Murder at Monticello (3 page)

“Me too.” Harry and Miranda sounded like a chorus.

“Ha!”
Mrs. Murphy yowled.
“Ever notice when humans drift back in history they imagine they were rich and healthy. Get a toothache in the eighteenth century and find out how much you like it.”
She glared down at Tucker.
“How's that for rational?”

“You can be a real sourpuss sometimes. Just because I said that Jefferson preferred dogs to cats.”

“But you don't know that.”

“Well, have you read any references to cats? Everything that man ever wrote or said is known by rote around here. Not a peep about cats.”

“You think you're so smart. I suppose you happen to have a list of his favorite canines?”

Tucker sheepishly hung her head.
“Well, no—but Thomas Jefferson liked big bay horses.”

“Fine, tell that to Tomahawk and Gin Fizz back home. They'll be overwhelmed with pride.”
Mrs. Murphy referred to Harry's horses, whom the tiger cat liked very much. She stoutly maintained that cats and horses had an affinity for one another.

“Do you think from time to time we might check out the dig?” Harry leaned over the counter.

“I don't see why not,” Mim replied. “I'll call Oliver Zeve to make sure it's all right. You young people need to get involved.”

“What I wouldn't give to be your age again, Harry.” Miranda grew wistful. “My George would have still had hair.”

“George had hair?” Harry giggled.

“Don't be smart,” Miranda warned, but her voice carried affection.

“Want a man with a head full of hair? Take my husband.” Mim drummed her fingers on the table. “Everyone else has.”

“Now, Mim.”

“Oh, Miranda, I don't even care anymore. All those years that I put a good face on my marriage—I just plain don't care. Takes too much effort. I've decided that I am living for me. Monticello!” With that she waved and left.

“I declare, I do declare.” Miranda shook her head. “What got into her?”

“
Who
got into her?”

“Harry, that's rude.”

“I know.” Harry tried to keep her lip buttoned around Mrs. Hogendobber, but sometimes things slipped out. “Something's happened. Or maybe she was like this when she was a child.”

“She was never a child.” Miranda's voice dropped. “Her mother made her attend the public schools and Mim wanted to go away to Miss Porter's. She wore outfits every day that would have bankrupted an average man, and this was at the end of the Depression and the beginning of World War Two, remember. By the time we got to Crozet High, there were two classes of students. Marilyn, and the rest of us.”

“Well—any ideas?”

“Not a one. Not a single one.”

“I've got an idea,”
Tucker barked. The humans looked at her.
“Spring fever.”

3

Fair Haristeen, a blond giant, studied the image on the small TV screen. He was taking an ultrasound of an unborn foal in the broodmare barn at Wesley Randolph's estate, Eagle's Rest. Using sound waves to scan the position and health of the fetus was becoming increasingly valuable to veterinarian and breeder alike. This practice, relatively new in human medicine, was even more recent in the equine world. Fair centered the image he wanted, pressed a small button, and the machine spat out the picture of the incubating foal.

“Here he is, Wesley.” Fair handed the printout to the breeder.

Wesley Randolph, his son Warren, and Warren's diminutive but gorgeous wife, Ansley, hung on the veterinarian's every word.

“Well, this colt's healthy in the womb. Let's keep our fingers crossed.”

Wesley handed the picture to Warren and folded his arms across his thin chest. “This mare's in foal to Mr. Prospector. I want this baby!”

“You can't do much better than to breed to Claiborne Farm's stock. It's hard to make a mistake when you work with such good people.”

Warren, ever eager to please his domineering father, said, “Dad wants blinding speed married to endurance. I think this might be our best foal yet.”

“Dark Windows—she was a great one,” Wesley reminisced. “Damn filly put her leg over a divider when we were hauling her to Churchill Downs. Got a big knee and never raced after that. She was a special filly—like Ruffian.”

“I'll never forget that day. When Ruffian took that moment's hesitation in her stride—it was a bird or something on the track that made her pause—and shattered the sesamoid bones in her fetlock. God, it was awful.” Warren recalled the fateful day when Thoroughbred racing lost one of its greatest fillies to date, and perhaps one of the greatest runners ever seen, during her match race with Kentucky Derby—winner Foolish Pleasure at Belmont Park.

“Too game to stay down after her leg was set. Broke it a second time coming out of the anesthesia and only would have done it a third time if they'd tried to set the break again. It was the best thing to do, to save her any more pain, putting her down.” Fair added his veterinary expertise to their memory of the black filly's trauma.

Wesley shook his head. “Damn shame. Damn shame. Would've made one hell of a brood mare. Her owners might even have tried to breed her to that colt she was racing against when it happened. Foolish Pleasure. Better racehorse than sire, though, now that we've seen his get.”

“I'll never forget how the general public reacted to Ruffian's death. The beautiful black filly with the giant heart—she gave two hundred percent, every time. When they put her down, the whole country mourned, even people who had never paid attention to racing. It was a sad, sad day.” Ansley was visibly moved by this recollection. She changed the subject.

“You got some wonderful stakes winners out of Dark Windows. She was a remarkable filly too.” Ansley praised her father-in-law. He needed attention like a fish needs water.

“A few, a few.” He smiled.

“I'll be back around next week. Call me if anything comes up.” Fair headed for his truck and his next call.

Wesley followed him out of the barn while his son and daughter-in-law stayed inside. Behind the track, over a small knoll, was a lake. Wesley thought he'd go sit there later with his binoculars and bird-watch. Eased his mind, bird-watching. “Want some unsolicited advice?”

“Looks like I'm going to get it whether I want it or not.” Fair opened the back of his customized truck-bed, which housed his veterinary supplies.

“Win back Mary Minor Haristeen.”

Fair placed his equipment in the truck. “Since when are you playing Cupid?”

Wesley, gruff, bellowed, “Cupid? That little fat fellow with the quiver, bow, and arrows, and the little wings on his shoulders? Him? Give me some time and I'll be a real angel—unless I'm going downtown in the afterlife.”

“Wesley, only the good die young. You'll be here forever.” Fair liked teasing him.

“Ha! I believe you're right.” Wesley appreciated references to his wild youth. “I'm old. I can say what I want when I want.” He breathed in. “'Course, I always did. The advantage of being stinking rich. So I'm telling you, go get that little girl you so foolishly, and I emphasize foolishly, cast aside. She's the winning ticket.”

“Do I look that bad?” Fair wondered, the teasing fading out of him.

“You look like a ship without a rudder's what you look like. And running around with BoomBoom Craycroft . . . big tits and not an easy keeper.” Wesley likened BoomBoom to a horse that was expensive to feed, hard to put weight on, and often the victim of a breakdown of one sort or another. This couldn't have been a truer comparison, except in BoomBoom's case the weight referred to carats. She could gobble up more precious stones than a pasha. “Women like BoomBoom love to drive a man crazy. Harry's got some fire and some brains.”

Fair rubbed the blond stubble on his cheek. He'd known Wesley all his life and liked the man. For all his arrogance and bluntness, Wesley was loyal, called it like he saw it, and was truly generous, a trait he passed on to Warren. “I think about it sometimes—and I think she'd have to be crazy to take me back.”

Wesley put his arm around Fair's broad shoulders. “Listen to me. There's not a man out there who hasn't strayed off the reservation. And most of us feel rotten about it. Diana looked the other way when I did it. We were a team. The team came first, and once I grew up some I didn't need those—ah, adventures. I came clean. I told her what I'd done. I asked her to forgive me. Screwing around hurts a woman in ways we don't understand. Diana was in my corner two hundred percent. Heart like Ruffian. Always giving. Sometimes I wonder how a little poontang could get me off the track, make me hurt the person I loved most in this world.” He paused. “Women are more forgiving than we are. Kinder too. Maybe we need them to civilize us, son. You think about what I'm saying.”

Fair closed the lid over his equipment. “You aren't the first person to tell me to win back Harry. Mrs. Hogendobber works me over every now and then.”

“Miranda. I can hear her now.” Wesley laughed.

“I'm not saying you're wrong. Harry was a good wife and I was a fool, but how do you get over that guilt? I don't want to be with a woman and feel like a heel, even if I was.”

“That's where love works its miracles. Love's not about sex, although that's where we all start. Diana taught me about love. It's as gossamer as a spiderweb and just as strong. Winds don't blow down a web. Ever watch 'em?” His hand moved back and forth. “That woman knew me, knew my every fault, and she loved me for me. And I learned to love her for her. The only thing that pleases me about my condition is when I get to the other side, I'm going to see my girl.”

“Wesley, you look better than I've seen you look in the last eight months.”

“Remission. Damn grateful for it. I do feel good. Only thing that gets me down is the stock market.” He shivered to make his point. “And Warren. I don't know if he's strong enough to take over. He and Ansley don't pull together. Worries me.”

“Maybe you ought to talk to them like you talked to me.”

Wesley blinked beneath his bushy gray eyebrows. “I try. Warren evades me. Ansley's polite and listens, but it's in one ear, out t'other.” He shook his head. “I've spent my whole life developing bloodlines, yet I can hardly talk to my own blood.”

Fair leaned against the big truck. “I think a lot of people feel that way . . . and I don't have any answers.” He checked his watch. “I'm due at Brookhill Farm. You call me about that mare and—and I promise to think about what you said.”

Fair stepped into the truck, turned the ignition, and slowly traveled down the winding drive lined with linden trees. He waved, and Wesley waved back.

4

The old Ford truck chugged up Monticello Mountain. A light drizzle kept Harry alert at the wheel, for this road could be treacherous no matter what the weather. She wondered how the colonists had hauled up and down this mountain using wagons pulled by horses, or perhaps oxen, with no disc brakes. Unpaved during Thomas Jefferson's time, the road must have turned into a quagmire in the rains and a killer sheet of ice in the winter.

Susan Tucker fastened her seat belt.

“Think my driving's that bad?”

“No.” Susan ran her thumb under the belt. “I should have done this when we left Crozet.”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you. Mrs. H. pitched a major hissy when she reached into your mailbox and touched that rubber spider that Danny must have stuck in there. Mrs. Murphy pulled it out onto the floor finally.”

“Did she throw her hands in the air?” Susan innocently inquired.

“You bet.”

“A deep, throaty scream.”

“Moderate, I'd say. The dog barked.”

Susan smiled a Cheshire smile. “Wish I'd been there.”

Harry turned to glance at her best friend. “Susan—”

“Keep your eyes on the road.”

“Oh, yeah. Susan, did you put that spider in the mailbox?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Now, why would you want to go and do a thing like that?”

“Devil made me do it.”

Harry laughed. Every now and then Susan would do something, disrupt something, and you never knew when or where. She'd been that way since they first met in kindergarten. Harry hoped she'd never change.

The parking lot wasn't as full as usual for a weekend. Harry and Susan rode in the jitney up the mountain, which became more fog-enshrouded with every rising foot. By the time they reached the Big House, as locals called it, they could barely see their hands in front of their faces.

“Think Kimball will be out there?” Susan asked.

“One way to find out.” Harry walked down to the south side of the house, picking up the straight road that was called Mulberry Row. Here the work of the plantation was carried out in a smithy as well as in eighteen other buildings dedicated to the various crafts: carpentry, nail making, weaving, and possibly even harness making and repair. Those buildings vanished over the decades after Jefferson's death when, a quarter of a million dollars in debt—roughly two and a half million dollars today—his heirs were forced to sell the place he loved.

Slave quarters also were located along Mulberry Row. Like the other buildings, these were usually constructed of logs; sometimes even the chimneys were made of logs, which would occasionally catch fire, so that the whole building was engulfed in flames within minutes. The bucket brigade was the only means of fire-fighting.

As Harry and Susan walked through the fog, their feet squished in the moist earth.

“If you feel a descent, you know we've keeled over into the food garden.” Harry stopped for a moment.

“We can stay on the path and go slow. Harry, Kimball isn't going to be out here in this muck.”

But he was. Wearing a green oilskin Barbour coat, a necessity in this part of the world, big Wellies on his feet, and a water-repellent baseball hat on his head, Kimball resembled any other Virginia gentleman or gentlewoman on a misty day.

“Kimball!” Harry called out.

“A fine, soft day,” he jubilantly replied. “Come closer, I can't see who's with you.”

“Me,” Susan answered.

“Ah, I'm in for a double treat.” He walked up to greet them.

“How can you work in this?” Susan wondered.

“I can't, really, but I can walk around and think. This place had to function independently of the world, in a sense. I mean, it was its own little world, so I try to put myself back in time and imagine what was needed, when and why. It helps me understand why some of these buildings and the gardens were placed as they are. Of course, the people working under the boardwalks—that's what I call the terraces—had a better deal, I think. Would you two damsels like a stroll?”

“Love it.” Harry beamed.

“Kimball, how did you come to archaeology?” Susan asked. Most men Kimball's age graduating from an Ivy League college were investment bankers, commodities brokers, stockbrokers, or numbers crunchers.

“I liked to play in the dirt as a child. This seemed a natural progression.” He grinned.

“It wasn't one of those quirks of fate?” Harry wiped a raindrop off her nose.

“Actually, it was. I was studying history at Brown and I had this glorious professor, Del Kolve, and he kept saying, ‘Go back to the physical reality, go back to the physical reality.' So I happened to notice a yellow sheet of paper on the department bulletin board—isn't it odd that I can still see the color of the flyer?—announcing a dig in Colonial Williamsburg. I never imagined that. You see, I always thought that archaeology meant you had to be digging up columns in Rome, that sort of thing. So I came down for the summer and I was hooked. Hooked on the period too. Come on, let me show you something.”

He led them to his office at the back of the attractive gift shop. They shook off the water before entering and hung their coats on the wooden pegs on the wall.

“Cramped,” Susan observed. “Is this temporary?”

He shook his head. “We can't go about building anything, you know, and some of what has been added over the years—well, the damage has been done. Anyway, I'm in the field most of the time, so this suffices, and I've also stashed some books in the second floor of the Big House, so I've a bit more room than it appears. Here, look at this.” He reached into a pile of horseshoes on the floor and handed an enormous shoe to Harry.

She carefully turned the rusted artifact over in her hands. “A toe grab. I can't make out if there were any grabs on the back, but possibly. This horse had to do a lot of pulling. Draft horse, of course.”

“Okay, look at this one.” He handed her another.

Harry and Susan exclaimed at this shoe. Lighter, made for a smaller horse, it had a bar across the heel area, joining the two arms of the shoe.

“What do you think, Susan?” Harry placed the shoe in her friend's hands.

“We need Steve O'Grady.” Susan referred to an equine vet in the county, an expert on hoof development and problems and strategies to overcome those problems. He was a colleague of Fair Haristeen, whose specialty was the equine reproductive system. “But I'd say this belonged to a fancy horse, a riding horse, anyway. It's a bar shoe . . .”

“Because the horse had a problem. Navicular maybe.” Harry suggested a degenerative condition of the navicular bone, just behind the main bone of the foot, the coffin bone, often requiring special shoeing to alleviate the discomfort.

“Perhaps, but the blacksmith decided to give the animal more striking area in the back. He moved the point of contact behind the normal heel area.” Kimball placed his hand on his desk, using his fingers as the front of the hoof and his palm as the back and showed how this particular shoe could alter the point of impact.

“I didn't know you rode horses.” Harry admired his detective work on the horseshoe.

“I don't. They're too big for me.” Kimball smiled.

“So how'd you know this? I mean, most of the people who do ride don't care that much about shoeing. They don't learn anything.” Susan, a devout horsewoman, meaning she believed in knowing all phases of equine care and not just hopping on the animal's back, was intensely curious.

“I asked an expert.” He held out his palms.

“Who?”

“Dr. O'Grady.” Kimball laughed. “But still, I had to call around, dig in the libraries, and find out if horseshoeing has changed that much over the centuries. See, that's what I love about this kind of work. Well, it's not work, it's a magical kind of living in the past and the present at the same time. I mean, the past is ever informing the present, ever with us, for good or for ill. To work at what you love—a heaping up of joys.”

“It is wonderful,” Harry agreed. “I don't mean to imply that what I do is anything as exalted as your own profession, but I like my job, I like the people, and most of all, I love Crozet.”

“We're the lucky ones.” Susan understood only too well the toll unhappiness takes on people. She had watched her father drag himself to a job he hated. She had watched him dry up. He worried so much about providing for his family that he forgot to be with his family. She could have done with fewer things and more dad. “Being a housewife and mother may not seem like much, but it's what I wanted to do. I wouldn't trade a minute of those early years when the kids were tiny. Not one second.”

“Then they're the lucky ones,” Harry said.

Kimball, content in agreement, pulled open a drawer and plucked out a bit of china with a grayish background and a bit of faded blue design. “Found this last week in what I'm calling Cabin Four.” He flipped it over, a light number showing on its reverse side. “I've been keeping it here to play with it. What was this bit of good china doing in a slave cabin? Was it already broken? Did the inhabitant of the little cabin break it herself—we know who lived in Cabin Four—and take it out of the Big House to cover up the misdeed? Or did the servants, forgive the euphemism, go straight to the master, confess the breakage, and get awarded the pieces? Then again, what if the slave just plain took it to have something pretty to look at, to own something that a rich white person would own, to feel for a moment part of the ruling class instead of the ruled? So many questions. So many questions.”

“I've got one you can answer.” Susan put her hand up.

“Shoot.”

“Where's the bathroom?”