One Hoof In The Grave [Carriage Driving 02] Read Free

trees.”
    “Yes’m.” He sounded disappointed.
    “Leave it,” Catherine called. “I want the police to see the set-up.”
    As soon as I heard the words “set up,” I knew what to look for. I clutched Dick’s jacket around my damp body and squelched over to the causeway in my wet paddock boots. Even though I had already started to dry, the breeze on my wet jeans and shirt made me shiver. I ignored the discomfort while I searched the ground just past the turn.
    I found the trip wire for the banner almost at once. The wire was stretched just above fetlock level on a horse. Thank God it was thin enough to break easily when the horses hit it, although once they were cleaned up, we’d have to check for cuts around their ankles.
    “Dick, come look at this,” I said. The two broken ends of the trip wire lay on the damp grass and glinted in the sunshine. Each end was twisted around a stout twig driven into the soft ground on either side of the causeway. I knelt and spotted some kind of spring arrangement on the bridge. Break the wire and the banner would be released from the bridge rails on either side. Sort of like a horizontal Jack-in-the-box. I assumed there was some connection to synchronize the noise of the bullhorn as well, but somebody else could find that. Possibly someone was standing back in the shadows of the pines to cue the bullhorn. In today’s world, they probably used a cell phone app.
    Not my problem. I gave up shinnying up trees when I was a teenager and before I had a grown daughter.
    Dick hunkered down beside me and looked at the wire without touching it.
    “Peggy and I weren’t supposed to be in the first carriage, but I suppose this wire thingie would have been triggered by whichever carriage was first,” I told him. “An equal opportunity trap.”
    “The order of go was posted yesterday afternoon,” Dick said. “Makes you wonder.”
    Dick pulled me to my feet. Peggy had stayed with the horses. I didn’t think she could hear us, but she’d definitely know we’d found something.
    “Anybody who triggered that banner and the noise would probably have wound up in the lake,” I said. “The calmest horse would have spooked. And a pair would be that much harder to keep on dry land. Once Ned’s foot slipped in the mud, we were toast.”
    One good-sized horse might have been relatively easy to release from a submerged carriage, but Halflingers, although they qualify as a draft breed, are the size of large ponies, and with two of them to free—I didn’t want to think what could have happened to them.
    “I’m not certain we could have saved a four-in-hand of short Welsh ponies,” Dick said. “No matter how many people were holding their heads up, four horses wear a lot of harness, and it’s not easy to find the carabiners under water. Those heads would have stayed under, and there would have been nothing we could have done for them.”
    He was right. Horses can snort, and they can close their nostrils for a short period of time. I suppose that’s from when they were faced with snow or sandstorms in their wild days. But they can’t keep the water out of their lungs for long, and Ned and Golden had been dragged under again and again. An eighteen-hand draft horse might have been able to stand on the bottom and keep his head above water without assistance, but not these little guys.
    “We might also have some drowned human beings,” he added.
    As usual we think of horses first and people second. Marathon cross-country carriages carry a minimum of two people, but they often carry a third person as well. In that instance the navigator rides up front with the driver while another person hangs off the back as a counterbalance. The big carriages may carry a fourth person. That would have meant three or even four people in the water.
    Peggy is remarkably fit despite her age, and apparently she can swim, but dunking unprepared elderly drivers into a frigid lake might well cause a heart attack or