“Me too,” Sylvie smiled.
The inspector nodded. “Yep, I’ll be there. High point of my year. Wouldn’t miss it.” He lifted one front leg, examined it, and set it down. When he tried to lift the other, the horse pulled away. The inspector bent over for a closer look. He glanced up at Sylvie then at Charley, shook his head and straightened. As he reached for the clipboard on the truck’s tailgate, Billie saw Charley’s hand come out of his pocket, fingers extended, thumb folded under, like a magician doing a card trick. The inspector set the clipboard back down and reached out to shake the groom’s hand.
“Always a pleasure to see you,” Charley said. “Thanks for a job well done.”
CHAPTER 3
NIGHT HAD FALLEN by the time Billie got home. She fed the horses under a thick blanket of stars, dropping flakes of hay on the ground and scoops of pellets into buckets hung on fences. Starship had his own corral, as did Hashtag, the only horse who boarded with her. The rescues she’d taken in who were now hers shared a pasture. Her small terrier, Gulliver, who viewed the world as an unruly place that could be barked into submission, ran in looping circles around her, yapping at invisible threats.
She filled the horses’ water buckets and checked that the door to the feed shed was closed and latched. None of the horses would try to escape, but Hashtag unlatched the gate to her corral any chance she got and headed over to the feed shed to try to jimmy that door open. Once, she broke into the shed and devoured so much grain Billie had had to call Doc out to treat the mare before she foundered or colicked. Since then, Billie double-checked the chain on Hashtag’s gate every night.
She climbed the hill to her casita on foot. The driveway was a tenth of a mile long and so steep that, when driving, she would put the truck into four-wheel drive. She paused to catch her breath where the driveway leveled before reaching the casita. No amount of climbing that hill seemed to make her fit enough to do it without gasping. The tiny adobe building had been built over a hundred years ago by her great grandfather for his hired hands. It was the only surviving structure on this old cattle ranch that had passed from generation to generation of Snows, ignored until Billie told her grandmother that she wanted it. When her grandparents died, she inherited it. She made a mental note to paint the front door—blue or red?—opened the door and stepped into the homey smell of hot, dry adobe.
She fed Gulliver in the kitchen then they settled onto the futon in the casita’s one room. As Billie ran her fingertips up the little dog’s muzzle, between his eyes, and down his neck, Gully sighed and rested his black chin on her thigh.
Eventually he hopped off the futon. Billie headed back to the kitchen and searched through the refrigerator. She found half of a veggie burrito that she had bought at a taco shop in Tucson a couple of days ago. It was wrapped in greasy paper and cradled in a white cardboard container. Nuked, it would do fine. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the darkened kitchen window, lit by the bathroom lights. Her hair, dark brown, almost black, was rough cut above her ears, styled by herself with the horse clippers. Her latest buzz had taken it down to her scalp, but it had grown and was about two inches long all over now. She liked it.
She poured a water glass full of white wine and made her way back to the futon. On the end table nearby the answering machine light flashed. She ignored it, leaned against the futon pillows, swallowed a gulp of wine, shuddered, and downed most of the rest fast. Images from the day floated in front of everything she did. The groom. The filly. Her terror.
Billie rose and carried the almost empty wine glass into the bathroom and set it beside the sink.
She ran hot water into the claw-footed tub that had been her grandmother’s, then her mother’s. When it filled, she padded back to the fridge for the wine bottle then kicked off her jeans and dropped her T-shirt on the floor beside the tub. Grateful for this end to her day, she climbed into the tub and leaned back.
A horse whinnied in the barnyard—one sharp call. She recognized Starship’s voice, higher than the other horses’, as if he were still a foal and not a middle-aged gelding. When his horse friends left him behind in his corral and climbed the hill of their pasture without him, he objected with a series of plaintive don’t-leave-me whinnies. But this one was different.
From the tub, Billie listened for what would come next so she’d know what he was talking about. He had a special call if he’d hurt himself and wanted her, another if Hashtag opened the gate and wandered away. When she didn’t hear anything else from him, she poured more wine. She avoided the mirror, didn’t want to be faced with the parallel scars on her upper thighs and the insides of her arms.
Something rattled in the barnyard. She grabbed her towel, looked out the bathroom window, and saw red taillights heading away from her place, down the road, toward the distant highway. That could be Sam and Josie Wilde, her neighbors up the valley, heading to the highway for an evening at DT’s Bar and Grill, or their son Ty on his way home after visiting them.
Gulliver was asleep, not barking at the disturbance, but Billie felt uneasy. She set the bottle and glass down, pulled on her soiled jeans and T-shirt, and wiggled her feet into her boots. Alerted to an outing, Gulliver raced to the door.
Using her cell phone’s flashlight, she scuffed
