The Grave Maurice Page 8

  “The thing is, Maury, people don’t respond logically or reasonably most of the time. I mean it. Hell, look at what I do for a living-”

  But Maurice was following his former train of thought. “Don’t tell me that in a year and a half, she couldn’t have escaped.” He felt angry now, angry not so much at Vernon as at Nell.

  “I’m not telling you. That’s what I’ve been saying: maybe she didn’t want to.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. Only, remember, they had Aqueduct.”

  “You’re not saying she’d stay on account of a horse?”

  “I don’t know, Maurice. Nellie had an incredibly strong bond with those horses.”

  There was a silence.

  “The last time I saw her, she was fifteen,” said Vernon. “She’s seventeen now and, damn it, I want to see her again.”

  “We may never see her again.”

  Vernon shook his head. “No. She’ll walk in someday. You’ll turn around and she’ll be there.” He reached across the table and put his hand on Maurice’s arm. “You’ll see. She’ll just walk in.”

  Night Rider

  THIRTEEN

  The girl adjusted the rifle across her back, held in a sling she had made from a leather belt. She needed to keep her hands free and the sling made it less tiring. She had taken the gun from the mudroom where they parked their guns like umbrellas. They were careless; they didn’t always lock them up, which she knew was breaking the law. She’d taken the rifle over a month ago on the night she’d finally decided to get out.

  No surveillance is constant; no one’s guard is always up. They didn’t seem to have learned this: that the brief moments in which one walks to the other end of the barn or path or court, the careless absence for a cigarette or a coffee and, of course, the overconfidence that lets you relax your vigil and leave the torch forgotten on a chair. Any of those things would result in failure, would permit the jewels to be snatched, the safe cracked, the horse gone. Those things, plus faulty reasoning; that after the first horse was stolen, the belief that the thieves wouldn’t come again, at least not again so soon.

  But they had come the very next night, before there was time for the owner in the big rambling house to draw breath, much less to get surveillance in place. Now there were two guards, one to watch over the Thoroughbreds, one to guard the barns where the mares were kept. It had taken the owner a while, taken the third theft to alert everyone to the possibility that the Thoroughbreds weren’t the target. That wasn’t as dumb as it sounded since these mares would be of no value to anyone.

  From the deep shadows of an empty stall, she watched the guard, an overweight, cigarette-puffing man who paid less attention than he should have. She’d been watching for an hour, waiting for him to leave his post. He did. He rose from his stool outside the stall, yawned, scratched his lower back. She knew his habits by now. He was a smoker and, as there was a rule against smoking here in the barn, he had gone down to the end and stepped just outside. He took the torch with him in case the lights should fail; they’d had a way of doing that lately.

  She was dressed in black-black jeans, black wind-breaker, gloves, boots, everything. Around her head she wore a dark scarf to hide her pale hair, so pale it was almost the color of the moon and might glimmer if it wasn’t covered. In this costume, she couldn’t have found herself in the dark. That thought was rueful.

  She had been coming here also on nights besides the ones in which she took the mares; she needed to study the effects of the surveillance, the habits of the two guards. It was almost easier with the two of them because they kept each other occupied. They liked to talk, to joke around. This was funny. Instead of increasing the watch over the horses, the owner had actually diminished it.

  One guard for each barn, but not one for each end. The thinking would be that it wasn’t a diamond necklace the thieves were after, but horses, and a horse moving about made noise.

  That’s why it had taken her ten months, working with them nearly every day, to get the mares used to her and her touch, and different touches sent different directions to them. The important thing was to get them to move silently. They were so unused to moving at all and even the small amount of freedom Nell had bartered for did little to make them active, for most of them couldn’t recall what freedom was like. There was little recollection, though, as nearly all of them had been foals of mares held in the same captivity, and they had been among the few chosen to take the place of the mares that died. That was how it worked. That was probably the way hell worked, too. So for ten months, during the time she was allowed to unfasten the rubber cups and take them for exercise, she had tried to school them in backing out of their stalls in silence and to move in silence. They were given only three signs to learn: her hand on the muzzle meant silence when they moved around; a touch on the right shoulder meant a turn to the right; on the left shoulder, to the left. It did not take the horses long to get used to these signals; the hard thing was that there were sixty horses to teach it to. But she managed with most of them.

  It didn’t matter if the men-the stable lads, the groom, the trainer, Mr. Mackay-who worked there saw her with the mares because they’d have no idea there was a grim plan behind her quiet treatment. Mr. Mackay and Kenny, the head stable lad, thought her exercising these horses was ridiculous and liked to tell her so. Nell thought Mr. Mackay should never have been let within a hundred miles of a horse. If she saw him take that whip to Aqueduct, she’d kill him. Her horse was not mistreated, was treated fairly well, actually, because they used him for stud. But she wondered why, since Aqueduct’s real name obviously couldn’t be put down in the book.

  What surprised Nell was that, apparently, no one employed here talked about the mares off the premises. At least Bosworth, the assistant trainer, had told her it was worth their jobs talking about it.

  “How in hell,” Bosworth said, “you talked that woman into letting you take care of those mares I can’t imagine.” He seemed to enjoy it, though.

  “I bargained.”

  “You bargained?” Bosworth laughed. “Well, Val Hobbs is the one holding the cards. What in hell did you have to call her hand?”

  “My freedom.”

  He looked astonished. “Freedom? Love, the last I saw you didn’t have any more freedom than those benighted mares do.”

  “But I could get out of here without much effort. No matter how much all of you are supposed to be watching me. After a year and a half-well, you can’t watch all the time. She knows that. I could run.”

  Bosworth thought this over. “Guess you could at that. Surprised you haven’t.”

  “That’s what I bargained with-not running.”

  “And she believed that?”

  “Why not? It’s true.” At least it had been for nearly twenty months.

  It had taken her weeks to make the stables habitable. How had the mares stood it? Horses were fastidious creatures, like cats. They had stood it because they had had no choice. The smell was almost overpowering, or would have been to anyone who had never mucked out a stable. This was much worse. And mucking out was done on a daily basis, often twice a day, even more. It was done for the comfort and health of the horses, not to make the environment more pleasant for the humans; it was done as part of their care. The floor was cement rather than earth, not a good standing for a horse, but easier to clean, and still they often stood in their own feces.

  On that morning she had first found them, Nell walked up the line of narrow stalls. There was barely room for a person to squeeze in next to the horse, to shove in between the horse and the insubstantial wooden partitions on both sides, shoulder high to the horse. There were two rows, fifteen horses in a row in these constricting stalls, thirty altogether and thirty in the barn beside this one. A rope was attached to the rear leg of each mare and when she peered into the shadows of each stall, she saw another rope anchoring one of the front legs-opposite rear and front legs, which meant the horse couldn’t move mor
e than a few inches forward or backward. Each mare had a rubber cup attached to its hind quarters. Nell crouched, keeping to one side, and looked at the hose that led from the cup to a container. The cup and hose were there to gather urine. Urine, for God’s sake.

  The horses weren’t important in themselves; they were important in foaling, or, rather, in staying pregnant. If a mare had a hard time doing this, she was taken away. Nell didn’t ask what happened to these horses. The little that she knew was bad enough. So they were kept for the urine that collected under them in plastic bags. She didn’t understand that, either.

  “Why are they kept like this? Why don’t they get any exercise?” she had asked Mr. Mackay. It was hard standing up to him; he took as blame any question you put to him. He was the meanest man she’d ever come across. He was in charge of the stable lads and was no nicer to them. The lads, though, had the huge advantage of knowing these people and knowing why they were here. And getting paid for it.

  “You ask too many questions.”

  She had also asked her questions of Bosworth, the assistant trainer, who she’d discovered over a period of time did not like this place and did not like the people who ran it. Consequently, he was more likely to be sympathetic to any criticism of them or questioning of the rules.

  “Exercise? They’re only here to pee and stay pregnant, the sorry beasts.”

  It was known that Bosworth was father to two dreadful boys who were in and out of the nick and, therefore, did sympathize with anyone forced to bring another creature into the world and have to put up with him.

  The only exercise the mares ever got was when they were led into the breeding arena. Led there and back. As far as she could tell, that was their life, as Bosworth had said it was. Some of them, such as Belle and Jenny, looked exhausted. They were the oldest, the ones who had foaled most, and she despaired that they were undoubtedly looking death in the eye.

  On those mornings or afternoons Mackay was off out of sight of the house she led each one out, one at a time, to a bit of pasture that was hidden from view by a tall, boxy hedge. They stood, the mares did. They stood and watched her in perfect silence.

  “You don’t have to just stand there, Belle. You can walk around, you can even run around.”

  But Belle didn’t move. Like the others, she was too wedded to her little space. And that, Nell realized, was how she herself had felt until they’d finally permitted her to go outside. Belle du Jour. Nell had named them all. So that she could remember the names, she’d drawn a diagram of the stalls and set down the name of the mare who occupied each of them. Marie had been the first she’d taken. Marie was one of the mares at the rear where the big doorway opened on to the stand of birches and was more secluded than the front. Anyway, the guards stood at the front. She had named the mares either with names or words she especially liked. She felt that these good names would make the mares feel good for something other than foaling. All of this was before she’d made her bargain with Mrs. Hobbs. Had she been caught letting them out, she’d get hell. Later on she got hell for giving them water. (“No bloody water, you hear me? They’re only allowed a certain amount, at certain times,” Valerie Hobbs had said, tensely.)

  Yet she was never caught letting the horses out for a few minutes. Since only she was interested in the mares, only she went to the stables, except of course when one of them foaled.

  At first she thought the foals must be the object. She knew Aqueduct was being used to cover several mares, and that must be why they’d wanted him. But it wasn’t the foals that were important, she discovered. Most of the time they were taken away, two, maybe three at a time, a big horsebox backed up to the barn and the foals loaded in. For the poor mares, the foals were the only particle of real life they experienced, the only hint that they were not machines. Once in a while, though, a foal was left with its mother, left until it could take her place and live the same life from foal to yearling to its first visit to the breeding arena, and the whole thing start all over again.

  Yet the farm did have outstanding Thoroughbreds who’d won big purses. So why were they not the ones used for stud? Again, Bosworth had told her. “Because they’re not worth it, these mares. They’re not here for their bloodlines. I told you: it’s the urine.”

  “Is it illegal, what they’re doing?”

  At that, he laughed. “ ‘Illegal’ wouldn’t stop her.” He looked off to the house.

  “She’s not a bad woman,” said Nell, who felt a reluctant kinship with Valerie Hobbs, or perhaps it was an odd empathy-the woman’s scatterbrained and uneasy alliance with the business end of things. (“If I didn’t have an accountant, I’d never turn a profit.”) And perhaps because Nell detected in Valerie Hobbs a heart that had taken a terrible beating and a trustworthiness she simply couldn’t explain. Why should Nell trust her?

  Nell held out a colored folder. “What’s this?”

  Bosworth brought his glasses down from their station on top of his head and looked and turned the thing over, front to back, in his hands. He shrugged. “Probably has to do with those mares.” He shrugged. “Where’d you get it?”

  This time Nell shrugged. “I just found it.” She could feel Bosworth looking at her.

  “Sure,” he said.

  There was a room off the kitchen that Valerie kept locked. Nell had noticed the closed door a number of times and wondered what was in the room. This morning, the key had been left in the door. Valerie was absentminded; she was always looking for keys, wallets, even her Wellies. Nell turned it, went in and saw nothing spectacular, even particularly interesting. Indeed, it looked much like her granddad’s office, only smaller. There were photos tacked on the wall (horses, mostly), a largish desk, breeder’s books. Nell leafed through one, looked to see how Go for the Gold was performing (very well), returned that to its place and moved to the desk, awash in papers: bank accounts, articles downloaded from the PC on the desk, bills, stationery and printed literature-folders, brochures-such as the ones she’d picked up.

  The one she had shown Bosworth dealt with a drug which would offset many of the problems and symptoms of menopause. It pictured a woman looking supremely happy, ostensibly because she didn’t have to worry about hot flashes, not if she took this drug. The company was an American one: Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories. The drug was Premarin. Premarin. Mare’s urine. Pregnant mare’s urine.

  Nell ran her finger along a row of dark-green ledgers, yanked one out, not knowing whether it would be helpful. It wasn’t-nothing but rows of expenditures on feed and equipment, money paid out to vets, farriers, trainers, stable lads. Routine accounts. She put it back, pulled out another. This one was a record of the mares-their dates of acquisition, many of them having been here for as long as four years. Four years of living like this. Recorded also were histories of pregnancies, foals born, foals removed for slaughter, rates of “production” of urine. Mares whose production was low or who were too difficult to impregnate also were sent to slaughter.

  She forgot she shouldn’t be in this room; she forgot the room itself as she stared at nothing, the room, its furnishings, photos, windows replaced by the memory of that big horse van pulled up to the farthest barn and as she watched three foals and one mare were loaded onto it. They were going to slaughter because the stud farm had no use for them. That’s all. Was there someone here rotten enough to do all of this? Yes, and he had walked up those attic steps a dozen times.

  It was then, right then that she knew she’d have to do something, but had no idea how to do it.

  Her opportunity had come when this farm and two others some miles away received threats. The letters had directed them to pay fifty thousand pounds or horses would be harmed. She had waited until the third night after the letter had appeared. That night she had stolen one of the mares, Marie, whose heart had not been destroyed by her imprisonment and who was only too glad to gallop, when the terrain permitted, away to the new place.

  Then she returned before dawn, “woke up” the followin
g morning and expressed her own shock and puzzlement that the horse thieves would have taken one of the mares instead of the far more valuable Thoroughbreds. Go for the Gold, or Prime Time, for instance. They put it down to stupidity, almost relieved that the thieves knew nothing about racing or horses.

  The next night she repeated her mare theft by taking Domino. In Domino’s case, she stopped every twenty or thirty minutes to let the mare rest or drink from the little stream. It took her four hours to make the three-mile trek.

  They questioned now the motive for taking the horses. She had listened to them the next morning trying to work it all out. Maybe it was animal activists who were behind this. Maybe asking for money was just a cover-up.

  Whatever it was, thought Nell, no one ever followed up on the threats; no horses were harmed.

  But tonight, after taking Stardust and Aqueduct, she could not go back; Aqueduct’s absence would tell them it was Nell doing this, even if nothing else would. Until now, most of the blame had been put at the feet of animal-rights groups. It could only be animal activists they were sure. On six different nights over the past month, she had taken six mares, three like Jenny, who was having a hard time conceiving and whom she was certain would be put down because of it. They might think she simply took the opportunity to run away, but that she’d had nothing to do with the horses that had gone missing. She would still try to save the other mares, but knew she couldn’t manage more than a very few this way. When she was out of here, she would find another way.

  When she reckoned the guards were deep enough into their story or joke, she moved very slowly down the row of stalls to where the circuit breaker was located. She flipped a switch. The lights fluttered and died.

  No one came. She had done this before on an erratic basis so that when she actually needed the dark no one would be suspicious of the lights going out and would conclude there was something wrong with the connections; faulty wiring is what they put it down to. The lights were supposed to be on at night to fool the mares into thinking it was spring as if conception was more likely in April.