THIRTY-FIVE
Vernon poured himself a finger of whiskey and went over to the mirror, waiting for Nell. In the time she’d been here, a gloomy afternoon had changed to an iridescent evening. The lights of streets and buildings and houses glittered; St. Paul’s dome was bathed in moonlight, and he wondered, How could a day that started as woefully as this one end up the way it had?
“Everything fits,” said Nell behind him, adjusting items that needed none, buttoning a button on the Harris tweed jacket and then unbuttoning it, the same with the white silk blouse. “Even the shoes.” She held up a foot. She smiled. Actually, she beamed.
To Vernon she looked not only happy but also gorgeous. “Perfect” was all he said.
“I’ll bet this is a good restaurant.”
“Would I take you anywhere else?”
“No. But there’s probably a dress code.” She looked unsophisticated and uncertain.
“They always hand me a tie at the door. Listen, if the cut of that coat can’t get you in, we don’t want to go. Come on.”
The maitre d’ at Aubergine raised no question of coat or tie. He wouldn’t consider questioning Vernon Rice; Vernon was too good a customer and too big a tipper. They were sitting in a quiet corner while Nell read the menu.
“Oh, God, I just realized I haven’t had a decent meal in weeks!” She put her hands to her face as if ashamed to admit it.
“Then you’re in luck. The food here is unbelievably decent. I expect you’re a vegetarian?”
“Well, yes, I guess I am.”
“They do something with mushrooms here that’s just short of psychedelic.”
“Order for me, will you?”
He ordered for both of them, looked at the wine list, asked for a wine which made the sommelier extremely happy. Then Vernon shoved his silverware around and leaned on the table. “Okay, now, continue talking.”
Nell did, through a first course of a vegetable pate, a second course of green salad and a third course of the heavenly mushroom dish. She talked little about herself, a lot about the mares. “She had this literature-pamphlets, folders, estrogen studies. I read about all of this. An American firm has had the patent on a drug called Premarin forever. It takes hundreds of thousands of horses to meet its quota.” Her fork, like a tiny silver plane, appeared to be writing in air. “The way these mares are roped means they can’t move more than a couple of inches any way. They can’t lie down. Nine and ten months pregnant and they can’t lie down.
“But what’s this Hobbs woman expect to get out of urine collected from only sixty mares? And I’m also curious about how she could have kept this going for several years with no one-I mean the animal-rights people-finding out about it? What about the people who work at that stud? They don’t talk about it? I mean on the outside?”
Nell shook her head. “They must not. One reason is they’re not really interested; they don’t care. Another could be they want to keep their jobs.”
Vernon listened, taking her in all over again, like a climate once visited and never forgotten.
He pushed his plate aside and leaned toward her. “You want to rescue these mares more, I imagine, than you want to see this Hobbs woman behind bars.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way, but, yes, I do. She didn’t treat me badly. Why?”
“Because you’ve got a bargaining chip. Sixty horses in return for keeping Ms. Hobbs out of the nick.”
She thought about that. “But that wouldn’t be up to us, would it? My abduction’s a police matter.”
Vernon liked that “us.” “Not entirely, but what you have to say about her will go a long way. She’ll put up the ignorance defense: ‘I never did know who this girl was or that she was kidnapped-’ You know.”
“Is it possible she really didn’t? That it’s the truth?”
“I suppose it’s possible she wasn’t the one who’d orchestrated the kidnapping, but she had to have known something. I can imagine the hell they caught for letting you get away. Although she seemed to have relaxed the rules on that to the point of-” He paused. “I could talk to Hobbs. She, and, possibly, the others who work there, they’re easily bought, is my guess. I could buy the horses out of the stables.”
“There are fifty-four there now, Vern.”
He ignored that. “Could Arthur keep them?”
“I think so. I’ve had the ones I took in an empty barn and I know there’s at least one more empty barn. It might mean building another. But the land-well, it’s certainly big enough. I could personally watch over them.”
Vernon had put his fork down a while ago. The duck, which he had shoved to one side, was, as always, perfect; he just wasn’t hungry.
She looked at his abandoned plate. “Aren’t you going to eat that?”
“You’re a vegetarian.” He smiled.
THIRTY-SIX
They stayed up most of the night, talking and not talking, their silences comfortable. Vernon had tried once again to get her to tell Arthur and her father that she was here and all right and would be home soon. Vernon pictured their response: joy, pure and unalloyed with the anger they certainly could have felt because she hadn’t told them before, hadn’t said she had been living on Ryder property for three weeks. For that was three weeks of grief they could have been spared. Vernon said as much.
Nell protested: “I can’t. I want to get those mares out of there first. Do you really think Dad or Granddad would be concerned over the fate of a bunch of horses they had no connection to? I mean, in all of their relief to get me back?”
“Probably not, no.” Vernon wondered if there wasn’t something else preventing her, some completely irrational shame over being taken in the first place and then not immediately trying to escape. He couldn’t pin it down. He swirled the brandy in his snifter, watching it lap the glass. “Okay. I understand that, Nell, but how would telling your father or grandfather jeopardize that, if you could convince them those mares are important to you?”
“For one thing, they wouldn’t be thinking up ways to get them out, which is what is needed and is what you’re doing. Dad wouldn’t do that; he and Granddad would have Cambridge police at Hobbs’s doorstep before you could turn around.”
“Yet… isn’t it police we
“In the time it took to get a warrant, Valerie Hobbs could kill the horses. If she hasn’t done it already. I don’t think she has, though; it was just a threat.”
