Chapter Two

Two

Larry Shaw swallowed two lint-covered aspirin he’d dug from the depths of his pocket with a sip of coffee and grimaced. A heavy dampness clung to the morning left over from the night’s storm, thick tendrils of steam curling up from the fields surrounding the fair grounds. The rain had turned the Georgia clay to red slurry that was doubtless going to rid a horse or two of a shoe. Beads of condensation clung to everything: the gates, the seats of the bleachers. It dripped down off the high ceiling of the pavilion and dotted the arena with water polka dots. The humidity was wreaking havoc on his arthritis, and he concentrated on extending his leg and straightening his inflamed knee with every step as he and Eli went to check the horses.

“…need a faster run,” Eli was saying. “These are the stupidest damn cows I ever saw.”

“Not sure it’s the cows’ fault,” Larry said, leaving out the usual reprimand that Eli was too impulsive, too heavy-handed with his horse, and always threw his rope too soon.

Eli snorted.

They were walking along beneath the tin-roofed overhang on the shedrow where the Dry Creek Quarter Horses were stabled, red clay dust rising up in clouds beneath their boots. The barn was chaotic in the usual sense of temporary digs: card tables stacked with coffee cups and boxes of doughnuts, hay snugged up to the wall, saddles on stands; cotton coolers, halters and bridles slung over travel trunks and heaped unceremoniously on the ground. In the stalls, horses were being groomed, fed, or were alone, restless and whickering for breakfast.

Larry had sent Slim to throw grain to their horses and none of their heads were out, all of them eating. So it took him by surprise when a sleek, black, unfamiliar horse thrust his head out over the second-to-last stall door at the end of the row, pinned its ears, snorted, and then withdrew. Beside it, a little chestnut with a blaze poked its nose into the morning, then it retreated too.

“Slim.” The tall, bow-legged ranch hand ducked under the rope strung across Charger’s stall, an orange Home Depot bucket in one hand, feed scoop in the other. He adjusted his trucker cap with the scoop-holding hand as he straightened up to his full six-foot-three height. He nodded a greeting to his boss and fellow rancher. “Who the hell owns those?” Larry asked, gesturing toward the last two stalls with his coffee.

Slim twitched his mustache by way of a grin that touched no other part of his sun-weathered, leathery face. His eyes were so small and deep-set, his graying brows so thick it was impossible to tell what was going on in his head – and that was a constant affliction, for which Larry was appreciative. Slim never caused him a moment’s worry or drama. “Think you’ll wanna see for yourself.”

“See what?”

The black – and he was a big one, tall and more solidly built than any of their rodeo mounts – turned his tail to the door as they walked past and sent them a threatening look over his shoulder. The last time Larry had seen that kind of warning in a horse’s face, he’d been dropping onto its back before his play for saddle bronc champion of the day.

Slim waved him over to the chestnut’s stall. It was a gelding, maybe fifteen hands and slight. He’d lain down during the night and there were wood shavings clinging to his mane and tail, but otherwise, he was fit and shiny, obviously well cared for. He faced them with swiveling ears, seemed to evaluate them a moment, then ambled forward, sniffing through rounded nostrils.

“I found her ‘bout an hour ago,” Slim said. “Poor thing’s still sleepin’.”

“Who…?” but then Larry’s eyes adjusted to the darkness of the stall and he saw “her”.

A dark lump was huddled in the far corner of the stall, thin fingers of light filtering through the gap between roof and wall highlighting a tangled mass of platinum blonde hair. A girl in dark clothes had her back wedged against the boards, small white hands clasping her shins, head tucked into her knees.

Larry felt Eli press in beside him. “Who is she?” he asked, loud enough to rouse the girl.

Her head lifted, shoulder-length, choppy-cut hair flipping back over her shoulders. Her eyes were huge and blue and a bit startling in the shadows of the stall.

She sucked in a deep breath. “Oh, crap.”

-O-

She’d been found. Melanie felt a surge of panic as her still-sleepy brain registered the three men crowded at the door of LT’s stall. Her self-assurance that she was only resting her eyes had been a hopeless wish: she’d obviously fallen asleep and, if the sun in her face was any indication, it was now the next morning.

She leaped to her feet. Or, at least, she tried to. She staggered and slapped at the wall for support, only succeeding in catching a splinter in her palm. With a hiss, she pulled her injured hand into the other and gave up on her attempted flight. Where would she have gone anyway? Not like she could sneak both the horses out.

“Whoa,” one of the men at the door said and she didn’t know if he was talking to LT, or to her. A glance confirmed that the tall guy with the mustache was staring at her, not the horse, and possibly smiling. Great.

Mel tucked her hair behind her ears, wincing at the snarls she felt in it, and took stock of the three watching her. There was Mustache Guy. And then a young guy with unruly blonde curls twisting out from beneath the brim of his baseball cap. The man in between them looked to be in his fifties, his graying hair cut close to his head, his frown putting heavy creases across his brow and in the corners of his mouth.

Mel glanced down at her boots and grimaced at the picture she presented: boots and black breeches so mud-spattered they might as well have been rust-colored to begin with, her rain slicker, now dry, was covered with dust and mud that had dried in ugly patches. She still wore the threadbare shirt she’d ridden in the afternoon before, her pink sports bra visible beneath it, and she pulled the halves of her raincoat together. When she glanced up again, the tall guy and the young guy were grinning, amused, but the one in the middle was still scowling. With nothing better to do, she plead her case.

“I’m so sorry. I – I know this looks bad, but I…I just wanted to pull over in the storm and…and…I can pay for the stalls,” she thought morosely of the last forty dollars in her possession: when she’d quit, she hadn’t been offered her last paycheck and had been too hell bent on leaving to demand it. “If you could please just not call the police, I’d…”

She trailed off as the face of the stern man in the middle slowly softened, the wrinkles smoothing. He chuckled. “Police? Why? You steal somethin’?”

“Well, I used the stalls and sha -,”

“You kill anybody?”

Melanie frowned. “No.”

“What about this black horse over here? He kill anybody?”

She shook her head because, in all honestly, she’d only had Roman a couple years and couldn’t vouch for his murder rap.

“You like sleepin’ in horse stalls?”

“Not especially.”

The young guy laughed and tried unsuccessfully to hide his smile behind a hand. The tall guy grinned and ambled off. The speaker reached up and stroked a hand down LT’s nose, and the gelding seemed happy to let a stranger touch him. “Well,” he said, “you like coffee?”

Mel nibbled at her lower lip in a nervous gesture, debating, among other things, her immediate safety. Her growling stomach made the decision for her: she couldn’t very well worry about keeping safe if she passed out from hunger. “Yes.”

“Come on out then,” he said and turned away, as if expecting her to comply.

She did.