Puss 'N Cahoots

“I’ll read my program in the morning to double-check clients, though. Seems to me what matters is the double cross. Noticed Sheriff Howlett questioning the Mexican workers.”
    “Sure are a lot of them,” Fair idly commented. “Seems like the number doubled since the first day.”
    “Big show. All hands on deck.”
    “Big show. Workers shipped in.”
Mrs. Murphy opened one eye.
“Big profit, too, I bet.”
    “What are you fussing about, pussycat?” Harry, warm now, pulled her arm from underneath the covers to stroke the cat’s silky forehead.
    “Doesn’t matter.”
Mrs. Murphy closed her eyes again.
    “Pretty much everyone was on the rail, except for the grooms and trainers getting horses and clients ready for the next class.” Harry returned to who was where partly because she was losing steam and losing track of the conversation. “Watching Renata and Shortro. Great guy, Shortro.”
    “Whoever killed Jorge had ice water in his veins. Cut it close.” He stopped. “Bad pun, sorry.”
    “Mmm.”
    “You falling asleep?”
    “I’m resting my eyes,” she fibbed.
    Fair glanced at the animals and his wife. “I’m wide-awake.”
    “Drink milk.”
Mrs. Murphy opened her eyes again, offering good advice.
    He smiled at the cat. “You’re listening to me.”
    “I’m trying, but I’m pretty sleepy, too.”
    “This is my point: if Queen Esther was stolen in the open, Joan’s pin, as well, and Jorge was killed in the blink of an eye—if these things were in the open, what’s hidden?”
    “Fair, you’re starting to think like Harry.”
Mrs. Murphy sighed.

B loodlines have signatures, right?”
    “Right.” Joan made a pot of coffee and a pot of tea while Harry cut into a big coffee cake as they sat in Joan’s kitchen.
    “Certain animals breed true. You can spot their get.” Harry used the word meaning “offspring.” “In the past the credit usually went to the stallion, but the mare is as important, if not more so.”
    “Actually, the latest research is leaning more toward the mare, but who knows? I’ve bred horses all my life, and if it were a matter of brains,” Joan tapped her head, “I’d be right one hundred percent of the time.”
    “Know what you mean. Your foundation sire, Denmark, foaled in 1839, consolidated the look and the action of the Saddlebred, you think?” Harry enjoyed the soft light flooding through the kitchen window.
    “Harrison Chief, too; he was foaled in 1872.” Joan listened to the coffeepot burble. “But like the Thoroughbred, there’s so much we’ll never know. You figure horses started coming over sometime after 1607. Not everyone kept good records.”
    “Not everyone could read and write.” Harry paused a moment. “Although I read somewhere that our literacy rate was higher at the time of the American Revolution than it is now. Boy, that’s a smack in the face.”
    “Doesn’t surprise me.” Joan shrugged. “But what we do know is that Thoroughbred blood, Morgan blood, and even Old Narragansett blood is in the Saddlebred.”
    Narragansett blood is the blood of pacers, a type of racehorse that pulls a sulky. A pacer’s legs, unlike a trotter’s, move in parallel, so the right side—fore and hind—will move in unison, as will the left. The movement of the legs for a trotter—in fact, for the trotting gait in any horse—is diagonal.
    “Who were the great foundation mares?” Harry asked as she watched a robin swoop down on a wriggling worm.
    “Uh, Stevenson mare, Saltram mare, Betsey Harrison, Pekina, Lute Boyd, Lucy Mack, Daisy the Second, Queen Forty-eight, and Annie C.”
    “You could teach a class.”
    Joan smiled as she poured tea for Harry, coffee for herself. “You know your Thoroughbred lines, I know Saddlebred. The American Saddlebred Association, ASHA, started in 1891, helped concentrate breeding information.” She paused a second. “But when you close the books the problems arise.”
    “Meaning you run out of blood?”
    “Yes. Horses, dogs, whatever, can become inbred. I linebreed. I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but you shouldn’t even dream of it if you haven’t studied and looked at a lot of horses—a
lot
of horses.”
    In linebreeding, one dips back into the same bloodlines, the theory being it reinforces the strong points of that blood. Do it too close and one can breed weak animals or idiotic humans. It takes an incredibly intelligent human to successfully linebreed horses.
    “Right.” Harry gratefully