Haynes nodded.
“I want to go home now.”
“Fine.”
“And after I get there, I don’t want any calls or visits from the Clarke County sheriff or his deputies.”
Haynes again nodded.
“You going to talk to him — the sheriff?”
“I have to.”
“But you won’t mention me?”
“No.”
“Or the guys with sacks over their heads?”
“If I don’t tell the sheriff about you, I can’t tell him about them.”
“Well, what are you gonna tell him?”
Haynes turned to look at the dead Zip. “I’m going to ask him what to do with a dead horse.”
Seventeen
Haynes got the number of the sheriff’s office in Berryville from directory assistance. After the man who answered said he was Deputy Soullard, Haynes identified himself and reported the death of the.horse.
The deputy put Haynes on hold until a stern baritone voice came on, announced that it belonged to Sheriff Jenkins Shipp-with-two-p’s and asked, “You Steady’s boy?”—somehow turning the abrupt question into a warm greeting.
After Haynes replied yes, Sheriff Shipp asked, “What’s your name again?”
“Granville Haynes.”
“I’m sure sorry about your daddy, Granville, and I do mourn his passing”
“You’re very kind.”
“Now what’s this about old Zip?”
Haynes said he had arrived at the farm to discover the horse had been shot and killed.
“Got a call from your daddy’s lawyer in Washington about Zip last Thursday. Tell a lie, Friday. He’s the one that told me Steady was dead and gone. Lawyer by the name of Mott, I believe.”
“Howard Mott.”
“That’s right, Howard. Said he was sending somebody out to pick up Steady’s old Cadillac and wanted to know if I could think of anybody who’d go out there and take care of Zip till he made other arrangements. Right away I thought of the Dyson kid — lives just down the road from Steady. Mott said he’d pay the kid twenty bucks a day to water and feed Zip, clean out his stall and exercise him some.” The sheriff paused. “And that’s what the kid’s been doing.”
“When?” Haynes said.
“After school.”
“If I drop the money off at your office, will you see that the Dyson boy gets it?”
“Yes, sir, I can do that. Be happy to.”
“One other thing, Sheriff. What should I do with a dead horse?”
There was a pause. “Uh — Granville, you happen to know if old Zip was insured?”
“No idea.”
There was another longer pause that made Haynes wonder how delicately the sheriff would put his next question.
“Well, sir,” Shipp said, “Zip was a pretty fair old hunter and I reckon if he was insured, it’d be for at least fifteen hundred, maybe even a couple of thousand.”
“That much?” Haynes said.
“At least.”
‘I’d almost pay that much to have him hauled off and buried.”
“No need for that,” Shipp said, sounding relieved and almost happy. “What I’ll do is call up the Blue Ridge Hunt Club and they’ll come fetch him and it won’t cost you a cent because they’ll chop old Zip up and feed him to the club dogs. Sort of recycle him, so to speak.”
“I know my father would’ve approved.”
“One other thing, Granville. Would you mind sticking around till a deputy drives out there and takes a look-see? Folks here do get upset when a horse is shot dead like that.”
“I’ll wait till he gets here,” Haynes said.
After he and the sheriff said good-bye, Haynes hung up one of the two phones in the office that once had been the dining room. Erika McCorkle, seated in a squeaky swivel chair at the other desk, also recradled the extension phone, rose, went to the window, looked out and announced, “It’s snowing.”
Haynes joined her at the window to inspect the snowfall. They stared at it silently until she said, “I was sure you’d tell him about Letty and the two guys with sacks over their heads.”
Still watching the snowfall, Haynes said, “It’s really coming down.”
“Why didn’t you tell him?” she asked. “Because you never break a promise — or because you only make the kind you won’t have to break?”
“I make and break them all the time,” he said. “Especially the ones I make to myself.”
“Well, I think it’s awfully sweet that you didn’t tell him.”
Moments later, Haynes found himself wondering whether it was Erika McCorkle’s mild flattery or mere impulse that had caused him to tell her about the missing memoirs. Whatever it had been, his normal caution prevented him from telling her about those who were anxious to buy them, sight unseen.
Erika seemed to ponder what he had told her before she asked, “So you think, or maybe just suspect, that somewhere, maybe even here, there’s a true honest-to-God manuscript chock-full of political dynamite and shocking revelations and other assorted hot stuff?”
“Right,” Haynes said and watched a sudden thought streak across her face, which, he realized, would never be any good at dissembling.
“Then that’s what those two guys were really after, wasn’t it?” she said. “The ones who tied up Letty.”
“That doesn’t exactly follow.”
“Sure it does,” she said. “And the same two guys who shot Zip and tied up Letty must’ve threatened to drown Isabelle unless she told them where the manuscript was. But after she told them it was here at the farm, they drowned her anyway.”
“You just set the new indoor record for intuitive leaps.”
“I take it you’re not buying.”
“I might,” Haynes said. “If everything checks out.”
“What the hell’s everything?”
“Let’s start with Letty and why she was here.”
“She was worried about Zip.”
Haynes stared at her for a moment, turned, went back to the phone, picked it up and tapped out a long-distance number. When the phone began to ring, he said, “Get on the extension.”
After Erika McCorkle lifted the extension phone to her ear, she heard it ring two times before a woman answered with, “Mott, James, Lovelandy and Nathan.”
“Mr. Mott, please. This is Granville Haynes and it’s important.”
After a brief pause, Howard Mott came on the line with, “Nothing can be important on a Saturday morning.”
“I’m at Steady’s farm.”
“So?”
“Did you call Sheriff Shipp and ask him to find somebody to take care of Steady’s horse?”
“Sure,” Mott said. “When I called to tell him Steady was dead and that I was^sending a guy out to pick up the Cadillac, I also asked if he knew anybody who’d feed, water and exercise the horse for twenty bucks a day. He said he did.”
“How’d you know about the horse?”
“Steady told me about — what’d he call him, Zip? — a year or so ago. But I forgot about him till Steady’s ex-wife called me.”
“When?”
“The morning after Steady died. She was worried about the horse. I told her I’d take care of it and to stop worrying. What’s wrong?”
“Somebody shot the horse.”
There was a brief silence until Mott said, “What d’you want me to do about it?”
“Nothing.”
“Good,” Howard Mott said and hung up.
Eighteen
They began the search upstairs, where they discovered three bedrooms, one bath, two old mirrored wardrobes and a lone closet. Haynes’s inspection of the bathroom medicine cabinet revealed an empty bottle of St. Joseph’s aspirin, a new toothbrush still in its plastic package and somebody’s diaphragm.
The smallest of the three bedrooms was meanly furnished with a thin mattress on a brass bed that was little more than a cot. An oval rag rug lay beside it on the pine floor that had been stained a dark brown. A chest of drawers, painted Chinese red, was empty. The other furniture consisted of a 1940s bridge lamp, a straight-backed wooden chair and an ancient wardrobe whose mirror was turning silver-gray. Haynes looked inside the wardrobe, found two wire coat hangers and decided he was in a guest room that had been deliberately furnished to discourage long stays.