DC Suburbs -- Part 13
by Martin H Slusser

Autobiographers at some future date would write that Cindy VanTur was not an ostentatious woman. Quite the opposite in fact. This is why her modest country home, built circa 1767, sported but eight guest rooms. The main stables had been destroyed and never replaced after the War Between the States, as Daddy McAllen liked to call it. This left a rather modest twenty stall barn to shelter the proud remains of the McAllen stud.

Of these, only one was not an elegant thoroughbred, but a rather plain and dowdy ancient Paso Fino mare of indeterminate age, La Sarafina.

No, not much of a house at all. But it was home to Cindy. Her family's ancestral seat. It was where a former bond slave and an ex-prostitute rose from being obscure dirt farmers and the McAllen family managed to forget their less than grand roots.

A few thousand acres of rolling wooded hills, some tobacco fields for tradition's sake. Pasture for her horses, of course. It all helped.

She sighed. It was a glorious day out there, all sunshine and blue skies. The sparkling glass of the French doors only magnified the problem. Even here away from the office she had so much to do.

No wonder Grace Hylnn, her predecessor, committed suicide, poor old dear.

Cindy managed to side-step a twinge of guilt at her part in Grace's death. The old woman had become more a hindrance than help. Since the raid that freed Benny, the old woman's mind began a downhill slip that ended in tragedy. It was unfortunate, but Hylnn knew too much to be deposed easily. A few too many sleeping pills, a razor blade, and a tub of hot water . . . and the right person suggesting it in so many subtle ways. The Boss approved it all beforehand.

No loss.

Cindy reached for a piece of Melba's homemade praline pecan candy. In the act of putting it in her mouth she stopped herself. She had gained a half K of weight in the last week due to stress and eating. This at a time her doctor assured her she should be losing the excess brought on by carrying a child.

The candy dropped into a waste can and Cindy reached for a stack of reports from her agents. All of them demanded immediate attention, but she wasn't about to make Grace's mistake and delegate too much authority. Grace should have learned from her former boss's mistakes, Senator Agor's Wife, Harriet, whom Grace herself removed as head of the Project.

With a knife, no less. Cindy shuddered. Hylnn was never one for subtleties.

Intent on heading for her office and cracking down, she stood, stretched like a golden lioness, and yawned.

Her reflection caught in the tall windows lining the south wall and smiled back. Her slender body showed well. The bared, well-muscled stomach sucked in, giving Cindy a haunted, starved look.

More than one way to catch a possum, darlin'.

Her hands passed down sleek flanks, over stretch marks for which Cindy felt a moment's regret, and then down to trim buttocks. Still a little soft, but firming from the rigors of a strict exercise program.

A work of art. Her instructor in the martial arts informed Cindy that the human body is a wonder beyond the human ken. She sighed again and crossed her arms over her high, firm breasts.

If she was a work of art, then surely before the accident in Fayetteville Benjamin Waya Greylov had been a masterpiece. A thirty-car pile-up, all caused by one naughty boy, her Benny.

The pictures of what was his face made her shudder. One eye left, a ragged scar. Much of his skull was now plastic.

Where are you, Benny?

As if on cue, the bassinet on the other side of her chair moved and a gurgle of laughter came from within. She was on her knees beside it in one lithe movement, the reports scattered on the floor.

“Hey, kiddo,” she said, smiling into the nearly toothless grin of her son. “How's Mama's little warrior today?” Berta, the child's nurse, wouldn't approve, of course. But Cindy couldn't resist holding the baby any more than she could resist holding the father.

“How is Mama's baby Benny today?”

Outside the French doors the winds were as warm and sweet as the sky promised. There was a musky tang of spring in the air, like semen and vaginal fluids rising from the ground in an almost overpowering aroma of fertility. Melba would be off hunting what she called dog peckers, a name Cindy found as repulsive as the mushroom itself was delicious. The wild morels were superior to anything she had anywhere in her travels with her peers. Often while in the office deep in the Pentagon she raised her arms, closed her eyes, and tapped her heels in an old gesture from boarding school, wishing that, like Dorothy, she could fly away home and never leave.

“Guess we're getting positively countrified, Honey.” She smiled at her son. The baby cooed and tried to unbutton her shirt.

“Young man, you are simply too, too much like your daddy.” Cindy scolded and laughed at the light that gleamed in his mischievous eyes.

“Ma ma ma.”

Cindy hugged him. “Mama loves you. Want to go to the stables and see the horses? See horsy?”

The baby squealed and clapped his hands. “Hussy! Hussy!”

“Horse,” she corrected in the gentle, but firm tones the baby's tutor/nurse demanded. “A hussy is . . . Damn, but I do miss your daddy.” To her adoring eyes he was the prettiest, smartest baby ever. She was in total disagreement with the baby's psychologist who claimed the boy was perfectly normal, an average child. “But you'll show them, won't you, Honey?”

The stable was the one place Berta, that Germanic battle-axe, would never allow the child. The stable master, Mr. Jamison, was an elderly but not old man, swore it was because Berta couldn't resist the lust she held for him. That or the old bat was terrified of horses.

In Cindy's estimate it was the horses. The Germanic's were a lustful people and not overly inclined to worry about the color of their bedmates.

Yet the stables were the one place she had to go. Needed to escape to. Benny was as crazy as any tracker. Her favorite was that old Paso Fino mare, Sarafina. She had been Benny's, up at the Manse near Fern Ridge in Pennsylvania.

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