Chapter 23
“It spit at me!” Chloe cried, dismayed. Nikki was holding her daughter, letting Chloe’s feet balance on a fence rail so that they could observe some of the other animals at the stables where Phee took riding lessons.
One male llama had obviously taken offense, laid his ears back, and hurled a wad of spit in Chloe’s direction.
“Icky!” Chloe proclaimed, about to burst into tears.
“You’re okay.” Nikki smothered a laugh as she swiped the bits of detritus that had landed on her daughter’s shirt.
“Am not okay!” To her mother’s horror, Chloe spat back at the animal, but by this time the llama had lost interest and was wandering toward a small herd of alpacas nearer the barn.
“Hey, no, honey,” Nikki said. “We don’t spit.”
“The llama did.” Chloe crossed her pudgy arms over her chest and glared at the offending beast, who had long forgotten her.
“I know. He was mad or scared or something.” Nikki plucked her daughter from the railing. “Come on, let’s watch the rest of Phee’s ride.”
“I hate him.”
“We don’t hate,” Nikki corrected. She set her daughter onto the gravel path. “Let’s go.”
“I hate him,” Chloe repeated indignantly. “He’s not nice.”
“Okay. You hate him. Now, come on.”
Chloe threw one last angry glance through the rails at the offending llama, then followed Nikki into the covered arena, where the smells of horses—oil, leather, dung, and urine—mingled with the dust that was forever kicked up as the riders guided their mounts through obstacles and over jumps.
The ceiling rose over twenty feet or more, thick crossbeams supporting fluorescent lights, while open-air windows allowed breezes to flow through the expansive space.
The arena was attached to the stables, separated by a short flight of stairs leading to an office and reception area with windows that overlooked the entire complex.
“There she is,” Nikki said, once they were on the bleachers that lined one side of the building.
She held her daughter so the girl could see over the barrier between the riding and viewing areas and Chloe could get a better view.
Nikki pointed to the middle of the arena, where Phee, tucked low in the saddle, guided a sleek bay gelding over a jump.
“Ooh!” Chloe said.
“Isn’t she doing great?” Nikki asked, but her attention was drawn to the instructor in riding top, breeches, boots.
A small glittering cross was at her neck, a long, dark braid down the middle of her back.
Annabelle Van Camp. On the sidelines, encouraging Phee, urging her on and praising her as she trotted, then cantered, the bay around the vast oval.
Just as Nikki had hoped.
Just as she’d planned when she’d offered to pick her niece up earlier in the day. “I’m taking Chloe to the park this afternoon anyway, so I may as well just grab Phee on the way home,” she’d told Lily, who was grateful for one less errand.
“No argument from me,” Lily had said.
Now, as Phee’s lesson was finished, Annabelle approached horse and rider, then patted the bay’s shoulder as Phee dismounted. “Great job,” she told the girl.
“Thanks!” Phee, a little breathless, was all smiles.
Quickly, Nikki carried Chloe down from the viewing area, but at the sight of her approach, Annabelle visibly stiffened. “Looks like you had an audience,” she said to Phee.
“Hi, Aunt Nikki!” Phee, her cheeks rosy, her eyes bright, waved to Nikki and Chloe before taking off her riding helmet. “I’ll be a few minutes.”
Nikki knew the drill from her own days of learning to ride. After the lesson the rider was expected to take care of the horse, cooling him down and removing the tack, and seeing that he was comfortable. All part of the lesson.
“We’ll wait,” she said, as Phee was already leading the gelding through the long, wide hallway to the stables, the horse’s hooves echoing as he followed.
Chloe spied a speckled pygmy goat in an enclosure next to the main, barnlike doors and was distracted while Annabelle started for the half flight of stairs to the office.
Nikki flagged her down. “Hey,” she called out, “I’d like to talk to you.”
“I don’t think so.” Pausing, she lowered her voice and cast her gaze around to be certain she wasn’t overheard, her single braid flipping over her shoulder, a horsefly buzzing around her head. “Archie said not to talk to you. Or … or to anyone.”
“You didn’t confirm that you were his alibi.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She tossed her head. The horsefly flew off, and Annabelle’s snake-like braid settled back into place, down the middle of her back.
“On the night Mavis was killed.”
“He already told you. We were together.”
“Except for the time when he went to his house. To get some things, I think he said.”
“But he didn’t do anything! He just found her there. Look, I’ve got to go. I have another lesson in, like, ten minutes.”
“And he never mentioned anyone who would want to do her harm?” Nikki asked, one eye on her daughter, who was pushing loose straw through the wire fencing to the goat.
“No,” she asserted, more than a little defensively. “But no one liked her. Not even her own family.”
“And not Archer?”
“What’re you suggesting? Oh, crap! He didn’t do it!” She rolled her expressive eyes. “God, haven’t you been listening?”
“Did he ever mention Billy Huber?”
“Who?” she asked, seeming bewildered for a second. “Oh. That guy who got killed out on his farm? No. He told you that.”
Another instructor was leading a tall, dappled gelding with a girl of about ten or eleven balanced in the saddle. Red hair poked from beneath her helmet, and as she passed, Nikki thought she recognized her. A classmate of Ophelia’s possibly?
“Look, I really have to go,” Annabelle said, as the big horse and rider passed.
She took a couple of steps toward the door to the office.
“Archie said to tell you to leave me alone or we’ll …
we’ll call an attorney!” She gave a quick, sharp nod.
Gone was the effusive, talkative girl in the hot tub.
Now the friendly “I-mostly-go-by Annie” had been replaced by scared Annabelle.
Archer had obviously laid down the law.
“Just leave me … leave us alone!” She turned quickly and dashed up the five steps to the office, her boot heels ringing, a bell over the door tinkling as she dashed inside and yanked the door shut behind her.
Through the large viewing windows, Nikki could see her talking excitedly with a severe, fiftyish woman whose keen eyes looked over half glasses.
Her hair was the color of steel and pulled back into a tight, small knot at the base of her skull, and her colorless lips were drawn into a hard, disapproving line.
Nikki guessed she was a manager or supervisor or possibly the owner of the riding academy, and right now, she was staring straight at Nikki, her expression nothing less than hostile.
Great.
If it hadn’t been before, her impromptu interview with Annabelle was definitely over.
Too bad. Though Nikki had been more than happy to spend the afternoon with Chloe and take Ophelia to her riding lesson after school, she’d had an ulterior motive, planning to “bump into” Annabelle and press her about Archer’s alibi on the night of Mavis’s murder.
She hoped to glean more information because so far she’d only come up with dead ends, which, she had to admit, probably included all of Mavis’s exes as well as Archer.
Not really surprising, she thought, picking Chloe up again and walking out of the building toward the parking area where she’d left her Subaru.
But she was quickly running out of leads.
As were the police, as far as she knew.
Pierce had been working late, pressured by the powers-that-be in the department to locate the killer.
Nothing seemed to be working for him as well.
What she’d learned from the little conversation they shared was that no link could be found between the victims. No alibis had cracked, except for Archer Greenlee’s, as he’d been protecting Annabelle.
Also, there was some kind of glitch getting information from the lab about the blood on the stones left at the homicide scenes.
So far, there had been nothing suspicious caught on CCTV foot age, nor on any of the neighborhood cameras that, unfortunately, didn’t include the Greenlees’ secluded estate.
It was almost as if the killer was a phantom.
Which, despite the tales of haunted houses, ghost stories, and voodoo lore woven into Savannah’s history, Nikki didn’t buy. She didn’t believe any of it for a second. She was, and always had been, a realist.
The killer existed.
He would be found.
Nikki just had to figure it all out.
Someway.
Somehow.
“By hook or by crook,” she said under her breath as she reached her SUV. Her daughter, riding on her hip, looked at her quizzically.
“What?” Chloe asked.
“Nothing. It’s silly,” Nikki replied, but she wasn’t really paying attention to the question as she spied a small woman just getting out of a large black pickup parked at the end of the lot. Her blond hair caught the rays of a dying afternoon sun as she made her way to a white Mercedes convertible.
Naomi Kittle.
Jamison’s wife.
And the black truck was the same Ram crew cab that Nikki had spied on the night of Lara Kittle’s sweet-sixteen party when she’d been searching for Pierce.
Then she realized the redheaded girl on the large dappled horse was Naomi’s middle daughter.
Shana. A classmate of Phee’s. That’s why Naomi was here.
To drop off her kid. But she wasn’t waiting for the lesson to end.
As the truck took off, Naomi climbed behind the wheel of her white Mercedes and, within seconds, was following the pickup down the magnolia-lined lane that connected the stables with the main road.