Furmidable Foes

26

June 21, 2019

Friday

Solstices wriggle between three days. Same with the equinoxes. The span is usually between the twenty-first and twenty-third, but it’s easiest to remember as the twenty-first, at least it was for Harry.

She considered these events moments of repose. A new season started. She liked to consider that, which is what she was doing early this morning as she walked through her house garden patch.

For income she had acres of sunflowers in the rear of the farm, along with hay, but she used the hay for herself. Now she scrutinized the shoots peeking up at her. Corn, potato, tomato, all in the grade school stage.

Pewter, flopped under the large walnut tree, thought vegetables a bore. Tuna, that’s what mattered. Chicken and beef weren’t so bad either, but fresh tuna was heaven. Mrs. Murphy tagged along with Harry, as did Tucker and Pirate.

“Pirate, honey, walk between the rows,” Harry instructed him.

He gingerly stepped off the little line of peeping plants and stepped into formation. Mrs. Murphy went first, then Tucker, then himself, now on the narrow walk between the rows.

Kneeling down, Harry poked her fingers in the soil. “H-m-m. If we don’t get rain in the next few days, I’d better water this.”

The hose, coiled up at the house, wasn’t that far away.

“Let’s pray this doesn’t turn into a drought year.” Harry stood up.

“Won’t,” Mrs. Murphy predicted.

“How do you know?” Tucker asked.

“Same way you do. I can smell it and I can feel it. They can only feel it when it’s a few miles away or the sky darkens. I wonder if once upon a time they could feel changes?” Mrs. Murphy replied.

“We’ll get rain tomorrow.” Tucker sniffed the air.

Pirate, taking baby steps since the two in front of him lacked his long legs, lowered his huge head, asking, “What do you mean, humans can’t feel what’s coming?”

Mrs. Murphy hopped onto the row next to the big fellow. “If they could, we’d all know it. Harry wouldn’t forget an umbrella or she’d throw snowshoes into the car. She listens to the Weather Channel, she goes outside and feels the air, but she’s behind. I think in order to survive, they once could read these changes, maybe not as well as we do but they could.”

“It’s terrible that they lost that ability.” Pirate frowned.

“They did it to themselves,” Pewter called from under the walnut.

“How can that happen?” Pirate had learned to take anything Pewter uttered with a grain of salt.

“Breeding,” Pewter replied with relish. “Instead of breeding stronger animals, they’ve bred weaker. The stronger ones died first in all their stupid wars. The cowards and weaklings lived. Bred more of the same.”

“Pewter, that’s awful,” Tucker barked.

“No one wants to hear the truth.” The gray cat flicked her tail in irritation. “Plus they bred stupidity as well. Lots and lots of stupid people.”

“Pewter, there are courageous people on earth now. Look at what Mom reads in the papers about protesters jailed in Russia or China or God knows what Middle Eastern country. Those people are willing to stand up and take the consequences.”

“Where are they here?” The gray fatty licked her lips.

“In the military,” Tucker fired back. “And our mother is not a coward. She’s faced danger.”

“O, la. The only reason she’s alive is we saved her how many times? She’s not the brightest bulb on the tree, you know.”

“You can’t compare humans to us. They are limited, but if they stay within their limitations they do pretty well,” Tucker thoughtfully said, then turned to Pirate. “Maybe one way to look at how you lose sense or senses is to look at some purebred dogs. Bassets used to have beautiful voices. The hunting bassets still do, but most of the show dogs have lost it. They are dwarf dogs, which I am, too.” He glared at Pewter. “You shut your mouth.”

Pewter replied with delightful maliciousness, “If the shoe fits, wear it.”

Mrs. Murphy warned Tucker. “Ignore her.”

“It’s hard to ignore someone that fat. Parts of her are in the next zip code.”

Pewter shot upward, tearing after the corgi, not bothering to sidestep the tiny little corn shoots.

“Hey!” Harry yelled.

“I will bloody that long silly nose of yours.”

Tucker had a head start and she could move along. After all, she was bred to herd cattle. Pirate, dumbfounded, watched the drama as Mrs. Murphy rubbed on Harry’s leg, hoping to calm the human.

“Kill!” Pewter sounded terrifying.

Tucker dodged to the left but the cat, fat or not, could easily change course.

Harry stopped to watch the drama. “She can run. Give her credit.”

Pirate lifted a paw and patted Harry, as the wolfhound had stepped back into the same row as the human.

“You’re a good dog, Pirate. God knows what any of us would do if you were a bad one.”

“I will always be a good dog to you. I will protect you and defend you for all my life,” the youngster murmured.

Mrs. Murphy, now under the big dog, called upward, “Good thing, Pirate, because you’ll have to. Harry gets into the damnedest messes.”

Tucker circled back to the little group as Harry left her garden, what she thought of as her best food garden, walking toward the barn. All the horses grazed in the verdant pastures. Every door and stall door had been flung open for the breeze. The upper doors where hay was stored were also open. The barn owl, asleep in the cupola, opened one eye, given Pewter and Tucker’s screams. She shut it. This was old news to her.

The tack-room door, open, allowed the beguiling scent of cleaned and oiled leather to drift into the center aisle. Harry loved visiting stables and barns. When she’d gone to Kentucky, she marveled at the Thoroughbred barns, some of them so grand, the cost must have been punishing. Those places were built for people who were not horsemen but who wanted to enter the racing game. Show impressed them. They naturally believed the owners had made money. Some had. Others inherited it. Others were smart enough to make money from other people’s money. No matter what, horse racing was tremendously impressive. Harry believed everyone should make a pilgrimage to Lexington, Kentucky, to take a stable tour. Maybe then they’d realize how important horses were to the economy. Of course, nothing was more important than dogs, who protected horses and humans, chased rats and other varmints, and even watched over children. Dogs truly were the center of the universe.

The center of Harry’s universe, or so she believed, trotted into the tack room, but it wasn’t a dog. It was Pewter, who had never lacked for self-regard even as a kitten.

“Scared the poop out of her.” She triumphantly jumped into Harry’s lap, looking straight into her eyes. “No one messes with Number One.”

“Aren’t you nesty.” Harry stroked her sleek head.

Despite the weight, Pewter was a deep gray with electric green eyes. She was pretty.

Mrs. Murphy followed in, jumping on the old tack trunk.

“Terrified. That dumb dog is terrified,” Pewter crowed.

“I’m sure,” the tiger cat fibbed.

The old dial phone rang. Harry picked it up. “Haristeen.”

“I know that.” Susan’s voice sounded over the line. “Why don’t you say Farm Queen? Have you seen that show FarmHer?”

“No.”

“I’ll tell you when it comes on. Won’t do me any good to tell you now. You’ll forget.”

“My memory’s good.”

“Okay.” Susan took a breath. “But what I’m going to tell you will push other thoughts out of your head. Did you know Jeannie Cordle suffered from diabetes?”

“No. I wasn’t that close to Jeannie. A warm acquaintance but I rarely saw her. Is that what killed her?”

“No. Frank asked for an autopsy because he was worried about the diabetes. Would the kids, adults now, be subject to it? It does run in families.”

“Seems to.” Harry was not very medical even though she was married to a vet. “How are Frank and the family?”

“About as good as can be expected. They waited for the funeral until the autopsy, of course. Also people are so far-flung now, it takes time to get everyone here.”

“Did the diabetes contribute to her death?”

“No. Ned called me because he can reach people in Richmond and he wanted to know. He has some good contacts in the medical examiner’s office. They wouldn’t tell him anything until the family was notified. Fair enough. But something about the way whoever was on the phone said it set off an alarm bell in my husband’s busy brain.”

“And?”

“Ned called his contact back after the family was notified. I hope I can pronounce this right but she was poisoned—” Susan paused.

Harry interrupted. “What?”

“I’ll try this. Atropine and scopolamine. Strong toxins.”

“How in the world did she, what, eat that stuff or rub up against it? Wait a minute. If she ate poison at the auction, wouldn’t we all have gotten sick or died?”

“Well, let me keep going here. Again, this is all new stuff to me. Those two substances I mentioned can act fairly quickly depending on how much is ingested. Again depending, it could take a few hours. The GI tract absorbs it and I think if you’re active it might speed the process along. We need a real doctor here, but she was definitely poisoned. Ned, of course, has to be concerned with safety in his district. But what they told him was, ‘Think of belladonna, deadly nightshade.’ ”

“What the hell?” Harry was incredulous.

“The Solanaceae family is large. These damn words are hard to pronounce. But she had ingested poison, a natural poison. The question is how?”

“Don’t they have tissue samples?”

“They do, but they don’t tell anyone how she came by it.”

“Could it have been an accident?”

“Highly doubtful.”

“So the toxin wouldn’t be hard to get?” Harry’s mind whirred.

“Not if you know what you’re doing. Fields are full of weeds containing this stuff. Plants like angel’s trumpet. This is the Datura genus.”

“If it’s so common, why aren’t more of us getting poisoned?”

“People don’t usually go around eating flowers and weeds.”

“So much for organic farming,” Harry quipped. “If you don’t know what you’re digging up, you can die.”

“Yeah, but we’ve always known that. Think of mushrooms.”

“True. So her killer must have known what they were doing? You think?”

“I don’t know. But why Jeannie? They are pretty sure it was angel’s trumpet, jimsonweed.”

“You know, Susan, it’s been a strange time. There’s two stills above my farm on either side of the ridge. Old bones, and hey, what about Bottoms Up’s beer truck getting emptied? Weird stuff.”

“Jeannie being poisoned is beyond weird. It’s incomprehensible,” Susan said.

“Something is wrong here.” Harry spoke with conviction. “Jeannie Cordle wouldn’t harm anyone. She was well loved.”

Susan, pondering this, replied, “There has to be a reason. There’s always a reason.”

“I don’t know,” Harry thoughtfully said. “Maybe Jeannie was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Pewter, great ears, heard every word. She leapt off Harry’s lap, ran over to Mrs. Murphy, telling her all she had heard.

“That really is the worst,” the tiger cat said.

“No. The worst is we’ll be dragged into it. You know Harry will never let this go. She’ll have to figure it out. I guess we’ll have to inspect her food.”

“Pewter, why would anyone want to kill Mom?”

“Because she sticks her nose where it doesn’t belong.”

“Why can’t people be more like cats?” Mrs. Murphy bemoaned.

“We can be curious but at least we have nine lives,” Pewter replied with some satisfaction.

“You hope.”