I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and stood up. My jeans were on the floor halfway across the room, and the gray cat had curled into a ball on top of them. When I grabbed a pant leg, the cat dug her claws into the denim. I dragged her across the carpet until she gave it up and abandoned ship. When I straightened, I saw that Rachel was laughing.
"Ha, ha," I mouthed.
I zipped up my jeans, didn't bother with the snap, and opened the door.
Rachel was wearing a form-fitting T-shirt and along with skin-tight riding breeches and boots. Very sexy. She'd pulled her silky dark hair into a loose pony tail. Wisps of hair had worked free and hung along the side of her face and down the back of her neck. She stepped inside, and I reached behind her and clicked the door shut.
A thin breeze drifted through the open window and stirred the dust that hung in the air. Her perfume smelled faintly of vanilla.
Rachel reached out and touched my skin. I looked down at her hand. Her fingertips brushed across my waist, close to the snap on my jeans.
"Marty told me you'd pulled an all-nighter." Her gaze rose slowly to my face. She was concerned… and something else.
I nodded.
She stood very still, and she was breathing through her mouth.
I took her hand in mine and embraced her, then leaned into the counter and pulled her against me. Rachel wrapped her arms around my waist, and the feel of her hands on my bare skin was electrifying. I traced my fingertips along her jaw and kissed her mouth. Her lips were cool and tasted of cinnamon. I smoothed my hand down the front of her shirt and tugged it out of her pants. When I ran my hand across the small of her back, she twisted her fingers in my hair and kissed me hard on the mouth.
The loft seemed unnaturally quiet and still, the air around us charged.
I turned her around until her buttocks were pressed against my thighs. Flattening my hands on her belly, I slid my fingers under her shirt, lifted it out of the way, and cupped my hands over her breasts. She arched her back, and every time she shifted, her ass brushed against my crotch.
Rachel turned her head toward me, and her hot breath fanned across my cheek. Her breasts rose with each inhalation, her nipples erect under the thin fabric of her bra. I rubbed against her, and after a moment, I slipped my fingers under the elastic.
She gripped my hand, then stepped away from me. She flicked down her shirt and turned to face me.
"I can't." She crossed her arms over her chest. "I'm sorry, Steve. I'm not ready."
"You don't have to be." My voice sounded hoarse. "I'll get dressed."
I walked into the bathroom, braced my hands on the sink, and hung my head. She'd been sending out subtle messages all along that she needed to go slow, and I'd blown it. I sucked in a lungful of air. After a minute or two, I splashed cold water on my face-it didn't help-finished dressing, and brushed my teeth.
When I went back into the kitchen, Rachel had made herself at home on one of the barstools. She looked composed and relaxed, and she'd tucked in her shirt.
I kissed her on the cheek and rested my hands on her knees. "I need to go back to Foxdale, I'm afraid."
"To feed the horses?"
I nodded.
"Marty's taking care of it."
"Wow," I mumbled.
"He couldn't get you on the phone-"
"It's off the hook."
"So I see." She brushed her bangs off her forehead. "Anyway, he wanted to tell you to stay home. They're going to do whatever they can tonight to get ready for the clinic and finish up in the morning. So I offered to drive over to tell you, but I see Marty was wrong." She glanced at my crotch and seemed surprised that her eyes had betrayed her. "You're not at all impaired from lack of sleep, are you?"
"Wide awake now that you're here."
She giggled. "So you don't mind my dropping in unannounced?"
I grinned. "Come anytime."
Rachel rolled her eyes. "Are you sure this wasn't an elaborate plot between the two of you to get me over here," she glanced around the loft, "in your apartment?"
I grinned. "No, we're not that clever."
Her eyes were so dark, they were almost black.
"Would you like something to eat?" I said.
She hesitated. "Dinner only."
"I promise."
"Who colicked?"
I told her about the pony while we ate grilled cheese sandwiches-the only thing I had left suitable for human consumption-and some stale pretzels. I didn't spend all that much time in the loft and rarely had company. The place would feel empty when she was gone, and I hoped her presence would become routine. But it wouldn't happen if I kept behaving like a sex-crazed lunatic.
I turned sideways on my stool and watched her. She took a bite of her sandwich and looked up at me. A smile shone in her eyes, and I couldn't help but wonder what her past experiences had been like. I swallowed some Coke and realized that I really didn't know all that much about her.
Despite what Marty had said, we decided to go back to the barn at ten-thirty. As I followed Rachel's Camry down Foxdale's lane, barn A's lights flicked out. Barn B was already dark. I pulled into a parking space as three of the four vehicles still in the lot started up and headed toward the exit. Only Karen's car was left. As Rachel and I walked around the corner of the indoor, Karen was locking the office door.
"Getting everybody out of here's a pain in the ass," Karen said when we met on the sidewalk. "Especially on weekends. They wanna hang out and socialize, they oughta go somewhere else to do it." Karen's gaze flicked over us, and she took in the fact that we were holding hands. "I have a life, too, but they never think of that."
"You gonna catch any of the clinic?" I said.
"You kidding? I have a weekend off, the last place I wanna be's here."
"Well, goodnight," I said.
"Oh, I almost forgot," Karen said. "Marty got all the stalls done except the eight that were in the last lesson, so you lucked out."
"Great."
With my blessing, Rachel bent Foxdale's rules (Karen would've had a fit) and worked her horse in barn B's arena while I started on the stalls. I was mucking out the second to last stall when she joined me.
"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.
Someone sat down next to me. The wooden slats moved under my butt. I glanced to my right and was surprised to see that that someone was George Irons.
"Hey there, Mr. Irons. How ya doin'?"
"Not bad. Be a lot better if I was out on the bay, kickin' back a few, instead of watchin' a bunch of fancy horses trot round in circles." He gestured toward the dressage arena. "Got half my barn here today."
I turned the Coke can in my hands and pulled back on the tab.
Mr. Irons waved at a large gray that was being walked along the rail on a loose rein. The gelding's nose almost touched the ground, and his back looked supple and relaxed. "My daughter's up next. That's her new horse. Got an overstep you wouldn't believe."
"Nice looking animal," I said.
Irons nodded as a bay horse walked in front of us. "Paid too much for him of course, but…" His attention drifted from the bay to its rider, and he seemed to lose his train of thought. "Well, lookit that. Ol' Vic's gone from bad to worse. I know they don't care what jumpers look like, but really, that one's got a knot between its eyes, makes you think somebody'd hauled off and whacked it with a ball bat."
"You know Mr. Sanders, do you?"
"Yeah, I know 'im, all right. I'll tell you one thing, though. He sure as shit wishes he'd never heard of me. When those bastards stole my horses, they took his, too."
Mr. Irons continued speaking, oblivious to the fact that I'd become still or that my breathing had slowed even though my heart was pounding faster than a freight train, the blood swooshing past my eardrums.
"He'd hauled in his gelding," Irons continued, "looking for someplace temporary to keep it while he was waitin' to get in somewheres else. Then it goes and gets stolen. Only had a week to go before he was plannin' on movin' it, too."
I cleared my throat. "What was the gelding's name?"
"Portage something or other. Don't remember now. Some big ol' gray. Part draft, part thoroughbred. Ugly head, but not as bad as that." He gestured after Sanders' bay gelding.
"Light gray?" I said.
Irons shook his head. "Dark gray with dapples."
Sanders guided his horse between a pair of jump standards and circled toward us. Steel had been a dark gray, heavily dappled. A draft cross of some sort. His theft from Foxdale had netted Sanders twenty grand.
Sanders looked down his nose at us as he rode past. My face felt stiff.
"Was the horse insured?" I asked, though I expected I already knew the answer.
"You bet he was." Irons scowled. "Better'n I can say for myself."
"By chance," I said, "do you recall which insurance company?"
"Sure do. Same company that handles my liability coverage. Liberty South. He told me he was thinking 'bout gettin' his horse insured and asked me who I used and was I happy with 'em. I introduced him to my agent. Lucky timing for him, huh?"
I asked Irons if the gelding had any distinguishing marks or blemishes, but his description was vague and could have matched a thousand horses in any given county.
"Did the horse have any unusual behaviors," I said, "any quirks, weird habits?"
Irons squinted at me. "What you wantin' to know for?"
"Did he?" I said.
"Well, now. Let me think." He rubbed the bristles on his chin. "He was tense for his breedin'. Mouthy, too. Couldn't leave nothin' alone."
"What about when you handled him? Did he do anything out of the ordinary?"
"Now you mention it, he wasn't happy unless he had part of his lead in his mouth. Always had to have something to chew on."
A steel gray draft cross with a fetish for lead ropes, who just so happened to belong to Victor Sanders, gets stolen from George Irons' dressage barn only to show up at Foxdale two years later where he's stolen again. Even when Steel had been in the trailer that night, he had fooled with the chains the entire time. They had to be one and the same.
I wondered if he was still alive. If any of the others were. Were they being masqueraded somewhere else under different names, waiting for their turn to be "stolen?" I didn't know what Sanders did for a living, but it took a hunk of change to board a horse at a facility like Foxdale and keep it active on the show circuit. Sanders never wore anything that wasn't top-of-the-line, and the Mitsubishi 3000GT he owned had to have cost him a bundle, not to mention the money he shelled out entertaining the string of young women he brought to the farm. Then again, maybe they didn't cost him much.
"So, what you wantin' to know all this for?" Irons said.
I looked at the tightness around his eyes and the heavy lines crinkling his face. "I'll tell you when I know more."
"Tell me now."
I shook my head. "When I know more."
I checked that everything was running smoothly in the barns, then drove home. Greg's vetmobile was parked at the barn entrance with the compartment doors popped open. As I headed for the steps, he walked out of the barn and set a stainless steel bucket on the gravel.
He flipped a towel off his shoulder and wiped his hands. "Cuttin' out early?"
"Nah. I'm heading back in a couple minutes." I crossed the lot and stood alongside the back bumper. "Remember Victor Sanders' horse? That steel gray draft cross that got stolen?"
Greg frowned as he uncapped a green bottle and squirted some sharp-smelling disinfectant into the bucket. He stretched the hose out of the back of the truck and lifted a dental float out of the sudsy water. "Vaguely."
I told him my theory while he hosed off and dried the floats and stowed them in a bin.
He shook his head. "I don't know Steve. Lots of horses have quirks like that, and now that the horse isn't around anymore, there's no way to prove it was the same one that was stolen from Ironsie's place."
Ironsie? "Well," I said, "I'll let the insurance company know, and they can take it from there."
I took the steps two at a time. When I reached the deck, I glanced over my shoulder. Greg had let the hose recoil back into the storage area under the compartment, and as he closed the lid, he looked up at me, his expression thoughtful.
I flipped through the clutter in the junk drawer until I found the packet Marilyn had sent me. I unfolded the copy of Sanders' insurance policy and smoothed out the pages on the countertop. On the first page of the mortality insurance application, question number fourteen asked: "Have you filed an insurance claim in the past three years for any of the proposed horses?" Sanders had answered no.
I got Marilyn's number from her brother and told her what I'd learned.
"And you said the company's name was…?"
"Liberty South." I gave her the agent's name. "What will happen now?"
"We'll contact them," she said. "Start an investigation. If we can't prove it was the same horse, or that he was involved in the thefts… I don't know. Maybe we can get him for intent to defraud." She signed. "Depends on what we find."
Around five-thirty, I went into the lounge, snagged three sodas from the caterer, and walked over to the main dressage arena. Most of the auditors were clustered around the clinician who, according to Rachel, was short-listed for the Olympics.
Michael Burke was his name, and he was younger than I'd expected, somewhere in his late-twenties, early-thirties, and soft-spoken. He was slouched in his chair with his feet propped on an arena marker, his fingers laced together over his stomach. He'd tipped his cowboy hat low on his forehead and looked half asleep as he watched a rider guide her big chestnut across the diagonal in a leg yield.
When I scooted an empty chair up close behind Rachel's and sat down, she smiled slightly, and I knew she'd seen me. I passed the Coke over to Michael, then handed her a root beer.
"Keep the front of the horse straight," Michael called to the rider. "Point his nose at F and push his haunches to the outside."
I settled back into my seat. The girl on the chestnut straightened her horse at F, then guided him through the corner.
"Better," Michael said.
I popped the tab on my Coke and waited for the fizz to dissipate. Rachel had a yellow legal pad balanced on her thigh, and she'd been taking notes with a pink ink pen. Her handwriting was neat and precise and loopy and reminded me of love letters furtively passed in an afternoon geometry class.
As I looked up from the page, Elsa walked around the row of chairs and stopped in front of Michael. I glanced at Rachel's profile, then studied the Coke can in my hand. I took a gulp and glanced sideways at them.
Mrs. Timbrook was wearing a man's dress shirt. The sleeves were rolled up, and she'd twisted the shirttails together and knotted them above her navel. She hadn't bothered with the buttons.
Or a bra.
She leaned forward to offer Michael a food tray from the caterer, and I almost choked. I shifted in my seat and looked across the front field toward the old Ritter farm.
The scrapers had finished cutting and reshaping the land, and earlier that morning, the graders had begun smoothing gravel along the cul-de-sacs.
Elsa squeezed a chair into the space next to Michael and sat down.
I risked another glance. Michael was pretty much ignoring her, but Rachel's eyebrows were bunched together, and her lips were pursed as if she'd eaten something sour.
The close proximity was suddenly too much.
I got up and left.
In barn B, halfway down the aisle near the cut-through to the arena, I slouched onto a hay bale and leaned against a stall front. The barn was cool and dark, and as I sat there, listening to the slow, measured breaths of the horse dozing in the stall behind me, I was fairly certain I was the only one in the barn except, of course, for the horses. I finished the Coke, crumpled the can, and tossed it at the trash can positioned just inside the boarders' tack room. It bounced hollowly off the rim and rolled across the asphalt.
In the square of bright light at the end of the long aisle, Michael crossed the expanse of asphalt that shimmered under the late afternoon sun.
I pushed myself off the hay bale and picked up the can as Elsa passed the doorway. And she wasn't heading to her barn.