I tied her in the wash rack and uncoiled the hose. She rolled her eyes.
“Easy,” I said. My throat burned. “Easy… easy.”
I turned the hose on her lower leg, allowing water to cascade from the knee down and keeping one hand on her shoulder so I’d have some warning if she freaked.
Across the aisle, Jasper’s empty stall haunted me. He should have had a long, celebrated career and a good long life right here at Rosemont. Unbelievably, my world would go on without him. I’d ride. I’d compete. I’d win. I’d maintain the persona. And my father and I… that would continue, too, unless I found a way out.
A tear ran down my cheek. I wiped my face with the back of my hand, inadvertently moving the hose. Diva flattened her ears and bared her teeth.
“Sorry. Easy.”
When the half hour was up, I dried her leg with a hand towel and led her into her stall. She was moving normally.
Her head flashed toward me. I pulled back and avoided an all-out sinking of teeth into flesh but caught a hard pinch on my upper arm. I took off her halter and got out the door without further injury. She began to eat delicately from her grain bucket.
There was no justice in a world in which Diva lived and Jasper died.
She gave the stall door a token kick, as if she knew what I was thinking. I hung her halter and lead rope on the door.
“We’ll check her again when we do the walk-through,” my father said.
Working alongside the grooms, we cleaned stalls and brought in and fed the stallions, the yearlings, the mares.
It was nearly seven when we started back to the house.
“Tomorrow I have some jobs for you around the barn, and then I want you on Vigo. We’ll work mostly over cavalletti, but I need to see you’re not afraid of real jumping, so we’ll go through a round of jumps, too.”
I didn’t expect to change his mind about keeping me home tomorrow, but I said, “Finals are next week.”
“About school, darlin’… you’re not going back. You’ll take your finals with a proctor. Starting this summer, you’ll attend classes online. I won’t let you throw away your future because of Will Howard. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
“What?” I said faintly.
“You heard me.”
I stopped in my tracks. “You can’t do that.”
“Just you watch.” He took my arm above the elbow and propelled me toward the house, letting go only when we were inside. Then he waited while I washed my hands and put the lasagna in the oven.
“Upstairs,” he said, and I nearly pissed myself again when he went into my room.
He picked up his bag from the floor. “Unpack.” He brushed past me, his footsteps receding down the hall.
The back stairs. I could take them down to the kitchen, leave through the back door, call Will from the barn—
No, really leave. Take one of the farm’s work trucks. The keys would be above the visor, and I’d been driving since I was twelve.
I opened my desk drawer, removed the envelope I kept my allowance in, stuck it down the back of my jeans, and pulled my shirt down to cover it. What else?
The duffel. It was already packed.
The floorboard creaked. He was coming back.
I unzipped the bag, took out a handful of socks, and began to cram them into a dresser drawer.
He closed the door.
Every part of me hurt.
“No.” I turned around. “I can’t.”
He wasn’t there.
A distinctive mechanical click came from the door.
I dropped the rest of the socks and jiggled the doorknob. It turned, but the door didn’t budge. Sixteen years I’d slept in this room, and I’d had no idea a key existed.
He didn’t need to guard me day and night. He could just lock me up.
I retrieved a hairpin from the bathroom and wiggled it around in the keyhole, turning it until blisters started to form on my fingertips. The door remained locked.
I’d been trained to stay cool and make shrewd decisions at forty miles an hour on the back of a prey animal that was all instinct and muscle. I needed to apply the same cool shrewdness now. I wouldn’t always be locked in this room.
From downstairs came a flurry of beeps from the alarm system, many more than were needed to set it. He was changing the code. If I did find a way out of my room, I couldn’t leave the house without triggering the system’s deafening whoops and sirens.
He’d made sure of it: I wasn’t going anywhere.
* * *
I PUT MY allowance back in my desk and sat down.
Tomorrow Gertrude would be here. Eddie would be at the barn. Things would begin to normalize, but what passed for normal between my father and me had at last become unbearable.
I could get myself out of this. I’d be exposed and have to give up everything I wanted, but I could end this. What would happen to the horses, the employees? To me? I was scared, but I was more scared when I thought about what I’d become if I didn’t end it.
After a long time, he unlocked the door. “Supper.”
He had showered and changed. He now wore a polo shirt that revealed the scabbed-over scratches on his neck.
We sat at the kitchen table, a first. Even when we were on our own, we ate in the dining room.
I separated the layers of my lasagna.
“I drafted a statement about the accident,” he said. “I’ll post it to your blog and share it on social media.”
His take on Jasper’s death, passed off as something I’d written, would evoke sadness and reflection, creating a sense of closure for fans and the media, and undoubtedly looking toward a future I no longer had, because at the first opportunity, I was going to shoot it down.
“You might pretend to take an interest.”
“I do enough pretending.”
He looked amused. He knew I couldn’t hurt him without hurting myself, too. He didn’t know I was now willing to do that.
Well, not willing. But I was going to.
I was.
After supper, I cleared the table and washed the dishes.
“Might as well do the walk-through,” he said when I was finished. “It’s nearly nine.”
He punched in the new code to disarm the alarm, his fingers a blur on the keypad.
Outside, crickets and tree frogs chirped. My resolve to tell made me ache.
The motion-detector lights at the barn snapped on. Moths materialized from nowhere, and bats wheeled in the air, catching them. In the training barn, Daddy turned on the lights in the aisle. Vigo nickered hopefully. The horses were accustomed to routine, so he didn’t seriously expect to be fed at this hour, but hope sprang eternal in the equine stomach.
My father peered through the bars of Vigo’s stall. Vigo snuffled against them.
“Good boy,” my father said, and we moved on to Diva.
She stood in the back of her stall, her head hanging low. She wasn’t bearing weight on her injured leg.
He clicked his tongue. She didn’t bare her teeth or flatten her ears.
He pushed open the door and went in.
Diva gave him a half-hearted glare.
“Easy, mare.” He ran one hand down her leg and held his other hand back toward me. “Give me her halter.”
I removed it from the hook on the door. Diva rolled her eyes at me.
Out of nothing but instinct, I whipped the lead rope toward her just as my father glanced back at me. A microsecond of understanding crossed his face, and then Diva did what she always did when confronted by a longe line or a hose or a lead rope that was too long.
She exploded.
- twenty-six -
SHE SPUN AWAY from me, her big, muscular butt slamming my father against the wall. His head hit the solid wood partition between stalls with a thud. He staggered forward, but before he could regain his balance, she reared. Her front hoofs struck the back of his head, dropping him to his knees. She pivoted and kicked him, both back feet
connecting with his upper body, lifting him off the ground and sending him back into the wall. His arms unnaturally straight and limp by his sides, he toppled forward into the thick straw bedding.
Diva quivered, her eyes rimmed with white. I backed away, and she bolted out the door, favoring her off foreleg but moving fast.
Vigo milled and whinnied.
My father lay on his stomach with his face turned toward me, his eyes half-open. Blood spread over the straw.
I dropped the halter and lead line, went into the stall, squatted, and pressed my fingers against his neck. No pulse. My fingers came away slick and red.
I saw the outline of his cell phone in the back pocket of his jeans and plucked it out, my hands trembling as I tapped the keys.
“Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”
“My father’s hurt. He’s unconscious and he’s bleeding.”
“Is he responsive?”
“No.”
“Is he breathing?”
I felt the inside of his wrist and his neck and again couldn’t find the pulse. I bent close to his head. The metallic odor of blood coated my nostrils. He exhaled faintly. The shaking in my hands got worse.
“He’s breathing.” My voice shook, too.
“Can you stop the bleeding?”
Still holding the phone, I ran into the tack room and grabbed a stack of clean towels from the shelf. Back in Diva’s stall, I pressed a towel to my father’s head. Red soaked through the pristine white terry cloth.
“An ambulance is on the way,” the dispatcher said.
“You have the address?”
“Rosemont Farms?”
“Yes, but we’re in the barn, not at the house. If they follow the driveway, they’ll come to the barn. All the lights are on.”
Keys clicked as she entered that information into a computer.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“An accident.” The lie rolled off my tongue as if it really had been an accident. “One of the horses trampled him. I want to call our neighbor.”
“Call me back as soon as you’ve done that.”
I disconnected and called Eddie and Gertrude’s house.
“Yeah, boss?”
“It’s Roan. We’re at the barn. Daddy’s hurt. It’s bad. They’re sending an ambulance.”
“On my way,” Eddie said.
“Eddie—Diva’s loose.”
“Got it,” he said.
I was supposed to call the dispatcher back, but I didn’t. I removed the blood-saturated towel from my father’s head and replaced it with a clean one.
A truck pulled up outside. The door opened and closed. Someone ran down the aisle. Eddie appeared in the doorway.
“Let me see.” He knelt beside us. I took my hands away from the towel. He checked underneath it and put it back. “Monty,” he said loudly. I’d never heard him call my father anything other than “boss.” “Can you hear me? Monty. Get more towels.”
I brought an armload of clean towels from the tack room and followed his instructions, rolling them and placing them around my father’s head for stability.
“Is he still breathing?”
He checked my father’s carotid artery. “Yeah. Get a blanket. He’s getting cold.”
“Is he dying?”
“He’s going into shock. Get the blanket. Move.”
The horses’ heavy winter blankets had been laundered months ago and hung covered in plastic at the back of the tack room. I tugged two of them from their hangers. We spread them over him and Eddie tucked them close. “What happened?”
I’d better get used to answering that.
“He was checking Diva’s leg and asked me for her halter.” I had to take responsibility without implicating myself. “I fumbled with the lead rope.”
Eddie nodded.
I tested the waters. “I should have been more careful.”
“Don’t blame yourself. It could have been any of us.” He changed the bloody towel on my father’s head. “What was he thinking, tending to her in her stall?”
Only a fool or my father—no fool but arrogant—would have tried that with Diva, but he’d have been all right if I hadn’t spooked her.
I shivered. “It wasn’t his fault.”
“Here, apply pressure.”
I took over pressing the towel to my father’s head. Eddie stood up.
“Where are you going?”
“You could use a blanket, too.” He disappeared into the aisle and a moment later was draping a blanket over my shoulders. He lifted the edge of the towel.
“Bleeding’s slowing down.”
“Is he bleeding out?”
“Head wounds bleed like a stuck pig, but he’s not bleeding out. The pressure is stanching the flow.”
I pulled my horse blanket close. “What’s taking them so long?”
“When did you call?”
“Right before I called you.”
“They’ll be here anytime. Gertrude went down to the gate to meet them.”
“Diva’s running around out there loose. I think she’s really hurt.” Was it okay to voice concern about Diva after what she’d just done?
“Teo will call Glenn.”
“Mateo?”
“Yeah. I’m going to the hospital with you.”
His tone was deliberately casual, which meant Eddie didn’t think doctors were going to patch my father up and keep him overnight and release him in the morning. Eddie thought he was dying, and he didn’t want me to be alone in a hospital waiting room when that happened.
“Okay.” I tried to sound casual, too. “Thanks.”
It was little more than twenty-four hours since Eddie and I had faced each other over Jasper’s body at Bluegrass, and I’d shown more concern for Jasper than I was showing for my father. I used the corner of a clean towel to wipe some blood from his cheek. “You’ll be okay.”
In the distance, a siren whined.
“See?” Eddie said. “They’re here.”
Vigo shuffled in his stall. The siren became unbearably louder. Red and blue lights strobed over the interior of the barn. The siren went silent.
Eddie stepped out of the stall into the aisle. “In here!”
I stood up and backed away as two paramedics appeared in the doorway. They’d brought a gurney, which they left in the aisle. One of them knelt by my father.
“What happened?”
“He was trampled by a horse.”
“You his daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t go anywhere. We’ll need some information from you.”
“Let’s step outside, sugar, give them room to work.” Gertrude must have ridden in the ambulance. She led me out of the stall, and we watched through the bars. One paramedic retrieved supplies from the gurney while the other examined my father. They fastened a rigid cervical collar around his neck. The collar was standard. Yesterday after Jasper had gone down, I’d been up and walking, but if I hadn’t been, spinal injury would have been presumed until it was ruled out.
They angled the gurney into the stall and lowered it to the ground, pulling the bloody straw away from one side of my father’s body. Then they placed a spine board on the cleared floor. That was standard, too. Carefully, they rolled him onto his back on the board.
His skin was the color of putty, and his eyes had closed all the way. He looked like a dead man.
Gertrude hugged me hard with one arm.
The paramedics strapped him to the board, clamped an oxygen mask over his face, inserted a needle into his arm, started a saline IV. Then they lifted the backboard onto the gurney and secured it.
One of them glanced my way as they wheeled him out of the stall. “Come with us.”
“We’ll be right behind you,” Gertrude assured me.
Outside, the back doors of the ambulance stood open. The interior looked cold, sterile. They pushed the gurney in. One of the paramedics climbed in after it. I started to follow.
The other paramedic put a hand on my arm.
“Ride up front with me.”
I did, but I turned in my seat and watched the one in the back cut open my father’s shirt.
“How old is he?” the driver asked as we set off. Strange—the siren wasn’t nearly as loud inside the ambulance as it was outside.
“Fifty-eight.”
“Allergies?”
“No.”
“Medications?”
“No.”
“Any health problems?”
“No.”
The paramedic in the back relayed that information into a radio, along with a dispassionate inventory of my father’s injuries and symptoms: blunt-force trauma and lacerations to the head and torso, swelling and firmness of the abdomen, possible spinal injury. The patient was in shock and tachycardic. Blood pressure was sixty over forty—half-normal. As she spoke, she continued working, shaving spots in my father’s chest hair and attaching electrodes to the bare skin.
“Shit,” the driver said.
On the side of the driveway, inches from the hood of the ambulance, Diva flung her head up, eyes wild, and pivoted, more or less cantering on three legs with Fernando jogging after her. Then we were past them.
“That the horse that did the damage?”
“Yes.”
“How’d it happen? Horse go berserk?”
What happened? How did it happen? Did you do this?
“She spooked.”
We drove past the house. Even with the lights on, it looked abandoned.
“What’s your name?” the driver asked.
“Roan.”
“I’m Darius. You called nine-one-one? You did a good job. You kept your cool.”
I hadn’t been cool when I’d lashed out at Diva with the lead rope. I’d been cold.
“Is he going to die?”
“We’re doing everything we can to see that he doesn’t.”
When we reached the gate we slowed to make the turn onto the road, but then we drove toward town and the hospital fast. Really fast.
I looked in the back. My father’s head had been bandaged. The electrodes on his chest led to a monitor, but I couldn’t see the screen or hear any beeps over the sound of the siren.
On the outskirts of town, Darius radioed the hospital we’d be arriving in five minutes, but we pulled up in less time than that. He and his partner rolled my father through the automatic doors of the ambulance entrance.
Dark Horses Page 29