Dead Of Night Part 9

"There are breeders in the area who keep nurse horses," he said, referring to mares who were bred every year so they would keep lactating, and provide milk for orphaned foals. "If we have to, we'll board the foal with one of them until it's weaned."

I knew what it was like to grow up without a mother. To deliberately kill a helpless baby's mother ... "That's horrible."

"What if Rika loses it while she's with her foal, and ends up trampling it?" he countered. "It wouldn't be the first time something like that happened. How would you feel if you knew we could have prevented it, and didn't?"

I knew he was right, even if I didn't want to admit it. "Let me work with her in the mornings. Please. I won't get too attached. She deserves a chance, at least."

"Dr. Marks has to evaluate her after she foals," Trick said. "If her behavior is still the same, I'll have no choice. As long as you understand and accept that, until then you can keep working with her." He picked up his keys. "I'll be back in a few hours."

Once Trick left I flew through my ch.o.r.es so I could get out to the barn and Rika. Naturally she wasn't happy to see me, and I knew my agitation would only make her more nervous, so I left her in her stall and began breaking down a bale of bedding.

Gray came out from the tack room and watched me for a minute. "He told you about Rika."

"Yes, he did." I shoved the pitchfork into the center of the bale. "I think he forgot we're supposed to be breeding horses, not killing them." When Gray took the pitchfork from me, I swiped at it. "You're messing with my therapy."

"You'll only give yourself blisters." He set the pitchfork to one side. "You knew that girl Melissa, right? She was in your art cla.s.s."

He wanted to talk. I wanted to scream. "Yes, she was, and no, I didn't."

He kicked some loose straw back at the bale. "I know something about her disappearing."

My eyes widened. "You what ?"

He looked up at the roof. "There was this old guy, and he fell on the sidewalk in front of the church, right after her parents left. She tried to help him. Then she just walked away with him."

"Gray, you saw it?"

"She dropped her purse. That's what the police found." He swallowed hard. "So I should call that tip line, right? I can give them a description of the old guy."

I couldn't believe Gray had been an eyewitness to Melissa Wayne's kidnapping. "If you were there, why didn't you say something? Why didn't you call 911 immediately?"

"I wasn't there." His voice dropped low. "I dreamed about it, the night she went missing."

I was about to yell at him for making the most sick, tasteless joke I'd ever heard, but then I remembered something he'd said to me, something I wasn't supposed to remember. My dreams come true.

I had to force myself to play skeptic. "Why would you believe something you dreamed really happened?"

"Because my dreams come true," he said, in an eerie echo of my memory. "Not all the time, and sometimes they're all mixed up, but this one ... it felt like the real thing."

"If you tell them that you dreamed it, they'll never believe you." I thought for a minute. "You can make an anonymous call from a phone booth. Say you were driving by and didn't realize it was Melissa you saw until you read the paper this morning."

"I'll call from the pay phone at the gas station," he said. "But you can't tell Trick about this."

"Go." I pointed toward his truck. "If you don't go and call them, right now, I'll do it myself from the house phone. Then you can explain this to Trick and the sheriff."

"I knew I shouldn't have told you," he said, and tromped off.

I watched him from the barn door until his pickup disappeared down the road. "Idiot." I was so angry I could have kicked Rika in the head. My brothers and their obsession with secrecy had gotten completely out of control. What if this "old man" my brother had seen in his dream had already hurt Melissa, or taken her out of the state? If not for Gray being a coward, she might be back home with her parents.

I walked back to Rika's stall. "Sorry, girl, I'm cancelling manners cla.s.s for today."

The mare put her head over the stall and looked at me with sad eyes.

"It sucks, I know." Without thinking I went over to give her a pat. "We'll try again tomorrow morning, and show those boys that they're wrong about you, and why are you doing that?" I stared as she nuzzled my palm, just as gently as Sali would. Her ears weren't laid back, she didn't nip me and she seemed as gentle as a lamb. "Did my other idiot brother give you a tranquilizer?"

Rika lowered her head and gave my shoulder an unmistakable, let-me-out nudge.

"I know I'm going to get grounded for this," I told her as I took her halter down and unlatched the stall door. "So when you kick me in the head, make sure you finished me off as soon as I drop."

Rika stood patiently as I put on her halter and attached the lead rope, and then politely shuffled out of the stall. She glanced at Sali before she lowered her head again.

I pushed up her head and looked into her eyes, which appeared bright and normal. "Okay, you're not drugged." She could also see that the doors were open on either end of the barn, but didn't take a single step toward freedom. Slowly I released the rope, turning her loose, but she still didn't move. "Um, this is usually when you run to the other side of the farm."

As if she understood-and disagreed with-me, she snorted and waggled her head.

"Or not." I caught the rope and gave it a tug. "My mistake. So, how do you feel about walking outside with me? If you're good, I'll give you an apple cookie."

Rika perked up as soon as we emerged from the barn, but she didn't try to yank the rope out of my hand or buck or any of the other nonsense I'd come to expect from her. She stopped and waited as I unlatched the back pasture gate. I quickly stepped to one side, expecting her to knock me over to get to freedom, but she turned out as nice and polite as Sali would.

I closed the gate and stood watching as she trotted down on fence, had a good look around and then checked out the feed bucket before dipping her head to nibble on some gra.s.s.

"Why couldn't you do this when ... " I stopped as a thought occurred to me. I couldn't remember a single time I'd ever been alone with Rika, except when Sali and I had ridden out to catch her. Which aside from a couple of visits from Dr. Marks and his daughter, had been the only times I'd ever seen her behave.

You know why she keeps running away.

"No. It can't be that simple." I grabbed the gate and went into the pasture, securing the latch before I faced the Arabian. I let her see the rope in my hands so that she knew I wasn't holding a treat to lure her before I whistled.

She came over to me, as if I'd called her to me a million times.

I still wasn't convinced. I wasn't going to climb on her back; although the books said pregnant mares could be ridden until they foaled, I couldn't a.s.sume she'd been saddle-trained.

But I can find out. I climbed over the fence and headed for the tack room. Rika came over as I perched my saddle on the fence and gave it a sniff.

"We'll try the blanket first," I told her as I stepped through the gate and approached her on her right side. Most horse owners believed the old myth that a rider should always keep to the left side, but Trick had taught me and Gray to regularly switch around so the horses would be comfortable being handled from all sides.

From the puzzled look Rika gave me she was also accustomed to being handled from the left, but she didn't fuss or move as I placed the blanket over her back.

I stepped back and went to grab my saddle. "If you keep this on, you get two apple cookies."

I saddled her the same way I would Sali; not being rough but not treating her like gla.s.s, either. When I reached under her belly she nickered a little, but that was all the protest she made.

I didn't buckle the girth strap, but straightened and stood back. "That's my favorite saddle on your back, and you're going to stand there all day with it on, aren't you?"

Rika lifted her head, and her ears flicked before she laid them back.

I glanced over my shoulder to see Gray's truck coming back up the drive. "Blast it, I thought he'd take longer."

Rika backed away from me, her muscles bunching as she pawed the ground and then wheeled around, sending the saddle and the blanket flying. She ran to the farthest end of the paddock, and trotted back and forth along the fence as if searching for a gate she could kick open.

Gray appeared on the other side of the fence. "Are you crazy? Trick told you not to work alone with her."

"That's the problem," I told him as I picked up the blanket and shook it out. "Did you call the police?"

"Yeah. I had to hang up because they were asking me too many questions." He gazed at the Arabian. "How did you get that saddle on her?"

"It's my saddle, so it only smells like me and Sali." I handed the blanket over the fence. "She likes girls. I imagine it's the other smells that are driving her crazy."

"What's smell got to do with it?"

"Everything." I retrieved my saddle and hoisted it over. "She isn't afraid of the other horses, or the barn, or anything on the farm. She's not scared of me or Mena, and she behaves whenever Dr. Marks is here. Rika isn't dangerous, Gray."

"Then why does she run away?" he pointed out.

"Simple. There are two things on this farm that terrify her." I looked up at him. "You, and Trick."

Ten.

While I was riding the bus into town the next afternoon, I thought about everything I had to tell Jesse. So much had happened that I started running a mental list: Jesse and Mena had been right about Rika being afraid (of my brothers), Gray had psychic visions in his dreams (was that part of his Van Helsing finder ability? I needed to ask Jesse what he thought), and (if Gray was right) Melissa Wayne had not been grabbed outside her family's church, but had gone willingly with the kidnapper.

I also used the opportunity to read a little of Dracula, the novel I'd borrowed from the shop. I skipped through a long, droning introduction by some modern critic I'd never heard of to read the first page, which had been written as a journal entry. It was mostly a travelogue about traveling around Europe on a train. It seemed almost as boring as the intro, although I did smile when Jonathan Harker complained about the spiciness of a dish made with lots of paprika.

Someone sat down next to me, but by that time I was so caught up in the story that I didn't pay any attention until I heard a distinctive click.

I looked into Kari Carson's camera lens. "What happened to 'Hi, Cat, can I take your picture?'"

"Shoot first, worry about law suits later." She grinned and s.h.i.+fted position. "Plus you photograph like a Vogue cover girl, Youngblood."

I held up my book to block her from taking another picture. "Does that mean I can charge you a thousand dollars an hour?"

"No. What are you reading?" She c.o.c.ked her head to see the front cover. "Ah, Bram Stoker, who never met a diary or letter he didn't like. I used to read that book whenever I couldn't sleep. Knocked me out better than a sedative. So anyway, how do you like being a working girl, in the non-prost.i.tute sense of the term?"

I told her a little about my job, leaving out only the fact that Jesse Raven was my boyfriend and came every night to help me. I liked Kari, but I wasn't ready to confide all my secrets in someone who worked for a subversive underground newswire being secretly pa.s.sed around our school.

She listened without comment until I mentioned the collection, and then she looked around the bus before she asked, "You know what happened in the cemetery last month, right?"

I thought for a minute. "I remember my brother saying someone vandalized a grave."

"That's the official story. Aka a complete lie." She unzipped her backpack and took out a plain spiral notebook, opening it before she handed it to me. "Seek made it the lead story for the winter break edition."

I read the headline. "Lost Lake has a grave-robber?" I put down the notebook. "Seriously?"

She nodded solemnly. "Whoever broke into the Hargraves tomb stole all three bodies inside. Now Mom and Pop had been there for like fifty years, so they were only skeletons, but they'd just had old Julian's funeral the day before. He was probably still pretty juicy."

"Oh, gross." I cringed. "Did you have to tell me that?"

"The public has the right to know all the gruesome details." As the bus stopped to pick up more pa.s.sengers, she slid down in her seat and pulled her hood forward to conceal her face. In a lower voice, she said, "Seek and I are investigating the break-in. We thought it might be some kid pulling a really nasty prank, but so far this looks like an inside job."

I frowned. "I don't understand."

"Julian was the last of the Hargraves, you know. When they put him in there, they were supposed to close up the tomb for good." Kari pressed some b.u.t.tons on her camera before she showed me the LCD screen. On it was an image of a huge marble tomb, the front of which stood open. "See the edges?" She pointed to them. "Bare marble. They were never sealed. Whoever stole the bodies just had to push in the front panel."

Something was wrong with the picture, but I couldn't tell what. "Did Seek run this photo in the Ledger?" I touched the notebook. When she nodded, I realized something. "Your boyfriend is the editor of the Lost Ledger?"

Kari winked. "I cannot confirm or deny that statement."

Which meant yes, I thought. "Can I show this to someone?"

"Sure, as long as you tell me what you find out." She took out a pen and wrote a phone number on the corner of one blank page. "I'll be home every morning through New Year's. Or come over to Tony's Garage the day before Christmas Eve." She looked up. "Oops, this is me." She reached over me to tug on the stop cord. "Don't work too hard, Youngblood. Santa's elves will picket you."

Kari's warning made me feel a pang of guilt; I hadn't given a single thought to what I would give my brothers for Christmas. Gray always gave us T-s.h.i.+rts, black for Trick and white for me, but he made up for his lack of imagination by recording Christmas movies for us all to watch. Trick always liked to surprise us with something special; last year he had found a beautiful black leather saddle for Gray, and had given me a gorgeous red and white fountain pen along with six bottles of fancy-colored inks.

My usual thing was to make a batch of Gray's favorite cookies and put a tin of them in a basket with a book, a mug and some hot cocoa mix. I did the same for Trick, except I made him an apple pie instead of cookies. Neither of them ever complained, but I wanted to do something different this year.

Then there was my dark boy. Jesse couldn't eat food, which ruled out baking, and since I'd handed over my paycheck to Trick I didn't have a lot of money to spend on a store-bought gift. I didn't even know if Jesse and his parents celebrated Christmas.

I stopped in front of the bookstore and glanced across the street. I'd never been inside the Junktique, and on impulse I crossed the street to look in the windows. The Johnsons displayed lots of little holiday-themed oddities, like Christmas tree salt and pepper shakers, and cookie jars shaped like snowmen and angels. I put up my hand to s.h.i.+eld my eyes from the glare of the sun on the window, and saw Mrs. Johnson standing on the other side.

I dropped my hand, smiled uneasily and turned to go back to the bookstore.

"Catlyn." She came out and held the door open. "Would you like to come inside?"

"No, ma'am." That sounded so panicky I added, "Thank you, but I have to get to work." She looked so disappointed that I felt even worse. "Maybe just for a few minutes."

Mrs. Johnson followed me into the store. "Are you window shopping for any particular reason?"

"I might need a gift for a friend." I looked around the shop, which was crammed with all sorts of old and interesting things. "He, uh, likes art."

"Come this way." She went around a big table stacked with vintage linens and led me to a wall with various old paintings. "The framed oils are rather expensive, but we have a few watercolors."

"They're very nice." I'd actually been thinking more along the lines of art supplies versus finished art.

"They are." She took out a rag and dusted the edge of one frame. "Did you have any cla.s.ses with my daughter?"

The abrupt question fl.u.s.tered me. "Um, no, ma'am, I didn't."

"Sunny's very friendly. It's why she's so popular at school." She put away the rag and straightened one of the paintings. "Maybe you sat with her at lunch one day."

"I'm sorry, but I never met your daughter, Mrs. Johnson." I pretended to check my watch. "I should really be getting to work."

"I know she told her friends where she was going that day," she continued, as if she hadn't heard me. "They won't admit it because they're afraid of getting in trouble, but they know. I can see it." She turned to me. "You have the same look in your eyes, Catlyn."