Рита Браун - Rest In Pieces

“There are worse jobs.” Cabell squinted his eyes from the smoke. “You could be a proctologist.”

The men laughed.

The phone rang. Tiffany called out from the kitchen, “Mr. Hamilton.”

“Excuse me.”

As Fitz picked up the phone, Stafford, Cabell, and Blair joined the ladies in the living room. In a few minutes Fitz-Gilbert joined them too.

“Has anyone seen or heard from Benjamin Seifert?”

“No. Why?” Little Marilyn asked.

“He didn’t go to work today. That was Cynthia Cooper. She’s spent the evening calling his business associates and family. Now she’s calling friends and acquaintances. I told them you were here, Cabby. They’d like to talk to you.”

Cabell left the room to pick up the phone.

“He’s out of the office as much as he’s in it,” Harry volunteered, now that Ben’s boss was out of earshot.

“I told him just last week to watch his step, but you know Ben.” Fitz pulled up a chair. “He’ll show up and I bet the story will be a doozie.”

Harry opened her mouth but closed it. She wanted to say “What if this has something to do with the vagrant’s murder?” What if Ben was the killer and skipped town? Realizing Little Marilyn’s sensitivity to the topic, she said nothing.

Harry had forgotten all about Ben Seifert when Blair dropped her at her door. He promised he’d be there at seven-thirty in the morning. She opened the door and turned on the lights. Only one came on. She walked over to the debris on the floor, the lamp cord yanked out of the wall.

“Tucker! Mrs. Murphy!”

The two animals giggled under the bed but they stayed put. Harry walked into the bedroom, knelt down and looked under the bed, and beheld two luminous pairs of eyes staring back at her.

“I know you two did this.”

“Prove it,” was all Mrs. Murphy would say, her tail swaying back and forth.

“I had a wonderful time tonight and I’m not going to let you spoil it.”

It was good that Harry had that attitude. Events would spoil things soon enough.

33

The earth glittered silvery and beige under its cloak of frost. The sun, pale and low in the sky, turned the ground fog into champagne mist. Mrs. Murphy and Tucker curled up in a horse blanket in the tack room and watched Harry groom Tomahawk.

Blair arrived at seven forty-five. As Harry had already brushed and braided Tomahawk, painted his feet with hoof dressing, and brushed him again, she was ready for a clean-up.

“What time did you get up?” Blair admired her handiwork.

“Five-thirty. Same time I always get up. Wish I could sleep past it but I can’t, even if I go to bed at one in the morning.”

“What can I do?”

Harry shed her garage mechanic overalls to reveal her buff breeches. A heavy sweater covered her good white shirt. Her worn boots, polished, leaned against the tack room wall. Her derby, brushed, hung on a tack hook. Harry had earned her colors with the hunt while she was in high school and her ancient black melton coat with its Belgian-blue collar was carefully hung on the other side of the tack hook.

Harry placed a heavy wool cooler over Tomahawk and tied it at the front. Unhooking the crossties, she led him to his stall. “Don’t even think about rubbing your braids, Tommy, and don’t get tangled up in your cooler.” She gave her horse a pat on the neck. “Tommy’ll be good but I always remind him, just in case,” she said to Blair. “Come on, everything’s done. Let’s get some coffee.”

After a light breakfast, Blair watched Harry replace Tomahawk’s square cooler with a fitted wool dress sheet, put on his leather shipping halter, and load him into her two-horse gooseneck, which, like the truck, was showing its age but still serviceable. He hopped in the cab, camera in his coat pocket, ready for the meet.

He was beginning to appreciate Harry’s make-do attitude as he perceived how little money she really had. False pride about possessions wasn’t one of her faults but pride about making her own way was. She wouldn’t ask for help, and as the blue bomb chugged along he realized what a simple gift it would have been for him to offer the use of his dually to pull her rig. If he had asked politely she might even have let him. Harry was funny. She feared favors, maybe because she lacked the resources to return them, but by Blair’s reckoning she kept her accounts even in her own way.

Opening meet of the hunt brought out everyone who had ever thrown a leg over a horse. Blair couldn’t believe his eyes as Harry pulled into the flat pasture. Horse trailers littered the landscape. There were little tagalongs, two-horse goosenecks, four-horse goosenecks. There were a few semis pulling rigs a family could live in, Imperatore vans with the box built onto the back of the truck, and there was even one of the new Mitsubishi vans, its snub nose exciting both admiration and derision.

Horses, unloaded and tied to the sides of these conveyances, provided splashes of color. Each stable sported its own colors and these were displayed both in the paint jobs of the rigs and on the horses themselves, blanketed in their own special uniforms, the sheets or blankets indicating their allegiances. Harry’s colors were royal-blue and gold, so Tomahawk’s blue wool dress sheet was trimmed in gold and had a braided gold tail cord on the hindquarters. There were coolers and blankets in a myriad of color combinations: hunter-green and red, red and gold, black and red, blue and green, tan and blue, tan and hunter-green, silver and green, sky-blue and white, white and every color, and one cooler was even purple and pink. The purple and pink one belonged to Mrs. Annabelle Milliken, who had ordered a purple and white cooler years ago but the clerk wrote down the wrong colors and Mrs. Milliken was too polite to correct her. After a time everyone became accustomed to the purple and pink combination. Even Mrs. Milliken.

Big Marilyn’s colors were red and gold. Her horse, a shining seal-brown, could have galloped out of a Ben Marshall painting, just as Little Marilyn’s bold chestnut might have trotted out of a George Stubbs.

Harry put on her stock tie, her canary vest, her coat, derby, and deerskin gloves. Using the trailer fender as a mounting block, she swung into the saddle. Blair asked her if she wanted a leg up but she said that she and Tomahawk were used to the do-it-yourself method. Good old Tommy, in a D-ring snaffle, stood quietly, ears pricked. He loved hunting. Blair handed Harry her hunting crop with its long thong and lash just as Jock Fiery rode by and wished her “good hunting.”

As Harry trotted off to hear the words of wisdom from the Joint Masters, Jill Summers and Tim Bishop, Blair found Mrs. Hogendobber. Together they watched the tableau as the Huntsman, Jack Eicher, brought the hounds to the far side of the gathering. Horses, hounds, staff, and field glistened in the soft light. Susan joined the group. She was still struggling with her hairnet, which she dropped. Gloria Fennel, Master of the Hilltoppers, reached in her pocket and gave Susan another hairnet.

Blair turned to Mrs. Hogendobber. “Does everyone ride?”

“I don’t, obviously.” She nodded in the direction of Stafford and Brenda, both of them madly snapping photos. “He used to.”