Рита Браун - Hounded To Death

“I’m sorry.”

“I just want to kill him.” Hope dropped the bags on the office desk.

“Don’t do that.” Dan tried to lighten the conversation. “That will cost more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, plus we need you here.”

“He’s right,” Sister agreed. “We do need you.”

“You-all make me feel better.” Hope calmed down.

“Get up early some morning and go on hound walk with us,” Sister suggested. “You’d be surprised at how it starts off the day: perfectly.”

“Thanks. I will.” Hope appreciated Sister’s concern.

Dan’s beeper went off. He walked outside as he dialed back on his cell.

“Hope, when are you going to come hunt with me?” Sister teased. “Think of how happy that will make your clients.”

“When I have more time,” the diminutive vet replied. “But I will come to hound walk. I promise.” She pulled sandwiches out of the bag. A couple of bourbon labels were stuck to her plastic sandwich wrappers. “Recovered?”

Sister knew Hope referred to the Kentucky show, finding Mo and then Giorgio. They’d had a phone conversation the day before, when Sister got home.

“Pretty much.”

“I still can’t believe it.”

Sister shrugged. “The question is, Why did someone wait so long to kill him?”

“Should have been strangled in the cradle,” Hope half joked.

“If you think about it, Mo Schneider makes a good case for free abortion on demand.”

Both women laughed, then Hope said, “Any more news on that point?”

“No. And I heard from O.J. Fonz still has no memory of who attacked him or how he ended up in that shed at Keeneland.”

“How’s Giorgio?”

“Good. He liked driving back with me.” Sister pointed to the labels. “Where’s the bourbon?”

Hope’s eyebrows lifted. “Be nice if I had all these brands. I’ve started lately to study them.” She pointed to an Evan Williams label. “Simple. Old-fashioned. Then there are bottles like Woodford Reserve. No labels. The name is on the glass.”

“I like that.” Sister picked up a cream-colored label. “Not much information.”

“No.”

“You know who loves bourbon and I suspect is well versed in it, since he’s the type to learn all about something? Grant Fuller.”

Hope stiffened slightly. “We’ve talked.” She looked up as Dan came back in.

He replied to the unasked question. “Lab results in on Caroline Silverman’s mare. Negative.”

“Good.” Hope smiled.

“You need to eat lunch and I need to push on. Good to see you-all.”

“Fair enough. Take care.”

Sister left, bag in hand, and drove back home.

The rest of her day passed in chores. She reminded Walter Lungrun, her joint master, to get a burn on the jump-building parties before the heat really became oppressive and the chiggers came out.

Chiggers could make a woman question the wisdom of the Almighty.

She wanted to clean the house because Gray Lorillard, her boyfriend, would be back Wednesday from visiting his aunt. She knew she’d not get to it tomorrow morning. Now or never.

Back in the house, the phone rang: Felicity Porter.

“Felicity, how are you?”

“I’m fine,” the Custis Hall senior said. “Mom and Dad refuse to come to my graduation. You’ll be there, won’t you?”

“Of course I will.”

Sister wanted to slap Felicity’s parents. The girl was pregnant and would marry when she turned eighteen, next month. The Porters, having envisioned a brilliant career for their daughter as an investment banker or stockbroker, had turned their backs on her. She planned to get a job, go to night school if possible, and raise her child. The baby’s father, Howie Lindquist, quarterback on the Miller School football team, loved Felicity and seemed to be a responsible young man.

“You’ll be my only friend.”

“You have many friends, Felicity.”

“My only older friend.”

This made Sister laugh. “Well, honey, I’m a trustee. You know I’ll be there, but if you want other older friends why don’t you ask Walter Lungrun and Betty and Bobby Franklin? They’ll stand by you. I know it’s terribly upsetting, honey, your parents not coming, but you’ll pull through. I believe in you.”

“Thank you.” A pause followed. “Pamela’s mother and father are coming. Pamela says her mother is going to make a last-ditch effort to get her to drop Ol’ Miss and go to the University of Pennsylvania. With her father’s money and her grades they’ll let her in even though it’s after the deadline. She was accepted there but turned them down.”

“You-all got accepted at so many colleges.”

“We really are the best class to graduate from Custis Hall.”

“No, mine was.” Sister teased her. “Class of Fifty-three. We’re the ones who gave the school the gorgeous silver tea service. See if the class of 2008 can top that.”

“We can try.” Felicity enjoyed the challenge. “The kitty is now at $1002.”

At the beginning of last year’s hunt season, Val, Tootie, and Felicity agreed to pay a dollar to the kitty each time one of them swore. The bulk of that sum had been paid by Val. The goal was to throw themselves a huge graduation party.

“Val apparently has not yet learned the virtue of restraint.”

“Good for us.” Felicity paused. “Thank you, Sister. You helped Howie and me find a place to live, you got me a job, you—well, I promise you I will be worth it.”

“Honey, all I did was open doors. You had to walk through them.”

“I promise you I will support myself and I will support Jefferson Hunt. I swear it.”

“I believe you will.”

After Sister hung up she finished the cleaning, surprised at how fast she did it. Usually it dragged on because she didn’t want to do it. But talking to Felicity picked up her energy.

Fortunate in the young people who hunted with her, she couldn’t understand people who complained about the young. It seemed to her that young people were like old people, good and bad in every bunch. She was surrounded by good ones.

By nine in the evening, she had showered and was headed for bed when Golly, moving at warp speed, nearly knocked her down, heading for the closet.

“The end is coming!” The long-haired calico declared.

Sister couldn’t feel changes in atmospheric pressure as early as the cats, dogs, hounds, and horses, but there had to be a storm brewing. Golly always headed straight for the folded cashmere sweaters, burying herself underneath them at the first hint of a boomer.

Sister opened the bedroom windows. The air felt oppressively still. The sun had set but a glimmer of gray colored the west, and she could still see the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains directly behind her. In the north sky she also saw enormous boiling black clouds.

“Uh-oh.” She threw on her slippers and robe, ran downstairs, pushed opened the mudroom door, hurried outside, and closed the windows of the Forester.

She hadn’t even gotten a foot out of the car when the first roll of thunder gave fair warning. What was odd was that it didn’t stop. The rolling thunder lasted for a full seven minutes. Lightning, still behind the Blue Ridge, was heading southwest. Within minutes it would be over the mountain, and then it would take fifteen minutes, tops, to reach the farm.

She grabbed the phone in the kitchen just as another flash, a sheet of light, made everything stand out in sharp relief.

“Shaker.”

“I’m on my way.”

She hung up. She and Shaker were telepathic. She had called to tell him to get to the kennel, because often a storm can provoke a particularly sensitive hound into labor and Violet was sensitive. If the mother panicked she might roll on her puppies.