by Laura Crum
Now we were crashing by him, feet away, Freddy charging forward, headed for home. I both heard and glimpsed Blackjack whirl with us. And then the rider was hurtling through the air toward me, arms outstretched for my shoulders in a flying tackle.
I saw him coming; so did Freddy. Even as I twisted, the horse leaped sideways, away from the attacker. I felt the impact on Freddy's rump, felt hands clutch at me. Freddy humped his back and lashed out with both back feet.
I heard a yell and a sharp, smacking noise and looked back over my shoulder. Blackjack, riderless, was right on our heels, and behind him the slicker-clad figure lay motionless on the ground.
I didn't hesitate. Kicking Freddy one more time, I headed down the hill at a long trot, through the blowing storm. I was going home.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Riding down the hill, thoughts coalesced. I knew damn well where I would go first. As I rode, I became aware of how wet I was, and how cold. Adrenaline ebbed; I shivered. My body ached; my head hurt. My shirt and jeans were soaking. My boots were full of water.
Paradoxically, it filled me with rage. Damn him to hell was the only thought in my mind.
I reached the barn where I'd been tied up and rode on. Past the ranch house, down to the big arena. Here I dismounted and led Freddy through the gate. Blackjack followed. I pulled Freddy's bridle off his head and turned him loose.
"Thank you," I said. Then I let myself out of the arena and shut the gate. I had some business to take care of.
Wind and rain blew into my face as I marched across the drive and up the steps of Clay's little house. I banged on the door and threw it open.
Clay was sitting in front of the TV; his head jerked around, eyes wide, as startled as if the storm itself had blown the door open and swept in. Water dripped off my clothes and hair and onto the carpet as I stepped into the room. Clay's shocked stare followed me in.
"Gail!"
"That's right," I said, as evenly as I could manage. "Surprised to see me?"
Clay said nothing; his mouth dropped half-open. Dispassionately, I noted that he didn't look particularly handsome at the moment. His lack of chin was all too obvious.
Clay seemed to gather himself. "What happened?" he asked.
For a moment our eyes met; Clay dropped his gaze to my soaking clothes. "What happened?" he asked again.
"What happened," I said, "is, your brother Bart tried to kill me."
"What?"
"However, he didn't manage it and he is now lying in the clearing at the top of the ridge. I don't know if he's dead or alive."
"My God, Gail."
"Don't sound so shocked, Clay. It doesn't cut any ice with me. You knew what Bart was up to."
"Gail, I . . ."
And suddenly my control broke. "You bastard!" I screamed. "What did you plan to do, sit here watching TV while he killed me?"
"Gail, I didn't know."
"The hell you didn't. You knew Bart was the arsonist. You knew he hit me over the head at Judith's. You must have known he planned to kill me."
"I didn't, I swear."
"Oh bullshit, Clay. Would you just for one moment drop your Mister Nice Guy pose and have a look at the truth. You suspected Bart from the beginning."
Clay was silent.
"And," I went on, "you knew, if you let yourself think, that Bart would need to kill me after I caught him at Judith's place."
"But you didn't remember. You said so."
"Bart couldn't count on that. And in the end, I did remember. I saw him, right before he hit me."
Clay and I were both quiet.
"How could you?" I could hear my voice rising. "How could you protest all that devotion and stand by while Bart tried to kill me? What kind of thing are you?"
"Dammit, Gail, I didn't know!" Clay was yelling, too; I saw a brief flash of genuine feeling in his eyes.
I didn't care. "What the hell do you mean, you didn't know?" I shouted at him.
"I didn't know what Bart was doing. I might have wondered, but I didn't know."
"That is the most complete bullshit I ever heard. You suspected Bart the whole time. I thought you were upset when the barn here burned just because it was stressful for your family, but it wasn't that, was it? You were upset because you knew Bart did it."
Clay jumped to his feet. "Will you listen? I didn't know. I wondered."
"Clay." I spoke very slowly and clearly, enunciating each word. "You must have had some reasons for your suspicions. What were they?"
"I saw Bart in the hay barn, about an hour before we noticed the fire here," Clay said miserably. "I was sitting on my porch, drinking a beer. There was a full moon."
"I remember."
"I saw someone moving around in the hay shed, which was at this end of the big barn. I stood up, tried to get a better look; I was behind the bushes in front of my porch. He didn't see me."
"Right," I said.
"Eventually I figured out it was Bart. I recognized his way of moving. So I sat back down and finished my beer. Bart didn't usually go in the hay barn at that time, but he did check on the horses before he went to bed. 1 didn't think anything of it. He never did see me, sitting there on the porch.
"Then we had the fire, and then, when that detective was questioning all of us, Bart said he hadn't gone in the hay barn."
"So you suspected him."
"I wondered. I thought it was possible I was wrong, that I'd seen someone else. After all, it was dark; whoever it was wasn't using a flashlight."
"Did you have any other reasons to wonder about Bart?"
"I knew he needed money. His ex-wife was after him pretty hard for some child support he never paid her during those years when he was a bum. He borrowed some money from me, but I knew it wasn't enough. I think he tried to borrow some from Mom, but she said no."
"So he burned the barn down for the insurance money."
Clay shook his head. "I think it might have been the only way he could think of to pay his debts. Bart doesn't have anything of his own, you know. Even that truck he drives belongs to Mom."
"What made him think Mom would give him the insurance money?"
Clay shrugged. "She's losing her grip on things. She puts up a good show, but she's actually a lot sicker than she looks. Just lately she's left everything, including the accounts, to Bart."
"Right," I said.
"What in the world was I supposed to do?" Clay turned his face away. "Tell that detective I suspected my brother?"
I was silent.
"I was so relieved when Christy's place burned." Clay winced. "That sounds terrible, but I thought it meant I must be wrong, that it wasn't Bart."
"So when did it dawn on you?"
Clay didn't answer.
''I'll tell you when it dawned on me," I went on. "Or when it should have dawned on me. When Angie told me where she lived. Next to Christy's place. I'll bet Bart set that fire and then picked Angie up and off they went. No one saw him, and no one noticed the fire until he and Angie were safely at some restaurant. "
"But why would he?" Clay said desperately.
"For that very reason. The fact that he had no apparent reason. He needed to direct suspicion away from himself. I don't think Bart knew too much about arson. He thought his own barn fire would be put down to a hot bale of hay. It must have come as a terrible shock to him when that fire investigator wasn't fooled, even for a moment. I think Bart reckoned that if there were another, apparently purposeless arson, suspicion would fall on Marty Martin, or someone like him. And it did."
For a long moment Clay stared right at me. "It's what you think, isn't it?" I demanded.
Clay dropped his eyes.
"So why," I went on conversationally, "do you suppose Bart kept starting fires, once the cops were busy investigating other people? It was a big risk."
Clay continued to say nothing. I kept staring at him. I knew why Bart had done it. Or I thought I knew why.
I remembered what my shrink had told me about arson
ists; what Walt Harvey had told me about arsonists. I remembered the dinner scene at the Bishop house, and how constantly Doris Bishop had thrown covertly hostile remarks in Bart's direction. At a guess, this had been going on all of Bart's life.
At another guess, I suspected Bart Bishop hated women, despite his constant show of girlfriends. That love-'em-and-leave-'em pattern was in itself a tip-off to a man who couldn't connect to women.
And how would he know how? I could hear my shrink's voice in my head. If the first essential connection to women is between a son and his mother, then Bart Bishop had clearly been left wanting.
And what of Clay? I glanced at him and caught the strangest expression on his face. It came and went almost instantaneously, but I registered it. As his eyes rested on me, he smiled. A tiny, quick, smug smile. Unbelievably, Clay Bishop was gloating.
The next moment his face showed only appropriate concern, but I knew what I had seen. At some level, perhaps beneath his conscious awareness, Clay was rejoicing in my distress.
Of course, I thought. I had hurt this man deeply. I had chosen his rival over him-the ultimate male insult. Somewhere inside, he was very, very angry at me.
But Clay had trained himself not to show anger. In fact, I suspected that Clay had taught himself not to feel anger. Perhaps because there was so much anger buried inside of him. After all, Doris Bishop had raised both Bart and Clay. Maybe both men were equally angry at women. Clay had merely chosen a different way of dealing with his rage. He hid from it.
"She named you well," I said finally.
"What?" Clay looked confused at the change of subject.
"Your mother. You've got feet of clay."
"Gail, I-" Clay began.
I cut him off. "I don't want to hear it. I'm done listening to your nice-guy routine. Bart lit those last two fires because he was frustrated and angry inside, particularly at women. It's no accident that the three fires he started to divert suspicion were all horse barns that belonged to single women who are supporting themselves. I think Bart got his jollies both from the violence of the fires and the attack on women. In some way the act fit his inner needs. Once he took it up, he wanted to keep doing it. But you, Clay, you said you loved me."
"I did, Gail. I thought I did."
I met his big, soft, long-lashed eyes with a sort of horror. As ever, Clay appeared so smoothly nice on the surface. It was only now that I understood that this veneer gave no clue as to what was going on underneath.
"So if you thought you loved me, why were you willing to just sit around after you guessed Bart had hit me over the head? Tell me that."
Clay met my eyes, mutely miserable. "I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to believe it was happening."
"So you just kept it all to yourself. Like you do everything else. You did nothing, said nothing."
Clay flinched at my words; in that moment I saw clearly that despite his aura of strength and confidence, inside, where it counted, Clay was abjectly weak. In a very real sense, he was afraid to know himself, afraid to face his real feelings. He had spent his life posturing niceness and competence; it was the only version of himself he was comfortable with. When his life took a turn that didn't fit in with being a "nice guy," Clay was lost.
"What was I supposed to do?" he asked me. "Tell you, 'I think my brother might be a murderer'?"
"Yeah," I said, "something like that. We're talking about saving my life here. I think you should have been willing to sacrifice your brother. I think you should have told the truth."
Once again, our eyes connected. I was aware of my hair and clothes, still steadily dripping onto the carpet; I could feel that the warmth of the house had taken some of my chill away. But my heart was cold. In some way I couldn't fathom, Clay's betrayal cut much deeper than Bart's attempt to kill me. I didn't take Bart's attack personally; I recognized it as his attempt to survive. It was Clay's lack of action that hurt.
"In case you're interested," I went on conversationally, "Bart got me out here on a fake emergency. He must have found out I was on call. He told the answering service he was Jeri Ward; after all, that name could be male or female.
"Once I was at the upper barn, with no one around, he bashed me over the head, again, tied me up and left me in the barn. Then he moved my truck. He was all dressed up in a slicker and rain hat, and he's about my height. No one seeing him from a distance could have known it wasn't me. No doubt he was wearing latex gloves, too.
"I bet he called the answering service and sent 'me' on another fake emergency, somewhere nearby in Harkins Valley. That way, when the truck was found there, it would appear that was where I disappeared. Then he walked back, probably along the trails, so no one would see him. Your brother knows every trail in these hills; he's been riding them all his life.
"You know what he planned to do with me?"
Clay shook his head, not meeting my eyes.
"I'll tell you. I've had a little time to work it out, and I can guess. He meant to shoot me in the head in the middle of one of those thunderclaps and pack my body off into the woods and push it into some ravine. That's why he had Freddy saddled and Blackjack there with the pack rig. With winter just coming on, if he'd chosen the right place, nobody would have found my body for a long, long time. It was a good plan."
I stared at Clay, water still running down my face from my hair. "Bart's only problem was he tied me up in too much of a hurry and didn't take the knife out of my pocket. He was in a big rush to move the truck. So I got away. But I didn't get by him. He saw me and started shooting at me. It was your horse that saved me, Clay."
Clay looked up at that.
"That's right, Freddy saved me. He kicked Bart right in the head, I think. And I remembered that Bart only kept four bullets in his pistol. He told me, that night at dinner. Once I realized he'd shot at me four times, I knew the gun was empty."
Clay shook his head, his eyes back on the floor.
"If I ever hear you're not taking perfect care of Freddy," I went on, "I will personally make sure you get accused of being an accessory in my attempted murder. Do you hear me?"
Clay nodded.
"As far as I'm concerned, as of now, all that I just told you never happened. I'm going to tell Jeri Ward that I remember who hit me in Judith's barn. And I do. I'm going to call the cops now," I said.
Clay's gaze stayed steadily on mine, those eyes as limpid as ever. But I saw only blank, opaque shutters; I no longer had any sense that I knew who Clay was. It occurred to me that I never had known him, only deceived myself into thinking I did. I could read Danny's heart and mind better than I could Clay's.
I walked toward the phone, my eyes locked on Clay. Perhaps I should have been afraid, but I wasn't. Clay never moved.
"If I were you," I said, with my hand on the phone, "I'd go see if Bart's alive or dead. And you'll need to put away Freddy and Blackjack; I turned them loose in the arena."
Clay took a step toward the door, then paused.
For another long second we stared at each other. Then I lifted the receiver, and Clay turned and went out into the rain.
EPILOGUE
Bart Bishop survived. He was in a coma for a week, and a wheelchair for a month after that, but he eventually recovered completely and was able to stand trial.
Clay and I haven't spoken since that night. And Blue Winter moved his trailer out to my place and has been here ever since. All in all, a happy ending.
Laura Crum lives in Aptos, California, with her husband and son and a large family of animals. Hayburner is her seventh Gail McCarthy mystery.
To find out more about her mystery series, or send her an e-mail, go to lauracrum.com
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