Breakaway (A Gail McCarthy Mystery) (3 page)

"Of course I was asleep." Kris grinned. "I was out until two-thirty. Unlike you, who were probably snoring by nine o'clock. You should've come with me."

"Right," I said. "Then what would I have done when the answering service paged me at seven?"

Kris shrugged. Her blond hair, which reached her shoulders, fell in what I understood to be a stylish curtain around her face. Her slim body was covered-barely-by a close-fitting sheath of a black nightgown. It struck me that I never saw Kris lately when she wasn't wearing some sort of snug garment.

She had a good figure, no doubt about it. For a woman of forty, or a woman of any age. But when I had first met her, six years ago, near the start of my veterinary career, she had seemed relatively unconcerned with looks and clothes, interested solely in her family, her horse, and the competitive sport of endurance racing.

The Kris Griffith I had become friends with cropped her hair short, wore eyeglasses, didn't bother with makeup. Though she always looked neat and attractive enough, it was clear she didn't worry about impressing anyone.

No longer. In the last year, Kris had undergone quite the transformation. Although her face was scrubbed clean at the moment, I knew from previous occasions what she would've looked like yesterday evening. Foundation to hide all wrinkles, much color on lips and cheeks, much blackness around the eyes. Not to mention the inevitable short, tight black skirt, skimpy top, and high heels. Kris had become very predictable.

"How'd it go?" I asked her.

"Oh, all right." Kris yawned and led me into her living room. "I didn't get lucky, though."

"Too bad." I was less than impressed with Kris's current mission in life, getting laid by as many attractive younger men as possible. Not to mention that my standards on "attractive" were pretty damn different from hers.

"We ended up at a bar called Moe's Alley, dancing to a great blues band. You would have liked it. You should have come," she said again.

"Uh-huh."

Kris was always trying to get me to go out with her and her other single girlfriends. She bemoaned my lack of interest in the dating scene and had told me, more than once, that I was wasting my best years.

Well, maybe she was right. I was thirty-six, no longer young. I'd never been married. The relationship with Lonny that had just ended was the only serious one I'd ever been in. And somehow or other, I just didn't have a flair for flirting with strangers.

Kris was heating water for coffee. She watched me over the open bar that divided her kitchen from an airy living area. "You need to get out more," she said.

"Gail, you're an attractive woman. Lots of guys would like to go out with you if you'd give them a chance. You don't have to mourn Lonny forever."

"Jeez, Gail, don't sound so enthusiastic," Kris said sarcastically. "I'd love to be going out with Clay Bishop. The guy's good-looking, has some money, seems like he's real nice. What more do you want?"

"I like Clay," I said.

Kris shook her head and poured hot water over the coffee in the filter. "You still don't sound very enthusiastic."

I looked out through her French doors at the foggy landscape. "I know," I said. "But it's not Clay. He is nice. It's just me."

Handing me a cup of coffee, Kris sat down on her futon couch, next to the armchair I was sitting in. "So what's going on with you?"

"I don't know," I said.

"You're depressed," Kris said firmly. "I know, I was depressed for almost a year. Right after the divorce. It's not something you can shake off, or talk yourself out of. It's like having the flu. You actually feel physically shitty-all the time. And tired and like nothing interests you. Right?"

"You're right," I said, surprised that Kris had pegged my emotional state so exactly.

"I know," she said. "I went through it. You don't like to admit it to anyone, but sometimes you feel so helpless, maybe being dead would be easier. You start to realize just how it is people commit suicide. Am I right?"

"Yeah," I said slowly. "Though I'm not there, yet."

"No," Kris said. "But you let the thought cross your mind. I know; I did. And the worst part is, you know perfectly well there's no real reason for it. I knew I didn't want to be back with Rick. I knew my life was basically okay. I was depressed-clinically depressed. It's a disease, Gail."

"Yes." Kris was emphatic. "That's exactly what you should do. You of all people should understand. This is a medical condition; your brain isn't making enough serotonin, or whatever they call it. Medication can help."

"I know, I know." I looked at her wearily. These were the very things I'd been thinking myself. But I couldn't seem to summon enough motivation to overcome my distaste for the idea of consulting a psychiatrist.

Kris looked at me sympathetically "It's not so bad, Gail. I'll give you the number of the guy I went to. He was very good. I'll bet he could help you."

Kris was still gazing at me with a worried look in her eyes. "If you're not so excited about Clay Bishop," she said, "what about that guy you met last summer? You seemed to like him."

"Blue," I said. "Blue Winter. I guess nothing is going to come of that."

"Why not?"

"I don't know," I said again. It was beginning to sound like my mantra. "I went out to visit him once. He just didn't seem too interested."

"Did you tell him you'd broken up with Lonny?" Kris demanded.

"No. I wasn't exactly sure how to work it into the conversation."

"Jeez, Gail, you are lame. If he's a nice guy he's not going to ask you out if he thinks you have a boyfriend. Particularly if he knows the boyfriend. You've got to be a little more direct. Why don't you ask him out to dinner?"

"That's depression," Kris said. "Maybe Clay's the right guy for you and you just don't recognize it because you're depressed. Like I said, I wish I was going out with him."

"Give it a try," I told her. "I don't mind."

Kris laughed. "You're his type; I'm not. Clay's a nice guy; he wants to get married. I'm not into that; I'm into having fun. At least for now."

"You figure I'm the marrying type?" I asked her.

"You're the type that wants to get serious." Kris smiled. "Clay lived with his last girlfriend ten years. He's the serious type, too."

"Uh-huh." I knew this, more or less, as did all the rest of the local horse community. Clay Bishop lived in Harkins Valley, too, and his family owned the Bishop Ranch Boarding Stable. Clay and his brother, Bart, both good-looking single men, were the subject of much talk in horsey circles.

"You need to see my shrink." Kris got out a piece of paper and a pencil, found her address book, and began copying. I let my gaze drift around the room.

Kris's house was two stories high-in the living room. This created a tall open area, which made the small room seem much bigger. A loft bedroom and bathroom over the kitchen completed the space. There was a spare bedroom over the garage that was used by Kris's teenage daughter, Jo, during the periods when she stayed with her mother. A simple house, but pleasant.

I liked this room. A collection of rugs from different lands covered the pine floor-all faded, all patterned. Dusty rose, burnt orange, plum-the soft old colors vibrant against the worn wood. An equally eclectic selection of art decorated the white walls-Japanese woodblock prints, a pen and ink by Heinrich Kley, an aboriginal painting, one of Maxfield Parrish's romantic landscapes. Staring at this last, I thought of Nicole.

"Do you know a woman named Nicole Devereaux?" I asked Kris. "She lives down the road about a mile, going toward Watsonville. In a little adobe house on the right that you can't really see from the road."

Kris shook her head. "I don't think so. In Lushmeadows?"

"No. Just past that."

I looked out through Kris's French doors. The fog was clearing-slowly. Just visible through a gap in the redwoods, Harkins Valley Road wound past manicured white-board-fenced pastures in a flat, open section of the valley. This was the Lushmeadows subdivision, a bunch of plots with great big houses on them, intended for the horsey crowd. Across the road sat the Bishop Ranch Boarding Stable, all that was left of the old Bishop Ranch, and home to my sometime companion Clay Bishop. The Bishops had sold the majority of their ranch land to the Lushmeadows Development Company in order to bolster their sagging finances. A situation that was becoming all too common in this county.

"I don't think I've met anyone around here named Nicole," Kris said. "Does she have horses?"

"One," I said. "A mare." And I told Kris the story of my odd call out to Nicole's. "It bothers me," I said. "It seems like such a creepy thing."

Kris shuddered. "That's the weirdest thing I've heard in years." I shrugged.

"Well, it's not as bad as raping a woman, if you think about it."

"I suppose." She shivered again. "But it's so strange. What kind of person would want to do that to a horse?" Abruptly she stood up and stuffed her feet into a pair of fleece-lined leather boots with rubber soles. Pulling a jacket off the rack by the door, she said, "Let's go feed Dixie."

"All right." I got up and followed her.

Kris's corral and barn, a prefabricated, portable metal construction, sat on a small patch of level ground outside her back door, providing enough space, barely, for one horse. Redwoods leaned over it, making it dark and muddy in the winter, and it was far from an ideal spot for a stable. But Kris had been determined to keep the little mare.

A world-class endurance rider for many years, Kris had given up the sport when her great gelding, Rebby, had crippled up with an obscure ailment called EPM. Kris had retired Rebby and he currently lived in a twenty-acre pasture at the far end of Harkins Valley, boarded with a couple of other retirees. Kris had acquired the little half Arab, half Quarter Horse mare she called Dixie mostly for her daughter.

Or so she said. In reality, I didn't think Jo was all that interested. It was Kris who rode Dixie, taking long rambles along the maze of trails that twined through Harkins Valley and the surrounding ridges. Even though her divorce had forced Kris to move from an elegant little horse ranch to this shady cabin in the woods, she had clung to Dixie and to horse-keeping with tenacity.

I understood. Even though she no longer had the time or money for competition, and Dixie, in any case, was not of that caliber, Kris needed to have a horse around. To feed, to brush, to take for rides. Just to provide that elemental presence, that unique connection to the natural world that horses are.

I felt the same way. Horses were unlike other pets; when you rode a horse you partook of his power, you put yourself at his mercy. Galloping a horse, you felt the force and the joy of speed and danger, given to you by this animal who in most ways was as dependent on you as a pet rabbit in a cage. And yet when you were on his back, you and he were in a sense partners; you trusted him to take care of you; he trusted you to take care of him.

Dixie nickered at us as we approached the barn and we both smiled. A horse's morning greeting is a reassuring thing. All's well with the world.

Kris put a flake of oat hay in Dixie's feeder, and we both watched the mare eat. A little golden dun without a white hair on her, Dixie was the color of toffee candy, with big soft, dark eyes like a Jersey heifer.

"She's sure a sweet little horse, isn't she?" I said to Kris.

"She's a doll. I only get around to riding her a couple of days a week, I'm so busy, but she's just as calm and quiet as can be. Even though she lives in this tiny pen."

"She's easy to handle and be around, too." My mind was following a different track.

"Sure." Kris looked at me. "What are you thinking?"

"I don't know. About Nicole Devereaux's mare, I guess. She said that horse is real sweet. And she doesn't live a mile away."

"I don't know." I shook my head. "Anything out of the ordinary, I guess. This woman, Nicole, didn't want me to call the police, so I guess I won't, but it does seem really weird."