Free TheCart Before the Corpse by Carolyn McSparren

crushed the can, dropped it into the sack I’d given him, and walked off. “You wish to see this place?”
    We spent the next hour and a half going over the stable. Inside the shiny new metal building, everything was utilitarian, but not fancy. Four sets of harness hung in the tack room and feed room beside cabinets for grooming and medicating supplies. A washer, dryer and water heater took up the far side.
    A wash rack took up twelve feet in the center of the left aisle across from the tack room. At the back stood four carriages: a metal breaking cart, two Meadowbrook carts, one for a big horse, the other for a large pony or medium horse, and finally a four-wheeled Phaeton set up with a singletree to hitch a pair.
    No cart small enough for Don Qui, so obviously he hadn’t yet been taught to drive. Or ever would be, if it were up to me.
    Jacob opened a door across from the feed room and stood back for me to go first. “Hiram called this the clients’ lounge,” Jacob said. “Said you could fix it up.”
    The room was twenty feet square with wood tongue and groove oak paneling on the walls and scored and dark stained concrete on the floor. No furniture, no curtains at the wide windows, no pictures on the walls, but a couple of stacks of framed photos leaning against the wall beside the door. I began to paw through them, but the first one stopped me. Hiram sat on the box of an elegant park drag behind a pair of beautifully turned-out bay geldings. He was waving a blue ribbon and laughing.
    He looked so happy. And so old.
    I set that picture aside and looked through the others. Hiram and his clients driving their horses in competition. Hiram driving hell-for-leather around marathon courses behind a four-in-hand or pair. Hiram as navigator or groom beside rich owners in top hats, or in the case of the lady clients, elaborate hats and fancy jackets. With each succeeding year, his hair grew grayer, the creases on his leathery face deeper, his eyes a paler blue. But that grin of exultation when he won never dimmed.
    During all those years before he retired, did he ever wish that I were on the box beside him spurring him on? In the long nights he slept in motels and other people’s houses, did he wish he still had a wife and daughter to come home to?
    Or had he only grown lonesome after he retired and left the limelight to move down here?
    “Hiram said you could hang the pictures,” Jacob said. “Maybe find some used furniture cheap.”
    I turned away so he wouldn’t see me gulp and choke back tears. Such a little thing, but something he’d been looking forward to sharing with me, the daughter he’d not been around to raise. The daughter who had returned the favor once I got old enough not to be around him .
    The timing, as usual in my life, sucked. God must have taken Irony 101 in some celestial college and indulged Himself in it whenever He needed a break from running the universe.
    “Where are his trophies?” I asked. His trophies were like most people’s photo albums. I could trace his life in the names and dates of driving events etched on them. Hiram had managed to spend his life doing what he loved to do, and well enough to make not only a living, but a reputation. Of course, he’d also enjoyed another sort of reputation. He did like the ladies as much as they liked him.
    The only ladies he hadn’t paid enough attention to were my mother and me. But I’d never stopped loving him, although he probably thought I had. Maybe if I had forgiven Hiram sooner for his failures as a husband and father, I might have forgiven Vic for his. Eventually, I might even have forgiven myself.
    Maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t have turned into a woman who couldn’t trust any creature that walked on two legs.
    “I have never seen trophies here. Are they at his place in town?” Jacob asked.
    I hadn’t seen them. Surely Peggy would have noticed if they’d been stolen in the burglary. Could he have taken a storage locker