Let Sleeping Dogs Lie (10 page)

Sheepishly, Gray agreed. “Most times I do but, you know, those spring days, you smell the apple blossoms, then it’s a joy to sit outside and clean tack or clean anything, really. The rest of the time, not so much.”

“I never knew how beautiful this place was until I left for college. Harvard, well, it’s in the city, grand as the place is, but I thought I would perish of homesickness.”

“Me, too, not so much at college but all those years in D.C.” Sam rose to start heating water on the stove. “I feel like hot chocolate. What about you?”

“Sounds good. I’ve been thinking about what you told me. What Sister told you after the Custis Hall meeting last night. Mercer’s one brick shy of a load.”

Gray smiled. “He’s always been excitable.”

“Excitable, hell, he’s all over the map. Lorillard men aren’t
supposed to be, well, you know. Anyway, he treats me like a slug, a sea slug.”

“Because you don’t have any money. Sam, he’s not that bad.”

“Hell, he’s not. The only reason he’s nice to me is when he nudges me a little to try to get business out of Crawford. Oh, how Mercer loves to make money and be around money.”

“His side of the family has had money for a long time. While he’s not exactly Crawford or Phil’s equal, he’s not poor by a long shot. And give him credit, he knows his business.”

“He can recite bloodlines and sales figures. I told him once, forget blabbing about bloodlines. People don’t care. Just talk about how much the sire won or the dam and what their progeny is doing on the track. But he keeps blabbing on, showing off.”

Gray mixed the hot chocolate powder, the hot water releasing the enticing smell. “Here.”

“Thanks. You taking a break from female companionship?”

“Sam, I usually spend Monday and Friday nights here if I can. Sometimes it is good to have one’s little space.”

“A Room of One’s Own.”
Sam cited the Virginia Woolf book, as he was well educated.

“Something like that.”

“I don’t know if I will ever enjoy female companionship. Been a long dry spell.” Sam started rubbing in the saddle butter using the warmth of his hands to help the waxes penetrate the leather. “Mostly I really do enjoy women but sometimes the way they think drives me over the cliff. Too emotional.”

Gray shrugged. “That’s painting with a broad brush.”

“Yeah, but my experience is women notice the damnedest things. I mean stuff that just makes no sense. Kind of like Mercer.” He burst out laughing.

Gray laughed, too. “The Laprade side of the family is given to emotional drama.”

“They live for it. I’ll bet you twenty Georges that if that body is
our grandfather or great-grandfather or whoever the hell he is, some family relation, Mercer will be beside himself.”

Gray touched his mustache, smoothing it outward. “Nero Wolfe. He’ll have to solve the crime.”

This set them both to laughing.

“I’m surprised Mercer hasn’t driven to Lexington to offer up his saliva for a DNA test.” Sam could hardly finish the sentence, he was laughing so hard.

“I don’t get the science behind that but it must work.” Gray finished his drink. “I wonder if we want to know too much. Maybe it’s better not to know. Someday, someone will find Amelia Earhart or pieces of something that will solve her disappearance. What good does it do? She’s gone. Same with the princes in the tower. Remember that, when the two little bodies were found under a stairwell in the Tower of London? Anyway, that was before DNA testing, but so many people are convinced these are the murdered sons of Edward the Fourth.”

“Gives academics and novelists a field day. You know, did Richard the Third kill them, or did Henry Tudor once he became king after killing Richard at Bosworth Field? I’m curious I guess. Yeah, I am.”

“You always liked history,” said Gray. “I read some and I know we need to know what came before but Sam, I can’t say as I care much. I care about now. I care about the future.”

“But that’s just it, the past is prologue.”

“Teach you that at Harvard?” Gray smiled.

“Did. The guilt of throwing away that education haunts me. Christ, what a mess I made of my life, your life, anyone around me.” Gray had paid for two drying-out clinics. The second one took. As Sam had remained sober for nine years now, Gray began to relax, yet in the back of his mind was always the fear that somehow for some reason, Sam would relapse.

“It’s all over, done. I don’t know what was worse, not capitalizing
on Harvard or losing your chance as a steeplechase jockey. You could have set up business after the competitive days were over but you’re still in horses, you can still set up a sideline.” He leaned down and picked up the saddle butter jar. “Build a better mousetrap.”

“That saddle stuff really is the better mousetrap.” Gray wiped his hands on a cloth, then rose to wash them.

Gray took his cup over to the sink, looked out the window. “Black as the ace of spades. Low cloud cover.”

“Half moon tonight. The good thing about a low cloud cover is it keeps a little heat on the earth. Those cold clear nights make it hurt when you breathe.”

“Tonight’s cold even with the cloud cover,” Gray remarked.

Sam opened the door to the mudroom, flinging two used towels toward the back door. “I swear I smell fox.”

Uncle Yancy, flattened low on the shelf, watching with his glittering deep yellow eyes.

Gray joined Sam at the door. “Does. Probably the graveyard fox.”

“Well, he has one hell of a signature if it’s this strong in the mudroom.” Sam closed the door.

Had the brothers walked into the mudroom, turned around and glanced upward, they would have seen the tip of a magnificent brush just falling over the shelf. Uncle Yancy was hiding in plain sight.

It would have been a good lesson for all to learn before it was too late.

That same Friday night Sister’s fountain pen glided over perfectly lovely cream stationery, the hunt club crest centered at the top. She sat at the graceful desk in her library, its smooth writing surface highly polished. This regal piece of furniture commanded the room. While Sister considered this her main desk she was one of those people who scribbled wherever she could. At the end of the day, after her shower, she would often troll through the house’s rooms, picking up and reading through her notepads, finding much that could prove useful.

Golliwog, her insufferable long-haired cat, sprawled on the back of the leather sofa, her tail slightly swaying to and fro. Plopped on the sofa cushions the two house dogs snored; Raleigh, a beautiful male Doberman and Rooster, a harrier bequeathed to Sister at the death of an old lover, Peter Wheeler. He also willed her his estate, Mill Ruins, on which an enormous waterwheel, ever turning, could have been restored to grind grain should anyone be so inclined. Mill Ruins was rented for ninety-nine years by Sister’s Joint Master, Walter Lungrun, M.D., a fellow in his prime, early forties.
Peter had always sworn to Sister that he would leave her everything, but she’d thought he was joking. He wasn’t and she found herself with two sizable farms to run, combined with the great good luck of owning desirable property.

Conscious of her wonderful luck, Sister realized there are people who resent anyone with resources. She accepted that blind hatred, and she had no real answer as to why the Wheel of Fortune had placed her on the upswing. She herself was not an envious person. She did, however, like very much that her position allowed her to be useful to others—specifically young people and animals. She cared little about anyone else’s status or bank account. She either liked you or she didn’t, and being Southern, if she knew you needed some financial help she often found a way to do that without embarrassing you. Many Virginians had a lot of pride and would not take what they considered a handout. She worried about so many people out of work, she worried about people sliding out of the middle classes into poverty, and she also was angered at those few who abused public trust whether on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or Washington, D.C.—people who profited secretly or openly from the distress of others.

She was just one person. All she could do was to shoulder the load with people she knew. Sister was not one to write checks to organizations. She had to know to whom money was going and she had to respect them. If nothing else, she was consistent.

She’d written a check this Friday to Custis Hall for a scholarship for a fourteen-year-old whom Mercer sponsored. He wrote the other half of the check for the girl’s first year.

Sister did not think of herself as a particularly loving or good person. She thought of herself as a clear-eyed responsible one. What others thought of her mattered precious little if at all. This quality above all others drove her enemies wild. Over the years, Crawford had dug, parried, and derided her, yet she never bothered to respond. Worse, she sought him out at the board meetings
and remained friendly with his wife—or as friendly as she could under the circumstances.

Some of this impressive lady’s supreme self-confidence was rubbing off on Tootie, who walked into the library.

“Bills?” asked the lovely young woman.

“You know, just when you think you’re in the clear, the mailbox is filled with some more.” Sister capped the pen, turning to view Tootie, who had recently turned twenty-one.

“Did you hear that Felicity got promoted?” Tootie mentioned a brilliant schoolmate of hers who had gotten pregnant. Unable to go off to college, Felicity took night courses toward a degree.

“Garvy Stokes knows talent when he sees it. I’m behind on seeing Felicity. I haven’t visited my godson in two weeks.”

“He doesn’t stop talking.” Tootie smiled. “Not at all like his mother,” she quipped.

“And how is your mother, speaking of mothers?”

Tootie shrugged. “Same as always.”

“You haven’t visited Chicago in over a year. Why don’t you go once hunt season is over?”

Tootie sat on the couch next to Raleigh. The Doberman raised his head only to drop it in Tootie’s lap, give her a loving gaze, then close his eyes.

Golly, on the other hand, opened her lustrous eyes. Far be it for the cat to miss anything.

“I don’t want to,” said Tootie. “It’s always the same old thing. They make me miserable, angry, and finally bored.”

“That’s a harsh judgment on your mother and father.”

“Sister, you’ve met them.”

“I have, and I know your father doesn’t much like me but he’s still your father and he loves you the only way he knows how. And as for your mother, she does what most good wives do, she props him up, tries to get him to see reason or at least have some emotional understanding. She loves you, too.”

“You know what, Sister? I don’t care.” A flash of defiance flared from that beautiful face.

Picking up the fountain pen, Sister twirled it. “You’ve been with me one and a half years now and you’ve taken courses at UVA. You’ve kept your word about that. Things come so easily to you—riding, college courses. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

“Not everything. I signed up for organic chem. That might not be easy.”

“We’ll see. You know Dr. Hinson will help.” Sister named the veterinarian, a woman who liked Tootie.

“I’m trying to be like you.” Tootie smiled. “I’m writing letters.”

Sister beamed. “It’s the only proper way to communicate, or at least to communicate some things. I was just writing O.J. to invite the Woodford group here in March. We’ve talked about it but a formal invitation is needed. Wouldn’t it just be silly if they all get here and we have a storm?”

“What was it you called the storm in Lexington?”

“A pogonip, a freezing fog. The superstition is that it brings bad luck.”

“Well, it did, didn’t it?”

“I suppose it did.”

“I found some old pictures of Benny Glitters.”

“You did?” Sister asked, surprised and curious.

“Sure. I’ll show you.” Tootie rose, walked to a simple desk tucked in a corner, upon which was Sister’s computer. The young woman sat down and quickly pulled up images from Google. “Look.”

Sister stood behind her. “I keep promising to move the computer out of here to a better place, a bigger place, and move that little desk. Well, that’s irrelevant, I fear. I’ll never be able to use it like you do.”

“You don’t have to. You have me.” Tootie clicked and sure enough there appeared an old sepia photograph of a petite woman in hacking attire, presumably Lela Harkness, astride a well-built bay.

“How about that? Don’t you love that Lela looks like a magazine model? People dressed for the occasion in those days.” Sister leaned forward, squinting a bit. “Benny Glitters looks like a handsome bay horse. Well, Thoroughbreds are usually some form of bay or chestnut with the occasional gray. Look how sturdy his forelegs are.”

“I found other pictures, too.” Tootie flipped through old photographs, some from the turn of the last century going up through the 1920s. “Here’s one of Phil Chetwynd’s grandfather, I guess.”

“Roger was the grandfather. Old Tom, Phil’s great-grandfather, started Broad Creek Stables. Both Phil and his brother—the one who lives in Charleston, West Virginia—resemble their father, also named Tom in honor of the original patriarch. I vaguely remember Roger. What I recall is that he was so competitive. When people had money in those days, they really had it.”

“Look at this.” Tootie filled the screen with photographs of L.V. Harkness’s daughters, and others of Walnut Hall through the years.

“Go back to Benny,” said Sister.

“Sure.”

“Okay, now can you find me a picture of Domino?”

“That’s easy. He was so famous. There’s lots of photographs.” Tootie proved her point.

“Hmm. It’s hard to tell how much Benny looks like his sire. Pull up one of Domino’s most famous son, Commando.”

Tootie did. “He looks a little more like Domino. I mean, it’s hard to tell bays apart.”

“ ’Tis. I’ll tell you a secret. Always start at the hoof. Then go up the legs starting from the rear. Pause at the gaskin, the large muscle at the top of the hind legs often called the second thigh. Now look at the hip angle. Okay, go to the forelegs. Same trajectory. Right? Now look from the withers to the hindquarters. Okay, set that in
your mind. Look at the shoulder angle, look at the angle of the neck from that shoulder, look at the chest. Finally, go to the head.”