Рита Браун - Outfoxed

“Big surprise.” Lafayette snorted in jest.

“I’ll tell you about books.” Golly stretched fore and aft, then sat down quite regally, prepared to declaim. “It’s the best way to enjoy an uninterrupted conversation with the best human minds from any century, from most any country. Superior as we are to humans, imagine if we wrote books. You might know what Man O’ War learned and thought. I could learn from the cats of ancient Egypt. It truly is our one great failing. We don’t record our experiences.”

“We’re too busy living them.” Raleigh laughed.

“There is that.” Golly smiled and purred. She did love Raleigh quite a bit.

The slam of a truck door diverted their attention. The cat and dog walked to the open barn doors. The sun had just set and soon a light frost like thin icing would blanket the ground.

“Doug and Cody,” Raleigh said.

“That started up again?” Rickyroo paid little attention to human couplings and uncouplings.

“How could Doug pick such a loser, even if she is pretty?” Golly returned to her hay bale by the side of the aisle, set up for the morning feeding.

“On again, off again.” Lafayette’s stall dutch door opened on the other side of the barn from Doug’s cottage.

“I don’t want her to hurt Doug again.” Raleigh’s ears swept back.

“Of course she will. She’ll hurt everybody, including herself, but there’s one thing I’ll say for Cody . . . if she gets somebody in trouble, she gets right in there with him.”

“What’s the worst that can happen? She gets pregnant,” Ricky said.

“There’s lots worse than that. People commit suicide over love and really dumb stuff,” Raleigh replied.

“Well, it doesn’t affect us.” Ricky felt the whole thing was silly.

“The hell it doesn’t.” Golly spoke forcefully. “Everything they do affects us.”

CHAPTER 14

Later that night three short knocks brought Cody to the front door of her small house. She opened the door.

“Hi, Sis.” Jennifer leaned against the doorjamb, the hall light framing her hair like a halo.

“Jen, get in here.” Cody clamped her hand around Jennifer’s wrist, pulling her inside and shutting the door behind her. “You asshole.”

Jennifer, unperturbed, unsteadily walked for the couch and dropped onto it. “Shut up.”

“What’d you take?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t jam me.” Cody bent over Jennifer to check out her pupils.

“Couldn’t go home.”

Cody picked up the phone. “Hi, Mom. Jen’s with me. She’s going to spend the night.”

“What about her clothes for school?” Betty asked.

“She can wear mine. She needs help writing her history report.”

“Well . . .” Betty’s voice faded. Then she said, “All right.”

Cody hung up the phone. “Don’t do this.”

“You do.”

She bent over Jennifer. It was like looking into her own face. “Because I’m weak. I don’t want to do it. I don’t even want to drink a beer. Something happens and I just do.”

“Yeah, well, me, too.”

“No one’s got a gun to your head. Stay off the stuff. I’ve wasted the last five years and I’ll never get them back and I’m trying to get straight. Hear?”

Jennifer nodded. “Everything is so fast.”

Cody sat next to her sister, patting her knee. “Yeah. And everything is so clear. Cocaine. I’m a genius on coke until I come off.”

“Black.” Jennifer rocked a bit.

“Heading down?”

“Yeah. There’s got to be something to cut that, I mean cut the down. I heard speedballs do it.” She mentioned a potent cocktail of cocaine and heroin.

“That’ll kill you if you get the mix wrong,” Cody replied.

“Got anything?”

“No.”

“You wouldn’t give it to me if you had,” Jennifer flared.

“If it would soften the drop, I would. I’ve been on that ride, little sis.”

“What am I gonna do?” Jennifer cried.

“Feel like shit. There’s nothing I can do.”

Desperation contorted Jennifer’s beautiful features. “You gotta help me.”

“I am. I’m letting you stay here.” Cody sighed. This would be a long night. “Where’d you get the stuff?”

“Easy to get.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Jennifer laughed. “Why the hell do you care? You get it where you can get it. I can buy it at school—lots of places.”

“Jen, you’re gonna stop if I have to lock you up and throw away the key. I’m not gonna let you screw around and fuck up like I have.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Jennifer just wanted her racing heart to slow down and the black clouds to disperse.

CHAPTER 15

The night promised a light frost. Sister Jane made the rounds before turning in for the night. She checked Dragon, head swollen but beginning to feel better. She said good night to the rest of the hounds, hearing a few good nights in return.

She walked back over the brick path to the stable. The horses slept in perfect contentment.

With Raleigh at her heels, she walked in her back door, removed her barn coat and scarf, draping them over the Shaker pegs. Then she slipped her feet out of the green wellies.

She clicked off the lights in the kitchen, the hall, and the front parlor. Then she climbed the front stairs to her bedroom. Two windows, the glass handblown, looked over an impressive walnut tree. Beautiful though it was, the sound of dropping walnuts on a tin roof could waken the dead during the fall.

Golly, already on one pillow, opened an eye, then shut it when Sister and Raleigh entered the room. An old sheepskin rested at the foot of the bed. Raleigh jumped up, circled three times, finally dropping like a stone.

“You weigh more than I do,” Sister teased him.

“Close,” Raleigh replied.

A chill settled in the room. Built in 1707, the house was a marvelous example of early American architecture. Insulation was horsehair in the walls, some of which also had lathing. Years ago when Ray was still alive they’d blown fluffy insulation down the exterior walls and it helped cut the cold. Materials had advanced since then, and she often thought of just ripping out the walls from the interior and putting up those fat rolls of pink insulation with numbers like R-30.

The expense halted that pipe dream, as did the total disruption to her life. Bad enough to be disrupted at forty but by seventy her tolerance had diminished proportionately.

She hopped out of bed, slipped on a sweatshirt, and hopped back in.

She picked up Arthur Schnitzler’s The Way into the Open , published in 1908. There was a line in the novel she appreciated, “the bereavements of everyday life.” She read a bit, then put it down. Neurotic, edgy Vienna displeased her tonight.

She reached for George Washington’s foxhunting diaries, which had been compiled for her by an old friend who worked at Mount Vernon. The good general had kept diaries, notes, letters from the age of fourteen on.

She read a few lines about hounds losing a line on a windy day. Then she put that down, too. Normally she loved reading Washington’s foxhunting observations. He was a highly intelligent man and a forthright one about hunting. But she needed relief from hunting. Right now it was causing as much headache as joy.

She opened a slim red volume of Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation . These notes, written in 1746, when the general was fourteen, were, he hoped, going to be engraved on his brain. The physical act of writing pinned the words in the mind as well as on the page. But for the young, tall youth, the main purpose was mastery over himself.