Timothy Culver - Power Play

Evelyn was smiling at him sidelong. “One of these days,” she said, “he’s going to say no, no you can’t have a horse, go away, we’re all busy. God knows what I’ll do then.”

“Go away, I suppose,” Robert said. “I know I would.”

Soon after, two horses were led out, one a handsome chestnut and the other a plodding gray beast with a barrel body. Robert suspected at once that the gray was for him and was the most docile animal they had available, and he was right in both suspicions. As he mounted — the horse stood there like a stuffed mattress, like something left over from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade — he was suddenly put in mind of an old joke about an orange horse, and he glanced at Evelyn. But the joke was sexual in nature and the punch line was obscene, so he kept it to himself.

Riding was fun, even though the plug they’d given him could only with great difficulty be roused from its lethargy. It preferred to walk, if motion was absolutely necessary, but a fairly constant drumming of heels into its ribs could get it to shift gears up to a thump-thump trot.

Whether it was the fact of movement, or simply being away from the house, or the view of him bouncing along on the gray galumpher, he couldn’t tell, but whatever the cause Evelyn came much more to life while they rode. Her conversation was animated, and so were her expressions, and he began to revise his estimate of her age downward. He’d guessed her to be thirty when he’d first seen her, but now he thought she was probably much closer to twenty-five.

He had known that Lockridge’s estate was large, but he hadn’t realized just how various it was. They traveled through parklike forest, the ground flat and soft, and then over hilly broken land treacherous with boulders and thick with underbrush. They came to the creek Evelyn had mentioned and followed it up a dim moist ravine, then cantered up a treeless grassy hillside that cried out for a golf course. From the top of that hill, Evelyn told him, he could see most of Lockridge’s property. She pointed at landmarks defining the perimeter, and he nodded agreement but didn’t really yet have a clear idea of the estate in his head.

And she showed him the ghost town. It was in the woods again, and he might have ridden right on by it without seeing it, if she hadn’t pointed it out. “You’re on Main Street,” she called. “Hold up a minute.”

His horse was more than willing to hold up. He sat astride it and looked around and said, “Main Street?”

She had come up beside him and brought her own animal to a halt. “This used to be a town here,” she said. “A long long time ago. Too far back to be on any of the maps Bradford’s ever seen.” She pointed. “See the stone wall?”

And then he did. A few crumbling stones, a low wall no more than a foot high at any point, covered by creeper vines and years of rotted leaves. It ran about twenty feet in a straight line, then made a sharp left turn and faded away. “What was that?” he asked. “A farmer’s fence?”

“More likely a house,” she said. “That’s all that’s left around here, the foundations of some of the houses. And the cemetery over there. A few of the headstones aren’t entirely buried yet.”

Robert looked around in wonder. “You mean this was no fooling an honest to God community? Not just a farm, but a whole town?”

“A whole town,” she agreed. “A pretty big one, too, I think. I’ve come across foundations for maybe twenty houses, scattered all around here.”

Robert said, “This must go back to the Revolution, even before.”

“Probably.”

“What do you suppose did it? Indian attack?”

“Bradford says it was probably just evolution. There stopped being a need for a town here, so it died. There are hundreds of towns like this, you know, all over the Northeast.”

“That’s amazing.” Robert looked around at the trees, the underbrush, the low line of stones. Suddenly it all seemed very forlorn, very sad. “Do you suppose they had a mayor?” he asked.

To his surprise, she understood the statement behind the question. “I feel that way sometimes, too,” she said. “I come here and I imagine the houses, and children running in and out of them, with everything seeming so sure and permanent. And the women keeping everything clean.”

“And now we don’t even know what name they had for the place,” he said. He gave her a doleful smile. “What a cheery treat you had for me.”

“I’m sorry, I hadn’t realized it would affect you that way. It does me sometimes, but most people just think it’s curious. Come on, there’s open meadow over this way.”

When they got back to the stables, the man there said, “They phoned down from the house for you, Mrs. Canby. About twenty minutes ago.”

Robert was surprised at how white she got. She dismounted hurriedly, saying, “Did they say what was wrong?”

“No, just asked for you.”

“Excuse me,” she said over her shoulder to Robert. “I’ll have to phone and see.” She hurried away to the stable office.

Robert dismounted and the man came over to pat the gray horse on the side and say, “Well, what did you think of Beulah?”

“Oh, is this Beulah? Well, she’s pretty flighty, but I managed to keep her from running away with me.”

The man gave him an understanding grin and said, “Well, maybe next time we’ll give you something a little quieter.”

“I’d like to see that,” he said, “something a little quieter.”

The man nodded and went away, Beulah plodding fatalistically along behind him, and a minute later Evelyn came back out to the sunlight and said, “I think we should go back to the house.”

“Of course. Something wrong with the little girl?”

“What, Dinah?” Her surprise was genuine, and he was surprised himself to see that it hadn’t even occurred to her the call might be about her daughter. “No, it’s Bradford,” she said.

They started walking toward the house, she setting a brisk pace. He said, “It’s nothing serious, I hope.”

“We all do,” she said. “About three months ago, he had an attack. We were in California. Uncle Joe said — that’s his doctor.” She looked at him doubtfully. “You don’t know him, do you? Dr. Joseph Holt. He’s my uncle.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, he said it was what they call a little stroke. Not a real stroke, because it doesn’t do any permanent damage. He explained this all to me, but I’m afraid a lot of it just sank into my head and disappeared without a trace.” She was walking briskly and talking in hurried spurts, telling him this more out of a nervous need to talk than for any other reason. “He said there could be others like it,” she said. “Or Bradford could have a real stroke, and then God knows what would happen. He might even die.” Her voice grew suddenly faint on the word die, and he looked at her in alarm. Her face was white still, with patches of color on the cheeks, but she didn’t look as though she was going to collapse.

He said, “Is that what happened now? Another attack?”

“Yes. A little one, thank God, he was only unconscious for a very few minutes. In fact, I talked with him on the phone.”

“That’s good, then,” he said.

“Oh, if I lost him, too,” she said, but didn’t say any more, and when he glanced at her he saw that that had been the complete sentence. She was walking grimly, staring at the house as they neared it.

Sterling and Elizabeth were in the front room, and Robert stopped off with them while Evelyn went on. He said, “Evelyn told me about it.”

“It seems he had one once before,” Sterling said. He and Elizabeth both looked helpless and worried, and he imagined the same expression was on his own face.