April Smith - Judas Horse

“Sorry, big guy.” I laugh. “I don’t have anything for you.” “He wants to suck,” Megan explains plaintively.

McCord’s attention is still on Sara. “What do you think?” “He looks all right.”

“He is all right,” McCord replies, cheery.

Megan: “Will he ever get his sight back?”

“Afraid not, Miss Tewksbury. The vet says it’s difficult to determine exactly the cause of the blindness, but the corneas are permanently scarred.” “Poor sweetheart.”

“He’ll do fine with the right care. You’d have to keep his environment consistent, in a corral where he always knows where’s his water and feed. But his other senses will become more accurate, and he’ll be able to get around, maybe as a companion animal to another horse.” “Like Sirocco?” Megan gazes up at McCord with the expectant look of a wife who really wants that washing machine.

“That’s what I was thinking. How long since she lost her baby?” “She had that accident on the track and came to us…maybe three months ago?” “Then she could still lactate.”

“Really? Nurse Geronimo?”

“It’s possible.”

He slides off his horse.

“So, Sara, do you like him?” he asks.

She shrugs. “He’s cute.”

“Like to keep him?”

“Keep him?”

“Look after him awhile, you and Sirocco, help him along. He needs a lot of TLC, and Dave Owens’s barn is full.” Sara blushes. Her shoulders collapse with doubt. “Me?”

“You’re the one who found him. In my book, that gives you claim.” McCord offers the rope.

Lifelong skepticism does not allow me to believe that Sterling McCord has traveled down the road this dusty summer afternoon simply to give Sara Campbell exactly what she needs, but as he patiently holds the lead out to her, whatever dark possibilities I conjure just don’t seem to hold. Whether McCord is an FBI agent on my tail or a cowboy doing a job, he is offering the girl what has been missing from her life.

Something to love.

Sara reaches out and her fingers close around the rope. The blind foal’s head comes up to her chest and his spindly legs match hers. She tentatively strokes his neck and fingers the fluff hanging off his chin.

“Let’s take him to Sirocco,” Megan says hopefully. “See if she’ll nurse.” We walk in procession toward the barn — McCord leading his horse, Sara and the herky-jerky foal, Megan and I — passing the white cat, the ducks, and the wire cage, now empty.

Someone has stolen all the rabbits.

“We’re having a party,” Megan tells McCord. “A midsummer festival. Please come. I’d like to buy you a drink for taking care of Geronimo.” “Not necessary but much appreciated. Especially if this lovely young lady’s gonna be there.” He is talking about Sara.

Sirocco is standing placidly in the pasture when Megan leads the foal inside. She unsnaps the lead rope and withdraws, latching the gate. They approach and sniff each other. Sirocco dodges away. The baby chases her, and she wheels in the dust. He follows, absolutely desperate, but she won’t let him near, making little nips and kicks. Abruptly, when she’s ready, she just stops, and after a moment, he finds the teats.

Megan, leaning on the fence, quietly thumbs the tears from her eyes.

The gun that killed Sergeant Mackee is a single-shot bolt-action sniper rifle about fifty inches long, weighing between fourteen and eighteen pounds. Not the kind of thing you can hide in a sugar bowl.

Every day, with quiet urgency, I search another part of the house. Every night, lying in bed, I perform a mental inventory of the rooms, noting anything missing or out of place. I visualize the porch. Grasses have grown tall around the rusted sink. Thick stands of lavender and wild daisies remain unbroken around the crawl space underneath the steps, and the basement windows show an untouched glaze of dust, meaning nobody’s been creeping around down there, hiding weapons. The narrow windows at ground level look in on Dick Stone’s workshop, which is always locked, and I have never rubbed the dirt away to spy inside. Stone is likely checking his own inventory every day.

The front hall is a staging area of floating possessions — jackets, umbrellas, junk mail, Slammer’s skateboard — but there is also a closet jammed with vacuum cleaner parts, tennis rackets, rain gear, and brooms, at the back of which is a latched door. Hurried inspection with a flashlight reveals the door and latch have been thickly painted over. Probably leads to a crawl space beneath the stairs.

The kitchen, to the left of the entryway, is a public space that would be hard to use for hiding contraband. The living room is a challenge. There are so many collections of tiny things, it is a perplexing game of Memory to place every piece of Depression glassware and each china cat. I have moved them just to see if Megan will move them back. She does.

In the living room, the TV is always playing, even in the daytime semi-darkness. At night, we assemble on the caved-in couch grooved with body imprints, like any other cobbled-together American family, placing our heels on the coffee table precisely in the spaces between the old wine bottles and bowls of dried-up guacamole, watching cop shows or a movie from Dick Stone’s collection of tapes. He has become obsessed with Apocalypse Now.

Also, he has begun to get in shape.

Stone is jogging ten miles in the mornings, a major change, which gets my attention. Offenders have rituals. They will alter their looks, get high, call Mom, or rob a store before they’re ready to go out and execute a major crime.

Like the Big One.

Along with a dedicated running schedule, he has been screening this movie regularly — once or twice a week — all of us saying the dialogue out loud like a gospel choir. Stone is as fussy about his tapes as Megan is about the candy dishes — he always keeps Apocalypse Now on the fourth bookshelf, at eye level, between The Deer Hunter and Taxi Driver.

One day, I noticed his favorite cassette was missing. It stayed missing for seventy-two hours; then it was back in the same place. Had he lent it? Is he playing with my head?

The sewing room is a drafty screened-in porch with tilting bamboo shades and bolts of discount cloth infested with earwigs. I call it the “Room of Unfinished Dreams.” An old Singer sewing machine is the island in the storm, black lace panties caught in its teeth, as Sara comes in here to sew her samples of lingerie — original designs that she claims she’ll sell one day to big department stores. There’s a dressing table with a big round mirror, drawers stuffed with Megan’s bags of yarn. The white cat likes the rattan love seat in the morning sun.

Lying in bed at night, I float inside my head like a dreamer to the upper limits of the sewing room, recollecting that the dropped ceiling tile showed no signs of removal (for illicit storage in the space above); then my inner eye travels up the stairs, past the German wall clock, to Stone and Megan’s bedroom, and the mondo mess of pills and herbal remedies in the master bath — including the heavy-duty antipsychotics Mellaril and Haldol, and benzodiazepines for anxiety, Ativan and Librium. It would be excellent to trace the doctor who wrote the prescriptions, but they are all generic, from Mexico. Megan, who did a stint as an aide in a psychiatric facility, has apparently been playing amateur shrink with Dick Stone’s brain.

Every day, I inspect Slammer’s room, the outbuildings, and of course the attic, and in every night’s review so far, this aging Victorian dame of a farmhouse has convinced me that she has herself in order — nothing wanton, nothing to hide.

The only place I have yet to search is Dick Stone’s locked workshop.