Рита Браун - Out Of Hounds

She turned to the Richmond Times-Dispatch for sobriety, where she found it. No screaming, no predications of mass death, simply what the governor’s speech meant for Virginia and what was known about the virus. After reading, feeling more clear, she picked up the phone and began calling Betty, Aunt Daniella…another surprise, for she took it all in stride…Yvonne, Sam, Kasmir and Alida, Freddie Thomas. That took her to noon. Betty sent out the email but Sister felt next she needed to speak to every landowner and those calls carried her to tea time.

Golly, in her special bed on the counter, a place much resented by the dogs, lifted her head as Sister boiled water.

“Golly, it’s one thing after another.”

“It would be easier if you didn’t have two dogs.”

“Golly, shut up,” Rooster grumbled from his three-hundred-dollar bed with sides and a removable fleece interior.

Sister spoiled them in every respect, except they had to learn manners when puppies.

Raleigh, not bothering to lift his head, remarked to Rooster, “Rooster, no one could take a cat seriously. Pay her no mind.”

The water boiled while Golly did, too. As Sister poured the water over a Yorkshire Gold teabag, Golly vaulted from her luxurious bed, raced over to Rooster, smacked the harrier on the nose, immediately leaping back up to her bed.

“I’ll get you,” Rooster threatened.

Golly did not deign to reply but purred loudly, so Sister rubbed her head.

Sitting down at the kitchen table, Sister drank the strong English tea, which snapped her right back. “All right you all, I’m back at it.”

Once in the library she pulled out the last volume of Sir Alfred Munnings three-volume autobiography. No sooner had she opened the book than she shut it.

Walking over to the graceful desk in the corner she picked up the phone, dialed the 859 area code followed by O.J.’s number.

“Sugar, I meant to call you this morning after I heard the news, but all this coronavirus stuff has taken up the day,” Sister said as she heard O.J.’s distinctive voice.

“Actually, O.J., I meant to call you because I heard the Andre Pater painting of Catherine Clay-Neal had been stolen.”

“You have good connections. Will be on the six o’clock news.”

“Oh.” A silence followed this. “Carter Nicewonder told me.”

“Well, there you have it. Good connections. Is there a woman with some means to whom he hasn’t tried to sell jewelry?”

“Probably not.” Sister laughed. “Some of it is beautiful.”

“Is.”

“Is everyone at the museum okay?”

“Yes. Catherine and I were coming back from a hunt. She wanted to stop for a moment, we walked in, no girls. They must have heard our voices because they started screaming from the closet. Locked in. Two men with face masks. Guns. No one was hurt. Once released we all walked through the museum, which is when we found Catherine’s painting gone. She’s distressed. Who wouldn’t be?”

“Sidesaddle.” Sister had seen photographs of the large, stunning painting. “Well, O.J., this is the first painting that isn’t a Munnings. Are you all right?”

“I’m upset for her and for the museum. They have a fine security system but this happened in the broad daylight. All those two had to do was walk inside.”

“You would think this would stop. The longer it goes on, the more vulnerable the thieves are, or the mastermind.”

“You would think. So far no dead driver has been found. Of course, the girls never saw the vehicle, but they made off. Zip. Just like that.”

“Well, let’s keep in touch. We can still walk out hounds, we’ll be six feet from one another and in the open. I think this is extreme but Walter says, given our lack of preparation and it’s such a different type of bug, we have to do this. I guess six feet apart is better than six feet under.”

“For how long? People will lose their shirts.”

Sister thought a moment. “Yes. We’ve lived through flu epidemics before. I mean recently, not 1919, which was mass death worldwide. But all those recent flus that have names like SARS. I bet I have that wrong, but you know what I mean.”

“I do. Vaccines developed pretty quickly, so we can hope this does, too.”

“If this were up to the medical profession, I would agree. But the politicians are in it and both parties will try to use this to advance themselves. They don’t give a damn about the American people.” Sister revealed bitterness.

O.J. sighed. “I remember reading The Gilded Age in college. This is the second gilded age.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe it’s also the gelded age. So many men aren’t men.”

“Now, there’s a savage thought but funny,” Sister responded.

The two chatted a bit more then Sister hung up, returning to the sofa. Raleigh and Rooster laid on each side of her, their heads on her lap. Golly rested on the back of the sofa, her tail occasionally flicking over the human’s nose.

Sister stopped, brushed the tail back, then referred to the index in the back of the Munnings book. She rose, disturbing the dogs, looked in the index of volume one and volume two. Then she sat back down, looked into those warm brown doggy eyes.

“He never mentions Florence. Why didn’t I notice that?”

“Who’s Florence?” Golly asked.

Sister rose again, went over to Gray’s far too expensive computer and looked for Florence Carter-Wood. Photographs showed up of a beautiful woman then paintings of her. Paintings by Alfred Munnings.

“I wonder,” she muttered under her breath.

Florence was Sir Alfred’s first wife. They married in 1912. She committed suicide in 1914. She had tried to kill herself on her honeymoon but somehow pulled it together. She herself painted and was part of a group of painters before World War I known as the Lamorna Group. Others painted her as well, for she was so beautiful. She could ride. Sidesaddle, of course.

Sister thought about that. Today Florence might be considered depressive. Then she seemed to have a streak of melancholy but nothing so severe as to cause comment until her suicide attempt on her honeymoon.

Sitting there, surrounded by the best love, Sister considered what little she knew.

She said, “He never mentioned her. Not once in his three volumes, and according to this brief biography, not once after she died. Not once.”

Rooster replied. “I like it when you talk to me.”

“Ha. She’s not talking to you, she’s talking to herself. Humans do that.” The cat tossed her head in what she considered a fetching manner.

“She talks to us.” Raleigh couldn’t bear criticism of Sister. “When she talks out loud even if it isn’t to us we can learn something.”

Once again, the tall woman whispered. “Not once.”

CHAPTER 33

March 12, 2020 Thursday

Brilliant sunshine flooded pastures, trees almost blooming. Sister, Betty, Weevil, and Tootie walked hounds across the large field between her farm and the Bancroft’s After All. The temperature, in the low fifties, promised spring.

Hounds knew they were not hunting, as no one was on horseback. But the humans, far apart from one another, walked briskly. A human brisk pace was a hound’s fast walk sneaking into a slow trot.

Sister and Betty, in their hound-walking shoes, began to trot. Weevil and Tootie, up front, kept pace with the hounds. Sister and Betty brought up the rear.

“I’m going to have to work up to this.” Betty slowed.

“Me, too.” Sister smiled, watching the two young people and the hounds move away.

“I never was much of a runner.” Betty looked down at her breasts. “No support bras in my youth.”