Dorr paused to stretch his back. He rotated his head and his neck cracked.
‘Maybe whoever did it didn’t know he was leaving town. They needed a girl to get him to open his door — maybe even a girl he had a past with.’
Marino and I let him talk.
‘He’s not the kind of guy to turn someone he knew away from his door. In fact, in my opinion he’s always been too laid back and nice for his own damn good.’
The grinding and hammering punctuated the farrier’s anger, and the shoe seemed to hiss a soft warning as Dorr dipped it in a bucket of water. He said nothing to us as he returned to Molly Brown, seating himself on the stool again. He began trying on the new shoe, rasping away an edge and pulling out the hammer. The mare was fidgety, but mostly she seemed bored.
‘I may as well tell you another thing that in my mind fits with my theory,’ he said as he worked. ‘While I was on his farm that Thursday, this same damn helicopter kept flying overhead. It’s not like they do crop dusting around there, so Mr Sparkes and I couldn’t figure if it was lost or having a problem and looking for a place to land. It buzzed around for maybe fifteen minutes and then took off to the north.’
‘What color was it?’ I asked as I recalled the one that had circled the fire scene when I was there.
‘White. Looked like a white dragonfly.’
‘Like a little piston-engine chopper?’ Marino asked.
‘I don’t know much about whirlybirds, but yup, it was small. A two-seater, my guess is, with no number painted on it. Kind of makes you wonder, now, doesn’t it? Like maybe somebody doing a little surveillance from the air?’
The beagle’s eyes were half shut and his head was on my shoe.
‘And you’ve never seen that helicopter around his farm before?’ Marino asked, and I could tell he remembered the white helicopter, too, but didn’t want to seem especially interested.
‘No sir. Warrenton’s not a fan of helicopters. They spook the horses.’
‘There’s an air park, flying circus, a bunch of private air strips in the area,’ Marino added.
Dorr got up again.
‘I’ve put two and two together for you the best I can,’ he said.
He grabbed a bandanna out of a back pocket and mopped his face.
‘I’ve told you all I know. Damn. I’m sore all over.’
‘One last thing,’ Marino said. ‘Sparkes is an important, busy man. He must’ve used helicopters now and then. To get to the airport, for example, since his farm was sort of out in the middle of nowhere.’
‘Sure, they’ve landed on his farm,’ Dorr said.
He gave Marino a lingering look that was filled with suspicion.
‘Anything like the white one you saw?’ Marino then asked.
‘I already told you I’ve never seen it before.’
Dorr stared at us while Molly Brown jerked against her halter and bared long stained teeth.
‘And I’ll tell you another thing,’ Dorr said. ‘If you’re out to railroad Mr Sparkes, don’t bother poking your nose around me again.’
‘We’re not out to railroad anyone,’ Marino said, and he was getting defiant, too. ‘Just looking for the truth. Like they say, it speaks for itself.’
‘That would be nice for a change,’ Dorr said.
I drove home deeply troubled as I tried to sort through what I knew and what had been said. Marino had few comments, and the closer we got to Richmond, the darker his mood. As we pulled into his driveway, his pager beeped.
‘The helicopter ain’t fitting with nothing,’ he said as I parked behind his truck. ‘And maybe it has nothing to do with nothing.’
There was always that possibility.
‘Now what the hell is this?’
He held up his pager and read the display.
‘Shit. Looks like something’s up. Maybe you better come in.’
It was not often that I was inside Marino’s house, and it seemed that the last time was during the holidays when I had stopped by with home-baked bread and a container of my special stew. Of course, his outlandish decorations had been up then, and even the inside of his house was strung with lights and crowded with an overburdened tree. I remembered an electric train whirring in circles along its tracks, going around and around a Christmas town dusted with snow. Marino had made eggnog with one hundred proof Virginia Lightning moonshine, and quite frankly, I should not have driven home.