Two such tough characters, Diana and Cora, faced each other from their shallow earthen holes, now muddy, which pleased them.
“Hate summer,” Cora grumbled.
“It’s not so bad,” the beautiful tricolor replied, her head resting on the edge of her crater.
“You’re still young. Heat gets harder to handle as you get older,” Cora said. She had recently turned six.
Six, while not old, gave Cora maturity. She was the strike hound, the hound who pushes forward. She sensed she was slowing just the tiniest bit and knew Dragon, Diana’s littermate, would jostle for her position.
Cora hated Dragon as much as she loved his sister. Quite a few hounds loathed the talented, arrogant Dragon.
Being the strike hound didn’t mean that Cora always found the scent first. But she worked a bit ahead of the rest—not much, perhaps only five yards in front, but she was first and she wanted to keep it that way.
If another hound, say a flanker, a hound on the sides of the pack, found scent before she did, Cora would slow, listening for the anchor hound, the quarterback, to speak. If the anchor said the scent was valid, then Cora would swing around to the new line, racing up front again. She had to be first.
If the anchor hound said nothing, then Cora would wait for a moment to listen for someone else whom she trusted. All she waited for was “It is good.” If she didn’t hear it soon, then she’d push on.
For years the anchor hound of the Jefferson Hunt had been Archie, a great American hound of substance, bone, deep voice, and reliable nose. Archie, a true leader, knew when to knock a smart-ass youngster silly, when to encourage, when to chide the whole pack, and when to urge them on. He died a fighting death against a bear, ensuring his glory among the pack as well as among the humans. They all missed him.
Diana, though young, possessed the brains to be an anchor hound. No one else exhibited that subtle combination of leadership, drive, nose, and identifiable cry. Cora knew Diana would become a wonderful anchor, but her youth would cause some problems this season. Like a young, talented quarterback, Diana would misread some signals and get blitzed. But the girl had it, she definitely had it.
In fact, the whole D litter, named for the first letter of their mother’s name as is the custom among foxhunters, oozed talent. And in Dragon’s case, overweening conceit.
Puppies taunted one another, their high-pitched voices carrying over the yards drenched in late-afternoon sunshine.
“Pipe down, you worthless rats,” Cora yelled at them.
They quieted.
“Too bad Archie can’t see this litter. He was their grandfather. They’re beauties.” Diana watched one chubby puppy waddle to the chain-link fence between the yards, where he studied a mockingbird staring right back at him from the other side.
“Babblers.” Cora laughed. “They are beautiful. But the proof is in the pudding. We’ll see what they can really do two seasons from now. And don’t forget”—she lowered her voice because gossip travels fast in close quarters—“Sweetpea just isn’t brilliant. Steady, God bless her, steady as a rock, but not an A student.”
Sweetpea was the mother of this litter.
“I wish it were the first day of cubbing.” Diana sighed.
“Don’t we all. I don’t mind the walking out. Really. The exercise is good, and each week the walks get longer. You know next week we’ll start with the horses again, which I enjoy, but still—not the same.”
“Heard the boys in the pasture yesterday.” Diana meant the horses. “They’re excited about starting back to work so long as Sister, Shaker, and Doug go out early, really early.” Diana sniffed the air. A familiar light odor announced the presence of Golly grandly picking her way through the freshly mowed grass toward the outdoor run.
Diana rose, shaking the dirt off.
Cora, too, smelled Golly. “Insufferable shit.”
Diana laughed. “Cora, you’re crabby today.”
“It’s the heat. But that doesn’t change the fact that that cat is a holy horror.” Cora curled farther into her cool mud crater. She wasn’t going to talk to the calico.
Golly reached the chain-link fence. “Good afternoon, Diana. Your nose is dirty.”
Diana sat down at the chain-link fence. “Keeps the bugs off.”
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t get bugs.”
“Liar,” Cora called out.
“Tick hotel,” Golly fired right back.
“Flea bait. You hallucinate. I’ve seen you chase the ghosts of fleas,” Cora replied, giggling.
“I have never hallucinated in my life, Cora. And you can’t get my goat, ha,” she said, “because you’re a lower life-form and I’m not letting you needle me.”
“Oh, if you aren’t hallucinating, then what are you doing when you, for no reason, leap straight into the air, twist around, race to a tree, climb up, drop down, and do it all over again? You’re mental.”
“Spoken like the unimaginative canine you are.” Golly raised her chin, half closing her eyes. “I’m being visited by The Muse on those occasions.”
“I’m going to throw up,” Cora said, and made a gagging sound.
“Worms!” Golly triumphantly decreed.
Diana, thoroughly enjoying the hostilities, said, “Just got wormed Monday.”
“Well, I walked down here in the heat of the day to give you girls some news, but since you’re insulting me I think I’ll go hiss at the puppies, teach them who’s boss around here.”
“You can tell me.” Diana lowered her voice and her head, her dirt-encrusted nose touching the fence.
“You’re a sensible girl,” the cat replied.
In truth, Diana was sensible and also quite sweet. She loved everybody.
Cora, upright now, walked over. “Well?”
“Who said I was talking to you?” Golly opened her eyes wide.
“Oh come on, Golliwog, you know we’re dying to hear it,” Cora coaxed, buttering her up.
The luxurious calico leaned forward, her nose on the chain-link fence now. “It was Nola. The family dentist identified her not an hour ago.”
Cora thought for a moment. “This will stir up a hornet’s nest.”
“If only we had known her . . . we hear and smell things.” Diana frowned. “We might have been able to help find out something useful.”
“The last hound that knew Nola Bancroft would have been Archie’s grandmother. She lived to be eighteen, you know,” Cora said. “It was a long, long time ago.”
“You’d think if any of us had known about the murder, or if any of the horses over at After All Farm knew, they would have told. We’d know. We pass those things down,” Diana said.
“Undomesticated.” Cora meant that undomesticated animals might have witnessed something at the time.
“Who lives that long?” Diana wondered.
“Turtles. That snapping turtle at After All Farm, the huge one in the back pond, he’s got to be forty years old, I swear it,” Cora said.
“Amphibians aren’t terribly smart, you know. Their brain moves at about the same speed they do,” Golly said with a laugh. Then she thought again. “But they do remember everything.”
“How old is Athena?” Diana asked, thinking of the great horned owl. “They live a long time, don’t they?”
“Don’t know,” the cat and hound said in unison.
Diana lay down, her head on her paws, her face now level with Golly’s face, almost. “Why does it matter? To us, I mean?”
“Because it really will stir up a hornet’s nest, Diana. People start buzzing. Old dirt will get turned over, and I promise you, ladies, I promise you, this will all come back to the Jefferson Hunt Club. Sooner or later, everything in this part of the world does,” Cora said.
“Think Sister knows that?” Diana asked. She loved Sister.
“She knows. Sister has lived almost six hound lifetimes. Think of what she knows,” Cora said, shaking her head in wonder.
“Well, exactly how do you th
ink this will affect us? Will people not pay their dues or something like that?” Diana asked.
“No. People drop out when it’s a bad season. No hunt club has control over the weather, but people act as though they do, the fair-weather hunters, I mean.” Cora observed human behavior closely. “Or when there’s a club blowup, which happens about every seven years. Archie always said humans do things in seven-year cycles. They just don’t recognize it.”
“Crawford Howard.” Golly curled her upper lip as she said his name.
“Up to his old tricks?” Cora snapped at a low-flying dragonfly.
“Cat intuition.” Golly smiled. “I have an idea. Whatever happened to Nola in 1981 was well done, if you will. When you’re hunting you all go places humans don’t. Sometimes even Shaker can’t keep up with you when territory’s rough. You might find something or smell something out there that could help solve this mess. After all, the best noses in the world are”—she paused for effect— “bloodhounds, but you all are second.”
“Second to none!” Cora’s voice rose, which caused a few sleepers to open one eye and grumble.
Humans ranked the noses of bloodhounds first, followed by bassets second and foxhounds third, with all other canines following. Foxhounds thought this an outrage. Of course they were best. Besides, who in the world could hunt behind a bloodhound? The poor horse would die of boredom. This was a pure article of foxhound faith.
“This has to do with hunting? Is that what you’re really thinking, Golly?” Diana noticed a few of the boys in the kennel were quarreling over a stick. How they had the energy to even growl in this heat mystified her. One of the troublemakers, of course, was her brother, Dragon.
“Yes, think about it. Cubbing starts September seventh. It’s the end of July. Stuff happens when you’re hunting. Everything speeds up. People reveal themselves out there.”
“We sure hear them scream for Jesus.” Diana giggled as she recalled a few of the oaths elicited by a stiff fence.
“I have never figured that out. The horse jumps the fence, not them,” Cora said, laughing.
“Oh, but that’s just it, Cora. Sometimes the human takes the fence and the horse doesn’t.”
They all laughed at that.
“We’ll keep our nose to the ground,” Cora promised.
“I have the strangest feeling that Guy Ramy will be coming back.” Golly lowered her voice again. “More cat intuition.”
In a way, Golly was right.
CHAPTER 6
The Hapsburg saphhire glittered on the small glass-topped table. Outside, the long summer twilight cloaked the grand old trees surrounding Roughneck Farm, and scarlet tendrils of sunset seemed to ensnare the wisteria that climbed all over the back porch. The rose and gold light reflected off the windowpanes of the neat gardening shed, casting intricate designs across the emerald lawn.
Tedi and Sister sat on the screened-in back porch. The humidity was particularly oppressive this evening. Sister drank dark hot tea while Tedi nursed a martini as well as a glass of iced green tea. The mercury was dropping with evening’s approach. The humidity seemed determined to hang on. Sister believed drinking a hot drink on a hot day kept you healthier. No one else could stand anything hot.
Raleigh and Golliwog were curled up together in Raleigh’s Black Watch plaid dog bed. Rooster, Peter Wheeler’s lovely harrier, was stretched out in his own bed, covered in the Wallace tartan, next to Raleigh. Peter, an ex-lover of Sister’s, had bequeathed his handsome hound to her and his entire estate to the Jefferson Hunt to be administered solely by the master—not the Board of Directors. Peter’s eight decades on this earth had taught him a benign dictatorship was infinitely preferable to democracy. He died peacefully last year, a quiet end to a productive life.
Both Sister and Tedi now knew Nola had not died peacefully, a fact they were currently grappling with.
The animals listened intently, even Golly, who under normal circumstances would have told Raleigh how lucky he was to have her in his special porch bed.
“I knew. I always knew. So did you,” Tedi said sadly.
Sister heard a squirrel clamber up the wisteria on her way to her nest in the attic. “We hoped. We always hoped.”
“I’m done crying. I know, Janie, that I can be all over the map, as you say.” She held up her hand to quell the protest. “I am a little different. I was never able to think the way you do. You think in sequences, you see patterns. Edward’s like that. I don’t. I gather it all up in one big basket, then dump it on the table and start sorting. But I eventually find what I’m looking for even if I drive everyone crazy doing it. It’s just the way my mind works.”
“You are an original,” Sister said, smiling. “I’m lucky to know you.”
“Do you realize we’ve known each other all our lives? But it seems like a split second. I don’t understand it. We’re seventy-one years old and I don’t feel old, I don’t act old, at least I don’t think I do. I don’t know where the years are. Are they hiding in my pocket? Are they wherever Nola is? What happened?”
Sister shrugged. “Wherever they are we sure packed a lot into them.” She sipped her tea.
“Yes, we did.” Tedi inhaled, her bright blue eyes flickering for a moment. “I’m not avoiding the subject.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
“I know Nola was murdered. I didn’t need the dental chart to prove those bones were Nola’s any more than I needed Ben Sidell to tell me her skull had been crushed. A blunt instrument, he said, or a large rock. They aren’t going to find the answers to this under a microscope, it’s been too long. Too long.”
“Well, he has to go by the book. Otherwise he won’t stay sheriff for long.”
“I know that. I just want to know who killed her. I still think it was Guy Ramy. Dog in a manger. I can’t have her, so no one else can have her.”
“But Nola was perfectly capable of running off with Guy and he was madly in love with her.”
“They all were. And she wouldn’t have run off with Guy. Headstrong as she was, Janie, Nola loved money. I think she might have allowed herself a flaming affair. And enjoy it all the more knowing I did not approve nor did her father. But marry Guy?” She shook her head.“No.”
“I think she would.”
“Why?”
“She knew in time you and Edward would forgive her. You’d have made a settlement on her with the appearance of the first grandchild. After all, you acquiesced to Ken in time.”
A silence followed this.
“Maybe.”
“No maybe about it. Nola could play her father like a harp, and eventually you’d have given in as well. So long as she was happy.”
“He wouldn’t have made her happy.” Tedi’s voice dropped a quarter of an octave.
“Tedi, there’s ripe disagreement on that subject. People started talking about it in 1980, when Nola and Guy first fell in love. Opening Hunt. You could feel the electricity.”
“Odd. They’d known each other all their lives.”
“Not so odd. He went away to college, graduated, put in two years in the service. She hadn’t seen him, hardly, for six years.”
“I don’t understand it.”
“No one does. That’s why love is love.” Sister smiled. “Freshen your drink?”
“I’ll do it.” Tedi rose, walking to the small bar in the pantry just off the kitchen, the wide, uneven heart pine planks creaking underfoot.
A larger bar, more elaborate, still stood ready between the living room and the dining room. Raymond had loved to throw big parties. Sister had gotten out of the habit after his death in 1991; she figured hunting was her form of throwing a big party. Although she did always have the Opening Hunt from her farm, with a huge breakfast following at the house. Raymond and Ray both had gloried in these occasions. She rather more endured them and hoped she was a gracious hostess. The glitter on the table held her eye. Two diamonds of two karats each flanked the eleven-karat sapphire and picked up all
available light, throwing it back on the large square-cut blue stone. Sapphires are usually too muddy or too pale. This one was a perfect royal blue—like a strip of startling water in the Caribbean.
Tedi called from the pantry, “You could pour me more tea, please.”
Sister poured tea from a graceful cut-glass pitcher, ice cubes tinkling inside, into Tedi’s frosted glass.
Tedi rejoined her. “Are you surprised I’m not crying? I’m not on the floor frothing at the mouth? It’s not that I don’t care. I do. I care passionately, but I don’t have one tear left in my body. And I don’t trust my emotions.”
“What do you mean?”
“When Nola disappeared I went to pieces. There’s really no other way to put it. Fragments of Tedi Prescott”—she used her maiden name—“were scattered from here to Washington and back. I wore out the road driving up there to the FBI. I just knew Paul Ramy wasn’t up to the task. Especially when Guy went missing. I was a total wreck. I regret that.”
“Honey, any mother would have been torn to shreds inside.”
“Yes, but I missed things. If I could have kept my wits about me, especially in those early days, I believe I might have picked up information, clues, nuances. I didn’t. All I felt was pain. I believe we were very close to the killer, to finding out who the killer was, and he slipped through our fingers to land God knows where.”
“We were all distraught.”
“Which works to a killer’s advantage.”
“Can you go over it again? Will it upset you?”
“No. I mean, I have been over it. I last saw Nola at Sorrel Buruss’s party. I think that’s the last time any of us saw her alive. We’d patched things up in the stable before hunting that day. She apologized and so did I. Had a whopping fight the night before over Guy. Anyway, she was in high spirits, I was in neutral spirits. Edward was grumpy but putting a good face on it since we were at Sorrel’s. Fontaine was an ass, as usual.” She mentioned the handsome husband of Sorrel. “Since Nola wouldn’t go to bed with him, he thought Sybil might be honored at his attentions. She slapped him square in the face. Sorrel, accustomed to his outrages, simply flipped him an ice cube to hold to his face. Nola laughed and laughed. Fontaine’s face grew redder and redder. I was furious when I saw Fontaine pressure Sybil. She’s a bit retiring and perhaps too anxious to please. I remember being very proud of her that she stopped that insufferable womanizer. Do you remember?”
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