after my babies.'
'Babies?'
'Cecil and Beanie. She was the one who paid the rent-Paris. Such a nice girl.'
'When was she last here?'
'Not lately. She's very busy, you know. She rides those horses. Zoom! Over the fences.' She swung the fat cat in her arms as if she meant to toss him. The cat flattened its ears and made a sound in its throat like a siren.
Landry went to the nightstand beside the bed and opened the drawer.
Bingo.
He took a pen from his pocket and gingerly moved aside a hot-pink vibrator, then lifted out his prize. Photographs. Photographs of Don Jade sitting astride a black horse with a winner's ribbon around its neck. Pictures of him jumping another horse over a huge fence. A photo of him standing beside a girl whose face had been scratched out of the picture.
Landry turned the photograph over and looked at the back. The first half of the inscription had been scratched over with a pen that had been pressed so hard it had carved a groove into the paper, but so carelessly it could still be read.
To Erin.
Love, Don.
30
He must be rounder, softer in the downward transitions.'
Van Zandt had parked along the road-a dark blue Chevy, not the Mercedes-and stood leaning on the fence, watching me. My stomach flipped at the sight of him. I had hoped to next see him-if not on the news, being taken into custody by the authorities-at the equestrian center in a throng of humanity.
He climbed carefully over the board fence and came toward the ring, his eyes hidden by mirrored sunglasses, his expression flat and calm. I thought he still looked ill, and wondered if it was killing that upset his system, or the danger of being caught. Or perhaps it was the idea of having a loose end dangling. Me.
I glanced at the parking area adjacent to the barn. Irina's car was gone. She had left while I'd been engrossed in my ride.
I hadn't seen any sign of Sean. If he had returned home from his night out, he was sleeping late.
'You must be looser in your back so that the horse may be looser in his back,' Van Zandt said.
I wondered if he knew, and knew in a fatalistic corner of my soul that he did. The possibilities ticked through my mind as they had every hour since my blunder at the town house: He had found the prescription and recognized my name from Sidelines, or Lorinda Carlton had recognized the name. The magazine might have been in the town house somewhere. They might have looked at the photograph together. Van Zandt might have recognized the horse, or my profile, or put the puzzle pieces together from the mention of Sean's farm. He might have found the jacket and the prescription, assumed Elena Estes was a cop conducting a search while he'd been in the interview room with Landry; called his attorney and asked to have the name checked out. Shapiro would have recognized my name.
It didn't matter how he might have found me out. What mattered was what he was going to do about it. If he knew I had been in his home Saturday night, then he knew I had seen the bloody shirt. I wished now I had kept the thing and damned the admissibility consequences. At least he would be in jail for the moment, and I would not be alone with a man I believed to be a murderer.
'Try again,' he said. 'Pick up the canter.'
'We were just finishing for the day.'
'Americans,' he said with disdain, standing at the edge of the ring with his hands on his hips. 'He is hardly warm. The work is only just beginning. Pick up the canter.'
My natural inclination was to defy him, but staying aboard the horse seemed preferable to a level playing field where he had six inches and sixty pounds on me. At least until I could get a better read on him and what he may or may not know, it seemed best to humor him.
'On the twenty-meter circle,' Van Zandt instructed.
I put the horse on a circle twenty meters in diameter, tried to breathe and focus, though my hands were so tight on the reins, I thought I could feel my pulse in them. I closed my eyes for two strides, exhaling and sinking into the saddle.
'Relax your hands. Why are you so tense, Elle?' he asked in a silky voice that made a chill go down my back. 'The horse can sense this. It makes him also tense. More seat, less hand.'
I made an attempt to react accordingly.
'What brings you out so early?'
'Aren't you happy to see me?' he asked.
'I would have been happy to see you at dinner last night. You stood me up. That doesn't win you any points with me.'
'I was unavoidably detained.'
'Taken to a desert island? A place with no phones? Even the police let you make a phone call.'
'Is that where you think I was? With the police?'
'I'm sure I don't know or care.'
'I left word with the maitre d'. I couldn't call you. You have not given me your number,' he said, then changed tones in the next breath. 'Collect, collect, collect!' he demanded. 'More energy, less speed. Come! Sit into him!'
I gathered the horse beneath me until I held him nearly on the spot, his feet pounding the sand in three-beat time. 'Are you trying to make up to me with a free riding lesson?'
'Nothing is free, Elle,' he said. 'Carry him into the walk. Like setting down a feather.'
I did as instructed-or tried to, rather-and failed because of my tension.
'Don't let him fall out of the gait that way!' Van Zandt shouted. 'Is your horse to be on its forehand?'
'No.'
'Then why did you let this happen?'
The implied answer was that I was stupid.
'Again! Canter! And more energy in the transition, not less!'
We went through the exercise again and again. Each time, something was not quite worthy, and that something was glaringly my fault. Sweat became lather on D'Artagnon's massive neck. My T-shirt was soaked through. My back muscles began to cramp. My arms were so tired, they trembled.
I began to question my wisdom. I couldn't stay on the horse all day, and by the time I got off, I was going to flop on the ground, limp, boneless, like a jellyfish washed ashore. For his part, Van Zandt was punishing me, and I knew he was enjoying it.
'… and make him float into the walk like a snowflake landing.'
Again I brought the horse to the walk, holding my breath in anticipation of another outburst.
'Better,' he said grudgingly.
'Enough,' I said, letting the reins out to the buckle. 'Are you trying to kill me?'
'Why would I do such a thing to you, Elle? We are friends, are we not?'
'I thought so.'
'I thought so too.'
Past tense. Intentional, I thought, not a misuse of the language that was probably third or fourth on his list.
'I called the restaurant later in the evening,' he said. 'The maitre d' told me you never came.'
'I was there. You weren't. I left,' I lied. 'I didn't see the maitre d'. He must have been in the men's room.'
Van Zandt considered the story.
'You are very good,' he said.
'At what?' I watched him as I walked D'Artagnon on the circle, waiting for the gelding's breathing to slow.
