Puss 'N Cahoots (5 page)

“Well, no. I'm hoping this will resolve itself before that happens.”

While the humans were speaking to Sheriff Howlett, Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tucker investigated the empty stall, door open. All three sneezed.

“Shoe polish.”
Tucker's eyes watered.

“Or hair dye.”
Pewter's eyes watered and she sneezed again.

“The humans can't smell it. The stall is clean. No evidence to them,”
Mrs. Murphy noted.

“Even if they could smell, the scent will dissipate fast as the heat comes up.”
Tucker inhaled again, sneezing violently, little bits of crushed cedar bedding flying around.

“Someone walked that mare out of here in front of everyone.”
Pewter appreciated the boldness of the enterprise.

“They did, but he or she knows the Kalarama routine.”
Tucker was astonished at all this.

Mrs. Murphy closed her eyes as the cedar dust lifted up. Once she opened them, she said,
“He knows the routine, yes. But he stood in here pretending to groom Queen Esther when he was actually dyeing her. That had to be how he got away with it.”

“No way,”
Pewter disagreed.
“Someone would notice an entire horse changing color.”

“Wasn't the entire horse. Fitted light blankets are on some of the horses. He'd only have to do the neck and legs,”
Mrs. Murphy replied.

At once all three said,
“The black horse being loaded onto the van.”

“Under everyone's nose.”
Tucker sneezed again.

W
atching a wind come from the west, one can see trees bend, then calculate how long before the wind arrives. Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tucker watched the news of Queen Esther's kidnapping travel from barn to barn like the wind. People moved quickly from one to another. The noise level rose. Then the owners, trainers, grooms, blacksmiths, and vets emerged from their barns to stand in the sunlight and stare at Barn Five. A few walked over to offer help and sympathy to Renata, Joan, and Larry.

“The good thing about Queen Esther walking off is we're off those damned leashes.”
Mrs. Murphy sat on a Kalarama tack trunk.

Paul Hamilton drove up in his cream-colored Mercedes E. He got out, appearing calm, and walked into the barn.

Joan, in the aisle talking to Manuel and Jorge, felt relief when her father stepped into the barn.

“Boys.” He nodded to the two men. “We've got twenty minutes before the reporters swarm over us from Louisville. Forty-five before they come on from Lexington.” He pushed his square-rimmed glasses up on his nose. “And I reckon some of those entertainment reporters will show up, too.”

Joan, her father's daughter, which meant she could see the big picture long before others even squinted at a blurry outline, replied, “Daddy, we were just discussing that. I say we take them to the empty stall, let them shoot their footage, then park them in the hospitality room for more questions. Won't hurt for people to see the ribbons and photographs hanging up there.”

“Where's Larry?”

“Working horses. If we let this get us off track, we'll lose more than Queen Esther.”

He nodded, radiating confidence. “Well, it's a hell of a mess, but I expect the Kalarama name will stick. No such thing as bad publicity.”

Joan knew when her father was trying to shore her up. “I hope you're right.”

“Where's Renata?” Paul half-expected her to be emoting full force.

“She's walking from barn to barn, checking every stall.”

Just then, Harry came around the end stall of the aisle on her hands and knees.

“What you doing there, Shorty?” Paul, despite all, was amused at the sight.

“I wanted to check the stalls and aisles before more people came through. You never know, the thief might have dropped something.” She stood up, brushing off her knees. “Found you have flashlights stuck in tack trunks and on ledges.”

“It's not Shelbyville if we don't enjoy at least one big storm and lose power,” Paul informed her as he pushed his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose.

Mrs. Murphy gracefully jumped off the tack trunk to return to Queen Esther's stall. Tucker, lying down in front of the trunk, and Pewter, snoozing on a director's chair next to the trunk, roused themselves to follow.

Manuel, tack in hand, baseball cap pushed back on his head, suggested, “Show them Larry working horses.” He meant the reporters.

“Good idea.” Joan smiled as Manuel kept walking toward a stall, Jorge behind him.

“Jorge, you make sure that every horse in this barn shines like patent leather.” Paul put his hands in his pants pockets.

“Sí.”
Jorge left, calling out some orders to the other men.

“They always do.” Joan loved her father, but sometimes when he butted in, it worked on her nerves. “Is Momma upset?”

“She's been on the phone to her sisters.” That meant she was upset.

Joan bit her tongue, because Frances would be even more upset when she found out about the pin.

As the humans kept talking in the aisle, Tucker dug a few spots to see if there was anything under the cedar shavings.

“Scent's fading.”
Pewter curled her upper lip toward her nose, which helped gather what odor there was.

“The cedar shavings are overpowering.”
Tucker sat on her haunches.
“I should have thought of that!”

“The cedar shavings are always overpowering. What's the big deal?”
Pewter twitched her tail.

“The big deal,”
Tucker was irritated,
“is that we were minutes behind the deed. The dye smell was still potent.”
Tucker stated what was obvious to her.

“You're right. But who dyed Queen Esther, who walked her out the back of Barn Five to hand her off to Ward? We know he took the horse.”
Mrs. Murphy swept her whiskers forward.

“Did he know he was taking stolen goods?”
Pewter wondered.

“I expect he did, but let's go to Charly's barn first,”
Tucker suggested, and before the last syllable left her mouth, the cats shot out of the stall, bits of cedar shavings hitting the corgi in the face.
“Hey!”
Tucker called after them as she roared out of the stall, soon catching up.

The three animals scooted around trainers, riders, and grooms between barns, only slowing down if the humans were mounted or leading a horse. At only ten-fifteen, August's sultry reputation was well earned.

By the time they reached Barn Three by the practice arena, Tucker's pink tongue hung out. She stuck her head in a water bucket for dogs that was tucked in the corner of the barn, as there's no such thing as a horseman without a dog. The cats, on their hind legs, also drank.

“Hotter here than in Virginia.”
Pewter panted.

“It is. At home we're by the mountains, and the ocean's not that far away,”
Tucker thoughtfully replied.
“There's usually a cool breeze.”

“From our farm it's one hundred forty miles—well, first you run into the Chesapeake Bay if you draw a straight line, but still, almost the same, to big water,”
Mrs. Murphy stated. She thought of the Atlantic Ocean as big water.

“How do you know that?”
Pewter doubted the tiger.

“Because I read the map with Mom. If you draw a straight line from Crozet east, you wind up just below Point Lookout, where the Potomac River pours into the Chesapeake Bay. If you crossed the water you'd wind up at Assateague Island, and that's the Atlantic Ocean. Okay, so it's more than one hundred forty miles to the Atlantic, but it's not all that far to where the river meets the bay. Even though we're about the same latitude as here, our weather's different. Anyway, that's what Mom says, and she
cares
about the weather.”

“Will you two shut up? Let's get to work,”
Tucker commanded.

Neither cat wished to take orders from a dog, but Tucker was right, so they fanned out, alert to any possibility.

Mrs. Murphy, claws like tiny daggers, climbed up the side of a stall to walk along the joists overhead.

Coming in the opposite direction, the large ginger cat in charge of the barn stopped, thrashed his tail vigorously, eyes wide.
“What are you doing in my barn!”

Below, Pewter heard the challenge just as the rest of the barn-cat crew emerged from the hospitality room.

Tucker, large enough to scare them, bared her fangs so the cats scattered to encircle Pewter. Tucker was on to that.

Overhead, Mrs. Murphy loudly answered the ginger cat.
“We're looking for clues about the stolen horse. We figure Charly had the most incentive.”

“Wasn't in my barn.”
The ginger allowed his fur to settle down, but the tip of his tail swayed.

“No, she wasn't, but we saw her being loaded onto Ward's van. Do you work for Charly?”

“No. I work for the fairgrounds,”
the fellow replied.

Mrs. Murphy checked where a stall corner was, so she could back down just in case he decided to fight. Looked like he was calming down, so she relaxed a bit.

“Why do you care about the horse?”

“Kalarama. I'm,”
she told a white lie,
“a Kalarama cat. If anything unusual happens, please tell me. I'm in Barn Five. Doesn't have to be about a horse. Could be anything, you know, sort of strange.”

Tucker walked beside Pewter, the other barn cats eyeing them with suspicion from a distance. The corgi stuck her head in a wastebasket outside a stall. Nothing.

She repeated this, putting her head in a red grooming bucket.

“Tucker, you're just looking for chicken, trying to pretend you're really looking for clues.”
Pewter taunted the dog.

“In the first bucket I smelled yerba maté tea, health-food-bar wrappers, orange peels, and needles that had contained Banamine.”
She named a horse tranquilizer.
“In this grooming bucket I smell cocaine in the little green tin marked Bag Balm.”

That shut up Pewter, who became more alert. She even climbed up the stall sides to peer in, then she backed down.

The last garbage bucket did have chicken bones, but Tucker resisted.

“Nothing here,”
Tucker called up to Mrs. Murphy.

“Try the hospitality room,”
Mrs. Murphy called down.
“The humans don't use it until showtime.”

Minutes later, Tucker and Pewter emerged from the resplendent navy and red room.

“Big fat zero,”
Pewter called up.

“Don't talk about yourself that way.”
Tucker's voice filled with mock concern.

“Bubble butt. Tailless wonder,”
Pewter shot back, but she was grateful Tucker escorted her, keeping the other cats at bay.

“Thanks for letting us visit your barn. I'm Mrs. Murphy, by the way.”
The tiger cat watched her two friends below.

“Spike.”
He smiled, revealing that his left front fang had been knocked out.

Mrs. Murphy hastily backed down a stall corner to drop in front of the cat and dog.
“Come on.”

“We aren't going through every barn, are we?”
Pewter, alarmed, raised her voice.
“It's already nasty hot.”

“Yes.”
Mrs. Murphy ignored her, and they marched over to Ward's barn. His green and white hospitality suite was more modest.

They repeated the process of checking each grooming tray, each wastebasket or open trunk.

Again nothing.

They walked up to Barn One, where Booty Pollard rented one half of the barn. His colors, orange and white, were uncommon in the horse world, but he'd graduated from the University of Texas and proudly used the Longhorn colors. Miss Nasty's empty cage, filled with toys, sported a limp orange pennant with a white “T.” The cage sat outside the entrance to the suite, as it needed a good airing out. Miss Nasty was not a good housekeeper, nor was her namesake.

Mrs. Murphy prowled above the horses while Pewter and Tucker worked below.

Although hot, Pewter kept at her task. She was interested since this involved another animal. Usually she and her friends accompanied Harry as she tried to help another human. Pewter loved horses, so she continued to brave the heat. She sauntered into the hospitality tent, where blue ribbons hung from massive longhorns at the top of the canopy. The whole top of the hospitality room was filled with blue ribbons. On the second row, below photos of horses and clients, red ribbons were neatly displayed on clear fish wire strung below the photos. Immediately below that were the yellow ribbons for third place.

Some trainers grouped the ribbons by horse, but Booty grouped by position, another manifestation of his eye for design and color.

Pewter flipped up a tack-trunk hook, but she couldn't lift the lid. She moved to a small bridle box next to the massive trunk, and that was easy to open.

“Bingo.”
She dashed outside.
“Found it.”

Mrs. Murphy climbed down as Tucker ran into the room. Inside the bridle box were four bottles of hair dye, neatly stacked.

“It's the color of Booty's hair.”
Mrs. Murphy wondered why people thought other people couldn't tell.

“Four bottles.”
Pewter was excited.
“Two empty.”

“You've got a point there.”
Mrs. Murphy was intrigued.
“We've got Booty and Charly supposedly hating each other but best friends at two in the morning. Ward loads Renata's horse. Booty's got the dye.”

“We don't know that was Renata's horse.”
Tucker watched as Pewter closed the bridle box.

“No, we don't, but the horse that Ward loaded could have been a double for Queen Esther except for color,”
Mrs. Murphy replied.
“That horse moved like Queen Esther.”

“Charly trained Queen Esther. Don't you think he'd know the horse we saw was her by the way she moved? He wasn't that far behind Ward.”
Mrs. Murphy pricked her ears forward.

“I'm glad it doesn't have anything to do with us. Not our horses.”
Tucker could imagine Harry's distress if someone stole one of her beloved horses.

“It will.”
The tiger heard footsteps approaching.
“Mother won't sit still while Joan and Larry are in trouble.”