The Grave Maurice

Hadn’t she said something like that a couple of years ago to Vernon Rice? Being around horses, she had said, “gives a person poise.”

Vernon Rice. She wondered what he was doing right now (except making money, of course). He had just walked in when I was currying Samarkand. A total stranger, a stepbrother.

Nell looked again at the white patches of stars and felt comforted.

He just walked in.

SIXTEEN

Aqueduct needed to run. She could feel his frustrated energy through her legs on his flanks and see it in the way he shook his mane and looked ahead as if the world were a row of hurdles he knew he could jump. She knew he wanted to jump that string of walls that zigzagged across the fields for almost half a mile. They called them Hadrian’s walls. It was the way she’d been taken that night, and the man who’d taken her had been a very good rider because some of those walls were dangerously high. She’d never been able to jump all of them. But Aqueduct could; Aqueduct loved the walls.

At two a.m., an hour when no one would be out, she rode the horse to the main buildings of her grandfather’s farm. It took a half hour, so she wasn’t surprised that the outlying barn in which she’d stabled the mares was no longer used.

They could have galloped along this road between the barn and the main Ryder property, but Nell wanted to save Aqueduct’s energy for the training course. She wanted things to appear to be back to normal, or at least to have the illusion of normality, the comfort of the familiar, no matter how small.

It was lovely in this wood in winter; it always had been along this old road, no matter what the season or the hour. Iridescent with frost or thin coatings of ice, the small twigs broke and fell. But Aqueduct, never a skittish horse, did not start or stop. With the moon itself like ice, as hard and bright as she could remember, the scene was a landscape of dreams. But we’re always dreaming, she thought, images floating upward when the mind is off guard. There’s always a dream going on down there, some part of the mind that didn’t care what was going on up here. She pushed a low-hanging branch out of the way, ducked under it, came out on the narrowing path to the stables and house. Her mares needed hay; she planned on hooking a bale of it onto the saddle if it would hold, maybe half on each side. She could walk beside the horse if the load seemed too heavy.

When they neared the barn, she hesitated, pulling back on the reins. They would remember Aqueduct-Samarkand and Beautiful Dreamer and Criminal Type. She thought they would remember.

“Come on, Duck,” said Nell as she slipped down from the saddle. She walked the horse to the first row of stalls, afraid almost to look, afraid she would see unfamiliar faces in every stall, improbable, in the relatively short time she’d been gone, yet she felt that time to be fatal, to be her fault, as if her absence had been deliberate, as if she had forgotten them and, having forgotten, had nullified them. Such a fancy was arrogant, she supposed, as if her absence could make such a difference, as if it were a magic act, that she could throw up a veil that would make them disappear at will.

But the horses were here and if they weren’t sure of her, they knew Aqueduct soon enough. It had always made her feel good to watch horses greeting one another. Aqueduct stopped at a stall and then went on to the next as if looking for someone. In the frozen stillness the only sounds were the soft nickerings. The horses were far enough from the house that no one would hear.

Yet it was like walking back into a past that no longer belonged to her, as if she’d mislaid it, left it deliberately behind and could no longer lay claim to it. She had forfeited it by not coming back. You wake up one morning and everything’s changed. Or you go along thinking you can take a step back to find the ground is gone behind you. You get careless and profligate with your time and your feelings, and then find out it’s too late.

Two years ago she would have said that she was happy; what she now knew was that happiness was irrelevant.

She stopped at each of the stalls, Samarkand’s and Beautiful Dreamer’s, and Criminal Type’s and Fool’s Money’s (where she thought of Vern and smiled), stroking the neck of each, getting in return what she hoped were (but wasn’t sure of) signs of recognition. Of course they must remember in some small way, some instinctive way. She could not be romantic or sentimental about it. She found the hay, small bundles of it.

In the tack room, she took her favorite saddle from the bench, thinking it wonderful the saddle was still there, as if everything connected to her then, her absence could have rendered nugatory. Then she took the too large one from Aqueduct’s back, adjusted her own saddle on him, then secured the hay to it. She hoisted herself up once more and walked Aqueduct across the horse yard, away from the barn and along the bridle path past the house. The house was at some distance; she stopped and gazed at it.

It was not that she could not imagine her father’s sadness, and her grandfather’s, and Maurice’s-somehow especially Maurice’s-desolation. But she couldn’t return yet, not quite yet.

They reached the training course and she leaned down and opened the gate. When they walked onto the track, a feeling of exhilaration washed over her, and she felt it in her horse, too. She wished that Maurice were here with his stopwatch, measuring time not by seconds but by halves of seconds. Split seconds, photo finishes. Faster than drawing breath. But he wasn’t.

Aqueduct shook his head and lowered it; she could feel the tension bulk his shoulders. She had rarely done this; racing was more Maurice’s job, not his job, but his pleasure. They had jockeys for this. She untied the hay and let it drop to the ground. She rose slightly in the saddle, leaned forward, hugged the horse’s flanks with her legs, gathered the reins and in the dead dark whispered, “Go, Duck!”

The horse leaped forward so quickly she thought he’d leave her behind. Then she forgot everything but the horse, the reins and the rushing air; it blew over her like a cowel. Nothing she’d ever felt had been this fast, at least nothing she’d felt a part of. The track was a mile long. It was around the second turn that she saw something lying in their path but it was too late to stop. Three seconds after she’d seen it, Aqueduct jumped it as if it were a low hurdle.

SEVENTEEN

Black-haired and black-coated, the woman lying on her side looked as if she’d been thrown down, a rider thrown from her horse. Nell squatted down and took out the penlight she always carried. Its light accentuated the woman’s porcelain skin, so perfect that it reminded Nell of pictures she’d seen of geisha-flawless faces covered with white powder. On her left hand was a gold wedding band; her hands were too soft, her nails too manicured to belong to a woman who spent much time around horses.

Nell could assimilate these details not because she was unmindful of the woman’s death itself, but because noticing details had been much of what kept her alive for the past two years and eventually permitted her to escape. She had developed a lot of the objectivity and emotional insularity of a detective or reporter. She stood, heart thudding, wanting to get up on Aqueduct and gallop away.

She didn’t know much about fixing the time of death, little about rigor mortis, but she did know it came and then passed. This woman seemed completely relaxed, so that could mean she was killed either very recently or some hours before. Killed how? Nell ran the small light over the form and saw nothing. Had she been stabbed? Shot? Strangled? And it had to have been in the last eight hours because there was