“In spite of meddling by our government!” she heard. “In spite of the war being waged against our sport and our breed! War against our very way of life!” he shouted. “We take PRIDE in this victory! PRIDE in our glorious breed! PRIDE in our trainers and owners and riders!”
With each shouted PRIDE the audience roared louder, screamed more shrilly, whistled.
“Victory lap!” the announcer bellowed to more roars.
She wrenched her body against the ties, beat her feet against the bale, trying to push it away. She hurt. She wanted to go home and forget she’d ever learned anything about walking horses. She’d write whatever Frank wanted her to write, never argue with him again. She missed Gulliver. What would become of him and her horses if she didn’t make it out of this?
She heard Dale and Eudora nearby, their voices muffled by the arena’s cacophony.
Then she heard Eudora ask, “What about our friends in the hay?”
“Unfortunate accident awaits. Spontaneous combustion. Nasty.”
Friends? Billie wondered. Her arms burned, the pain increasing moment by moment. She shut her eyes and clenched her teeth. A bale thudded onto the pile above her, then another. Someone was out there, stacking them on her.
“Please!” she cried into the tape that covered her mouth. “Help me!”
In her mind she saw the filly Hope burned to death, limbs contracted, face contorted into a scream. Billie saw the empty eye sockets and smelled burned flesh.
“No! Please!” But no sound escaped her gag.
She felt the thuds of hoof beats approaching, slowing, stopping. Sylvie said something she couldn’t make out either, but she heard the girl’s excitement.
“We’ll go to the inspectors,” Dale said. “Now!” and the hooves retreated.
Billie pictured Sylvie and the horse waiting for their turn with the inspectors, Sylvie leading him in tight circles to the left and right around the traffic cones, leading him away then back toward the veterinarians. She imagined them bending to examine his legs, palpating for tenderness, flinches, pain. Looking for scars while Dale stood close by, cigarette dangling from his lips.
“Can you hear me?” Charley’s voice. He coughed, ending in a long, gasping retch.
“Yes!” she shouted, silently.
“They got me in here with you,” he said. “They put something in my inhaler. Rompun, I think. Can’t breathe. I can’t get out of this hay pile. Maybe you can. Don’t you forget what I gave you. My last words. Remember.”
She listened for more, but there wasn’t any.
She tried to struggle loose, but they’d tied her tighter this time. This time she wasn’t going anywhere.
“All okay with the inspector?” she heard Eudora ask.
“Close call,” Dale answered. “But we got through.”
“I smell gas.” Sylvie’s voice.
“I got some from maintenance for the ATV,” said Eudora. “It’s almost out. Let’s go celebrate.”
“Where’s my dad?” Sylvie asked. “And Bo?”
“We’re meeting them at the Road House,” Dale said. “Charley’s already loaded the horses, but the trailer’s got a flat, so he’s going to change it and catch up with us.”
Billie didn’t want to die like this. All the times in her life she’d cut and burned herself on purpose, the times she’d nearly killed herself working for Frank, or riding horses, or at home alone in drunken despair. Not like this, murdered in a fire in the type of place she loved most of all, a barn with horses, dying to the sound of her screams and theirs.
Dale, Eudora, and Sylvie left, their excited voices drifting away. A door closed. She was alone. Waiting. She didn’t know for what. Someone to come back with a lighter, a match.
The door opened.
She stopped struggling to listen, waiting for the sound that would start the inferno.
Silence. Then a grunt. Another. And another. Someone was moving the bales. She tried to scream again, roaring into the tape that covered her mouth.
“Is someone there?” a male voice.
Light poured onto her. She shrank away, terrified that it was fire. Fingers probed her hair, her head, snagged her ear, grabbed at her shirt.
“Oh my God!”
Bo ripped the tape from her mouth and cut the baling twine that bound her.
“What happened?” he asked over and over. “What happened? I came back for my fiddle and smelled gasoline.”
“Go,” she said to Bo. “I won’t tell them you were here.”
“You sure?”
She nodded.
He backed away, eyes wide and wild. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!”
“You need to get out of here now, Bo. Run!”
He turned and darted for the door, slamming it behind him.
Billie reached for Charley between bales. She touched his arm, fumbled for his wrist, and felt for a pulse. None. She changed her grip and tried again. Nothing.
Voices sounded outside. The door rattled. Billie crouched behind the stacked hay, hoping that whoever entered wouldn’t notice it had been tampered with. The hay hook Bo had used to pull the bales off of her lay on the floor. She picked it up, ran her hand from the tip of the red metal hook to the wooden handle.
When the door opened, Eudora and Dale were arguing.
“He was turning us in,” Eudora said.
“He wasn’t the first bastard to try. This will take care of him—and her.”
Billie prayed that one of them would leave. She didn’t know how she’d manage to take them both on.
“I’m going to settle up with Dom,” Eudora said.
As if in answer to her prayer, Billie heard the door close.
“So long,” Dale said.
For an instant, she didn’t realize he was talking to her, addressing her where he thought she lay trussed in the middle of the hay. He struck a match. She smelled it, heard the whoosh of flame as it caught. Fire raced along the bales as he lit them. The room became an instant inferno, the air vicious as venom. The hair on her face singed. Dale stood between her and the exit. His eyes widened with surprise when he saw her. She had to get out.
“MOVE!” She couldn’t hear her own scream over the fire’s roar.
Dale stepped backwards, toward the door. He would step out and close it with her inside, she knew. Ignoring the searing pain in her shoulder, Billie swung the hay hook with both hands, bringing it down as hard as she could, burying the point in his neck. He grabbed at it, fighting to pull it out, and slammed her into the wall. She braced her feet against it and pushed off, hurling herself into the flames, dragging him with her. With both hands, he clutched his neck, trying to pull the hook out. She let go and ran.
Outside, Billie collapsed retching, gasping clean night air. Eudora charged past on her way back into the barn, shrieking her husband’s name. Fire wrapped around the door, crawled up the wall. The roof exploded in flames.
Chapter 30
BILLIE TURNED THE truck and trailer into the fairgrounds in Deming, New Mexico, parked beside an empty arena, and got out with Gulliver. They both stretched. She felt like she’d been sitting for days. Well, she had. Last week, she’d driven from Arizona to Tennessee in three days with her trailer empty. But the trip home with her new horse was taking a lot longer. Every three hours she’d pulled off the freeway to unload Jazz and lead him around to stretch his legs. She offered him water, timothy hay, and if there was grass, she let him graze. Every afternoon she stopped for the day, using Google to find fairgrounds with stalls and arenas where she could turn him out to roll and to run if he wanted to. So far he hadn’t wanted to, but he had the opportunity.
She’d reach home by tomorrow afternoon, pull into the ranch, and settle Jazz into the corral she used to quarantine incoming horses. From there, he’d be able to see Starship in his corral, and the other horses in theirs. In a few weeks, she would move him so he’d be across a fence from Starship. A week or so after that, she’d turn them out together.
She walked to the back of the trailer, wincing as she lifted and straightened her arms to open the door. Her rotator cuff still bothered her and she might need surgery to repair it. Most of the bandages were off her arms and hands but the skin felt hot, as if it were still burning. Scars had formed, but the doctors said they would lessen over time. She didn’t know if they’d be permanent or if they’d fade to nothing. The ones on the insides of her elbows tugged and hurt when she tried to straighten her arms, but these too the doctors said would improve. She was sick of being told how lucky she was to have escaped the barn fire that claimed three human lives. No horses had died in it, but the owner, the trainer, and the head groom of Angel Hair Walkers had been incinerated.
Jazz stood tied in his trailer, his black rump to her, his face turned over his shoulder as far as the rope allowed, looking at her. Talking softly, she sidled in beside him until she could reach the rope’s slipknot and undo it.
Carefully, she backed him out, letting his hind legs take the brunt of the descent onto the ground. He paused with his front feet still on the trailer floor then slowly lowered them outside, one at a time, easing his weight cautiously onto each in turn.
While Gulliver chased a prairie dog into its hole, Billie let the big horse graze some parched grass, offered him a drink from his bucket, then tied him to the outside of the trailer.
From the back of the truck, she got her kit with his bandages and dressings and set it on the ground. Kneeling, she unwrapped his legs and examined the gauze beneath the wraps. It was still a seeping mess.
When she told Doc she was going back to Tennessee to buy Jazz and bring him home, he told her that horses who had been sored took a long time to clear the chemicals from their bodies. Now she knew what he meant. She wondered what he’d say when he came to examine his new patient tomorrow evening after she got home, what changes he’d make in the treatment. She could only hope that Jazz’s prognosis would be better than the filly’s had been.
With fresh gauze, she cleaned the wounds, re-treated, and re-wrapped them. She injected Jazz with his evening dose of pain medicine. Through it all, he stood immobile and trembling, still afraid he’d be battered, shocked, or burned if he moved. It was going to take a long time for him to trust her or anyone else. If he ever did.
She led him to the arena and turned him lose. Without his huge stacked shoes, she supposed he could run, but he never did. He stood rock-still, tolerating her while she petted his neck. When she backed away, he sighed his relief. She closed the gate, and he slowly walked toward a patch of weeds that looked like they might once have been grass, and nosed them.
Frank had called while she was driving and had left a message on her cell. She pulled a folding chair from the back seat of the truck and set it up in the cool wind where she could keep an eye on her horse and terrier, who was now chasing tumbleweeds. She grabbed the bag with her knitting in it, a shawl for herself this time, and told her new phone to dial Frankly.
Frank answered, “Where are you?”
“Deming.”
“Where?”
“Southwestern New Mexico.”
“Pretty?”
“Pretty flat. I’ll be home at the ranch tomorrow.”
“How’s the horse?”
“Quiet.”
“Is that good?”
“Not this kind of quiet. His legs are still weeping chemicals. He’s still in pain.”
“You can tell?”
She nodded.
“Billie?”
“I can tell. When will my piece run?”
“I have a proposition for you,” he said.
Billie watched a dust devil form about a quarter mile away. The miniature tornado swooped and spun, ducking left then right. As it approached, it grew, lifting trash cans and wooden pallets into the air along with sand and dirt. It roared past Jazz, missing him by inches. He didn’t seem to notice.
“Billie?”
“Sorry, I was watching a dust devil.”
“Really? What’s that?”
“What’s your proposition, Frank?”
“I’ll make you a contributing editor here at Frankly. You’ll do four pieces a year for me, and I’ll give you a raise. Three of the pieces I’ll choose. You can choose one.”
“I don’t know, Frank.”
“Think it over.”
“I’m not coming back to New York.”
“No one asked you to. Anyway, I’m getting married.”
Vertigo made the chair tilt beneath her. She grabbed the truck’s door handle and hung on.
“You’d be inconvenient,” he said.
“Married?”
“I want you safely where you are.”
He hadn’t answered her about when the article would appear. Didn’t he know? Of course he knew. She mustn’t pressure him. He’d made her an offer. Could she say no? She had spent the money from the article within forty-eight hours of receiving the check. She’d paid Sam and Josie for watching the ranch and feeding the horses while she was gone. She’d paid Josie extra for taking care of Gulliver. She’d bought a load of hay and grain. There was enough money left over to repair the leaking roof. Instead, she had phoned Simeon. “Is that horse I rode still for sale?”
It was crazy, she knew. The horse was nearly two thousand miles away and probably crippled. It would cost a fortune to buy him, get him, treat him, care for him. But she was driven by guilt that she’d ridden him.
“I’ve about sold him already,” Simeon told her. “Mary Lou Collier wants him.”
“How much is she paying?”
“Aw, I’m headed back to Minnesota, Billie. Jazz didn’t win his class so I’m practically giving him away. Hell, I am giving him away.”
“Twenty-five hundred,” Billie offered. “I’ll trailer out and pick him up in a few days. Just have to arrange for help here then I’ll come. Less than a week, okay? Deal?”
So the money was gone. She might get the reward for the information Charley left her. She had turned the thumb drive over to the Humane Society, copying it first. She didn’t know if the reward would materialize, or if it did, when.
She’d spent her last dollars on another horse.
“I could use the work,” she told Frank.
“Write up some ideas for me,” he said.
Maybe when she got home she’d be able to think clearly. She’d ride out on Starship, across the mesa and up into the mountains, Gulliver at their heels. Maybe one day she’d be able to ride Jazz. She’d take him up into the foothills at dusk and turn him to face south so he could see the lights moving along the interstate. All her horses liked that. While Gulliver flopped down to pant, Jazz would stand watching traffic, his heart beating under her bare calves.
Ever since Dale and Eudora tried to kill her in the fire, she’d expected her sleep to erupt into nightmares about Dale’s death, but so far it hadn’t. She still felt the hook sink into him, felt her arm rip it through his flesh, saw his eyes when she shoved him into the fire. But she didn’t feel regret or guilt or shame. Not anything except rage. Not yet anyway.
After she hung up with Frank, she used her phone to Google nearby yarn shops. She found one along her route that she might go to later in the morning. The brief stop would give Jazz a rest, and she could add to the yarn she’d collected on this trip—just a few hanks she picked up at local stores. At first they were more for souvenirs than for projects, but recently an idea for a saddle blanket for Jazz had formed in her head. So far she had one skein from Tennessee, and two from east Texas bought in a shop where she heard the new country music sensation Bo Collier on the radio.
The peaks of the Florida Mountains captured the final rays of the setting sun. A three-quarter moon rose in the darkening sky. Billie gathered Jazz’s hay in her arms, stuffed it into his hay
net, and carried it into the arena to give to him. He turned away from her. She left the hay on the ground and walked to the rail. Looking for Gulliver, she didn’t notice Jazz come to stand beside her until his shoulder touched hers. She raised her hand and scratched his withers. Together they watched the dog and the tumbleweeds in the wind.
The End
The Scar Rule Page 23
