A Taste of Blood and Ashes

by Jaden Terrell

  “It’s okay, fella.” I stood up and went to him, caught a faint whiff of kerosene. I rubbed the three sworls on his forehead. A complicated personality, if the old-timers were to be believed. A horse that would guard his heart until you proved yourself worthy.

  I slid my hand down his neck and scratched his withers, feeling sick and drained. I knew now how he could have been scarred one day and not the next. The horse I’d seen at Trehorne’s, the one with one forehead sworl, the one Junior had called a clown, was an ambassador, the animal potential clients saw when they stopped by the barn, beguiled by the sign that welcomed visitors 24/7. Meanwhile the real Rogue’s legs were soaked with turpentine and mustard oil, the soles of his feet bruised or scraped raw.

  Chest burning with a sudden rage, I glanced back at Hap and said, “Why are you showing me this?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “You want me to stop them.”

  “I don’t know what I want,” he said. “I just know this can’t go on.”

  “Did Junior start that fire at the Underwoods’?”

  He rubbed his face with his hands, a washing motion. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

  The rumble of a truck engine and the crunch of tires on gravel turned his attention. The Trehornes’ rig pulled up beside the stall, and Sam and Junior Trehorne climbed out.

  Junior crossed his arms and watched me with suspicious eyes as Trehorne looked from Hap to me and growled, “What are you doing here?”

  Hap held his brother’s gaze. “Just talking about Zane’s accident. How it might have happened.”

  Trehorne tossed Junior a halter and lead rope, and the younger man pushed past me and slipped the halter over Rogue’s ears. Rogue tensed, deepening the worry lines around his eyes.

  “You’re not showing today?” I said.

  Sam Trehorne said, “The important part is over. And there’s a lot to do to get ready for Shelbyville.” He opened the back gate of the trailer.

  I must have moved to stop them, because Hap’s hand closed on my shoulder, holding me back while we watched them load Rogue into the trailer.

  42.

  Khanh was sitting on the front steps of the trailer when I got back, chopsticks in her hand, a bowl of sticky rice with peanuts on her lap. A steaming cup of coffee sat in the grass beside her feet.

  I passed her by and went to the corral, laid one hand on Tex’s withers and another on Crockett’s, breathed in the clean, sweet scent of them, and tried to purge the smell of kerosene.

  “Something happen,” Khanh said. It wasn’t a question.

  I told her what I’d learned about Rogue, glossing over Rhonda’s late-night visit. When I finished, she gave me a knowing look. “You play with fire,” she said. “Be careful, not get burn.”

  Before I could answer, Eli’s Dodge pulled into the camp and puttered to a stop beside his camper. He stepped out carrying a McDonald’s bag and a matching cup, raised the cup in greeting, and headed over when he saw us. He was wearing his contacts again, his eyelids red and weeping.

  “God.” He rubbed them with a thumb and forefinger. “I don’t know how people get used to these things. Gran always said they were just vanity, and now I get why.” He held up the bag and said, “McMuffins. I brought extra, if you want one.”

  Khanh shook her head, held up her bowl.

  “Not hungry,” I said.

  “You look upset,” he said. “See that? Those are my journalistic powers of observation.”

  “I just got back from Maggie’s service.”

  He shook his head and took a sip from his cup. “Terrible waste. I probably should have gone. I thought about it, but then I thought it would be too sad. Just thinking about it reminded me of Gran’s funeral.”

  “Recent?”

  “Couple of weeks. You know . . .” He rubbed absently at the stubble on his chin. “Maybe Maggie’s killer was there. Don’t they say a lot of killers go to their victims’ funerals?”

  “Sometimes the funeral, sometimes the cemetery, sometimes both. One guy we busted visited his victim’s grave every year on the anniversary of her murder.”

  “Romantic,” he said dryly.

  I gave him a quick recap of Maggie’s memorial service, leaving out the part about Rogue.

  I also didn’t tell him what I’d learned from the woman at the Sextant. It would only have humiliated him. He had the right to try and earn his place there, and if he could do that and still vindicate his grandfather, more power to him.

  He jotted down some notes and went back to his trailer to eat his McMuffins. I watched him go, then turned to Khanh. “I’m giving Billy forty bucks to take you out to lunch after you finish at Lori Mae’s. By the time you’re done, the show here will be over and you can come and pick me up.”

  She gave me a shrewd look. “You always try get rid of me, boss man.”

  “Just a precaution,” I said. “It would be a shame to lose you just when I’m getting so fond of your coffee.”

  43.

  I breathed a sigh of relief when Billy’s Vincent van Gogh van pulled out of the campground, the top of my sister’s dark head just visible over the back of the passenger seat. With Khanh safely away, I fed and watered the horses, then took two Tylenols and went inside to shower. My side was bruised from armpit to hip, a mottled mass of purple. I turned the water on as hot as I could stand and let it beat the knots out of my muscles, then dried myself and dressed in clean jeans and a sea-blue shirt my ex-wife had given me. She’d said the shirt complemented my eyes.

  I tucked the Glock into its waistband holster and the Tomcat at my ankle and told myself I hadn’t chosen the shirt with Rhonda in mind.

  I stopped by the Underwoods’ trailer and, when no one answered my knock, wound my way back to the arena. I passed Gerardo longeing Tesora in the warmup ring, saw Trudy waiting in the inspection line, then pushed inside where the morning classes were just beginning. The crowd was thin and seemed subdued, perhaps due to the early hour, perhaps out of respect for the dead.

  I scanned the bleachers for Rhonda without success, then told myself the pang I felt wasn’t disappointment.

  Down near the ring, Zane sat in his accustomed place, head bowed, picking at the buttons of his shirt. Carlin sat beside him in a rhinestoned blouse, her show chaps turned up so they didn’t drag the ground. She searched the crowd, brow furrowed, then waved when she saw me and headed over.

  “It was a good service,” she said. “I’m glad you came.”

  We’d come a long way since the day I’d picked my way through the ruins of their barn. But then, a lot had happened since then.

  “I’m glad too,” I said.

  I must have looked distracted, because she said, “Did something happen?”

  “Hap took me to see Rogue this morning. I hadn’t really had a chance to see him since we’ve been here. I smelled kerosene.”

  A quick, sharp sorrow flashed across her face. Then her eyes hardened. “He’s not my concern.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “About what happened to Zane. I’ve been making it too complicated.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it. We know Owen was killed, probably that night. What are the odds Rogue would go bat-shit crazy that same night?”

  “It doesn’t matter what the odds are. It happened.”

  “Unless it didn’t.”

  I glanced out over the arena, where a group of teenage girls rode in a novice youth class. She followed my gaze, calm on the surface, her small fists clenched at her sides.

  I said, “Rogue’s not a vicious horse. I wondered from the first if someone might have used a drug or buzzer to make him attack, but Doc said it would be almost impossible. Too many variables, he said. So I let it go. But I wasn’t asking the right question.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. What was the right question?”

  “What’s the easiest way to make it look like a horse has attacked someone?” I didn’t wait
for her to answer. “You hit them over the head with a bat or a shovel and beat them half to hell. Then you drag them into the horse’s stall, splash some blood around. Maybe you even spook the horse then, get some actual hoof prints.”

  “Break his spine,” she said softly. “Oh, God. My poor sweet boy.” A dawning horror crept across her face. Maybe she was thinking about soring and the stories Zane had told her of the Trehornes, or maybe she was thinking of the research she’d done for the TASA booth. “I have to get him back.”

  She knew, she had to know, that Trehorne wouldn’t give Rogue up without a fight. That if he considered an offer at all, it would be many times what Trehorne had given for him. Even with the insurance settlement, the Underwoods didn’t have that kind of money. Zane’s accident had cleaned them out.

  But those were practical matters, and Rogue’s fate was a matter of the heart.

  Carlin looked at her watch. “My phone’s on the charger, but I have fifteen minutes before I show. I’ll make it a quick call.”

  “You’re about to go on. It can wait until after your classes.”

  “It’s been a year,” she said. “I have to get him out of there.”

  “It’s been a year. A few more hours aren’t going to make a difference.”

  “I know, I know. I’m being silly, but they make a difference to me.”

  “The show’s over. They won’t do anything to him today.” The defiant chin and the steel in her eyes said this was not negotiable. I held out my hand. “Give me your keys. I’ll go get your phone for you.”

  “I’ll go,” she said. “You’re still moving pretty slow.”

  “I could run,” I said. “Running doesn’t hurt as much as some other things.”

  That brought a laugh. “I don’t want to know what other things, do I? No, you stay here with Zane. I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

  She hurried toward the exit, and as she pushed through the double doors, I saw her break into a trot. Zane, watching from the railing, raised his eyebrows, and I went down to explain the latest turn of events.

  “ROGUE DIDN’T DO THIS TO ME?” he typed. “WHY CAN’T I REMEMBER?”

  “Do you remember being trampled?”

  “NO.”

  “Then why would you remember not being trampled any better?”

  I watched his face as he reframed his understanding of his accident. Tears welled, ran down his face. The mechanical voice said, “ALL THIS TIME I’VE BEEN THINKING, WHAT KIND OF HORSEMAN GETS TRAMPLED BY HIS OWN HORSE? I THOUGHT I DID SOMETHING STUPID.”

  “Maybe you did,” I said. “But if you did, it wasn’t trusting Rogue.”

  He lifted his hand to type a response. Then the boom of a shotgun echoed from the campground.

  There was no mistaking the sound of the shotgun blast for anything else. I spun and ran for the Underwoods’ trailer. My ribs complained as I raced up the bleachers, but the blast of the gun had sent a pulse of adrenaline through me, and I was only distantly aware of the pain. Zane’s wheelchair hummed to life, but I didn’t wait for him to catch up.

  I don’t know how long it took me to reach her. A crowd was forming, but I pushed my way through.

  The door to the trailer hung open. In front of it, Carlin lay crumpled on the ground, her blouse drenched in blood, the grass beneath her glistening red. Her shirt was torn at the shoulder, and beneath it, red meat, white bone. I glanced inside the trailer and saw the shotgun mounted on the far wall, a heavy string wound from the trigger to the handle of the door.

  I tore off my shirt and folded it. As I pressed it against the wound, someone shouted orders: somebody get Doc, somebody call an ambulance. I glimpsed Gerardo, pale beneath his dusky skin and in his eyes a terrible rage. Beside him, Eli touched his arm and whispered something to him.

  Then Doc was there, kneeling beside me. He pressed two fingers to her throat and said, “She’s alive. I don’t know how or for how long, but she’s alive.”

  The world compressed to nothing but the sound of Doc’s voice and the warmth of Carlin’s blood on my hands. My shirt was sodden with it, and still I pressed against the wound as if to somehow hold the life inside her. A siren wailed, first distant and then closer. Someone jostled me, and strong hands pulled me from her. It’s okay, we’ve got her now. When I looked up again, Gerardo and Eli were gone.

  44.

  This last violence was one too many for the spectators and the show crowd alike. Doc and I knelt in the grass, blood on our hands and the sun on our shoulders, as engines roared to life and competitors led their horses to their trailers. Zane sat nearby, sobbing silently, while Trudy knelt beside his chair and held his hand. Behind him, Eleanor stroked his hair, something that might have been triumph in her eyes. The interloper fallen, Eleanor had swooped in to reclaim her son.

  Could she have engineered the shotgun blast? I thought it through and dismissed the idea. Maggie’s death and Owen’s took this way beyond a mother’s desire to eliminate a hated daughter-in-law.

  No, this was something more.

  I looked at Doc and said, “When is it going to be enough?”

  He wiped sweat from his forehead, and his hand left a streak of blood like war paint. “You think I did this? I helped save her life, for God’s sake.”

  “It’s tied to you. To whatever you and your friends did to Tom Cole and to whatever scheme you’re into with Sam Trehorne.”

  He leaned back on his heels and closed his eyes. “Tom Cole,” he said softly. “What happened to Tom Cole, that was an accident. We were kids, just out of high school. We only meant to scare him.”

  “What went wrong?”

  He shook his head, and as he spoke, I saw it with him, smelled creek water and whiskey as they tipped the bottle to Cole’s lips, then pushed him under water. I heard Jim Lister’s voice, soft and cunning, smooth as the voice of reason: Dunk him again, boys, he hasn’t learned his lesson yet.

  “Jim wasn’t a kid,” I said. “He knew what you were doing.”

  “I don’t know what happened,” Doc said, as if he hadn’t heard. “I don’t know if he had a heart attack or if we just held him under too long or one too many times. Only the last time we pulled him up, he was limp as a dishrag. He wasn’t breathing. I tried CPR, but nothing worked. I didn’t really know what I was doing, just what I remembered from one class we had in high school. We panicked.”

  “Then Jim told you what to do.”

  “He said if we just held fast, nobody could prove we’d been there. And he was right. We staged the scene, covered our tracks. Jim hired a woman to say Tommy had been with her, drinking. And we did what he said. We held fast.”

  “Until Owen.”

  He lowered his head. “Until Owen. But I swear to God I didn’t know they’d . . . that he’d been killed. Not until you told me.”

  “Let’s get back to Tommy. You and Sam were the ones who held him under?”

  “Me and Sam. But mostly me. I don’t know what got into me.” His voice was full of wonder, and he looked down at his hands as if they belonged to a stranger. “I was scared to death, and I guess it just swept me away.”

  “You had to know you couldn’t let him live, not after you’d half drowned him.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “No?”

  “No. I never thought that. Never once.” He opened his eyes. They were wet, but his voice was steady. “I went to school, became an EMT, served in the war. I saved lives, trying to make up for it.”

  “But you can’t make up for a thing like that. So you came home.”

  “I came home.” He blew out a long breath and blinked hard. “I started my vet practice. Then one day Sam came to me and said I had to help him save his farm, or he and the others would say I wasn’t with them that night after all. That they’d lied to protect me.”

  “He blackmailed you.”

  “If you want to call it that. I could have said no, taken whatever came.” He tipped his head back, and the tear
s trickled down his temples and into his ears. “You try to balance it out, to do more good than bad. I helped make the industry better. Cited a lot of trainers, stopped a lot of folks from soring.”

  “But not Sam Trehorne. Not Jim Lister or Dalt Underwood or Eleanor.”

  “No.” His voice was soft. “Not them.”

  “Doc,” I said. “You say Tom Cole’s death was an accident, and I believe you. You say you want to do good, and I believe that too. But these killings now, they aren’t accidents.”

  “No. No, they’re not.”

  “Then the question is, what are you going to do about them?”

  He pushed to his feet, grass and dirt clinging to the blood on his palms. He looked resigned but also lighter, as if his confession had freed him from some heavy weight. “I’m going to clean up and go check on Carlin. Then I’m going to go home and hug my family. And after that . . . well, I guess we’ll see.”

  I heard something in his voice that made me pause. “This is your chance to be a stand-up guy,” I said. “I’m going to be awfully disappointed if you go home and eat a bullet instead.”

  He looked back over his shoulder and shot me a small, sad smile. “Life is full of disappointments. But shouldn’t you ask yourself the same question? What are you going to do about it?”

  “I’m going to wash my hands,” I said. “And then I’m going to talk to Junior.”

  He nodded, and I could tell he saw it too. Junior was a fire setter. It was Junior who’d threatened Carlin, Junior who’d heard Owen’s claim of seeing Tom Cole’s murder. Sam Trehorne might have pointed the weapon, but if that were so, all indications were that Junior was the weapon he’d pointed.

  The drone of Zane’s wheelchair made me look up. Trudy stood behind him, a hand on the back of his chair. I said to her, “You’ll take him to the medical center?”

  She nodded. “Mace can drive the van, and I’ll follow in the car.” I opened my mouth to protest, but she held up a hand. “Whatever bad blood’s between the two of you, he isn’t the bad guy here. He couldn’t have rigged that shotgun; he was at the stables.”