TheCart Before the Corpse Read Online Free

might get around to it, or she might blow me off.
    I went into Wal-Mart for a couple of six packs of diet soda, a bag of ice and a couple of packets of peanut butter crackers, filled the ice chest, and got on the road.
    My mother was only partly right about my father almost killing us.
    Actually, I was the reason my mother walked with a cane.
     

Chapter 3
     
    Sunday evening
    Merry
     
    By the time I found Mossy Creek, I’d gotten lost on hilly back roads twice and asked where to locate Mossy Creek at three convenience stores.
    Since I did not have directions to my father’s apartment, I called this Peggy Caldwell from my cell phone to find how to get there once I finally found Mossy Creek.
    It was dusk before I pulled into the driveway at her address and simply sat. As long as I didn’t get out, meet the woman, talk to her about Hiram, I could almost pretend Hiram was alive somewhere and would come home to his new apartment.
    I could see why he’d liked the town and Caldwell’s place, although he generally didn’t pay all that much attention to where he lived. He seemed as happy sleeping on hay bales in a cold barn waiting for a mare to foal as he did in a state bedroom in some baron’s castle in Bavaria. That’s one trait he passed down to me. My daughter Allie, who is settling into her first apartment in New York with three other girls, haunts flea markets, IKEA, and Crate and Barrel. Once she makes her first million—any day now at the rate she’s going—she’ll switch to Mario Buatta and move into the Dakota.
    Since I never knew how long we’d be staying in any one location when I was growing up, I learned never to invest my heart in making friends I might have to leave tomorrow, or my money in my surroundings and possessions. Good thing, since Vic took most of what we owned in the divorce. He might have taken Allie as well, except that she was already a junior at the University of Kentucky and interning at Goldman Sachs in the summers.
    Who needed human friends when I had the horses? Although a horse may try to kill you occasionally, it’s almost never out of meanness, and he won’t betray you. No matter how miserable my life has been from time to time, I could always count on a gentle nuzzle from a velvet nose to lift my spirits. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so lost and miserable if there had been a handy horse to love on.
    I was glad Hiram had found a place to call home. Looking out the window of the truck I could see that the house was a 1930s Tudor, but well maintained.
    Hiram’s landlady apparently liked to garden. Masses of azaleas in different shades ranging from coral to pale pink budded in her front yard, and the driveway dropped off sharply in back of the house to what looked like several acres of lawn with big trees and lush plantings.
    Hiram said his apartment had been created on the lower level out of part of the garage. He could walk out the French doors from his small living room onto a patio under the main house’s deck and into the back yard. He loved spring, and would have enjoyed the quickening life he saw from his patio.
    He’d actually sounded enthusiastic about the place, which surprised me. The apartment came furnished, which didn’t surprise me one bit. Most of the guest houses and above-the-stable trainer’s apartments he’d lived in came furnished. I doubted he owned a stick of furniture.
    Hiram did accumulate harness, tack, carriages, horse blankets and horse coolers, a million items he needed to look after his four-footed charges. Since I didn’t see either a big diesel truck or a humongous horse trailer, I assumed both were parked at his new farm. His personal possessions probably fit into a couple of suitcases and maybe a garbage bag or two.
    Personal possessions I’d be forced to go through. God, how I dreaded that. I doubted he kept old love letters from his lady friends on the carriage circuit, but if he had, I didn’t want to read them.
    I seldom managed shows in