Chapter 2

 

The heel of her suede boot pivoted on the frozen grass as Dr. Nash stepped out of the car. When she straightened to her full height, the car's exhaust billowed across the airfoil and swirled over the roof. She slammed the door and strode through the mist toward me with her leather duster flapping around her calves.

Dr. Deirdre Nash stopped a pace short of bumping into me. "What the hell's going on?" Her voice sounded hoarse, as if she'd just woken up, yet an element of tension strained her vocal chords and clipped her words.

While I explained that I'd surprised someone at barn seven and described how he'd sideswiped the barn when he tried to run me over, her shoulder-length brown hair whipped across her cheek in the wind. A few strands caught on her eyelashes. As she jabbed at them with her fingernails, I repeated Sergeant Bodell's theory that the arsonist might have been using the back lot as an observation post. Her hand froze.

"Oh, God." She spun around and sprinted for her car, and I don't think she would have moved any faster if the fire were blasting across the fields toward us.

"Sergeant Bodell might have left already," I yelled as she slid onto the bucket seat and slammed the door. She punched the gas, rocketed the Spyder back onto the drive, and slued the little car around the corner.

"Well, thanks for asking if I'm okay," I said to the air that seemed to shudder in her wake.

Dr. Deirdre Nash reminded me of my mother. Both women were exquisitely elegant, tall and thin, with a natural grace and poise that made you sit up and take notice. Even if they weren't conventionally beautiful, their confidence and carriage made you believe they were. And they were both about as fluffy as a glacier. I pulled the farm truck past Maddie's car and walked into the barn.

She'd already grained the horses and was tossing them their hay. The barn was alive with the sounds of twenty large animals shifting around in their stalls. They pawed their hay or buffeted their feed tubs, searching for a stray piece of corn or sliver of oat. Maddie jarred one of the stall doors against the doorframe and rammed the bolt through the latch. She turned and caught sight of me.

"Hey," she said. "It's about time."

I shrugged. "Sorry."

She brushed wisps of hay off the front of her jeans, then crossed the aisle and stood beside me. "The last six need haying, then you'll be done." She looked out the open door and all but rolled her eyes. "D-o-c-t-o-r Deirdre sure was wired." Maddie had a way of saying the boss's name that made it sound like she was wadding it in her mouth just before she spat it out.

"Wouldn't you be," I said, "if this was yours?"

Maddie shot me a quick glance.

"Did you call her?" I said.

"No, I thought you did. The sirens must have woke her." She slowly zipped up her denim coat, then slipped both hands behind her neck and pulled her thick curly hair from beneath the fleece collar. She had a way of moving that was just a little too deliberate and made me think her actions were for my benefit. An understated come-on.

Maddie was a true redhead with pale skin and freckles and hazel eyes that alternated between brown or green or blue, depending on the light and the color of the clothes she wore. This morning, they looked brown in the incandescent light that turned her auburn hair to gold where the curls corkscrewed onto her shoulders. She was short, maybe five-three, and a good bit chunkier than Rachel, but she filled out her jeans rather nicely, in a way that emphasized everything that was wonderful about her sex.

"The Cozzene mare's got wax on her teats a quarter inch long." She glanced at me, then went back to staring outside. Beyond the reach of the security lights, the sky had lightened to a pewter gray. "You just might have a foal tomorrow morning, if she don't go before that."

Maddie headed down the aisle and said over her shoulder, "See you tomorrow, Steve." She smoothed a hand over her ass like she was brushing off the seat of her pants; then she turned the corner, and a second later, the car's hinges squawked when she opened the door.

The engine cranked over as I glanced at my watch. As long as none of the mares were in danger of imminent labor, my lunch break started at six-thirty, which gave me exactly twenty minutes to make my rounds. I finished haying, then stepped outside.

A band of red stretched across the eastern horizon beneath fragmented cloud that hung low in the sky, dark purple against aqua. The frost was so thick, it looked like snow. Every blade of grass, each fence board, even the barns were coated with it. I pivoted around. The pastures spread out in all directions, defined by fence lines that rose and dipped with the terrain and vanished in the swales where a ground-hugging mist had settled during the night.

I checked the mares in barns one through five, and when I was satisfied that breakfast was the only thing they had on their minds, I drove to the clinic. Six vehicles were parked in the lot. My Chevy, two Stone Manor trucks, and the stud manager's Ford sat at the end closest to the road and looked like the rest of the landscape, cold and inert, shrouded beneath a layer of frost. Dr. Nash had nosed her Spyder right up to the office door. It looked like she'd just driven it right off the showroom floor. A dark brown cop car idled next to the Spyder, half on the grass, half on the gravel. Cops. They parked wherever they damned well pleased.

The side of the cruiser was streaked with slashes of gold that flowed over the wheel wells and underlined the words SHERIFF Fauquier County. I wondered if Sergeant Bodell was the driver.

I cut to the left, bypassed the office door, and squeezed through the opening between the large sliding doors that accessed the central aisle. The clinic was larger inside than its profile suggested. The central aisle was fourteen foot wide and continued all the way down to the far end of the building. The office was immediately to my right, followed by a restroom and living quarters, then three fourteen-by-fourteen stalls that housed the stallions. I was certain they'd heard me come in, but they knew they weren't going to be fed. Not yet, and not by me. The stud manager was solely responsible for their care, and his shift didn't begin until seven.

There was an open area to the left of the central aisle where rubber chips covered the ground, and the walls were padded with thick foam rubber mats. Although I hadn't been around long enough to see them do it, they bred the mares there. The actual clinic was located just beyond the open area, and three more stalls completed the left side of the barn.

Both the clinic and office had large Plexiglass windows that faced the central aisle. The clinic was dark, but light edged around the closed Venetian blinds in the office windows. I used the restroom, and as I stepped back into the aisle and flipped through my keys, the office door opened.

"You don't know that!" Dr. Nash paused in the threshold. Her thin fingers tightened around the doorknob as she looked over her shoulder at Sergeant Bodell.

He stood on the mat in front of the receptionist's desk with his hands jammed in his pockets. "Come on, Deirdre. Be reasonable."

"Emmett, I swear to God. If I catch him on my property, I'll kill him myself."

Bodell glanced at me, stepped toward her, and lowered his voice. I turned my back to them, and as I slotted my key in the lock, her voice carried across the aisle.

"Calm down. How can I?"

He said something I couldn't hear.

"A lot of good your extra patrol's done so far," Dr. Nash said as I stepped into the clinic and closed the door.

I'd been out in the cold since two-thirty, and the warm air felt wonderful. I hung my coat on the back of a chair, grabbed my lunch out of the fridge, and dropped the ham and cheese sandwich into the microwave.

The clinic looked like an oversized kitchen with cabinets lining three walls and long stretches of bare countertop, but that's where any similarity to a domestic environment came to an abrupt halt. Instead of cookbooks, binders and veterinary manuals lined the counters. An autoclave sat in the far corner of the room, and the cabinets were stocked with cotton rolls and bandages and boxes of syringes and needles and who knew what else. Vials of Acepromazine and Banamine and rows of brown Penicillin bottles cluttered the racks in the refrigerator.

When the microwave alarm chimed, I popped the door. As I peeled the plastic off my sandwich, I glanced into the barn aisle through the Plexiglass window. Sergeant Bodell stood behind Dr. Nash as she rapped on the door that accessed the living quarters. The stud manager lived there, if you call inhabiting a fourteen-by-fourteen room living. I knew what that was like, and it was not a lifestyle for the claustrophobic or the ambitious.

When Frank Wissel opened his door and squinted at Dr. Nash, she leaned forward and gestured with her arms. Her raised voice vibrated across the Plexiglass and filtered through the walls. Her words were garbled, but I had no trouble imagining the topic of conversation.

Frank must have said something in response, because the stallions at the far end of the barn whinnied, and a thump reverberated through the wooden planks that lined the exterior wall. As far as they were concerned, the sound of his voice meant that breakfast was on its way.

I wheeled one of the office chairs over to the west-facing window and sat down. The clinic was surrounded by a maze of paddocks, and the fence lines stretched all the way over to the gravel drive that wound past the Nashes' home and ended at an old bank barn. A barn much like the one that had just burned to the ground.

I thought of my boss, sleeping there after the fire that had leveled her parents' barn, worrying over those broodmares, knowing four lives hung in the balance, not two.

I pictured the burns, patches of raw flesh that radiated heat into the chill air and oozed serum that matted the singed hair in foul streaks. I imagined the smell.

Behind me, the industrial-sized heater that hung from the ceiling vibrated to life and pushed a wave of warm air across the room. I blinked, then glanced down at the can of Coke in my hand. I cracked it open and settled back in the chair. I could just make out a fire engine parked on Cannonball Gate, but the rest of the scene was blocked from view by the Nashes' house. A huge column of smoke and ash had risen toward the cloud base and drifted southeast until it was difficult to see where one ended and the other began. As I watched, the sun inched above the horizon, and in the west, the rim of the Blue Ridge Mountains glowed red against a dark sky as if a wildfire had crested the ridge. As the sun inched higher, the golden light cascaded down the slope. It spread across the valley floor, racing to meet the sun, and the colorless landscape and mist that blanketed the ground momentarily turned pink before the day brightened.

When I'd swallowed the last of the sandwich, I balled the wrapper in my hand. As I got to my feet, the door opened. One of the day crew came in. He nodded in my direction, then yawned as he flipped through the timecards slotted in a metal rack on the wall. The woman who'd handled the paperwork when I was hired told me they were supposed to be kept in alphabetical order, but when I'd punched in the next morning, they were jammed into the slots every which way.

I remembered the guy's name as I drained the last of my Coke. Paul . . . something. Something Italian. He fished out his card, punched it, then shrugged out of his parka.

Paul removed the filter basket from the coffee machine and dumped the grounds in the trash. He slipped the pot off the hot plate and glanced at me before he set it in the sink and turned on the hot water. "What's your name?"

"Steve."

"Maybe Maddie didn't tell you, but the guy who used to work your shift made the coffee every morning. Would be nice if you did, too."

I didn't say anything, and in a second or two, he looked over his shoulder. Although Paul was my height, he outweighed me by a good forty pounds. A solid forty pounds that he hadn't sculpted solely by mucking stalls. Physically, he reminded me of Marty with his dark complexion and thick black hair. I guessed he was a couple of years older than me, maybe twenty-four or five, and I had the distinct impression he used age as a yardstick, a way of sizing someone up or classifying him when, in fact, age meant very little. What mattered most was what you did with your life, and sometimes, if you were unlucky, what mattered most was what was done to you.

"What's happening over by Pond Lane?" he said as he reached across the counter to open one of the cabinet doors. Genoa. That was his last name.

"A barn burned down."

His hand froze at shoulder height; then he slowly lowered his arm and turned around. "You're shitting me?"

"Nope."

"Man, that's the third one in three weeks."

"Wasn't the first one set the same night the guy who worked my shift quit?"

"You mean Bruce?"

I nodded.

"Sometime around then, but I'm pretty sure he was already gone. Why?"

"You think he's setting them?"

"Why the hell would you say that?"

I shrugged. "Timing. Maybe he got fired and is pissed."

"Nah. Not Claremont. Anyway, he quit."

"Well, seeing as I'm gonna be doing his job, you know why he left?"

"All I know is, he showed up like usual . . ." Paul leaned back on his heels and looked at the ceiling. "Must've been a Saturday, his long day, 'cause I picked Maddie up around midnight, and he was just punching in. Anyway, he started his shift like he always did, but by the next morning, the little weasel had gone and quit. 'Course, at the time, we didn't know that. Everybody thought he'd gone home sick like he'd done Friday morning."

"Sick. How?"

"Awh, nothing, man. Just a lousy cold. Then, when Maddie come in Sunday, just after midnight, Frank was working in Bruce's place. When he told her he'd quit, she was madder than a cat with its tail caught in a hay tedder. It was her long day, see? And she thought for sure she'd have to work both shifts the next night, too, even though Nash said Ronnie was gonna work Bruce's shift."

"Why'd she think that if management told her otherwise?"

He turned back to the sink and shut off the hot water. Steam coated the window so that it was no longer possible to see through the glass. "What the bosses say they're gonna do and what comes down ain't always the same thing. You'll figure that out for yourself, soon enough. Anyway, the season had already started off with every fucking thing that could go wrong doing just that. A week before Bruce quit, a shipment come up from Florida--"

"A shipment?"

Paul looked at me like I was crazy. "A load of mares, man. Ain't nothin' else coming in here in the middle of the night. Anyway, one of the mares walked off the trailer sick as a dog, and Dr. Nash had to put her down. Then, if that wasn't bad enough, two mares dropped their foals on Maddie's long day, right after Bruce split." Paul filled the pot with cold water, emptied it into the machine, and slid it back onto the hot plate. "The first two of the season, and they're born the same night. You know what the odds are of that happening?"

"Not especially," I said, and Paul shot me a look.

He wedged a filter into the Mr. Coffee and peeled the lid off a can of Folgers. "Well, it don't happen much. Not this early in the season. The mares always start off slow. Now, come April, that's a whole different story. By then, you and Maddie'll be foaling two or three a night. Anyway, Bruce is a no show, and we've got two new babies on the ground that we gotta make sure are nursing good. Well, you can't have just anybody looking after them at night." Paul dumped some coffee into the filter, closed the lid, and hit the switch. "Seems like with horses, if something bad's gonna happen, it happens at night, but I guess Ronnie did okay."

Paul stretched his arms behind his back and braced his hands on the edge of the countertop. "Anyway, I knew Bruce was a loser, first time I laid eyes on him."

"Why's that?" I said.

"Except for the girls, working here didn't hold his interest much. The guy had bigger plans."

"Like what?"

"I wouldn't know. You could just tell."

We both glanced at the Mr. Coffee as the first drops of hot water spurted and gurgled into the filter.

"Personally, I'm glad he's gone. The guy thought he was hot shit. He stayed away from Maddie, though," Paul looked me straight in the eye, "once I made it clear what would happen if he didn't."

I held his gaze, and in that instant, the door flew open, and some of guys on the day shift barged into the room, followed by a blast of chilly air that swirled across the floor. When their excited voices faded away to nothing, Paul frowned, then reluctantly looked away. I crossed my arms over my chest and shifted. Without thinking, I leaned against the counter, and a twinge of pain cut into my hip where the pickup had slammed into muscle. I shifted my weight squarely onto my feet and straightened my spine.

The crew had been talking about the fire, and after a moment of awkward silence, when they punched their timecards and slid a few curious glances our way, they started up again.

Ronnie Townes dumped his parka on the counter and pushed a mass of frizzy dreadlocks off his forehead. "Who you think done it?"

"How the hell should I know?" one of the older men replied.

"Man. I'm glad I ain't working nights no more."

Ronnie had rough, dry skin and a scrawny neck creased with horizontal lines that looked dirty. He'd dyed his hair sometime in the distant past, and the ends had faded to the color of baling twine.

One of the crew, a sleazy-looking guy whose brown hair hung in greasy strands down his forehead, draped his arm across Ronnie's shoulders and pulled him off balance. "What, Ronnie?" he mocked as he ruffled the kid's dreadlocks. "You afraid the big bad firebug's gonna get you?"

"Knock it off, Tiller." Frank Wissel, the stud manager, stepped into the room, followed by three crewmembers.

Wissel punched his timecard, then moved to the center of the room. After years spent working outdoors, his age was difficult to judge. He was light on his feet and reasonably fit, and I had a feeling he was younger than his weathered skin and gray hair suggested. "Anything to report, Cline?"

"You know about what happened at barn seven?" I said.

He nodded.

"That's it, then."

"Okay." As Wissel told us about the fire, it appeared that everyone had either driven past the scene or had heard about it secondhand. When the stud manager mentioned the hit-and-run, I scanned the faces of the men and women as they lounged in office chairs or leaned against the counters or sat cross-legged on the floor and noted that they all seemed genuinely surprised.

As Wissel went over the day's schedule, my gaze once again drifted around the room. We were a sorry looking bunch, wearing tattered jeans or stained overalls, mud-caked boots and worn coats. Ronnie's parka had duct tape at the elbows, and his zipper was busted. Tiller's watch cap was so stretched out of shape, it hung down the back of his head like an empty feedbag.

Wissel eventually separated us into groups of four, and as he assigned the barns we were to muck out, Paul Genoa folded his arms across his chest and stared at me. I'd lucked out. We wouldn't be working together for the rest of the morning.

"Okay, that's it," Wissel said.

Chairs creaked and fabric rustled as everyone pushed off the walls or stood. Half of them scooped gloves and hats and travel mugs steaming with coffee off the countertops; then we drifted toward the parking lot.