"How much longer will you be?" Rachel said.
"At the pace I'm going, another twenty minutes."
"I'll keep you company."
"You don't have to do that."
"I know." She leaned against the doorjamb. "But I want to. Anyway, I don't have anything better to do."
"I might be longer. You're distracting me."
"Oh… I'll leave then." She backed into the aisle.
I hopped out of the stall, took her in my arms, and kissed her. There was passion on her part, I was happy to see, and less poised control.
In actuality, it took me half an hour to finish up. Afterwards, we walked out to the parking lot. As we stood by her car, a police cruiser out on the road slowed and turned into the lane. The tires crunched across the gravel, sounding loud in the quiet darkness. He pulled alongside Rachel's car and left the engine running.
Officer Dorsett climbed out of his cruiser. "Jesus. You live here?"
"Just about." I made introductions.
Dorsett flicked his gaze over Rachel, pausing, I noticed, at the more compelling parts of her anatomy. Even with a jacket to ward off the chill, she couldn't disguise her figure. I wondered if she'd noticed, but if she had, nothing showed in her face.
"Were you leaving?" he asked us.
"Yes."
He looked directly at me and said, "Have you walked around yet?"
"No."
"I'll go with you. Nothing much going on right now."
Rachel and I said goodnight. Not the goodnight I'd envisioned, however, thanks to Officer Dorsett watching our every move. After she'd driven away, I started toward the barns. I'd taken several steps before I realized Dorsett hadn't moved.
I turned around and looked at his face. "What's wrong?"
"I've heard something that might be connected with your case."
A muscle twinged in my gut.
"Last weekend, just off Route 30 across the Maryland-PA line, some horses were stolen from a hunter barn. The woman who owns the place heard something and went outside to investigate. No one's seen her since."
I groaned. "Did anyone see the rig?"
Dorsett shook his head. "So far there aren't any leads, and her live-in boyfriend didn't hear a damn thing."
I swallowed.
"The farm's secluded. You can't see it from the road, and the barn's not close to the house." His portable radio clattered. Dorsett listened, then dismissed a broadcast that was mostly unintelligible to my ears. "They probably thought they wouldn't be interrupted."
"What about the boyfriend?"
"He remembers that she went out. After that, nothing. They'd been drinking, and he was pretty much wasted."
"What's Ralston think?"
Dorsett shrugged. "He's up there now."
We checked the farm, but afterward, I couldn't remember one damn thing I'd seen or done.
I lay awake for hours. When the clock radio switched on at four o'clock. Saturday morning, my skull felt as if it had been squeezed in a vise. I walked over to the window and rubbed my eyes. Light had already begun to seep into the eastern horizon.
Despite a lack of enthusiasm on my part, the clinic started without a hitch, and by lunch time, both barns had been mucked out. I walked behind barn B and stood by the pasture gate. The school horses were exiled to the field for the duration of the clinic, and any change that interfered with a horse's normal routine could wreak havoc with its digestive system. In the past two years, though, the practice hadn't caused any problems. Unexplained colics, like last night's, were the norm.
Two years. It was hard to believe I'd been at Foxdale that long. I rested my forearms on the fence. I ought to stop feeling sorry for myself. Waste of time.
The sun felt warm on my shoulders. The clatter of Mrs. Hill's voice over the P.A. system was an indistinct murmur. I looked over the horses. They were content, relaxed, happy to be outside. Farther down the hill, a bay pony pawed the ground in front of the automatic waterer. I hopped the fence and walked down the slope. She turned her big, old head and watched my approach with a calm eye.
"Hey there, girl. What's wrong?" I patted her neck, and she nuzzled my arm.
Her coat hadn't completely shed out, and I could smell the sharp odor of sweat and damp horse hair. I looked at the waterer and frowned. The lid was closed. I flipped it back onto the main housing. It wasn't easy to move, but if she'd been fooling with it, I supposed she could have managed it. She pursed her lips and drank greedily from the bowl.
I turned to leave. Movement in the implement building caught my eye. As far as I knew, Dave hadn't come in, and no one else should have been down there. I cut across the pasture.
Brian was sitting in the chair alongside Dave's workbench, his head bowed, elbows propped on his knees. A crumpled paper bag and an empty Miller's can lay on the ground by his feet. A second can dangled from his right hand. When I stepped into the shade of the roof overhang, he looked up and squinted at me through a haze of cigarette smoke.
"Well, if it ain't Sherlock Holmes." Brian gestured to a six-pack on the lower level of the mow. "Want some?"
When I didn't respond, he said, "Oh yeah. That's right. I forgot. You don't drink, don't smoke." He gulped some beer. "Let's see. You don't cuss. Not much anyway. You're polite as hell. Work like a dog."
He peered at me and rolled the cigarette filter between his lips. "Just what is it you do for fun?"
I gritted my teeth. "Get up."
"'Get up.'" He chuckled. "Get it up, you mean?" He took the cigarette from between his lips and spit, like he'd gotten a piece of tobacco on his tongue. "You do do that, don't you? Get it up with Mrs. Elsa 'if it moves, fuck it' Timbrook."
I lunged forward, twisted my fingers in his shirt, and hauled him to his feet. His chair toppled backward, and beer sloshed down the front of my jeans. His eyes were bloodshot, and he was having trouble focusing on my face.
Brian smirked. "So, I guess you're not so special after all."
I spun him around and leaned into him so that my mouth was close to his ear. "Fuck you." I shoved him outside.
He stumbled when his shoes hit the gravel in the lane.
"Pick up your check in the office," I said. "And don't come back."
"You gotta be kidding? Who'd want this job anyway, working for a self-righteous bastard like you? Slingin' shit all day long 'til you smell like it." His gaze drifted from my face to what was left of his six-pack. He looked back at me, his pale eyes wide and unblinking, and flicked his cigarette into the building. It landed on the ground behind me.
The skin on the back of my head contracted.
He gestured to the west wall where the graffiti had been. "Maybe they'll fix you."
I watched him start toward the office, then I spun around and searched for the cigarette. It was smoldering under the hay elevator. A couple more feet, and it would have landed in the chaff that littered the floor at the base of the mow.
I ground out the butt with the toe of my boot and exhaled breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding.
Brian hadn't wasted any time. By the time I got to the office, he'd already left.
The room was crowded. A thin woman with tanned, wiry arms and mousy brown hair held back with a bandanna was leaning on Mrs. Hill's desk with her fingers splayed across the bare metal. "… couldn't come, so one of my other girls wanted to take her place, and…"
A young girl had borrowed the office phone. She covered her ear with the palm of her hand and hunched forward while, behind her, three riders debated whether the times posted for their rides were running to schedule.
Mrs. Hill frowned at me, then waved me off. Though I knew she'd be irritated because we were short an employee on such a busy weekend, she wouldn't want to talk about Brian then. I cut through the lounge and bought a Coke, then went outside and sat on one of the benches that were positioned down the length of the arena. Several clinic participants and a handful of boarders were working their horses in the sandy footing. On the far side of the judges' stand, a group of spectators were watching the clinic up close.