Free TheCart Before the Corpse by Carolyn McSparren Page A

somewhere? Hiram had enough silver cups, bowls and trays to outfit a banquet at Buckingham Palace. Plus medals, bronze statues of carriage horses and plaques. A narrow shelf ran around the entire perimeter of the room two feet under the ceiling. Perfect for displaying awards. He said they impressed the clients. He must have expected me to set those out as well.
    No sense in wasting time staring at an empty room. Let whoever took over the place from me furnish it, display his own trophies and pictures. “Come on,” I said. Jacob followed me down the aisle and into the spring sunshine.
    “Twelve stalls,” Jacob said. “Planned to have them filled before full summer, maybe build another section next year if the economy gets better.”
    “Do any of the horses actually belong to him?”
    “The Halflinger is all. The Dutch warmbloods belong to some millionaire in Southern Pines. Hiram says the owner is frightened to drive them. Sent them down here to make them bomb proof. Huh. No horse is bomb proof.”
    “Who owns the Friesian?”
    “Hiram has him from a man in Aiken. He and the jackass were raised together. Can’t stand to be apart. Can’t show a horse with a donkey running around the dressage arena around with him.” He frowned down at me. “He has other issues.”
    “What else? That sounds like plenty.”
    “You plan to keep training? Hiram said you are a good teacher. Said you used to be a good driver.”
    Actually, I planned to return the horses to their owners as soon as possible, but I didn’t necessarily want to say that to Jacob. “I have no idea.”
    “Heinzie needs ground driving and long lining to get him used to being alone. A calm hand on the reins. Broken trace in the arena a while back scared him some. He is also lazy and loses his focus. Hiram had to correct him often. Needs confidence to drive without the jackass.”
    I enjoy ground driving. It requires only walking behind the horse far enough back to be out of range of a kick and teaching the horse to answer the reins and the whip. I wouldn’t have to climb into a cart and pick up the reins.
    “Dressage arena is back there behind the stable on the right,” Jacob said. “So the clients can look out the windows and watch their horses work.” He said ‘clients’ with a sneer. Obviously the rich and famous did not impress him. Or he envied them so much he hated them.
    “Do you drive?” I asked Jacob.
    He hesitated as though this was a trick question, then he said, “Got back into it after I moved in down here. Driving with Hiram when we were not building and fencing and cleaning.”
    So he could help on the reins.
    He added, “I was in raised in Pennsylvania. I drove every day one way and another.”
    With a name like Jacob Yoder I should have guessed he was Amish. Yoder is practically the equivalent of Smith in some Amish communities. That slightly stilted manner of speaking should have clued me in. No real accent, no ‘thee’s’ and ‘thou’s,’ but he seldom used contractions or southern colloquialisms. If he’d been in prison, his speech patterns would have changed for the worse, not the better. He hadn’t entirely lost the way of speaking he’d learned as a child.
    Mother said Hiram had spent a year in Intercourse with an Amish family before he and my mother met and married. He said he learned everything from shoeing horses to sewing harness to plowing fields with a team of six Belgians across. To carpentry, repairing, restoring and building carriages. That’s where he learned the woodworking skills he taught me.
    The Amish are not only peaceable folks, they generally wash their own dirty linen. So how had Jacob Yoder wound up in prison? For what? And how could I find out? Surely the police would find out about his record. He would be the obvious suspect. That must have been why he told me about his stint in jail. If he really did have an alibi for the time of Hiram’s death, he had nothing to worry about.
    If not,