Hayburner (A Gail McCarthy Mystery)

by Laura Crum

Slowly his head lowered and his eyes seemed to dim. Laying his muzzle down on the ground, he folded over onto his side. His ribs moved once with the last breath. Jade Hudson continued to stroke his neck.

  After another minute, I used my stethoscope to listen for a heartbeat.

  "All quiet," I told her. "He's gone."

  She nodded, the tears still flowing. "Thank you," she said.

  "Sure you're okay?"

  "I'm sure." Straightening up, she stood beside me. "I've been through this before. I'm accepting of it. Death is part of life."

  "True enough," I said.

  For a long moment I gazed at her quiet, tear-streaked face. I saw the serenity, the peace. Even as I looked at her, I knew that her tranquility was born, at least in part, from the solitary, monastic simplicity of her life. I knew this, because in some ways my life resembled hers. And now I was giving it up.

  Blue's face came into my mind, the memory of his touch, his kisses. Even the thought of him sent a surge of basic, primitive desire through me. I already knew, somewhere deep inside, that I was giving up the solitary life for Blue. There was no doubt in my gut.

  Jade and I walked back to my pickup together. "Thank you," she said again, as I climbed in.

  "You're welcome."

  I could see her in my rearview mirror as I drove out, her head bent slightly, walking back to her house. And then my cell phone rang.

  "Gail, Tony Sanchez has a colic," Nancy said.

  "I'll be right there."

  Tony lived in Harkins Valley, just down the road from Christy George. As I drove the narrow, winding curves of Harkins Valley Road, I passed one horse operation after another. Harkins Valley was ideal horse country and many, if not most, of the folks who moved out here were horse people. The options were endless: On the right a high-class jumper stable with all new facilities, on the left a little old family farm that belonged to Judith Rainier, the barbed-wire-fenced pastures full of rodeo horses. Next came a turn-of-the-century dairy converted to a setup for a woman who raised Shetland ponies, and then the wide, white-board-fenced fields of a local dot-com millionaire. In the distance I could see the plots of horsey Lushmeadows subdivision. Tony Sanchez's place was on the right.

  Tony had money. He owned pricey cutting horses-about a dozen of them-and was one of our best clients. His peach-colored Spanish-style house was new, as was the modern metal barn and corral setup behind it. One large pasture was fenced in non-climb wire with an iron-pipe top rail. Everything perfectly tidy. I drove up to the barn. Tony was waiting for me in front of a box stall.

  In his early fifties, or so I guessed, of medium height and a Mexican heritage, Tony had the high cheekbones, broad planed face and dark olive complexion of his Indian forefathers. He also had a wide, white smile and tons of ambition. Tony was one of the most successful electrical contractors in Santa Cruz County.

  I climbed out of my truck and walked to greet him. "Hi Tony," I said. "How are you?"

  Tony held out his hand and I shook it. "I am fine. And you, Gail?"

  "Doing well," I said. "How is your mother?"

  "She is doing well, also. Thank you for asking."

  Tony spoke English perfectly, with only the slightest trace of a Mexican accent. Meticulously polite himself, he appreciated a certain formal politeness in others, something I had learned over the years. No matter how dire the situation, Tony would want to conduct a decorous ritual greeting.

  "Well, please give her my regards," I said to him now. "I always enjoy Dona Esther." This last was quite true. Tony's mother lived with him, and I had met her several times. A sprightly, intense woman, some eighty-five years young, she took a lively interest in the horses, and could often be seen out at the barn, gesturing in an imperious way with one small, claw-like hand as she pointed out chores that needed doing.

  "I will tell her you said so." Tony smiled. "I am sure she will be very pleased."

  Feeling that the forms had been taken care of, I gestured at the stall door Tony was standing in front of. "You have a problem?"

  "Yes, this horse has been having little stomach aches for a week. But today, he is worse."

  "Uh-oh." Little colics off and on for a week usually meant one of two things: sand or stones. Neither was desirable, though stones were a good deal more lethal than sand.

  "Let's have a look at him," I said.

  The strawberry roan gelding was cross-tied in his stall. Head hanging down, he pawed the shavings beneath him repetitively. In his eyes was a look of dull misery.

  After checking his vital signs, I bent over and had a long listen to his gut. Finally I stood up and faced Tony.

  "Sand or a stone?" he asked with a wry smile. Tony was a horseman; he probably knew almost as much about colics as I did.

  "I'm not sure," I said. "You can usually hear sand in the gut, and I can't. And, judging by his vital signs, which are pretty good, it's probably not a big stone."

  "I hope it is not that." Tony sighed.

  We both knew that stones, an odd anomaly that seems to occur only on the West Coast-no one really knows why-could only be cured by expensive, and risky, surgery. "Stones," when removed, looked exactly like stones-round, smooth river rocks-and could be six inches or more in diameter. They were thought to be coagulations of some sort of mineral build-up in a horse's intestines. A given animal could carry one or more stones around for a long time, years even, and then a stone would shift into a spot where it blocked all passage through the intestine. An instant, and severe, colic resulted. Such colics often ended in torsions, or twists, where the intestine behaves like a hose with a kink in it. Only surgery-or a miracle-can save a horse with a twisted gut.

  However, stones often gave warning as they moved around inside a horse, and the type of chronic, low-grade, persistent colic Tony had described to me was sometimes a sign of stones.

  "I'm not sure," I said again. "I think what we ought to do is give him some painkiller, and pump some mineral oil into him, and then I want to run some blood work on him. Once in a while this sort of chronic colic turns out to be caused by an internal infection."

  "I have never heard of that," Tony said. "What do you do?"

  "Antibiotics can usually clear it up."

  "That is good."

  "You'd better put him on a regime of psyllium, too," I said. "Just in case he does have some sand in there. The extra fiber can help."

  "I can do that," Tony said. "I have some psyllium in the feed room."

  I finished the procedures of injecting painkiller into the horse's jugular vein, drawing blood, and pumping mineral oil through a tube I inserted in his nostril and down his esophagus. As Tony was walking me out to my truck, I spotted Dona Esther, waving to me from one of the windows in the house. I waved back.

  "Be sure to tell your mother I said hi," I told Tony.

  "I will," he agreed. "Would you care to come in? She always enjoys company."

  "I would love to, but I have a busy day ahead of me."

  "I understand." Tony flashed his very white smile at me. "Any time you would care to visit, my mother and I would be delighted. I think she is sometimes lonely."

  "Living with you?" I smiled.

  Tony shrugged. "I am glad I can give her such a life. We were very poor when I was a child. Now she can have anything she wants. But I think she misses her village."

  "It's wonderful that you can do all this for her." I waved a hand at the surroundings.

  He shrugged again, spreading his own hands out eloquently. "Surely it is what every son would want to do for his mother?"

  I wondered. It seemed to me that quite a few adult sons wanted principally to avoid their mothers. And I had seen Dona Esther ordering Tony about in her charming but quite dictatorial way. I thought there might be many men who wouldn't care for that. Not to mention the fact that Tony was never known to date, a subject of some speculation in the local horse community. Rumor had it that his mother forbade it.

  Before I could say anything else, my cell
phone rang.

  "Gail, Laurie Brown has a horse that she thinks may have eaten twenty-five to forty pounds of grain. He's not showing any problem yet, but ..."

  "I'll be right there," I said.

  Laurie Brown lived in Harkins Valley, barely a mile from where I stood. Like Tony, she was one of our best clients. Unlike Tony, she did not possess a lot of sangfroid when it came to her horses.

  Laurie's five Peruvian Pasos resembled the spoiled children of an indulgent mother. All possible luxuries and safeguards were provided for them; as a result, they seemed to acquire every malady and have every accident known to man or horse. As Laurie had once put it, "I could lock them in padded stalls and they'd find a way to hang themselves."

  I pulled out of Tony's driveway at a good brisk clip, picturing Laurie Brown's likely hysteria, and waved at Lucy Kaplan, who was schooling a dressage horse in her riding ring. Lucy was a trainer who rented the place across the road from Tony. An old barn, it was known as Harkins Valley Stables, and had been the home of many different trainers over the years. These days Lucy's upscale clients, many of them from Lushmeadows, parked their BMWs, Mercedes, and Porsches in the little gravel lot next to the barn.

  Cruising down Harkins Valley Road as fast as seemed safe, I wondered how one of Laurie Brown's pampered babies had gotten into the grain. Given her zealous care, it seemed an improbable accident.

  In another minute I passed the burned-out shell of Christy George's barn, no one about. Just before I reached Lushmeadows, I turned right on a short cul-de-sac called Redtail Ridge. Laurie Brown lived at the end of the road.

  Laurie's place sat in the lap of the hills to the east of Harkins Valley proper. Her gently rolling five acres faced south and west; her small house, surrounded on all four sides by a porch, was at the back of the property, just below the ridge line. The barn and corrals were situated on the level land beneath it.

  Laurie was waiting at her barn. Predictably, she could be seen pacing up and down in front of a stall as I drove in, peering at the horse inside.

  Before I could even get out of the truck, she began talking. "He seems fine, Gail, but I'm not sure how much grain he ate and my book said to have the vet out, anyway."

  "Your book's right," I told her. "The time to treat founder is before it happens, not after. After is often too late."

  "What do you mean?" Laurie asked nervously.

  "The onset of founder can take twelve hours or so," I explained. "By the time a horse shows pain, the laminae of his feet can already be so inflamed that irreversible bone damage will follow, no matter what we do."

  "Oh no." Laurie seemed ready to burst out sobbing. "This is my favorite horse."

  "When did he eat the grain?" I asked.

  "Sometime between when I fed last night and when I came down to feed this morning. I can't believe he got into it. The sack had been sitting outside his stall for weeks. Right here." She pointed to a spot that certainly looked a safe distance away from the denizen of the stall, an alert-appearing chocolate brown gelding.

  "I was feeding him a handful of grain with every feeding," she said. "Just to perk him up a little. And somehow, last night, he managed to reach that sack and drag it into the stall with him. When I got down here this morning I found the empty sack, inside the stall. I'm not sure exactly how much he ate. It was a fifty-pound sack and I think it was at least half-full."

  "All right," I said calmly. "Here's what we're going to do. I'll check him over carefully; get a baseline evaluation on him. Then we'll tube him full of mineral oil, to move the grain through him, and I want to give him an anti-inflammatory and a relaxant. I'll inject them in the muscle. You'll need to repeat those doses this evening. With luck, he'll be just fine."

  "I hope so."

  "What's his name?" I asked her, as she got him out of his stall. "Coco," she said, and launched off into a spiel about the horse's history and how wonderful he was.

  I encouraged her to talk. Focusing on her horse's good points seemed to calm her a little, and this was, after all, part of my job. Being a good veterinarian involves having good people skills. One needs not only to doctor the animal, but also to have the owner feel happy about it.

  This was something I had grown better at over the years. I'd learned to read clients as individuals; rather than producing the same pacific manner for all, I responded to each as the situation seemed to demand.

  Tony, for instance, needed no bromides. Laurie, on the other hand, appreciated being distracted from her worry. Since I knew both these clients, it was easy to respond to them; more difficult was assessing a new person. Still, it needed to be done, and done well, if we were to continue to succeed as a practice.

  As I checked Coco out-he appeared to be fine-and administered prophylactic measures, I reflected that people skills were Hans Schmidt's stock in trade. He attempted, often successfully, to charm clients; he flirted ostentatiously with any who were female, irrespective of age and manner. Jim and I were both a good deal less forthcoming-perhaps this was part of the reason we were losing people to Hans.

  And what about John? I had no idea how he related to clients.

  Making a snap decision, I asked Laurie, "Have you used our new vet?"

  "Yes. A couple of times. John, right?"

  "Right. Between you and me, what do you think?"

  Laurie furrowed her brow. She might be a bit obsessive about her horses, but in real life, so to speak, Laurie Brown was an extremely successful, and very sharp, businesswoman. Her opinion would be useful. I waited quietly while she thought.

  "He's all right," she said. "He took care of the two problems I had him out for-they were minor-very competently. He had a pretty good way with the horses. It was just ..." She paused.

  "What?" I asked.

  "He was so quiet," she said. "Very polite, but I couldn't read him at all. Couldn't tell if he liked me or despised me, if you know what I mean. I found it a bit disconcerting."

  "Yes," I said. "Thank you. And I think Coco will be all right. There's no sign of a problem, and we've done all the right things. Be sure and call me if he shows any reluctance to move around or any sign of pain. Right away," I added.

  "I'll do that," she said.

  I climbed back in my truck, waving good-bye. I hadn't made it out her front gate before my cell phone rang again.

  "Gail, Amber St. Claire's got a bad puncture wound on her young stallion. She wants you up there right away."

  "Great," I said. "All right."

  Amber St. Claire was one of my least favorite clients. She was rich and spoiled and raised Quarter Horses. That about covered it for me, as far as descriptions were concerned. Amber could be counted on to be difficult.

  Today was no exception. My arrival at her place was greeted by a curt, "Where've you been?"

  "It took me an hour to get here from Harkins Valley," I said evenly. "It's just that far. Morning, Amber."

  She lifted her chin in a brief acknowledgment of my greeting and turned away. I followed her out to the barn.

  Amber's young stallion stood cross-tied in the barn aisle. Dark chestnut, he had the lean, breedy look of a Quarter Horse with running bloodlines, which means, in essence, mostly Thoroughbred. Something about the sharp, steely look in his eyes made me wrinkle my nose. His knee was as big as a football.

  "When did it happen?" I asked.

  "Yesterday. It's a puncture. Pretty deep," Amber said. No mention of why she hadn't called us out yesterday, I noticed.

  "You know the drill," I told her. "I'm going to need to flush it out, maybe x-ray it to look for foreign bodies and bone chips, and then we'll start him on a regime of antibiotics and flushing." I gave the horse a dubious look. "How's he going to be about all this?"

  "Tee?" she laughed. "He's a big baby. I'll get Jill to help you." Cupping her hands, she whistled sharply. A minute or two later, a plump girl came trudging in from somewhere. "Jill, hold this horse for Gail." Amber waved a preemptory hand.

  Jill was almost c
ertainly stable help; still, as usual, Amber's manner was more that of master to slave than employer to employee. I waited for Jill to untie the horse; it had never crossed my mind that Amber would hold him herself. Many years of experience had taught me that Amber didn't get her hands dirty. She liked queening it around in the horse world; she did not like work.

  Jill put the chestnut stallion on a lead line while Amber strolled off down the barn aisle.

  "How's he going to be about this?" I asked the woman quietly, as Amber moved out of earshot. I noticed that Jill was handling Tee with considerable caution.

  She shook her head. "Don't take your eyes off of him," she warned. "He acts quiet and sweet, and then, bang, he goes for you. He's the most dangerous stud I've ever been around. He almost killed me last week. Grabbed for my neck when I wasn't looking. I was wearing a jacket and I moved quick; that's the only reason I'm here. He ripped my jacket right in two."

  "Geez," I said. "Amber said he was a pup."

  "That's what she told me, too," Jill snorted. " 'Tee's just a big baby.' T. Rex is what I call him."

  "Right," I said. Keeping one careful eye on the stallion's face, I injected a solid dose of tranquilizer into his jugular vein. In a minute he was swaying on his feet.

  ''That ought to do it," I told Jill, who visibly relaxed.

  In a minute Amber was back. "What's with Tee?" she snapped. "You didn't tranquilize him, did you? He doesn't need that."

  "I'm afraid I won't work on a stallion without tranquilizing him, Amber," I said blandly. "Too many bad experiences, you know."

  "Are you afraid of him?"

  "That's right," I agreed. "I am afraid to get hurt."

  Amber shrugged derisively, the wind taken out of her sails. "Get on with it, then."

  I did. Heavily sedated, T. Rex posed no problem. I gave Jill antibiotics and instructions and took my leave, feeling sorry for her. Halfway back to the office, the phone rang again.

  "Gail, I just got a call about a broken leg." Nancy sounded apologetic.

  "Damn. Where is it?"

  "Felton." Nancy gave me directions and I headed off in that direction, after canceling my scheduled appointments. It was past noon; I already knew it was one of those days.