She slid out of the truck at Richard’s, suddenly aware of the wet spot on her thighs where she’d held the bottle as she drove. Richard came out to greet her, wearing faded jeans and a softly worn denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
“Unpasteurized.” She held out the milk. “Might be organic. Who knows? Came from a cow I know down the street.”
“I’m glad you came.” He took the bottle from her, his fingers grazing hers.
The door swung open, and Billie saw Sylvie with a teenage boy behind her, taller than his sister, but younger by a couple of years—the boy Billie had watched ride at the horse show. “My daughter Sylvie you’ve already met. And this is Bo, my son.”
Billie smiled and said hi to them.
“Put this in the fridge, will you, Syl?” Richard asked.
Sylvie reached for the bottle and read the label. “It’s from the feed store,” she said. “Tuberculosis.”
Billie felt her smile tighten.
“You’re a total bitch,” Bo said. “I like this kind of milk the best, with cream on the top.”
“Whatever.” Sylvie swanned her way up the porch steps and into the house, letting the screen door slam.
“I got you some eggs too.” Billie reached back into her truck and handed them to Bo.
He opened the carton and looked inside. “All different colors,” he said. “Those really are the best kind.” Then he sang a snatch of the old Beastie Boys song “Egg Man.”
“Shut up, Bo,” his sister yelled from the house. “You sound like a cow in heat.”
He grinned at Billie.
“Come in,” Richard said.
Inside the house, log walls were whitewashed from the baseboards up to the vaulted ceiling. The plank floor gleamed, and the chairs and sofa were made from driftwood laced together with rawhide.
Billie felt as if she had known each cow whose hide stretched over a pillow.
“Did you kill and skin these?” It was out of her mouth before she even knew she was going to say it.
He blinked at her. “They came with the house. I bought it furnished a couple of months ago.”
So this wasn’t really his taste yet. She was relieved. The house felt like the architectural equivalent of a frozen dinner.
As if sensing her disappointment, he said, “I have added a few things. Mostly practical stuff to the barn and pastures. But that’s mine.” He pointed toward a small Navajo rug that hung on the wall, woven in earth tones with deep red arrows arced in flight above a forest of stylized pine trees.
She ran her fingers over the tightly woven wool. “It’s gorgeous!”
“I bought it when I was about Sylvie’s age. I had no idea about its history. I just thought it was pretty.” He showed her to a glass-fronted cabinet. “I found these just lying around here. Mostly from the corrals near the barn.”
Pottery shards, a couple of arrowheads, a mano, and part of what had been an axe blade lay on a shelf.
“I’m learning about the tribes who left these behind,” he said. “Their lives, how they hunted and farmed, what they ate. It’s fascinating.”
“Did this interest you in Tennessee?”
“Not so much. It’s all new to me here.”
His enthusiasm made her grin.
Richard offered her a glass of wine, which she accepted with more gratitude than she hoped showed. He grabbed a Dos Equis from the fridge door, opened it, and perched on a stool, elbows on the counter. The kids had disappeared out the kitchen door. Billie heard them laughing.
“Before we eat, we need to talk,” Richard said.
Billie settled onto a stool that faced him. “Okay.”
He slid his fingers around the beer can’s lip, staring at the tracks he made in the condensation, watching small droplets roll to the bottom.
“You were right about me,” he said. “Don’t look surprised. You did your research and you found out about me. I’ve sored horses.”
“I’m surprised you admit it.”
“I don’t have a choice, do I? I grew up in Tennessee. My family raised walking horses and fox trotters and spotted saddle horses. We trained and showed them. That was how my folks made a living.”
“How could you…?”
He raised his hand asking her to wait.
“Listen to me. Soring started in the 1950s. Horses who walked big started to win big. If that’s what it took… So my folks learned how to do it, to win.”
He looked at her, his eyes troubled and serious.
“They taught me how to do it, and I did it. Thought nothing of it. We all did it. It never meant anything. We all got caught from time to time. We’d get a ticket and that was all. No fine. No punishment, certainly no jail time. Getting caught was just another rite of passage. Once you’d been written up, you were a real trainer.”
He looked at her to see if she understood. Billie wished she could pull out her pad and take notes, because as he talked, she saw everything he said in quotations in her article. She was mentally underlining for emphasis, restructuring for clarity.
“And?” she prompted.
“I married another trainer, Mary Lou, the mother of the kids. We ran a really topflight barn. Won a lot. Had wealthy clients. Sylvie was born. Then Bo. They grew up in that world too.”
“I saw them ride at the show.”
“Right,” he said. “Sylvie loves Big Lick horses, and she’s a gifted rider. She’s got a big future in this business.”
Billie rocked back off the stool and stood. “You taught her to hurt horses?”
Hearing the anger in her voice, Richard looked down at his hands on the counter. “We did, me and my wife. We taught her—and Bo—everything they’d need to know to become successful.”
Billie finished her wine and set the glass on the counter, trembling. “You son of a bitch.”
He looked up at her. “I know. I know. But then I quit.”
He’d quit? Billie had a dozen questions for him, maybe a hundred. While she was
