Page 92

Even if they were good and hungry, sixteen pigs could not be expected to consume Dr. Lecter in hi

s entirety at one seating. It had taken them a day to completely consume the filmmaker.

The first day, Mason wanted Dr. Lecter to watch them eat his feet. Lecter would be sustained on a saline drip overnight, awaiting the next course.

Mason had promised Carlo an hour with him in the interval.

In the second course, the pigs could eat him all hollow and consume the ventral-side flesh and the face within an hour, as the first shift of the biggest pigs and the pregnant female fell back sated and the second wave came on. By then the fun would be over anyway.

CHAPTER

65

BARNEY HAD never been in the barn before. He came in a side door under the tiers of seats that surrounded an old showring on three sides. Empty and silent except for the muttering of the pigeons in the rafters, the showring still held an air of expectation. Behind the auctioneer’s stand stretched the open barn. Big double doors opened into the stable wing and the tack room.

Barney heard voices and called, “Hello.”

“In the tack room, Barney, come on in.” Margot’s deep voice.

The tack room was a cheerful place, hung with harnesses and the graceful shapes of saddlery. Smell of leather. Warm sunlight streaming in through dusty windows just beneath the eaves raised the smell of leather and hay. An open loft along one side opened into the hayloft of the barn.

Margot was putting up the currycombs and some hackamores. Her hair was paler than the hay, her eyes as blue as the inspection stamp on meat.

“Hi,” Barney said from the door. He thought the room was a little stagy, set up for the sake of visiting children. In its height and the slant of light from the high windows it was like a church.

“Hi, Barney. Hang on and we’ll eat in about twenty minutes.”

Judy Ingram’s voice came from the loft above. “Barneeeeeey. Good morning. Wait till you see what we’ve got for lunch! Margot, you want to try to eat outside?”

Each Saturday it was Margot and Judy’s habit to curry the motley assortment of fat Shetlands kept for the visiting children to ride. They always brought a picnic lunch.

“Let’s try on the south side of the barn, in the sun,” Margot said.

Everyone seemed a little too chirpy. A person with Barney’s hospital experience knows excessive chirpiness does not bode well for the chirpee.

The tack room was dominated by a horse’s skull, mounted a little above head height on the wall, with its bridle and blinkers on, and draped with the racing colors of the Vergers.

“That’s Fleet Shadow, won the Lodgepole Stakes in ’52, the only winner my father ever had,” Margot said. “He was too cheap to get him stuffed.” She looked up at the skull. “Bears a strong resemblance to Mason, doesn’t it?”

There was a forced-draft furnace and bellows in the corner. Margot had built a small coal fire there against the chill. On the fire was a pot of something that smelled like soup.

A complete set of farrier’s tools was on a workbench. She picked up a farrier’s hammer, this one with a short handle and a heavy head. With her great arms and chest, Margot might have been a farrier herself, or a blacksmith with particularly pointed pectorals.

“You want to throw me the blankets?” Judy called down.

Margot picked up a bundle of freshly washed saddle blankets and with one scooping move of her great arm, sent it arching up to the loft.

“Okay, I’m gonna wash up and get the stuff out of the Jeep. We’ll eat in fifteen, okay?” Judy said, coming down the ladder.

Barney, feeling Margot’s scrutiny, did not check out Judy’s behind. There were some bales of hay with horse blankets folded on them for seats. Margot and Barney sat.

“You missed the ponies. They’re gone to the stable in Lester,” Margot said.

“I heard the trucks this morning. How come?”

“Mason’s business.” A little silence. They had always been easy with silence, but not this one. “Well, Barney. You get to a point where you can’t talk anymore, unless you’re going to do something. Is that where we are?”

“Like an affair or something,” Barney said. The unhappy analogy hung in the air.