Рита Браун - Whisker Of Evil

Sugar smiled. “I know Harry won’t sell any of them.”

“You got that right.” Fair laughed, for his ex-wife couldn’t bear to part with any animal once she got to know him or her. “Have you talked to Harry?”

“No,” he sheepishly replied. “Well, I don’t know that anything will happen, and she’d get all upset. Easier to tell you.”

Fair tried to think as Harry would. “Sugar, are you worried that you might be in danger? Barry’s death was bizarre, and with each passing day it seems more, well, bizarre.”

Sugar’s voice rose. “What did he know? I can’t think of anything. Barry worked hard. What could he have known? I go over it and over it. He just pissed someone off. Over a girl. That’s what I think. So they rip out his throat and dump him. That’s what I think.”

“Kind of what I think, too. When there was no saliva found on the body, that was the tip-off. But I thought he was between romances and not between the sheets.”

“Me, too, but he could have taken up with a married woman. He knew how to talk to women.” Sugar said this with admiration.

“I’m starting to think it isn’t about talking to women, it’s about listening to them.”

Sugar thought about this. “Might be right. I sure do listen to Carmen. That girl can talk. We’re sort of going out.”

“I’ve got new respect for Barry.” Fair paused, then winked. “And you.”

“Why?”

“Barry didn’t talk to you about his conquests. He wasn’t a braggart, even to his best friend. And you’ve been very circumspect about Carmen.”

“A couple of times Barry said Carmen plucked his last nerve, but that was different. Barry was raised right.”

To be raised right as a man in the South, regardless of class or color, meant you did not discuss women in disparaging terms and you never whined about a woman if she did wrong by you; you kept your mouth shut. Men suffered in silence.

Like most ideal behavior, many men tried to live up to the standard but fell short.

“Speaking of being raised right, these mares represent an investment of money and hard work. Your mother would have been proud.”

Sugar beamed. “Thanks.”

Sugar’s father left his mother when Sugar was four, and the ne’er-do-well subsequently died in a bar in Baltimore, literally falling off the barstool dead drunk. His mother passed away three years ago of lung cancer.

“Well, I’d better push off. Got a couple of mares to check over at BoomBoom’s.”

“She do late breedings, too?”

“No. She’s only got two mares left, the hunters. As luck would have it, the pretty refined bay, Keepsake, jumped the fence and checked around until she found someone she liked.”

Sugar laughed. “Hope it wasn’t a donkey.”

“That’s just it. We don’t know. The closest intact horse”—meaning stallion—“lives down Whitehall Road at Phyllis Jones’s place. Let’s hope that’s where that hussy visited. Called Phyllis. Her fences are just fine, but the mare might have jumped in and jumped out.”

“No wonder Boom hunts that mare.”

Fair nodded in agreement. “For BoomBoom’s sake let’s hope it was one of Phyllis’s stallions—because those are nice, nice horses—and not the donkey over at Short Shot Farm.”

“I didn’t know they had a donkey.”

“Just bought it for their little girl.”

Sugar started to laugh. “I want to see this one. If BoomBoom winds up with a mule, she’ll pitch a fit and fall in it.”

If a donkey breeds a horse, the offspring is a mule. Mules can’t breed as they are sterile.

“Hey, Boom will fool you. If it’s a mule, she’ll keep it.”

“No way.”

“Five bucks says I’m right if it’s a mule.”

“Can’t predispose her toward keeping the critter. Promise.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die.” Fair laughed as he repeated the childhood oath.

“Five bucks.” Sugar shook Fair’s hand.

As Fair climbed into the truck he called back, “Try one of those generic antihistamines. There are a couple that won’t make you drowsy. Knock that headache right out.”

“Okay.”

19

C an’t people just elope?” Harry grumbled as she sorted the unusually large number of envelopes Saturday morning.

Isabelle “Izzy” Stoltfus, a ripe twenty-three, worked the post office on Saturdays, but this Saturday, June 12, her first cousin was getting married over in Stuart’s Draft, so Harry filled in.

Izzy’s distant cousin, Jerome, was the animal-control officer. The two of them possessed literal temperaments. If something was written down, surely it was revealed wisdom. If it wasn’t written down, they were paralyzed by indecision.

Fortunately, post-office procedures had changed little since the postal relays of ancient Rome. You delivered the mail, simple as that. What had changed was the speed with which it could be handed to you.

Once the mail sack was dropped at the Crozet Post Office, sorting the mail took time. Harry had to place each person’s letters, magazines, and junk mail into their box. Packages too large for the box were set on industrial shelving, numbered by postbox rows. So the top shelf, since this was a small town, was one through fifty; the second shelf was fifty-one through one hundred, and so on.

“Why is she moaning about elopements? The wedding invitations went out and came in two months ago,” Pewter logically said.

“She’s not complaining about the volume of mail. She’s complaining because Izzy’s not here. She’s ready to cut hay, and you know how she gets about that first cutting.” Tucker loved the first haying, the sweet smell of the newly mown hay flat on the ground in rows that often curved as gracefully as the line on a Manet canvas.

“It really is a mess of mail.” Pewter sauntered over to the pile on the sorting desk, the rest in the cart.

Mrs. Murphy, already on the white, blue, pink, yellow, and even cerise envelopes, said, “Party time. Flag Day parties. Fourth of July parties coming up. Bastille Day parties.”

This being Virginia, there were parties for every single human endeavor or lack of same. There were fishing parties, hunt club trail-clearing parties, the usual round of birthdays, retirement parties, let’s-celebrate-death-to-chiggers parties (chiggers being a nasty little bug), and the ubiquitous informal parties. Now, these informal parties could be tricky. A lady didn’t put on white gloves and party manners, but she couldn’t show up in flip-flops, a tube top, and cutoff jeans. Despite protests to the contrary, there really were no informal parties. Dress might be relaxed, but folks pulled themselves together. Virginians take their public appearances seriously. This seriousness about personal display allows them to be wonderfully charming, funny, and entertaining at all the parties. When a person knows they are correctly turned out, even if the clothes aren’t their favorites, they relax.

Every one of those invitations that Harry flicked into the back of the mailboxes specified the dress code. Not one of them said, “Come as you are.” No one wanted to see you as you are. Much too scary. They wanted to see you at your best.

Harry, born and bred in these parts, from families that arrived here in the early seventeenth century, received almost every invitation possible. She loved parties, but the dress tortured her. Her limited funds were spent on her farm.

No one could hold a candle to Big Mim or BoomBoom in the turnout department, but Harry looked okay. Big Mim could and did pop over to Milan and Paris. She ran ahead of the fashion curve. BoomBoom preferred shopping in New York, knowing just where to find all the bargains south of Houston Street. Nor was she averse to tromping through Bergdorf Goodman.