Whisker of Evil by Rita Mae Brown; Sneaky Brown Pie

Author:Rita Mae Brown; Sneaky Brown Pie
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Bantam Dell
Published: 2003-11-10T22:00:00+00:00

27

The old wood from the shed, neatly stacked, bore testimony to Harry’s hard work and essential frugality. She wasn’t cheap but she saved anything that might be useful, and the boards could repair breaks in the fence line.

Blair’s new fence posts, in bundles, rested next to the old wood.

She’d worked each night of the week to dismantle the old shed. The supporting posts she pulled out with her tractor, then filled in the holes with pounded rock dust.

At five-thirty Saturday morning, June 19, she fed the new mares, as well as Tomahawk, Poptart, and Gin Fizz. Her tea steamed from the small slit in her carrying cup as she put it down on the desk in the tack room. The mice, sound asleep behind the tack trunk, didn’t stir.

Harry’s favorite time, early morning, was shared by Mrs. Murphy and Tucker. Pewter liked breakfast, but she wasn’t by nature an early riser. Today she awoke, ate, then curled up on the kitchen chair, her tail covering her nose.

“Mrs. Murphy! What a good girl you are.” Harry held up a dead mouse.

“Thank you.” Mrs. Murphy had caught a field mouse and put it on the tack-room desk.

Harry didn’t know where the mouse came from, but she believed her barn was being expertly patrolled.

Harry placed the mouse on the floor. She’d take it outside and bury it as soon as she checked her barn list. Each evening, her last chore in the barn was making tomorrow’s list. A big notepad with different colors of paper sat on the left-hand back corner. Each day she pulled off a different color; today’s was neon yellow. That way she wouldn’t confuse her chores. It irritated her to carry one day’s chores to the next day. She felt she had failed or, worse, had been idle.

“Idle hands do the devil’s work.” This phrase looped through her head regularly, for she had heard it since childhood from her grandparents and her parents.

“Hmm.” Mrs. Murphy read the list with Harry as she was sitting in Harry’s lap. “You’d better stake out the outside wall of your shed before you start digging new post holes.”

Tucker guarded the dead mouse. “We should put this under Pewter’s chair, then listen to her fib about how she killed it. She can tell stories.”

“She’s an honest cat until it comes to hunting. Even a fisherman can’t keep up with her lies.” Mrs. Murphy laughed, the distinctive odor of dark tea curling into her nostrils.

Harry’s list ran in two parallel columns. The left-hand column was the chores she needed to accomplish. The right-hand column was the calls she needed to make.

“All right, let’s go stake this thing.”

“She listened.” Tucker’s ears pricked up.

“Luck, plus it’s the obvious thing to do.”

Harry scooped up the mouse, buried it under the big lilac bush. Since it was a little mouse this took two minutes. Then she grabbed a ball of chalk-impregnated orange twine out of the truck. She’d bought the twine at the building-supply store. She had enough odd wood bits to make stakes.

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