Death by Equine by Annette Dashofy (booksvooks txt) 📕

Meryl’s home with her four kids and assorted dogs, cats, fish, and occasionally a ferret or Guinea Pig. “I appreciate that. Really. I have no shortage of places to stay. Milt said I could bunk with him and Catherine. And Daniel invited me to stay at his place.”

The room fell deadly silent. Jessie looked up to find both Greg and Meryl eyeing her with the same stunned expression. Meryl’s morphed into a sly smile. Greg’s did not.

“But for now, I’m fine at the track.”

Greg cleared his throat. “I have to go. Call me if you need anything.”

“Right.”

Greg started toward the dining room.

“Wait up.” Meryl fell into step behind him. “I’ll walk you out. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

Jessie smiled to herself. Poor Greg. The “something” Meryl had in mind was surely Vanessa. Jessie hoped she wasn’t going to spend the rest of the day bailing her friend out of jail for assaulting an officer of the law.

Once they were gone, Jessie wandered around the living room, poking at the glass fragments with her foot. She wondered if Greg would bother cleaning up while he was there. The thought almost made her laugh. Half consciously, she dug deeper into the shimmering mound with her toe. Something in the rubble caught her eye. Using the sole of her boot, she nudged away the debris. The object caught the light coming through the other windows but didn’t refract it the same way the glass did.

She squatted and brushed the broken pieces aside. Gingerly, she picked up the silver and turquoise barrette that had been buried. She didn’t have to study it long to know where she’d seen the thing before.

Meryl’s voice startled her. “Did you find something?”

Jessie rose, cradling the barrette in her hands. “I think my burglar left behind a calling card.”

“What is that? A belt buckle?”

“No.” Jessie held it up.

“A hair clip? Whose?”

Jessie stashed the barrette in her pocket and smiled. “Sherry Malone’s.”

JESSIE ARCHED HER ACHING back and stretched in a useless attempt to relieve the knots accumulated from a second night on the old sofa. She thought about the three offers of beds and skimmed right over Milt’s and Meryl’s to settle on Daniel’s. She closed her eyes and toyed with a delicious daydream involving the memory of his goodnight kiss, expanding to the purely fantasized feel of his arms around her, the warmth of his body.

A fat feline jumped onto her stomach, effectively performing the Heimlich maneuver, expelling the rest of her fantasy.

Jessie sat up with a groan, gave Molly’s ears a scratch, and deposited the cat on the floor. Molly ambled over to the bowl where the tabby kitten was crunching dry food, ran her rough, pink tongue over the tabby’s face a couple times, and nudged him aside so she could get her own breakfast.

Jessie shuffled to the desk and flopped into the chair. She removed the silver and turquoise barrette from the center drawer and turned it over in her hand. What had been in those records that Sherry so desperately needed to hide?

A loud rap at the office door jarred her from her thoughts. She slid the barrette back into the drawer. “Come in.”

As if thinking of the young woman had conjured her up, Sherry poked her head into the office. Her usual tan seemed to have washed away, and her voice had a raspy texture that hinted of a sleepless night. “We have a problem in Barn F.”

Jessie tried to recall who was stabled there but couldn’t. “What kind of problem?”

“You’d just better come with me.”

Sherry climbed into the passenger side of Jessie’s truck but refused to offer any kind of explanation. “Drive,” was all she said.

Jessie was surprised to see Neil Emerick waiting in front of the barn, gnawing on a toothpick. She and Sherry slid down from opposite sides of the cab.

“What’s going on?” Jessie asked.

His eyes shifted between the two women. Removing the toothpick, he turned. “This way.”

Jessie followed with Sherry bringing up the rear.

At first glance, the barn appeared empty, but a small crowd gathered around one of the stalls halfway down the shedrow. Three men gazed into the stall, their conversation too low for her to understand. When Jessie approached, they grew silent and parted, giving her a clear view of the horse inside.

An emaciated gray stood in the center of the stall with his head hanging and his eyelids half closed. The horse’s flesh seemed to have sunk inward with only traces of it attached to prominent withers, an angular spine and much too obvious ribs and pelvis.

Jessie had seen a pasture full of badly neglected horses once when she’d volunteered with the animal control officer during her internship. She’d hoped to never see such a heart wrenching sight again. This was worse. “My God. How could you let this happen?”

“I didn’t let nothing happen,” Emerick snapped. “I’ve been pouring the feed to the old bag of bones ever since he got here. He gets more grain than any three of my other horses combined. He just don’t pick up. Then this morning that one insisted you look at him.” He thrust a thumb at Sherry, who leaned against the railing across the shedrow from the crowd, chewing her cuticles.

The haunted look in her eyes rattled Jessie. “He’s running a fever,” Sherry said and went back to chewing her fingers.

Jessie’s gaze lingered on her, but she refused to meet it. Jessie sensed she had the answers to nearly all of her questions about the last couple of weeks. Right now, though, Jessie only had time to consider the skeletal gray.

“I’ll be right back.” Jessie excused herself to go to her truck. By the time she returned with a white plastic bucket full of supplies, someone had snapped a break-away tie hanging in one corner to the horse’s halter. The tie appeared to be all that kept his nose from hitting the ground. “You said he’s been like this since you got him.