Barn Notice

by totallynotabrony


Chapter 4

As I stealthily made my way into the Rich house, I still didn’t see any indication that anypony was home.  

There was a red stain on the kitchen floor.  I didn’t have time to stop and investigate, having not yet finished checking the rest of the house. There was a knife in the hall, its tip stuck in the hardwood floor.  It matched a missing one from the block on the kitchen counter.  Had somepony tried to defend themself? I still hadn't encountered anypony. I hadn’t been gone that long, so I had expected Rich to still be home.  And the butler, of course.  How many more staff were there?  I wondered about Diamond Tiara and her friends.

I finished looking around the first floor and glanced out the window.  There was nopony outside near the pool.  Starting up the stairs, a board creaked under my hoof and I heard a faint gasp.

“Diamond Tiara?” I called.

A long moment passed.  “W-who are you?” she replied.

Locating her voice, I finished climbing the stairs and stood in front of her closed bedroom door.  “My name is Octavia.  I met with your father earlier today.  Where is he?”

“They t-took him.”

“Who took him?”

“I don’t know.”  I heard her sniff loudly, and then she began to sob.

I needed to find him so I could finish the job he’d given me, and I needed to do that so I could finish the job his wife had given me.  I needed to do all this because I needed money to get things in order so I could figure out how and why I had been put out to pasture.

Diamond’s crying was starting to interrupt my thinking.

I walked closer to her door and knocked.  “Can I ask you a few questions?”

“What-”  She paused, apparently getting herself under control.  “What do you want?”

“I’m going to need to know everything that happened if I’m going to find your father.”

She jerked the door open.  “You’re going to find him!?”

Now that the door was open and we were face to face, I saw that she wore too much makeup for a filly, and crying had only caused it to run.

“That’s right.”  I wasn’t sure how she had gone from scared to sad to urgent in the course of thirty seconds.  Teenage hormones, perhaps.  I’d never been good with teenagers, even when I was one.  Maybe that was why I was the one who felt awkward in this conversation.

“I’ll need to know whatever you can tell me,” I prompted.  “What did you see?  What did you hear?  Other senses?”

“It...it started when the front door slammed open,” she said, haltingly, as her eyes went to the floor.  “There were some loud voices, and fighting.  I heard my father ask what was going on.  I almost went downstairs.  If I had…”

She swallowed hard and shook her head.  “I went to the window, and saw four stallions dragging my father away.”

“What about the butler, Garcon?”

“Huh?”  She looked at me.  “I don’t know.”

“Do you know of anypony who would want to hurt your father?”

“No.”  She seemed emphatic.

“Did they say what they sought?  Money?  Did they ask about you?”

“No.”

Flim and Flam didn’t strike me as having enough spine to do anything like this, not to mention not having enough time to put it together after their meeting with me.  

I got Diamond to describe the ponies who took her father.  She hadn’t stared out the window too long, and had only seen their backs, anyway, but a basic overview of coats and characteristics was better than nothing.

“I’m going to find the ponies who did this,” I said.

“But…”  she seemed lost, looking at my face, but not really focusing, as if thinking too hard.  “Why?  Who are you?”

Your father owes me money, would probably not come off well in this situation.  Little as I cared for some rich girl’s feelings, I was at least tact-aware.  “I’m a business associate, and there are no police in Ponyville to handle something like this.”

I couldn’t believe that was still the case after I had been gone so long, but had bothered to check just in case when I got back in town.  It was the monster attack capital of Equestria, after all, so crime was not even an afterthought.

She sniffed.  “What am I going to do?”

“You can go to your mother, can’t you?  Isn’t it her week for custody anyway?”

“Ugh.  Fine.”  She turned and grabbed a backpack from where it lay on the floor.  I stepped out of the doorway to let her exit the room.  As she passed me, she paused.  “Just...hurry, okay?  I’ll get daddy to give you a reward.”

My my, that made the third member of their family that had commissioned me today.

Diamond Tiara
Yet another client

“One more question. Do you have any tomato juice in the house?”

She gave me an odd look. “No, why?”

I thought again about the red stain in the kitchen.

I saw her out of the house and over to her mother’s.  It didn’t sit right with me leaving her alone, but if whoever took her father hadn’t even bothered to glance around the rest of the house, then clearly they didn’t care too much about Diamond Tiara.  At any rate, I couldn’t be in two places at once.  After dropping her off, I headed for Soarin’s place.

He’d told me where to find him, but I was slightly surprised what awaited me when I knocked on the door of a small house on the outskirts of town.  I had been under the impression that he was living the high life on whatever bachelorette would take him in.  Maybe this was just his in-between pad.

Soarin greeted me.  “Hey, sorry about the place,” he said, a trace of embarrassment on his face.

The house, while relatively clean, was essentially empty.  No tables, no bookshelves.  There was a lawn chair and a pool inflatable in front of the TV.  Also, some alcohol.

“Jeeze, I think Octavia is actually doing better living above a turnip processing barn,” quipped Rainbow, who was already there.  Apparently her day of teaching was done.  To Soarin, she said, “Weren’t you staying with that heiress, whatshername?”

“We’re taking a break,” Soarin muttered.  

“Well, good to have a backup safehouse,” I said charitably.  “It’s not even above a turnip factory.  I thought you said you were broke, Soarin.”

“Your broke and my broke are two different things.  Look, I’m crazy enough to deal with burned spies all day long, but taking on the national revenue service, hell no.  Why do you think this is where I call home?  Just because I was a little dishonest on some tax forms.”

Soarin gestured around.  “I mean, you are welcome to say, if you want.  There’s space, seeing as the only rooms I use are the living room, bedroom, and the hot tub room.”

“I’ve already paid the rent at the turnip barn,” I replied, neutrally.

Soarin had a seat.  “So what can I do for you today?  How’s it going with Spoiled Milk?”

“Your first job after getting put out to pasture was dealing with Spoiled Milk?” said Rainbow.  “Wow, being pasture-ized must be terrible.”

Jokes at my expense do not bother me, or at least they usually don’t.  I ignored Rainbow and briefly explained what had taken place at the Rich house.  That got both of their attention.  I finished with the descriptions of the stallions Diamond Tiara had seen.

“Hmm, I might have heard of a few of those guys,” Soarin said.  He glanced at Rainbow, who was sprawled across the inflatable pool ring in the living room.  “You remember that one scrap we got into back when we tried dating?”

“You aren’t dating?” I asked.  As close as they seemed, I had thought so.

“This idiot?” both of them said simultaneously.  They glanced at each other, and then laughed.

“No,” said Soarin, “but we do share certain mutual interests.”

“Yeah, I’m interested in seeing him fail at actual love,” Rainbow said.

“Oh, ouch, it’s not like you’re doing so hot yourself.”

“At least one of us doesn’t get thrown out of Sweet Apple Acres on sight.”

“Bitch.”

“Ass.”

“We really need to get you a girlfriend, Soarin.”

“You volunteering for another round?”

“You think I could play housewife? “

“Point taken.”

I broke in. “I’m sorry, does this catty bickering help?”

“Sure it does,” said Soarin.

“Yeah, it’s a great teambuilding exercise,” said Rainbow.

They both said it with straight faces.

Rainbow, Soarin
“Bitch,” “Ass”

I shook my head.  “I meant does this catty bickering get us closer to the ponies who might have taken Filthy Rich?”

“We’ll have to work some contacts,” said Soarin.  “If we get lucky, we can maybe locate their hidey hole and hit them tonight.”

He started to get up.  “Anyway, Octavia, while you’re here, can I get you something?”

The two of them were both drinking some cheap local brew.  I wasn’t thirsty, but did realize that I hadn’t eaten all day.

“I am hungry,” I allowed.

“What do you want?”

“Do you have any yogurt?”

An old fallback of mine, the closest thing I had to comfort food. Yogurt is good for you.  It has protein, vitamins, and other essential nutrition.  It doesn’t require any preparation.  It tastes good.  It’s available all over the world.  It wasn’t a full meal, but I thought I would be much more likely to find only snacks in Soarin’s house anyway.
 
“Sure, it’s in the fridge,” Soarin replied.

The kitchen was just off the living room and just as barren.  Paper plates filled the trash bin.  A drawer was slightly open revealing plastic forks and knives.  I opened the refrigerator door.

“These are jello shots,” I said.

“What’s the difference?”

Aside from the not-yogurt, there was nothing in the fridge but cheap booze and hot sauce.  I sighed and came back out of the kitchen.  “Nevermind.  I’ll pick some up tonight...tonight!  Oh  blimey, I forgot!  I need to go to dinner with my mother and I’m going to be late!”

I spun in place, heading for the door.  There was a bottle of wine sitting there on the floor, so I grabbed it.  “I need this!”  I ran out.

It’s fortunate that wine isn’t carbonated, because I galloped all the way to my mother’s house.  I even made it with seconds to spare before six o’clock, though my mother was already opening the front door and wearing a disapproving look.  Well, it wasn’t as if she ever had any other expression, or not that I had ever seen.

“So you came.”

“Yes, you did invite me.”

“I shouldn’t have to tell you to come, Octavia, this is your home, too.”

House, maybe, if she actually left it to me in her will.  Home...well, I hadn’t lived there in years, nor did I want to.

She stood back from the door to let me in.  She cast a sideways look at the wine bottle, but didn’t say anything.  I had no idea what brand it was, but trusted Soarin.  Sure, his idea of good booze was “cheap,” but if this was in an actual glass bottle, then he must have picked something decent.

“What were you doing associating with Rainbow Dash?” my mother asked.

It wasn’t as if I would be tarnishing Rainbow’s reputation with my mother any further by telling her the truth.  “She tried to pay me to take over for her at the school.”

As it turned out, that was a great thing to say, because it was all my mother talked about for the next hour over dinner.  If she knew that I wasn’t paying attention to her monologue, she at least didn’t stop and scold me for it.

You know, I used to disdain times like this when she used to talk at me, but as I sat there decided it was certainly better than me having to be engaged in the conversation.

I just made sure her glass was full of wine and thought about my life predicament.

My mother is not a standout cook, but she wouldn’t let herself be bad.  It was also the first home-cooked meal I’d had since a few years before when I’d saved the life of a Saddle Arabian emir and he’d insisted I join him for dinner, even if it was his palace chef doing the actual cooking.

So I’d done a lot of cooking for myself.  I wouldn’t let myself be bad at it, either, because sometimes the alternative had literally been eating bugs.

I had been uninterestedly monitoring the conversation as it shifted to my mother’s recent health problems - which I thought were mostly in her head - the suspicious neighbor, and a zebra couple who had moved into town who were also suspicious.

After our plates had been empty for an hour or so, the wine ran out.  Remarkably, my mother took that as a natural stopping point of the conversation.

“You can stay in your old bedroom,” she said.

The direct comment brought me out of my haze, signaling that I had to start responding again.  “Actually mum, I have a place.  They’re expecting me.”

Hayseed probably didn’t care either way, but I had paid him.

At the same time, I did kind of want to see my old bedroom.  Was it exactly how I had left it?  But if I asked, she would surely use it as leverage.

Instead, I excused myself to use the restroom.  I did, in fact, but on the way back detoured to my bedroom.

The sign with my name that I’d made in school art class was still there.  How long had it been?  I quietly opened the door.

I was almost expecting the smell of dust, but no, she wouldn’t allow that.  The room was exactly as I had left it, though perhaps a little neater.  It also seemed a little smaller than I remembered.

My eyes fell on the cello case leaning against the wall.  The strongest sense yet of unwanted homesickness fell on me.  I shook my head and closed the door.  No, both of us could be stubborn about this.

I was nearly back to the dining room and considering how I could end the night early when there came a sudden ringing of the doorbell.