Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

CHAPTER 7

Cold seeped into Uncle Yancy’s bones. At ten, for a red fox he was old. Quick thinking and cleverness kept him alive when other foxes fell by the wayside. He wondered when his spouse would leave her earth, a spacious den. A nag, Aunt Netty had plucked his last nerve and he had moved out. She said she threw him out. Over the last three years Netty’s expulsions became an annual event based, she said, on his messy ways. She prided herself on a clean den. His version was she didn’t know what she wanted and had turned into an old crank.

Then spring would come, Aunt Netty would need help with one project or another, something usually involving killing rabbits, and she’d woo him back.

This night, twenty-two degrees outside but cozy in the mudroom at the Lorillard home place, Uncle Yancy swore he wouldn’t fall for it this spring … if spring ever arrived.

Yancy had chewed a hole through the floorboards from underneath the mudroom to crawl up next to the tack trunk. A few of the floorboards were rotten, which made it easier. Sam Lorillard had thrown a pile of washed red rags in the corner, then forgot them. The fox, smelling crumbs and other tidbits would push the rags aside, enter through, then push them back. Once in the mudroom he had many places to hide, including jumping from shelf to shelf until he was on the highest one. To him, the mudroom was a little bit of heaven. The temperature inside hovered in the low fifties. The grasses and old towels in his den in the graveyard, another under the front porch, were all right if he curled up, but this was true luxury.

Uncle Yancy recognized the Lorillard brothers, Gray and Sam. The two kept the home place, having bought out their snotty sister, Nadine, who was now a leading light in Atlanta, wanting nothing to do with country life. She certainly wanted nothing to do with Sam.

Gray would stay home maybe two nights a week, less if he was called in for a consulting job in Washington where he retained a convenient small apartment. The rest of the time he stayed at Sister’s.

Uncle Yancy knew many of the humans in his territory. The Bancrofts’ farm touched the Lorillard farm on the Lorillards’ western edge. He also knew Sister, Shaker, Betty, and Sybil and he even recognized some people in the hunt field. From time to time the hounds, all of whom he also knew, would pick up his scent and he’d lead them a merry chase until he tired of it. Usually he’d dump them at Hangman’s Ridge, an eerie place. Too many ghosts and too many minks—those nasty little devils with their sharp teeth. He hated them. It was mutual, but their strong odor almost always threw off the hounds, and many’s the time when Uncle Yancy walked down the backside of Hangman’s Ridge. Just in case, he marked every gopher hole and abandoned fox den along the way. You never knew when you’d need it.

On the top shelf, he rested his head on his outstretched right arm.

The kitchen was next door, a wood-burning stove heating most of the wooden house with a little help from a newly installed heat pump. There Sam sat on a chair, bucket between his feet, bridle in his hands. Uncle Yancy could smell the special saddle conditioner, a type of saddle butter, that the wiry man always ordered from Grangeville, Idaho.

The men’s voices carried into the mudroom and the fox found their deep timbre oddly soothing. He liked Sam, who he saw more than Gray. Something sad and lonely about the man affected the creature. Most all of the higher vertebrates can sense emotions in others. Humans deny this ability in animals, but then they also deny their own emotions. Uncle Yancy had nothing to hide, therefore he was open to all information.

“That stuff really is the best.” Gray leaned back in the wooden chair. “But it takes so long. First you have to strip down the leather, wash it good, use some saddle soap, then let it dry. Half the time I don’t have the time.”

“Brother, when do you clean your own tack? You pay Tootie to do it for you.”

Sheepishly, Gray agreed. “Most times I do but, you know, those spring days, you smell the apple blossoms, then it’s a joy to sit outside and clean tack or clean anything, really. The rest of the time, not so much.”

“I never knew how beautiful this place was until I left for college. Harvard, well, it’s in the city, grand as the place is, but I thought I would perish of homesickness.”

“Me, too, not so much at college but all those years in D.C.” Sam rose to start heating water on the stove. “I feel like hot chocolate. What about you?”

“Sounds good. I’ve been thinking about what you told me. What Sister told you after the Custis Hall meeting last night. Mercer’s one brick shy of a load.”

Gray smiled. “He’s always been excitable.”

“Excitable, hell, he’s all over the map. Lorillard men aren’t supposed to be, well, you know. Anyway, he treats me like a slug, a sea slug.”

“Because you don’t have any money. Sam, he’s not that bad.”

“Hell, he’s not. The only reason he’s nice to me is when he nudges me a little to try to get business out of Crawford. Oh, how Mercer loves to make money and be around money.”

“His side of the family has had money for a long time. While he’s not exactly Crawford or Phil’s equal, he’s not poor by a long shot. And give him credit, he knows his business.”

“He can recite bloodlines and sales figures. I told him once, forget blabbing about bloodlines. People don’t care. Just talk about how much the sire won or the dam and what their progeny is doing on the track. But he keeps blabbing on, showing off.”

Gray mixed the hot chocolate powder, the hot water releasing the enticing smell. “Here.”

“Thanks. You taking a break from female companionship?”

“Sam, I usually spend Monday and Friday nights here if I can. Sometimes it is good to have one’s little space.”

“A Room of One’s Own.” Sam cited the Virginia Woolf book, as he was well educated.

“Something like that.”

“I don’t know if I will ever enjoy female companionship. Been a long dry spell.” Sam started rubbing in the saddle butter using the warmth of his hands to help the waxes penetrate the leather. “Mostly I really do enjoy women but sometimes the way they think drives me over the cliff. Too emotional.”

Gray shrugged. “That’s painting with a broad brush.”

“Yeah, but my experience is women notice the damnedest things. I mean stuff that just makes no sense. Kind of like Mercer.” He burst out laughing.

Gray laughed, too. “The Laprade side of the family is given to emotional drama.”

“They live for it. I’ll bet you twenty Georges that if that body is our grandfather or great-grandfather or whoever the hell he is, some family relation, Mercer will be beside himself.”

Gray touched his mustache, smoothing it outward. “Nero Wolfe. He’ll have to solve the crime.”

This set them both to laughing.

“I’m surprised Mercer hasn’t driven to Lexington to offer up his saliva for a DNA test.” Sam could hardly finish the sentence, he was laughing so hard.

“I don’t get the science behind that but it must work.” Gray finished his drink. “I wonder if we want to know too much. Maybe it’s better not to know. Someday, someone will find Amelia Earhart or pieces of something that will solve her disappearance. What good does it do? She’s gone. Same with the princes in the tower. Remember that, when the two little bodies were found under a stairwell in the Tower of London? Anyway, that was before DNA testing, but so many people are convinced these are the murdered sons of Edward the Fourth.”

“Gives academics and novelists a field day. You know, did Richard the Third kill them, or did Henry Tudor once he became king after killing Richard at Bosworth Field? I’m curious I guess. Yeah, I am.”

“You always liked history,” said Gray. “I read some and I know we need to know what came before but Sam, I can’t say as I care much. I care about now. I care about the future.”

“But that’s just it, the past is prologue.”

“Teach you that at Harvard?” Gray smiled.

“Did. The guilt of throwing away that education haunts me. Christ, what a mess I made of my life, your life, anyone around me.” Gray had paid for two drying-out clinics. The second one took. As Sam had remained sober for nine years now, Gray began to relax, yet in the back of his mind was always the fear that somehow for some reason, Sam would relapse.

“It’s all over, done. I don’t know what was worse, not capitalizing on Harvard or losing your chance as a steeplechase jockey. You could have set up business after the competitive days were over but you’re still in horses, you can still set up a sideline.” He leaned down and picked up the saddle butter jar. “Build a better mousetrap.”

“That saddle stuff really is the better mousetrap.” Gray wiped his hands on a cloth, then rose to wash them.

Gray took his cup over to the sink, looked out the window. “Black as the ace of spades. Low cloud cover.”

“Half moon tonight. The good thing about a low cloud cover is it keeps a little heat on the earth. Those cold clear nights make it hurt when you breathe.”

“Tonight’s cold even with the cloud cover,” Gray remarked.

Sam opened the door to the mudroom, flinging two used towels toward the back door. “I swear I smell fox.”

Uncle Yancy, flattened low on the shelf, watching with his glittering deep yellow eyes.

Gray joined Sam at the door. “Does. Probably the graveyard fox.”

“Well, he has one hell of a signature if it’s this strong in the mudroom.” Sam closed the door.

Had the brothers walked into the mudroom, turned around and glanced upward, they would have seen the tip of a magnificent brush just falling over the shelf. Uncle Yancy was hiding in plain sight.

It would have been a good lesson for all to learn before it was too late.