'I expect you're right.'
'Damn straight. But I'm not going to keep shoving it in Donna's face. She feels like a first-class fool as it is. Valerie played her – got between us and messed in something that was none of her business. It was deliberate. Both of us can see it now, and Donna still gets spitting mad about it.'
From the tone of her voice it was apparent Peggy was not in a forgiving mood, either. 'Isn't she kind of upset with Greg, too, because he let her make the investment?'
'Not really. It was Valerie's fault.'
'But I'd think Greg would be looking out for his clients' best interest.'
'Greg isn't aggressive, which is why Donna chose to do business with him in the first place. He didn't know Valerie was pitting us against each other, so when Donna insisted, I guess he figured he'd just do what she asked.'
I didn't say what I was thinking – that Greg was a financial advisor, and was supposed to be keeping his clients from making mistakes like throwing their entire retirement fund into something that was high risk. I made sympathetic noises and eased Peggy into taking about her plans to go back to school in the fall, and about Donna's softball team. She was her team's power hitter, and was getting ready for an away game in Mount Vernon the next evening. I told her I would finish their taxes and have them submitted electronically by the end of the day.
I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes. Valerie wasn't leaving me alone. She was interfering in my work and with my clients. The police were lining up a case against me, her father was poised to wreak his own special havoc, and I was getting visits at home from people who had an ax to grind. Valerie was more distressing to me dead than she'd been alive. To simply defend myself was no longer enough. That was getting me nowhere. Mr. Green suggested I sit back and wait. Wait for what?
I had far better ways to spend my time. I was in a position to look into a part of Valerie's life the police had no expertise in: the habits of a dressage rider. There was a chance I could unearth something to pass along to Thurman. This investigation needed to end. I shut down the computer and went to my bedroom to change out of yesterday's clothes.
I was certain Blackie had been horse-napped by mistake, despite the drive-through holes in my theory. If Valerie had been expecting Nachtfeder to be delivered to her farm, not Blackie, maybe something existed that would prove my hunch. But I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out why Valerie would move her own horse to her farm, much less Blackie. That would mean deliberately putting hoof prints in her perfect pastures, and I'd seen how she reacted to a dog trotting through the field at the dressage club's pasture-management meeting.
It was conceivable the police wouldn't know if the barn was ready to house her horse. But I would. I had plenty of time before my appointment with Detective Thurman. It would be easy to check out Valerie's barn. With luck I'd have something useful to tell him. I grabbed my purse and headed for my car.
I spent the fifteen minutes it took me to get to Carpenter Road to do some heavy thinking. Could she have gotten a last minute invitation to a clinic? Was there some event going on she had decided to attend? There might be information of that sort in the barn or in her house. The most useful course of action would be to look through her mail and e-mail to see if something had come up. Crap. That meant I'd have to search her house. I would probably find a house key in the tack room. Everyone kept a house key in their tack room. Everyone I knew, anyway.
I made my way up the long twisting driveway, past the big Victorian house, and parked at the barn. It wasn't pouring rain like it had been earlier, but it was cold and misting and unpleasant. At least I'd be inside. I hurried to the barn and slid the door open enough to walk through. After groping around I found the light switches and flipped them on. I was most definitely intruding, and the guilt made me cautious, even though no one else was there.
I'd never been inside Valerie's barn. Although the outside was fussy and silly for its purpose, I figured the interior would show more attention to functionality. I was wrong. The six oversized stalls, although nice, had expensive black enamel and brass grill-work on the doors and fronts. The aisle was set with cobblestone, like what you'd find in the driveways of some expensive homes. Pretty, but impractical unless you liked to spend your time sweeping and cleaning. Nachtfeder's name, in flowing script, was on a thick brass plate on a stall door. The stall should have been bedded if Valerie was expecting him, but except for the pristine stall mats, it was empty.
I checked the other stalls. Nothing. I could tell which one Blackie had occupied on Sunday, courtesy of Delores, because dirty hoof prints marred the surface of the otherwise unused black mats. I saw no buckets for grain or water in any of the stalls.
I tried the door knob on what I assumed was the tack room, although it was at the other end of the barn from the narrow grooming stall. The door swung open to an empty room. There were paneled walls, a slate floor, and a crystal chandelier, but not a single hook to hang a halter on, much less keys.
I shook my head in disgust at the decor. Maybe I'd have better luck in the feed room. There had to be supplies and special supplements Valerie used for her horse, like glucosamine and MSM. I recalled she used those and something with biotin in it, too, for Nachtfeder's feet. She wouldn't have skipped his supplements. She was too obsessive about them.
A smaller room across the aisle, although more practically finished, was similarly vacant. It contained no shelves, feed bins, or feed of any kind. There wasn't even a sign of mice. A ladder led up to the hay loft and I climbed up far enough to poke my head through the access door. I could see we had a theme going here. Not only was there no hay, but there never had been. In the loft everything looked as though the carpenters had just left.
Okay, I could safely say she was not expecting to house a horse in her barn. It wasn't necessary to have a horse inside when you had lush pastures. I went outside in the drizzle. I knew she had groundskeepers who regularly mowed the pastures. And because she had no resident livestock, the grass grew evenly throughout, including in front of the gates.
There were water troughs positioned near the gates in each of the three pastures, but none had water in them. I doubted they ever had. The plugs had been removed from the bottoms, standard practice to keep rainwater from collecting and creating a mosquito-friendly environment. The knowledge Blackie had spent an entire night and half the morning there without access to water angered me. He could have easily colicked. As particular as I knew Valerie was about her own horse, water was certainly not something she would have overlooked. She was famous, or at least supremely annoying, for her penchant of pitching a fit when her exact instructions weren't followed-and she always double checked.
I needed to look around some more. I'd whittled my mental list down to the bare essentials, and it wasn't looking good for any of the remaining items. If I found anything, no matter how small, I'd have to be careful how I got the information to Thurman so I didn't get myself into more trouble. Just thinking about it made my hands sweat.
I found the water spigots near the barn. There were no hoses attached. I went back to the feed room and rechecked. No buckets, no hoses. Unless Valerie stored her equipment elsewhere, she definitely had not been planning to house a horse here. What the hell was going on? I had to curb my impatience, take this one item at a time, gather information and then piece it together. But it didn't make the number of unanswered questions any less frustrating.
The mist turned to rain again, so I hurried to the other outbuildings (also built to complement the house, but not as elaborate as the barn) to avoid getting soaked. I had about as much luck with keeping dry as finding any horse-keeping supplies. One building held the tractor and mowing equipment as well as the horse trailer and truck. The other held miscellaneous gardening paraphernalia. With water dripping off my hair and into my eyes, I searched the garden shed. No horse stuff. Then, as I reached for the switch to turn off the lights a glint of metal caught my eye. A ring with a handful of keys hung on a nail in a recess by the door. One of them had to be for the house. I no longer had an excuse not to search there. Before I could talk myself out of it, I grabbed the whole set and jogged, head down, through the rain-turned-to-downpour to the back door of the three story Victorian.
Luckily for me the porch off the back door was covered. The rain pelted on the roof like lead shot as I huddled, wet and shivering, over the wad of keys, trying to decide which might fit. The keys to the tractor and trailer were obvious, but the others, and there were quite a few, all looked as if they might belong to the house.
The third key I tried met with unexpected results – a hand on my shoulder.
I screamed and spun. Frederick Parsons's driver loomed over me. He was dressed in black and, despite the rain, wore dark glasses on a face as expressionless as when I encountered him on my own front porch. I thought I was going to pass out.
