answer? She’s dead.” He looked across the table. Of course he didn’t want Vernon to accept that answer. He wanted Vernon to convince him there was another answer. Any other answer. Any other.
“The thing is, Maury, people don’t respond logically or reasonably most of the time. I mean it. Hell, look at what I do for a living-”
But Maurice was following his former train of thought. “Don’t tell me that in a year and a half, she couldn’t have escaped.” He felt angry now, angry not so much at Vernon as at Nell.
“I’m not telling you. That’s what I’ve been saying: maybe she didn’t want to.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. Only, remember, they had Aqueduct.”
“You’re not saying she’d stay on account of a horse?”
“I don’t know, Maurice. Nellie had an incredibly strong bond with those horses.”
There was a silence.
“The last time I saw her, she was fifteen,” said Vernon. “She’s seventeen now and, damn it, I want to see her again.”
“We may never see her again.”
Vernon shook his head. “No. She’ll walk in someday. You’ll turn around and she’ll be there.” He reached across the table and put his hand on Maurice’s arm. “You’ll see. She’ll just walk in.”
Night Rider
THIRTEEN
The girl adjusted the rifle across her back, held in a sling she had made from a leather belt. She needed to keep her hands free and the sling made it less tiring. She had taken the gun from the mudroom where they parked their guns like umbrellas. They were careless; they didn’t always lock them up, which she knew was breaking the law. She’d taken the rifle over a month ago on the night she’d finally decided to get out.
No surveillance is constant; no one’s guard is always up. They didn’t seem to have learned this: that the brief moments in which one walks to the other end of the barn or path or court, the careless absence for a cigarette or a coffee and, of course, the overconfidence that lets you relax your vigil and leave the torch forgotten on a chair. Any of those things would result in failure, would permit the jewels to be snatched, the safe cracked, the horse gone. Those things, plus faulty reasoning; that after the first horse was stolen, the belief that the thieves wouldn’t come again, at least not again so soon.
But they had come the very next night, before there was time for the owner in the big rambling house to draw breath, much less to get surveillance in place. Now there were two guards, one to watch over the Thoroughbreds, one to guard the barns where the mares were kept. It had taken the owner a while, taken the third theft to alert everyone to the possibility that the Thoroughbreds weren’t the target. That wasn’t as dumb as it sounded since these mares would be of no value to anyone.
From the deep shadows of an empty stall, she watched the guard, an overweight, cigarette-puffing man who paid less attention than he should have. She’d been watching for an hour, waiting for him to leave his post. He did. He rose from his stool outside the stall, yawned, scratched his lower back. She knew his habits by now. He was a smoker and, as there was a rule against smoking here in the barn, he had gone down to the end and stepped just outside. He took the torch with him in case the lights should fail; they’d had a way of doing that lately.
She was dressed in black-black jeans, black wind-breaker, gloves, boots, everything. Around her head she wore a dark scarf to hide her pale hair, so pale it was almost the color of the moon and might glimmer if it wasn’t covered. In this costume, she couldn’t have found herself in the dark. That thought was rueful.
She had been coming here also on nights besides the ones in which she took the mares; she needed to study the effects of the surveillance, the habits of the two guards. It was almost easier with the two of them because they kept each other occupied. They liked to talk, to joke around. This was funny. Instead of increasing the watch over the horses, the owner had actually diminished it.
One guard for each barn, but not one for each end. The thinking would be that it wasn’t a diamond necklace the thieves were after, but horses, and a horse moving about made noise.
That’s why it had taken her ten months, working with them nearly every day, to get the mares used to her and her touch, and different touches sent different directions to them. The important thing was to get them to move silently. They were so unused to moving at all and even the small amount of freedom Nell had bartered for did little to make them active, for most of them couldn’t recall what freedom was like. There was little recollection, though, as nearly all of them had been foals of mares held in the same captivity, and they had been among the few chosen to take the place of the mares that died. That was how it worked. That was probably the way hell worked, too. So for ten months, during the time she was allowed to unfasten the rubber cups and take them for exercise, she had tried to school them in backing out of their stalls in silence and to move in silence. They were given only three signs to learn: her hand on the muzzle meant silence when they moved around; a touch on the right shoulder meant a turn to the right; on the left shoulder, to the left. It did not take the horses long to get used to these signals; the hard thing was that there were sixty horses to teach it to. But she managed with most of them.
It didn’t matter if the men-the stable lads, the groom, the trainer, Mr. Mackay-who worked there saw her with the mares because they’d have no idea there was a grim plan behind her quiet treatment. Mr. Mackay and Kenny, the head stable lad, thought her exercising these horses was ridiculous and liked to tell her so. Nell thought Mr. Mackay should never have been let within a hundred miles of a horse. If she saw him take that whip to Aqueduct, she’d kill him. Her horse was not mistreated, was treated fairly well, actually, because they used him for stud. But she wondered why, since Aqueduct’s real name obviously couldn’t be put down in the book.
What surprised Nell was that, apparently, no one employed here talked about the mares off the premises. At least Bosworth, the assistant trainer, had told her it was worth their jobs talking about it.
“How in hell,” Bosworth said, “you talked that woman into letting you take care of those mares I can’t imagine.” He seemed to enjoy it, though.
“I bargained.”
“
“My freedom.”
He looked astonished. “
“But I could get out of here without much effort. No matter how much all of you are supposed to be watching me. After a year and a half-well, you can’t watch all the time. She knows that. I could run.”
Bosworth thought this over. “Guess you could at that. Surprised you haven’t.”
