Monday, April 20th, 1964
Buddy could’ve had one of the grooms who worked for him lead Arctic Ghost out of the breeding barn, the sixteen-and-a-half-hand twelve-year-old gray stallion, who bred better than he’d run. But Buddy liked him specially, and he was leading good the way he always did for Buddy, swinging his head some, but stepping careful, and Buddy brought him into the stallion barn and took the lead rope off him in his stall, and had just checked his water buckets, once he’d locked his door—when the phone rang in the tack room.
It was Becky, his wife, telling him the Sheriff had called, and wanted to see him at home on his lunch hour, and she’d told him he’d likely be home at one. Buddy asked her what he wanted, and she said she didn’t know. “I didn’t like to ask, with him bein’ the Sheriff and all.”
Buddy spent the next four hours shuffling that question around in his head, while he oversaw the scheduled breedings—handling his grooms, and the client’s people, making the three owners who wanted to watch their mares get bred feel like he was being hospitable, while he made sure everything was done for their safety, for the mares’ and the stallions’, and the folks handling both.
It was Frankie D’Amato flickering through his mind that made Buddy feel halfway sick. Making him wonder if Frankie’d been messing around behind his back again, trashing his good name and shedding blame on him for something he couldn’t imagine.
Word had it Frankie’d gone and broke a good stud’s leg deliberate with a sledge hammer or something like it, to get a cut of the insurance money from the owner, who was naturally thought to be in it too. It hadn’t been proved, but it was being looked into. And him knowing the lengths Frankie’d gone to before was enough to make Buddy feel real uneasy. And waiting made it worse.
At five to one, Buddy was in his truck, past Mr. Mercer’s big-pillared house, turning left out the long shady drive onto Route 1685. He turned left again onto the Old Frankfort Road, driving beside moss-covered stone walls, then right between two tall stone pillars into a dark-dappled open-work woods.
He passed the old stone pioneer house that had been in Mercer Tate’s family since the Revolution (that he rented now to distant cousins), curving his way to the left beyond it, then out of the woods and across the pasture where the breeding sheep grazed—black faced, and easy to startle, skinned looking too, having just gotten sheared.
The sheriff’s car was in front of Buddy’s house, the small stone-and-cedar farmhouse that came with his job for Mr. Tate. It was the sweetest little house he’d ever hoped to live in—a story-and-a-half peaked-roof cottage with a one-story room built off both sides. If he got him a job with a trainer the way he wanted, leaving that house would be real hard. Not half so hard as leaving Mr. Tate. That gnawed at his insides right then, soon as it come to mind.
But then Buddy slammed the door to his truck and took the front steps in one leap, his flat-heeled boots sounding hard on the flagstone stoop. He pulled off his wide straw hat as he walked through the door into the center hall, and saw Earl Peabody at the dining-room table through the living room on his left. Earl was facing Becky, with a twin on either side, sitting in their high chairs in yellow dresses, cookies clutched in greasy-looking hands.
Earl said, “You got you a fine family here, Buddy. They’re eatin’ real good for not being two.”
Buddy nodded and said, “Thanks, Sheriff,” as Becky got up and fetched him his plate from the kitchen.
“There’s cold chicken and coleslaw, and I got more cornbread too, if ya want. The sheriff ate before he come. I’m puttin’ the girls down for their nap, so y’all can talk in here. Would you like some more iced tea, Sheriff?”
“Thank you, but I’m doin’ fine.”
Becky pulled the twins out of their chairs and herded them toward the stairway, with a detour or two from both of them before their hard-soled baby shoes could be heard hitting the stairs with pauses between each one.
Buddy said, “What can I do for you, Sheriff?” feeling his heart pounding in his ears, and his throat closing up on his chicken.
“You heard Carl Seeger died?”
“Read about it in the paper.”
“I can’t go into a lotta detail, but I talked to Charlie Smalls, and he told me he mentioned to you when you was shootin’ the breeze in the fall that his sister had her a key to Carl’s house put away in his garage. Miz Seeger’d put it there for Esther, and left it alone when she moved.”
“I can’t say I recall.” All six–foot-three of Buddy looked hunched and squeezed into the metal dinette chair that he’d kept pushed a foot or so out from the table. He leaned over his plate, holding a fried chicken breast in his hands, pulling meat off with his teeth, his eyes looking sideways at Earl.
“Charlie said it was when you two was talkin’ about how Seeger had got himself fired for stealin’ a formula from Equine.”
“I ’member tellin’ him that.”
“Charlie said something like, ‘Then there was justice in Esther havin’ a key when Carl wouldda been real upset. He treated her like she’d be one to steal, when he was a thief himself.’”
“Okay. Yeah, I guess that’s about right.” Buddy could feel the heat in his skin starting to die down, and he took a big breath and let it out, because Frankie D’Amato hadn’t entered in.
“Did you tell anybody about that key? Anybody at all?”
“Why would I?”
“I don’t know, but did ya?”
“I don’t recall.” Buddy had finished his chicken breast and was holding his hot buttered cornbread in one hand, staring at the kitchen wall. “I didn’t give it much thought, and I can’t see why I’d tell anybody. Gossipin’ when you’re in the horse business can not only get ya fired, it can hurt a lotta folks.”
“Did ya tell Becky?”
Buddy raised his voice and said, “Honey, could you come here a minute?” He wiped crumbs off his mouth with a paper napkin and swallowed half his iced tea.
They could hear Becky skipping down the stairs, and then she was in the living room, standing in the middle of the floor, six feet from the dining room doorway, a rag doll in her hand. “Buddy?”
“Did I tell you about a key bein’ in that guy Carl Seeger’s garage?”
“Yeah. You did. Last fall, I think.”
Earl asked Becky if she’d told anybody else.
“No, I never did.”
“Buddy?” Earl asked again, holding his glass in both hands.
“Nope.”
Becky said, “I thought I heard you say somethin’ to Jo.”
“Me? When?”
“Few weeks ago. She was telling you ’bout Carl getting the IRS guy to come pester them after he finished with Mr. Harrison.” Becky was short and thin, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, a blue-and-white checked shirt tucked into her denim skirt, her blue eyes looking nervous. “I thought you said somethin’ like ‘If ya ever want to leave a dead rat in his kitchen, there’s a key in his garage.’ You were just kiddin’. I mean you were just—”
“Me?” Buddy’s hand had frozen with a forkful of coleslaw halfway to his mouth.
“You were pickin’ me up at Jo’s after I’d watched Ross, when Mama had the twins, and you’d been helpin’ Toss out at the barn. Sometime this spring. March maybe. Or early April?”
“Okay. Maybe. Somethin’ like that.”
“You both sure of that?” Earl was holding his notebook, his ballpoint pen poised above the paper, his black-framed glasses sliding down his large nose, his eyes studying theirs.
Becky said, “That’s the way I remember it.”
“I guess, yeah. You’re making it sound important, Sheriff.” Buddy was beginning to look worried, like a minefield might be opening up right underneath his feet.
“Don’t know that it is, but it could be. Ya mention it to anyone else?”
Buddy said, “Not that I can think of. I wouldn’t a said a word about a key to some folk’s house unless I thought whoever I was talkin’ to could be trusted not to break in. Jo and Alan? They’d never do somethin’ like that. Never in a million years.”
“Did ya know Seeger, did ya?”
“Nope. Never met him.”
“You know anything else about him, maybe something from Esther, or the Munros?”
“Just that he was real hard on Esther, and what he did with the formula at Equine made me think of him as a no account. The IRS business too.”
“Well. If ya think of anything else connected to Seeger, give me a call at the office.”
“I will.”
“I’ll arrange to get a deputy to take a statement later.”
“Sure.” Buddy got up and walked him out the door, then sat down on the stone stoop and lit himself a Marlboro with a kitchen match as he watched Earl drive away, thinking, How am I gonna tell Jo and Alan?
Excerpt from Jo Grant Munro’s Journal
Tuesday, April 28th, 1964
It looks as though Blue Grass’s burning must’ve been something electrical. The insurance folks have been investigating forever, and though the final report isn’t in, they’ve said it doesn’t look like arson. Which Spencer hadn’t expected, of course, but the insurance money will be critical, and I’m sure it’s been hard waiting to hear what they think.
We haven’t heard anything more from Earl, but Buddy called a week or so ago, and told us that Earl had asked him if he’d told anyone about the key in Carl’s garage.
I’ve always thought you just tell the truth and even if somebody else isn’t, it’ll work out fine in the long run, so I never would’ve wanted him to hedge around it. But finding out Earl knows we knew about the key made my stomach turn over right then. Alan’s too, probably, even if we didn’t talk about it much.
There’re been anxious silences every day when we’ve worried alone so as not to upset the other—interspersed too with feverish discussions of the circumstantial evidence Earl’s got. That’s when we weren’t talking about Ross’ diarrhea, and us not knowing how to make it stop.
But not hearing from Earl has eased us back into more of a routine—of Ross, and our work, and helping Toss some, of taking walks with Emmy, and me riding Sam and Alan riding Maggie (who seems to have gotten attached to Alan, which pleases him no end).
I’ve been praying every day that Earl’s eliminated Alan as a suspect, and this is not just the lull before the proverbial maelstrom.
Thursday, April 30th, 1964
Ross was sleeping in his buggy late that afternoon, in the shade of a huge old maple, next to the sand riding area just past the south barn.
Jo was sitting on Sam at the south end watching Alan canter Maggie. She’d been asking Alan to pick up the canter from the walk, and the trot, then bring Maggie down to one gait, and then the other, to help him work on his position in transitions, and get quick responses from Maggie too, instead of letting her shuffle a couple of strides before she responded to his aids.
Jo said, “I’m glad you came home at five for once. It’s too beautiful not to ride.”
“That’s why I came home.”
“You’ve really learned a lot in two years.”
That made Alan laugh, before he smoothed a hand along Maggie’s neck as she rushed a couple of strides, then settled into the canter. “Oh, yeah? Then why is this so hard?”
“You’re both learning. Good transitions take a lot of hindquarter strength too, and Maggie’s just getting back in shape after having that last baby.”
“Her canter’s getting smoother.”
Jo nodded, and had just said, “And you’re beginning to get more precise in the way you apply your aids”—when she heard a car coming toward them on the long drive from the house.
It was a white sedan, and when it’d gotten close enough for her to see the insignias on the front doors, her heart lurched against her ribs, and blood rushed to her face. “Alan!” There was worry and warning and misery in her voice.
And Alan brought Maggie down to a walk, and looked across his left shoulder to see what Jo had seen.
The car stopped just north of the barn, and Earl opened the driver door and squeezed himself through. Pete Phelps climbed out the passenger door and stood looking like an embarrassed egret, as he stared into the small paddock of mares and newborn foals.
Earl nodded at Jo, and squinted at Alan as he said, “I need to talk to you a minute.”
“Sure. Let me just get Maggie unsaddled and turn her out in her paddock.”
“Ya reckon Jo could do that for ya?”
Alan had climbed down and was leading Maggie toward Jo, who’d already dismounted and was walking Sam toward the back of the barn. Alan met her at the open door to the aisleway and handed her his reins, before he started toward Earl, who was pulling a paper out of his shirt pocket, without taking his eyes off Alan.
“I got no choice, Alan. I feel real bad, but I gotta ask ya to come with me. I got a warrant here for your arrest for the murder of Carl Seeger. I hate doin’ it, but I’m gonna hafta handcuff ya too and take ya into the department. I can cuff yer hands in front. It don’t have to be in back. But that’s the procedure I gotta follow.”
“Earl!” Jo was white-faced and rigid, Sam and Maggie standing close together just behind her, her voice sharp, her hands gripped tight on both sets of reins, just as Ross started screaming. “He didn’t kill Carl! You know better than that!”
“Can’t ignore the evidence, Jo. County Attorney give me no choice. I gotta take Alan in and book him, but you go ahead and get you a lawyer, and work on makin’ bond as soon as it gets set.”
“Do I get to change my clothes? I’m dirty, and sweating, and I need to get cleaned up.” Alan was glaring at Earl, as he peeled off his riding gloves and unbuckled his helmet.
“Sorry.”
“I’m going to take my chaps off, and wash up with the hose. You can come with me and watch if you feel the need.” Alan was unbuckling his rawhide chaps without looking at Earl, his face hard and angry, his green eyes, when he took off his sunglasses and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, hot and pinched and focused on the tack room door as though nothing in this world could have made him turn aside.
Earl watched him pull the handle up on the pump in the tack room and drag the hose out behind the barn, and wash his face and hands. Jo and Earl were staring at Alan’s back when Alan said, “Jo, get Bob Harrison’s lawyer. Then call Bob at home and tell him what’s happened.”
While they took his mug shot and fingerprinted him again in the Woodford County jail in Versailles, Alan told himself to calm down and watch his mouth.
This is nothing compared to France.
Demolition before D-Day.
Setting up local army governments.
You dealt with nothing but deceit.
Use what you learned then.
Listen. Read between the lines. Don’t aggravate Earl.
Earl walked him into the Sheriff’s Department next door to the jail, past the old scarred counter in the front room, where a plump deputy looked up with ill-disguised hostility as they passed into Earl’s office.
The brown linoleum was old and cracked, the desks—Earl’s facing the door, Pete’s against the wall on the left—were banged-up metal under chipped tan paint. There were gray metal chairs with red plastic seats sitting in front of Earl’s desk, and Earl sat in one, and waved Alan to the other. Pete swiveled his desk chair toward them, and folded his arms across his bony-looking middle, while he stared across at Alan.
Earl pulled a stick of Juicy Fruit from his shirt pocket and peeled off the silver paper, folding it into his mouth, before he held the pack out to Alan—who shook his head and leaned back in his chair, his hands spread on the arms.
Earl sat and watched Alan for a minute with his thumbs hooked in his belt. “As you know, we got circumstantial evidence against you, and we gotta go through it again.”
“You think I’m stupid enough to do it the way it was done?”
“Meaning what?”
“Use a toxin that could only come from my own lab. Leave my pen at the scene. Leave a syringe and a surgical glove. I figure there must’ve been a glove, or a piece of one, of the type we use in our lab there too, since you took samples from the lab. And with you taking the Selectric ball, and samples of Equine paper, there’s a good chance that the note Carl left didn’t match his typewriter, or his typing paper either. How dumb would I have to be to make mistakes like that?”
“Can’t ignore it though, can I?”
“No, I know that, but—”
“What other explanation can you offer for the evidence? No alibi neither. Your car seen just past his house close to the time he died.”
“And if I were going to go to his house, would I do it so my car would be seen? No! I’d plan it a whole lot better!”
“You gotta admit you got motive.”
“What motive? That he tried to steal my formula, and he got the IRS to hassle Jo and me? I would not murder somebody over an IRS audit! And he didn’t get away with stealing my formulas. He got fired. He got stopped. It means I think he was a dishonest son-of-a-pup, but it doesn’t mean I’d kill him.”
“There’s more evidence besides what I’ve mentioned before.”
“What? Anything new from the autopsy?”
“I’m not obligated to reveal our evidence, not at this stage of the proceedings.”
“Earl, it’s me. Alan Munro. Remember the murderer I helped you arrest, when I could’ve killed her with my bare hands for what she did to Jo! You know in your gut I didn’t do this.”
“I wouldn’t a thought it, but the County Attorney he don’t know you from spit, and he’s the one weighing the evidence and asking the judge for a warrant so he can take you to District Court.”
“Do you have any evidence placing me inside Carl’s house?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“You don’t. You can’t. I’ve never set foot in his house! You don’t have my prints on the vial, or the syringe, or anything else. You can’t!”
“Well, you cain’t tell me you wouldn’t a worn gloves.”
“Right. And I wouldn’t have been dumb enough to make all the other stupid mistakes!”
“The question I cain’t answer, and I don’t figure you can either, is why would Carl kill himself just to set you up? Unless you got some other suspect.”
“I don’t know. I admit that that’s a serious question. And I don’t have another suspect. But I’m not giving up on finding one.”
“Fine.”
“Do you have Carl’s appointment calendar?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, it seems like maybe what he’d been doing, and who he was meeting, might give us some kind of clue.”
“Actually, we didn’t find one. And consider that a concession on my part to pass on that information.”
“I do. Thank you.”
Earl pulled a legal pad off his desk and handed it to Alan. “You write down your side of things. Your history with Carl Seeger, when you went to his house like ya told me before, and all-and-everything, and what you was doin’ the day and night of the fifteenth. Then Pete and me, we’ll sign it after you as witnesses that it’s your words.”
“Crap, Earl!”
“You can wait for your lawyer if you want. If you—”
“No. I’ll write it now. I don’t have anything to hide.”
“One thing I will tell ya, that I don’t have to, is that the final ortopsy report got real delayed. The M.E. from up in Franklin who did the preliminary examination, after I talked to him that morning, he was in a real bad car accident on his lunch hour. They doubt he’ll be out of the hospital for another week or ten days. They don’t have nobody else to fill in. So it ain’t been finished.”
“That seems fairly outrageous. That they’d only have one doc.”
“The other one they used some turned out to be a drunk, and they fired him not too long before all this happened, and he up and moved outta town.”
“Still seems unprofessional.”
“Well, we’re kinda small potatoes around here. We don’t get hardly any unexplained deaths, and there’s never been a big need. The doc had no doubt Carl’s death was caused by the injection, and his blood was on the needle and all, and the cat’d been injected too. He found that before he got hurt, but we’ll have to wait for the rest.”
“But you know they’re going to set bond for me?”
“I reckon they will, yeah. You’re not much of a flight risk, with your family and job and all. ’Course, this bein’ late in the day, I reckon you’ll have to spend the night, but tomorrow your lawyer can go to work, and the bond’ll get set, and then Jo can talk to the bank and all, and get ya out after that.”
“Not tonight?”
“I’d be surprised. And you better prepare yourself for this bein’ all over the papers. This is real big for Woodford County. Lexington and Louavull, they’ll be on it too. We ain’t had a murder case like this in Versailles, premeditated and all, pro’bly since 1949. This ain’t no knifin’ outside some bar late some Saturday night.”
“Except for the one two years ago.”
“Right.”
“When can I take the lie detector test?”
“Takes awhile to schedule it. Earliest next week.”
“Jo does not need to go through this, Earl. She knows everybody in a fifty-mile radius, and it’s bound to be horrific for her.”
“I reckon that’s true, but it cain’t be helped.”
“Still—”
“You may be kinda a newcomer ’round here, but everybody’s gonna know you now, that’s for darn sure.”
It was past two when Alan woke up and threw the blanket off his face. He sat up shivering, sweat pouring through his shirt, his jeans sticking to his thighs, trying to see where he was.
He’d been back in France, running from a train they’d booby trapped with plastic explosives, and it was night, and there was machinegun fire behind him, and Gary Prescott had just been blown apart fifteen feet to his right.
It’d changed then the way it always did, to him running across a stone square in a tiny village up near Amiens, where he saw a guy from the French Resistance lob a grenade at a woman who’d been posing as a collaborator, but had worked with Alan and the OSS before American troops moved in.
He could see the grenade flying toward her—the perfect arc, the effortless throw—Marie not seeing it as she walked away from him. And then Alan was running faster and faster, screaming at her back. And then he felt himself stumble on a chunk of rubble and hit his face on the edge of a curb—where he watched her get ripped apart against a café window that shattered on her as she fell.
That’s when he woke up, shivering and sweating, and told himself to open his eyes.
He wasn’t in France.
There wasn’t a grenade.
The woman he’d been trying to save had been.
He’d been ten feet away. And he hadn’t stumbled.
And the war was over and done with.
He was in Versailles, Kentucky.
In jail for murdering Carl.
That made Alan laugh—and not be able to stop for longer than he could explain—before he pulled his threadbare blanket up around his shoulders, and told himself to calm down and take a deep breath.
There was light in his cell, from a streetlamp, falling on the concrete floor through the bars on the one high window in the wall on his right where he sat on his metal cot. There was light from a bulb too, in a wire cage, in the hall ceiling beyond the two-foot square of bars in the door on his left.
He heard another door open at the end of the hall, and the clap of hard-soled shoes hitting concrete, heading toward his cell.
The footsteps stopped outside his door, and he looked up and saw a small guy with yellowish skin, holding a mug of coffee in his hand, staring at him through the bars. “You okay in there?”
“Sure. I’m fine. Nothing to worry about here.”
The deputy didn’t answer. He blew on his coffee and took a sip, then walked back to the end of the hall and closed the door behind him.