Puss 'N Cahoots

kissed Joan on the cheek, then kissed Harry. “How are you girls this morning?”
    “All things considered, as good as we can be,” Joan replied.
    Like most mother-daughter relationships, this one was mostly good, with a few spots of strain.
    “I hope they find who did this terrible thing.” Frances didn’t sit down when Joan pointed to a chair. “But he wasn’t killed here, and that’s a good thing.”
    Joan stared at her mother, who was not an unfeeling woman. “Mother.”
    “No, no, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded, but I was thinking, if Jorge did something or crossed someone, why didn’t they kill him here? So I think whatever happened happened because of the show.”
    “Or maybe that’s where it all came together.” Harry followed Frances’s line of thought.
    “Well, I’m not a policeman.” Frances flattened her lips together for an instant as she wrinkled her brow. “That coffee does smell good.” She accepted the proffered chair.
    Joan walked over to the stove, and Cookie breezed in to sit by the older woman.
    “Coffee cake?” Harry had the knife poised over the cake.
    “No, thank you. I eat so many sweets at these horse shows. I’m determined to be good.”
    “You’ve kept your figure.” Harry complimented her.
    “Why, thank you.” Frances beamed, then turned to Joan as her coffee was poured. “Joan, I don’t like to meddle in business. After all, I don’t know horses like you, Larry, and Paul do, but,” she picked up her silver spoon as Joan put the pot back on the burner, “Renata will cause trouble.”
    “She already has.” Joan sat back down.
    “Trouble with men.”
    “Oh.” Joan blinked as both she and Harry turned to look at Frances.
    “Women like that stir up men. Charly’s behavior proves that. I heard how he acted when Renata took her horses from him.”
    “Has Charly been vengeful in the past?” Harry asked.
    “Well, one time he and Booty got crossways. Booty accused Charly of making a pass at his wife.” Frances lifted her left shoulder, then let it drop. “Why, I don’t know. Well, we don’t look at women the way men do, but Charly swore he didn’t, which then insulted Annie Pollard, who wants to think of herself as universally attractive. Booty got loose with his mouth, Charly didn’t take kindly to it, then it seemed like things were patched up. At the next big horse show, Charly stuck ginger up the tails of Booty’s horses when he wasn’t in the barn.”
    Joan laughed. “You should have seen Booty trying to show the horses. ’Course, Charly soaked the ginger in turpentine. Made them wild.”
    “He was an explosive guy in the first Iraq war.” Frances nodded.
    “Explosions, Mom.”
    “And explosive.”
    They chatted a bit more, then Frances finished her coffee and carefully placed the cup on the saucer. “Joan, do you think we’re safe?”
    “I don’t know,” Joan honestly answered.
    “Well, your father is worried, although he says the double cross means something and it doesn’t have anything to do with us or we’d know what it means. Jorge was such a nice man, I can’t imagine what he could have done to—well, you know.”
    “If we knew that we’d be halfway to the killer.” Harry picked up a square of crystallized brown sugar out of the bowl, placing it on the tip of her tongue.
    Frances folded her hands together in her lap. “He didn’t gamble, drank a little beer on the weekends, didn’t run after women. He always said he was putting his money in the bank so he could buy his own farm. He kept his trailer pretty clean.” She mentioned this because Jorge lived on the farm, behind a palisade to give the workers privacy. A few were married. Occasionally Frances, Paul, Joan, or Larry would visit their living quarters, but they respected their need to be away from the bosses. “He did have a girlfriend for a while.”
    “What happened?”
    “She got a scholarship to go to William Woods University in Fulton, Missouri, part of an equine program. I don’t know the details, but anyway, she left Kentucky and I think the romance just faded away,” Joan told Harry.
    “No bad blood?” Harry inquired.
    “Don’t think so,” Joan replied.
    “All the no-counts in the world and Jorge gets murdered.” Joan, exasperated, put her chin on her fist, elbow on the table.
    “Well, girls, I’ve got errands to run. I went to Mass this morning and lit a candle for Jorge, came here, and now I’m off to the dry cleaner’s,