“You can ask.”
She indicated my cane. “You can’t run. Doesn’t that scare you sometimes? What if you were attacked or you needed to get away from somebody?”
“You’re right that I can’t run.” I looked her in the eye. “But you know what they say about losing one of your five senses, don’t you? That the others become more acute. It’s kind of the same thing with me. I’ve learned to compensate for what I’ve lost. And to answer your question, I don’t scare easily.”
She fingered the necklace again, though this time she rubbed the medallion like it was a talisman. “Maybe I underestimated you,” she said.
“You wouldn’t be the first,” I said.
Quinn was in his office in the villa when I got back. “How’d it go with the Orlandos?” he asked.
“Better than I expected,” I said. “I talked to Claudia. Stuart was at work. She was pretty horrified but she understood why we need to call the sheriff. Said she had no clue who might have done it. Swore it was no one they’ve been meeting with to lobby against foxhunting.”
“I got some good news.” He looked pleased with himself. “A clue.”
He opened one of the side drawers in his desk and took something out. “Look at this. I found it near the spot where the paint ran out. Whoever did it brought their dog with them.”
I picked up the black leather collar with the silver studs on it. “She didn’t bring her dog,” I said. “She wears it as jewelry.”
“What are you talking about—she?”
It was the collar Amanda’s sulky daughter Kyra had worn at the Point-to-Point on Saturday.
The paint. The fox. What better way to get back at her mother—the secretary of the Goose Creek Hunt—than to attempt to sabotage one of their meets? I only hoped she hadn’t taken her juvenile anger one step further and tampered with the trails or jumps her mother and the rest of the hunt might take tomorrow. What she’d done had been stupid and malicious but at least no one had been hurt.
So far.
Chapter 21
“I don’t see any reason to call the sheriff anymore, based on what we know now,” I said to Quinn after I explained about Kyra. “But I do need to call Amanda. And Claudia.”
“Why’d she do it?” he asked. “The kid, I mean.”
“If you met her, you’d know. She’s like Mia used to be at her age. Maybe worse. In a permanent stage of rage.”
“Glad I don’t have kids. Never did want them.”
I set down Kyra’s ugly collar. It was the first time he’d ever said something like that. Unlike Quinn, I wanted children. But after my car accident, the doctor told me that the odds were against it, given the internal damage.
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “Never, ever wanted them?”
He shrugged and picked up a tennis ball from the corner of his desk, tossing it in the air and catching it, over and over. When he was really thinking, he’d bounce it off the wall opposite his desk. It had left scuffmarks and annoyed the hell out of me.
“Long story.” He threw the ball against the wall.
“I wondered if that might be another secret from your past,” I said. “A son or daughter growing up in California?”
He looked at me so intensely I blushed. “Not that anyone told me,” he said.
“Sorry. That was out of line. Guess I’d better make those phone calls. I don’t suppose you’d stick around while I do it?”
He swished the tennis ball through a hoop attached to his empty trash can. It bounced a few times and he retrieved it. “I’ve got a better idea. Let’s go out on the terrace and you can call there. The sunset’s going to be nice tonight. How about if I get us a couple of glasses of Cab?”
It was the first time since his ex-wife had shown up in town that he seemed like his old self. Maybe he’d finally managed to free himself of whatever hold she had on him.
“I’d like that,” I said.
I called Amanda first and kept it short and to the point. There was a long silence when I finished.
Finally she said, “While I was talking to you this morning, I went to Kyra’s bedroom. She got Freddie the Fox as a gift from her grandparents a few years ago. He was gone.”
“So you suspected her since this morning?”
“I’m so sorry, Lucie. You have no idea how embarrassing and upsetting this is for me. Her father and I will deal with her, I promise,” she said. “I’ll take care of having your wall professionally cleaned. I know a good company.”
I shook my head and looked at Quinn, who frowned at me and mouthed, “What?”
“She wants to pay for the cleanup,” I said with my hand over the receiver.
He shook his head. “No dice.”
“Thank you but no,” I said. “I want Kyra to come over here this evening to apologize and explain why she did it. Then I want her to clean the wall and the pillars. She and anyone else who helped her deface them. She can take her fox back, too. I cleaned up my driveway from that one.”
“Let me handle this, Lucie. She’s my daughter.”
“By covering for her and bailing her out? No. Sorry, but she has to take responsibility for what she’s done.”
“She won’t come. She won’t listen to me. Why should she listen to you?” Amanda sounded stiff.
“Because if she doesn’t listen to me she’ll have to deal with the sheriff. He’s a lot less tolerant than I am.”
“You’d call the sheriff?” She seemed stunned.
“I would. Look, if this goes any further…if she’s done something out in the field and someone gets hurt tomorrow, she’s in big trouble.”
There was a silence on Amanda’s end.
“God, Amanda,” I said, “don’t tell me she did something to the jumps and fences?”
Quinn set down his wineglass and stared at me, his lips compressed in a thin line.
“I took care of it.” Her words were clipped. “Everything’s fine. Don’t worry.”
“Took care of what? Why didn’t you tell me about this right away?” Whatever else Kyra had done, it was far more serious than defacing the stone pillars. Worse, Amanda seemed to be trying to minimize it. I could feel my anger growing.
“Because I checked everything,” Amanda said. “You don’t need to worry.” I pointed my index finger to my head like a gun and pretended to pull the trigger. Quinn looked grim.
“What’d she do, Amanda?” My voice was tight with disbelief. She really intended to let her daughter off the hook.
“She, uh, rigged one of the fences so it would come apart when a horse went over it.”
I closed my eyes. That was how my mother had died. “I’m canceling the hunt.”
“It’s not necessary, Lucie. I talked to Kyra. It was only the one fence and it’s fixed. She didn’t do anything else.”
“I absolutely want her to come over here tonight. We can talk about whether or not the hunt goes on after she explains herself and apologizes.”
“I’ll talk to her, but I can’t guarantee she’ll come.”
“Then the sheriff will be by and it won’t matter what she feels like doing.”
“You’ve made yourself quite clear.” Amanda sounded terse and unhappy as she hung up.
“She’s mad at you, isn’t she?” Quinn said when I snapped the phone shut.
“Yes, dammit. Stupid, stupid kid. Someone really could have gotten hurt. Amanda was acting like it was no big deal.”
“We’ll take care of that tonight.” He still looked grim.
I called Claudia next. That conversation went better.
Quinn and I finished our wine as the sun turned into a hard orange ball that hovered just above the horizon. Higher in the sky a line of clouds like beads on a necklace changed from blood-colored to violet, then washed out into flannel gray as the sky darkened behind them.
Quinn picked up our empty wineglasses when all that remained was a line of gilded brightness separating the sky from the mountains. “What are you going to do now?”
“See my grandfather off for his big reunion tonight,” I said, “then wait for Kyra and Amanda to show up.”
“You think they will?”