'Did the horse have any unusual behaviors,' I said, 'any quirks, weird habits?'
Irons squinted at me. 'What you wantin' to know for?'
'Did he?' I said.
'Well, now. Let me think.' He rubbed the bristles on his chin. 'He was tense for his breedin'. Mouthy, too. Couldn't leave nothin' alone.'
'What about when you handled him? Did he do anything out of the ordinary?'
'Now you mention it, he wasn't happy unless he had part of his lead in his mouth. Always had to have something to chew on.'
A steel gray draft cross with a fetish for lead ropes, who just so happened to belong to Victor Sanders, gets stolen from George Irons' dressage barn only to show up at Foxdale two years later where he's stolen again. Even when Steel had been in the trailer that night, he had fooled with the chains the entire time. They had to be one and the same.
I wondered if he was still alive. If any of the others were. Were they being masqueraded somewhere else under different names, waiting for their turn to be 'stolen?' I didn't know what Sanders did for a living, but it took a hunk of change to board a horse at a facility like Foxdale and keep it active on the show circuit. Sanders never wore anything that wasn't top-of-the-line, and the Mitsubishi 3000GT he owned had to have cost him a bundle, not to mention the money he shelled out entertaining the string of young women he brought to the farm. Then again, maybe they didn't cost him much.
'So, what you wantin' to know all this for?' Irons said.
I looked at the tightness around his eyes and the heavy lines crinkling his face. 'I'll tell you when I know more.'
'Tell me now.'
I shook my head. 'When I know more.'
I checked that everything was running smoothly in the barns, then drove home. Greg's vetmobile was parked at the barn entrance with the compartment doors popped open. As I headed for the steps, he walked out of the barn and set a stainless steel bucket on the gravel.
He flipped a towel off his shoulder and wiped his hands. 'Cuttin' out early?'
'Nah. I'm heading back in a couple minutes.' I crossed the lot and stood alongside the back bumper. 'Remember Victor Sanders' horse? That steel gray draft cross that got stolen?'
Greg frowned as he uncapped a green bottle and squirted some sharp-smelling disinfectant into the bucket. He stretched the hose out of the back of the truck and lifted a dental float out of the sudsy water. 'Vaguely.'
I told him my theory while he hosed off and dried the floats and stowed them in a bin.
He shook his head. 'I don't know Steve. Lots of horses have quirks like that, and now that the horse isn't around anymore, there's no way to prove it was the same one that was stolen from Ironsie's place.'
Ironsie? 'Well,' I said, 'I'll let the insurance company know, and they can take it from there.'
I took the steps two at a time. When I reached the deck, I glanced over my shoulder. Greg had let the hose recoil back into the storage area under the compartment, and as he closed the lid, he looked up at me, his expression thoughtful.
I flipped through the clutter in the junk drawer until I found the packet Marilyn had sent me. I unfolded the copy of Sanders' insurance policy and smoothed out the pages on the countertop. On the first page of the mortality insurance application, question number fourteen asked: 'Have you filed an insurance claim in the past three years for any of the proposed horses?' Sanders had answered no.
I got Marilyn's number from her brother and told her what I'd learned.
'And you said the company's name was…?'
'Liberty South.' I gave her the agent's name. 'What will happen now?'
'We'll contact them,' she said. 'Start an investigation. If we can't prove it was the same horse, or that he was involved in the thefts… I don't know. Maybe we can get him for intent to defraud.' She signed. 'Depends on what we find.'
Around five-thirty, I went into the lounge, snagged three sodas from the caterer, and walked over to the main dressage arena. Most of the auditors were clustered around the clinician who, according to Rachel, was short-listed for the Olympics.
Michael Burke was his name, and he was younger than I'd expected, somewhere in his late-twenties, early- thirties, and soft-spoken. He was slouched in his chair with his feet propped on an arena marker, his fingers laced together over his stomach. He'd tipped his cowboy hat low on his forehead and looked half asleep as he watched a rider guide her big chestnut across the diagonal in a leg yield.
When I scooted an empty chair up close behind Rachel's and sat down, she smiled slightly, and I knew she'd seen me. I passed the Coke over to Michael, then handed her a root beer.
'Keep the front of the horse straight,' Michael called to the rider. 'Point his nose at F and push his haunches to the outside.'
I settled back into my seat. The girl on the chestnut straightened her horse at F, then guided him through the corner.
'Better,' Michael said.
I popped the tab on my Coke and waited for the fizz to dissipate. Rachel had a yellow legal pad balanced on her thigh, and she'd been taking notes with a pink ink pen. Her handwriting was neat and precise and loopy and reminded me of love letters furtively passed in an afternoon geometry class.
As I looked up from the page, Elsa walked around the row of chairs and stopped in front of Michael. I glanced at Rachel's profile, then studied the Coke can in my hand. I took a gulp and glanced sideways at them.
Mrs. Timbrook was wearing a man's dress shirt. The sleeves were rolled up, and she'd twisted the shirttails together and knotted them above her navel. She hadn't bothered with the buttons.
Or a bra.
She leaned forward to offer Michael a food tray from the caterer, and I almost choked. I shifted in my seat and looked across the front field toward the old Ritter farm.
The scrapers had finished cutting and reshaping the land, and earlier that morning, the graders had begun smoothing gravel along the cul-de-sacs.
Elsa squeezed a chair into the space next to Michael and sat down.
I risked another glance. Michael was pretty much ignoring her, but Rachel's eyebrows were bunched together, and her lips were pursed as if she'd eaten something sour.
The close proximity was suddenly too much.
I got up and left.
In barn B, halfway down the aisle near the cut-through to the arena, I slouched onto a hay bale and leaned against a stall front. The barn was cool and dark, and as I sat there, listening to the slow, measured breaths of the horse dozing in the stall behind me, I was fairly certain I was the only one in the barn except, of course, for the horses. I finished the Coke, crumpled the can, and tossed it at the trash can positioned just inside the boarders' tack room. It bounced hollowly off the rim and rolled across the asphalt.
In the square of bright light at the end of the long aisle, Michael crossed the expanse of asphalt that shimmered under the late afternoon sun.
I pushed myself off the hay bale and picked up the can as Elsa passed the doorway. And she wasn't heading to her barn.
Chapter 17
The final ride of the evening was followed up with a party of sorts. When the last of the participants headed for their lodgings, I walked through the barns. I had just finished checking on the clinic horses when Michael and
