TheCart Before the Corpse Read online

  “I don’t want to either.” I dropped to my knees. I don’t pray much, but I did say a silent prayer that wherever Hiram had wound up, he’d have horses to drive and ride. For Hiram and me there could be no paradise without horses.

  Like father, like daughter. I wanted to cry, but my eyes stayed hot and dry. “I promise I’ll fix this,” I whispered.

  Peggy’s fingers clutched my shoulder. “No, we’ll fix this.”

  *

  After Peggy drove away, I found Jacob Yoder lounging on a bale of hay outside the new stable. He’d already let the animals back into the pasture, but I saw no sign that he’d mucked their stalls. Maybe he was expecting me to do it.

  When he saw me, he stood up with a sigh that started somewhere around his dirty work boots.

  “I’m meeting the sheriff in Bigelow shortly,” I said. “I’ll be back after that. I’ll pick up a couple of cheeseburgers and fries on my way. We can eat and talk. Okay with you?”

  “Triple cheeseburger. Big fries, big Coke,” he said. No ‘thank you’ or ‘nice of you to think of me’ and certainly no offer to pay his share.

  “Fine.” I turned away.

  “Hey,” he called after me.

  “Yes?”

  “You keeping me on or what?”

  I longed to tell him to get his mangy ass off the property, but that would be counter-productive. Besides, there was a chance he either had killed my father himself or knew who did. I didn’t want him disappearing on me. I could at least give him a chance to prove Hiram was right about him.

  “Do you live on the place?” I asked as I turned back to him.

  “Yonder across the pasture in the trees. Hiram and me did up an old trailer so it’s just about fit to live in. It’s over there where it is not so hot.”

  “What do you do for water and plumbing?”

  “Bathroom and shower in the stable. Reservoir on the trailer for water. Drive it across the pasture in the back of my truck.”

  “I see. That means Hiram used you as a caretaker as well as a . . . ” What? Groom? Handyman? Stockman? I had a suspicion that whatever I called him wouldn’t sit well with him.

  “Yes. We have worked long and hard to fence, build the arena and complete the inside of the stable. Then Hiram goes and gets . . . dies. Not a right thing.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Will you sell or stay?”

  “I haven’t had time to give any thought to what will happen, but for the moment, consider that nothing will change. Probating wills takes a long time.” That was assuming that I was Hiram’s heir and executrix. Maybe his will was what the burglar had been after last night. If so, he hadn’t found it. I knew from a couple of Hiram’s emails to me that his will was with his lawyer unless he’d moved it recently.

  Unless he’d changed his mind and left everything to Peggy or Jacob, the whole shebang (and the entire headache) was mine. Including the bills and mortgage payment.

  “I am paid every other Friday. I do not stay Friday night or Saturday here. I return late Sunday,” Jacob said.

  I nodded. I’d check to see if Peggy agreed with that, but for the moment, I had to accept what he said.

  As I walked off again, he said to my back, “That woman she locked the workshop back when she left?”

  Actually, I had padlocked it behind Peggy and me and kept the key. No sense in letting him know I had the means to open it, so I simply nodded.

  “I might need tools.”

  “I see all the equipment you’ll need to muck stalls and sweep the aisle. I should be back before you do much more.” If he did that.

  I left him grumbling. There had to be a very good reason for Hiram to hire this man as his only helper and to put up with him for six months. I wondered if Peggy knew any of the background of that ‘obligation’ Hiram had talked about.

  Thirty minutes later I walked into the sheriff’s office in Bigelow.

  Sheriff Campbell was nothing like the cliché southern small town sheriff. He was shorter than I am, thinner than I am, shaven bald and as smartly tailored as a South American dictator. He wouldn’t need pepper spray. All he had to do was aim the reflection from that shiny badge in a perp’s eyes to blind him for life.

  I had fed horses a couple of hours ago, but I was cleaner than most working farmers. When I walked into his office, he stood, wrinkled his nose almost imperceptibly, and shook my hand. I don’t know what he’d been expecting, but I wasn’t it.

  “I am sorry for your loss, little lady,” he said.

  Nobody’s called me that since my mother entered me in a pony lead line class when I was three. I wore a pink tutu, howled my head off and won sixth place. I liked the pony. It was the tutu I couldn’t stand.

  I managed a weak smile. “You said you wanted to talk to me? Have me sign some paperwork?”

  “First off, you got any identification? Purely a formality.”

  I pulled out my Kentucky driver’s license. I did not show him the carry permit for the pistol I keep in the center console of my truck. I drive horse vans long distances by myself. Even if I didn’t need protection, I have to be able to put a horse out of its misery if it’s hurt in an accident on the highway. I know that’s an unpalatable thing to think about, but it’s a fact of life. Part of the unspoken contract we have with the animals in our charge is not to allow them to suffer needlessly. So far I’ve never had to do it and I pray I never do.

  “All right, Ms Abbott. Seems you’re who you say you are. Terrible accident.”

  “I’d like copies of the police and medical examiner’s reports, please.”

  He blinked and humphed. “Now, you don’t want to do that. You need to remember your daddy the way he was.”

  “I need to know what happened to him more.”

  “Old man out there on a Saturday morning working all alone. Tire fell on him. Iron, antique thing. Heavy. Freak accident.”

  “In Kentucky the reports of accidental deaths are public records. I assume that’s true in Georgia. So may I have copies please? I’ll be happy to wait while someone runs them off for me.”

  His ears had turned an amazing shade of puce, but he was still playing nice with me. “Ordinarily, takes a week or so for the records to be available for request.”

  I put on my most charming and helpless smile. I can do charming when I set my mind to it. “But computers can do it much faster, can’t they? I’m sure you realize I need to take care of things here to get back to my job.” Which I’d probably been fired from after the accident on Sunday, but he didn’t need to know that either. I think it was the prospect of getting rid of me that clinched it.

  He picked up his desk phone and requested copies of all the reports. “The desk’ll have some paperwork for you to sign so we can release the body. You decided which funeral home you want to pick it up?”

  Peggy had prepared me for this and had already called the Mossy Creek Funeral Home, the mortuary she recommended. I still didn’t know what I would do about a memorial service, but I wanted my father’s body out of that morgue as soon as possible.

  “She’s already alerted the funeral home. Thank you so much, Sheriff,” I simpered. “I’ll wait for the papers outside. I know you’re just overwhelmed with fighting crime.” I shook his hand and left while he was still wondering whether I’d just given him a shot or not.

  *

  The staple food of horse show people is cold cheeseburgers with soggy French Fries. These looked better than most. I found Jacob leaning against the hood of Hiram’s truck waiting for me. In the pasture, I could see the horses grazing, but had no idea whether he’d mucked their stalls or not. He might have wanted to eat before I chewed him out.

  I handed him his lunch bag and a soda and walked past him into the shadowy stable out of the sun and sat on a bale of hay. Jacob followed and sat on the bale two down. Didn’t want to sit too close to me, no doubt.

  I could hear the click of false teeth as he munched. He didn’t look that old, but he also didn’t look like a man for
whom good dental hygiene had been a priority.

  “So, Jacob, tell me about you,” I said.

  He cut his eyes at me. “Who talked to you?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Hiram write you about me?”

  “He mentioned he had only one man working with him full time until he got more business. I assume that was you.”

  “That all?” His shoulders visibly relaxed. Mine tightened.

  “What should he have told me?”

  Chomp, click, chomp, click, chomp, click went his teeth for more than a full minute, then he slurped his soda and burped. A significant burp. “I have no reason not to say. I have been inside the last few years.”

  “Inside what?”

  “Inside. Prison.”

  “Oh.” So I was dining al fresco with a felon.

  “I am on parole. Must have a job and place to live before they parole you. I wrote Hiram. He hired me and put me up in the trailer. It was here when he bought this place.” He made an unpleasant noise in his throat. I held my breath. I don’t like to watch people spit. “We cleaned it up. Still not much.”

  “That was nice of him.”

  He spun so fast his soda slopped out of the can and onto the bale of hay. “Nice? No nice about it. He owed me. Owed me more than working me like a field hand and letting me live in that rusted trailer.” Those rheumy, hung-over beet eyes blazed like lasers.

  I shoved my back against the side of the stall. No need to look any further for someone who wanted to kill Hiram. I dug my hands into the pocket of my jeans and shoved my truck keys between my knuckles. If he came at me, I’d go for his eyes and run like hell back to my truck and my pistol. “Why did he owe you?” I said as quietly as I could. I used the same gentle tone I’d used on Jethro the stallion and for much the same reason.

  His lips drew back from those shiny teeth. Then his whole body let go, and suddenly he was a thin old drunk with a hangover again. “Never you mind.” He stood up, crushed the can, dropped it into the sack I’d given him, and walked off. “You wish to see this place?”

  We spent the next hour and a half going over the stable. Inside the shiny new metal building, everything was utilitarian, but not fancy. Four sets of harness hung in the tack room and feed room beside cabinets for grooming and medicating supplies. A washer, dryer and water heater took up the far side.

  A wash rack took up twelve feet in the center of the left aisle across from the tack room. At the back stood four carriages: a metal breaking cart, two Meadowbrook carts, one for a big horse, the other for a large pony or medium horse, and finally a four-wheeled Phaeton set up with a singletree to hitch a pair.

  No cart small enough for Don Qui, so obviously he hadn’t yet been taught to drive. Or ever would be, if it were up to me.

  Jacob opened a door across from the feed room and stood back for me to go first. “Hiram called this the clients’ lounge,” Jacob said. “Said you could fix it up.”

  The room was twenty feet square with wood tongue and groove oak paneling on the walls and scored and dark stained concrete on the floor. No furniture, no curtains at the wide windows, no pictures on the walls, but a couple of stacks of framed photos leaning against the wall beside the door. I began to paw through them, but the first one stopped me. Hiram sat on the box of an elegant park drag behind a pair of beautifully turned-out bay geldings. He was waving a blue ribbon and laughing.

  He looked so happy. And so old.

  I set that picture aside and looked through the others. Hiram and his clients driving their horses in competition. Hiram driving hell-for-leather around marathon courses behind a four-in-hand or pair. Hiram as navigator or groom beside rich owners in top hats, or in the case of the lady clients, elaborate hats and fancy jackets. With each succeeding year, his hair grew grayer, the creases on his leathery face deeper, his eyes a paler blue. But that grin of exultation when he won never dimmed.

  During all those years before he retired, did he ever wish that I were on the box beside him spurring him on? In the long nights he slept in motels and other people’s houses, did he wish he still had a wife and daughter to come home to?

  Or had he only grown lonesome after he retired and left the limelight to move down here?

  “Hiram said you could hang the pictures,” Jacob said. “Maybe find some used furniture cheap.”

  I turned away so he wouldn’t see me gulp and choke back tears. Such a little thing, but something he’d been looking forward to sharing with me, the daughter he’d not been around to raise. The daughter who had returned the favor once I got old enough not to be around him.

  The timing, as usual in my life, sucked. God must have taken Irony 101 in some celestial college and indulged Himself in it whenever He needed a break from running the universe.

  “Where are his trophies?” I asked. His trophies were like most people’s photo albums. I could trace his life in the names and dates of driving events etched on them. Hiram had managed to spend his life doing what he loved to do, and well enough to make not only a living, but a reputation. Of course, he’d also enjoyed another sort of reputation. He did like the ladies as much as they liked him.

  The only ladies he hadn’t paid enough attention to were my mother and me. But I’d never stopped loving him, although he probably thought I had. Maybe if I had forgiven Hiram sooner for his failures as a husband and father, I might have forgiven Vic for his. Eventually, I might even have forgiven myself.

  Maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t have turned into a woman who couldn’t trust any creature that walked on two legs.

  “I have never seen trophies here. Are they at his place in town?” Jacob asked.

  I hadn’t seen them. Surely Peggy would have noticed if they’d been stolen in the burglary. Could he have taken a storage locker somewhere? Hiram had enough silver cups, bowls and trays to outfit a banquet at Buckingham Palace. Plus medals, bronze statues of carriage horses and plaques. A narrow shelf ran around the entire perimeter of the room two feet under the ceiling. Perfect for displaying awards. He said they impressed the clients. He must have expected me to set those out as well.

  No sense in wasting time staring at an empty room. Let whoever took over the place from me furnish it, display his own trophies and pictures. “Come on,” I said. Jacob followed me down the aisle and into the spring sunshine.

  “Twelve stalls,” Jacob said. “Planned to have them filled before full summer, maybe build another section next year if the economy gets better.”

  “Do any of the horses actually belong to him?”

  “The Halflinger is all. The Dutch warmbloods belong to some millionaire in Southern Pines. Hiram says the owner is frightened to drive them. Sent them down here to make them bomb proof. Huh. No horse is bomb proof.”

  “Who owns the Friesian?”

  “Hiram has him from a man in Aiken. He and the jackass were raised together. Can’t stand to be apart. Can’t show a horse with a donkey running around the dressage arena around with him.” He frowned down at me. “He has other issues.”

  “What else? That sounds like plenty.”

  “You plan to keep training? Hiram said you are a good teacher. Said you used to be a good driver.”

  Actually, I planned to return the horses to their owners as soon as possible, but I didn’t necessarily want to say that to Jacob. “I have no idea.”

  “Heinzie needs ground driving and long lining to get him used to being alone. A calm hand on the reins. Broken trace in the arena a while back scared him some. He is also lazy and loses his focus. Hiram had to correct him often. Needs confidence to drive without the jackass.”

  I enjoy ground driving. It requires only walking behind the horse far enough back to be out of range of a kick and teaching the horse to answer the reins and the whip. I wouldn’t have to climb into a cart and pick up the reins.

  “Dressage arena is back there behind the stable on the right,” Jacob said. “So the clients can look out the windows and watch their horses
work.” He said ‘clients’ with a sneer. Obviously the rich and famous did not impress him. Or he envied them so much he hated them.

  “Do you drive?” I asked Jacob.

  He hesitated as though this was a trick question, then he said, “Got back into it after I moved in down here. Driving with Hiram when we were not building and fencing and cleaning.”

  So he could help on the reins.

  He added, “I was in raised in Pennsylvania. I drove every day one way and another.”

  With a name like Jacob Yoder I should have guessed he was Amish. Yoder is practically the equivalent of Smith in some Amish communities. That slightly stilted manner of speaking should have clued me in. No real accent, no ‘thee’s’ and ‘thou’s,’ but he seldom used contractions or southern colloquialisms. If he’d been in prison, his speech patterns would have changed for the worse, not the better. He hadn’t entirely lost the way of speaking he’d learned as a child.

  Mother said Hiram had spent a year in Intercourse with an Amish family before he and my mother met and married. He said he learned everything from shoeing horses to sewing harness to plowing fields with a team of six Belgians across. To carpentry, repairing, restoring and building carriages. That’s where he learned the woodworking skills he taught me.

  The Amish are not only peaceable folks, they generally wash their own dirty linen. So how had Jacob Yoder wound up in prison? For what? And how could I find out? Surely the police would find out about his record. He would be the obvious suspect. That must have been why he told me about his stint in jail. If he really did have an alibi for the time of Hiram’s death, he had nothing to worry about.

  If not, however, he might take off for parts unknown.

  Except that would really make him look guilty.

  We spent the next hour walking over the dressage arena and the land. It was truly beautiful. Even this early, the pastures were lush green, mostly lespedeza, although I saw some timothy and Bermuda. They’d need cutting in less than a month if we had normal spring rainfall.

  The peak of the hill I’d driven up did indeed look as though it had at some point been flattened by a giant’s palm. Hiram’s land undulated gently into old growth trees and tall pines along the edges. “What’s over there?” I asked, pointing beyond the arena toward a thick stand of hardwoods.