I tried the door knob on what I assumed was the tack room, although it was at the other end of the barn from the narrow grooming stall. The door swung open to an empty room. There were paneled walls, a slate floor, and a crystal chandelier, but not a single hook to hang a halter on, much less keys.
I shook my head in disgust at the décor. Maybe I'd have better luck in the feed room. There had to be supplies and special supplements Valerie used for her horse, like glucosamine and MSM. I recalled she used those and something with biotin in it, too, for Nachtfeder's feet. She wouldn't have skipped his supplements. She was too obsessive about them.
A smaller room across the aisle, although more practically finished, was similarly vacant. It contained no shelves, feed bins, or feed of any kind. There wasn't even a sign of mice. A ladder led up to the hay loft and I climbed up far enough to poke my head through the access door. I could see we had a theme going here. Not only was there no hay, but there never had been. In the loft everything looked as though the carpenters had just left.
Okay, I could safely say she was not expecting to house a horse in her barn. It wasn't necessary to have a horse inside when you had lush pastures. I went outside in the drizzle. I knew she had groundskeepers who regularly mowed the pastures. And because she had no resident livestock, the grass grew evenly throughout, including in front of the gates.
There were water troughs positioned near the gates in each of the three pastures, but none had water in them. I doubted they ever had. The plugs had been removed from the bottoms, standard practice to keep rainwater from collecting and creating a mosquito-friendly environment. The knowledge Blackie had spent an entire night and half the morning there without access to water angered me. He could have easily colicked. As particular as I knew Valerie was about her own horse, water was certainly not something she would have overlooked. She was famous, or at least supremely annoying, for her penchant of pitching a fit when her exact instructions weren't followed-and she always double checked.
I needed to look around some more. I'd whittled my mental list down to the bare essentials, and it wasn't looking good for any of the remaining items. If I found anything, no matter how small, I'd have to be careful how I got the information to Thurman so I didn't get myself into more trouble. Just thinking about it made my hands sweat.
I found the water spigots near the barn. There were no hoses attached. I went back to the feed room and rechecked. No buckets, no hoses. Unless Valerie stored her equipment elsewhere, she definitely had not been planning to house a horse here. What the hell was going on? I had to curb my impatience, take this one item at a time, gather information and then piece it together. But it didn't make the number of unanswered questions any less frustrating.
The mist turned to rain again, so I hurried to the other outbuildings (also built to complement the house, but not as elaborate as the barn) to avoid getting soaked. I had about as much luck with keeping dry as finding any horse-keeping supplies. One building held the tractor and mowing equipment as well as the horse trailer and truck. The other held miscellaneous gardening paraphernalia. With water dripping off my hair and into my eyes, I searched the garden shed. No horse stuff. Then, as I reached for the switch to turn off the lights a glint of metal caught my eye. A ring with a handful of keys hung on a nail in a recess by the door. One of them had to be for the house. I no longer had an excuse not to search there. Before I could talk myself out of it, I grabbed the whole set and jogged, head down, through the rain-turned-to-downpour to the back door of the three story Victorian.
Luckily for me the porch off the back door was covered. The rain pelted on the roof like lead shot as I huddled, wet and shivering, over the wad of keys, trying to decide which might fit. The keys to the tractor and trailer were obvious, but the others, and there were quite a few, all looked as if they might belong to the house.
The third key I tried met with unexpected results – a hand on my shoulder.
I screamed and spun. Frederick Parsons's driver loomed over me. He was dressed in black and, despite the rain, wore dark glasses on a face as expressionless as when I encountered him on my own front porch. I thought I was going to pass out.
"Keys." He held out his hand.
I swallowed a mouthful of dry nothing and dropped them into his upturned palm without a word.
"Why are you here?" It didn't sound like a question, but it must have been.
A gagging noise came out before any words. "Nothing, no reason. Just, uh, looking for clues."
He regarded me for a long moment from behind the dark glasses. I held my breath, waiting.
"There's nothing here," he said.
"Oh."
He stared at me. At least I think he was staring. He might have been napping for all I could tell. Only my own terrified reflection looked back at me from the shiny black lenses. Maybe I could leave.
"I think I'll go now." I edged past him and almost made it. He turned his head toward me and took hold of my arm. The blood fled from my face.
"I'm watching you," he said.
"Oh, uh, okay," I said in a small voice.
He released my arm abruptly. I scurried to my car, my heart rate at near stroke level, somehow got the key in the ignition, and took off not daring to look back.
By the time I got home I'd marshaled my wits and gotten a grip on my initial desire to continue driving until I reached my parents' house in San Francisco. I hustled up the walk to the porch but stopped, house key in hand, when I saw a page from a newspaper taped to my front door. Odd. The page was from the Everett Times. I removed it and glanced at both sides. Last week's edition. None of the articles looked even mildly interesting.
Then I saw the red circles. Someone had used red ink to mark individual words in different articles. Why? As I hung up my jacket, it hit me.
A message!
Duh.
I grabbed the paper and searched. Five words, or parts of words, were circled. I read, more or less left to right: "stop," "ing", "ions." "ask," "quest."
"Stoping ions ask quest? Doesn't make any sense. And "stoping" is spelled wrong."
I looked again and this time I read from top to bottom. "Stop asking questions."
Molar-grinding aggravation outmaneuvered my initial spike of fear. Dammit, I'd been assaulted, yelled at, interrogated and insulted-and that was the short list. Now some jerk was leaving me a stupid note right out of a bad movie. I had freaking had enough.
I locked the front door behind me and strode to the kitchen. Yanking open the freezer door, I pulled out a half gallon of triple chocolate fudge ice cream and grabbed a soup spoon from the silverware drawer. Cup of Aunt Vi's tea, my ass. I dug in.
Chapter Fifteen
At three o'clock I sat in a cold, hard chair, in a cold, hard conference room at the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office. Detective Thurman was late. My attorney, Jacob Green, held the newspaper message I'd handed him by a corner and read it while tapping an index finger against his thin lips. He exhaled abruptly and waved the paper like a flag.
"You said this was on your front door?"
"Yes."
"Any idea who left it?"
"No."
"Any idea what, specifically, the message is referring to?"
"No."
"Well, we'll let the good detective deal with it." He slid it into his briefcase and resumed the pacing I interrupted when I arrived.
Jacob Green was not what I expected, not even close to the image I formed from our first phone conversation. Rail thin, tall, and middle-aged, the attorney pacing a new track in the worn linoleum was straight out of Central Casting's supply of used-car salesmen. Right down to the ancient, ill-fitting suit and the I'd-rather-die-than-lie-to-you brown eyes.
He stopped pacing all at once and hit me with a narrow-eyed stare.