“I don’t suppose you know a pediatrician?” Richard asked Billie.
“Josie might know one. Josie and Sam, my neighbors? Want me to ask them?”
“Please. Just in case.”
Alice Dean rested her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes as he carried her up to her room.
Billie reached for her phone.
By the time she hung up with Josie, she had a list of three pediatricians with practices nearby, and the phone numbers for a half dozen urgent care clinics as well as for most, if not all, of Tucson’s major hospitals. She handed it to Richard when he came back.
“That’s great. Thanks, and to your neighbors. I hope we won’t need these, but they’re good to have.”
“Josie raised her own kids,” Billie told him, gathering her things to leave. “She and Sam were outfitters up north, and they had foster kids. So she’s pretty organized about things like this.”
“I see that. You don’t have to go, you know.” He pulled another bottle of wine from the fridge. “I remember meeting Josie, but I don’t know her. Tell me about her.”
Billie hesitated then hopped up to sit on the counter as he filled her glass. “Great neighbors. She’s maybe a little critical of what I do and how I do it. She’s got a lot of her own experiences and a lot of opinions.”
Richard chuckled, setting out some little cakes on a plate and sitting opposite her. “But you do like her.”
“I do. I wish she’d been my foster mother.” It slipped out, and she was sorry the minute she said it.
“You were a foster kid?”
“It’s in the past,” Billie snapped. “I said no more questions. How about you, Richard? Tell me all the rough things from your childhood. Tell me the really, really bad stuff, the stuff that left you with scars.”
She saw that he was taken aback by her edginess, and she regretted it. Not so much because she’d made him uncomfortable, but because she had accidentally revealed too much about herself with her outburst.
“There isn’t any,” he said. “Really not. Just what I told you about my mother. That was one of the great things about living where we did. The walking horse world is pretty tight-knit. It’s a big family.”
“Of perverts.”
“What? No!” Richard said. “Listen to me. We looked out for each other and each other’s kids. We went to school together and to each other’s houses during the week. On weekends we all went to the Saturday night horse show and rode together. Sunday we went to the same churches, then to each other’s houses for a barbecue.”
“Sounds ideal,” Billie said. “Except for the part about what you all were doing to the horses you rode. And you do know that people who abuse animals tend to abuse children?”
That was a dirty shot, deliberately misrepresenting studies by flipping them to say that adults who hurt animals hurt children, when she knew it was abused children who were likely to hurt animals.
“When my mom got sick, Eudora and Dale took over for her so I was always taken care of. One of the big weekend shows got turned into a charity event to raise money for Mom’s care. That’s the way it is there.”
Billie rolled her glass between her palms, struggling with herself. Carefully, she exhaled. “I need to go,” she said.
“I wish you’d stay a while longer.”
“Believe me,” she snapped, “you don’t want that.”
“Billie, I don’t understand what this is about. I thought we were having a good time, but you seem furious about something. What aren’t I getting?”
“You really want to know?”
Richard nodded.
Billie emptied her glass. “Okay. This might not make sense to you, but here it goes. You and your friends had everything good…that’s what you’re telling me, right?”
“Pretty much,” he agreed.
“You had—have—money and land and horses and each other. And all the good things that go with that. Right?”
“Pretty much right.”
“So, what have you done with all this good shit? You’ve tortured animals. What fucking sense does that make?”
“I know,” he said.
“You don’t know, Richard. But I know. To answer your earlier questions, yes, I was a foster kid. I was beaten and raped, and when I ran away I was brought back for more. But before all that happened to me, my father was a trainer. He despised other trainers who mistreated their animals. My parents were killed in a car crash…”
“Jesus, Billie.” He reached toward her, but she pulled away.
“Jesus yourself, Richard.”
“Is that why you cut yourself?”
She pushed her wine glass at him for a refill. She should just shut up. The wine was fueling her outburst, as it had that night at DT’s after the fire that killed her filly, but it felt so good to be angry. She felt clear and strong and right.
“Why I did that is my own business,” she said. “For now, you just need to know that I am going to do the best job I can writing about these horses of yours.” She set her glass on the counter and stood up, stumbled and caught herself. “Your friends have to be stopped. Someone has to speak up for the horses. Introduce me to people I can interview back in Tennessee. I’m asking for a guide through the whole mess there. Think about it. I’m going home.”
She took a staggering step, and he was at her elbow, supporting her. “Stay,” he said.
Suddenly she was exhausted and depressed. She didn’t want to drive home. She felt exposed by her self-revelations, stupidly, glaringly ugly. As if she’d covered herself with glow-in-the-dark paint and turned out the lights.
“You’ve had too much to drink. I have a guest room. No one will bother you, and you can drive home later. Whenever. Make yourself comfortable. I need to see to Alice Dean.”
She didn’t want to stay at Richard’s but it seemed the right thing to do. She nodded. “Fine. Where’s your guest room?”
He showed her to a small, tidy room off the kitchen with exposed log walls,
