The Golden Stranger

by Karen Wood

  ‘Sorry,’ said Shara. ‘He doesn’t mean it.’

  ‘So, I took your advice and read the paper this morning.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Was that you and your mates?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who pulled the animal welfare stunt?’

  Shara pulled a face at him. ‘No way!’

  ‘Even though you thought today’s paper might be worth a read?’

  Shara bent down and unbuckled the hobbles around Rocko’s feet, avoiding his eyes. ‘Nup.’

  ‘The contractors have surrendered the brumbies.’

  Shara looked up at him. ‘Are you for real?’

  Corey smiled down at her and his face seemed genuine and kind. ‘Yeah. I just heard about it from Dad.’

  ‘That’s fantastic! They’ll be saved.’ She couldn’t hide her delight.

  ‘Thought I’d stop in and give you the goss. Just in case, you know, you might know anyone who was involved in it. Which you . . . don’t?’

  She shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘It’s not a good event, that wild horse race. It gives rodeo a bad name.’

  Shara looked into Corey’s hazel-brown eyes and wondered why he was telling her this. Did he agree with what she had done or was he trying to get enough information to pin it on her? Best keep her mouth shut, she decided. He was still connected to a lot of other rodeo people who did not share the same views, and word spread quickly in horsey circles. She watched him run a hand over Rocko’s back. Her horse certainly seemed to trust him, though, and that was very unusual.

  ‘You doing the Nanango draft next weekend?’ she asked, buckling the hobbles back together and changing the subject.

  ‘Yep. You?’

  ‘Don’t know yet. Dad’s car is at the mechanic’s. Not sure if it’ll be fixed by then.’

  ‘I’ve got a spare spot on the float.’ Corey looked out over the paddocks where the cattle grazed, then gave her a wink. ‘We can train on your cattle this week.’

  She smiled back. Now he was getting cheeky. ‘Those ones are all pregnant. Dad would spew.’

  ‘Doesn’t he have to draft out some weaners or something?’ ‘He did that last week.’

  ‘Bummer. Come to the draft anyway.’

  ‘What about all the other girls I see you with?’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘It’s not easy being a demigod.’

  ‘Might be a bit too squeezy on that horse float.’

  ‘Come with me anyway,’ said Corey. ‘Just as a friend.’

  Shara shook her head. Corey might seem nice enough, but he was still a rodeo boy who roped calves and rode bucking broncos. He didn’t fit with her crowd of friends. ‘I’ll make my own way there.’

  As Corey’s Hilux rolled out of the driveway, Grace and Jess rode in.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ asked Jess, after giving Corey a perfunctory wave. ‘You didn’t tell him anything, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he ask?’

  ‘Sort of. I just brushed it off,’ Shara said reassuringly.

  ‘He’s already pummelled Elliot for information,’ said Grace, slipping off her horse and tying it to the hitching rail.

  ‘Did Elliot tell?’

  ‘No,’ said Grace. ‘But he reckons Corey really hammered him.’

  ‘Typical rodeo thug,’ said Jess dismissively. ‘Hey, did you see the picture in the Coachwood Chronicle?’ She jumped off Dodger and pulled a folded piece of newspaper from her pocket. ‘We’re famous!’

  ‘Infamous, you mean,’ said Shara. ‘I nearly choked on my breakfast when Dad opened the paper this morning.’

  ‘Our mum loved it,’ said Rosie.

  ‘She would have done the spray-painting herself,’ said Grace, ‘but the Connemans already have a restraining order against her. Just about every stock contractor in the country does. I think she thumped one of them once.’

  Shara laughed. She could just imagine Mrs Arnold, with her mad black curly hair and fiery tongue, hammering the head of a scrawny cowboy. If only her own parents were that cool.

  ‘I drove past the show this morning with Mum and the red semitrailer was gone. They’d packed all the yards and signs away,’ said Jess.

  ‘Corey told me they surrendered the brumbies,’ said Shara excitedly. ‘They’ll be re-homed instead of being turned into pet food.’

  ‘Oh! That’s fantastic,’ said Grace. ‘Wow! We saved some brumbies! That’s so freaking good!’

  ‘Corey’s okay, I reckon,’ said Shara.

  ‘No, he’s not,’ said Jess. ‘He strings along about ten girlfriends at once, and he rides broncos. Don’t let him charm you, Shara. He’s a cowboy schmuck!’

  ‘I’m not letting him charm me! I just said he’s okay. He’s not as bad as you think.’

  Jess pulled a face. ‘Anyway, those dodgy Conneman brothers probably won’t be coming back to Coachwood Crossing again. Saddle up, Sharsy. Let’s ride.’

  Shara skipped to the shed to get her saddle, her friends following. The tin door was flapping open, and she hooked it back against the wall, puzzled. ‘It’s not like Dad to leave the door open.’

  She headed into the shed, and stopped in her tracks. Inside, the two wooden racks that held her saddles and rugs stood empty. Around her feet lay a mess of leather and canvas.

  Hex leapt about and sniffed urgently, darting from one bundle to the next. He investigated an old chaff bag that lay emptied on the floor. Then he trotted the length of the workbench, inspecting the boxes of nails and screws and David’s tools that lay strewn beneath.

  ‘What happened to the shed?’ asked Jess.

  ‘It’s been ransacked,’ answered Shara.

  She bent down and picked up her pride and joy, the trophy saddle she’d won at the Longwood campdraft finals. ‘Oh no! It’s all scratched.’ She replaced it carefully on the rack. ‘Who would go through all my stuff like that?’

  4

  SERGEANT BIGWOOD came over that afternoon and took a statement from Shara, but said as nothing had been stolen there was little he could do. ‘Just local kids up to no good,’ he had concluded, and Shara’s dad had agreed.

  Shara wasn’t convinced. She lay awake that night, fretting. Who would have done such a horrible thing? Did someone have a grudge against her? She tried to think about something else. School. Biology. She loved biology. It was full of all sorts of stuff that she could relate to horses, such as reproductive systems and genetics. She had learned, for instance, that if she put a cremello stallion over a bay mare, she could get a buckskin foal. She got an A+ for that assignment.

  As she drifted towards sleep, a strange ruckus, like steel on steel, started outside. Shara lifted her head from the pillow and held her breath, listening. There it was again. But why weren’t the dogs barking?

  Shara jumped out of bed and ran to her parents’ room. Barry met her in the hallway.

  ‘Did you hear that, Dad?’

  ‘It sounded like the shed door,’ he said. ‘You stay in the house and I’ll check it out.’

  ‘Let the dogs off,’ she whispered. ‘They’ll sort it out.’

  ‘No, I want to catch this troublemaker in the act.’ Her father marched off, pulled on his boots and grabbed a baseball bat from behind the front door.

  ‘Be careful, Dad!’

  ‘I’ll be fine. It’s probably just some kid. Don’t turn any lights on for a bit.’ He stopped and turned to her. ‘Stay here,’ he ordered. Then he slipped out the door and disappeared into the front yard.

  Shara’s mum joined her at the lounge-room window, drawing a robe tightly around herself and tying the belt. Together, they squinted into the darkness.

  Within seconds, Barry was back. ‘Call the police, Louise. I reckon there’s more than one of them in there, not just kids by the noise.’

  ‘What did you hear? What are they doing?’

  ‘Not sure, but they’re making a hell of a racket. Don’t seem to care who hears them.’

  Sha
ra frowned, puzzled. Why were the dogs so quiet?

  ‘The police are on their way,’ said Louise from behind them. ‘I think you should just wait and let them handle it, Barry. There’s no point you getting hurt.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ he agreed.

  For ten minutes there was no sound from the shed but an occasional jingle of saddlery. Then blue flashing lights lit the surrounding paddocks and a car tore up the gravel road towards the house. Hex and Petunia went berserk. From the shed came an explosion of metal and concrete. The shed door slammed.

  Barry ran across the yard to greet the police car. ‘They just took off!’

  Don Bigwood leapt from the car and followed Barry into the darkness, gripping a torch. Voices yelled and twigs snapped. Streaks of light waved about in the bushes. Louise snapped on the verandah lights.

  The men were back at the house within five minutes. Barry held his palms in the air, panting. ‘They were like ninjas.’

  Don Bigwood shrugged. ‘Disappeared into thin air.’

  Hex whined from his kennel. ‘Shut up, you useless dog,’ Shara growled at him.

  Again, she found the shed in a mess. One of the saddles had been knocked to the floor and the chaff bag had been gone through again. This time, however, the door to the feedroom was also ajar. Oats and barley carpeted the floor.

  ‘Looks more like an animal has broken in to get at the feed,’ said the sergeant. ‘One of your cows, maybe.’

  ‘But we shut the doors with two barrel bolts,’ said Shara. ‘No animal could open that.’ She looked around her. ‘There are no droppings. A cow would leave poo everywhere.’ She began to pick up her stuff, frowning.

  After the sergeant left, Barry re-bolted the doors. He made sure the windows were closed and secured them with timber rods. ‘Let’s just hope they’ve found what they’re looking for and will leave us alone from now on.’

  Shara brought her saddles back to the house, just to be on the safe side. Before she turned off her bedside lamp for the second time that night, she thumbed a quick message to Jess.

  Shed broken into again, meet @ bakery early.

  The next morning Shara sat in the main street outside the bakery, inhaling the delicious aroma of hot bread. Hex and Petunia panted lazily at her feet. She looked at her watch: six-thirty. Maybe Jess wasn’t working today. She had already earned enough to pay for her new filly, Opal. Maybe she could no longer cope with selling stodgy white carbohydrates and had cut back on shifts. Shara pulled her phone from her bag and thumbed another message:

  Where r u???

  She decided to go in and buy a lime-green doughnut while she was waiting. At this hour of the morning, they’d be hot from the fryer. She could scoff it before Jess arrived to lecture her about the evils of artificial colourings and high GI.

  A bell ding-a-linged as Shara pulled open the flyscreen door and stepped into the yeasty warmth of the bakery. She smiled hello to Jess’s boss, who was busily bundling up two large bags of bread for a customer. ‘Hi, Chan. Jess working today?’

  ‘She should be here any minute,’ answered Chan. As she spoke, the man she’d been serving tucked a bag under each arm and came away from the counter. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a lean face that seemed somehow familiar. Nudging the door open with his elbow, he squeezed out. There was a high-pitched yelp from outside.

  ‘Hey!’ Shara yelled after him. ‘Don’t kick my dog!’

  ‘Put the mongrel on a leash,’ muttered the man, without turning around.

  Shara’s mouth formed a huge, incensed O. Hex and Petunia were totally well-behaved. Who was this out-of-towner to tell her what to do with her dogs? ‘Big man,’ she said sarcastically, loud enough for it to feel good, but not quite loud enough for him to hear. ‘Feel good to kick a defenceless animal, does it?’

  ‘It probably does, to him,’ said Jess, appearing behind her. ‘He’s one of the Conneman brothers.’ She threw her bag down behind the counter and tied an apron around her back.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I get all the gossip in here. He’s been coming in and getting the day-old bread to feed the horses. Yesterday he parked the Bred to Buck truck out the front.’

  ‘I thought they’d left town.’

  ‘They must have some unfinished business.’

  Shara felt an uneasy gnawing in her gut.

  Jess took a crate of hot bread and carried it across the shop to arrange the loaves neatly on the shelves. ‘So what happened last night at your place?’

  Shara filled her in on the night’s events. ‘Sergeant Bigwood thought it might be a cow or something trying to get at the feed, but the door had two barrel bolts holding it closed.’

  ‘Well, that guy was pretty big,’ said Jess, tilting her head out towards the street, as a small red car eased out of its parking spot and rolled down the main street.

  Shara squirmed at the thought. ‘How would he know who I was or where I lived?’ She paused. ‘Do you think he might know I was part of the protest?’

  Jess shrugged.

  ‘Hex would’ve barked if it was a person.’ Shara wished she could feel a little more certain of that.

  ‘You’re probably right. Unless it was someone Hex knows.’ Jess paused. ‘It wouldn’t be Corey, would it? It was a bit weird how he came over to your house the other day.’

  ‘He came to tell me the brumbies had been rescued,’ said Shara. ‘He was being nice.’

  Jess arched an eyebrow. ‘Sure?’

  ‘No.’ Shara couldn’t hide her uncertainty. When she thought of Corey’s easy smile, she was sure. But when she thought of his rodeo career and hard-handed girlfriends, she became decidedly unsure.

  5

  THAT NIGHT, Shara lay in bed with her hands gripped tightly around her dad’s giant spotlight. In the paddock beyond the window, two round-bellied cows lumbered down the hillside. More followed, breaking into a jog along the steep track that carved through the property. Had something disturbed them?

  Shara stared hard into the darkness. Then, somewhere closer to the house, there was a low groan. Hex growled. Then silence.

  Slowly, carefully, Shara slid the window open and listened. She heard a low whine and then a grunt. It didn’t fit the usual night-time noises. Shara was startled to see a large dark shape near her brother’s dead cars.

  She tiptoed hurriedly to her parents’ bedroom door. ‘Dad,’ she whispered. ‘There’s something moving down in the front yard. It’s really big.’

  ‘Well, there’s your burglar,’ he said, pushing aside the quilt and reaching for a robe. He made his way to the door. ‘Got your torch?’

  Shara flicked the spotlight on and cast sweeping beams of light over the front yard. Hex immediately whined. Petunia let out a small yap. There was a rustle of bushes. ‘There!’ she hissed. ‘By the shed!’

  Two red eyes glimmered in the torchlight. Then something groaned and dropped heavily to the ground.

  The verandah lights snapped on.

  ‘A horse,’ gasped Shara.

  Startled by the sudden light, it scrambled to its feet and staggered sideways, placing itself back in the shadows of the garden, with its legs wide apart and its head low. Streaks of light from the verandah played on the silvery spangles of its mane.

  But it was in trouble. It stood with flaring nostrils before lowering itself to the ground and rolling wildly with its legs in the air.

  ‘It’s a colt! He’s got colic or something,’ said Shara, running down the front steps with bare feet. ‘We need a halter!’

  ‘You keep an eye on him, love. I’ll get one from the shed.’ Barry disappeared into the darkness.

  Shara approached the horse slowly. ‘Easy, boy.’

  The horse lay on his side and looked up at her, then curled his neck to look at his stomach.

  ‘I don’t know who undid the barrel bolts for him, but he’s been into the feedroom,’ said Barry, reappearing with a halter. ‘There’s hay and grain everywhere.’

  ‘N
o wonder he has a bellyache.’ The horse groaned as Shara pulled the halter over his ears. ‘It’s okay, boy, I’m not gonna hurt you.’ She gave him a gentle pull and urged him to walk. ‘Better get up and keep moving, otherwise your gizzards’ll get twisted.’

  She pulled at the colt’s head with all her strength until he struggled to his feet. He took one reluctant step after another and then pushed his head into her tummy as though begging her to stop. A long moan rumbled from his chest.

  ‘Oh, you poor thing,’ she said, noticing the patches of sweat on his neck and over his eyes. ‘He needs a vet, Dad.’

  ‘Can’t it wait till morning?’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll still be alive by then.’

  The colt crumpled to the ground again and threw back his head, thrashing his legs. Shara pulled at the rope. ‘No, no, you have to get up!’ She had the awful feeling that he might never rise again if she let him stay down. ‘Dad, this is an emergency!’

  Barry groaned. ‘Why do these things always happen in the middle of the night? Don’t horses know that vets charge double to make midnight calls?’

  ‘Mum, help me!’

  Louise pulled on some boots and ran down the steps in her robe. ‘You pull his head. I’ll get his tail.’ She grabbed the horse’s ratty, half-chewed tail and gave it a good firm yank. He put one leg out in front of him and lifted his head. ‘That’s it, come on,’ encouraged Shara. ‘Give him a kick, Mum.’

  Louise gave the horse a few encouraging nudges on the rump with her foot. ‘Come on,’ she said, in a no-nonsense voice. ‘Up!’

  Shara was massively relieved when the colt struggled to his feet again. ‘I’ll try to bring him into the light,’ she said, dragging him closer to the house. Under the verandah’s spotlight, the colt was so thin that his ribs stuck out along his back. His shoulders were flat and triangular and his flanks sank away from his hip bones. ‘He’s an RSPCA case. Look at him!’

  Barry let out a sigh and headed up the steps to the back door. ‘One big vet bill coming up.’