Claws And Effect Part 18

"I'm not big on dead bodies." Pewter turned up her nose.

"It's not like he's been moldering out here for days," Murphy snapped. "Follow me."

The three animals walked in a semicircle, reaching the back of the two-horse trailer. They scrunched under the trailer, wriggling out by the body but careful not to move too quickly.

"Come on, Mim, you can't stay here. This can't get in the papers. I'll take care of you." Miranda struggled to lift up Mim, who was dead weight even though she was elegant and thin. Coop gently held Mim's right arm, pulling her up along with Miranda's efforts.

"I don't care. I don't care who knows."

"You can make that decision later," Miranda wisely counseled.

Mim glanced over her shoulder at the fallen man. "I loved him. I don't care who knows it. I loved him. He was the only man I ever truly loved, and I threw him aside. For what?"

"Those were different times. We did what we were told." Miranda tugged.

Mim turned to Cynthia. "I don't know if you know what love is but I did. If you do fall in love, don't lose it. Don't lose it because someone tells you he isn't a suitable husband."

"I won't, Mrs. Sanburne." Coop asked Miranda, "What car?"

"Hers. I'll drive. Ask Harry to bring my car home later."

"Yes." Coop helped fold Mim into the pa.s.senger seat. Her eyes were gla.s.sy. She looked ahead without seeing.

Miranda turned on the ignition, found the seat controls, moved the seat back, then reached over to grasp Mim's left hand. "It's going to be a long, long night, honey. I don't know how to use that thing." She indicated the built-in telephone. "But if you call Jim or Marilyn, I'll tell them we're having a slumber party. Just leave it to me."

Wordlessly, Mim dialed her home number, handing the phone to Miranda.

As they drove back down the drive, they pa.s.sed the coroner driving in.

Tucker, nose to the ground, sniffed around the body. Rick noticed and shooed her away. The cats climbed into the two-horse trailer tack room.

Although the night was dark they could see well enough. No spent sh.e.l.ls glittered on the floor of the trailer. A plastic bucket, red, with a rag and a brush in it sat on the floor of the small tack room. The dirty bridle still hung on the tack hook, a bar of glycerin soap on the floor.

"Guess he was going to clean his bridle and saddle before going home," Pewter speculated.

"I don't smell anything but the horse and Larry. No other human was in here." Mrs. Murphy spoke low. "Although Tucker is better at this than we are."

Tucker, chased off again by Rick, hopped into the tack room. "Nothing."

"Check in here," Pewter requested.

With diligence and speed, the corgi moved through the trailer. "Nothing."

"That's what we thought, too." Mrs. Murphy jumped out of the open tack room door, breaking into a run away from the parking lot and the barns.

"Where's she going?" Tucker's ears stood straight up.

Pewter hesitated for a second. "We'd better find out."

Harry didn't notice her pets streaking across the paddock. She and Susan walked over to Larry's body.

"I'll kill whoever did this!" Harry started crying.

"I didn't hear that." Rick sighed, for he, too, admired the older man.

"He brought me into this world." Susan cried, too. "Of all people, why Larry?"

"He got too close." Coop, not one to usually express an opinion unsolicited, b.u.t.toned up her coat.

"This is my fault." A wave of sickening guilt washed over the sheriff. "I asked him to keep his eyes and ears open at the hospital and he did. He sure did."

"If only we knew. Boss, he kind of said something at Harry's breakfast today. He'd had a little bit to drink, a little loud. He said-" She thought a moment to try and accurately quote him. "'Yes,' he said, 'I'll catch up with you tomorrow.'"

"Who heard him?" Rick was glad when Tom Yancy pulled up. He trusted the coroner absolutely.

"Everyone," Harry answered for her. "It wasn't like he had a big secret. He didn't say it that way. He was happy, just-happy and flushed."

"Harry, I want a list of everyone who was at your breakfast this morning," Rick ordered.

"Yes, sir."

"Go sit in the car to get warm and write it out. Susan, help her. A sharp pencil is better than a long memory." He pointed toward Susan's station wagon.

The two women walked back to Susan's vehicle as Tom Yancy bent down over the body. He, too, was upset but he was professional. His old friend Dr. Larry Johnson would have expected nothing less of him.

Mrs. Murphy stopped on a medium-sized hill about a quarter of a mile from the barn.

"What?" Tucker, whose eyes weren't as good in the dark, asked.

"Two places the killer could stand. On top of the barn. On top of this hill-or he could have been flat on his stomach."

"How do you figure that?" Pewter asked.

"Powder burns. No powder burns or Tucker would have mentioned it. He had to have been killed with a high-powered rifle. With a scope-easy."

"Shooting from here would be easier than climbing on the roof of one of the barns," Pewter suggested. "And the killer could hide his car."

The three animals stared behind them where an old farm road meandered into the woods.

"It would have been simple. Hide the car, walk to here. Wait for your chance. Someone who knew his routine." Tucker appreciated Mrs. Murphy's logic.

"Yeah. And it's hunting season. People carry rifles, handguns. There's nothing unusual about that." Pewter ruffled her fur. She wasn't a kitty who enjoyed the cold.

"We'd better go back before Harry starts worrying." Mrs. Murphy lifted her head to the sky. The stars shone icy bright as they only do in the winter. "Whoever this guy is, he's able to move quickly. He was at the breakfast. He heard Larry. I guarantee that."

"Do you think it's the same person who hit Mother over the head?" Pewter asked.

"Could be." Mrs. Murphy loped down the hill.

"That doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling." Tucker felt a sinking pit in her stomach.

26.

The fire crackled in Miranda's fireplace, the Napoleon clock on the mantel ticked in counter rhythm to the flames. Mim reclined on the sofa, an afghan Miranda had knitted decades ago wrapped over her legs. A cup of hot cocoa steamed on the coffee table. Miranda sat in an overstuffed chair across from Mim.

"I hope he didn't suffer."

"I don't think he did." Miranda sipped from her big cup of cocoa. She enjoyed cocoa at night or warm milk and hoped the substance might soothe her friend a little bit.

"Miranda, I've been a fool." Mim's lovely features contracted in pain.

Mim could pa.s.s for a woman in her middle forties and often did. Rich, she could afford every possible procedure to ensure that beauty. She'd grown distant and haughty with the years. She was always imperious, even as a child. Giving orders was the breath of life to Mim. She had to be in the center of everything and those who knew and loved her accepted it. Others loathed it. The people jockeying for power in their groups, the developer ready to rip through the countryside, the errant politician, promising one thing and delivering another or nothing, Mim was anathema to them.

Her relations.h.i.+p with her daughter alternated between adversarial and cordial, depending on the day, for Mim was not an effusive mother. Her relations.h.i.+p with her son, married and living in New York City, had transformed from adulation to fury to coldness to gradual acceptance of him. The fury erupted because he married an African-American model and that just wasn't done by people of Mim's generation. But Stafford displayed that independence of spirit exhibited and prized by his mother. Over time and with the help of Mary Minor Haristeen, a friend to Stafford, Mim confronted her own racism and laid it to rest.

Her aunt, Tally Urquhart, flying along in her nineties, said to Mim constantly, "Change is life." Sometimes Mim understood and sometimes she didn't. Usually she thought change involved other people, not herself.

"You haven't been a fool. You've done a lot of good in this life," Miranda truthfully told her.

Mim looked at her directly, light eyes bright. "But have I been good to myself? I want for nothing. I suppose in that way I've been good to myself but in other ways, I've treated myself harshly. I've suppressed things, I've put off others, I've throttled my deepest emotions." She patted a tear away with an embroidered linen handkerchief. "And now he's gone. I can never make it up to him."

The years allowed Miranda to be brutally direct. "Would you? He was in his seventies. Would you?"

Mim cried anew. "Oh, I wish I could say yes. I wish I had done a lot of things. Why didn't you tell me?"

"Tell you? Mim, no one can tell you anything. You tell us."

"But you know me, Miranda. You know how I am."

"It's been a long road, hasn't it? Long and full of surprises." She breathed in deeply. "If it was meant to be, it was meant to be. You and Larry." She gazed into the fire for a moment. "What a long time ago that was. You were beautiful. I envied you, your beauty. Never the money. Just the beauty. And he was handsome in his naval uniform."

"Somewhere along the way we grew old." Mim dropped a bejeweled hand on her breast. "I'm not quite sure how." She sat up. "Miranda, I will find who killed Larry. I will pursue him to the ends of the earth like the harpies pursued Orestes. With G.o.d as my witness, I swear it."

"The Lord will extract His vengeance. You go about your business, Mimsy. Whoever did this wouldn't stop at killing you either. They hit Harry on the head."

"Yes, her story sounded fishy."

Miranda shut her eyes. It had popped out of her mouth, and after she'd promised Harry not to tell. "Oh, me. Well, the cat's out of the bag. Harry snooped in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the hospital and someone cracked her on the noggin. It's supposed to be a secret and I, well, you can keep a secret-obviously."

"Funny, isn't it? We live cheek by jowl, everyone knows everyone in Crozet, and yet each of us carries secrets-sometimes to the grave."

"People say we should be honest, we should tell the truth, but they aren't ready to hear it," Miranda sagely noted.

"Mother certainly wasn't," Mim simply said.

"Well, dear, Jim Sanburne was quite a payback."

A slight smile played over Mim's lips. "d.a.m.n near killed her. Aunt Tally understood but then Aunt Tally understands more than the rest of us. She keeps reminding me, too."

"Why did you marry Jim?"

"He was big, handsome, a take-charge guy. An up-and-comer as Dad would say. Of course, he came from the lower orders. That killed Mother but by then I'd learned."

"What?"

"I'd learned to just go ahead. The h.e.l.l with everybody. I knew she wasn't going to cut me out of the will."

"But did you love him?"

A long, long silence transpired; then Mim leaned back. "I wanted to be in love. I wanted, well, I wanted the things you want when you're young. I never loved Jim the way I loved Larry. He's a different sort of man. You know, those early years I'd see Larry driving to work at the hospital, driving back to his private practice, at the country club with Bella. At first the sight of him hurt me because I was wrong. I knew I was wrong. But he always said he forgave me. I was young. I wasn't quite twenty, you know, when I fell in love with Larry. He was so kind. I think a little part of me died when he got married but I understood. And-" She opened her hands as though they might have contained treasure. "What could I do?"

"Love never dies. The people die but love is eternal. I believe that with all my heart and soul. And I believe G.o.d gives us chances to love again."

"If you envy me my looks, I envy you your faith."

"You can't reason your way to faith, Mim. You just open your heart."

"As we both know, I haven't been too good at that. I sometimes wonder if I would have been a more loving woman had I rebelled earlier against my family and married Larry. I think I would have. I closed off. I became guarded. I lost myself along the way. Now I've lost him. You see, even though we weren't lovers anymore, even though we lived separate lives, I knew he was there. I knew he was there." She cried harder now. "Oh, Miranda, I loved him so."

Miranda rose from her chair to sit on the edge of the sofa. She took Mim's hand in both of hers. "Mimsy, he knew you loved him."

"In time, Jim knew, too. I think that's why he redefined the word 'unfaithful'-well, that and the fact that he wearied of me bossing him around. It's rather difficult for a man when the wife has all the money. I think it's difficult in reverse, too, but the culture supports it, plus we've been raised to be simpletons. Really." Mim's modulated voice wavered. "That, too, was one of the things I loved about Larry. He respected my mind."

"It's like that Amish saying, 'We grow too soon old and too late smart.'" Miranda smiled. "But Jim grew out of it or he grew old. I don't know which."

"Breast cancer. Scared both of us. I believe that's when Jim came back to me, realized he loved me and maybe we'd both been foolish. Well, that's all behind me. My cancer hasn't recurred in five years' time nor has Jim's unfaithfulness." She smiled slightly. She sighed. "What did Jim say when you spoke to him? I don't remember. I know you told me but I don't even remember you driving me here."

"He said to call him if you needed him. He was going straight to Twisted Creek Stables." She let go of Mim's hand, reached over to the coffee table, and brought up Mim's cup. "This really will make you feel a little better."

Mim drank, handed the cup back to Miranda. "Thank you."

"I wouldn't want to be in Sheriff Shaw's shoes right now."

"I mistakenly a.s.sumed this had nothing to do with us." She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. "When Hank Brevard was found with a slit throat I thought it was brutal, but Hank lacked the fine art of endearing himself to others. That someone would finally kill him didn't seem too far-fetched. One had only to find the reason. But now-everything's different now."

"Yes." Miranda nodded.

"I think of death as an affront. I know you don't. You think you'll join up with Jesus. I hope you're right."

"'For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord G.o.d; so turn and live.' Ezekiel, chapter eighteen, verse thirty-two. Turn and live," Miranda emphasized.

"You've changed, too, Miranda."