Death By Mistake by Abigail Keam

Hunter Wickliffe woke up. Something had sounded in the night and awakened him. Getting out of bed, he went over to the large double-hung sash window, catching sight of a car racing away around the curve of the driveway to Wickliffe Manor. He could hear the car screech to a stop and then turn onto Old Frankfort Pike. He looked at his watch. It was two twenty-three in the morning.

Donning trousers and flip-flops, Hunter trudged down the hallway and opened the door to his wife’s son, Palley’s bedroom. The bed was messy, but no Palley. He then slogged to Kathy’s room, gently knocked, and opened the bedroom door.

The bed was made, showing no one had slept in it. Odd. His wife usually went to bed around midnight.

After checking the upstairs bathrooms and finding them unoccupied, Hunter went down the grand staircase and searched throughout the entire first floor of his 19th-century home. He couldn’t find either Kathy or Palley.

Hunter checked the decorative ceramic bowl by the open back door and saw Kathy’s keys were there. Stepping into the velvet night, he shouted Kathy’s name.

No one returned his call.

Thinking it strange Kathy was not in the house, Hunter went outside to look for her. Discovering Kathy’s Lexus parked in the driveway, he placed his hand on the hood. Hunter found it cold to the touch, so she had to be on the grounds somewhere. He headed to the stables as he heard the boarded horses acting up. That was always a bad sign.

As he walked down the dark gravel path to the horse barn, a Great Horned Owl hooted in the distance, Black Angus cattle snorted in their pasture, and the crunch-crunch of his flip-flops on the gravel were the only sounds to be heard. The otherwise eerie quiet unnerved Hunter. He made a mental note to get some dogs. Dogs were good indicators of people and things not being in place. They were always aware of the unusual. A dog walking beside him in the dark would give him confidence.

Was he frightened?

Hunter was certainly wary.

Something was definitely off.

He picked up a thick fallen branch from a walnut tree and carried it with him. Closer to the barn, he distinctly heard the horses kicking their stalls and neighing occasionally. Not a good sign. Perhaps a coyote had been sniffing around the stable.

Dropping the branch, Hunter stepped through the side door. Searching for the light switch, he found it and turned on the overhead barn lights. The horses immediately quieted down. He first noticed the pedestal fans, which were supposed to circulate the air on warm nights, were turned off. He looked at his watch again. It was two forty-five. As the night cooled, the fans were programmed to switch off at three.

He stepped to the nearest fan and touched the housing. The metal felt wet. Now what would cause water on the fans? Hunter looked up. The roof wasn’t leaking. Besides, it hadn’t rained.

“What’s going on, ladies?” Hunter asked as he opened the stall doors and checked several horses close to the west entrance until he noticed bales of hay lying in disarray on the floor of the barn’s central aisle. Someone or something had also overturned the sweet feed buckets near the storage closet. A sense of dread filled him.

“Kathy? Kathy, are you here?” Hunter called out.

The only responses were horses nickering. Hunter strained to hear his wife’s response or maybe a faint cry for help. Perhaps she went to check on the horses and fell. He wanted to hear something—anything resembling a human voice.

Certain that something was amiss, Hunter went into the first five stalls and opened the back stall doors to a large paddock, letting the pregnant Thoroughbred mares out. He brought them in only at night to keep coyotes and wandering dogs away from them. Free, the horses ambled over to a water trough for a quick sip of cool water.

The last four stalls contained pleasure horses boarded at the Wickliffe Farm. Hunter slid open the stall door and grabbed the skittish Arabian horse by the halter. “Whoa, girl. Whoa. That’s a good girl.” He opened the back exterior door of the stall and pulled the horse toward the outside. She happily joined the other horses now grazing hay left out for them.

Hunter went to the next stall to check on a Quarter horse when he noticed shiny

splotches of a dark substance on the center aisle’s rubber mat. He squatted down and swiped the dark substance with his finger. The substance was gooey, and as he raised his hand to inspect it, the overhead light illuminated the unmistakable red color. Hunter smelled the red substance and rubbed it between his fingers. As a forensic psychiatrist, he had seen enough dead bodies to know this was coagulated blood!

He jumped up and frantically searched the last stalls. “Kathy! Kathy!” There were two remaining horses, which he quickly pulled into the paddock. It wasn’t until Hunter came to the remaining stall that he discovered Kathy lying on her back with unblinking eyes staring at the ceiling. He quickly checked for a pulse, and when he didn’t discover one, Hunter slid down the wall of the stall in disbelief. Shocked, he sat beside his dead wife and put his head between his hands, moaned, “Oh, Kathy. What did you do? What did you do?”