When Ty and the rest of the fire crew left, Billie dragged herself to the casita, Gulliver trudging beside her. She wanted a drink. Several.
Images of the fire swarmed over her like hornets. She paced the tiny casita. Gulliver watched her from the futon, his chin on his paws. She opened the door, stuck her head out into a swarm of moths and bugs, beetles, and gnats. She slammed it shut, pulled her cell phone from her hip pocket, and just stared at it. She stood at the table in front of her computer and let her fingers jitter across the keyboard. She looked out the window, checking for flames.
She perched on the edge of the futon and set her laptop on her knees. When the Google page loaded, she typed in soring, waited a few seconds, watching her hand tremble, as the little blue circle spun on the screen, searching.
The page loaded with a string of small photos. She clicked on each in succession, opening views of horses’ scarred legs; huge shoes weighted with dozens of nails; champions staggering around the arena at some show in Tennessee, blue ribbons in their bridles. The same things she had seen at the show down the road at Rio del Oro.
Beneath the photographs were dozens of pages of articles and posts on this topic. How, if soring was so well-known and well-documented, could it even exist? Why wasn’t it being prevented?
Billie glanced at the by-line on the first article and saw it was by a former senator. He wrote about introducing the Horse Protection Act in 1970 to stop soring and lamented that, decades later, owners and trainers continued the despicable practice. He ended by calling on citizens to stop going to walking horse shows and to boycott the companies that support them.
Beneath the article, she read comments from people who agreed with the senator, and others who defended the rights of individuals to treat their animals any way they wanted, damn the government and animal rights meddlers.
Billie shut the laptop, and sat staring at the window frame, its old wood rotten in places, nailed up decades ago. Dust furred the upper strip. The butted joints were pocked by termite-chewed areas, miniature battlefields. She needed an exterminator.
The sill, worn clean of paint, was littered with pens, ChapStick, pennies, a pottery shard she had found in the barnyard when she was moving in, and a rusted shoeing nail. She sighed. Anything for a diversion.
Soring. The word was a euphemism for torture. It conjured aching muscles, bruises, even anger—I’m sore at you. The word must have been chosen to hide the practice rather than revealing or defining it.
She closed her eyes, trying to imagine the world these horses and owners lived in, beyond the world of barns and shows to the community that supported them, flouting the laws that prohibited their every action.
Only one trainer had ever gone to jail—not for long, but that first jail sentence indicated that the world of unparalleled and unquestioned freedom could be shrinking. Whistle-blowers who once complained ineffectually now had some clout. Things would feel tighter, Billie imagined, claustrophobic.
Who were the people being squeezed by this?
She made herself a cup of coffee and turned back to the Mac. She loved research, following a twig that turned into a branch, a limb, a tree, a forest. When she straightened her back, it was two hours later. Gulliver scratched at the door, wanting to go out. She was late feeding the horses.
She didn’t know the name of the forest, but she had identified some of the trees. Dale. Eudora. Richard? Maybe Richard.
Finding his name on a list of trainers and owners who had been cited for soring violations, she felt sick with disappointment and anger. How could she have found him attractive? How could she have flirted with a man who would do something like this? Even though she hadn’t known, shouldn’t she have sensed something?
She shut the computer. She was finished with him. Done. Luckily things hadn’t gone any further than just a little flirting.
She hiked down the hill in the dark to feed and check on the horses. It was hours since Ty had buried Hope but the smell lingered in the stagnant night air. He must have brought Billie some hay from the Depot because she found a dozen bales of alfalfa under a tarp beside the feed shed. She should call and thank him, but she needed to get away. She couldn’t stay on the ranch another second. She climbed into the truck, Gulliver jumped into her lap, and they headed out. Her truck tires chattered over the washboard road, their rhythm accented by some loose metal banging beneath the motor.
As she drove, she worried. If she locked the casita door, anyone who wanted to get in could open a window. She hadn’t closed them so that air from the swamp cooler could circulate and cool the space. And if she had closed them, they had no locks anyway. If she had shut and latched the gate to the barnyard, anyone who wanted to get in could just go around it. The fence on either side was a drift fence that petered out in a few yards. Living so far out in the country, she never thought of intruders, at least, not until this week. People rarely came down the road to visit, and most of them were her sparse clients wanting to visit their boarded horses. They called ahead. Solitude was its own protection.
She wondered who had been there. What sick son of a bitch had set the fire? And had he, or she, known the filly would die in it?
CHAPTER 10
IT LOOKED LIKE a big night at DT’s Bar and Grill. The
