“No. Your flame burns steadily. It has to, Sorrel; you’re a mother. Men can leave. They can leave us flat out. They can die. They can run off with other women or they can show up on their thirty-seventh birthday and declare they want to climb Mount Everest before they’re forty. We’re tied to the earth. Once the children are grown I suppose we can do those things, too, but how do you break a lifetime of holding back?”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“I think a lot. I’m alone much of the time or I’m doing chores. My mind is always on an adventure.” She picked up a cookie, putting it in Sorrel’s hand. “Okay. You don’t have to eat it but look at it. I’m making a sandwich even if you won’t eat it. Take it with you.”
“There’s enough food in my house to keep a brigade full.”
“Then I’m making one for myself.”
As the older woman buttered the bread she chatted and listened.
Doug knocked on the back door, then came inside. “Horses are fine, Mrs. Buruss. I’ve turned your trailer around.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s a great trailer,” he said admiringly.
“Only the best. You know how he was.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.” His handsome face radiated honesty.
“There isn’t anything else you can say. Thank you, Doug.”
“Did Sister tell you? We found the rope. We think it’s the rope.”
Sister turned her silver head to face Doug. “I was getting to that.”
Both Sister and Doug explained how they’d found the rope, where they’d found the rope, and what it looked like.
“Sounds like Fontaine’s King’s rope.”
CHAPTER 43
Four hundred and sixty people crammed into the pre-Revolutionary Episcopal Church. Built in 1749, laid brick with white lintels, the unadorned structure sheltered by ancient spruces and hickories exuded an inviting presence. It didn’t take a particularly active imagination to envision colonists tying up their horses, doffing their tricornes, or adjusting their Sunday hats if female, to cross the threshold into the vestry.
Every member of Jefferson Hunt attended, many genuinely sorrowful. Crawford, not at all sorrowful, escorted Martha. He walked to the grave site in the churchyard as well, just to make sure the walnut casket would be lowered into the ground.
Martha, keeping her misery in check, wiped her eyes from time to time. Crawford kept his eyes down much of the time.
The Franklins sat together. Jennifer held a lace handkerchief to her eyes, not to dab tears but to hide the laughter. Dean Offendahl, one of her high school boyfriends, in the choir, would wink at her. Betty, outraged, headed straight for Dean once the service was over. A funeral might be a good place to fall in love but it wasn’t a good place to flirt. Jennifer, unaware of her mother’s mission, walked with Cody and Bobby to chat with Sister, Doug, and Shaker. Together they walked out to the parking lot, a light northerly wind mussing everyone’s hair.
They stopped out of respect as the funeral director ushered Sorrel and the kids into the black limousine. Fontaine’s sister from Morgantown, West Virginia, and her family followed in the next black limo.
“She’s holding up remarkably well,” Betty quietly remarked.
“You’d think she’d be glad to get rid of him,” Cody said in a low voice.
Doug firmly said, “Cody.”
She shrugged.
Sister walked over next to her. “If love were logical, you would be one hundred percent correct but love isn’t logical. If it were, no one in their right mind would marry. For all his faults, she loved him. She loved him from the day she met him in college.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“I suspect you have mixed emotions yourself.”
This terse sentence from Sister cut to the bone. Cody wondered if Sister knew about her affair. Unlike most people, Sister Jane did not feel compelled to tell people what she knew. A slight chill bumped down Cody’s spine.
“Would you like to ride with me?” Doug offered, hoping for the chance to talk to Cody alone before the gathering at the Buruss home.
Cody agreed and once the door was closed she blurted out, “God, I’d give anything for a drink right now.”
“No.”
“I won’t, I won’t. But funerals make me shaky.”
“Cody, did you ever notice a special rope in Fontaine’s stable?”
“What do you mean?”
“From out west. King’s ropes, I think. Stiff. Used to rope steers and calves.”
“No.”
“Think hard. Maybe he hung it in the tack room or inside his trailer. You’d notice it, as it’s different from the stuff you buy at the co-op.”
“No. I’d show up three times a week, saddle up Keepsake, and that was that. In and out.”
CHAPTER 44
Alone in bed that night, Sister scribbled on a yellow legal pad. She was reconstructing everything she could remember from the time she first saw Fontaine until he vanished. Next to her was her red leather-bound hunt diary. After each hunt she wrote the events in her diary. Reading about hunts years later delighted her.
She and Raymond used to sit in bed together writing in their respective hunt diaries. He’d fuss at her because she’d use a fountain pen and he was afraid she’d spill ink on the sheets. She never did.
Outside the night was crystal clear as only a November night can be.
Golly rested on the pillow next to her. Sister thought of it as Raymond’s pillow. Raleigh curled up in front of the fireplace in the bedroom, the aroma of cured hardwoods filling the room.
The more she thought about opening hunt, the more disturbed she became. Why kill Fontaine in the hunt field? Surely it would have been easier to kill him somewhere else.
The risk in killing a human being when near to a hundred mounted followers as well as foot followers bespoke either boldness or frenzy. Granted, the foot followers remained on Hangman’s Ridge with Peter Wheeler. Foot followers almost always camped out at the Hangman’s Ridge fixture because of the vistas and because they could eat their breakfasts, drink coffee or roped coffee, and catch up with old friends.
The killer knew all this, of course, but what puzzled her was why take such a chance? It was a hell of a chance. Wouldn’t it have been easier to lure Fontaine onto a back country road and shoot him? Or poison him?
On one level she was furious, white-hot with rage, that someone would commit a crime in her hunt field.
On another level, she was frightened. The swiftness of the murder, the cool appraisal of the situation, and then the lightning strike, pointed to an exceptionally courageous person.
She’d listened to the arguments and theories from friends. It had to be a foxhunter, one who really knew the sport. Well, that was obvious. Others said it was planned but impromptu, which is what she, Shaker, and Doug pieced together once down in the slippery ravine.
Still, there was an element of elegant revenge. The killer picked the hunt field for an emotional charge. The hunt field meant the world to Fontaine but it must also have meant something for the killer or for the killer and Fontaine together.
She also thought it would decimate her hunt field. What a pity, for the season had promised to be a great one, one of those magical seasons that rolls around every fifteen to twenty years.
She’d canceled Tuesday’s hunt since the funeral was Wednesday. Tomorrow the regulars would be out. Saturday would tell the tale because it was an especially good fixture, Beveridge Hundred.
She turned out the light but couldn’t sleep. Every time she’d turn Golly would grumble. Finally, she clicked on the light to read Anna Karenina. Tolstoy was a bit of a hunting man. Not so good a hunting man as Turgenev, Balzac, or Trollope but still she liked reading those authors who understood and appreciated hunting. Then, too, Anna Karenina, complex, shifting, profound, never loosened its grip on her, not from the first day she’d picked it up at age seventeen. Of course, then she hated Karenin. Now she understood him perfectly.