A pale light was already coming in through the tall windows in the hall. Annie put the bag down and went into the kitchen without turning on any lights. Before checking the phone messages, she thought she would make herself a cup of coffee. As she waited for the old copper kettle to boil, she walked over to the window.
Outside, only a few yards from where she stood, was a group of whitetail deer. They were standing completely still, staring back at her. Was it food they were after? She'd never seen them this close to the house before, even in the harshest of winters. What did it mean? She counted them. There were twelve, no, thirteen. One for each year of her daughter's life. Annie told herself not to be ridiculous.
There was a low, burgeoning whistle as the kettle started to boil. The deer heard it too and they turned as one and fled, their tails bouncing madly as they headed up past the pond to the woods. Christ almighty, thought Annie, she's dead.
Chapter Three
Harry Logan parked his car under a sign that said Large Animal Hospital and thought it odd that a university couldn't come up with wording to indicate more precisely whether it was the animals who were large or the hospital. He got out and trudged through the furrows of gray sludge which were all that remained of the weekend snow. Three days had passed since the accident and as Logan wove his way through the rows of parked cars and trailers, he thought how astonishing it was that the horse was still alive.
It had taken him nearly four hours to mend that chest wound. It was full of fragments of glass and flakes of black paint from the truck and he had to pick them out and sluice it clean. Then he trimmed the ragged edges of flesh with scissors, stapled up the artery and sewed in some drainage tubes. After that, as his assistants supervised the anesthetic, air supply and a long-overdue blood transfusion, Logan got to work with needle and thread.
He had to do it in three layers: first the muscle, then the fibrous tissue, then the skin, some seventy stitches in each layer, the inner two of them done with soluble thread. And all this for a horse he thought would never wake up. But the damn thing had woken up. It was incredible. And what's more he had just as much fight in him as he'd had down in the river. As Pilgrim struggled to his feet in the recovery chamber, Logan prayed he wouldn't tear the stitches out. He couldn't face the idea of doing it all over again.
They had kept Pilgrim on sedatives for the next twenty-four hours by which time they thought he had stabilized enough to stand the four-hour trip over here to Cornell.
Logan knew the university and its veterinary hospital well, though it had changed a lot since he was here as a student in the late sixties. It held a lot of good memories for him, most of them to do with women. Sweet Jesus, did they have some times. Especially on summer evenings when you could lie under the trees and look down at Lake Cayuga. It was about the prettiest campus he knew. But not today. It was cold and starting to rain and you couldn't even see the damn lake. On top of that, he felt lousy. He had been sneezing all morning, the result no doubt of having his balls frozen off in Kinderhook Creek. He hurried into the warmth of the glass-walled reception area and asked the young woman at the desk for Dorothy Chen, the clinician who was looking after Pilgrim.
They were building a big new clinic across the road and, as he waited, Logan looked out at the pinched faces of the construction workers and felt better. There was even a little ping of excitement at the thought of seeing Dorothy again. Her smile was the reason he wasn't going to mind driving a couple of hundred miles every day to see Pilgrim. She was like a virgin princess from one of those Chinese art movies his wife liked. A hell of a figure too. And young enough for him to know better. He saw her reflection coming through the door and turned to face her.
'Hi, Dorothy! How're you doing?'
'Cold. And not very happy with you.' She wagged a finger at him and frowned, mock-stern. Logan held up his hands.
'Dorothy, I drive a million miles for one of your smiles, what have I done?'
'You send me a monster like this and I'm supposed to smile at you?' But she did. 'Come on. We got the X-rays.'
She led the way through a maze of corridors and Logan listened to her talking and tried not to watch the delicate way her hips moved inside her white coat.
There were enough X-rays to mount a small exhibition. Dorothy pinned them up on the light box and they stood side by side, studying them. As Logan had thought, there were cracked ribs, five of them, and the nasal bone was broken. The ribs would heal themselves and the nasal bone Dorothy had already operated on. She'd had to lever it out, drill holes and wire it back in place. It had gone well, though they still had to remove the swabs packed into the clotted cavity of Pilgrim's sinus.
I'll know who to come to when I need a nose job,' said Logan. Dorothy laughed.
'You wait till you see it. He's going to have the profile of a prizefighter.'
Logan had been worried there might be some fracture high on the right foreleg or shoulder, but there wasn't. The whole area was just terribly bruised from the impact and there was severe damage to the network of nerves that served the leg.
'How's the chest?' said Logan.
'It's fine. You did a great job there. How many stitches?'
'Oh, about two hundred.' He felt himself blushing like a schoolboy. 'Shall we go see him?'
Pilgrim was out in one of the recovery stalls and they could hear him long before they got there. He was calling out and his voice was cracked from all the noise he'd been making since the last lot of sedatives had worn off. The walls of the stall were thickly padded but even so they seemed to shake under the constant thumping of his hooves. Some students were in the next stall and the pony they were looking at was clearly bothered by Pilgrim's din.
'Come to see the Minotaur?' one of them asked.
'Yeah,' said Logan. 'Hope you guys already fed him.'
Dorothy slid the bolt to open the top part of the door. As soon as she did so, the noise inside stopped. She opened the door just enough for them to look in. Pilgrim was backed into the far corner with his head low and his ears pinned right back, looking at them like something from a horror comic. Almost every part of him seemed to be wrapped in bloody bandage. He snorted at them then raised his muzzle and bared his teeth.
'And it's good to see you too,' said Logan.
'You ever see a horse this freaked before?' Dorothy asked. He shook his head.
'Me neither.'
They stood there for a while, looking at him. What on earth were they going to do with him, he wondered. The Maclean woman had called him yesterday for the first time and had been real nice. Probably a little ashamed, he thought, about the message she'd sent through Mrs Dyer. Logan wasn't bitter, in fact he was sorry for the woman after what had happened to her daughter. But when she saw the horse she'd probably want to sue him for letting the wretched thing live.
'We should give him another shot of sedative,' said Dorothy. 'Trouble is there aren't too many volunteers to do it. It's kind of hit and run.'
'Yes. Though he can't stay on the stuff forever. He's already had enough to sink a battleship. Let's see if I can get a look at his chest.'
Dorothy gave an ominous shrug. 'You've made a will, I hope?'
She started opening the lower part of the door. Pilgrim saw him coming and shifted uneasily, pawing the floor, snorting. And as soon as Logan stepped into the stall, the horse moved and swung his hindquarters around. Logan stepped to the side wall and tried to position himself so that he could move into the animal's shoulder, but Pilgrim was having none of it. He surged forward and sideways and lashed out with his hind legs. Logan leapt for safety, stumbled, then beat a rapid, undignified retreat. Dorothy quickly shut the door after him. The students were grinning. Logan gave a little whistle and brushed his coat down. 'Save a guy's life and what do you get?'