Саманта Сильвер - Just Horsing Around

“You’re a little cutie, aren’t you?” I asked him. I knew he’d be too young to answer; most animals didn’t figure out how to talk to me until after they were weaned. But that was ok. He happily let me stroke his mane a few times, then went back to his game.

“Thanks so much for letting me see him,” I said to Kevin. “And to you Polly, for inviting me.”

“No problem,” they both replied as we headed back to the car. My mind raced with excitement, and it took everything I had to contain it. I’d confirmed my theory, now I had to go back and tell Charlotte and Sophie as quickly as possible.

I still had no idea who had killed Corey, or Caroline Gibson. But I was fairly certain I’d just discovered a new, huge motive for someone.

Chapter 17

“You guys, I have the biggest news!” I exclaimed as soon as I got back into the house, a little after six.

“Oh sure, now you’re willing to share,” Sophie replied, sticking her tongue out at me. She was floating in the air in the middle of the living room. Sprinkles was whining at her feet, evidently not happy with this turn of events, while Bee was sitting on top of the bookshelf, watching, hoping for entertainment.

“What on earth?” I asked, looking over at Charlotte.

“Your sister seems to think that the best way to see if I actually have magical powers is to put me in strange situations and see if my body reacts. So far, it’s not working.”

“I can see that,” I replied. Charlotte had one of her giant spell books out, and was frantically scanning through the pages.

“You do realize that the witches and wizards that wrote those books were like, the biggest racists against non-witches ever, right?” I told Charlotte. “They were like, inches away from actually inventing slurs. They weren’t exactly into helping humans get magical powers.”

“I know that,” Charlotte replied. “But at the same time, there has to be something in here about finding out how your magical powers work.”

“Yeah, and it’s by trying spells and having them work.”

“Well obviously Sophie is different. She has the powers, she just hasn’t figured out how to unlock them yet.”

“And what if I don’t have the powers?” Sophie asked. “What then?”

“You’re the one who’s always complaining that she can’t be a witch like us,” Charlotte shot back.

“Well right now I’m complaining that you’re making me float in the middle of the living room like some kind of fake Aladdin without a magic carpet.”

Suddenly Sophie let out a squeal as she fell hard to the ground, hitting the rug on the floor with a thud.

“Ow! Why would you do that?” she cried out. “I think I’ve broken my leg! You’re supposed to be a doctor! What happened to ‘first do no harm’? This is the opposite of that!”

I knew I was this close to a bad case of the giggles as Sophie lay on the floor complaining. For someone who supposedly had a broken leg, she sure complained a lot. Sprinkles ran over to her, wagging his tail, helping out by giving Sophie as many kisses as he could.

“Oh, Sophie, it’s ok, I’ll take care of you if you’re hurt,” he told her. “Are you hurt? Is this going to affect our walking schedule?”

“No, no, Sprinkles, I think I might be alright. Despite Charlotte’s best efforts to kill me.”

“What?” Charlotte asked. “You said you were tired of floating there. Besides, I thought maybe if you didn’t see it coming, if you had any sort of magical powers, your body would use them automatically to save you from the fall.”

I had an intense suspicion that Charlotte was simply using these ‘tests’ to secretly torture Sophie for fun.

“Alright, well, I think we can now say with confidence that Sophie is not, in fact, a witch,” I said. “She can speak to Sprinkles, and let’s just assume that’s all she’ll ever be able to do.”

“But I want to be able to do the cool spells like you guys do,” Sophie muttered. “It’s so unfair that I can’t.”

“Yeah, well, do you want to do the cool spells more than you want my sister to drop you on your butt in the middle of the living room?” I asked. “Anyway, I’ve confirmed my hypothesis, and so I can share it now. And it’s a big one.”

“What is it?” Charlotte asked from where she was in the kitchen preparing what looked like an omelette for dinner.

“Ok. So basically, in horses, eye color is linked to coat color. They don’t have a separate gene for their eyes. And both Amazing Grace and Touch of Frost were pure black and chestnut. It’s obvious when you look at them that there aren’t any hidden white patches or anything on them. But Touch of Midnight has blue eyes, which in Thoroughbreds is most common when they have the gene known as ‘splashed white’, an overo coat pattern.”

“But neither one of the parents are white?” Charlotte asked.

“No. And granted, they don’t have to be. Sometimes the white on a splashed white horse can be tiny, especially if they’re heterozygous, which means they have one dominant gene and one recessive gene, instead of two dominant or two recessive genes.”

“But you said both parents were perfectly solid coloured, which means…” Sophie started, but Charlotte cut her off.

“One of Touch of Midnight’s parents isn’t his parent!”

“Exactly!” I said. “And it’s not the mare. She’s definitely his mother. Touch of Midnight had to get his blue eyes from the splashed white gene. And yet, seemingly neither one of his ‘parents’ have the gene.”

“So some guy spent half a million dollars on sperm that didn’t belong to Touch of Frost.”

“I think that’s a pretty good motive for murder, don’t you?” I said triumphantly.

“Wow,” Sophie said. “You were right, that is big.”

“So you think Caroline Gibson was killed because she sold the sperm of a different horse and passed it off as Touch Frost’s?”

“Yes. And Corey, too. He was the head of the stables. He definitely would have known what was going on. That must have been why he was murdered, too.”

“But then there’s a problem. The horse you saw, the one you gave medicine to. Was that Touch of Frost? Or was that the impostor? Because if it was Touch of Frost, then why not just give the real sperm?” Charlotte asked.

I shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know for sure. All I know is that there’s no way Touch of Frost – the real one, wherever he is – is the sire of Touch of Midnight.”

“Do you have a guess?” Sophie asked.

“If I had to guess, I would say that for some reason, Touch of Frost is no longer available. I don’t know why. Maybe he got sick and passed away. That would be my best guess, but I honestly have no idea.”

“But if they have an impostor horse pretending to be Touch of Frost, how come no one has noticed he’s different? And why doesn’t he have the blue eyes or the white patches on him?”

“Well, despite the name, splashed white doesn’t necessarily mean the horse has to have a lot of white on him. In some cases, it can be as little as just a sliver of white on the nose, or something like that. If I had to guess, I’d say they found a horse that looked passably like Touch of Frost and dyed the white sliver on him black.”

“But hold on,” Sophie said. “We still run into a problem: no one who was on the farm that day would have been linked to Touch of Midnight’s people, right? You have the jockey, the trainer, the housekeeper, the daughter and the mom’s best friend.”

I threw myself back on the couch, somewhat dejected. Sprinkles, spotting the opportunity, jumped up onto me and happily licked my face while I scratched his back for a minute, before continuing to speak. “I know it has to be this, though. That was our problem before, we didn’t really have motive . Sure, Tony openly hated Caroline, but it’s still pretty rare for someone to just snap and murder their boss out of the blue like that. This is a real motive. It has to be one of them.”