Chapter Twenty-Four
We were standing in the barn Joel and Harvey had vacated. All the stalls were occupied with contented looking horses, munching their feed, or lolling their heads over the half doors. Only the pretty horse nearest to us looked agitated. She’d circled the stall several times before settling down.
“Maroon,” read Lily, pointing to the tag on the door.
“I think this is Jessica’s horse,” I said, petting Maroon’s muzzle when she hung her head over the door. “It sounded like that horse Harvey took out was stabled in here but don’t horses always get their own stalls?” I looked around, puzzled.
“This is a girl horse,” said Lily, “and that was a boy horse.” She pointed the way Harvey and Joel had left.
“Does that make a difference?”
“It does if they’re bunking up for sexy time.”
“What? Eww.”
“Sorry,” snorted Lily. “Would you prefer I said special horsey cuddles?”
“No, that’s not any better. Are you suggesting Joel was trying to mate them?”
“I’d guess so but Harvey didn’t seem happy about it. That stallion is from the rehab yard so is probably injured somehow and I doubt the owner would want him in close enough proximity to another horse to potentially make the injury worse.”
“Maybe the owner didn’t know,” I said, a lightbulb clicking on. “Good horses cost a lot of money. You said thousands.”
“More for the right horse, especially racehorses and eventers.”
“Does that include the babies?”
“Yeah, a foal with champion bloodlines is worth a lot.”
I read the name on the door again, my memory sparking. “Maroon is Jessica’s competition horse. She said they’d won a lot of competitions. Maybe that horse has too.”
“They both have beautiful coloring. Her agility combined with his potential strength, maybe speed too, could make a foal with a good price tag. But…” Lily paused.
“What?”
“It sounds like Joel was trying to sneak that stallion in. If the owner didn’t know, then Joel probably didn’t pay stud fees.”
“What’s that?”
“A fee for the stallion’s services.”
“I don’t under… oh!” My eyes widened.
“Lots of retired stallions get that job. It’s a great income producer and all they have to do is have a good time.”
“Eww!”
Lily shrugged. “Sounds like a good retirement to me.”
“So long as you’re the stallion.”
“Isn’t that the truth?”
Something the men had said bugged me. “Did it sound like Harvey has been giving money to Joel? He said the gravy train would end.”
Lily nodded. “Yeah, I thought it sounded like that too.”
I knew I needed to get closer to Joel and Yvette, but Harvey clearly needed investigating too. To make it even harder, I was sure none of them liked me enough to let me get close and subtly pump them for information.
“I just saw Yvette ride out onto that trail she took you on,” said Lily. She’d moved nearer to the door and was leaning casually against the architrave, arms folded across her chest, like she’d stopped for a moment to relax.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s our cue,” I said. I checked my watch, noting the time. “Forget about what we just saw for now. Let’s head to her place.”
Yvette’s house was more of a small cottage than an annex to the farmhouse, and tucked away beyond a copse of trees.
It wasn’t as big as the main farmhouse but it was larger than the stable hands’ cabins and seemed to be all on one level.
Gauzy curtains covered the window and the gray door’s glass windows were opaque.
It also had the same pin keypad as the cabins so that made lockpicking futile.
Instead, I grabbed a handful of grit from the pathway, shook out the larger pieces until I was left with a fine dust that I blew across the keypad. The dust settled predominantly on four numbers, exactly as I hoped.
“Good job,” said Lily, grinning.
“I figure oily fingers would transfer every time she touched the numbers,” I said. “The bad news is we need to narrow down the thousands of options that those four numbers present.”
On the client paperwork, Jessica had listed the birthdates for herself, her husband, and Yvette. I tried each of them, the LED returning red each time.
“I don’t know how many more times I can try before this keypad refuses any more attempts. It might send out an alert to Yvette or revert to the auto shutoff for the entry. That could be five attempts, or ten. Or one more!”
“Usually, it’s something personal. What about the day she and Joel started their affair?”
“There’s no way of finding that out. They didn’t advertise it.”
“True. I’m scrolling through the farm’s social media for ideas,” said Lily, tapping on her phone.
She showed me a photo of Yvette cozied up to a beautiful horse, both looking directly at the camera.
“What about her favorite horse’s birthday?
Or the day she won gold in the state show jumping competition? ”
“The horse,” I guessed.
“0-4-0-9.”
I input the numbers and the LED popped green.
“We’re in,” I said, opening the door. We stepped directly into a living room furnished with a gray, L-shaped couch and a large cream rug, the type you could sink your feet into.
A coffee table held a silver metal tray with a fancy candle and a TV remote control.
A biofuel fireplace was built into one wall, either side of which held shelves full of paperbacks.
Long, white, floaty curtains pooled at the floor, impractical for warmth but enough for privacy.
A built-in unit next to the door housed jackets, boots and shoes. There were two back protectors in different lengths, neither of them Jessica’s damaged model, several helmets, a couple of riding crops, and a small basket full of gloves in a variety of colors.
It was lived in, but neat. Cozy, soft, and warm.
Doors led off the hallway, one to a guest bedroom set up with a desk and chair.
The middle door opened to a bathroom. The last door led to a larger bedroom, with a king bed made up in cream and gray.
We bypassed them, reaching the farmhouse-style kitchen set out in a horseshoe shape with a circular pine table, wrapped with four chairs.
French doors revealed a small courtyard garden, mostly paved, with a small table and chair set.
“I remember the days when my home was neat and tidy and I could put stuff down and it would stay there,” said Lily.
“That only happened when you didn’t go home for days,” I said.
“It was so nice to go home too,” she continued, ignoring me as her face became wistful. “When this case ends and I go home, I guarantee you I won’t be able to find anything except Poppy’s toys. They will be everywhere.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “You can always escape to my house,” I said.
“Or give up. Maybe both.” Lily brightened. “There’s always a silver lining.”
I checked my watch. “Ten minutes have passed since you saw Yvette ride out. We need to look for any evidence that she might have intended, or conspired with Joel to kill her sister. And we need to find whatever it was Yvette took. If it were an envelope, perhaps she didn’t want anyone else to find whatever was inside. ”
“What if the envelope is in the trash and it’s empty?”
“We’ll deal with that if it happens.” Truth was, I had very low expectations about finding something that small and non-descript.
If it held something so important Yvette had to steal it from her deceased sister’s home behind Joel’s back, I was sure she wouldn’t waste time dealing with the contents.
If we were very lucky, Yvette hadn’t dealt with it, either through grief or laziness, or because she didn’t expect her sister to have hired a nosy PI with a penchant for breaking and entering.
It seemed like Yvette didn’t know Jessica had realized all kinds of things.
I only wished Jessica’s life hadn’t ended when it did. I would have loved to see her rise like a phoenix from the ashes of her life, only to fly into the next life she would create for herself.
It was heartbreaking to know that would never happen for her. That her life had ended knowing how terrible her loved ones were being behind her back… and that made me angry.
The desire to right those wrongs surged within me, reminding me of my purpose.
Jessica had hired me to solve her murder, and I was going to not only do that, but figure out exactly what was going on and take them all down. Nothing else would be enough.
“I’ll take the office, you take the bedroom,” I said. “Be really careful to put everything back as you found it.”
“This isn’t my first rodeo,” replied Lily, already pulling plastic gloves from her pocket and handing me a pair.
“You’re carrying gloves?”
“When don’t you? I have a pack of these in my special kit for moments like this.”
“Handy,” I said, but what I really meant was I needed one of those kits. “Although you could have given me a pair for rummaging through the trashcan,” I added with a grumble.
Yvette’s home was so neat and tidy that I figured the most likely place for an envelope or a notepad would be in her desk, assuming she’d kept it and the contents.
The desk’s surface held a laptop, a mug with pens, an unused notepad, and a small potted plant with vibrant green leaves.
Three drawers were underneath. I started at the top, carefully rifling through the contents.
Various pieces of stationery, a set of pens, a stapler and a box of staples, and last year’s desk calendar, devoid of any entries.
The second and third drawers were just as empty of clues and I closed them all quickly, turning my attention to the laptop. I lifted the lid and almost immediately the screen came to life, leaving a password box waiting for input.
Now that was interesting.
I turned the laptop over, hopeful for a password, but no such luck. Then for the sheer hell of it, I typed in “IloveJoel” and hit enter.
The password screen faded, leaving a virtual desktop as uncluttered as the physical one at which I stood, hunched over, staring at the screen, in appalled amazement at my lucky guess.
There were several icons for the internet and TV streaming, and then some folders each marked with what looked like a horse’s name.
Another labeled “Competitions” and one for “Teaching Schedule.” I opened the internet icon and checked her browsing history.
Horse sales, tack sales, feed, a couple of searches on actors I assumed she found attractive, the air date for a TV show, and then some searches on how to make a man love you, how to get him to leave his wife, how to be patient, what betrayal does to family relationships.
All damning stuff, but nothing that linked her directly to Joel.
Then I saw it, an online email provider. I clicked on it and a new window opened but instead of displaying Yvette’s name, or an official Ashgrove Farms address, there was a string of letters and numbers. Three emails were in the inbox, each of them from Jessica.
Who is this? was the first message.
Who are you? I need more information than this. Send receipts was the second.
The third read: We should meet. Tell me when and where and I’ll come.
I clicked “sent” and found two emails, both addressed to Jessica. I loaded the first, which read: Your husband is unfaithful. He wasn’t where he said he was the weekend you went away.
The second read Receipts attached. Two photos were attached.
The first was a dark, grainy photo of Joel, his arms wrapped around a woman, her back to the camera, hair covered with a hat, with his car behind them.
It looked like a screenshot from a security camera but the background didn’t look like anything I’d seen on the farm.
The second photo was clearly Joel, his head on a pillow, his eyes closed like he was asleep.
The sheets barely covered his bare chest. With Joel as the camera’s focus, it could have been any bed, anywhere.
Yet it was clearly him, and someone clearly had access to take such an intimate photo.
I took pictures of everything.
“Anything?” asked Lily appearing in the doorway and making me jump.
“Yvette was the one who tipped off Jessica about her affair,” I said. “She sent anonymous emails.”
“Bitchy move.”
“I think she was trying to break them up without taking responsibility for it. Perhaps Jessica already guessed but this was the extra evidence she needed,” I said, moving the mouse icon to close the page. Then as it hovered over the drafts folder, I clicked that, just in case.
A single, solitary email remained there. I clicked it, noting it was addressed to Harvey.
I know what you’re doing and you need to stop.