Thanks to Anaïs, Paras had had that full feed—oats, honey, beets, but also bran—almost more than she could eat, though she had eaten every morsel. She was not hungry—but she did expect to be hungry. For the first time in many days, she began to feel a little nervous.
She hoisted herself to her feet.
Thoroughbreds are nervous horses—you heard that all the time, and it was a compliment. It meant that they were quick and smart and attentive. There were non-Thoroughbreds up where she had trained and mostly lived, in Maisons-Laffitte, and all the Thoroughbreds congratulated themselves on not being as dull as those others, with that odd hair around their fetlocks, and those heavy heads and thick coats. You might not be a winner (and every Thoroughbred was well aware of who won, who placed, and who showed), but at least you were a Thoroughbred, and that counted for something. But to be nervous meant to run here and there, and it was pretty clear, even if Frida had said nothing about it, that running about was not a good choice right now.
UP IN MAISONS-LAFFITTE, Delphine was also looking at the snow, and there was more of it than there was down in the city. She had just finished shoveling the walk that led from her small house to the road. Soon she would get on the little tractor she kept for barn work and push the snow away from the horses’ stall doors, out into the middle of the yard. And at some point, the men who took care of the entire training facility would plow the roads. The horses would keep their blankets on today, and she and Rania would take them out into the yard and walk them for an hour around the pile of snow. She had ten horses; all this would take most of her day.
She didn’t have to worry about them for the moment—the night before, she had given them each an extra hay net to get them through the morning as well as the night.
None of her stalls were empty; she still wondered and worried about Perestroika, but another horse had come to take her place, to be trained for the spring season. There was a stall nearby that she used for storage—if Paras turned up, she could put her there. But she had lost hope. No one said it, but everyone thought it—Paras was surely dead. Perhaps she had wandered from Auteuil to the Bois de Boulogne and died there, and her carcass, stripped by vultures and foxes, was hidden in a ravine somewhere. Perhaps she had been kidnapped. A stolen horse might be doing something somewhere. Paras’s markings were not unusual—a plain white star, two little cowlicks in typical spots, otherwise, a red bay, no white stockings. Delphine would recognize her, but to the average person she would look like a multitude of other horses. Delphine had scrutinized horses at all the racetracks she’d been to—in Deauville, down south, in Chantilly—for that telltale luxuriant forelock, those intelligent eyes, those wide nostrils, but she had seen no horse that looked like Paras. She had contacted the racing authorities at France Galop, she had put up signs, she had advertised in newspapers and on Internet forums, she had told all of her friends more than once, she had called all the stud farms in France, England, and Ireland, just in case a mystery mare might show up to be bred, though how a thief might pull that off, she had no idea. But someone else might—a fellow trainer named Louis Paul (and everyone knew that wasn’t his real name) was said to have stolen horses in the past. And he didn’t like women trainers, said they were ignoramuses and deserved no support. Once in a while, he went out of his way to mock her if she didn’t do well in a race. There were plenty of stories about ringers in the racing world—horses disguised to look like other horses so that they could run in a race they might win. She had notified Animal Control. Of course, a stolen horse could be sent to the slaughterhouse, but for what? A handful of euros? And surely any slaughterhouse would recognize that Paras was sound, well fed, young. Delphine had contacts at a few slaughterhouses, too. It was a mystery, as if the horse had vaporized into space.
She, Madeleine, and Rania had taken it very hard—Rania hadn’t wanted Delphine to agree to train the new horse, a gelding named Jesse James, but Delphine could not do without the income, and it had seemed too sad to do as Madeleine wished—as Madeleine offered to pay for—to hold the stall, empty, bedded, waiting for the filly’s return. The race Paras had won was not prestigious—it was not as though, at least at this point, she was worth hundreds of thousands of euros—but, unlike many owners, Madeleine didn’t care about that. What all three of them cared about was the filly, soon to be a mare, Paras herself. As a trainer, Delphine thought she might have been harder-hearted than Rania or Madeleine. Training racehorses was a business; you had to accept that anything could happen and still you had to get on with it. And she had gotten on with it, but she couldn’t give up the conundrum. Paras was Delphine’s very own cold case.
Of course, the other mystery was what had happened to Rania’s handbag, which might have disappeared at the same time—when Rania came back to the stall from the bathroom and found the door open, found the grooming box tipped over, found Paras gone, she had forgotten about everything but her phone, even though her handbag was full of money—she had put her whole week’s salary down on the race and won her bets. Paras had been something of a long shot—12–1—but the horses that ran second and third had been even bigger long shots—30–1 and 50–1—and since she had bet on all three of them, she had won a number of euros that Delphine shuddered to calculate. But Rania had been much more upset about losing the horse than about losing her winnings, and Delphine had not punished her for being careless—when you have to pee, you have to pee, everyone knew that. What everyone did not know was, what in the world had happened? The handbag had never turned up—Rania’s keys and credit card and phone had never turned up. Only her little mirror lay there on the gravel outside the stall, glinting in the deepening dusk—a clue, but a clue that no one could understand.
Without telling Madeleine, Delphine had spent a hundred euros of her own to call an animal psychic. They had spoken on the phone; the woman, who was in the west of Ireland, had taken her credit-card information before “casting about.” Delphine had given the woman—Áine was her name—all of Paras’s particulars, including color, date of birth, cowlicks, racing history, breeding—and at her end of the line, Áine had cast about so long that Delphine had thought the line was dead and said, “You there? You there?” Finally, Áine said that Paras was walking down the street, looking into shopwindows, but since she herself had never been to Paris and didn’t know French, she could not say what was written over the shops—all she knew was that the windows were dark, but that Paras seemed healthy and active. These remarks were so ridiculous that Delphine simply put them out of her mind and swore that she would never be fooled again. Walking down the street, looking into shopwindows, indeed! What was she looking at? Designer platform heels? A hundred euros down the drain! But even so, she found a single grain of comfort in the fact that a voice—a rather deep, warm, and lilting Irish voice—had not said that the horse was dead. She pulled her hat more tightly down over her head, and marched, shovel in hand, across the road to the stables. She still had to shovel the snow away from the door to the storage barn where she kept the little tractor.
The horses saw her coming. None of them talked about Paras much—only six of them had known her, and she had not been one of those fillies who are friendly and agreeable to everyone. When she disappeared, the horses from England (there were two of these) assumed that she had been sold away. The horses from France said, if she had been sold, why were the humans so upset? Jesse James, the single, solitary horse from America, asked if she’d been running in a “claiming race,” like they had back where he had come from, where, if you ran, another owner could pay some money and take you straight to his barn, but his accent was very strange, and no one answered him. According to the other horses, he was related to Paras—he had Northern Dancer everywhere in his pedigree—but because his grandsire was Nijinsky, he was big and brawny, a chestnut. Today, though, no one was worrying about Paras—it was cold, their blankets were dirty from lying down in the muck, the hay was a little dry. When all was said and done, they were Thoroughbreds—a day inside, a day walking, was not a good day.