Whisker Of Evil

5

Aunt Tally had been shrinking with age. As a young woman she towered over her female peers, but now in her nineties her five-foot-eight-inch frame had contracted to five feet four inches, the national average, and if there was one thing Aunt Tally hated it was being average.

Mim, her niece, sat next to her at the end of the sturdy kitchen table in Aunt Tally’s wonderful old Virginia kitchen, the wood-burning cooking stove still in use as well as an expensive Aga, a convection stove known only to the cognoscenti. The Aga was the pride of Aunt Tally’s cook, Loretta Young. Loretta affected the demeanor of the actress she was named for, which was quite a novelty in a cook.

As it was Sunday, Loretta was down at Big Mim’s to assist with the Sunday dinner. Gretchen, the majordomo of that house, loathed Loretta. Jim had slyly placed a boxing bell on the side leg of the dining-room table. He intended to hit it with a small hammer, thereby amusing his family and guests and serving notice on the two battling broads, as he put it, to settle down, at least until dinner was served.

Big Mim had driven out to pick up her aunt, who didn’t want to go to Dalmally until the last minute. She declared it took her all that extra time to just pull her face up off the floor.

Cynthia Cooper, Harry, Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tucker arrived just as Tally had applied her peach lipstick. They hadn’t known Aunt Tally was going to Dalmally. They were now all huddled around the table.

“I found this in the creek not far from where I found Barry.” Harry reached into her pocket and removed the ring, which she’d wrapped in her handkerchief. She’d shown it to Cooper before, and both women decided to go straight to Aunt Tally.

“Mmm.” Tally picked up her magnifying glass as Mim’s face registered recognition.

“Holy Cross, Aunt Tally.”

“I know that,” Tally snapped. “I want to see what’s inside. M.P.R. 1945.”

Mim’s face turned white. “Mary Patricia Reines.”

“What?” The nonagenarian’s light-blue eyes opened wide. “Mary Pat’s been missing since 1974.” She turned to Deputy Cooper. “You should know.”

“That was before my time, Miss Urquhart. It must be an inactive file.”

“Inactive? Unsolved is more like it.” Aunt Tally’s white eyebrows drew together.

“This is Mary Pat’s high-school ring. She wore it on her left pinkie. I’d know it anywhere.” Mim, hands shaking, put the ring down. “Exactly where did you find this?”

“In Potlicker Creek where the dirt road heads toward the mountains, the road that goes over to Augusta County ’cept no one uses it. Can’t really get through anymore. Well, you could on a horse.” Harry amended her statement.

“Potlicker Creek? Where you found Barry Monteith, you say?” Big Mim had heard about that because Sheriff Shaw called once the body had been removed. He notified the Sanburnes for two reasons. One, Jim was mayor of Crozet. Two, Big Mim ran this end of the county and it wouldn’t do to get on her bad side.

“Downstream a little bit. I fell in the creek and picked up a rock to throw at a rogue stag. Tucker chased him off.”

Aunt Tally plucked up the ring from the table where her niece had placed it as though it were a hot coal. “Worn. Wonder if it’s been tumbling around in that creek for all this time.”

“It was pretty much worn when she disappeared,” Mim quietly said. “She wore it every day since her graduation in 1945 and it’s ten-karat gold, thin as it is. Oh, dear, but this stirs up memories. Aunt Tally, if you will forgive me, I’m going to drink some roped coffee.” Mim, slender and elegant, pushed away from the table and walked over to the counter where a huge, gleaming automatic coffeemaker, shipped over from Italy, kept a perfect brew steaming. “Can I fix anyone else a shot?”

“I’ll have one.” Aunt Tally leaned back in the ladderback chair.

“Just coffee for me, thanks,” Cooper said.

“You aren’t on duty, are you? No uniform,” Big Mim noted.

“No, but I’ll stick to coffee.”

“Harry, tea for you?” Mim clicked on the electric teapot.

“Thank you.”

Big Mim opened a cabinet, pulled out a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, and poured a shot into two large mugs of coffee. No point in using single malt in coffee. Some folks used bourbon, others rum, or even a flavored brandy, but Mim and her aunt stuck to good scotch. She placed the mugs on the table along with sweet cream and brown sugar. She poured a plain mug for Cooper just as the teapot clicked off—perfect timing. Then she put down a few treats for the animals and sat down herself.

“I dimly remember Mary Pat’s disappearance, but I was in grade school,” Cooper commented.

“Me, too. She bred Ziggy Flame, a big flaming chestnut thoroughbred—beautifully bred, I remember that. The mare was one of the Aga Khan’s best mares, a daughter of Almahoud. His sire was Tom Fool, used to stand at Greentree Stud in Kentucky, one of the greats.”

Big Mim smiled. “Harry, what a memory.”

“If I could recite bloodlines my mother would give me a quarter,” Harry replied. “But I don’t remember much more than that.”

“Mary Pat, a beautiful woman, inherited pots of money. Her parents were killed at the beginning of World War Two when the Germans sank a passenger ship that had left Lisbon. They’d been caught in Europe when war broke out and were trying to get home. Obviously, she was still a minor, so the executor of the will administered the estate. That was Randy Jenkins, and he did a good job. Mary Pat graduated from Holy Cross, studied at Hollins, graduated, and came back to run St. James Farm. She wanted to breed horses and she did. She disappeared in 1974 along with Ziggy Flame, not a trace of either one ever found until now,” Big Mim recounted. “We’d been friends since childhood. She was older than I, but even when I was small she was a friend, like a big sister.”

“No suspects?” Cooper knew she’d give up her Sunday. She would head right back to the station and search for Mary Patricia Reines’s file.

“Oh, Marshall Kressenberg, a stable hand and exercise rider, was a suspect, but only because he was on the farm when she disappeared. They got along all right. Sam Berryhill, her farm manager, was a suspect, but he’d been in Middleburg so that ruled him out. Let’s see, he died in ’88. Her entire estate except for a couple of broodmares passed to Alicia Palmer, who became the prime suspect. They never could pin it on Alicia.” Aunt Tally filled in details.

Cooper interrupted. “The actress?”

“Yes.” Big Mim picked up the conversation. “She had a good career, married again and again and again. She lives in Santa Barbara and, as you know, occasionally comes back to St. James, which she maintains just as Mary Pat left it—except for renting out the stables and training track to Barry Monteith and Sugar Thierry. Alicia’s not really a horse person.”

“Graveyard of old movie stars, Santa Barbara,” Aunt Tally giggled. She remembered Santa Barbara when Ronald and Benita Colman owned San Ysidro Ranch. Aunt Tally had spent many a lovely weekend there in her youth, and it was quite a wild youth, lasting well into her fifties.

“Her horses were sold at auction. A big breeder in Maryland bought most of them. I remember Humphrey Finney was the auctioneer. The progeny of her stable are still on the tracks today. Mary Pat knew what she was doing.” Big Mim sighed, for she had loved Mary Pat. “And she bred back that mare to Tom Fool. Ziggy disappeared just as his career was burgeoning but, thank God, the bloodlines survived. When the broodmare band was dispersed, Ziggy’s mother was bought by a breeder in Kentucky. Forget the name. Out of that breeding came Ziggy Dark Star, Flame’s full brother, a year younger, who had a stud career. Never raced, or if he did I never heard about it. He was in Maryland. Of course, Mary Pat was gone by then, so she didn’t know just how good her breeding program was.”

“Don’t forget Tavener Heyward.”

“He was a suspect?” Harry was incredulous, since Tavener Heyward was one of the most respected equine veterinarians in the country.

“No, no. Mary Pat gave him four broodmares, daughters of Speak John, Raise a Native, Secretariat, and Buckpasser, and a sum for stud fees. She’d left instructions for their breeding, too. Tavener did quite handsomely with those mares. Course, he’s made a bundle in the practice, too. He was one of the few people who stood by Alicia when she was under suspicion.” Big Mim checked the large clock on the wall. “Aunt Tally, we need to leave soon.”

“When I’m ready will be soon enough. I’m not ready,” she resolutely replied. “Those broodmares put Tavener on the map. That’s how he got into the racing world, but for him it’s steeplechasing. As you know, he’s behind one of the most successful chasing stables in the country and he took over her colors, green and gold. I think he was in love with Alicia.”

“What a strange and sad story.” Harry vaguely recalled her parents’ distress when the popular Mary Pat disappeared.

“Strange, and now we know she’s somewhere out there. I guess Ziggy is, too,” Big Mim half-whispered.

“What do you mean, Mimsy?”

“Aunt Tally, she always wore this ring. Her remains have to be somewhere upstream; the ring would only wash downward,” Big Mim replied.

“She could have lost it,” Tally argued for the sake of arguing, but she knew if Mary Pat had lost her class ring everyone would have heard about it. Mary Pat always wore her ring.

“And just why did you bring it here?” Big Mim directed this to Cooper.

“If I turned it over to the sheriff, he’d put it in a tiny Ziploc bag and there it would languish. I wanted to find out whatever I could before turning it in.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have to even give it to Rick,” Aunt Tally said. “Mary Pat’s ring has nothing to do with Barry Monteith getting his throat ripped out, even if he did rent the stables on her old farm. It’s just coincidence.”