Breeding Ground

BREEDING GROUND

by

Sally Wright

Copyright © 2013 Sally Wright
All rights reserved.

Print Edition ISBN: 978-0-9827801-4-5

eBook editions by eBooks by Barb for
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Tyler Babcock – artist, childhood friend of Alice Franklin

Sandy Babcock – Tyler's wife

Frankie D'Amato – stallion groom at Mercer Tate's farm

Alice Franklin – artist, HR/PR Director, Blue Grass Horse Vans

Booker (Charles) Franklin – mechanical engineer, founder, Blue Grass Horse Vans

Richard Franklin – son of Alice and Booker, Office Manager, Blue Grass Horse Vans

Spencer Franklin – son of Alice and Booker, Production Manager, Blue Grass Horse Vans

Jack Freeman – former WWII OSS agent, friend of Tom Grant

Jo (Josie) Grant – architect, owner of Rolling Ridge Farm, sister of Tom Grant

Tom Grant – former WWII OSS operative, mechanical engineer, brother of Jo Grant

Bob Harrison – microbiologist, founder, Equine Pharmaceuticals

Brad Harrison – Bob's son, Accounting Manager, Equine Pharmaceuticals

Rachel Harrison – Bob's wife, Brad's mother

Peggy James – Alice Franklin's secretary, Blue Grass Horse Vans

Buddy Jones – farm hand on Jo Grant's broodmare farm

Dwayne Kruse – ex-husband of Tara, father of Giselle Kruse

Giselle (Gigi) Kruse – daughter of Tara and Dwayne Kruse

Tara Wilson Kruse – mother of Giselle, Accounts Receivable, Blue Grass Horse Vans

Alan Munro – former WWII OSS operative, chemical engineer, friend of Tom Grant, works at Equine Pharmaceuticals

Earl Peabody – Woodford County Sheriff

Betsy Seton – nurse, riding instructor, Tara Kruse's aunt

Charlie Smalls – stallion groom at Claiborne Farm

Mercer Tate – owner of prestigious Thoroughbred breeding farm

Mary Treeter – Alice Franklin's friend, neighbor, cleaning lady

Toss Watkins – Jo Grant's uncle, manager of Jo's broodmare farm

Michael Westlake – mechanical engineer at Blue Grass Horse Vans

Iris Westlake – Michael's mother

Bea Westlake – Michael's sister

Grace Willoughby – widow of minister in Louisville, Kentucky

“I KNOW WHAT YOU DID

I WILL MAKE YOU PAY”

I
got that message in the mail, in words cut out of magazines, after a friend was murdered. I had good reason to be afraid that that threat was related, and that it came from the killer. But there's a lot I have to explain first before I say more about it.

I've written the record of what happened – the account, of sorts, that follows. But I didn't want to say “I” all the time, and explain how I talked to this one, and talked to another, and pieced it all together after the fact. I decided to write it down as though it were a novel, in the order it all happened, and write it from the outside, so I'm being sandwiched in just like any other character.

That's not to say I consider myself an accomplished writer. I'm an architect by training, and it's been my career all along, but they say writers and architects have the same kind of brains. And I think I agree with that, especially looking back now, after all these years. I wanted to be a writer when I was a little child, and I worked at it when I was young, but didn't pick it up again until I started a journal after my brother died, when all this business began.

Now I can see, with everything that's followed since, in all these lives, and the ones they touched, that there's more than one story from Lexington, Kentucky that ought to get told before I die.

Everyday folks are interesting. At least I find that, the longer I live. What they learn from and what they can't see, with the suffering they go through, and the misery they make – what comes to them, and what they cause; and the love that wins out, and the beauty they ignore; the wonder some dwell in too, and the weakness others wallow around in; the kindness and strength in some that makes you step back. Maybe all of that in one, in a lifetime. Maybe in me too.

And the horses we've got here, I've got to tell about them. The ones that run our lives, and get planned and pampered and brutalized by us too, for the best and the strangest and the worst of reasons.

I've been pondering it all for a lifetime and more, and I had to write it down.

Jo Grant Munro

August 8, 1995

Rolling Ridge Farm

McCowans Ferry Road

Versailles, Kentucky

Saturday, March 17, 1962

I
ce. In Virginia. An inch thick on everything it hit, had made Jo Grant's pickup slither and slide the twelve miles of hills and hollows west from Middleburg to her brother Tom's farmhouse on the highest hill she'd faced yet.

Trees and power lines had come down all around her, turning the roads into obstacle courses that took two hours to cross. And by the time she'd turned into the lane that led to Tom's house, if she'd thought she could've walked up the hill, she would've left the truck where it was, stuck off to one side.

When she'd finally flogged it to the top of the drive, inching and crawling and sliding back down – when she'd turned the engine off in front of Tom's door – Jo's whole body was rigid, and her jaws felt soldered together. Ice had melted on her chin and her throat, and her face was raw from sticking it out the window, straining to see what she couldn't.

She sat there for half a minute, shivering in her seat, listening to sleet peck at ice-covered metal, telling herself to breathe again, and stop thinking about Tom.

It wasn't the ice, or the digging herself out, or hauling branches out of the road that had left Jo Grant sitting stunned in the dark. She'd grown up on the edge of Lexington, Kentucky where ice storms roll through like blizzards in Vermont. It was death again, taking its toll, where and when it shouldn't.

When she looked back on that Saturday later, when she saw how what came next changed her life – the lives of too many others too, innocent or not – her loss nearly became a footnote to what walked in from Tom's war, and what she saw in families touched and torn by murder.

But that night, frozen in her truck, two tears slid slowly toward Jo's chin, and she shoved them away in disgust. She hadn't cried when Tom's landlord had called and told her Tom had died. She hadn't whimpered at his memorial service in a Middleburg church that morning. She'd sat dry-eyed at his lawyer's in Middleburg that afternoon. And she didn't intend to start crying now. Not till she'd packed Tom's things in her pickup, and driven his horses home.

It was a good thing she'd gotten them in the barn at noon before she'd left to meet the lawyer. The sky in the west had been iffy then, and if she'd left them out in an ice storm they could've broken a leg or two, or done something else as deadly.

They still weren't settled for the night. They should've been fed and watered by six, and it was pushing eight already. So she grabbed the papers from the lawyer, and the cardboard box from the safety deposit box Tom had taken in both their names, and picked her way across ice-glazed bricks to Tommy's front door – the black door in the old brick farmhouse he'd rented till he'd been killed.

She still couldn't take it in. Tommy. The invincible. Killed on a motorcycle, after teaching motorcycle safety since he was a kid. The pole-vaulter who'd moved like a panther. Hit by a truck that turned left right into him, breaking every bone in his body against a fieldstone wall.

Jo shook her head as she unlocked the door, because of the obvious irony. That Tommy could fight through World War II and make it home unscathed, only to die because a ninety-year-old farmer couldn't see his Triumph.

But Tommy put himself in the crosshairs. Choosing dangerous addictions. Motorcycles. Horses. Skydiving on his birthdays. Even in the work he'd done, Tommy'd chased disaster, taking engineering jobs in all the world's worst trouble spots.

Jo told herself she wasn't being fair. That once he'd bought Sam, his six-year-old gelding, and rented the farmhouse here, Tom had worked consistently in the U.S. for a company near Fairfax. Building only-God-knew-what for some arm of the military. Probably. Though no matter how she'd asked him, Tommy never had said.

But why did he take more and more risks, once he got home from the war?
Jo Grant asked herself that for the umpteenth time that week, as she set Tom's things on the chair in his cold front hall.

The lights went on, which surprised her, with the farm as far off the road as it was. It made her change fast into jeans and boots, because if the power did go off, the well pumps wouldn't work, and she had to water the horses while she still could.

Bundles of contradictions, horses. Strong but fragile. Big but spooky. Needing constant care.

Jo, on the other hand, needed to get away from them. And once she got Tom's two to Lexington, where her uncle would take them while she looked for a buyer, she'd do exactly that. Get away from nursing anything – equine or human.

She filled the kitchen sink with water in case she needed it later, and rolled up the sleeves of Tom's winter barn coat, cramming candles in its pockets too, before she started toward the barn in the back, holding on to the clothes line that stretched halfway across.

She fell once, next to the barn door. And then heard, as she felt for the light switch, what she'd dreaded all her life – a horse thrashing around in a stall, breathing hard and fast.

She gritted her teeth before the lights went on, then saw what she expected – a sweat-covered horse, eyes white-edged and panicked, rolling on his back in his stall.

Sam, the gelding Tom had really cared about, the half-Thoroughbred, half-quarter-horse cross – Sam was drenched and steaming, his chestnut coat dark and slick and flecked with white foamy sweat. He rolled onto his stomach when he saw Jo, his back legs tucked toward the side, his forelegs stretched straight in front to push him up on his feet.

His ears hung low and limp. His head drooped toward his knees. His soft brown eyes were wide and frightened as he started circling his stall again, pain driving him hard.

Jo said, “Hey, Sam,” as she reached out a hand and let him sniff her fingers. “You're a good boy. And I'm sorry you hurt.”

Sam glanced around at her, having stood still for a second, quivering and exhausted, his rear-end toward the door now, his head in a back corner.

“You'll be alright. I'm going to help, okay?” Jo knew he didn't understand that, but he needed to hear a calm quiet voice. He needed her to move slowly too, and as though she knew what she was doing.

She unlatched the half-door to his stall while she talked, and fastened it behind her, then walked around to stand on his left and slide a hand down his neck.

Sam turned his head and sniffed Tom's barn coat, then smelled Jo's hand again, while Maggie, the pregnant mare across the aisle-way, shuffled her feet and nickered, with her head over her door.

“I'll feed you in a minute, Maggie. I've gotta look after Sam.”

Jo wasn't an absolute stranger. She'd taken care of them the last six days, which helped her see the difference when she looked at the bedding in the stall. Sam had been rolling and circling his stall long enough that what manure there was had been pulverized and scattered. And there hadn't been much to begin with – which was not a good sign.

Jo slid her right hand down Sam's withers, and draped that arm across his back, then pressed her right ear against his side so she could hear his gut.

What she heard was what she'd been afraid of.

Absolutely nothing. Sam was colicking. His intestines had shut down, and nothing was moving through.

The worse case would be a torsion, a twisted intestine that ties itself off. A few vets had brand new clinics that could do colic surgery, but even if there was one near Middleburg, which she doubted, she couldn't put Sam in a trailer. Not on roads like those.

Impacted food usually causes colic. Dry hay and stemmy winter grass could've gotten packed solid and stopped the gut from working, especially since Sam hadn't drunk much water to keep everything moving. For the two buckets Jo had filled at one were still almost full.

Rolling could've made him worse too, twisting intestines that hadn't been before. And if he did have a twisted gut, the best thing Jo could do was put him down right away. The problem was that deciding the cause wouldn't be easy for a vet.

Walking can make colic feel better, and Sam was circling again, while Jo talked quietly and patted his flank when it swung past, as she opened his stall door.

Sam needed a vet. And Jo scanned the list of numbers tacked to the tack room wall. The vet's was there near the top, but when Jo grabbed the wall phone Tom had rigged above the feed bin, the phone line was dead.