Claws and Effect (13 page)

25

The revolving blue light from Rick's squad car cast a sad glow over the scene. Cynthia stood with him behind the three barns at Twisted Creek Stables. The parking lot for trailers and vans was placed behind the barns, out of sight. Those renting stalls could use the space for their rigs.

Larry Johnson, who lived in town, boarded his horse here. He'd always boarded horses, declaring he wasn't a farm boy and he wasn't going to start now. He'd boarded his horses ever since he started his practice after the war.

Facedown in the grass, one bullet in his back, another having taken off part of the back of his skull, he'd been dead for hours. How long was hard to say, since the mercury was plummeting. He was frozen stiff.

He would have lain there all night if Krystal Norton, a barn worker, hadn't come to the back barn to bring up extra feed. She thought she heard a motor running behind the barn, walked outside, and sure enough, Larry's truck was parked, engine still humming. She didn't notice him until she was halfway to the truck to cut the motor.

“Krystal,” Cynthia sympathetically questioned, “what's the routine? What would Larry have done after the hunt breakfast?”

“He would drive to the first barn, unload his horse, put him in his stall, and then drive back here, unhitch his trailer, and drive home in his truck.”

“And he'd unloaded his horse?”

“Yes.” Krystal wiped her runny nose; she'd been sobbing both from shock and because she loved Dr. Johnson. Everybody did.

“Nobody noticed that he hadn't pulled out?” Cynthia led Krystal a few steps away from the body.

“No. We're all pretty busy. There's people coming and going out of this hack barn all the time.” She used the term “hack barn,” which meant a boarders' barn.

“You didn't hear a pop?”

“No.”

“Sometimes gunfire sounds like a pop. It's not quite like the movies.” Coop noticed a pair of headlights swerving into the long driveway and hoped it was the whiz kids, as she called the fingerprint man, the photographer, and the coroner.

“We crank up the radio.” Krystal hung her head, then looked at the deputy. “How can something like this happen?”

“I don't know but it's my job to find out. How long have you worked here?”

“Two years.”

“Krystal, go on back to the barn. We'll tell you when you can go home but there's no need to stand out here in the cold. This has been awful and I'm sorry.”

“Is there some—some deranged weirdo on the loose?”

“No,” Cynthia replied with authority. “What there is is a cold-blooded killer who's protecting something, but I don't know what. This isn't a crime of passion. It's not a sex crime or theft. I don't believe you are in danger. If you get worried though, you call me.”

“Okay.” Krystal wiped her nose again as she walked back into the barn.

The headlights belonged to Mim Sanburne's big-ass Bentley. She slammed the door and sprinted over to Larry Johnson. She knelt down to take him up in her arms.

The sheriff, gently but firmly, grabbed her by the shoulders. “Don't touch him, Mrs. Sanburne. You might destroy evidence.”

“Oh God.” Mim sank to her knees, putting her head in her hands. She knelt next to the body, saw the piece of skull missing, the hole in his back.

Rick motioned Coop to come on over fast.

Cynthia's long legs covered the distance between the barn and the parking lot quickly. She knelt down next to Mim. “Miz Sanburne, let me take you back to your car.”

“No. No. I want to stay with him until they take him away.”

Another pair of headlights snaked down the driveway. Miranda Hogendobber stepped out of her Ford Falcon, which still ran like a top. Behind her in Susan's Audi station wagon came Susan, Harry, and the two cats and dog.

Rick squinted into the light. “Damn.”

Coop, voice low, whispered, “They can help.” She tilted her head toward Mim.

“Help with what?” Mim cried. “He's gone! The best man God ever put on this earth is gone.”

Miranda hurried over, acknowledged Rick, and then knelt down next to Mim. She shuddered when she saw Larry's frozen body. “Mim, I'm going to take you to my place.”

“I can't leave him. I left him once, you know.”

Miranda did know. Friends since birth, they shared the secrets of their generation, secrets hardly suspected by their children or younger friends who always thought the world began with their arrival.

Taking a deep breath, Miranda put her cheek next to Mim's. “You did what you had to do, Mimsy. And your mother would have killed you.”

“I was a coward!” Mim screamed so loud she scared everyone.

Susan and Harry hung back. They wouldn't come forward until Miranda got Mim out of there.

“Make a wide circle so the humans don't notice,”
Mrs. Murphy told Pewter and Tucker.
“We need to inspect the body before other humans muck it up.”

“I'm not big on dead bodies.”
Pewter turned up her nose.

“It's not like he's been moldering out here for days,”
Murphy snapped.
“Follow me.”

The three animals walked in a semicircle, reaching the back of the two-horse trailer. They scrunched under the trailer, wriggling out by the body but careful not to move too quickly.

“Come on, Mim, you can't stay here. This can't get in the papers. I'll take care of you.” Miranda struggled to lift up Mim, who was dead weight even though she was elegant and thin. Coop gently held Mim's right arm, pulling her up along with Miranda's efforts.

“I don't care. I don't care who knows.”

“You can make that decision later,” Miranda wisely counseled.

Mim glanced over her shoulder at the fallen man. “I loved him. I don't care who knows it. I loved him. He was the only man I ever truly loved, and I threw him aside. For what?”

“Those were different times. We did what we were told.” Miranda tugged.

Mim turned to Cynthia. “I don't know if you know what love is but I did. If you do fall in love, don't lose it. Don't lose it because someone tells you he isn't a suitable husband.”

“I won't, Mrs. Sanburne.” Coop asked Miranda, “What car?”

“Hers. I'll drive. Ask Harry to bring my car home later.”

“Yes.” Coop helped fold Mim into the passenger seat. Her eyes were glassy. She looked ahead without seeing.

Miranda turned on the ignition, found the seat controls, moved the seat back, then reached over to grasp Mim's left hand. “It's going to be a long, long night, honey. I don't know how to use that thing.” She indicated the built-in telephone. “But if you call Jim or Marilyn, I'll tell them we're having a slumber party. Just leave it to me.”

Wordlessly, Mim dialed her home number, handing the phone to Miranda.

As they drove back down the drive, they passed the coroner driving in.

Tucker, nose to the ground, sniffed around the body. Rick noticed and shooed her away. The cats climbed into the two-horse trailer tack room.

Although the night was dark they could see well enough. No spent shells glittered on the floor of the trailer. A plastic bucket, red, with a rag and a brush in it sat on the floor of the small tack room. The dirty bridle still hung on the tack hook, a bar of glycerin soap on the floor.

“Guess he was going to clean his bridle and saddle before going home,”
Pewter speculated.

“I don't smell anything but the horse and Larry. No other human was in here.”
Mrs. Murphy spoke low.
“Although Tucker is better at this than we are.”

Tucker, chased off again by Rick, hopped into the tack room.
“Nothing.”

“Check in here,”
Pewter requested.

With diligence and speed, the corgi moved through the trailer.
“Nothing.”

“That's what we thought, too.”
Mrs. Murphy jumped out of the open tack room door, breaking into a run away from the parking lot and the barns.

“Where's she going?”
Tucker's ears stood straight up.

Pewter hesitated for a second.
“We'd better find out.”

Harry didn't notice her pets streaking across the paddock. She and Susan walked over to Larry's body.

“I'll kill whoever did this!” Harry started crying.

“I didn't hear that.” Rick sighed, for he, too, admired the older man.

“He brought me into this world.” Susan cried, too. “Of all people, why Larry?”

“He got too close.” Coop, not one to usually express an opinion unsolicited, buttoned up her coat.

“This is my fault.” A wave of sickening guilt washed over the sheriff. “I asked him to keep his eyes and ears open at the hospital and he did. He sure did.”

“If only we knew. Boss, he kind of said something at Harry's breakfast today. He'd had a little bit to drink, a little loud. He said—” She thought a moment to try and accurately quote him. “‘Yes,' he said, ‘I'll catch up with you tomorrow.'”

“Who heard him?” Rick was glad when Tom Yancy pulled up. He trusted the coroner absolutely.

“Everyone,” Harry answered for her. “It wasn't like he had a big secret. He didn't say it that way. He was happy, just—happy and flushed.”

“Harry, I want a list of everyone who was at your breakfast this morning,” Rick ordered.

“Yes, sir.”

“Go sit in the car to get warm and write it out. Susan, help her. A sharp pencil is better than a long memory.” He pointed toward Susan's station wagon.

The two women walked back to Susan's vehicle as Tom Yancy bent down over the body. He, too, was upset but he was professional. His old friend Dr. Larry Johnson would have expected nothing less of him.

Mrs. Murphy stopped on a medium-sized hill about a quarter of a mile from the barn.

“What?”
Tucker, whose eyes weren't as good in the dark, asked.

“Two places the killer could stand. On top of the barn. On top of this hill—or he could have been flat on his stomach.”

“How do you figure that?”
Pewter asked.

“Powder burns. No powder burns or Tucker would have mentioned it. He had to have been killed with a high-powered rifle. With a scope—easy.”

“Shooting from here would be easier than climbing on the roof of one of the barns,”
Pewter suggested.
“And the killer could hide his car.”

The three animals stared behind them where an old farm road meandered into the woods.

“It would have been simple. Hide the car, walk to here. Wait for your chance. Someone who knew his routine.”
Tucker appreciated Mrs. Murphy's logic.

“Yeah. And it's hunting season. People carry rifles, handguns. There's nothing unusual about that.”
Pewter ruffled her fur. She wasn't a kitty who enjoyed the cold.

“We'd better go back before Harry starts worrying.”
Mrs. Murphy lifted her head to the sky. The stars shone icy bright as they only do in the winter.
“Whoever this guy is, he's able to move quickly. He was at the breakfast. He heard Larry. I guarantee that.”

“Do you think it's the same person who hit Mother over the head?”
Pewter asked.

“Could be.”
Mrs. Murphy loped down the hill.

“That doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling.”
Tucker felt a sinking pit in her stomach.

26

The fire crackled in Miranda's fireplace, the Napoleon clock on the mantel ticked in counter rhythm to the flames. Mim reclined on the sofa, an afghan Miranda had knitted decades ago wrapped over her legs. A cup of hot cocoa steamed on the coffee table. Miranda sat in an overstuffed chair across from Mim.

“I hope he didn't suffer.”

“I don't think he did.” Miranda sipped from her big cup of cocoa. She enjoyed cocoa at night or warm milk and hoped the substance might soothe her friend a little bit.

“Miranda, I've been a fool.” Mim's lovely features contracted in pain.

Mim could pass for a woman in her middle forties and often did. Rich, she could afford every possible procedure to ensure that beauty. She'd grown distant and haughty with the years. She was always imperious, even as a child. Giving orders was the breath of life to Mim. She had to be in the center of everything and those who knew and loved her accepted it. Others loathed it. The people jockeying for power in their groups, the developer ready to rip through the countryside, the errant politician, promising one thing and delivering another or nothing, Mim was anathema to them.

Her relationship with her daughter alternated between adversarial and cordial, depending on the day, for Mim was not an effusive mother. Her relationship with her son, married and living in New York City, had transformed from adulation to fury to coldness to gradual acceptance of him. The fury erupted because he married an African-American model and that just wasn't done by people of Mim's generation. But Stafford displayed that independence of spirit exhibited and prized by his mother. Over time and with the help of Mary Minor Haristeen, a friend to Stafford, Mim confronted her own racism and laid it to rest.

Her aunt, Tally Urquhart, flying along in her nineties, said to Mim constantly, “Change is life.” Sometimes Mim understood and sometimes she didn't. Usually she thought change involved other people, not herself.

“You haven't been a fool. You've done a lot of good in this life,” Miranda truthfully told her.

Mim looked at her directly, light eyes bright. “But have I been good to myself? I want for nothing. I suppose in that way I've been good to myself but in other ways, I've treated myself harshly. I've suppressed things, I've put off others, I've throttled my deepest emotions.” She patted a tear away with an embroidered linen handkerchief. “And now he's gone. I can never make it up to him.”

The years allowed Miranda to be brutally direct. “Would you? He was in his seventies. Would you?”

Mim cried anew. “Oh, I wish I could say yes. I wish I had done a lot of things. Why didn't you tell me?”

“Tell you? Mim, no one can tell you anything. You tell us.”

“But you know me, Miranda. You know how I am.”

“It's been a long road, hasn't it? Long and full of surprises.” She breathed in deeply. “If it was meant to be, it was meant to be. You and Larry.” She gazed into the fire for a moment. “What a long time ago that was. You were beautiful. I envied you, your beauty. Never the money. Just the beauty. And he was handsome in his naval uniform.”

“Somewhere along the way we grew old.” Mim dropped a bejeweled hand on her breast. “I'm not quite sure how.” She sat up. “Miranda, I will find who killed Larry. I will pursue him to the ends of the earth like the harpies pursued Orestes. With God as my witness, I swear it.”

“The Lord will extract His vengeance. You go about your business, Mimsy. Whoever did this wouldn't stop at killing you either. They hit Harry on the head.”

“Yes, her story sounded fishy.”

Miranda shut her eyes. It had popped out of her mouth, and after she'd promised Harry not to tell. “Oh, me. Well, the cat's out of the bag. Harry snooped in the basement of the hospital and someone cracked her on the noggin. It's supposed to be a secret and I, well, you can keep a secret—obviously.”

“Funny, isn't it? We live cheek by jowl, everyone knows everyone in Crozet, and yet each of us carries secrets—sometimes to the grave.”

“People say we should be honest, we should tell the truth, but they aren't ready to hear it,” Miranda sagely noted.

“Mother certainly wasn't,” Mim simply said.

“Well, dear, Jim Sanburne was quite a payback.”

A slight smile played over Mim's lips. “Damn near killed her. Aunt Tally understood but then Aunt Tally understands more than the rest of us. She keeps reminding me, too.”

“Why
did
you marry Jim?”

“He was big, handsome, a take-charge guy. An up-and-comer as Dad would say. Of course, he came from the lower orders. That killed Mother but by then I'd learned.”

“What?”

“I'd learned to just go ahead. The hell with everybody. I knew she wasn't going to cut me out of the will.”

“But did you love him?”

A long, long silence transpired; then Mim leaned back. “I wanted to be in love. I wanted, well, I wanted the things you want when you're young. I never loved Jim the way I loved Larry. He's a different sort of man. You know, those early years I'd see Larry driving to work at the hospital, driving back to his private practice, at the country club with Bella. At first the sight of him hurt me because I was wrong. I knew I was wrong. But he always said he forgave me. I was young. I wasn't quite twenty, you know, when I fell in love with Larry. He was so kind. I think a little part of me died when he got married but I understood. And—” She opened her hands as though they might have contained treasure. “What could I do?”

“Love never dies. The people die but love is eternal. I believe that with all my heart and soul. And I believe God gives us chances to love again.”

“If you envy me my looks, I envy you your faith.”

“You can't reason your way to faith, Mim. You just open your heart.”

“As we both know, I haven't been too good at that. I sometimes wonder if I would have been a more loving woman had I rebelled earlier against my family and married Larry. I think I would have. I closed off. I became guarded. I lost myself along the way. Now I've lost him. You see, even though we weren't lovers anymore, even though we lived separate lives, I knew he was there. I knew he was there.” She cried harder now. “Oh, Miranda, I loved him so.”

Miranda rose from her chair to sit on the edge of the sofa. She took Mim's hand in both of hers. “Mimsy, he knew you loved him.”

“In time, Jim knew, too. I think that's why he redefined the word ‘unfaithful'—well, that and the fact that he wearied of me bossing him around. It's rather difficult for a man when the wife has all the money. I think it's difficult in reverse, too, but the culture supports it, plus we've been raised to be simpletons. Really.” Mim's modulated voice wavered. “That, too, was one of the things I loved about Larry. He respected my mind.”

“It's like that Amish saying, ‘We grow too soon old and too late smart.'” Miranda smiled. “But Jim grew out of it or he grew old. I don't know which.”

“Breast cancer. Scared both of us. I believe that's when Jim came back to me, realized he loved me and maybe we'd both been foolish. Well, that's all behind me. My cancer hasn't recurred in five years' time nor has Jim's unfaithfulness.” She smiled slightly. She sighed. “What did Jim say when you spoke to him? I don't remember. I know you told me but I don't even remember you driving me here.”

“He said to call him if you needed him. He was going straight to Twisted Creek Stables.” She let go of Mim's hand, reached over to the coffee table, and brought up Mim's cup. “This really will make you feel a little better.”

Mim drank, handed the cup back to Miranda. “Thank you.”

“I wouldn't want to be in Sheriff Shaw's shoes right now.”

“I mistakenly assumed this had nothing to do with us.” She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “When Hank Brevard was found with a slit throat I thought it was brutal, but Hank lacked the fine art of endearing himself to others. That someone would finally kill him didn't seem too far-fetched. One had only to find the reason. But now—everything's different now.”

“Yes.” Miranda nodded.

“I think of death as an affront. I know you don't. You think you'll join up with Jesus. I hope you're right.”

“‘For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God; so turn and live.' Ezekiel, chapter eighteen, verse thirty-two. Turn and live,” Miranda emphasized.

“You've changed, too, Miranda.”

“I know. After George's death the church was my comfort. Perhaps I tried too strenuously to comfort others.” A smile played on her lips. “It all takes time.”

“And Tracy.” Mim mentioned Miranda's high-school boyfriend, who had returned to her life but was currently in Hawaii selling his home.

“I feel alive again. And you will, too. We need to think of something to do to honor Larry, something he would have loved.”

“I thought I'd establish a scholarship at the University of Virginia Medical School in his name—for family practice.”

“Jim?”

“He'll like the idea. Jim's not mean-spirited.”

“I know that.” Miranda smiled. “Do you think you could ever talk to him about those years?”

Mim shook her head no. “Why? You know, Miranda, I believe there are some things best left unsaid in a marriage. And I think every woman knows that.”

“Mim, I think every man knows that, too.”

“I always think they know less than we do, most of them anyway.”

“Don't fool yourself.” Miranda got up and threw another log on the fire. “More cocoa?”

“No.”

“Do you think you can sleep? The spare bedroom is toasty.”

“I think I can.” Mim threw off the afghan and stood up. “I take you for granted, Miranda. I think I've taken many people for granted. You're a good friend to me. Better than I am to you.”

“I don't think like that, Mim. There's only love. You do for the people you love.”

“Well.” This was hard for Mim. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

The old friends embraced. Miranda led Mim to the spare bedroom.

“Miranda, whoever killed Larry had no conscience. That's the real danger.”