by Ian Stansel
They looped around the backside of the tiny town of Freestone, Silas peering between buildings for any cops on the truncated main drag. He didn’t want to stop, but he was already low on supplies. After only a day. He tied Disco to a water-meter pipe in back of the town’s store and went in wearing his hat low over his forehead. Inside, he hurriedly filled a basket with bread and sliced roast beef, two cans of vegan chili for nearly seven bucks a pop, three tall cans of a cold coffee drink, and two bottles of water. Silas had already taken a few squeezes from his bota to shake the hangover from his head, and the bladder was nearly empty, so he grabbed two bottles of pinot. He got a pound of carrots and three pounds of apples to tide Disco over until he could refill on grain. The hippie woman at the counter took her time passing the items over the register’s scanner and made chitchat about the weather, suggested Silas check out their refillable water bottles, muttered something about chemical leaching, and Silas tried to respond with easy neighborliness and not betray that his heart was pounding away inside his chest.
He and his horse lunched in a green-grassed grove of birch trees two hundred yards off a winding, slope-shouldered road. The plan had been for him to move inland, where fewer people might know him, away from the equestrian world that centered nearer the coast, but there in that stand of trees, he felt a new sense of unease bloom in his gut. The water had always been an anchor, a line defining the edge of the world. Inland he would be adrift. He wouldn’t know where to go, and, worse, he wouldn’t know where to avoid. So instead, after he fed on bread and beef and one can of cold bean chili, he cut back south a ways and then followed Salmon Creek westward. Midafternoon, Disco drank from Watercress Gulch and they continued on until Silas could nearly hear the insistent pleasure traffic of Highway 1. At this proximity, his breathing eased, but disappointment welled inside. He hadn’t made it even fifty miles from home and already he was backpedaling. Of course, this was why he hadn’t let himself come up with a specific plan in the first place. Far easier to justify cowardly navigation when you’re moving through a nebulous intention.
Silas got hold of his bota, squeezed the last of the wine into his mouth, turned his horse north, and urged her on.
Four
Lena saw the trailer from a hundred yards down Nicasio Valley Road. Her trailer. Parked at the side of the road across from Silas’s spread. A strange and disorienting sensation, seeing your own rig where it shouldn’t be, outside your husband’s murderer’s property, no less. She steered Pepper to the gravel shoulder where his steps wouldn’t resonate as much. A dun rump, high and muscular, and black tail appeared in the shadow of the trailer. Lena knew the horse. Major. Rain’s six-year-old Danish warmblood. Lena had bought him originally and he’d been a school horse for a short time before Rain fell in love with him, had to have him. She’d paid him off in installments over more than two years, during which period Lena and Frank had on several occasions discussed forgiving the debt and just letting her have him. But each time they concluded that he would mean more if the girl had to work a bit harder toward ownership.
Lena came up to the truck slowly, warily, in case she was mistaken, though she knew she wasn’t. She said, “What are you doing here?” Startled the girl.
Rain angled her bony elbows out the window of the truck. “I figured this is where you’d start. Figured if I was wrong I’d take Major back. No harm, no foul. But if I was right, then I just might join you.”
“What is it you think I’m doing, Rain?”
“I saw the saddlebags in the tack room last night.” She nodded toward the gear tied over Pepper’s rump. “Those saddlebags.”
“Go on back home.”
“You think he’s making off on a horse, and I think you’re right.”
“You don’t even know the man.”
“I know you. I know you wouldn’t be out here unless you were certain.”
Lena said, “Certainty is for young people and fools.”
“The thing I can’t figure out is how you’re going to find him. He could have gone anywhere.”
Lena unhooked her bottle from the saddlebags and took a long drink of water. She said, “Silas Van Loy is a coward and a drunk and a cheat. Plus he’s stupid to boot. That’s how I’m going to find him.” It felt somehow liberating to say this, and she had to tamp down the urge to repeat it again and again, I’m going to find him, I’m going to find him.
“So what will you do?”
“Rain, this isn’t your concern. Please.”
“I can help.”
“This isn’t fun time. It isn’t an adventure.”
“I’ve got my things. I’ve got a pack and food and water.” Rain twisted into the dark of the truck cab, then returned, holding something. She said, “And I’ve got this.” Her hands opened like a tulip to reveal a small silver gun. “My father gave it to me when I moved out to the barn.”
“You plan on shooting someone, Rain?”
“No.”
“Put it away.”
Rain folded a cloth around the gun. She said, “Look what else I have.” She held up her phone and the screen lit up, displaying all manner of colorful icons. She tapped at one and a moment later a muffled, nasally voice issued some kind of announcement. “It’s a police scanner,” Rain said.
“On your phone.”
“You can tune in to different departments, listen in.”
Lena had to admit that this might be incredibly helpful, and given that the flip phone in her pocket, with its two wings hanging together by wires, was nearly ten years old, she wouldn’t have it without the girl.
Rain said, “You all have been good to me. You and Frank both.”
“We gave you a job.”
“No. It was more than that. And two is better than one. We can cover more ground. Two sets of eyes on the lookout.”
“The lookout.” Lena suddenly wanted to be anywhere but there, on her horse, having this conversation. She wanted to be in bed, half awake, Frank’s warmth covering the short distance between them. What had been commonplace occurrences—those moments when she was smart enough to take notice of what she had—were now fantasies. Frank was gone, and Lena felt more alone than she ever had. And this was why, despite the danger and her instinct to protect Rain, despite the voice inside chiding her for putting the girl in harm’s way, she found herself pointing up Nicasio Valley Road, saying, “There’s a turnoff up where trail riders park their rigs. Next to the post office. Be ready by the time I get there.”
She pressed Pepper into a trot as Rain pulled off the shoulder. Major was out of the trailer and tacked when Lena caught up. The two women made their way north along a well-worn riding trail. The plan, in Lena’s head, was to stop in the few towns nearby, ask around. She was half angry at Rain for wedging herself into the search, so she pointedly said nothing about where they were going. More, though, she was angry at herself for being so happy the girl was there with her. They moved at a lively trot through the morning sunlight. On the downward slopes they picked up into a canter.
Carly’s Land Rover sat angled on the shoulder of Red Hill Road. She stepped out as the two women approached on their horses. The sun was barely up over the eastern hills of the county, but Carly shielded her eyes nonetheless. “Sweetheart,” she said.
The women got closer and Lena said, “You know Rain.”
“Of course.”
Lena said, “This the spot?”
“Just there,” Carly said, pointing up the road. “By that big old tree.”
“Cutting right across, then.”
“Straight into that little valley.”
Lena contemplated the cleft in the earth. “All right,” she said.
“Sweetheart, what can I do for you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Do they really have him? Silas?”
Lena said nothing and did not look at either of her companions.
“Is she talking to you?” Carly said to Rain.
Rain said, “We’re just
out for a ride.”
“Well, of course I understand that. But this doesn’t seem quite right. Lena, you said they had Silas. You said they were talking to him. Is that the truth?”
After a long moment of silence, Rain said, “That’s what I heard. Picked him up at his place.”
“So you just wanted to see where I saw him?” Carly said to Lena, incredulousness edging her voice.
“I was curious,” Lena said finally.
“Curious about what, sweetheart?”
Lena inhaled the scent of eucalyptus and dust in the air. “Curious about where a man goes after murdering my husband.”
Lena accepted a long squeeze of her hand and she and Rain said goodbye to Carly, waited until her SUV was out of sight, and rode into the shallow, grassy valley. Over the next hour the air warmed and Lena shed her vest and the two women went along in silence.
Finally, Rain caught up to Lena and said, “He’s a good trainer, right? Silas? That’s what everybody says.”
Lena said, “He knows horses. I’ll give the man that.”
There was a part of Lena’s mind that, a few hours before, had believed that this was not only a chase, but an escape. The house, when she’d returned from the hospital the day before, was filled with Frank. The kitchen retained the faint smell of the bacon he’d made that morning. The book he’d been reading the night before, a Dick Francis mystery, was splayed on his bedside table. He could never find a bookmark. Beard hairs clung to the upper rim of the bathroom sink. The clock in the kitchen seemed to be counting the moments he’d been gone.
But if she’d thought it would be any different out in the open air, astride Pepper, she’d been wrong. The air was his breath. The tree branches were his arms outstretched. The sound of Rain riding behind her was not Rain, but Frank—though it had been so long since they took a ride together on these hills, these trails. His absence surrounded her, crushed her, howled its thunderous silence. When it got to be too much, she urged her horse forward into a canter, but every step Pepper took merely stamped her husband’s name into the earth.
Lena and Rain stopped at Soulajule Reservoir and let the horses drink. Lena drank coffee from a thermos and shared two apples with Pepper. They rode on. Midafternoon, Lena’s phone began ringing and buzzing with voicemails. Riley, of course. Riley would try to find her, would enlist the cops, get in his little Porsche and drive all over California calling her name angrily into the wind.
“Why’d he do it?” Rain asked. “I mean, do you have any idea?” The two women were crossing through a patch of elms. The trees were wide set but with canopies broad enough to shade the ground and the riders loping across it.
“I don’t know. The two of them, they feuded.” Lena would not have used that word—feud—ten years before. It implied an equality of give-and-take, of aggression and victimhood, and for years she had not perceived the situation between the brothers this way. Not nearly. Frank was no angel, of course, but as far as she was concerned, Silas was the aggressor far more than her husband. Though there were times when she allowed the thought to bubble up from the dark recesses of her mind that there was more to Frank’s role in the war and that she simply, consciously or not, turned away when the evidence of it came to light in their otherwise very happy lives.
Soon Rain’s phone rang. Lena said, “Ignore it,” and the younger woman obeyed without a word. “There’s a proper campsite a few miles up. Can’t build a fire out on these hills. Too dry. We’d have the cops on us in minutes.”
Rain said, “I feel like we’re the outlaws.”
“We’re something close, as far as they’d be concerned.”
They made the campsite just as the air was tensing with cold and the sun completed its long descent. A few other groups of people were setting up nearby, laughing and drinking. Lena and Rain hoisted the saddles from their horses, and the animals’ sweaty backs steamed in the campfire light. The horses fed on grain and grazed on grass while the women picked packed dirt from their hooves. Rain walked both animals by leads through the grounds to work out their muscles while Lena pierced hot dogs with sticks and peeled the labels from cans of soup and tucked the cans into the fire logs. By the time night fell, the horses were blanketed and the women were packed into their bags.
That night Lena dreamed Frank’s wake was underway and the man himself walked through the door in dusty jeans, his old Stetson atop his head. Lena asked him what he was doing there, why he wasn’t dead.
“Hell, I was just down the road looking at an Appaloosa,” he said.
He pointed out the window and in a field stood a white, winged horse. A Pegasus.
He smiled. Said, “What’d you think, I wasn’t coming back?”
Lena looked at him. “I did,” she told him, feeling a fool. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”
⟱
There’d been riders in Lena’s family going back to her great-grandmother Aileen. Family lore went that when she was nineteen, still then in the family’s homeland of England, Aileen rode a horse alone nearly eighty miles from Liverpool to Leeds to see a boy slated to ship off to war. The boy was pretty—with high-set angular features and a tilting smile—and sweet, with a penchant for lyric phrases of love that meant little yet leveled the girl. He died soon after leaving England, but before that Aileen rode her red quarter horse, whose name no one was sure of, back to Liverpool with a love that was so recently and so secretly consummated that she could not conceive of loss, of anything that might fall short of the great tidal wave of love that she was certain would wash over her and her sweet, pretty boy, day after day and night after night for decades to come.
This story was one Lena thought of often as a young woman. It was not the tragic drama at the story’s heart that she was taken with, though; rather, it was the picture of her great-grandmother alone atop her horse, traversing narrow trails across windswept English heaths. Lena did not consider herself to be a particularly romantic person, but the figure her great-grandmother cut in her mind was one image she could happily indulge for hours on end.
And it was this story Lena and her mother, Sandra, were recalling the morning they’d first visited the Van Loy stable, trailering their horses on the back of Sandra’s AMC Eagle for a show. Lena was twenty-two years old. Frank and Silas had been running their father’s place in San Geronimo five years then, and they had built a good reputation as trainers. Still young, with Frank not even approaching thirty yet, but folks were talking. And they knew it, those two. Thought they were a whole new generation of horsemen manifest. So much so that two years before, they’d scheduled their big summer show the same June weekend as the Dutton Acres show. Everyone went to the Dutton show—over a thousand people across the two days. It was one of the primary events on the equestrian calendar. Frank and Silas were aware of the timing, of course. They couldn’t not be. But there they went, their first year out, trying to compete. Almost no one went to their event and they lost money and even looked like fools to the few people bothering to notice them in the first place. But then, sure enough, the next year, they did it again. In the prior months, though, they’d amassed some fans. Their barn was full up and the weekend riding seminars they put on sold out regular. A couple dozen folks came out for their show that summer, forgoing Dutton. By the next June, their operation was so popular that Dutton moved their show to September, end of season.
In the field north of the arena, Lena and her mother pulled in and parked amid the flashing chrome of other trailers and trucks. “Big,” Sandra said, shielding her eyes and taking in the event.
Lena had her quarter horse Roscoe, whom she’d been riding two years. A good horse. Small and with a wide belly, but smooth, with a surprising agility and height over jumps. Sandra brought a sorrel gelding she’d just bought, a three-year-old. It was his first show.
Lena placed second in their first jumping class. Sandra rode Roscoe in this, too, and took fourth. A joke passed between them—the student becomes the teacher. Some such.
A chuckle. Sandra took her gelding in an under-saddle and got blue. A special horse, and Lena liked the way her mother smiled widely as the judge hooked the ribbon on her horse’s bridle. Then Lena took another second jumping. A good day for the both of them and they were feeling proud, holding reins out by their trailer and passing a cold bottle of Coke back and forth and wiping their brows, saying “Hi there” when folks went by and nodded, people paying attention, knowing that these two ladies and their horses were doing well this day in June.
“You shoulda gotten blue,” a deep voice said.
The two women turned to find a young man, handsome in his anachronistic bolo tie and Stetson. He tipped his hat at them and pushed his sweat-soaked hair back off his forehead before replacing the Stetson.
Lena said, “Oh. Red is a good color for me.”
“Well, complexion aside, you got cheated.”
“Is that right?”
The man stepped over to Roscoe and set a hand on his rump. “He’s a good ol’ boy, isn’t he.”
“He is.”
“Nice jumper. I like when you don’t expect it by looking at them. They’re harder to sell—most people want the ones that’ll wow their friends—but a horse like this makes you appreciate what he can do even more. You bought this one?”
Lena nodded.
The man said, “You know horses.” Then he motioned toward the arena, said, “One of the judges—guy with longer hair?—he’s banging that girl took blue.” The man tipped his hat at Sandra. “Pardon my language.”
Lena said, “That’s none of our business.” Though a part of her—a not inconsequential part—felt a welling of outrage. She valued justice, Lena did, and pockets of its absence in the world depressed and angered her.
“If you want to file some kind of complaint with the stable, you’d be within your rights.”
She rolled her eyes.
The man said, “I could help you.”
