Рита Браун: Crazy Like A Fox

“Do you recognize this man?” Sister played the video.

Tedi smiled. “Weevil!” Then her hand flew to her breast. “Weevil at the museum?”

Sister explained what had transpired.

“Edward. Edward, darling, come here a moment.” Tedi then leaned toward Sister. “He was at Dartmouth when I was at Madeira, but he’d come home for the holidays and we hunted around. By the time I was a junior in college we’d covered most of Virginia and Maryland.”

Edward excused himself from Sam Lorillard, Gray’s brother, who worked for Crawford Howard, a thorn in the side of Jefferson Hunt. Crawford, however, was happy to use the hunt to train his green horses, Sam in the irons.

“Honey, look at this.”

Sister played the video.

“There were no videos when Weevil was alive,” Edward, a man married to facts as well as to Tedi, remarked.

“Darling, this was three days ago.”

“That’s impossible.” He looked again at the replayed images. “Impossible.”

Sister stared up into Edward’s eyes. She was six feet tall, and he was taller. “You were in your early twenties then. Is it possible you don’t exactly recall how he looked?”

“Not likely.” Edward half-snorted. “That s.o.b. romanced my sister, then took one look at Tedi and made a pass at her. I charged right up and said, ‘If you so much as lay a hand on her, I will kill you.’ ” He smiled sheepishly. “I was a young man in love and now I’m an old man in love.” He wrapped his arm around his wife’s still-tiny waist.

“And you, Tedi, do you believe this is Weevil Carruthers?”

“Sister, if you ever saw the man in the flesh, you would never forget him. That’s Weevil.”

“Could it be someone made up to look like Weevil?”

Tedi stared at the video, then into her friend’s cobalt eyes. “No. A man would have to be born that impossibly handsome. He was, you know. Did you ever see him?”

“From a distance. My mother took me to a hunt on our way down to Raleigh once. I was, I don’t know, maybe ten. I dimly remember a handsome blond man on a steel gray horse. I think I was too young for a strong response.”

Edward laughed. “Indeed. I remember when he disappeared. If you were a hunting man you practically had to take a ticket and stand in line at the Albemarle County Sheriff’s Department. The department called on Richmond officers to help, I remember that. Too many suspects—they were overwhelmed. Never found him, of course.”

“Until now, if you believe in ghosts,” Sister simply stated.

Taken aback, Edward replied, “I don’t. I don’t, but that video is hard to explain and blowing ‘Gone to Ground’ is, well, very Weevil.”

“People must have liked him despite all,” Sister said.

“Oh, he was great fun, charming, a hard rider, and he could hold his liquor. Men liked him until he slept with their wives or daughters. After I told him I would kill him, he smiled at me, and said, ‘She’s worth killing for. I’m glad you know that.’ Then he tapped his cap with his cowhorn, nodded to Tedi, and rode off. How could I not like him?”

“You?” Sister focused on Tedi.

“Yes, he was impossibly handsome but he was, oh, fifteen years older than I, so he seemed old. But I liked him. He was a rip-roaring huntsman, but you know, in those days more game, fewer roads. Thought today good hound work, by the way.”

“Was.” Sister loved a compliment, which she always took to be for the hounds, not herself. “This video is so strange. I had to show you, as surely there’s some kind of logical explanation. Although unlike you, Ed, I do believe in ghosts.”

CHAPTER 3

Neat piles of papers on the right-hand side of Crawford Howard’s specially built enameled desk reflected the blue light of the computer screen Crawford was studying. The L-shaped desk had a heavy glass insert in the section where he wrote letters. The desk itself, enameled in hunter green, dominated the room, as did the man himself.

Crawford, now in his mid-fifties, had made his first fortune in Indiana, building strip malls. Once secure, he moved to central Virginia, which he remembered, as a young man, visiting historic sites with his parents. He fell in love with the beauty of the state, and the strange romance of the battlefields, starting with Yorktown. He also fell in love with foxhunting. He began hunting with Trader Point Hunt near Zionsville, Indiana. As this was a drag hunt, he learned to jump because hounds always found the dragged scent. Once he moved to Virginia he encountered the vagaries of live hunting, as well as the difficult terrain of The Jefferson Hunt, where he started.

Accustomed to getting his way, thanks to his wealth, he felt, after a few years and large checks to the club, he should be appointed Joint Master to serve along with Sister Jane. However, riding and giving money is not the same as knowing hunting, and he didn’t really know it. He knew real estate, he knew construction, he knew the stock market, but he couldn’t tell the difference between an American foxhound and an English foxhound. While that can be learned, modifying one’s behavior’s to Virginia standards was too much for certain egotistical personalities. Crawford was such a one.

Needing, at long last, a Joint Master, Sister asked Walter Lungrun, M.D., in his early forties. She’d known him since he was a child. She also knew her husband had fathered him on Mrs. Lungrun. Neither she nor her husband referred to this, and Mr. Lungrun raised Walter as though his own. In theory, no one knew.

In a snit, Crawford withdrew from The Jefferson Hunt to start his own outlaw pack. Having blown through three huntsmen, it was not a success. He’d hired a young woman, Cynthia Skiff Cane. She could deal with his meddling better than the prior men, but there were days when even she had to walk away, diplomatically.

Having lost some weight, Crawford, in good shape, still with a full head of hair, proved attractive enough. His wife loved him. Someone did, thankfully.

He leaned back in his chair, letting out a long deep breath. “My God.”

Then he picked up the phone to call an old college friend in New York City who was a vice president at a large brokerage house. “Larry.”

“Crawford, how are you?”

“Dismal. I’ve been looking at our dollar rising even higher today. The euro is about worthless.”

After a pause, Larry replied, “Great for importers. Bad for exporters.”

“My mat business is suffering. I’m losing money hand over fist.”

Crawford, keeping his fingers in many pies, had bought into a wonderful business manufacturing car mats and truck bed mats to protect the paint and offset the slipperiness of a truck bed, especially in foul weather. You could break a leg back there.

“You fortunately are diversified. I have clients who really are going broke over this.”

“I hate to lose money,” Crawford grumbled. “And I believe I will lose more. Why did anyone ever think a European Union would work? They’ve been killing one another over there for centuries. Hell, if you go back to Julius Caesar and Vercingetorix, thousands of years. Absurd.”

“Well now, Crawford, I’d like to think that World War Two truly woke them up. I’d like to think that the European Union will pull the chestnut out of the fire.”

A long sigh followed this. “I’m not going to argue.”

“That’s a first.” His old friend laughed. “Back in the days of our Sigma Chi bull sessions, who could argue all night long, with or without booze?”

Crawford smiled at those days, how much he loved his fraternity, the sheer fun of it all. “You’d be surprised at how much I’ve learned.”

“You married Marty. That was the best move you ever made. You make a mess, brother, she cleans it up.”