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“Grampa’s been fine,” I tell her, giving the outside of the barn an admiring once-over. “Heavens to Betsy… what a terrific job the boys did!”

Vern and Teddy Smith, who are Miss Jessie’s help, and younger brothers to dishwashing-pie baking Miss Florida from the diner, spent all last week painting the barn stop sign red, and I’m not sure, but I believe this is the first time I’ve seen it done.

“Where are the two of ’em anyway?” I pop open the clasp on my leather-like. “They deserve gold stars.”

“Gave ’em the afternoon off,” Miss Jessie says as we step inside the barn. “Florida needed some roof tarrin’ done.”

“Well, when ya see ’em next, could ya tell ’em-” I cut off, since there’s nothing in this world, next to the smell of sizzling pork sausage and lilies-of-the-valley, that enters your nose as sweetly as a clean horse barn. Alfalfa hay and curly shavings and soaped leather mixing in with the perfume Miss Jessie calls oh de horse manure. Her breeding operation is a small one, but she does all right since she’s got a nice stud named Handsome, who sired a Derby runner. She’s also got a few retired racehorses she keeps for trail riding. Mostly nobody around here would keep a horse that doesn’t earn its keep, but Miss Jessie, she’s the kind type. Like allowing that vermin Sneaky Tim Ray to live with her. (I’m certain she doesn’t realize that he’s only laying low here at the farm until the trouble he instigated in Leesburg blows over. Even though he brags on it to me every chance he gets, I’m not gonna tell Miss Jessie that her cousin by marriage hoodwinked “some old bat” out of her cookie jar savings. Or that he is absolutely NOT staying here at the farm so he can help out around the place like he told her he would. It is a sad, horrible thing to be Disillusioned: The condition of being disenchanted.)

The barn’s got twenty stalls lined up ten across ten. A tack room full of bridles and saddles and trunks full of medicine and traveling bandages. Washing sinks and hoses for watering. And a feed room with sacks of grain. Upstairs, there’s a hayloft full of mice. That’s where Sneaky Tim Ray sleeps and hides his hooch. Just to be safe, I close up my precious briefcase and slide it under the bushes outside the barn. In case Holloway comes to and wanders up here, don’t want my leather-like getting disappeared by a certain someone who’d steal the gold outta your teeth if you fell asleep with your mouth open.

“She’s down here,” Miss Jessie reminds, ’cause she thinks I’ll’ve forgotten the whereabouts of the filly, and she’s right.

Snug in their stalls and busy picking at their afternoon hay, the horses nicker nicker, begging for something sweet when we walk by. Down on the far side of the aisle, backed against the birthing stall, are the old mare, Whinny, and her new foal, Gibby, named after me, that I got to see getting born. You know who helped deliver this baby? Billy. He’s going to be a Vietnam veterinarian as soon as he gets over his nervousness sickness.

“Did you hear a rumor down at the diner this mornin’ about Buster Malloy goin’ missin’?” Miss Jessie asks, sliding open the stall door.

“Mr. Malloy has gone missin’? Really? How come nobody told me?” I ask, shocked. He’s an important man around here. His disappearance would make a whopper of a headline in next Friday’s paper. “Maybe I better not ride today. Maybe I should head over to the Malloy farm instead and have a look around for some clues. Mr. Howard Redmond of New York City says clues are real important to solvin’ any mystery and that would include a missin’ person, I believe.”

Stopping her fussing with the filly, Miss Jessie says, “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Gib. Ya better leave that sort of serious detectin’ up to Sheriff Johnson. Pretty sure your grampa wouldn’t want ya to get mixed up in something like that.”

“All right,” I answer, but I think I must be lying, which I am trying to do on a daily basis, since it’s another good step in the right direction. Quite Right people lie. All over the place.

Done wrestling the halter on, Miss Jessie stands back and admires the baby, whose blaze is shaped like a question mark that makes her face seem curious. “She’s a looker if I do say so myself.”

“Will she race, ya think?”

“Sure hope so. Handsome is her sire and-” But then the barn phone starts ringing, and Miss Jessie says on her dash outta the stall, “Be right back. You keep pettin’ on her. She’s gotta get used to being handled.”

“Okey-dokey,” I say, going toward the filly on soft feet. I want to lay my cheek against her toasty neck ’cause these foals always smell delicious, but she shakes me off like a fly and darts under her mother for comfort, and her doing that, that makes the saddest feeling sweep over me. I work real hard at not allowing myself to miss my mama much, but sometimes the deep yearning for her seeps outta my heart and pools into a spot I’ve found is best not dove into.

“Well, this is gettin’ more interestin’ by the second,” Miss Jessie says, bustling back down the aisle with a saddle and bridle that she sets down on the rack outside Peaches’s stall. “Seems it’s not a rumor anymore. Nobody’s seen Buster for a coupla days. What’s wrong?”

“Hay in my eye, is all,” I say, sliding the birthing stall door closed behind me. I don’t want her to tell Grampa I was crying. He wouldn’t approve. “How’d ya find that out? About Mr. Buster bein’ gone for sure?”

“That was Sheriff Johnson on the phone. Pull her out of the stall, Gib.”

After getting Peaches hooked up in the aisle, Miss Jessie eases the saddle down on her scruffy gray back. I am hoping to ride horses again, but since the crash, I’ve had some balancing problems. This donkey is closer to the ground, if you get my drift.

“The sheriff’s been up to the Malloy place and talked to his help,” Miss Jessie says, fastening the girth tight.

“If Mr. Malloy has been missing for a coupla days, I think the help shoulda called down to the sheriff’s station earlier. Would that be appropriate thinkin’?” (Reverend Jack, down at the Methodist church? He’s always trying to get me to think “appropriately.”)

“That certainly would be appropriate thinkin’,” Miss Jessie replies in a complimentary way. “The field boss told the sheriff that Buster mentioned somethin’ about going to a government get-together and he assumed that’s where Buster’s been. But whoever it was that he was supposed to be meetin’ up with called the sheriff station this morning reportin’ that he never showed up.”

“Oh, my, my. The field boss assuming like that? That is such a big mistake to make.” The Importance of Perception in Meticulous Investigation says that assuming anything is just about the worse thing anybody can do. You should never assume anything until you have the facts. “Are you by any chance having hot sex with Sheriff Johnson?”

“Lord.”

I asked her that because when Miss Jessie and Grampa go out to dinner at Gil’s Supper Club, and she’s gussied up in that vanilla dress of hers that is cut on the low side up top, and the high side down below, well, I strongly suspect Grampa wouldn’t mind spooning her up for dessert. But if my understanding is correct, hot sex is a one-per-customer deal, and if she’s already having it with the sheriff, that would leave Grampa SOL. (Shit outta love.)