The Stars Shine Bright

by Sibella Giorello

  I lifted the second tarp.

  There were three oil drums, just like the one Junior used to hide his joint. Each was marked with spray paint—Paper, Glass, Plastic. The paper recycling didn’t look that different from the mess blanketing the vet’s van and office, and the drum marked Glass held brown and green bottles with their labels dutifully removed. But the third drum, labeled Plastic, was almost empty. A half-dozen empty Gatorade bottles sat on the bottom. The clear plastic milky with age.

  I turned a slow circle. Junior was insisting Brent wanted the smoke detectors disposed of properly. In recycling bins. If some Gatorade bottles later covered a bunch of plastic disks, who would have noticed? Not the vet, who left himself Post-it notes to remember his own glasses. And blue tarp had covered the drums, protection from the rain. Sixty yards to my right, the barns sat perpendicular to the medical clinic. But only the backs were visible. I couldn’t see any stables. Only one thing was certain. My first impression of Wertzer was dead-on. That guy was a bloodhound, an investigator who scoured a place for the smallest fire hazards. I imagined him finding this oil drum full of paper, sitting directly under a wooden building. Then discovering smoke detectors. He never would have imagined they were kept to make a dirty bomb.

  But I might have missed it too. I couldn’t understand why, after I renounced lying, God would send Felicia Kunkel. All her whining and complaining seemed like punishment.

  But I was wrong.

  There was no such thing as luck. And there were no coincidences. And all things worked together for good . . .

  Including Felicia’s sores.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  The vet’s fire-hazard-on-wheels was abandoned between two hot walkers. The back hatch door was lifted like a sail, and the sweating horses were eyeing it like it might bite them.

  I followed a Hansel-and-Gretel-like trail of torn bottle wrappers and plastic caps into the next barn. At the far end of the gallery, I saw Claire Manchester. She stood with her muscular arms crossed over her thin chest, and with her hollow cheekbones she reminded me of a pirate’s flag. Skull and crossbones. The impression grew stronger when she opened her mouth.

  “Back off,” she said. “He’s not done with my horses.”

  “I was looking for Brent.”

  “So am I. I’m going to kill him.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I scratched two races today. All because the boy wonder never showed up. We’re going through Lasix like water.”

  The old vet lumbered from a stall. He held empty syringes in one liver-spotted hand. But he kept his other hand out, against the wall. Like Eleanor, he struggled to walk over the uneven sawdust floor. And when he saw me, his face sagged.

  “You too?” he said.

  “I can wait.”

  “You’ve got no choice.” He pulled a piece of paper from the chest pocket of his plaid shirt, squinting at the scribbled words. “I’ve got four more barns ahead of you.”

  “And you’re not done here,” Claire said. “Olive Lamp needs Banamine for that colic. If it’s even colic.”

  He sighed. “You want a blood test?”

  “Blood test!” Her hands flew out, landing on her bony hips. Elbows akimbo. “Enough with the blood tests. They’re all negative, but I still have to pay the bill. No wonder that zit-faced assistant went into hiding.”

  The vet nodded. He nodded like a man habituated to a nagging wife. She kept after him as he walked down the gallery and didn’t stop until he had turned into another stall. Then she spun toward me, continuing the diatribe.

  “I’m going broke.” She raised her voice, calling to the vet. “The vet bills alone are bankrupting me!”

  When the vet came out of the stall, his walk picked up a sudden quick cadence. I followed him down the gallery, fleeing Claire’s fury, but he didn’t seem to notice me. He was patting his shirt, his pants. He climbed into his van, and the busted shocks dropped four inches. Then he started patting again, the same places he patted before. I climbed into the passenger seat, onto the newspapers. He looked over at me. He seemed distracted.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Can’t find my glasses,” he said.

  I pointed.

  He reached up, patting his head. “Oh. Thanks.”

  “No problem. Where’s Brent?”

  He turned the key and chunked the gearshift into reverse, turning around in his seat to look out the rear hatch, which was still up. As he passed the hot walker, the horses rattled their heads, shaking the leashes.

  I tried again. “Is Brent around?”

  “Two days left in the season and he calls in sick. I told him this would happen.”

  “What kind of sick?”

  “Stomach bug. That kid pushes himself too hard.” He shoved the gear into drive. “I told him to take a break. Did he listen? Now I’ve got to take his rounds.”

  The wind rushed through our open windows and blew out the back. With one hand on the wheel, the vet tried to read the slip of paper.

  “Have you ever looked into those recycling bins behind the medical clinic?”

  “Just what I need.” He racked the gearshift and got out. The shocks sprung up.

  “Pardon?”

  “Just what I need.” He walked to the back. “Another woman telling me what I’m doing wrong. Okay, it’s a mess. Who cares? Find somebody else to pick on. I’m an old man.”

  He grabbed the rope handle and yanked. The drawer squeaked out.

  “I’m not concerned about the mess,” I said. “I want to know why Brent stored the smoke detectors back there.”

  He rummaged through the white boxes, tearing them open and throwing the litter over his shoulder. “What?”

  “Smoke detectors. Taken out of the barns. After the renovation.”

  “Yeah, scared the horses. So what?”

  “Brent kept them.”

  He hesitated. Then returned the bottles inside the boxes, marked Rx. Time was moving away from me, I could feel it. Forty-eight hours were gone. And the track only had forty-eight hours left in the season. I started with the missing Americum 241, because he was a doctor. Every doctor understood nuclear radiation. And I kept talking while he removed the small glass vials. But he didn’t seem to be listening.

  “Have you ever seen someone with radiation poisoning?” I asked. “It starts out looking like acne. Then it gets worse. The sores get bigger. They start weeping.”

  He waved the scrap of paper as if swatting a fly. “I don’t have time for this.”

  He shoved the drawer closed and started for the next barn.

  I called out to his back, “You were right about the Glock.”

  He stopped.

  “My name is Raleigh Harmon.”

  He turned around.

  “I came here to work undercover for the FBI. Eleanor thought there was some race fixing. But that wasn’t it. And I’m no longer working for the FBI. I quit.”

  He looked down at the notes in his hand, walked back to the van, and yanked open a different drawer. This time he lifted his chin to read through his bifocals. Despite every molecule inside me screaming for action, I waited. Some people couldn’t be pushed. I stood listening to the breeze coming down the backstretch. It smelled of horse and hay and manure. I could hear the newspapers, rustling like sighs inside the van. And suddenly they told me what was wrong. This van. That office. He took comfort in a certain amount of messiness. The man made nests. He brooded and hunkered down and he didn’t like change. For almost fifty years he’d managed to keep his peace among these competitive and restless people. And here I came, full of lies and uncomfortable questions, and he was no dummy. He recognized the Glock for what it was.

  “I’m sure you’ve wondered about him,” I said. “Beyond his working too hard.”

  He continued to read the notes. Or pretend to. “You lied to me.”

  “I’m sorry. But now I’m telling you the truth. The season might end with a bang. Literally.”
r />   “What’s that supposed to mean”

  “When Americum 241 gets airborne, it’s deadly. And I think that contraption under the starting gate was just a trial run.”

  He reached up suddenly, grabbing the back hatch. I jumped back. He slammed it down. “And you expect me to believe Brent had something to do with that?”

  “Think about something. When SunTzu and the jockey went down, where was he? You kept yelling into the radio, telling him to get to the track. He showed up last.”

  Two grooms walked from the barn. They glanced at the vet, taking us in. They were speaking to each other in Spanish, walking to the hot walkers. The vet watched them unsnap the bridles.

  “Did you hire Brent?”

  “The girl came to me. She said her friend needed a job.”

  “What girl?” But I felt a knot in my stomach.

  “Ashley. She told me he was a good worker. And cheap.” He turned to me, his old Celtic face sagging again. “You know what it’s like, trying to find somebody who’ll take orders from me?”

  “Did he always have that acne?”

  The vet looked down at his hands. He stared at the vials, as if he’d already forgotten what they were for. “No,” he said. “He looked bad. I told him to take some days off. Go get some sleep.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Here.”

  “Where?”

  “In the clinic.”

  “He’s living in the clinic?”

  “I did the same thing, saving money for vet school. And he was helping me out. He took my night calls.”

  I remember my visit to the vet’s office. Brent came in, looking sickly and tired. But if he lived there . . .

  “Doc Madison?” A voice crackled from inside the van. “Doc? You there?”

  The vet opened the passenger side door and dug through the trash on the floor until he found the radio.

  “I’m here,” he said. “Who’s this?”

  “Petey Smith, Barn Two. We’re waiting for Brent to come—”

  “You ever hear the phrase ‘hold your horses’? I’m moving as fast as I can.”

  Petey Smith started to complain. The vet dropped the radio into the front pocket of his pants. Petey was still talking when he slammed the door and headed for the barn.

  I felt like a puppy running after him. “Is Brent in the clinic now?”

  “No. His brother picked him up.”

  “Where’s his brother live?”

  “How should I know?” He turned left, moving under the eaves. “Somewhere over the pass.”

  “Yakima?”

  The vet stopped.

  “Or maybe Selah,” I said.

  The radio crackled again.

  “Doc, hey, Doc!”

  The vet pulled the radio from his pocket slowly, but he twisted the volume all the way down.

  As if he couldn’t bear to hear any more.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  The safest place to make a phone call seemed to be the Quarterchute. Even the old guys had shuffled for home. Two janitors remained, one wiping down the tables while the other swabbed the floor with a mop, moving in rhythm to some Tex-Mex music that lilted from a boom box on the counter.

  I walked over to the betting window in the far back and hit speed dial. Jack answered on the first ring.

  “Brent Roth,” I said. “He’s building a dirty bomb.”

  “Harmon, I still have a job. And I want to keep it.”

  “The guy called in sick. His brother came and got him. Guess where the brother lives? Selah. That’s Handler’s ranch.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “The veterinarian. And here’s something else. The guy’s showing signs of radiation sickness. Sores all over his skin. Weird mood swings. Jack, forty-eight hours are gone. And this guy’s not playing games.”

  “Harmon, if zits and mood swings were grounds for arrest, the jails would be full of women with PMS. So if you don’t mind—”

  I hung up.

  For the next three minutes, I paced along the back wall. Then I checked my phone. No call. I kept myself from calling him by staring at the photographs on the wall. Winning barns, from years past. I saw Eleanor and Harry together. A happy middle-aged couple. Then Claire Manchester’s barn. And Abbondanza was there too. Most of the photos showed a tiny platinum blond. I leaned in. She was identified as Karen Trenner. And the resemblance to her daughter was striking. When my cell phone rang, I checked my watch. Sixteen minutes. Not bad. But the janitors were looking over, hearing the Tijuana Brass horns. Whaa-whaa-whaa.

  I flipped open the phone. “Thank you.”

  “What if I’m calling to say no?”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Only because you’re falling fast.”

  “Do you have the background check or not?”

  “We’re back to Arnold Corke.”

  “What?” I said.

  The janitors looked over again. I gave a little wave, tried to smile, and dropped my voice. “How?”

  “He’s another one of Corke’s unhappy campers. Drug addict mother. Brent Roth went into foster care early. By ten, he’d moved to Corke’s place. No dummy either. He got a full-ride scholarship to UW. Guess what he studied.”

  “Jack, spit it out.”

  “Physics and engineering.”

  Ideal for bomb-making. “Now do you believe me?” I said.

  “Hard to say. This far out on the limb, I can hear it cracking.”

  “What would convince you?”

  “Facts. Like, who’s paying the taxes on that trailer?”

  “Why that?”

  “Harmon, this is the People’s Republic of Washington State. If it moves, the state slaps a fee on it. So if Corke still has the title, which is what Handler said, then the bill would come to him every year. Maybe he’s helping these guys more than he wants to admit.”

  “That would take me days to find out.”

  There was a long silence. The janitors were wiping down the counters, scrubbing the grill. But beyond the picture windows, the backstretch was empty. And the oval waited. For tomorrow. And the last day. The perfect day to set off a bomb.

  “Jack, do you want me to beg?”

  “No,” he said. “I want to keep my job. And you’re asking too much. So all I can tell you right now is, good luck. And yeah, I know. You don’t believe in luck. But right now, that’s all you have.”

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  I searched for Ashley.

  The showers were empty, and when I circled back to the barn, she wasn’t in the stables. Cooper’s office door was open, so I glanced inside. Ashley wasn’t there, but Cooper was sitting at his desk. The bottle of whiskey was open. And his face had a rosy glow. But his smile said his good mood was more than booze. He only smiled like that when his horses won.

  But something else caught my attention too. His shirt.

  It was definitely the same blue shirt Claire Manchester bought from Tony Not Tony. But the connection was less certain. Was she bribing him to lose? Or were they having some kind of love affair? Cooper. Claire. I shuddered at the thought.

  “Have you seen Ashley?” I asked.

  “I fired her,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “Not doing her job. I haven’t seen her all day.”

  I turned and headed for the back of the barn, toward the grooms’ studios. The horses were kicking the plank walls, but with no perceptible rhythm. Almost catatonic. I rapped on Ashley’s pink door. There was no response. I tried the knob.

  It was unlocked.

  When I stepped inside, closing the door behind me, the room still had that hydrochloric acid odor. But now it was mixed with a false sweetness. Soap. No, I realized. Shampoo. Her strawberry shampoo, the stuff that drove Henry the Ate crazy.

  Beside her bed, a half-eaten banana was next to a saltine. I could see her U-shaped dental impression in the chalky fruit. A bath towel was heaped on the floor, and a row of puddles like kett
le lakes stretched to the clothing bins. The last time I was here, everything was folded neatly into the milk crates. But now the shirts hung messily, as if yanked out. I stepped over the puddles and stood in front of the crates. Something else seemed different. But I couldn’t decide what. The top shelf still held her mementos. The wine bottle. It had been moved to the side. And the green glass was pushed up against some small stones. I read the label again. There was a handwritten date. March of this year. I picked up the bottle. Chardonnay. From the Yakima Valley. I felt a familiar prickle running up the back of my neck. The rocks she’d gathered were fine-grained, igneous. Russet-colored. Dusted with a whitish clay.

  They were arranged in lines on the shelf. Vertical lines, and horizontal. Three stones connected by one stone followed by another three stones down. It was . . . a letter.

  H.

  Next to that, another three stones down. But two were at the top of the line. Two in the middle, two at the bottom.

  E.

  The third letter was a straight line with a foot: L.

  HEL.

  Hell?

  I turned around, taking in the room. No signs of struggle. But the bite of a banana. Towel dropped. Water puddled on the floor. I could see her long hair, dripping wet. No struggle. But rushed. Hurrying.

  I turned around, reading the stones again. Over and over. I realized what was wrong.

  She ran out of stones.

  The word she wanted to spell was HELP.

  Chapter Sixty

  Feeling almost blind with fatigue, I managed to drive to the condo. I set my alarm for one hour and when it beeped, I woke up feeling like my nap lasted thirty seconds. I stumbled into the shower, dressed, and drove to the convenience store.

  The Indian family was eating dinner behind the checkout counter. I asked Raj for a cheeseburger and fries. To go.

  “Let’s do the salt,” said the girl with the pigtails.

  “Let’s do sugar,” I said. “Pour eight packets into a large coffee cup.”

  She went to work and fifteen minutes later, I was heading east, sipping coffee sweet enough to be served as tea below the Mason-Dixon line. Every other thought, I had to remind myself why the FBI couldn’t help with Ashley. She hadn’t been missing twenty-four hours—the minimum length of time necessary for someone to be declared officially missing—and nobody was going to take those abbreviated stones seriously.