by Laura Crum
When all was perfectly silent and still, I clucked to Sunny and bumped him with my heels. “Kick Henry up,” I said to Mac. “Let’s go home.”
That night, after Mac was asleep, I told Blue about Cole Richardson’s house on a hill.
“It was weird,” I said. “I didn’t like it. It gave me the creeps.”
“Because you knew the owner had been murdered?”
“Maybe. But I don’t think so. It was just the way it felt. Some vibe it had. Like a bad aura.”
“Sounds pretty new-agey to me,” Blue said.
“I know. But Mac and the horses could feel it, too, I swear. Nobody liked it there.”
Blue shrugged. “Big, empty mansion way out in the woods? Sure. It’s a little creepy. No reason why any of you would feel comfortable there. Don’t make it more than it was. Are you trying to tell me it’s haunted?” And Blue grinned.
I didn’t smile back. Inescapably, my mind pictured that white curtain blowing out the window; the memory of a little boy on the abandoned swingset.
“Who knows?” I said, almost crossly. “I’m trying to tell you it creeped me out. It gave me a bad feeling. I’m trying to figure out what it was telling me.” I compressed my lips on this statement. Perhaps I wasn’t being entirely truthful, but close enough.
Blue looked at me patiently. “You’ve said often enough how much you hate these great big ugly new houses that are perched on half the hills around here. I don’t like them myself. Why is this one any different? Other than you know the owner was murdered.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I have no explanation for how I felt. But I am curious. I think I’m gonna ride back there tomorrow, without Mac, see if I can make sense of it. Can you take him somewhere?” There, I’d said it.
“Sure,” Blue said. “We’ll have a father-son expedition. Maybe we’ll go to the Boardwalk.”
The Boardwalk was the local amusement park, a picturesque seaside carnival that dated from the early nineteen-hundreds and was much loved by Mac.
“That would be great,” I said. “I’ve been wanting to take a solo ride on Sunny, anyway. See how he goes by himself. Spend a little time getting to know him. When I ride with Mac, most of my focus is on my kid.” This part was true, anyway.
“No problem, Stormy.” Blue pulled me closer to him on the couch and kissed me. “You go take your horse for a ride and check out your haunted house. Mac and I will ride the roller coaster.”
“That’ll be a thrill,” I murmured as I kissed Blue back.
“Not as big of a thrill as you’re going to give me now.” Blue smiled and tipped my head back. “Or so I hope.”
I leaned back against the cushions. “Right,” I said, as I unbuttoned his shirt. “Do you want to put your hands in the air and scream?”
Blue laughed.
Then we were both quiet.
Chapter 20
Bret called the next afternoon, after Blue and Mac had left for the Boardwalk, just as I was headed down to the barn to saddle Sunny.
“John Green’s looking for some evidence to pin the arson fire on Lonny,” he said. “He hasn’t found anything yet, but that’s the direction he’s headed. I sat down with him, told him my theories about Cole, told him about Kate and that she might have seen the suspect at the saleyard. Now he thinks she saw Lonny.”
“But Kate was adamant,” I said. “She was sure it wasn’t Lonny. If there was any doubt in her mind—”
“I know,” Bret interrupted. “I’ve only got a minute here. John Green doesn’t care. Kate is dead and can’t talk. Old John is looking for a simple, logical solution to this deal. If Lonny killed Cole and Lorene, maybe he killed Kate because she saw him. And dammit, I’m the one who told him that Kate saw the suspect.”
“Shit,” I said.
“I just thought you’d want to know,” Bret said.
“Yeah,” I said, “Bret, what about this house over here on the coast? I found it. Couldn’t you drive over and have a look at that file cabinet? Maybe that would tell us something helpful.”
“I wish I could. But I need to be there officially. If I just snuck over there and broke in, the evidence would be tainted. We might not be able to use it. I’ve got to think of a way to interest John Green in the whole idea. I’ll work on it. Got to go.” And he hung up.
I stared at the silent phone and said, “Shit” one more time for good measure. Then I dialed Lonny’s number.
Lonny answered on the first ring, which told me he was in the house. Not good.
“Hi,” I said. “How are you doing?”
“I’m still here, I guess.”
Lonny didn’t sound like himself. The timbre of his voice was softer, the usual forceful energy missing. He sounded old and tired, almost hesitant.
“Hang in there,” I said. “Do you want us to come back? We can. Any time.”
“That’s all right,” Lonny said. “I’m not very good company right now.”
“You don’t need to be good company. Would it help if we were around?”
“No. Gail. I’m better off by myself.”
I heard the heaviness in Lonny’s slow voice and recognized that he truly just wanted to hole up. Which is what I would have felt like doing in his shoes. Talking to others, even friends, was more of a burden than a comfort.
“Hang in there,” I said again. “Everyone knows you didn’t do this.” Except John Green the detective, apparently, I thought silently. And quite sincerely prayed that Lonny was never actually accused of burning Kate’s house down.
“I meet with the lawyer again on Monday,” Lonny said.
“Good. That’s tomorrow,” I reminded him. “I’m sure the lawyer will have some good ideas.”
“I hope so.” But Lonny’s tone wasn’t particularly hopeful. More like defeated.
“Hang in there,” I said for the third time. Damn. I sounded like a broken record. I just couldn’t think of anything else to say. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Take care of yourself” was all I could come up with.
Lonny and I talked for a minute more. He told me the horses were fine and Gunner was thriving. We said our good-byes. And I stared at the silent phone and said, “Shit,” again.
Then I marched out the door and down to the barn, frustration seething through every inch of me. I felt a little better when I spotted Sunny dozing under an oak tree. I grabbed a halter and went to catch him.
“Come on, little guy,” I said. “We’re going for a ride.”
* * *
Sunny plodded quietly down my driveway and out the front gate, seeming unperturbed by the lack of companions. Good. Very good.
Henry and Plumber watched us go, barely lifting their heads. Looked like my new horse went as well solo as he did in a group. Not all horses possessed this desirable trait. I was happier and happier with my acquisition.
When I reached the end of our short side road I cut across the neighbor’s field; Sunny eyed their goat pen with a slightly askance expression, but didn’t spook. I parked him alongside the main road and waited to cross.
Cars, trucks, busses whizzed by. Sunny stood, calm and quiet. I waited. And waited. A clump of fur by the white line drew my eye. Finally the traffic cleared. I kicked Sunny to a trot, looking down as we passed the small carcass.
A cat. A little tabby cat, unknown to me. Just another victim of this busy road.
The sight of the cat’s smashed body, road kill like so many others, brought sudden tears to my eyes. Perhaps someone had loved this little cat; maybe only yesterday he had cuddled in the curve of a child’s arm, happily purring, safe and warm. Now the spirit was rent from his body, suddenly and violently, leaving what? This carcass, certainly. Was there anything more? The fragile little mind-body creature was gone. Did his spirit still exist somewhere, somehow?
Why? The ready question leapt to my mind. What horrible sort of thing was this life we lived, in its brevity and brutality? What was the point in our love for these little spirits housed in bodies, hu
man or animal, if they were all to die eventually, some sooner, but all in the end, some suddenly and in pain, but all sure to become an empty, cold carcass, no longer the creature we loved?
And what happened to the one we loved? We didn’t know. Was he just gone, like a candle flame snuffed out? Was love a cruel joke?
Once we could no longer touch the warm body, see the face and look in the living eyes, hear the words, hold the hand, and smell the special scent, what then? Once the spirit had left the body, was it gone entirely? The ones I had lost seemed gone. I missed them sorely. I could no longer feel their presence in my life. They were gone.
Are we really? The still, small voice in my mind was no voice I knew or could hear. It was just there.
Am I gone?
Somehow I knew it was Roey, my lively red dog.
Can you not feel me?
The tears slipped down my cheeks as I stared at the curve of Sunny’s cream-colored mane springing off the crest of his smooth gold neck.
“I can feel you here,” I whispered to her in my mind. “But I don’t know what it means. It’s just a voice in my mind. I don’t know if it’s real. When I hold Mac in bed, that’s what’s real. And that’s exactly what comes to an end.”
How do you know what’s real? Love is just a cruel joke if death is an end to the spirit. But what if death is just a passage? What if it is a change, not an end? What if love endures?
What if? I wanted to scream. What good is what if in the face of the overwhelming love I felt for Mac, Mac who would one day die, as would I. I had no guarantee at all that it would not be tomorrow, as Kate and her little girl had so suddenly and violently died. I had no guarantees at all.
Why was life so? Why not something tranquil, harmonious, gentle, stable? Why not something that stayed? What good God could possibly have created this brief, brutal, transitory, painful experience, spirit wedded to body for just long enough to yearn for permanence, to learn to love others who were equally impermanent? What piece of shit was this?
And then I remembered the autumn afternoon that I brought Toby the pony home from the equine center, knowing that he had a terminal diagnosis, cancer in his kidneys, and hadn’t long to live. I had shut the front gate and turned him loose, and he wandered along the driveway all afternoon, grazing. Mac and I sat down next to him in the grass and the sunshine, and Toby drowsed for a while and watched us.
Mac petted him and hugged him, and said, “Can you see how much I love him?”
And I said I could.
That night Toby shut himself in his pen, closing the gate with his muzzle.
The next day he roamed the garden, grazing, and stayed in the hay barn, and as we left him, Mac stepped up to him in the most natural way and gently stroked his muzzle in goodbye, the last time he would ever pet his pony. Blue and I did the best we could; and fed Toby carrots and gave him painkillers on that last evening, and then put him down when it was clear that he was miserable.
But in that one moment, as Mac said goodbye, we were all together in truth and love and beauty—as close as I would ever come to understanding what is. Life and death and being connected. Being sad no different from being happy. Two halves of one whole. And we are part of it. Not separate, just a part of it.
“Thank you, Toby,” I whispered. “I love you.”
Sunny stumbled and I blinked. Somehow or other, without really seeing the terrain around me, I had managed to ride Sunny through a small grove of willows, up the hill by the boarding stable, past a few neighborhood houses, and to the bottom of the ridge trail.
The ridge trail was steep, and I seldom rode it with Mac, but I had wanted to test Sunny a little. And here we were.
Sunny looked at the sharp upward trend of the sandy trail ahead and paused. I could feel his thought. I’d rather not go up there. Maybe I won’t.
I kicked him firmly in the ribs and clucked. Oh yes you will, I told him silently.
Sunny sighed and began to clamber up the ridge. I could feel his sturdy legs driving as he hopped up the first big step up, a two-and-a-half-foot shelf. As we were already scrambling up a pretty steep hill, it was quite a jump.
But my little palomino plug managed it handily. It was becoming clearer all the time that Sunny had covered a lot of country in his life. I was starting to have confidence in him.
Up the trail we climbed, Sunny taking the step-ups in stride, trotting a little in the steepest places, easing up to breathe when the trail leveled out some. As we climbed, a broad vista opened up to the west, similar to what could be seen from the Lookout. There was Monterey Bay and the headlands to the north. The air was misty today and most of the horizon looked whited out. I wondered if the fog would come in, or perhaps this was a little front that would bring rain. On we climbed, up and up.
The sandy southwest slope was carpeted with manzanita, greasewood, black sage, and monkey flower, the plants of the dry chaparral. I could smell the aromatic, spicy scents, mixing with the dust of the trail, and the horse and saddle-leather smells of my mount. I took a deep breath. Life was good.
We were on the crest now, with a big dropoff to our right. The trail headed down the other side, descending abruptly into a forest of mixed pine, eucalyptus, and oaks. Sunny picked his way down the hill slowly and carefully, his ears forward, looking at everything.
We topped the next rise and were in the midst of a eucalyptus grove. Mac called this the “five thousand eucalyptus forest.” All around me the slender pinkish trunks with their peeling bark squeaked and groaned in the slight breeze like an old wooden sailboat. Long shafts of light slanted between the airy, constantly rustling trees.
Sunny trudged purposefully as the trail followed the ridgeline up and up. I could see the spiky crown of the landmark tree to my left and the warm meadow and cold valley below me. We passed between several huge Monterey pines and descended another hill to find ourselves at the trail junction.
I rode on up the next hill, passed the trail that led to the Lookout, and started down what was arguably my favorite trail in the whole network. I called it the “pretty trail,” and for me, in some way that I couldn’t define, it seemed to epitomize the whole green world of the ridgetop, this familiar landscape that I loved so well.
The pretty trail sloped gently downhill between a mixed forest of oaks, redwoods, and broad-leafed trees. Wildflowers and grass fringed it and green-gold light shot through the canopy above and dappled the ground. Everything seemed to swirl around me in a leafy kaleidoscope of shimmering life. Though I couldn’t see it through the branches, I knew my house sat on the ridgeline opposite. The trees that screened the pretty trail were visible from my porch. Somehow, when I was here, I always felt that I was at the heart of things, the center of my own personal green world.
I rode on, seeing Sunny’s pricked, creamy-yellow ears in front of me, content in the moment, asking no questions, needing no answers. I was here.
Long minutes later, the pretty trail descended to an open scrubby meadow, dotted with large clumps of rustling pampas grass. I reined Sunny to a stop at the trail fork. If I turned right, I would be on the trail that passed the swingset and could take me to Tucker Pond and Cole Richardson’s driveway.
Did I really want to do this? I hesitated. My mind felt blank. But somehow my hand reined Sunny to the right and we trudged up the hill in the direction of the abandoned swingset. Like it or not, it seemed, I was headed to Cole’s empty house.
The house obsessed me. Whether it was the strange aura I felt, or my underlying conviction that the answer to the murders lay there, I didn’t know. I did know that I had a half-assed idea, one that I hadn’t confided to Blue or Bret.
How do you tell your husband, or a cop, that you plan on a little breaking and entering?
Chapter 21
The answer is that you don’t. Or at least I hadn’t. I had told Blue where I was going. I had my cell phone in my pocket. That seemed adequate.
If I was right...if that screen door was open, I wouldn
’t even be breaking in. Just walking through an open door. If the caretakers weren’t around, which they shouldn’t be, I could take a look in that file cabinet. And maybe find out if there was something that could save Lonny.
I still wasn’t sure I actually wanted to do this, though. Little bubbles of anxiety rose in my stomach as Sunny marched up the hill. I’ll just see how it feels when I get there, I told myself. I’ll just see.
The sky seemed to be getting grayer every moment. Wind rustled emphatically in the big clumps of pampas grass that lined this part of the trail. The air was growing rapidly colder. Either the fog or a storm was blowing in. It was hard to tell which.
Sunny trudged along, not seeming bothered by the wind that whipped through the brush and flipped his mane around. Tree branches overhead blocked out most of the sky as we plunged down into the oaks, but I could tell it was getting darker. I shivered in my denim jacket. I hadn’t planned on a storm. Or the blowing fog.
On we went, uphill and down. Sunny’s hoofbeats made a steady rhythm. Ahead of me the oaks opened up into a clearing. I could see the swingset, forlorn in the woods, its swings long since deteriorated, only the frame remaining. I shivered again.
Sunny walked calmly up the trail, ears forward. The wind blew the grass in long bending swells on either side of me. The trail fork was ahead. I reined Sunny to a halt by the swingset. The left-hand turn led to Tucker Pond.
I’ll just go to the pond, I told myself. No harm in riding to the pond. You do that all the time.
Reluctantly, Sunny obeyed my signal to take the left-hand fork. His gait slowed as he registered that we were heading directly away from home. But he walked on obediently enough, through the purple stars and shiny green leaves of the run-amok vinca, past the ruins of the little house and barn, and through a tunnel of green shrubbery where the abandoned car rested. We dropped down a short, steep hill and Tucker Pond was before us, its water brown and wind riffled.
