Rosemary Harris - Dead Head

When we finished we locked Babe’s office and brought the tray inside. I walked Becka to her car.

“I’m sorry we never talked before,” she said, shaking my hand. “We will, I promise. And I can use some help with my garden next season if you have the time. I know how pleased Caroline is with your work. She was so excited about the venture you two were starting. I confess I was jealous. She might have asked any of us to go in with her, but she asked you. And Chiaramonte’s is a perfect location for a gift shop and small garden design center. I guess that won’t happen now.”

“Grant said me someone else was interested in the property,” I said, “unless Roxy was just trying to push him into making an offer. I wouldn’t put it past her to do that.”

“Oh no, it’s probably true,” Becka said. “I think you met him. Attractive man, around fifty years old? He spent a lot of time at the Paradise Diner the day you worked on the planters. He asked if we happened to know of a nursery for sale. Can you beat that for coincidence? I guess he’s the one.”

Now I had two mysterious strangers on my suspect list, so that’s where I started looking for my tipster.

It was time to whip out the blow-dryer.

There was an unfortunate truism that the better you looked and felt, the more people gave you what you wanted. Ordinarily I raged against this unfair fact of life and would have protested bitterly if anyone had suggested that I’d ever taken advantage of a situation with a flick of the hair or a well-timed laugh. But these were extraordinary times.

I made a lunch date with Mike O’Malley. I rummaged through the bags of Lucy’s cast-off purchases and laid out my clothes more carefully than I had for the wedding we’d attended. Some of my makeup was dried out or clumpy, but there was enough of the old magic left in that neglected basket of tubes and pots to help me look smoky-eyed and full-lipped.

My first stop was Mossdale Stables, located on one of Springfield’s many back roads. A series of swoops and rises past a small stream and over a stone bridge led me to Mossdale’s, where privileged kids worked on their seats and I occasionally went to collect horse manure to spread around flower beds.

When they’ve finished sharing their favorite tips on how to keep the deer at bay (human hair, coyote urine, Irish Spring soap), gardeners frequently debated the value of different kinds of manures, bat guano being the most highly prized and most expensive-think how long it must take to get a full barrel. Gardeners discussing manure was as lively a conversation as die-hard baseball fans arguing about the designated hitter.

Cow manure is right up there, but there aren’t too many farms left in Connecticut. Most of that product is imported, bagged, and shipped from who knows where. On the other hand, in Connecticut, we had no shortage of little girls bobbing up and down in those cute little riding outfits-the velvet hats preparing them for their velvet headbands. There were more than seven million horses in the United States, and I’d have bet a large number of them were here in the Nutmeg State.

I liked The Black Stallion as much as anybody, but I’m not much of a rider. Like most things I did once or twice a year-skiing, riding a bike, baking bread-I was a perennial novice, never doing it often enough to get better. When I rode, the horse never had any doubt who was in charge, and it was never me. For me, it was all about the horse poop. Black gold, plentiful and free.

Hank Mossdale was a quiet, capable guy in his forties whom I’d never seen in anything other than jeans and a chambray work shirt. He had thick brown hair, a year-round tan, and a body that looked rock hard from riding and manual labor.

Hank had gotten into the business late and through an unlikely path. He wasn’t to the saddle born; he’d been an accountant. At some point in the late 1990s the firm he worked for was recommending livestock as a tax shelter. At the time, you could take a large depreciation on the animals for the first few years and thereby shelter income. And it worked until the IRS changed the rules.

One day on a visit to a horse farm in upstate New York where he was breaking the bad news to the owners that their silent partners were soon to be even more silent, Hank had an epiphany. He realized that livestock was alive. Horses weren’t just items on a balance sheet, they were magnificent creatures, and he became obsessed with the idea of owning a stable.

Most people-if they had the horse fantasy at all-saw themselves at the Kentucky Derby sipping mint juleps, wearing outlandish hats they’d never wear in real life, and paying experts to train their horses. Hank’s plan-he was after all an accountant-was more conservative. He would buy one horse and train it himself for the somewhat less elite world of harness racing. No juleps. Less cachet, but an easier field to enter. He’d use the money from purses to buy the stable.

If he’d bothered to ask any professionals what they thought of his idea, they would have told him it was insane. It could take a hundred thousand dollars of care and training to win an eight-thousand-dollar purse. But he didn’t ask-he just went ahead and did it.

His first wife, smelling the horse manure but not the potential roses, left him for a more reliable breadwinner, a cardiologist; but she should have had more faith, because eventually Hank made it work.

He and his partner, Karen, a professional horse trainer, bought a horse that went on to win two of harness racing’s most prestigious races and, ultimately, more than one million dollars. By that time the ex-wife had unhappily relocated to St. Louis, where she was in the process of getting another divorce. Between the purses and the horse’s stud fees, five hundred dollars a, um, pop, they were able to buy a defunct riding academy on eight acres adjacent to the highway and state land, where riders where permitted to go. Hank and Karen were up to their elbows in horse manure for the foreseeable future.

I pulled into the long dirt driveway and parked next to a black Audi. Hank was leaning on the paddock fence, watching a minibus disgorge a load of kids and their teachers, who tried to keep their changes from spreading out in all directions. He waved and walked over to me.

“Karen will have her hands full with that lot. They always ask how fast the horses can run, as if that’s all there was to it. The urge for speed. I guess life’s a video game at that age.”

Hank Mossdale was always friendly, but that day he seemed warmer than usual. And he smiled a lot more. “You’re not dressed for mucking out.”

So that was it. I’d thrown a barrel and a pitchfork into the back of my Jeep, but I wasn’t kidding anyone. (Note to self: leave the blow-dryer out.)

“Just visiting, really. Got a few minutes?”

“For the woman who hauls away horse apples for me? Of course.” We left the horse trainer to her charges.

Owners who boarded their horses at Mossdale’s were considered members. I’d heard that was the business model that worked for Mossdale’s-not unlike membership in a county club. I guess that was the accountant in him. Horses were available for day use, but it was the members who kept his business afloat. Becka Reynolds had told me the man who’d spoken to Caroline generally rode at around 8 A.M.

There was the tiniest bit of frost of the ground and it crunched under our feet as Hank and I strode over to the barn where his office was located. I waited for one of his workers to lead away the horse she was grooming before telling him why I’d come.

“Only one new rider here on any kind of regular basis,” Hank said. “He’s in the locker room now, as a matter of fact. Said he had real estate business this morning, that’s why he’s riding later than usual. Name’s Ellis Damon.”