Amanda

by Kay Hooper

  “Am I?” She managed a smile, and hoped it didn’t look as strained as it felt.

  He pulled her into his arms.

  Amanda sighed and briefly closed her eyes as she relaxed against him, her arms slipping inside his suit jacket and around his lean waist. For just a moment, she told herself, she would lean on him and take the comfort he offered. For just a moment. She was entitled, wasn’t she?

  “So much for our little secret,” she murmured.

  “Was it going to be a secret?” He rubbed his chin in her hair.

  “Well, for a while. At least a day or two.” She lifted her head—with rather terrifying reluctance—from his chest and looked up at him. “I’m all right, really.”

  Walker kissed her, taking his time about it and resolving any doubts the watchers might have had as to their interpretation of the hug.

  “You did that deliberately,” Amanda told him when she could, bemused to see that she was clutching at his shirt. She smoothed the fine linen absently.

  “Of course.” He was smiling, and the green eyes were alight. “A kiss should always be deliberate.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t like secrets,” he said, and released her. “I have to go talk to the sheriff. Wait here for me, all right?”

  “Unless the wind changes.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She heard a brief laugh escape her. “I’m only afraid of horses when I can smell them. So—if the wind changes, I’ll have to get out of here.”

  Walker looked at her for a moment, then shook his head and went off toward Sheriff J. T. Hamilton’s tall, skinny form.

  Amanda leaned back against the fence again and shoved her trembling hands into the pockets of her jeans. He didn’t like secrets. Wonderful. Not that she hadn’t already known that, of course, but the reminder was unnerving.

  The entire morning had been unnerving—beginning just after midnight.

  She brooded for a few minutes, not really paying attention to the people milling about. But then she realized that Sully was coming toward her, accompanied by a slender woman of medium height with bright red hair cut short on her well-shaped head.

  “Leslie wanted to meet you,” Sully told her in his usual abrupt way. “Leslie Kidd, Amanda Daulton.”

  Amanda met Sully’s steady gaze for just a moment, surprised, then looked at Glory’s newest rider and smiled. “Hello, Leslie.”

  “My friends call me Les.” Her eyes were a melting brown, lovely and oddly gentle in her face; she wasn’t beautiful or even especially pretty, but there was something curiously compelling about those eyes. And her voice was soft and sweet without being at all childlike. “What about you? Does anyone ever shorten it to Mandy?”

  “Not more than once.”

  “I’ll remember that—Amanda.” Then Leslie’s smile faded and she added, “This is an awful thing.”

  “Yeah.” Amanda looked at Sully. “What’s going on over there?”

  “Helen’s examining the body, and J.T.’s examining the ramp,” Sully replied. “Who called Walker?”

  “He said he was always called when anything happened at Glory. I didn’t ask by who.”

  Sully grunted. “J.T., probably.” Then he eyed Amanda with a certain sardonic amusement. “Nice going, by the way. I’ve heard of being in bed with the opposition, but you’re the first I’ve seen take that literally.”

  Clearly, he had not missed the embrace and kiss from Walker. Conscious of Leslie’s silent attention, Amanda merely said, “I believe in covering all my bases.”

  “Apparently, that’s not all You’ve covered.” Sully waited a moment to see if she had a response, then turned around and headed back toward the others.

  Amanda let out a little sound of frustration that was almost a growl, and muttered, “I knew it was too good to last.”

  “What was?” Leslie asked curiously.

  “He was being nice to me. It must have been too great a strain on his temper.”

  “Well,” Leslie said fairly, “when you and this— Walker, is it?—greeted each other, we could feel the heat way over there. Being Sully, he could hardly resist a remark or two.”

  Amanda eyed her. “You seem to have gotten to know him rather quickly.”

  “Sully?” Leslie’s brown eyes were innocent. “Well, he’s really not very complicated, you know.”

  “he’s not?”

  “Oh, no. It’s just that he’d die for this place, and he’s afraid he’s going to lose it.”

  “He won’t. Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  Leslie nodded slowly, then said, “He surprised you when we first came up. Why?”

  “Because he said I was Amanda Daulton as if he really believed that’s who I am.”

  “Maybe he does.”

  “Maybe.” Amanda turned her gaze back toward the barns, just in time to see a black body bag on a stretcher being wheeled toward a waiting ambulance. The sight made her feel a little queasy, and in her mind was the question she’d been asking herself ever since Sully had told her what had happened.

  What if it hadn’t been an accident?

  As if she were indeed telepathic and not only with horses, Leslie Kidd said softly, “I didn’t hear a thing. Didn’t see a thing. And my apartment’s right above where it happened.”

  Amanda looked at her, but before she could say anything, another woman was approaching and Leslie murmured, “I’d better go. Dr. Chantry’ll probably want to talk to you alone.” Then she paused, adding flatly, “Be careful, Amanda.”

  “I will.” Watching Leslie Kidd walk away and Helen approach, Amanda found herself uneasily preoccupied with the breeze that was beginning to die down—and change direction. “Why would I be afraid when I smell horses?” she demanded of Helen when the doctor reached her.

  “Afraid?” From her imperturbable reaction, it seemed Helen was used to having things come at her quickly.

  “Yeah. But only when I smell them. Why?”

  “Probably some kind of trauma. You’ve associated the smell of horses with a frightening or painful experience, probably when you were a child, and so the smell of them triggers fear.”

  “I don’t remember anything like that.”

  Helen looked at her thoughtfully. “Is the reaction getting stronger?”

  Amanda nodded. “Since I came to Glory, yes. Much stronger. Especially in the last week or two. And … sometimes I wake up scared to death, and all I can remember is that everything smelled of horses.”

  “Then you might be as close as one dream away from remembering why you’re afraid. It sounds like your mind is preparing you for some kind of shock, for some … revelation You’ve avoided remembering.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Of course. The mind is a responsible guardian, Amanda; it often protects us, for as long as necessary, from shocks we aren’t capable of surviving or which would devastate us. We remember when we’re ready to, when we’re strong enough to take the shock. And as for the smell of horses triggering your fear—smell is one of the strongest memory triggers we humans have.”

  “I don’t like the sound of any of that.” Amanda felt profoundly uneasy.

  Helen smiled at her. “Don’t worry too much about it. When you’re ready to remember, you will. It won’t do any good to try forcing it—or escaping it.”

  Amanda nodded, though she was not at all reassured. Changing the subject, she said, “About Victor. It was an accident, wasn’t it? A careless mistake?”

  “So it seems.” Helen shrugged. “there’s no evidence of anything else, not that I can find. The hydraulics could have failed, dropping the ramp when Victor was under it. On the other hand,” she added deliberately, “someone could have hit the release button—it’s there for emergencies, in case the ramp has to be lowered very quickly—and intentionally used it to kill him.”

  “Why would anyone have wanted to kill him?” Amanda asked quickly.

  “I don’t know. D
o you?”

  Amanda hesitated a moment, then shook her head. After all, she told herself, as she had before, no one else could possibly have known that Victor had told her about something that had happened here at Glory twenty years ago—and even if someone had known, or if Victor himself had told someone else about it, so what? Christine was dead, Matt Darnell long gone; who would care about their affair even if it had taken place?

  “He didn’t strike me as a very likable man,” she told Helen. “But he’d been at Glory for more than twenty years, and I assume if someone here, had wanted to kill him they would have done it before now.”

  “That’s the way I saw it.”

  Amanda changed the subject again. “I guess there’s no news on what made me so sick the night of the party?”

  “Not yet.” Helen sighed. “Damned labs don’t seem to be making any headway. But the test results should come directly to me, so I’ll let you know.”

  “My DNA test too?”

  Helen was surprised. “No, those results will go directly to Jesse. He insisted, and since he’s footing the bill, he gets what he wants.”

  It was Amanda’s turn to be surprised, but only for a moment. Then she realized why Jesse would have arranged things that way. A master manipulator, he was perfectly capable of looking at an inconclusive DNA test result and announcing to the family that it had, in fact, been conclusive. He might even be capable, she thought, of claiming absolutely negative results to be positive; Jesse hated to be proven wrong.

  “I didn’t know,” Amanda said. Before she could say anything else, the breeze began to shift, and the warm scent of horses wafted past them.

  “Amanda?”

  She swallowed hard, trying to control the panic. “I —I have to go, Helen. Um … tell Walker I couldn’t wait, all right? I’ll—I’ll talk to you later.”

  Without waiting for a response, and hardly caring what any watchers might think of her sudden retreat, Amanda bolted for the house.

  “Seems clear to me,” Sheriff Hamilton said in his habitually weary voice. “The ramp dropped and Vic had the misfortune to be under it when it did.”

  Walker nodded. “I’d say so. But neither one of us knows anything about hydraulics, J.T. If I know Jesse, He’ll want this van checked out stem to stern, and pronto. You want to arrange to have it towed to town, or you want me to?”

  “Why towed?” The sheriff sounded a bit plaintive. “Jesus, Walker, it was the ramp failed, not the engine.”

  “it’s an old van, remember? The brakes are hydraulic too. You want to drive it ten miles on mountain roads?”

  Hamilton pushed his trademark fedora onto the back of his head and sighed. “Guess not. I’ll have it towed.”

  Walker nodded, but somewhat abstractedly. He studied the ramp of the van—raised now and carefully locked into place, its black-painted surface showing no stains of violence—and then looked at the now churned-up sand that had cradled Victor’s body for at least several hours before he’d been discovered.

  “What’s eating at you?” the sheriff asked, his voice still drawling but his faded blue eyes sharp.

  “I’m not sure. Something about this just doesn’t feel right.” Walker frowned, then said, “Lower the ramp again, will you? I want to have a look inside.”

  J.T. motioned to his deputy, and they went to either side of the rear of the van so that they could slowly and carefully—with a manual crank—lower the ramp to the ground.

  Sully stepped up to Walker. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  Positioned so that he could look directly into the van when the ramp was down, Walker studied the interior of the vehicle for a long moment without answering. Then, slowly, he said, “Why was he raising the ramp, Sully?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what was the point? Why close it up after he unloaded the horses? I’ve seen this van parked here whenever it wasn’t in use, and the ramp was always down.”

  The sheriff, stepping closer to listen, asked Sully, “Is that right?”

  “Yeah, I guess it is.” Sully frowned. “it’s here between the barns, out of the way, and there’s never a real reason to close it up. Open, it stays aired.”

  “Speaking of airing,” Walker said, “there’s another reason Victor wouldn’t have closed up the van. After a long trip with six horses, it’s pretty ripe in there. Look around you—no shovel or pitchfork, no wheelbarrow; he obviously didn’t intend to clean out all that manure, at least not until he’d got some sleep.”

  “He wouldn’t have anyway,” Sully said. “he’d have got one of the maintenance people to do it. But … you’re right, Walker. There’s no good reason why he would have raised the ramp.”

  The three men looked at each other, and then the sheriff said unhappily, “Well, shit.”

  “Not a chance in hell of finding anything useful now,” Walker said. “Dozens of people have been all over this area this morning. If there was any evidence it was deliberate, it’s gone now.”

  “Who would have wanted to kill him?” Sully demanded, keeping his voice low. “I mean, sure, Victor could be a jerk, especially where women were concerned, but you could say the same of half the men in this county. He didn’t get along with everybody, and he was a sarcastic son of a bitch; so what? You don’t cave in a man’s skull just because he pissed you off.”

  “And who’d a thought up such a thing?” the sheriff offered, still acutely unhappy. “Gun or knife, sure. Hell, even a stick. But a ramp? How’d whoever it is know he’d obligingly walk under the thing?”

  “It does seem an awkward way to murder someone,” Walker said slowly. “At the same time, it might have been the easiest way. Somebody could have raised the ramp while Victor was leading the sixth horse to the training ring, and the way the van’s parked, he might not have realized anyone was here. He would have walked beside the van from the front … wouldn’t have seen the ramp up until he got back here … and probably would have headed for the controls on the other side without even thinking how wrong it was … and when he got under the ramp, whoever was hiding there could have hit the emergency release button.”

  Sully was shaking his head, still resisting the idea. “But why? It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “Murder never does,” Walker said absently, then added, “You know, it could have been a lot simpler. Somebody could have hit him over the head with a stick or rock—and then arranged for the ramp to drop on him to make it look like an accident.”

  “Why?” Sully repeated.

  “I don’t know why. I didn’t care for Victor very much myself, but I was never tempted to kill him. Apparently, someone was very tempted.”

  “Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything,” Sheriff Hamilton reported wearily. “And unless Helen finds something in the postmortem, We’ve got nothing. All your theories aside, Walker, this’ll likely end up stamped accident.”

  “Yeah.” Sully’s voice was morose. “But what if he’s right, J.T.? What if We’ve got a murderer on Glory?”

  To that, the sheriff had no reply.

  Walker found her just inside the garden almost half an hour later. She was sitting on a stone bench in the shade, staring somewhat blindly, he thought, at a trellis where only one lone red rose still bloomed.

  “Amanda?”

  She jumped a bit, but at least there was no fear in her eyes when she looked up at him. Helen had said she’d run away from the stables with fear in her eyes. Terrible fear.

  He sat down beside her. “The wind changed, huh?”

  Amanda grimaced slightly and nodded. “Did Helen tell you I got spooked and ran?”

  “She told me you were afraid.” Walker turned a bit so that he could study her intently. “From the sound of it, more afraid than I realized. Why, Amanda?”

  “I don’t know. Helen says something must have happened to me, something I associate with the smell of horses, but if it did, I don’t remember what it was.”

  “You said you had a bad
fall,” he recalled slowly.

  Amanda shook her head. “I said that to offer Jesse some kind of concrete reason for being afraid of horses, but the truth is, I can’t remember why they scare me.” She glanced at him, a humorless smile twisting her lips. “Aren’t you going to pounce, Walker? I’m admitting to a lie.”

  She was brittle, Walker realized as he listened to the tension in her voice. Wound so tight she was in danger of snapping. Because of this apparently escalating fear of horses? Or because of Victor’s death?

  “No,” he said, “I won’t pounce. The fear is obviously real, whatever caused it.”

  “And my lying about it doesn’t bother you?”

  Dryly, he said, “What’s one among so many?”

  With another sideways glance and brief smile, this one holding a touch of genuine humor, she said, “Bastard.”

  “You asked,” he reminded her with a smile. “And —whatever happened to you, you’ll remember it when you’re ready,” he said.

  “That’s what Helen said.”

  Walker looked at her for a moment, then reached for her hand. “Listen, why don’t you go back to town with me, and we can have lunch together? It would probably do you good to get away from here for a few hours.”

  “I have to look for the dogs.”

  He frowned. “I assumed they were in the house, or—”

  “No. They’ve been gone all morning. I’ve called them, but they haven’t come.” She shrugged jerkily. “So I have to look for them.”

  “they’re probably out chasing rabbits.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  With everything else that had happened, Walker wasn’t particularly concerned by the dogs having been AWOL for a few hours, but Amanda’s tension was definitely making him uneasy. He had the idea that she was holding herself still only with a great effort, that she was a breath away from jumping up and running—and a lot farther than just to the house.

  “Amanda, look at me.”

  After a moment, she did, her eyes darkened with strain.

  He touched her cheek with his free hand, and asked quietly, “What is it? What are you feeling?”

  Her smile was as strained as her eyes. “it’s been a rough morning. You may have noticed.”