“Hey!” he objected.
“Just for me,” she promised. “Where’s Sylvie?”
“With Dale. Getting her horse ready.”
“How can you reconcile being against soring and having your daughter ride sore horses?”
“Is this an interview?”
“I guess.”
“Well, I can’t reconcile it. And I can’t do anything about it. Sylvie is almost eighteen. I can’t stop her. I may not agree with what she’d doing, but she’s too grown up now for me to control. Doesn’t mean I sanction it. She’s my daughter and I love her.”
“And the rest of your family?”
“I can’t speak for them. We all grew up soring horses. I’ve quit and I’m speaking out against it. That makes me unpopular with my own kinfolk. But I’m doing what I think is right. And so are they.”
“They think soring is right?”
“Let’s say, they think it’s their right. Billie, can we quit this interview and just be ourselves for a while? It seems I’m on stage all the time now. Press and media interviews and then all of it all over again. I’d like to just be with you, not your editor, not your iPhone, not your notebook. Can we?”
“Can you tell me how Alice Dean is?”
“She’s home now. She’ll be fine.”
“I’m glad. Yes, we’ll just be us.”
“I’d kiss you if I could.”
She watched his lips as he spoke, imagining them, remembering them and the shape of his earlobe, the taste of his neck.
“Stop it,” he grinned at her.
“Can’t.”
He leaned forward to whisper, “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it last night. Can I see you later?”
His breath fluttered the hair at the nape of her neck.
“I’m working,” she said.
“You have to stop sometime. Call me later.”
“Maybe,” she said, aware of glances their way. “I’ll be sure to watch Bo’s performance.”
Billie finished her Coke and tossed the paper cup into a trash bin. She descended a flight of metal stairs to the ground floor where the horses were prepared to enter the arena. She caught a glimpse of Sylvie leading her horse through the massive metal double doors into the enclosed inspection area. Billie tried to follow, but a guard told her it was closed to the public. She pulled out her press pass.
“Inside then,” he told her. “But you have to go up to the landing. No one on the floor except competitors, their teams, and the inspectors.”
She climbed the stairs to a balcony crowded with reporters. Bored by what seemed to be nothing going on below, they were chatting with each other, telling stories of other assignments. Billie apologized her way to the front, where she could see over the rail.
Below her a half dozen horses were being led in tight circles around traffic cones. The horses tripped and stumbled over their padded shoes. Each horse was attended by a handler or two and a trio of inspectors who palpated and swabbed their lower legs and hooves.
Dale stood beside Sylvie, holding her horse’s reins. From where Billie stood overhead, the horse looked profoundly miserable. He squatted on his haunches and shifted his weight from one front foot to the other. As the inspector bent to examine the horse’s legs, it pulled away. Dale extracted a cigarette from his pocket and lifted it toward the animal’s eye. The horse froze and remained motionless during the rest of the inspection.
Billie expected someone to comment on what she’d seen, the horse intimidated into immobility, cued by the cigarette—just like in the video of Dale that Charley had given her.
The babble of reporters gossiping continued around her. A fan roared. The inspector said something Billie couldn’t hear. No one was going to mention the cigarette.
“He’s stewarding that horse with a cigarette,” she yelled over the voices, into the fan’s roar.
Dale’s head swung toward her. Sylvie looked up. And so did the inspectors. And the other competitors. Immediately Dale started talking to the inspectors, making not-me gestures.
Billie spent the next half hour watching, marveling at what the inspectors seemed to ignore. Then she wandered off to find the restroom. As she left the toilet, she was startled when Eudora stepped quickly up to her. The older woman stuck out her hand, and as Billie reached to shake it, she grabbed Billie’s hand and pressed something hard and round against her ribs.
“Stay close to me,” Eudora said. “Or I will shoot you.”
CHAPTER 27
THE GUN—BILLIE HAD no doubt that it was a gun—prodded her foreword, but if she moved too fast, Eudora tightened her grip and pulled her back. They left the arena and made their way outdoors through a drizzle past throngs of people to Dale’s barn.
Eudora shoved Billie into a heavily draped stall where horses were taken for the final prep before going into the show ring. Someone slapped a thick wad of cotton over Billie’s eyes, tied a rag over that to completely block any light, and dug her phone out of her pocket.
“You are a serious problem, my dear.” She recognized Dale’s voice. “I’d hoped we could manage you—for your own good as well as ours. But that’s not working out.”
He grabbed her wrists and yanked her hands behind her back. Pain sizzled through her shoulder as he wrenched her rotator cuff. She felt it tear, a growing agony filled her world, worse and worse. She screamed. He slapped his hand over her mouth then hit her on the side of her head, one sharp crack.
She awoke to the stench of urine and manure and pain that nearly overwhelmed her. Her head hurt, and her shoulder screeched. When she tried to move, she couldn’t. The effort exploded in her rotator cuff, and her effort to suck in air to scream alerted her that she was gagged as well as bound and blindfolded. Claustrophobic panic made her struggle. She fought herself to stillness, made herself barely inhale, made herself
