Outfoxed

CHAPTER 44

Alone in bed that night, Sister scribbled on a yellow legal pad. She was reconstructing everything she could remember from the time she first saw Fontaine until he vanished. Next to her was her red leather-bound hunt diary. After each hunt she wrote the events in her diary. Reading about hunts years later delighted her.

She and Raymond used to sit in bed together writing in their respective hunt diaries. He’d fuss at her because she’d use a fountain pen and he was afraid she’d spill ink on the sheets. She never did.

Outside the night was crystal clear as only a November night can be.

Golly rested on the pillow next to her. Sister thought of it as Raymond’s pillow. Raleigh curled up in front of the fireplace in the bedroom, the aroma of cured hardwoods filling the room.

The more she thought about opening hunt, the more disturbed she became. Why kill Fontaine in the hunt field? Surely it would have been easier to kill him somewhere else.

The risk in killing a human being when near to a hundred mounted followers as well as foot followers bespoke either boldness or frenzy. Granted, the foot followers remained on Hangman’s Ridge with Peter Wheeler. Foot followers almost always camped out at the Hangman’s Ridge fixture because of the vistas and because they could eat their breakfasts, drink coffee or roped coffee, and catch up with old friends.

The killer knew all this, of course, but what puzzled her was why take such a chance? It was a hell of a chance. Wouldn’t it have been easier to lure Fontaine onto a back country road and shoot him? Or poison him?

On one level she was furious, white-hot with rage, that someone would commit a crime in her hunt field.

On another level, she was frightened. The swiftness of the murder, the cool appraisal of the situation, and then the lightning strike, pointed to an exceptionally courageous person.

She’d listened to the arguments and theories from friends. It had to be a foxhunter, one who really knew the sport. Well, that was obvious. Others said it was planned but impromptu, which is what she, Shaker, and Doug pieced together once down in the slippery ravine.

Still, there was an element of elegant revenge. The killer picked the hunt field for an emotional charge. The hunt field meant the world to Fontaine but it must also have meant something for the killer or for the killer and Fontaine together.

She also thought it would decimate her hunt field. What a pity, for the season had promised to be a great one, one of those magical seasons that rolls around every fifteen to twenty years.

She’d canceled Tuesday’s hunt since the funeral was Wednesday. Tomorrow the regulars would be out. Saturday would tell the tale because it was an especially good fixture, Beveridge Hundred.

She turned out the light but couldn’t sleep. Every time she’d turn Golly would grumble. Finally, she clicked on the light to read Anna Karenina. Tolstoy was a bit of a hunting man. Not so good a hunting man as Turgenev, Balzac, or Trollope but still she liked reading those authors who understood and appreciated hunting. Then, too, Anna Karenina, complex, shifting, profound, never loosened its grip on her, not from the first day she’d picked it up at age seventeen. Of course, then she hated Karenin. Now she understood him perfectly.

In the stable, snug under their blankets, the horses dozed. Gunsmoke woke with a start. He usually lay flat out and snored. He whinnied.

Lafayette awakened. “Okay?”

“Yeah. I keep feeling that rope hitting me.”

“I wouldn’t think to look for a rope over a jump. Not when hounds are running,” Lafayette said.

“It was high.”

“When did Fontaine leave the field?”

“He pulled off for a toot after helping Lottie Fisher. He’d pull the stuff out of his jacket, sniff, wait a minute, and then rejoin everyone. People thought he was going to the bathroom. Course, sometimes he did.”

“No one called him over?”

“Not exactly. He sat for a minute to catch his breath, too. Hard run. Anyway, I saw Rickyroo in the distance. Doug was ahead of the main pack; then I heard the pack split. Off to the right and behind us I heard hoofbeats. Fontaine turned my head away because he started moving toward the main pack. The horse and rider were behind in the woods but moving fast. I wonder if that person beckoned him? He headed toward the split pack after that. You could really hear them, too. No one called out to him. I hear better than he does. Did. I could hear the horse in front of me but now way ahead—and the woods were thick. Fontaine was following. I’m certain of that.”

“Weird.” Lafayette’s eyes were closing.

“I remember one thing before I hit that rope. Behind the fence line, back in the woods, a horse snorted.”