“And Clari says that she was certain the Jeep had been gassed up the night before. Apparently Grazley was a fanatic about being able to take off at a minute’s notice.”
I reached under the table to the bookshelf that forms the base of our kitchen counter and retrieved my Tompkins County map. I found Swansea Road, the location of Grazley’s clinic, and traced the route to the Citgo on Faulkner Road.
“There was only one route he could take to reach Fifteen,” I observed. “And the Citgo is the only gas station along that stretch. Someone could have drained the tank, made the call, and then . . . waited.”
“So somebody set him up,” Madeline said in a hushed voice.
“Possibly, Madeline. Possibly. We are very far from a clear understanding of the parameters of this case.”
“Good heavens, Austin. What are we going to do now?”
“I would like to know a bit more about why Benny Grazley was headed to the McClellan farm. McClellan made quite a point of telling me he’d fired him. And an equally loud point about my visit to the horse this morning.” I glanced at the kitchen clock. “It’s close to eleven, already. I’ll keep that appointment. And I’ll see about getting some answers to those questions.”
“Austin?”
“Yes, my dear?”
“Be careful.”
THE McClellans had invested an enormous amount of money in real estate. The house sat on the crest of a hill, facing a sweep of acreage to the south. What I could see of it was stuccoed. Pink stucco. And a great deal of it. The barn and pastures were four hundred yards west of the house itself. The entrance to the whole place was off Route Fifteen. I pulled the Bronco in and came to a halt. Lincoln, anticipating my departure from the truck, leaped over the back of the front seat, and settled at my side.
“We have a choice,” I said to the dog. “A right turn takes us to the barns. The left to the house.” I leaned forward and peered through the windshield. “Which is precisely the color of Pepto-Bismol.”
Lincoln put his paw on my right knee.
“The barns, then.”
I proceeded slowly down the asphalted drive. The facility was impressive. I’d seen such a spread for sale, complete, in a recent edition of Farming Today. The barn roof was constructed of bronze architectural shingles. A cupola with a jumping horse weathervane held pride of place at the peak. It was a Morton building, with pale oak siding. The high-peaked stable appeared to have eight stalls, each with a fenced paddock leading from the double Dutch doors. The entryway would be the tack room and, possibly, quarters for stable hands. A long building with a much lower roof was attached to the west end. An indoor arena, then, and a fine one. There was a dressage-sized outdoor arena, as well. A slender young girl rode a big chestnut stallion around the perimeter. She held him in an extended trot. He moved very nicely. Long legs, with a lot of bone, and a fine set of hindquarters taut with muscle. His left foreleg was braced with Vetrap, but I saw no evidence of a limp. I narrowed my eyes against the sun. His mane seemed to be chopped in an irregular fashion. Strange oddity on a show horse.
Two vehicles sat in the circular drive outside the barn entrance. One, a sporty Cadillac van, had been hastily parked. The driver’s door was open. The other, a silver Hummer, blocked the entrance. The Hummer was purchased, no doubt, to navigate the sand dunes and desert stretches of upstate New York. There was no sign of the shot-up Lincoln Continental. In the shop for repairs, I assumed.
I parked next to the outdoor arena. As soon as I left the Bronco, Lincoln immediately appropriated the driver’s seat. The girl, who was too thin, was intent on her ride. I set my carryall down, negotiated my way around the Hummer, and stuck my head in the half-open door just in time to see Brewster McClellan strike his wife. It was an openhanded blow, and petulant. “Goddamn it, Marina!”
“Do not,” I said loudly, “do that again.” I glanced outside. The girl rode on, oblivious. I stepped into the short hallway and shut the door. McClellan gaped at me, his face congested with anger.
“Dr. McKenzie?” Mrs. McClellan said. “Uh. Hello.” Her face was as expressionless as it had been last night. Madeline had informed me the botulinum toxin is used to achieve this effect. The slap had left no mark on her complexion. She bit her lip, cast a scared glance at her husband under lowered brows, and slipped out, shutting the door noiselessly behind her.
“Dr. McKenzie,” McClellan said. He stretched his mouth in a grin. “Little late, aren’t you?”
Never apologize. Never explain. Particularly to bullies. I merely regarded him over my spectacles. McClellan made a show of looking at his watch. He wore a blue striped dress shirt and a suit. His watch was a gold Rolex. “Gotta run, doc. I’m meeting in town with the mayor.” His glance slid sideways. “Sorry you had to see that little incident with Rini.” He gave me a man-to-man grin. “Bet you’ve got the same problem, doc. Women going nuts with the credit cards.”
“No,” I said, “I do not.”
“It’s not that we can’t afford it. Just that Rini’s got a bit of a problem that way. And she hides it. Goes nuts for clothes and makeup and then doesn’t tell me. ’Kay? I don’t like surprises. Took me off guard, is all.” McClellan hunched his shoulders.
It is a curious fact that the guilty overexplain themselves. Moreover, I didn’t believe a word of it. Marina McClellan wore the same clothes she’d worn the night before; breeches, a worn sweater, and ancient woolen socks under her paddock boots. The only difference was her shirt, which today was a pale pink instead of white. And frankly, she had the sort of pale, washed-out complexion that could do with a bit of makeup. No, Marina McClellan was not a spendthrift. Not on herself, at any rate.
McClellan exhaled heartily. “Right. Well. Steph is outside with the horse. You go ahead and do what you gotta do. And send the bill in to me. Don’t worry about the cost.”
I followed him out the door. Stephanie and her horse were at the gate to the paddock, near Marina. All four of us, and I include the horse, watched as McClellan roared away in the Hummer.
I turned and went to the arena. I got my first look at the horse close up. His mane was choppy because he had a series of small, scabbed-over wounds just where the hair of the mane grew from the neck. They started midway and went down to the nape.
“Steph,” Marina said in her soft, nervous voice, “this is Dr. McKenzie.”
“Hi.”
The greeting was as flat and monotonous as my morning oatmeal. The girl was about fifteen or sixteen. Her hair and complexion were lusterless. She wore a long-sleeved flannel shirt, a shaggy vest, and breeches. I looked at her nails. They were bitten to the quick. The bed of her right thumbnail was rimmed with dried blood.
I said nothing about this, but merely asked: “Shall we see about Beecher, then?”
She dropped off the horse and stood holding him by the reins. I stepped back and, as is my wont with any new animal, looked him over from head to tail.
Beecher was a Swedish Warmblood, which is say, a light draft horse. Almost all of that splendid breed are chestnuts, and this fellow was no exception. He was a lovely, sunlight brown with a white snip on his muzzle. He had an exceptionally mild and kind eye. I looked at how his legs set into that broad, muscular body. “He’s a wonderful animal,” I said. “Just wonderful. You’re eventing him?”
No answer.
“Steph,” her mother prompted.
“Yeah, I’m eventing him. At Earlsdown. If that crappy leg of his is in shape.”
“I saw you working him when I drove in. He looked sound enough to me. Did you say Dr. Grazley had taken a look at him recently?”
Stephanie made a disdainful noise. Marina said, “We weren’t all that satisfied with the way he’d been treating Beecher. So Brewster fired him.”
“He was an idiot,” Stephanie said flatly.
“But he looked at him initially.”
“Way back when this first started, yeah. But Daddy wouldn’t let him within a mile of the place, now.”
“You crazy?”
“Stephanie,” Marina protested.
Stephanie rolled her wad of gum from one cheek to the other. “Last vet to take a look at Beecher was Dr. Schumacher. He put the bandage on. And I was supposed to run the hose over the leg a couple of times a day.”
I looked at her. “And have you?”
She shrugged. “I’ve been busy. And like you say, he’s not gimpy now.”
I bent down and unrolled the Vetrap from Beecher’s right fore. A healed cut ran from the cornet band about halfway to the knee. There was very little swelling.
“And how did this happen?” I asked.
“He was rolling in his paddock and caught his leg under the fence,” Stephanie said indifferently.
“It’s a common enough injury and it’s healed well.” I straightened up and got to my feet. “To be on the safe side, put him under light work for a few more days, gradually increasing his workout until he’s up to full speed in about a week.”
Stephanie snapped her gum. “So I can take him to Earlsdown, right?”
“I will decide that,” I snapped.
She glared at me. “I’ve heard about you,” she said between gritted teeth. “You old fart. Think you know more about horses than anybody else. I told Daddy not to put you on the committee. I told him! Nobody’s stopping me from riding this year. Nobody!” She burst into loud and unattractive tears. “Everybody’s against me.”
“I can bar the horse from competition, and I will,” I said. I pointed at the scabs on Beecher’s neck. “That must stop. Immediately.”
“We’ve got pigeons in the barn,” she said sullenly.
“Lice would disqualify him, too.” I picked up her hand and held it palm down. The quicks of the nail beds were as scabbed as her thumb. “But it’s not lice. You have been picking at this horse.”
She snatched her hand away.
“Your decision, young lady. Stop it at once.”
“I don’t understand,” Marina said. “We need to get rid of the pigeons?”
Stephanie whirled and shrieked, “Shut up, Mom!” to which Marina had no response.
This put paid to any idea I had of appealing to the troubled child’s parent.
“Can I ride, now?” Stephanie snarled. “I’ve only got ten days until the show. There’s a ton of work to do.”
I nodded. Stephanie hauled herself back onto the horse and urged him into a trot.
“If you want to leave the bill with me, I’ll see to it,” Marina said as she walked back to the tack room. “And we will see you tonight for dinner, won’t we?”
I turned to follow her, and was just in time to see the horse stop, buck, and pitch the girl off into the sand.
Marina screamed. I swore. The horse trotted a short way down the fence and snorted. The girl groaned, sat up, and began to wail. Beecher snapped at his own hindquarters and began to race around the ring, kicking violently. He rounded the fence, reins trailing, and galloped toward Stephanie, who wailed all the louder. He swerved just before he reached her, his hooves flying past her forehead by a hairsbreadth.
Marina looked blank. She didn’t move.
I hopped over the rails and dropped to the sand. The girl was my first concern. I helped her to her feet. She jerked her arm from my hand and stalked off to the gate. I waited for Beecher to round the far end of the arena one more time. He rolled his eye as he raced past me, and I said, “Whoa.”
He slowed.
“Whoa.”
He put his head down and walked on. I approached him at a diagonal, told him to stop, and grabbed the reins. I patted him absently, looking him over. He wasn’t breathing hard, and he hadn’t worked up much of a sweat. He snapped at his hindquarters again.
Puzzled, I examined his hindquarters more closely. A white-faced paper hornet crawled sluggishly over his croup. I took aim and smacked it.
“A bee?” Marina said at my elbow.
“Hornet. A vicious one. It’s been unusually warm,” I said. I picked the body of the hornet up between thumb and forefinger. “This fellow is out and about well before his time. It’s been a warm spring. Just to be safe, I’d check the eaves of the barn for nests.”
“Oh, I’ve got hornets, I know that already,” Marina said. She stared over the fence. Her daughter stamped into the barn and slammed the door behind her. Marina, arms hugging her thin body, stared after her. “A whole pile of them.”
Seven
“GOOD grief,” Madeline said over our very late lunch. “What a horrible morning you had.”
She’d made French onion soup and a large green salad. That, and her own presence, went far toward mitigating my sour mood.
“And the horse is okay?”
“He seemed to be. Picking at his skin like that won’t harm him. He’s a horse. I doubt that he feels it. It’s what the picking represents. The child is troubled. Animal abuse is a very bad sign, psychologically.”
She sighed. “Well, I suppose we’ll get through dinner tonight somehow. But he hit his wife, Austin.” She shook her head, bewildered. “It’s awful. Shouldn’t we do something? I mean, if the poor woman’s being beaten, don’t we have an obligation to help? And what about calling child services about Stephanie?”
“Her parents provide a significant obstacle there. They’re the legal guardians, of course. From what I can see, she’s abusing her mother, not the other way round. And the police will only help the horse if there’s evidence of abuse under the act, which there is not. We could,” I added, in a mildly humorous tone, “call AA.”
“The auto club?”
“Alcoholics Anonymous. I did observe two things about McClellan. There was a distinct smell of Scotch on his breath . . .”
“At eleven in the morning?”
“Which would argue for what I believe is called an intervention of some sort by the man’s friends. If he has any. And when he hit his wife it was more of a bat than a slap.” I pointed toward Odie, asleep, as usual, on her perch on the woodstove. “Much like the cat’s attacks on Lincoln. Which would suggest that we leave the situation alone.”
At the sound of his name, Lincoln thumped his tail on the floor.
“Well,” Madeline said in a troubled way. “I suppose we have to leave it. At least for now. But I don’t know how I am going to look any one of them in the face at dinner tonight. And you say they didn’t call Grazley to come out to the farm?”
“If one of them did, it’s been denied.”
“Now what?”
“Now what?” I repeated.
“If none of the McClellans called Ben Grazley, and even if one did, they’re denying it, which is just as good as guilty, in my book, we’re looking at intentional murder. Just as you said. And if we aren’t going to talk to the police about the family mess at the McClellans, are we at least going to let them know we’re sure these shootings are deliberate murders?” Madeline finished this heated speech with her cheeks flushed and her considerable bosom heaving.
“Perhaps I should talk to Provost.”
“Perhaps? What’s with the perhaps? You bloody well have to, Austin. Or I’ll do it for you.”
I thought this a good idea. I have never known anyone to sneer at Madeline. More to the point, Provost would not decry her incisive insights into a certain shooting as amateurish.
“Except that you’re the one who’s made all these brilliant deductions, and you’re the one who should get the credit.” She reached over and clasped my hand proudly. “I’ll bet the village council ends up giving you a citation, or something. When are you going to see Provost? This afternoon?”
“I have quite a bit of work to get through this afternoon,” I said, a bit feebly.
“Nonsense. You might just as well stop in at the police station.”
“I have a great deal of work to do here,” I said firmly. “Not to mention the fact that I am on call, in case any of my patients ne
ed me.”
“Stubborn old goat.”
I set my jaw.
“Fine. But you’ll get around to it? Talking to the police?”
I set my jaw even more firmly.
We finished the soup. Madeline disappeared into the laundry room. My work awaited. There was next week’s column yet to do, and that review to write.
All desk work.
I looked out the window. The sun spilled all over the place. A light breeze rustled the tops of the maples. Time passed. I may have fallen into a light doze until Lincoln came and stood next to my chair, his gaze hopeful. Madeline swept back into the room, her arms filled with clean towels.
“Any farm calls?” I asked.
“No, dear.”
Some days, I told myself, were bound to be slow, especially when a practice was just beginning to build.
“No messages?”
Madeline slung the towels to one hip, dug one hand into the pocket of her jeans and withdrew a disappointingly small stack of pink slips. “Not too many, sweetie. One for Allegra. One for Joe. You know what? I think we should run a little teeny ad in the paper. Let people know we’re here.”
Advertising. I shuddered. The dog shoved his head under my hand. I rubbed his ears, then rose, collected the coffee cups, and took them to the sink where I rinsed them with care.
“Oops,” Madeline said. She unfolded a pink slip.
“What?”
“But there is this one from Rita.”
The day became a little glummer.
“She wanted you to call her back. She said there’s a problem with the column you turned in.”
I sighed. “It’s a pleasant day for a walk. I could go down there and discuss it.”
“. . . And she said it’s not necessary to come down to the newspaper. She said not, not, not, as a matter of fact.”
“Nonsense. Lincoln and I can use the walk.”
The Case of the Roasted Onion Page 8