On the way home, Taz thought she'd better brave the supermarket. Just in case the storm lasted. The first flakes were falling. She pulled in next to Harry's truck just as Harry put two large bags of groceries into the seat.
"Taz, what have you got there?"
Taz gave her the story.
Mrs. Murphy shouted from the seat, "Welcome to Crozet, Brinkley. You were named for a good dog, a German shepherd."
"Thank you. Do you think she'll feed me soon?"
"As soon as you get home, and she lives maybe seven or eight minutes from here. She's very responsible and, oh, make sure you tell her you like her work. She's an architect," Tucker helpfully suggested.
"Don't drool on her blueprints," Pewter sassily said.
"Oh, forgive me. I'm Mrs. Murphy, this is Tucker, and the smart mouth is Pewter. We live out by Yellow Mountain and we work at the post office so I'm sure we'll see you."
As Harry and Taz talked about H.H.'s death, the shock of it, they moved on quickly, because it was cold, to the next guild meeting and what they both hoped to accomplish.
"Hey, I was surprised to see you at the basketball game. You haven't been a regular."
"I thought I'd give it a try." The cold air tingled in Taz's upturned nose.
"Well, let me know if you need anything for your new best friend."
"Thanks. I'm hoping to find a home for him. I'd better grab some milk and bread and hurry home. Brinkley needs to eat."
"Yes," Brinkley agreed.
When Taz got home, the first thing she did was mix some canned food into the dry food. She watched while the famished animal gulped the food then drank water. When he finished he smiled up at her.
"You know, even though you're skinny, you're a rather handsome dog." She walked over to pet him. "You know, oh, I said that already, didn't I? Well, how about if I put your bed in the bedroom? We don't want it where people can see it."
She picked up the fleece doggie bed, placing it on the floor at the foot of her bed. She thought the dog would curl up and go to sleep for he had to be exhausted but Brinkley was so thrilled to find a person who might love him he followed her everywhere she went until she sat down at her computer. Then he blissfully slept at her feet.
She couldn't help but smile when she glanced down at him.
Harry arrived home before the wind started howling. By the time she left the barn, the doors rattled.
Walking to the house she complained to her animals. "First it's El Niño, then it's La Niña. Okay, that passed and with it the mild winters, but this is ridiculous. Second big blow in as many weeks."
Once in the house she fed her pets, buttered a bagel, pulled out a legal-sized pad, a pencil, and sat at the kitchen table. She diagrammed the inside of the Clam, marking who sat where. She diagrammed the parking lot, noting the spot where H.H. collapsed. Then she wrote down the names of everyone she could remember who either tried to assist or who watched helplessly.
"Didn't she hear a thing Herb told her?" Pewter crossly complained.
"She heard." Tucker gazed at Harry, her expressive brown eyes filled with concern.
"She feels compelled to solve this or to at least shift the focus onto herself and away from Susan," the tiger correctly surmised.
"I think she'll be careful." Tucker hoped she would.
"I'm sure she will but if she's being watched, it's only going to add fuel to the fire." Mrs. Murphy knew her human very well.
"Sooner or later people will know H.H. was murdered," Pewter thought out loud. "Might take some of the onus off her."
"They won't know until the report comes back from the state lab in Richmond," Mrs. Murphy replied. "January isn't the murdering season so those toxicology reports will be back soon enough, I'll bet. She can get into a lot of trouble in that time."
"Maybe the storm will slow her down." Tucker allowed Pewter to groom her.
"We can hope." Mrs. Murphy jumped onto the kitchen table.
Harry looked at the cat and back at her drawing of the parking lot. "Ah, you three were in the truck. I'll add that." She added their names with a flourish. "Maybe if I can find out who H.H. was sleeping with I can figure this out."
In a way she was right and in a way she was wrong.
13
Although the storm didn't dump a lot of snow on the ground, the winds howled ferociously. Drifts piled up across the roadways, and five feet behind the drifts the asphalt shone as though picked clean. Nor did the winds abate. Shutters rattled, doors vibrated, and the stinging cold seeped through the cracks and fissures in buildings. The storm system stalled out, too, so every now and then a flurry of snow attended the wind.
Harry's three horses, Gin Fizz, Poptart, and Tomahawk, played outside wearing their blankets, each one a different color to please the horse. Unless the ground was glazed with ice, Harry turned her horses out. They needed to move about, burn off energy. She would bring them in at sundown. Often she'd pause during her barn chores to watch them dash around. Poptart, the youngest and lowest on the totem pole, liked to tease the two older horses. She'd sidle up to Gin Fizz, the handsome, flea-bitten gray, then tug his blanket askew. She'd do this until he'd squeal, then she'd torment Tomahawk. Poptart was the baby sister at her teenage siblings' party. Usually Tomahawk and Gin Fizz indulged her. When she'd cross the line they'd flatten their ears, bare their teeth, and snort. If that failed, a well-timed kick, not connecting, usually backed off the naughty horse.
Simon, the possum, snored slightly as he slept in the hayloft. He'd made cozy quarters out of a hay bale. Since Harry knew he was there she'd never pulled out that bale. The owl dozed in the cupola, glad to be out of the wind. The blacksnake, in deep hibernation, was out of it. She wouldn't stir until April at the earliest. Old and huge, she was as big around as Harry's wrist. The mice cavorted behind the walls of the tack room, having burrowed into the feed room. Theirs was a merry life despite the efforts of Mrs. Murphy and Pewter to curtail their nonstop party.
The doors at both ends of the center-aisle barn were shut tight, but they still slapped and banged. The stall doors to the outside Dutch doors were locked, top and bottom, but wind secreted itself between the frames, causing them to shake with each blast.
Inside, Harry's breath spiraled out as she spread a light dusting of lime over the wet spots. She'd clean out the soiled bedding, expose the wet spots and lime them, then let them dry and come back just before sundown to pull bedding over them. Once a week, usually Saturday morning, she'd strip down each stall so it would air out. Then she'd put a generous helping of fresh wood shavings over it. She liked straw because she could make a better compost out of it for her garden, but soiled straw was heavy and strained her back with each successive full pitchfork. Also, straw was getting expensive; more expensive still were peanut hulls. Some people even tried shredded newspapers. The good thing about Crozet, among other fine qualities, was the availability of small sawmills. She could find a suitable grade of wood shavings without any trouble, for a reasonable cost. Toss a little mix of cedar shavings in each stall and the barn smelled wonderful.
She couldn't prove it but Harry believed those cedar shavings helped keep down the parasites, not that she had to worry about parasites in this weather.
Though proud of her barn system, her farm management, Harry wouldn't brag about her accomplishments. She figured the shine on her horses' coats and their happy attitudes spoke to anyone with horse sense. As to the rest of it, if a person drove down the long road to the farm they would behold a tidy, neat, well-loved farm no matter what the season.
Over the years she'd dug two new wells at each end of the farm to accommodate watering troughs. In time she hoped to purchase one of those irrigation systems with pipes interspersed with wheels. The system would roll at a timed rate of speed over the pastures. It was moving sculpture, a beautiful sight to her eyes. Beautiful price, too.