He nodded, then looked up as Phil called over the chatter, “Crawford, the old Chetwynd offices are serviceable in downtown Charlottesville. They need a bit of rehab but I could do that as a gift to Custis Hall if the board pursues this.”
Charlotte pounced but softly. “Phil, that is extraordinarily generous. Well, Crawford, you’ve given us all something exciting to consider. I don’t want this to slip away, frittered away in committees, so may I ask the following to be done for our next meeting? Crawford, would you examine our curriculum and determine what you think would be suitable for satellite locations or even e-courses? Most all students have access to a computer now.”
Apart from the reception to his idea this flattered Crawford, who assumed she’d always limit his input to financial matters. “Of course.”
“Phil, given your family’s long association with the area, might you explore other potential locations?”
“Are you willing to decentralize enough so that we could offer classes in Waynesboro and over by Zion Crossroads?” Phil inquired. “In that way, we could bring in students from western and eastern counties. Zion Crossroads could serve Louisa, Fluvanna, possibly even Orange. There are a lot of bright kids out there.”
“Hear. Hear,” Mercer said.
“Mercer, are you willing to secure, or even procure, the numbers of students in area schools who score in the top ten percent at their school, the ones with good grades?”
“Of course, but Charlotte, there are kids who aren’t doing well scholastically who would if we could just reach them.” Mercer truly cared.
The headmistress smiled for she, too, wanted to find those diamonds in the rough. “You’re right, but we may have to work up to that or find an efficient way to identify them. I know test scores aren’t always the answer; the answer is and always will be educators who take an interest in their students, which brings me to you, Lucas.” She addressed Lucas Diamond, who had worked in the State Education Department. “Find those teachers.”
He looked up at the ceiling, then around the table. “Well, if you all can do what you’re going to do, I will do my part.” Then he laughed.
“What about me?” Mary Wainwright asked plaintively.
“Mary, this board and me in particular are going to shamelessly abuse you.” That got everyone’s attention. “Once we have a plan, you are going to give a concert to raise money.”
All eyes were on Mary as she dramatically breathed in, then said saucily, “I will raise so much money you’ll be able to build a satellite campus.”
The room cheered. Sister thought it was the best board meeting she’d ever attended.
As it broke up, knots of people conferred and she found herself with Phil and Mercer by the long polished sideboard against the wall.
“Hey, to switch the subject, Sister, I know Lafayette is getting on. That fellow has to be fourteen or so, right?” asked Phil.
“We’re both getting up there.” She smiled at the thought of her aging horse.
“Keepsake and Rickyroo must be close to their early teens, too, if I recall,” Phil continued.
Mercer teased, “I feel a horse deal coming on.”
“I have a two-year-old and a three-year-old. One is by Guns and Roses and the other by St. Boniface, out of solid mares but they don’t have the speed for the track. They have good minds. Why don’t you come have a look?”
Crawford joined the group. “Phil, thank you for bringing my hounds back the other day.”
Knowing the history between Crawford and The Jefferson Hunt, Phil said, “It was Sister’s idea.”
As this transpired, Mercer glanced at his iPad, which showed he had a new e-mail. He checked on the message. “Sister, thank you,” Crawford said, doing the right thing.
“Crawford, they hunted wonderfully well under Shaker and they are in good flesh. Very handsome hounds.” Sister smiled.
Clearing his throat he responded, “Thank you.”
“What the hell?” Mercer exclaimed, then looked up. “Sorry.”
“Well, what the hell?” Sister teased him.
“Justin Sautter, with the help of Meg and Alan, have gone through the family papers and found a note about the delivery of Benny Glitters’s slate memorial. Roger Chetwynd”—Roger was old Tom Chetwynd’s son—“Lucius Censa, the Chetwynd’s stable manager, and a Negro worker accompanied the memorial. The Kentucky forensic people said the skeleton is that of an African American male, early forties, old break in the left leg. Anyway, they think the skeleton might be of the man who accompanied the slate memorial from here in Virginia to there. They also found a note in Lela’s hand about the slate and the man escorting it, whom she described as a ‘fine dark man with an adorable little dog.’ I’ll bet that was my grandfather!” Mercer said with excitement.
“I thought your grandfather walked into a whorehouse and never walked out,” Phil remembered.
“Am I missing a good story?” Sister leaned toward Mercer.
“Grandpa Harlan did,” said Mercer, “but I didn’t mention that the whorehouse was in Lexington, Kentucky.”
Phil calmly replied, “Mercer, even if it is your grandfather, why would he end up in a grave with a horse and a dog? It makes no sense.”
“It makes sense to someone,” Mercer’s voice rose.
“I’m sure they are all dead,” Phil replied.
“Well, they may be but that doesn’t mean someone who is alive doesn’t know,” Sister stated as Crawford, Mercer, and Phil looked at her.
“If you all will excuse me, I’m going to concentrate on the living.” Crawford withdrew.
“Me, too.” Phil smiled.
Mercer drew close to Sister. “You’re right. Someone might know. Wait until I tell Mother. I want to know who killed my grandfather and why. Mother’s become very intrigued, too.”
“I can understand that, Mercer, but you don’t know for sure that this body was your grandfather’s. As it was 1921, he must have had late children.”
“He did and my father, his son, had me in his middle years. In my family, we stay, um, virile and healthy a long time.”
“I hope so.” She winked at him.
CHAPTER 7
Cold seeped into Uncle Yancy’s bones. At ten, for a red fox he was old. Quick thinking and cleverness kept him alive when other foxes fell by the wayside. He wondered when his spouse would leave her earth, a spacious den. A nag, Aunt Netty had plucked his last nerve and he had moved out. She said she threw him out. Over the last three years Netty’s expulsions became an annual event based, she said, on his messy ways. She prided herself on a clean den. His version was she didn’t know what she wanted and had turned into an old crank.
Then spring would come, Aunt Netty would need help with one project or another, something usually involving killing rabbits, and she’d woo him back.
This night, twenty-two degrees outside but cozy in the mudroom at the Lorillard home place, Uncle Yancy swore he wouldn’t fall for it this spring … if spring ever arrived.
Yancy had chewed a hole through the floorboards from underneath the mudroom to crawl up next to the tack trunk. A few of the floorboards were rotten, which made it easier. Sam Lorillard had thrown a pile of washed red rags in the corner, then forgot them. The fox, smelling crumbs and other tidbits would push the rags aside, enter through, then push them back. Once in the mudroom he had many places to hide, including jumping from shelf to shelf until he was on the highest one. To him, the mudroom was a little bit of heaven. The temperature inside hovered in the low fifties. The grasses and old towels in his den in the graveyard, another under the front porch, were all right if he curled up, but this was true luxury.
Uncle Yancy recognized the Lorillard brothers, Gray and Sam. The two kept the home place, having bought out their snotty sister, Nadine, who was now a leading light in Atlanta, wanting nothing to do with country life. She certainly wanted nothing to do with Sam.
Gray would stay home maybe two nights a week, less if he was calle
d in for a consulting job in Washington where he retained a convenient small apartment. The rest of the time he stayed at Sister’s.
Uncle Yancy knew many of the humans in his territory. The Bancrofts’ farm touched the Lorillard farm on the Lorillards’ western edge. He also knew Sister, Shaker, Betty, and Sybil and he even recognized some people in the hunt field. From time to time the hounds, all of whom he also knew, would pick up his scent and he’d lead them a merry chase until he tired of it. Usually he’d dump them at Hangman’s Ridge, an eerie place. Too many ghosts and too many minks—those nasty little devils with their sharp teeth. He hated them. It was mutual, but their strong odor almost always threw off the hounds, and many’s the time when Uncle Yancy walked down the backside of Hangman’s Ridge. Just in case, he marked every gopher hole and abandoned fox den along the way. You never knew when you’d need it.
On the top shelf, he rested his head on his outstretched right arm.
The kitchen was next door, a wood-burning stove heating most of the wooden house with a little help from a newly installed heat pump. There Sam sat on a chair, bucket between his feet, bridle in his hands. Uncle Yancy could smell the special saddle conditioner, a type of saddle butter, that the wiry man always ordered from Grangeville, Idaho.
The men’s voices carried into the mudroom and the fox found their deep timbre oddly soothing. He liked Sam, who he saw more than Gray. Something sad and lonely about the man affected the creature. Most all of the higher vertebrates can sense emotions in others. Humans deny this ability in animals, but then they also deny their own emotions. Uncle Yancy had nothing to hide, therefore he was open to all information.
“That stuff really is the best.” Gray leaned back in the wooden chair. “But it takes so long. First you have to strip down the leather, wash it good, use some saddle soap, then let it dry. Half the time I don’t have the time.”
“Brother, when do you clean your own tack? You pay Tootie to do it for you.”
Sheepishly, Gray agreed. “Most times I do but, you know, those spring days, you smell the apple blossoms, then it’s a joy to sit outside and clean tack or clean anything, really. The rest of the time, not so much.”
“I never knew how beautiful this place was until I left for college. Harvard, well, it’s in the city, grand as the place is, but I thought I would perish of homesickness.”
“Me, too, not so much at college but all those years in D.C.” Sam rose to start heating water on the stove. “I feel like hot chocolate. What about you?”
“Sounds good. I’ve been thinking about what you told me. What Sister told you after the Custis Hall meeting last night. Mercer’s one brick shy of a load.”
Gray smiled. “He’s always been excitable.”
“Excitable, hell, he’s all over the map. Lorillard men aren’t supposed to be, well, you know. Anyway, he treats me like a slug, a sea slug.”
“Because you don’t have any money. Sam, he’s not that bad.”
“Hell, he’s not. The only reason he’s nice to me is when he nudges me a little to try to get business out of Crawford. Oh, how Mercer loves to make money and be around money.”
“His side of the family has had money for a long time. While he’s not exactly Crawford or Phil’s equal, he’s not poor by a long shot. And give him credit, he knows his business.”
“He can recite bloodlines and sales figures. I told him once, forget blabbing about bloodlines. People don’t care. Just talk about how much the sire won or the dam and what their progeny is doing on the track. But he keeps blabbing on, showing off.”
Gray mixed the hot chocolate powder, the hot water releasing the enticing smell. “Here.”
“Thanks. You taking a break from female companionship?”
“Sam, I usually spend Monday and Friday nights here if I can. Sometimes it is good to have one’s little space.”
“A Room of One’s Own.” Sam cited the Virginia Woolf book, as he was well educated.
“Something like that.”
“I don’t know if I will ever enjoy female companionship. Been a long dry spell.” Sam started rubbing in the saddle butter using the warmth of his hands to help the waxes penetrate the leather. “Mostly I really do enjoy women but sometimes the way they think drives me over the cliff. Too emotional.”
Gray shrugged. “That’s painting with a broad brush.”
“Yeah, but my experience is women notice the damnedest things. I mean stuff that just makes no sense. Kind of like Mercer.” He burst out laughing.
Gray laughed, too. “The Laprade side of the family is given to emotional drama.”
“They live for it. I’ll bet you twenty Georges that if that body is our grandfather or great-grandfather or whoever the hell he is, some family relation, Mercer will be beside himself.”
Gray touched his mustache, smoothing it outward. “Nero Wolfe. He’ll have to solve the crime.”
This set them both to laughing.
“I’m surprised Mercer hasn’t driven to Lexington to offer up his saliva for a DNA test.” Sam could hardly finish the sentence, he was laughing so hard.
“I don’t get the science behind that but it must work.” Gray finished his drink. “I wonder if we want to know too much. Maybe it’s better not to know. Someday, someone will find Amelia Earhart or pieces of something that will solve her disappearance. What good does it do? She’s gone. Same with the princes in the tower. Remember that, when the two little bodies were found under a stairwell in the Tower of London? Anyway, that was before DNA testing, but so many people are convinced these are the murdered sons of Edward the Fourth.”
“Gives academics and novelists a field day. You know, did Richard the Third kill them, or did Henry Tudor once he became king after killing Richard at Bosworth Field? I’m curious I guess. Yeah, I am.”
“You always liked history,” said Gray. “I read some and I know we need to know what came before but Sam, I can’t say as I care much. I care about now. I care about the future.”
“But that’s just it, the past is prologue.”
“Teach you that at Harvard?” Gray smiled.
“Did. The guilt of throwing away that education haunts me. Christ, what a mess I made of my life, your life, anyone around me.” Gray had paid for two drying-out clinics. The second one took. As Sam had remained sober for nine years now, Gray began to relax, yet in the back of his mind was always the fear that somehow for some reason, Sam would relapse.
“It’s all over, done. I don’t know what was worse, not capitalizing on Harvard or losing your chance as a steeplechase jockey. You could have set up business after the competitive days were over but you’re still in horses, you can still set up a sideline.” He leaned down and picked up the saddle butter jar. “Build a better mousetrap.”
“That saddle stuff really is the better mousetrap.” Gray wiped his hands on a cloth, then rose to wash them.
Gray took his cup over to the sink, looked out the window. “Black as the ace of spades. Low cloud cover.”
“Half moon tonight. The good thing about a low cloud cover is it keeps a little heat on the earth. Those cold clear nights make it hurt when you breathe.”
“Tonight’s cold even with the cloud cover,” Gray remarked.
Sam opened the door to the mudroom, flinging two used towels toward the back door. “I swear I smell fox.”
Uncle Yancy, flattened low on the shelf, watching with his glittering deep yellow eyes.
Gray joined Sam at the door. “Does. Probably the graveyard fox.”
“Well, he has one hell of a signature if it’s this strong in the mudroom.” Sam closed the door.
Had the brothers walked into the mudroom, turned around and glanced upward, they would have seen the tip of a magnificent brush just falling over the shelf. Uncle Yancy was hiding in plain sight.
It would have been a good lesson for all to learn before it was too late.
CHAPTER 8
That same Friday night Sister’s fountain pen
glided over perfectly lovely cream stationery, the hunt club crest centered at the top. She sat at the graceful desk in her library, its smooth writing surface highly polished. This regal piece of furniture commanded the room. While Sister considered this her main desk she was one of those people who scribbled wherever she could. At the end of the day, after her shower, she would often troll through the house’s rooms, picking up and reading through her notepads, finding much that could prove useful.
Golliwog, her insufferable long-haired cat, sprawled on the back of the leather sofa, her tail slightly swaying to and fro. Plopped on the sofa cushions the two house dogs snored; Raleigh, a beautiful male Doberman and Rooster, a harrier bequeathed to Sister at the death of an old lover, Peter Wheeler. He also willed her his estate, Mill Ruins, on which an enormous waterwheel, ever turning, could have been restored to grind grain should anyone be so inclined. Mill Ruins was rented for ninety-nine years by Sister’s Joint Master, Walter Lungrun, M.D., a fellow in his prime, early forties. Peter had always sworn to Sister that he would leave her everything, but she’d thought he was joking. He wasn’t and she found herself with two sizable farms to run, combined with the great good luck of owning desirable property.
Conscious of her wonderful luck, Sister realized there are people who resent anyone with resources. She accepted that blind hatred, and she had no real answer as to why the Wheel of Fortune had placed her on the upswing. She herself was not an envious person. She did, however, like very much that her position allowed her to be useful to others—specifically young people and animals. She cared little about anyone else’s status or bank account. She either liked you or she didn’t, and being Southern, if she knew you needed some financial help she often found a way to do that without embarrassing you. Many Virginians had a lot of pride and would not take what they considered a handout. She worried about so many people out of work, she worried about people sliding out of the middle classes into poverty, and she also was angered at those few who abused public trust whether on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or Washington, D.C.—people who profited secretly or openly from the distress of others.
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