One Hoof In The Grave [Carriage Driving 02] (29 page)

“And Hiram never knew he had a son?”

She shook her head. “But I never stopped thinking of my child, wondering who had adopted him, whether he was happy, whether he had a warm coat in the winter or went to the beach in the summer. Then I had Paul, junior, and Sandra, and Big Paul and I were building his practice. I was working in the office full time and being a wife and mother and life got in the way. I saw Hiram at shows, but neither of us ever mentioned that one night.”

“When did Troy find you?”

“He didn’t. I found him.” She leaned her head back against the couch and closed her eyes as though telling the story had worn her out. I didn’t doubt it.

“When Paul died so suddenly, I was devastated. We had a good marriage.”

Except for one whopping big secret.

“Then one morning a couple of months after Paul died, I woke up and realized I could finally go find my son.”

“So you did? Just like that?”

“Hardly. With computers, it’s a lot easier to get information about adoptions now than it used to be, but I had no idea how to go about it, so I hired someone. He found Troy in a little over a month.”

“Where?”

“Beckley, West Virginia. His adoptive parents are both high school teachers. Not rich, but he didn’t suffer from poverty. He had started college at Blacksburg, but dropped out after one year to take a job in construction when his father had a heart attack. He said he couldn’t justify even in-state tuition and expenses. He planned to go back, but you know how that is.”

I nodded. Once he left, it would be hard for him to go back.

“It took months before he’d agree to meet me. He didn’t want to upset his adoptive parents. I respected that, but they finally persuaded him he needed to at least meet me.”

“And the rest is history. Happy ending, nice and tidy.” I was getting pretty tired of Catherine. I wanted to go hug a horse and get my head around this.

She shook her head violently. “Not at all. He was
so
angry. He accused me of abandoning him. But we talked and talked and emailed and took baby
Facebook
steps to know about each other’s lives, and little by little he saw who I was and that I meant it for the best and forgave me.” Her nose and eyes were red, and her tears had cut paths through her makeup.

“So how do we get from Beckley to Atlanta?”

“I wanted to do something for him, to get to know him. I offered him full tuition and expenses to Emory. He didn’t have any trouble transferring, although his credits were a couple of years old. And I offered him a job working for me at shows on the weekends.”

“You know everybody thinks you’re sleeping with him?”

She shrugged. “Seemed simplest that way. We both thought it was funny.”

I’d bet her mother didn’t think it was one bit funny. “So does your family know?”

Her eyes widened. “Oh, no! Not yet. It’s just Mother and Sandra and Paul, junior, now. Paul’s at Princeton Law and Sandra’s at Randolph Macon. I’ve worried about the best way to handle introducing Troy. We were thinking maybe Thanksgiving.”

Had the woman lost her mind? Then it hit me. Troy was a nice young man, but he had the social polish of a West Virginia trout. Catherine hadn’t only been getting to know her son and introducing him to the driving and social crowd, she’d been grooming him.

“Where does Morgan fit into your plans?”

Catherine snapped to attention. “She doesn’t. I know better than to turn her into Juliet to Troy’s Romeo by forbidding the relationship, but I’ve got to make him see that she’s destroying his chances for a good life. That banner… My God, he could have drowned your horses!”

When a knock sounded on the door of the clients’ lounge, we both jumped. Dick stuck his head in and said, “Sorry to interrupt. Just wanted to tell you that Don Qui’s back in the pasture and I’ve locked the Meadowbrook in the barn out of the way. With the show and clinic coming up, I didn’t figure you’d have time to drive the little devil before Monday or Tuesday.”

“Thanks, Dick. Catherine and I were just going over some final tweaking for the show Saturday.” I glanced at her. She gave me a grateful look.

“Yes, I really have to go. Mother’s coming to dinner tonight,” Catherine said.

I followed her out to her bright red crew cab truck.

“Please tell Agent Wheeler that Troy’s innocent,” she said. “And whatever you do, don’t tell a soul what I told you. Please, I beg you. I wouldn’t want my mother and my children to find out before I have a chance to tell them.”

I made indeterminate noises. I’d tell Geoff and Peggy and possibly Dick whatever I thought they ought to know.

“Troy plans to apologize to you and Peggy for that awful banner.”

“That’s not necessary.” God, it was the last thing I needed.

“Yes, it is. I haven’t told him about your relationship and I won’t, not ever, without your permission, but I think if you got to know him you’d like him and want to tell him yourself.”

Not damned likely.

She grasped my hand again. Lord, the woman couldn’t keep her hands off me or keep herself out of my space. I wanted her gone. I no longer wanted her to judge my show or train on Sunday, but I couldn’t cancel without a reason and didn’t plan to reveal the one I had. After this weekend I would avoid her and her son—no way would I call him my half-brother. I watched her drive down the hill until the first turn obscured her truck.

Ten minutes later I had Heinzie, the big Friesian, saddled. Since his first excursion riding Peggy and me bareback, I’d ridden him often. Dressage under saddle improved his driving, and vice versa.

Today the riding helped
me
.

Something in my face backed Peggy and Dick off. They went into the clients’ lounge and shut the door without asking any questions.

I worked Heinzie in the dressage arena for nearly an hour. By the time I finished cooling him out we were both worn out and sweaty.

Peggy had finished afternoon feed. Everyone except Heinzie was munching happily.

“Don Qui kept an eye on the back door, so he could be certain Heinzie hadn’t flown away and left him,” Peggy said as she shut Heinzie’s stall door so that he could eat his dinner. “He didn’t bray. Big step forward.”

Bless the woman. She didn’t ask a single question. Dick had gone back to her house for a nap before dinner. I hadn’t made up my mind what, if anything, to tell them. Dick had been Hiram’s friend for twenty years or more. Peggy had been his first and best friend in Mossy Creek.

I hadn’t known my father well since I was a child. Peggy and Dick could give me a better take on whether he would or would not deflower an eighteen-year-old virgin and walk away without another thought.

“Sorry, all empty. Move your car or I’ll move it for you. This truck can shove your Mini over the cliff.” I opened the passenger door.

She said to my back, “We’re
right
to do what we do, and if you weren’t one of
them
, you’d admit it.”

“One of whom?”

“The enslavers of animals. The destroyers.”

“Are you one of those people who want me to turn my horses loose in the Okefenokee Swamp to fend for themselves?”

“They did when they were free.”

I turned back to face her. “Some fifteen thousand years ago, about the time a Mongolian shepherd jumped on a pony, or a wolf ate scraps, curled up warm beside a huntsman’s fire and got his ears scratched. Your ancestors might have been able to survive in the wilderness then too.
You
want to try it without Bergdorf’s and Kroger’s?”

“How about the wild mustangs?”

“How about them? They have been on open range for hundreds of years where there is at least a modicum of food to eat, unless they die miserably of drought or floods or battles for mares or worm infestations or colic or breach birth or broken legs or wolves or coyotes or Grizzly bears or snakebite. Every month I send money to the human beings who make certain that they have hay and water, and rabies powder and a dozen other vaccines, and plenty of room to roam. And every year human beings adopt some of them and I suspect the horses are glad of it.”

“You can’t know that.”

“No, I can’t. I do see that afterwards they’re healthy and relaxed and enjoy being around people. When we domesticated animals we signed a pledge to look after them.”

“How paternalistic—you’re saying we’re better than the animals.”

Peggy had climbed out of the truck and come to stand at my shoulder.

“We do have opposable thumbs,” she said mildly. “Which makes it easier to serve them by picking up a bale of hay or a hoof pick. Most of us feel a sense of empathy between us and them—herd instinct, if you will. When you put up that stupid banner, you nearly drowned two of your precious animal buddies.”

“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Troy said. He’d come to apologize, not debate. “No way we thought anybody would get hurt.”

“Nobody was, no thanks to you,” I snapped. “Troy, I accept that you’d probably have jumped off the Empire State Building to keep getting laid. Morgan used you. She would have been happy to see a couple of horses drown.”

“I wanted you
all
to drown, not only the horses,” Morgan snarled.

I saw the astonished look Troy threw her. “You don’t mean that.”

“Of course I do. We’d have gone viral on the net. I video-taped the whole thing from the woods.” She rounded on him. “What did you think would happen? At the very least, that old wrinkly should have drowned.” She pointed at Peggy. Uh-oh.

I could see on his face the numb realization that she was dead serious.

“This old wrinkly,” Peggy said. “was captain of her swim team at college.”

“A million years ago,” Morgan sneered.

I put a hand on Peggy’s arm. We didn’t need to go to jail for assault.

Troy was completely out of his depth. I felt kind of sorry for him, but he should have known better than to let Morgan La Fey drive him out here.

“They’ll all
be
better off dead!” Morgan said. ‘Kill them all—dogs and cats and sheep and cattle . . .”

“Hey, wait,” Troy said. “You never said anything about
killing
them.”

“If they’re so screwed up they can’t live free, then we should kill them. Period,” Morgan said. She turned on me. “It’s
your
fault. If you hadn’t made them dependent, they could survive without you. Since they can’t, they should die.”

“Human babies are dependent,” I said. “Does the same go for them, or is your pogrom just for other species? Just mammals, or do you include birds and reptiles and fish?”

“Man,” Troy said. He was staring at Morgan as though he’d never seen her before. “Like I don’t believe in testing on animals, or dog fighting and puppy mills and stuff, but
nobody’s
killing my dog.”

I had a sudden vision of Peggy armed with an AR-15 ready to fend off anyone who tried to hurt her four cats. I’d be standing down at the end of my road with a bazooka or a hand-held missile launcher if I could get my hands on one, ready to protect even Don Qui with my life.

“Grow a pair, why don’t you?” Morgan sneered at Troy. “What good are animals? They’re already victims, having chemicals poured into their eyes so the rich can have a new moisturizer, or slaughtered so the rich can eat sirloin, or tearing each other apart so the rich can bet on them, or pulling wagons or letting people sit on top of them so the rich can bet on races.” World class sneer.