He let the light play over the car. It was Lorraine Calhoun’s convertible. The top was down, showing the red leather of the interior — a car, Lew thought morosely, that cost more than a Diesel tractor — and used just as a plaything — to speed a rich man’s daughter around on her playtime engagements.
A horse snorted and kicked.
Lew Turlock opened the barn door. Somewhere at the back of the barn a horse gave a low snicker in appreciation of the human companionship.
Turlock, accustomed to sensing the moods of animals, detected the tension all up and down the long line of stalls. The horses were nervous, as though a thunderstorm had been approaching.
A horse snorted. Lew could hear the iron ring turn in its hasp as the horse lunged back on the rope. Then there was the sound of nervous hoofs on the wood floor of the stall and another long snort.
Lew found the light switch and clicked on the lights.
With the blaze of illumination the horses instantly became silent.
Lew’s eyes, running down the long line of stalls, caught sight of a girl’s leg and a high-heeled shoe, the toe pointed slightly upward. Beyond that, he could see part of a hand stretched out palm upward.
Even in that first moment of soul-numbing excitement, Turlock remembered about the horses. He mustn’t alarm them. He spoke to them automatically as he hurried down the line of stalls. “Whoa, boys, take it easy. Steady now. Whoa, boys.”
She was lying on her side, sprawled out grotesquely, in such a position that the mare had to stand at an angle to avoid trampling on the still body.
The cruel, disfiguring wound in the top of her head, with the sinister red pool seeping from it onto the stable floor, told its own story.
Lew gave a strangled cry, “Betty!”
He knelt by the girl, then noticed her clothes. They were not Betty’s clothes.
“Miss Calhoun — Lorraine,” he said.
The figure lay starkly still. Lew touched the arm.
It needed only that one touch of the lifeless flesh to tell Lew Turlock that nothing he could do would be of any use.
He left the body exactly as he had found it, but he carefully stepped over it, untied the mare and led her out.
The nervous mare drew back on the rope as she came to the sprawled figure, then reared and jumped, alighting with a pound of hoofs on the floor beyond.
Lew tied her up and then went to the extension telephone which Calhoun had had installed in his barn within the last two weeks.
3
Sheriff Bill Eldon received the call at his home.
He was, at the moment, suffering through one of the frequent visits of his wife’s sister Doris. Time did not dull the sharpness of her mind — or of her tongue.
The sheriff listened to Lew Turlock’s heavy voice stolidly giving him the details.
“You say she was kicked by the mare?”
“That’s what it looked like. She must have gone into the stall and the mare caught her right in the middle of the forehead.”
“You didn’t move her?”
“Well, I got her out of that stall.”
“You shouldn’t have done that, Lew. You should have left the body...”
“Not the body,” Lew said, “the mare. She was stomping around and all excited.”
“You didn’t move the body?”
“Shucks, no. The mare jumped over it slick as could be. I knew enough not to touch the body. So did the mare.”
“How about the Calhouns? Are they home?” the sheriff asked.
“No, no one’s home. Sid Rowan and his wife must have gone to the show.”
“Okay,” the sheriff said. “I’ll get the coroner and come out. I’ll call up the theater and tell them to put a message on the screen for Sid Rowan to get out there right away. See that no one touches anything. G’bye.”
Doris Nelson was sitting in the front parlor, straining her ears to listen. She waited only to hear the click of the receiver and then rasped out, “Who is it? Who’s killed? What happened?”
Grinning maliciously, the sheriff picked up the receiver again. His second call would give him a valid excuse to ignore the questions. He said to the operator, “Get me James Logan, the coroner, right away. It’s official and important.”
A few moments later the sheriff had notified the coroner, called the movie theater, and left instructions to have Sid Rowan called from the show. Then he had slipped out of the side door and got his car out of the driveway — all without answering Doris’s rapid-fire staccato of eager questions, in itself no small feat.
Logan, the coroner, and Lew Turlock both lived well to the south of town. The Turlock ranch was some five miles out, and the sheriff, taking it for granted that Logan would be there ahead of him, drove at conservative speed along the main street of Rockville, carefully regarding the rights of other cars that were on the road. Although he had switched on his official red spotlight, he refrained from using the siren. After all, there was nothing he could do. The girl was dead. The Calhouns were prominent people. There would be quite a bit of publicity over the thing. The city newspapers would probably telephone in for complete facts. The Calhoun girl was pretty as a picture. But she was a city girl, and she should have known better than to go prowling around a nervous mare at night.
Once south of town, the sheriff speeded up the car and rolled briskly along the pavement. As he turned off on the dirt road which led up to the hill where the two houses were situated, he noticed that there were several fresh car tracks just ahead of him and that one of the puddles left in the road was still churned with yellowish muddy water. This meant that the coroner would be there ahead of him.
The sheriff liked that. He was always nervous when he had to stand around waiting for the coroner. He turned up the driveway, which skirted the base of the hill and then climbed up to the knoll, and slid his car to a stop just behind that of the coroner.
Logan was already in the barn. The sheriff walked on in.
Logan said, “I’ve looked around, Bill. It’s evidently accidental. She went into the stall to get something and the mare kicked her. It must have happened right after the horses were fed. The mare got nervous with the body lying there and didn’t eat a bite. The chute is still filled with hay. That mare’s hot-blooded and nervous. Miss Calhoun probably didn’t know enough about horses to understand she had to speak to a horse when she entered the stall. She walked in without saying a word. The mare saw her out of the corner of her eye and let fly.”
“How long’s she been dead?” the sheriff asked.
“We can find out when Sid Rowan comes and tell us what time he fed the horses. Must’ve happened within five minutes of the time he put down the feed. This probably will be Sid now.”
A car drew up outside. A man and woman got out and entered the stable.
“What’s the trouble here?” Sid Rowan said, his voice showing irritation. “Can’t I get away to a movie without...”
He broke off as the sheriff stepped forward.
Rowan was in the middle fifties, a stringy, wiry man with steel-gray eyes, long of leg and arm but quick-moving despite an awkward shuffle about his walk. His wife was four or five years younger and inclined to be fleshy and slow-moving.
The sheriff told them what had happened.
“But she wasn’t here,” Rowan said. “There was no one here. No one was home. The family were coming down tomorrow. You know how it is. They used to come down every week-end, now they come down about two week-ends out of the month, the whole bunch of them — servants, family, friends. Three or four automobile-loads sometimes. Shucks, wait a minute, that’s her car parked out there now. She must have come down unexpected like.”