Charley.
She followed him around the shed’s corner. As if he felt her behind him, he stopped and turned. Their eyes met.
“What?” Billie asked.
Keeping his hands low, his gestures small, he waved her away.
“What?” she almost pleaded.
“Nothing,” he whispered so she could barely hear him. Then he turned and walked toward Dale’s rig.
She watched as, at the trailer, Sylvie checked her horse’s girth then mounted in a smooth arc. Like a ballerina waiting in the wings to go onstage—not in the full exaltation of performance but with a kind of inner preparation—an unconscious rehearsal of what was coming animated her body. Her back straightened, her shoulders dropped and squared, her neck elongated.
Charley walked alongside as Sylvie lined up her horse with the rest of her class, then he ran a rag over the stallion’s face and legs and over Sylvie’s boots, wiping away the minute amount of dust that might have settled during her short ride from the trailer.
Richard and Dale and Alice Dean were still there, next to the arena rails near the in-gate, the men still talking. Richard absently bent down and scooped up Alice Dean. Straddling his hip, she ran her toy horse trailer across his shoulders, up the back of his head.
When Billie approached, father and daughter smiled at her.
“So what do you think of the show, Billie?” Richard asked.
She looked around. Her barnyard was full of people who had paid to be there. The horses looked well cared for and, as Richard had promised, they were in flat shoes and not wearing chains. The arena had bloomed with riders and music. She heard laughter and applause.
But she wasn’t going to make it easy for them. “There are horses in leg wraps in one of the trailers,” she said, looking at Dale. “Why do they need leg wraps if they’re sound?”
“Which trailer?” Richard asked.
Billie pointed toward Dale’s red truck. “Dale’s leg wraps look like the wraps trainers sore under,” she said.
“Everyone here tonight promised not to fix their horses,” said Richard. “Like Groucho Marx said, sometimes a bandage is just a bandage.”
She turned from them as the next class was called and Sylvie seemed to float into the arena on her stallion along with eight other riders. Sylvie steered her horse to the rail and stopped behind her brother. Bo looked like an illustration from the pages of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” skinny in a black suit, slumped in the saddle as if barely alive. Billie watched the first few minutes of the class, certain that Sylvie had won. The blue roan stallion she rode for Dale moved out with more animation than the other horses, lifting his feet higher and faster.
When she turned away, Dale had left Richard leaning on the rail, watching his kids. She saw Charley waiting for the class to end, ready to lead Sylvie’s horse back to the empty stall in Dale’s trailer.
She eased over next to him. “Charley.”
“Stay away from me.”
“You were at my feed shed.”
“I left you something. Now go.”
“What did you leave me?”
“Shush! Get away from me,” he said. “You’ll really get me killed this time.”
Wondering what he meant by that, Billie turned back to her feed shed. She pulled the door shut behind her and hit the light switch. Moths collided with each other. She batted them away from her face and started to search. She found nothing on the tabletops, grimy with spilled horse feed and mouse turds. Nothing was out of place on the shelves or the window ledges. She felt around the metal garbage cans that held oats and grains. Nothing. She looked through the wastebasket. Nothing. At last she found it, taped to the underside of the corkboard where she collected receipts from the stores, spearing them with push pins. The red flash drive he had tried to give her before now lay in her palm.
She tucked it into her bra to look at later, turned off the light, and went back outside. Applause from the spectators rolled over her. She heard Sylvie’s name called. The winner.
CHAPTER 15
WHERE TRAILERS HAD been parked around the barnyard the night before, mounds of garbage cans and black trash bags waited in the early morning sunlight to be picked up. Billie’s face was slick with sweat that wasn’t drying. She glanced at the sky and found a single lonely cloud peeking above the mountain. Soon—today or tomorrow most likely—the rains would start. Until then, clouds would form, dissipate, re-form. The temperature would rise and with it humidity until the high Sonoran Desert felt like a Manhattan street in August.
At the far end of the arena, she saw Richard wipe his face on the back of his forearm. He had driven over before dawn to help her clean up from the show. She’d made iced coffee for them both, and they had started work just as the sun rose.
She tossed another garbage bag into the bed of the Silverado then started to tie off another one that was still in a garbage can. A couple of syringes like the one she had found in the bedding of Dale’s trailer last night lay in it, near the top. She removed them, wrapped them in her blue bandana, and carried them the length of the arena to Richard. He smiled as she approached, sweet and slow, reminding her of the moment last night with his hand on her waist, his fingers on her leg. The way his arms almost had closed around her.
She held out the cloth. “What are these?”
He looked. “Syringes?”
“What are they for?”
“Giving shots, Billie. Duh?” He grinned, playing, teasing.
“Damn it, Richard. I know that. What kind of shots? Why would horses get shots last night?”
“I have no idea. Maybe they were vaccinations.”
“Here? At a horse show?”
“I don’t know what they’re for.” He turned away from her, back to the mountain of
