The Case of the Roasted Onion

by Bishop, Claudia

  “The Fulbright girl? Ride Hugo?”

  “She’s placed in the ribbons at Devon, or so I understand. You’ll undoubtedly want to see her ride.”

  “You’re right about that,” Lila snapped. “And I’ll want her sober, too.”

  I said nothing to this. But I confess to considerable surprise.

  “It was out of line, no question about that.” Lila swept on. “Even though the kid had a lot on her plate at the time. You heard about that father of hers, of course.”

  I made a sound of assent. Spurious, of course.

  “But even so, I’ve got to have some kind of guarantee that the kid’s not going to be boozed to the gills on my horse.”

  Lincoln sat up in his basket, his ears forward. Allegra came down the stairs, the puppy cradled carefully in her arms. She sent an anxious glance in my direction, and then let herself out the front door.

  “Doc?” Lila’s voice was insistent in my ear.

  I’d taught for more than thirty years. There were no guarantees where students and liquor were concerned. Drugs were worse yet. But I was not convinced. Stephanie’s gossipy tirade had made no mention of this particular problem. And the show world is rife with malice and innuendo, much of it downright false.

  “I find it hard to think that would be a problem,” I said.

  “Huh. Well. If we can get that cleared up, and I see the kid ride, we might have a deal, doc.” She lowered her voice. “Anyhow, I think we should get together to discuss it.” She lowered her voice still further. “Just the two of us?”

  Madeline swept in the back door, Joe at her heels. Allegra returned with the puppy. All three of them met in the middle of the kitchen. I dropped the phone in the cradle and rose to meet them.

  “Well,” Madeline said in a pleased way. “Here we all are.”

  The phone rang. I ignored it.

  “Perhaps we should all sit at the table?” I suggested.

  The phone rang again.

  “Did you call Lila, Austin?” Madeline advanced on the phone.

  “I did.”

  “And did you hang up on her, like you always do?” (A faint hint of exasperation there, I thought.)

  “I don’t think that’s it,” Allegra said, quietly, her eyes on mine.

  “Well, whatever did she have to say?” Madeline picked up the phone as she spoke, and then said into the receiver, “Hello? Lila! We were just talkin’ . . . ? No, I just came in. Did Austin talk to you about . . . ? He did?” She rolled her eyes at me. I’d been right. She was exasperated with me. “You just put him into a right old fluster, Lila. And he drops that old phone all the time. Now, about Hugo. Can you bring Hugo over here tomorrow? About nine? No? Why ever not . . . what?”

  Lila would keep her for some time. And Madeline herself can keep a conversational ball in the air in a manner that defies conventional physics. I seated Joe, Allegra, and the puppy at the table. I put the teakettle on for the rich cocoa Madeline favors as a nightcap. I retrieved a lined yellow pad and sharp pencils from my desk and placed them on the table. By the time I had seated myself, Madeline had wound up the conversation with Lila. One look at her, and I knew that for the moment, at least, the Earlsdown case had been tabled. Madeline stood by Allegra’s chair and looked down at her. It was hard to read her expression. Concern, dismay, and a modicum of anger were all there. “Allegra, honey, there’s a few things we need to discuss.”

  “What did Mrs. Gernsback tell you?”

  Madeline glanced at me, then Joe. “I think that’s something the two of us should talk about, don’t you?”

  Allegra was pale. Her chin jutted out. “I don’t have anything to hide. What’d she tell you about me?”

  “I’d really rather we didn’t discuss this in front of Joe and Austin, sweetie.”

  “Right,” Allegra said grimly, “like the whole horse world hasn’t heard something about me already. That jerk McClellan. He’d never seen me before. And the minute he heard my name, he got this look. If I do get to go to Earlsdown, you don’t think it’s going to be all over the barns in two seconds flat?”

  Joe got to his feet. “Hey,” he said, “Mrs. McKenzie’s right. Maybe I should get on back to the clinic.”

  “You sit right there,” Allegra snapped.

  Joe sat.

  The color rose in Allegra’s face. She gripped the puppy so tightly that it protested with a yelp. She bit her lip and gently smoothed its ears. Then she took a breath. “She told you I destroyed my horse.”

  “Oh, honey,” Madeline sat next to her, her hand on her arm. “She didn’t say that. She said there was an accident. And the horse isn’t dead.”

  “As good as.” Allegra began to cry. I get quite uncomfortable when people cry. In my experience, which Madeline claims is limited, more women cry than men. It’s one of the reasons I remained a bachelor until fifty.

  Madeline sat back and folded her hands in her lap. Her gaze remained steady. “Lila may make googly eyes at every breathing male in three counties, but there’s not a ounce of spite in her. She said you were drunk or high on something and you crammed your horse. Bowed a tendon. Said it only happened the one time she ever heard, that there’d been some brouhaha with your dad that could account for it. Just wanted to be sure that it wasn’t going to happen with her Hugo. Can’t blame her, sweetie.”

  “I wasn’t drunk and I wasn’t high,” Allegra said tightly. “I’ll swear on anything you like.” She swiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I think somebody slipped me a Mickey Finn.”

  “Chloral hydrate?” I said. “For heaven’s sake, why?”

  Allegra looked miserable. “There was this guy. He was with one of the event teams. I’d gone out with him a couple of times. Then he made some comment about my dad . . .”

  I smoothed my mustache. “‘That’ Sam Fulbright,” I said rather quietly.

  “Yes. Everybody knows about it.” The tears poured down her face, unnoticed.

  “I don’t,” Joe said frankly.

  “Sam Fulbright was the CFO of Enblad,” I said.

  “Oh.” Joe’s face cleared. “The guy who messed up with the investments.”

  “That’s the one,” Madeline said. “Currently in the clink for ten years.” She wriggled her eyebrows at me. I wriggled mine back.

  Madeline reached over, took the puppy from Ally’s lap and handed it to Joe. Then she pulled a fistful of tissue from her caftan pocket and dabbed at Allegra’s cheeks. “What happened, sweetie?” she asked gently.

  “I don’t know!” Allegra pounded the table with both fists. “I swear somebody spiked my water bottle. Yes, there was some stuff going down at home. But there was always stuff going down at home. I never let that get to me before, and I can’t . . .” She shook her head. “Anyway. I felt just fine, going up. Ready.” She darted a shy glance at Madeline. “You know how it is? Excited? But all pulled together. Like your brain and your body have totally merged.”

  Madeline nodded, her eyes bright. “I remember.”

  “Harker was ready, too. When I mounted, it was like his brain and body were part of mine. We just—there was no way we could lose. I was really wound.

  “It was a killer course. Thirteen jumps. But I’d walked it the day before, and of course, I’d watched all the guys who’d been up before me, and the one I was really worried about was the triple.”

  Joe raised his palm slightly. “You’ve lost me here.”

  “It’s a series of three jumps, with a few strides between,” Madeline said. “Some are in and out, that is, the horse lands off the first one and has to take off for the next without much more than a chance to get his feet under him.”

  “This combination was one and a half and two,” Allegra said.

  “The horse has a stride and a half before he takes off, then two strides,” Madeline added.

  Joe nodded. “Got it.”

  “The triple came off a water hazard.” Allegra’s eyes were distant with memory. “Harker loved water. So I wa
s concentrating on keeping him straight—he liked to play in it—and then . . .” She thrust her fingers in her hair. “It was like, ‘tilt!’”

  “Tilt?” Joe said.

  “Yeah. Like the world just went sideways. Then I got dizzy. I lost my center. So I must have leaned back. Harker pulled up, of course, and then I guess I just kept going. Anyhow. We lost it. I lost it. He took the fence sideways and all I can remember is that it was like being caught on one of those rides at Disney World, where you go around and around and you can’t get off. And then . . .” She put both fists to her mouth. When she spoke again, her voice was husky. “Anyhow. We fell. The EMTs showed up, and the truck, and they hauled us both out of there.”

  “And then?” Madeline asked.

  “And then the jump monitor told the judges I was reeling around in the saddle like I was drunk,” Allegra said flatly. “So they made me pee in a cup and took a blood sample, and I came up clean, of course, but by that time everyone was talking about how I was drunk. And that’s not all.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Somebody turned my water bottle into the committee and it was loaded with vodka. And I didn’t put it there.” She clenched her teeth and fell silent. “I think it was that guy I dumped. He took off after the accident, and I haven’t seen him since.”

  “Hm,” Madeline said. “But the blood and urine tests were negative?”

  “Unless they were alerted to the contrary,” I said, “They would have tested for liquor or amphetamines only.”

  “I didn’t drink anything!” Allegra shouted. “You can call them and ask. Go on! Call them right now!”

  “I believe you.” Madeline tilted her head thoughtfully. “Why didn’t everyone else?”

  Allegra said fiercely, “My dad . . . people said . . .”

  “. . . That anything can be bought, these days. Even a negative drug test.” Madeline looked at me. I raised an eyebrow, but forbore to comment.

  “They said my dad was a crook and so was I.”

  “And what happened to the horse?” Joe asked.

  Allegra wrapped her arms around herself, as if she were holding her ribs in place. She didn’t answer for quite a long time. Then she said: “They took him.”

  “Who took him?” Joe persisted, a question that immediately occurred to me.

  Allegra shut up completely.

  Madeline frowned a little, and for a moment, I thought that Joe (and I, because I certainly wanted to know the answer) had gone too far in pressing the girl. Poor Allegra had certainly been through a grueling experience. But that stubborn chin had a great deal to say about the tenacity of her character. She mopped her face with her sleeve. “First off, I wanted to take him home, but they wouldn’t let me.”

  I cleared my throat. “What was the precise nature of his injury?”

  She took a deep breath, seeming to find relief, as I often do, in the recitation of facts. “He was limping hard, after the crash, I guess. I thought he’d broken his cannon bone. I didn’t get to see him until the ER guys let me go back to the show. By that time, they’d taken X-rays. A stress fracture, they said, but they took care of that with a walking cast.” A second deep breath seemed to steady her further. “But the tendon was bowed.” She looked at me. “The scariest thing was whether or not they were going to put him down.”

  I mused about this. Without seeing the X-rays, at a guess the horse would be totally out of commission for a year, at least. And the chance of the leg regaining enough soundness to compete at Earlsdown levels was moot. The horse would be sound to hack, but nothing more, no matter how many years he had at rest. “Who performed the initial diagnosis, my dear?”

  “The attending vet. Dr. Coughlin.”

  I would have known that, if I’d stopped to think about it. Of course it would have been Coughlin.

  “And then Dr. Coughlin put his two cents in when my dad pressed him about it. He wanted to put Harker down.”

  Coughlin? I leaned forward with increased attentiveness.

  “But he was your horse, sweetie,” Madeline said. “Surely you could decide to take him home and retire him?”

  “To where? We’d lost the house.” A look of infinite bitterness crossed her face. “It was all about the money.”

  “I don’t quite get it,” Joe said. “You mean your dad wanted to put the horse down for the insurance money?”

  “It seems to take you a while to get the picture, Turnbald. He needed every nickel he could get.”

  “So, did they?”

  “Just shut up,” Allegra said. “Just shut up.”

  Madeline and I exchanged glances. The connection between horse and rider was profound. Allegra was not exhibiting the extravagant grief one would expect from a youngster who had lost a horse under these circumstances. On the contrary, she looked a little smug.

  “So where’s the horse now?” Joe said.

  “Never mind.” She drew her knees up and rested her chin on them. “Safe. A whole year’s got to go by before I can be sure that he’s healed enough so that the policy won’t pay out if he’s put down. He’s with some good friends of mine.” She looked at us out of the corner of her eye. “The year’ll be up in two weeks.”

  Madeline laughed suddenly. “I wondered why a voice major was so anxious to take a job with a veterinarian.”

  Joe and I looked at each other.

  Madeline got up and smoothed Allegra’s hair. “We’ve more than enough room. As you saw the day you showed up.”

  “I’ll work the board off,” Allegra said. She shot a bitter look at Joe. “If there’s enough work to do.”

  “We’ll see,” Madeline said comfortably. “With Austin here getting these consulting jobs, and now that we’re in the detective business, who knows what kinds of jobs’ll need doing around here.”

  Allegra hiccoughed a little, in the way that one does after a bout of tears is over. “So. That’s what happened at Earlsdown last year.” She raised anxious eyes to Madeline. “Do you think Mrs. Gernsback will believe me?”

  “Well, I believe you, in any event.” Madeline rose and went to the stove. The electric teakettle had whistled and then turned itself off. She felt the sides with her hand, and then took three coffee mugs down from the shelf. She dropped healthy tea-spoons of cocoa in each and then poured the steaming water.

  “I can’t tell her about Harker,” Allegra said anxiously, “not until April sixteenth. That’ll be a whole year after the accident. And then I can keep Harker alive. I talked,” she added, with a rather quaint expression on her face, “to a lawyer.”

  “Lila’s a lot of things, but she’s a rock when it comes to giving folks a hand. And she’ll make up her own mind, anyhow, partly on how you do with Hugo tomorrow. And partly on how Hugo does with you. She thinks the world of that horse. Besides,” she added, with a smile to take away the sting, “she’ll probably check the committee records from last year.”

  “She’s coming over here, then?”

  “So she can see you ride. Yes. She said ten tomorrow morning would be fine.”

  Allegra let out a long sigh. “I’ve got another chance, then. Thank god.”

  Madeline smiled and set the mugs of cocoa down. Joe grabbed one and knocked back a slug as if it had been beer. He burped, rather pointedly, I thought, and said, “Okay if I speak now, Miss Fulbright? I mean, do I have your permission?”

  Allegra flushed a little. “A while ago? When I told you to shut up? I shouldn’t have.”

  “No. You shouldn’t have.” He paused, both eyebrows raised.

  “Sorry,” Allegra said, through gritted teeth. Then, with a look even I recognized as one of spurious concern, she continued, “You can butt out of my business anytime, though. I haven’t got a problem with that. Just in case you thought I wanted your stupid opinion.”

  “You know what you’ve got a problem with? When the conversation’s not about you.” He braced his feet against the table legs and tilted his chair backward. “You don’t mind if we get off of the profou
ndly fascinating topic of you and get to what Mrs. McKenzie wants?”

  Allegra closed her eyes and nodded to herself. “Suck up,” she muttered, “just suck it on up.”

  Madeline pinched her lower lip, to keep, I judged, from laughing. Joe sat up with an indignant thump. “Ask yourself this, Fulbright. ‘Do I really need to be here at this meeting?’” He fluttered his eyelashes, patted his hair, and said in a falsetto: “‘Shouldn’t I be upstairs doing something useful like washing my hair?’”

  “Like, get over yourself? Before it’s too late?” Allegra said sweetly.

  I rapped the table with my knuckles. This meeting was getting out of control. “Not only does Miss Fulbright need to be here, her contribution is essential.”

  “You’re kidding.” Joe scowled. “I mean, you’re kidding, sir.”

  “It is?” Allegra asked with a pleased air.

  “Yes. We will need someone undercover at Earlsdown. She is perfect. I am sorry to say this, my dear, but the mild—and unearned—disgrace you are burdened with at the moment is all to the good.”

  Allegra’s expression was wry. She had very nice eyes, between green and brown, and with her hair sticking up and that mischievous smile, she looked quite elfin. “You mean because no one will believe I’m a good guy.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the crooks won’t be as careful around me as they would around a virginal guy like Joe.”

  “Hey!” Joe said indignantly.

  “I hope not,” I said.

  Allegra looked at me soberly. “So what is going on, do you think?”

  I adjusted my spectacles. “Insurance fraud is my best guess. For the moment.”

  “You mean someone’s killing horses and veterinarians for the money?” Joe was appalled. “I mean, I guess I can see if the horse is already down with a problem, the money might be a deciding factor, but you’re talking about setting it up.”

  “My, my,” Allegra mocked gently, “tough guy from the Bronx that you are. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before.”

  “Yeah, but that’s racehorses. You’re dealing with huge bucks, there. We’re talking eventers. They don’t make that kind of money, so they aren’t worth that kind of money. And why would a vet like Coughlin risk his reputation for small bucks?”