about?” Peggy asked. “Gin and tonic, please.”

  The bartender nodded and mixed the drink. “Ma’am?” he asked me.

  I shook my head. “Diet Coke, please.” I wanted a clear head, and I was still on antibiotics, though I was down from Vetrap to an oversized Band-Aid.

  “Let’s split up,” Peggy said. “You follow Brock. I’ll see if the Tollivers are here.”

  The conservatory was so full of huge plants that you could have hidden a tribe of Jivaros behind the palms. Although the fans moving the warm air were equipped with soft lights, the room was in shadow. I couldn’t see Brock and Gwen for a moment, then the door leading to the patio and pool opened and they slipped out. I slunk after them. They stopped in the shadows just outside the door to keep out of sight. I nearly knocked over a twelve foot tall Sega Palm when I backed into it.

  “Are you insane?” Gwen said. She was speaking softly, but sounded as though she were speaking through gritted teeth. “You can’t walk away. Who’d you think you’re playing with?”

  “We have to call it off,” Brock said. “At least postpone the next trip. The place is crawling with cops. That Wheeler is no dummy.”

  “All he cares about is the murder. He’s not looking at us.”

  “The hell he’s not! If he finds out Raleigh knew . . .”

  “He won’t. He fired you all the time. This was no different.”

  “Not like this. He knew the consequences if he got tied into it. The rig’s registered to him. He could lose the farm. He swore he’d call the cops. You and I shouldn’t even be seen together.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Her voice rose. “We have every reason to be seen together. What’s suspicious wou
ld be you getting another vet right now.”

  “Only if we have some professional connection. We shouldn’t be talking now.”

  She sounded furious. He, on the other hand, sounded downright whiny. And scared.

  “Are you dumping me? Is that what this is all about? Now that he’s dead, you think you can climb into that bitch’s bed?”

  I heard voices and laughter. Someone was coming into the conservatory. Brock and Gwen shut up instantly. If they came back in, they were bound to spot me behind the palm tree.

  I am a lousy spy.

  Peggy

  Juanita Tolliver might look like a field hand most of the time, but when the occasion arose, she cleaned up well. She was middle-aged tubby with the bulge around the gut that comes to most post-menopausal women. Peggy would bet that her little black dress came out of a fancy atelier in New York or Paris, and that the double strand of ping-pong ball black pearls covering her crepey neck came from Mikimoto. Unlike the widow Raleigh, her heels were only a couple of inches tall, but looked like a pair of Bruno Maglis Peggy had seen in Bizarre a couple of months earlier. Juanita’s hair was streaked with gray, but without a hint of blue and feathered to flatter. As a matter of fact, her hair matched the dark gray pearls. Coincidence?

  While everything about Sarah Beth screamed, “Newly acquired for a price,” Juanita whispered “Been there, always had that.”

  She laid her hand on Peggy’s arm and gave her an air kiss, then stepped back and said, “You’re holding up well. How’s Merry?”

  “Not in jail.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Without seeming to, she moved the two of them past the dining room and into the butler’s pantry beyond. She leaned against the cabinets through whose windows gleamed china, crystal, and a ton of well-polished silver. “Harry is not happy. Sheriff Nordstrom’s a nice boy, but he’s way out of his depth.”

  “That’s why he turned the case over to the GBI. Has Agent Wheeler come to talk to you and Harry yet?”

  “Not so far, although Harry spent some time with him Sunday afternoon after Merry found Giles’s body. Seems competent, but Harry and I think he ought to be digging into Giles’s finances. I heard rumors he was sailing close to the wind. Not that he didn’t as a general rule, of course.”

  “Anything specific?”

  “You know the way Harry and I feel about Ham Bigelow and his crowd,” Juanita wrinkled her nose. “If half of what they get up to ever comes out, the general populace will roll out the tumbrels, and we’ll all wind up on the guillotine.”

  “Not me. I’m a peasant. And I can knit.”

  She grinned. “I’ll remember that, Madame DeFarge.” She stopped speaking as a tall man wearing a clerical color passed through, smiled, but didn’t stop. He shoved through the swinging door into the kitchen as though he owned the place.

  “Seriously,” Juanita said in not quite a whisper, “I suspect not even Dawn knew all the robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul stuff Giles was into.”

  “I thought that was called a Ponzi scheme,” Peggy answered.

  “Near enough.” Juanita set her empty highball glass on the glass-topped breakfast table, but immediately picked it up and rubbed the wet circle off with a paper napkin. Then she set the glass down on the napkin with a small nod. Not a woman who left even small messes for others to clean up. “Giles wanted Harry in on a limited liability company with him and Governor Bigelow five or six years ago,” she said, “but Harry turned them down. Then came the mortgage collapse.”

  “I’m sure Agent Wheeler has someone looking into Giles’s finances. They even have a name for the people who do that. Forensic Accountants.”

  “Looking for where all the financial bodies are buried. Anyway, give him a heads-up. Ham Bigelow gets bitchy real quick when anyone looks too closely at his land deals, and the GBI works for the State of Georgia.”

  “The state of Georgia is just what Ham thinks he is—just like Louis the Fourteenth—l’etat, c’est moi.”

  The door opened and Harry stuck his head in. “Juanita, I’ve had it up to here saying nice things about Giles. At the rate I’m lying, my nose is gonna get home before I do. And I want some dinner that doesn’t come in bite sizes. Can we go now? Oh, hey, Peggy.”

  Juanita threw Peggy a look. “Yes, dear. Coming.” She patted Peggy’s arm and trailed after her husband. “See you at the funeral?” she said over her shoulder.

  Peggy nodded. She wondered if Juanita had singled her out simply to pass on information about Giles’s financial condition and aim the investigation away from the driving crowd. Everyone kept intimating that Giles Raleigh had crooked deals going, but nobody had as yet mentioned anything specific. Geoff would know more, but he’d never tell her and Merry.

  She mentally re-girded her loins and pushed through the swinging doors to the kitchen. Three white-coated servers were shuttling full trays of finger food out and empty trays in to be refilled. A chef wearing a chef’s toque and a triple-fronted white chef’s jacket was taking a cookie sheet of miniature quiches out of a restaurant-size oven.

  Yep. Definitely not the local funeral ladies, although the local funeral director would have his own cadre of women who usually handled finger food for the viewing and after-the-funeral buffet. The emblems on the waiters’ breast pockets read The Elegant Gourmet, Dahlonega. That would come across as arrogant to the locals. Not that Sarah Beth would care, of course, nor even notice. Assuming that Dawn did inherit the farm, Sarah Beth would be moving out soon anyway, probably to the Raleigh condo in Atlanta.

  The priest had disappeared through one of the other doors. Although the service was to be held at the local Episcopal Church, Peggy suspected that Giles had never darkened the door of the place. She intended to chat up the good rector to find out.

  “’Ma’am, ‘scuse me.”

  Peggy flattened herself against the wall beside the pantry door to allow a waiter past with a chafing dish of something pinkish and gooey—probably shrimp, although it looked more like molten bubblegum. “Sorry,” she whispered and backed out of the room.

  She found the priest standing by the dining room table. He wasn’t eating greedily, but as steadily as a grazing antelope. She picked up an iced shrimp guaranteed not to burn the inside of her mouth and introduced herself. “You must be the rector from St. Andrews,” she said.

  He gulped down whatever he’d been eating, leaving a plate still full of goodies—heavy on the caviar. “Yes indeed, Father Clemons. St. Andrews is my baby.”

  Peggy introduced herself and shook his hand. “Must be nice to have a parishioner like Giles in your congregation.” She meant a rich parishioner, of course, although she doubted Mr. Clemons would admit to that.

  He nibbled on a quiche. “We didn’t see much of Giles, although Sarah Beth is always willing to volunteer. Don’t know what we’d do without her. She supplies the energy to keep our needlepoint group in high gear. We’re redoing all the kneeling benches.”

  “I didn’t know she did needlepoint.”

  “Oh, my yes. She gives classes. She did most of the designs.” He gave a small smile. “Of course, it takes years to accomplish a project that big. I suspect I’ll be long gone before all the benches are finished.”

  “To a larger parish?”

  This time he laughed. A silken orator’s laugh from a man who was used to public speaking. “In a manner of speaking. I was thinking more of dead or retired.”

  “You’re a young man—from my prospective, that is. Too young to have grandchildren?”

  “My wife died several years ago. We were childless.”

  “You could remarry.”

  His eyes took on a faraway glint. Peggy followed his glance. He was staring at Sarah Beth in the front hall, with the expression a hound dog gets when he spots a ham biscuit just outside his kennel.

  Well, my, my. All those hours working out the details on the kneeling bench project might have brought the reverend a bit closer to Sarah Beth than was good for either of them.
r />   Good grief, he couldn’t be the father of her baby, could he? Episcopal priests were not celibate like their Roman Catholic brethren, but the Episcopal Church still frowned on divorce, particularly among its clergy.

  It would, however, be permissible to marry a widow, even a pregnant one. One more motive for Sarah Beth, and, she supposed, for the reverend Mr. Clemons as well.

  When Clemons put his empty sherry glass down and excused himself, Peggy picked it up on her linen napkin and surreptitiously stuffed it in her purse. She had no idea whether it was possible to get DNA from an unborn fetus. Geoff already had Raleigh’s DNA if he needed to test it, but at some point he might be interested in Clemons’s DNA as well. She intended to give the glass to him just in case.

  Chapter 25

  Tuesday night

  Merry

  “Gwen, the vet, and Brock had a nasty spat on the patio,” I said in the car. Dick was driving us home in his big Lincoln. Peggy was sitting beside him, so Geoff and I had the back seat. We might have sat closer in the days before seat belts and this damn case. As it was, we were buckled in at opposite ends.

  “What about?” Geoff asked.

  “Something that Brock wanted to cancel and Gwen didn’t. I think there was a trip mentioned, and a mysterious ‘they’. I gather they were not nice people and wouldn’t take kindly to any talk of cancellation. Raleigh found out what they were doing and hit the ceiling. Something about the rig belonging to Raleigh. Apparently, he truly intended to fire Brock this time. Doesn’t that give Brock a motive to get rid of Raleigh before he could make good on his threat?”

  “Depending on what they were into.” Geoff tapped Dick on the shoulder. “You know Gwen, right? What sort of people does she come from?”

  “No idea. I do know she went to vet school at UGA, but I don’t know her family.”

  “What I’m asking is, does she come from money? New or old?”