“Well, you’re at one now.” He extended a mustardy hand. “I’ll be happy to put those up for you, though, ma’am.”
Billie handed the flyers to him. As she walked away, she felt eyes on her back, heard the kids’ silence as they watched her. Once, she had written an article about an evangelical church with a charismatic leader, a church so guarded and selective it amounted to a cult. She had the same feeling now as she’d had back when she’d left the church’s meeting house. Watched.
She should be heading home. It was almost time to feed the horses their supper. Of the nine she cared for, eight were her own and one she boarded for a client. Gulliver also needed to be let out of the house for a run before he got desperate.
Billie turned to see the boy with her flyers walk to the trash bin and throw them in.
He and his friend headed off between a row of barns whose entrances were decorated with embroidered banners. Folding chairs arranged in conversation groups on ersatz emerald mini-lawns matched the banners’ colors—red, royal blue, kelly green, and gold. Card tables served as bars stocked with diet sodas, bottled water, and booze; but no one was hanging out.
The first rays of sunset turned the whitewashed barn walls shades of tangerine. Shadows striped the ground. Billie looked around, wondering where to go, what to look at, what to look for. Nothing, probably. Horse shows were horse shows. Maybe she was just inventing a story worth following. But, still, where were the horses? She had to at least look before she left. She moved in closer and worked her way down the row of barns farthest from the arena, buildings so quiet they seemed almost deserted, hoping no one would notice her.
The door to the last barn stood ajar. She stepped quickly inside, the step more a reflex than a considered choice, and stood still, listening, smelling. The building reeked of dry manure heated by the long day’s sun. A tiny breeze pushed through the opened doors at each end, and she was grateful for it. After baking all day in the early summer sun, the temperature inside must have been close to 120 degrees.
She didn’t hear anything that alarmed her, so she wandered down the aisle, making herself look relaxed, checking out the empty stalls on either side. Some had been raked bare, others left uncleaned, mounded with dried manure and strands of hay and straw. She counted twenty-five stalls to a side, fifty altogether.
At the far end of the barn, the stalls had been enclosed, walls built, and doors hung to make tack and storage rooms. In one, a gray metal bookcase stood empty except for stacks of old magazines and newspapers. A dinged-up Bakelite radio sat unplugged on a gray metal desk. Beside it, an alarm clock lay face down. A calendar two years out of date hung askew from a nail. She opened the door opposite the one she had come in and stepped from the sweltering building out into the evening’s cooler air.
She prowled between the buildings, trying to see into the stalls, hoping to spot some horses. But the windows were shut tight with shutters closed over them, which was strange because in the heat all the doors and windows should have been left open to give horses and humans a breeze. It didn’t make sense. Horse shows were public events, implied by the word show. All her life she’d gone to horse events every chance she got—shows and rodeos, gymkhanas, barrel races, team penning, and horse races. Billie had never encountered anything like this.
Halfway down the row, she stepped up to the double doors of the barn with vehicles parked outside. A huge photo portrait showed an elegant older woman standing between two men—one white-haired, with a goatee, dressed in a maroon riding suit; and a man in work clothes who held a brush and lead rope in his hands. Cautiously, Billie pulled the door open.
Inside, she smelled horse sweat, human sweat, and fresh manure. She heard a horse snort, hooves on dirt. Almost blinded in the dark aisle, she stood still, listening, waiting for her eyes to adjust. She heard some sort of engine, voices indistinct beneath the roar. Just as her eyes got used to the gloom, the door at the far end of the barn opened, and figures passed through it as horses and people left. The door closed, and the barn went dark again. She squeezed her eyes shut then opened them.
There was nothing to see, just an ordinary aisle in a barn like hundreds of barns in Arizona. This barn had wooden walls, stall doors scalloped by decades of horse teeth, wheelbarrows heaped with filthy straw parked at intervals, and shovels and mucking forks leaning against the plank walls nearby.
Thinking of her own hungry horses and uncomfortable dog, she turned to leave.
“Quit!” She heard a man’s voice, annoyed, resigned. “Quit, damn you.”
She crept toward his voice. A stall door stood open. His back to her, a man crouched, shirtless. His skin had the texture of parchment, thin and wrinkled under striped, threadbare overalls. Billie recognized him as the man in work clothes in the portrait outside.
He squatted beside a palomino filly, just a yearling, judging by her stumpy foal tail. The groom wore latex gloves covered in a glistening greenish gel he must have scooped from the tub beside him. One of the filly’s lower legs was already covered in the stuff. As he tried to smear some on the other leg, she stamped and pulled away.
“QUIT!” He yanked on her lead rope. When he reached toward her, she backed away, tossing her head, her eyes rimmed in white.
Billie couldn’t stop herself. “Can I help?”
He twisted toward Billie and rose stiffly from his squat, his hand drawn back into a fist.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m Billie Snow. Who are you?”
“Charley. I work for Dale Thornton. He’s
