The Fame Equation

by Lisa Wysocky

  Today we were able to pull the cart alongside Petey and also behind him without him trying to turn his head or body around to confront the cart. It was more validation that horses do process information if you let them sit and think about things for a day or so.

  After patting Petey, allowing him to lead himself back to the barn aisle, and giving him lots of love for a job well done, Jon turned him out into a paddock with Wheeler and Reddi. Only then did I get Sally Blue out of her stall. I groomed her while Jon refreshed Petey’s stall, and hers. Then we turned Sally out into the front pasture with Gigi and Bob, and let Ringo stretch his legs in the covered arena.

  While Ringo explored the arena, Jon and I stood near the arena gate. After a few false starts, I asked Jon the question I had been mulling over all morning.

  “How did your visit with Tony go?”

  “Okay,” he said after a moment. “Some awkward moments. Not as many as I expected. We’ll probably always have some of that.”

  We watched Ringo paw, drop, and roll in the center of the arena, and I was glad to see that he rolled all the way over on his back from left to right, then reversed the process. A horse who could only roll from one side onto the center of his back and not flop over onto the other side, often had a sore back, hip, or pelvis.

  “Mind if I ask you something?” Jon asked.

  Gee, Jon was getting quite personal these days. Our previous years of existence as trainer and assistant had pretty much been limited to the job. I was so used to Jon as a private person that his reaching out felt odd.

  “What’s on your mind?” I said.

  “Do you ever wish you had a better relationship with your dad?”

  “My dad? We don’t even have a relationship.”

  “I know.” Jon gave a rueful smile. “But do you ever wish you did?”

  I considered that. My dad was a charming Irishman with sparkling green eyes and bright red hair. He had loved my mother so much that when she died the only way he could cope was to look at the bottom of a bottle of whisky. When I was nine, he left me alone so often in a Chicago slum that child protective services rescued me and reunited me with my grandmother in Tennessee. That might be why I got so mad at Hill Henley and his treatment of Bubba, because I had once been a neglected child myself. Only a psychiatrist could help me sort that out and I currently didn’t have the time, energy, or desire to go that route.

  Since then, my dad called me once every few years. I occasionally got a birthday or Christmas card from him, and I’d seen him four times. He even showed up for both my high school and my college graduation. Well, he was two days late on the college one, but he made the effort. Once, he came to my farm. I had last seen him two years ago at a horse show in Oklahoma City. From what I could tell, he bounced around from one farm labor job to another, one racetrack to the next, and every bar in between. Did I wish I had a better relationship with him?

  “I wish he didn’t drink,” I said. Then I picked up a broom and started to sweep the aisle.

  Hill came home just after noon. I saw him pull in with his trailer and gave him half an hour to unload and get the horses situated. Then I hoofed it on over to his place and pounded on the barn door. Forget the Dobermans. After I got through, Hill might wish they had laid into him instead of me.

  As usual, Hill’s timing was unfortunate. If Jon had not just asked me about my dad and brought up a boat load of mixed feelings, I might not have been so hard on Hill. As it was, it wasn’t pretty.

  “––and if you ever had one, single, bright idea, it must have been beginner’s luck,” I shouted. “And Hill? You clean up that mess you call a house, today, or I am going to call the child welfare people.” I was so worked up I realized that I sounded like Brandyne Potts.

  “What you been doin’ in my house?” he asked, his voice dangerously low. I needed to be careful, as Hill was holding a pitchfork. It was a plastic one, but I still didn’t want to see it too closely. Even plastic tines could poke out an eye.

  “Your son invited me,” I yelled, waving my arms like Fitch. “He wanted help looking for a card, or a letter, or a phone number where he could reach you because you weren’t answering your stupid phone.” I wondered if people could hear me across the river. I hoped not. The Cumberland ran behind both of our farms and was wide enough and deep enough for barge travel. But I knew that sound carried over water.

  I lowered my voice. “Your son cares about you. Why? I have no idea, but he does, even though you’re about as useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle. You had better stand up, and be deserving of his care.”

  “Or what, missy?” said Hill. His eyes were black and I could feed the menace ooze out of him. “Or. What?”

  “You just clean up your house and take care of Bubba. Take good care.”

  Before I knew it, I had turned and was striding away. I wanted to look back, to see if Hill’s pitchfork was going to slam into the back of my head, but I resisted the urge. It would have spoiled my exit.

  I was just crawling through my own fence when my cell rang. My instincts were to let it go to voice mail. It was probably Hill ready to throw more threats at me, but I looked at the screen to find it was Keith.

  “I just got a copy of the roughs from the video shoot,” Keith said as soon as I answered. “The sheriff ’s office got a copy, too, but I got the camera guys to send a full set over to me. Want come over to the house to watch with me?”

  Did I? Absolutely.

  “Bring Jon, if you can,” said Keith. “He was there for most of the shoot. He might see something that we miss.”

  “What are we looking for?” I asked.

  “An odd look, a conversation, facial expressions. Anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Got it. We’ll be right over.”

  Despite my friendship with Carole, I hadn’t had many invites to the Carson home. A party or two, and a few coffees with Carole when the older kids were at school was about it. Our schedules were completely different, and frankly, all those kids together made me want to stuff them into a closet. Not that I would ever do that . . . well, probably not.

  Jon was a harder sell than I thought.

  “I’ve got calls to make, feed and lumber and shavings to order, and I was going to get that new insulation wrapped around the water pipes in the barn today. If you haven’t noticed, it’s November. Winter is on the way.”

  Winter was a relative term here in Middle Tennessee. A typical January week might include six degrees and snow followed by sixty degrees and sun. Next up: a gray, windy twenty-eight with freezing rain, sleet, and ice.

  “But it’s for Melody,” I said. “You might notice something in the raw footage that Keith and I miss. You were there. You could help.”

  Jon couldn’t say no after that, so we walked over to the Carson place and knocked on the side door. Inside, the home was everything you might imagine the home of a country superstar to be. There were warm pine hardwoods, comfy leather chairs and sofas, and coffee tables you could put your boots up on. Gold and platinum records hung on the walls, award trophys littered the mantle over the big fireplace in the great room, and acoustic guitars could be seen tucked away in several nooks. Overall, the house had an air of casual messiness. It was easy to see that four children lived here, and that their house was a home. It was lived in and loved.

  Keith led us to a secluded media room that I think was over the four-car garage. The house was large and I got twisted around. We each grabbed a club chair and Keith set the footage on go. There were actually two sets of video footage. The first was from the unpersonable Fitch and the company that had been hired to shoot the music video. It included take after boring take of each scene from each camera.

  While I knew I was going to look at footage of my friend, I hadn’t thought the idea through. Melody was so young and alive and vibrant on the screen that I felt I could reach out and touch her. To know that her body now lay in a box in the ground on top of Pinnacle Hill, well it was like learning anew th
at she had been killed. Jon and Keith both handed me a Kleenex box at the same time.

  We fast-forwarded through most of the Fitch footage, as almost all of it was solely of Keith and Melody. I certainly didn’t see anything in there that indicated that Keith had killed his duet partner and Jon later said that he didn’t either.

  The video company also had concert footage of Keith and Melody on stage and then it was my turn to hand a box of Kleenex back to Keith. The final scene from this company had been filmed at the riding center. But, it was all close-ups of the program’s riders and horses, with a few glimpses of leaders and sidewalkers––nothing that showed anything other than staged interactions.

  Then we looked closely at the music video itself. The shot of Keith and Melody cantering across the steeplechase grounds on Bob and Sally with the rich drape of fall foliage behind them was stunning. This was followed by the two stars walking hand in hand, leading their horses. The videographer had reached deep to capture an array of moving expressions that played across each of their faces.

  I’d actually had to compromise on that shot. For the two stars to walk hand in hand, Melody had to lead Sally from the right side, rather than the traditional left. Only a horse person would catch that, though. The video next showed Melody and Keith helping a child with a disability get on her horse. Lots of smiles and high fives all around.

  Keith paused the video and leaned over to talk to Jon and me. “That footage came from my personal videographer. He filmed with a hand held, rather than with a tripod, so the footage has a raw feel. It’s also grainier because it was indoors and there wasn’t as much light as we should have had. But I think it works, don’t you?”

  The next shot was also at the center and showed Melody and Keith shaking the hands of adults in wheelchairs, one of whom was dressed in military garb. Then the concert footage kicked back in.

  “Soundcheck,” said Keith.

  “The rehearsal place,” I added to Jon. Jon nodded. The horrendous Nashville flood of 2010 had put Soundcheck under about ten feet of water. Many top artists lost stage sets, memorabilia, instruments, and costumes. But, the facility had rebounded nicely and was back in full swing.

  The video closed with another shot of Melody, Keith, and the horses cantering across the field, but this time they stopped for a kiss. I didn’t know much about award-winning videos, but if I had ever seen one, this was it. It was full of color and emotion, and was sure to tug on the heartstrings of each and every viewer.

  For our purposes, the raw footage from Keith’s personal videographer was far more interesting than Fitch’s footage had been. At craft services, a morning shot found Buffy and Davis in a heated argument. As the shot was from a distance we could not hear the words, but quick movements of his head and jabs with his arms punctuated Davis’s body language. Buffy’s arms spread wide several times before she turned and walked toward the camera. Her face was grim.

  In a dressing room at Soundcheck, there were Buffy and Davis again, rifling through a row of clothes that were hanging on a portable metal clothing rack. By the look of them, the clothes were for Melody. Neither person wore a happy expression. At the riding center, in another long shot, Ruthie was vivaciously interacting with some of the riders and their families. But then she straightened and stared in the direction of the barn. The look on her face was pensive. We backed up the video several times to try to figure out what, or who, Ruthie was looking at, but it was impossible.

  Also at the riding center was a happy Rowan Harding, swinging between the arms of her parents, Allen and Emily. Emily was full of doting looks toward her daughter, but Allen was not so happy. In fact, his face was set in stone as he looked past the camera.

  There was some footage of Keith and Melody talking quietly, their bodies relaxed, as they waited for a shot to be set up. Robert Griggs hurried past in several of the shots, clipboard in hand. One time he stopped to talk to Fitch, the director, who waved him away. Robert walked off, then stopped to turn back to look at Fitch. Robert’s expression was cold.

  A number of Mighty Happy volunteers in long sleeved gold t-shirts with the center logo on them mingled in and out of the shots. Once, Sandy Sweet spoke with Ruthie and Emily, but the conversation seemed pleasant enough.

  The last bit of footage found Allen and Ruthie off in a corner of the arena. The area was not well lit, but one could easily see the family resemblance. Both were stocky with heavy thighs, although Allen was much taller than Ruthie’s five-foot- four. They had the same hooked nose, blue eyes, and crooked smile, but Ruthie’s posture was casual, while Allen’s was all business. His shoulders were square and his arms were folded as he listened to his sister.

  I wished there had been better sound, but most of the shots were not taken close in and it seemed as if most of the subjects were not even aware that they were being filmed. All in all, it made me want more than ever to go to the volunteer training at the riding center that evening. I also wanted to speak with Buffy and Davis. Something was definitely going on between those two, something that might even lead to finding Melody’s killer.

  Before we left, I asked Keith about the looks Annie saw he and Buffy share at the funeral.

  “Was it that obvious?” he laughed. “Buffy is not my publicist, but we see each other frequently, because she worked with Melody. That woman is after me all the time. I keep telling her I am a happily married man, but she never gives up.”

  Keith must have seen the disbelieving expression on my face.

  “Oh, she’s subtle. She’d never say or do anything that anyone else would notice, but gosh darn she makes me uncomfortable.”

  So Buffy also had a crush on Keith Carson. Maybe hers was not as platonic as mine. As Jon and I walked back to the barn I wondered if Buffy’s feelings were strong enough for her to kill someone she thought might steal away his potential affections. Someone like Melody Cross?

  14

  THERE WERE ABOUT A DOZEN people at the Mighty Happy Therapeutic Riding Center’s new volunteer orientation, including Darcy and me. After this afternoon’s encounter, I didn’t have the strength to call Hill to ask if Bubba could come along. Besides, Hill had just gotten home. He and Bubba needed some father/son bonding time. I hoped part of that time would be spent cleaning up their house.

  All of the prospective volunteers gathered at one end of the arena, where a dozen or so chairs had been set up around a power point screen and projector. The other new volunteers seemed to come from a cross section of the community. A few sported windbreakers stamped with the church logo, and combined, the group ranged in age from high school students to retirees.

  After a mighty happy welcome, Emily led the training with Robert’s help. We started by filling out a lot of paperwork that absolved the center of liability should anyone happen to fall underneath a horse, be bitten, or break an ankle stepping on or off the mounting ramp. We then watched a promotional video about the center before Emily got down to business.

  First off was a tour, where we were shown the tack and feed rooms, and the large, cork bulletin board where instructions were left for volunteers. Then, by flashlight, we toured the pasture and paddocks.

  “We have a ‘no treat’ rule for the horses, so leave those carrots and peppermints at home,” Emily said. “The horses sometimes are given treats by staff, but you can imagine what would happen if all of our volunteers brought treats whenever they came out. Our horses would be on sugar overload and develop dental problems.”

  “The horses also might start to look for treats and nuzzle your pocket, or the pocket of a participant,” Robert added. “Some of our people have poor balance, so if a horse bumps them with their nose, the person could fall over.”

  Point taken. We next were shown where the first aid kit and telephones were, on the off chance there was an emergency. We also learned that the tack room doubled as an official storm shelter, and where the water shut off valve and the electric breaker box were located. I got the feeling that Emily was so organi
zed that an emergency would never be allowed to happen in her presence, but we were shown where to go and what to do, just in case a rogue disaster dared to sneak in.

  Emily’s mood here was quite different than I had seen in her before. With Rowan she had been a kind and loving mom. In lessons she was a fun teacher who knew just how much to challenge her students. Here she was so businesslike she was almost clinical in her delivery. It made me wonder if she could turn her moods off and on, much as I had seen Pastor Ruthie flick the switch on her charisma.

  Next, we were given instruction on how to relate to the program participants. Some of their “riders” didn’t actually ride, but instead did obstacle courses and other leading exercises with their horse, so “participant” was the center’s catch-all word. We were taught how to shake hands with a locked elbow and upper arm, so the participant who did not understand boundaries would not get too up close and personal, and how to gracefully avoid a hug, if one was not welcomed. Hot dog! I could put this stuff to use if I ever hit the dating pool again.

  I also learned that when it came to the world of therapeutic riding, I knew nothing. In fact, the correct terminology was EAAT, equine assisted activities and therapies. Therapy horses at this center were trained to respond correctly to the least experienced human handler, so consistent horse handling practices were firmly in place. We all needed to follow their horse handling rules, even if we interacted with our own horses differently.

  After learning the specific steps they took to groom, saddle, and otherwise tack their horses (most of the horses were led, and ridden, in a halter, rather than a bridle), we went to the wooden mounting ramp. This was a structure of about twenty feet in length with a ramp at one end and a platform of about three feet in height at the other. The ramp was wide enough for a wheelchair to be pushed up it.