Over her head, an air conditioner groaned, dribbling water into the dirt. The office door, closed against the wind and late afternoon sun, finally opened. Two girls and two boys in polished boots, sleek breeches, and white shirts scuffed past her. She lifted her head to watch them and listened to their excited chatter as they passed.
“Wait!” Billie called. When they turned, she held out a flyer in her raised hand.
They looked at her, uncertain. She might be a panhandler, a beggar, or a crazed religious zealot about to proselytize salvation and the end of the world.
“What do you want?” asked one of the girls. Her blonde ponytail protruded beneath her bowler hat. Expensive-looking sunglasses covered most of her face above a pointy nose and cleft chin.
Billie could tell that there was almost no chance these kids would be helpful, but exhaustion drove her to at least try. “I’d like you to post this flyer for me. It’s for my place. I board horses. I rehabilitate injuries, and I take care of sick horses.” She was talking too fast, babbling like an infomercial. But she couldn’t stop. “I do some rescue work too. And there’s great trail riding at my place.”
The girl said, “This is a gaited horse show for Tennessee walking horses. We are totally not into trail riding.” She turned away, ponytail swinging.
“But wait!” Billie called, as if she were pitching hair dye on the Home Shopping Network.
The girl looked back at her as the kids moved away. “You won’t get any takers during this show.”
“So when’s the next one?” she called.
“Check the board,” the girl yelled back. “Duh!”
Billie felt thirsty, the kind of crazy thirst that came from hours in 105-degree heat with the humidity below ten percent. There was no moisture left in her body. She stood, feeling light-headed. At the far end of the office building, she spotted a refreshment stand with SODAS hand-printed on orange poster board taped to the side of a freezer. She pulled a dollar bill from her pocket and headed that way.
“You got water?” Billie asked the wizened man behind the white folding table.
He opened the freezer, rummaged, brought out a frosted plastic bottle, and handed it to her. “Dollar.” It sounded like, dolor, Spanish for pain.
She handed him the bill.
“You ride here?” His accent was south of the border.
She shook her head. Between gulps of icy water, she showed him her flyers. “I’m putting these up,” she said.
“There’s boards inside the barns. But they won’t let you inside unless you’re one of them.”
“One of who?”
“Them who shows these horses that are here at this show.” He leaned closer. “They don’t let you inside the barns when they’re here with their horses. Not like other shows here where it’s all open. There’s some barns that people can’t go into at those shows, but they’re just roped off. These walking horse people close and lock the doors. I’m here for all the shows, selling food, selling drinks. This one…” He shook his head.
Billie looked over his shoulder to the nearest barn. If she hadn’t been so focused on drumming up business, she would have noticed the closed doors and shuttered stall windows that ran the length of the buildings. There were other oddities too. Normally at a horse show, there were horses everywhere. Horses being walked, groomed, saddled, and ridden. But at this show, she didn’t see any. And, except for three or four snazzily dressed riders lolling on chairs in lengthening patches of late afternoon shade, the place looked and felt deserted.
“So, why are the barns closed?” she asked him.
“Stuff they don’t want you to see.”
Stuff they didn’t want her to see?
Fine. She had enough going on that she didn’t need to dig into the secrets of these strangers. She had given that up when she left New York and investigative journalism. No more snooping for her. No more digs into the archaeology of human wickedness. Now her life was her ranch, her horses, and her pitiful, dwindling bank account.
At least that was what she tried to tell herself, but her fascination with secrets was ingrained—immediate, profound, professional. Secrets had paid her bills. For nearly a decade, her life revolved around secrets she exposed for the magazine Frankly. She’d even married Frank, its founder and editor. They had eaten secrets for breakfast, digested them for lunch, and regurgitated them at dinner. Stuff they don’t want you to see tasted better than caviar. She forgot the flyers, forgot the bills. She was transported back to her old life, searching for secrets buried like ticks in flesh.
“What kind of stuff?” she asked.
Before he could answer, another couple of riders in their mid-teens wandered up on foot, wallets in hand. They reminded her of Mutt and Jeff as they ordered hot dogs and cheeseburgers, chips, corn on the cob, kraut, chili, french fries, onion rings, and an assortment of condiments. Billie’s stomach growled so loudly the taller boy guffawed. She assembled a smile on her face and managed not to slap him.
“Hey,” she said. “I’d like to get these posters up on the message boards in the barns.”
She sensed him hesitate so briefly it was almost imperceptible.
“Give them to me, ma’am,” the short boy said around the onion rings he’d stuffed into his mouth. “I’ll put them up.”
The wall she was running into made her all the more determined not to back off. “I can do it myself. Just tell me where to hang them.”
“You can’t go into the barns,” the tall one said.
“I’ve never been to a show where I
