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all full of questions. I told him you were on the phone, but he’s made himself at home in the library with Thompson and Wendy. Seems to think that being your neighbor gives him the right to intrude.”
    “That’s all right. I’ll go talk to him.” Margaret glanced at Manning as she pulled open the door. “Are you coming?”
    He sighed and shifted to his feet. “Yeah, I’ll be right there.”

CHAPTER
11

    A burn shot through Manning’s gut as he watched the door swing closed behind his mother.
    Smitty arched a bushy eyebrow. “You all right?”
    He took a breath. “I just don’t get it, Smitty. Richard’s dead and she can’t get beyond the fact that I didn’t show up to work at Longmeadow this morning, that it took her a while to locate me.”
    “You’re her son. She needed you this morning. It’s her way of showing her disappointment that you weren’t there.”
    “Mother needed me? I doubt that.”
    “It’s the truth.”
    “You can’t tell that from the way she’s acting now.”
    “She’s shed all her tears. At least publicly. You know how your mother is.”
    “Oh, yeah.” Manning’s fingers curled in the air like quotation marks. “Just get back on the damn horse and get on with it.”
    Smitty clamped his mouth into a pucker and slowly shook his head. There was an uncharacteristic hardness in his eyes. “She’s not getting any younger, Manning.”
    Manning narrowed his eyes. “What are you saying?”
    “You need to step up to the plate, son. Your mother just lost her oldest and dearest friend. She and Richard have had each other’s backs since high school—that’s more than fifty years. Margaret would kill me for saying it, but she can’t go through this alone. She needs you by her side.”
    Shouldn’t that work both ways?
Manning thought. He was grieving Richard’s death, too, but his mother wasn’t there for him. He eased out a slow breath. “Yeah. All right.”
    Smitty gave him a tired smile and plucked a bottle of Virginia Gentleman from the liquor cabinet. “I think you and I might need a little something to help us get through today. What say I make us both a proper cup of coffee?”
    They carried their steaming mugs to the library, and Manning dropped down in a barrel chair next to Percy in front of the fire. He took a healthy draw of the spiked coffee as he listened to his mother recount how she had found Richard in the stewards’ stand at Longmeadow. She said it appeared Richard had been shot with his own hunting rifle during a robbery, and that the authorities were going to interrogate the members of the nearby road crew repaving St. Louis Road.
    “Jesus Christ.” Manning ran his hand along his jaw, his fingers rubbing noisily at the stubble of his beard. “It just doesn’t add up. How would someone from the road crew have spotted Richard? You can’t see the racecourse or the stewards’ stand from the road.”
    Thompson looked at him as if he were dense. “No, of course not. But one of those characters could have seen Richard turn in the entrance to Longmeadow. Margaret said the gate was closed when she arrived, so if someone saw Richard drive through and close the gate they could make a pretty good assumption that he was alone and wasn’t expecting anyone to join him.”
    “Someone might have seen Richard drive in, but I don’t think Richard was the one who closed the gate,” Margaret said. “It makes no sense for him to do so while he was at the course. You know we always open the gate when we arrive and fasten it when we leave. I think it’s more likely the killer closed the gate to delay the possibility of someone driving in and finding Richard’s body.”
    “When was Richard killed?” Percy asked.
    “I don’t know if the medical examiner has determined a time of death yet, but Richard had clearly been dead for some time before I arrived.”
    “So he might have been murdered last night,” Percy murmured. He shot a look at Manning. “Was the gate