“But what’s this Hobbs woman expect to get out of urine collected from only sixty mares? And I’m also curious about how she could have kept this going for several years with no one-I mean the animal-rights people-finding out about it? What about the people who work at that stud? They don’t talk about it? I mean on the outside?”
Nell shook her head. “They must not. One reason is they’re not really interested; they don’t care. Another could be they want to keep their jobs.”
Vernon listened, taking her in all over again, like a climate once visited and never forgotten.
He pushed his plate aside and leaned toward her. “You want to rescue these mares more, I imagine, than you want to see this Hobbs woman behind bars.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way, but, yes, I do. She didn’t treat me badly. Why?”
“Because you’ve got a bargaining chip. Sixty horses in return for keeping Ms. Hobbs out of the nick.”
She thought about that. “But that wouldn’t be up to us, would it? My abduction’s a police matter.”
Vernon liked that “us.” “Not entirely, but what you have to say about her will go a long way. She’ll put up the ignorance defense: ‘I never did know who this girl was or that she was kidnapped-’ You know.”
“Is it possible she really didn’t? That it’s the truth?”
“I suppose it’s possible she wasn’t the one who’d orchestrated the kidnapping, but she had to have known something. I can imagine the hell they caught for letting you get away. Although she seemed to have relaxed the rules on that to the point of-” He paused. “I could talk to Hobbs. She, and, possibly, the others who work there, they’re easily bought, is my guess. I could buy the horses out of the stables.”
“There are fifty-four there now, Vern.”
He ignored that. “Could Arthur keep them?”
“I think so. I’ve had the ones I took in an empty barn and I know there’s at least one more empty barn. It might mean building another. But the land-well, it’s certainly big enough. I could personally watch over them.”
Vernon had put his fork down a while ago. The duck, which he had shoved to one side, was, as always, perfect; he just wasn’t hungry.
She looked at his abandoned plate. “Aren’t you going to eat that?”
“You’re a vegetarian.” He smiled.
THIRTY-SIX
They stayed up most of the night, talking and not talking, their silences comfortable. Vernon had tried once again to get her to tell Arthur and her father that she was here and all right and would be home soon. Vernon pictured their response: joy, pure and unalloyed with the anger they certainly could have felt because she hadn’t told them before, hadn’t said she had been living on Ryder property for three weeks. For that was three weeks of grief they could have been spared. Vernon said as much.
Nell protested: “I can’t. I want to get those mares out of there first. Do you really think Dad or Granddad would be concerned over the fate of a bunch of horses they had no connection to? I mean, in all of their relief to get me back?”
“Probably not, no.” Vernon wondered if there wasn’t something else preventing her, some completely irrational shame over being taken in the first place and then not immediately trying to escape. He couldn’t pin it down. He swirled the brandy in his snifter, watching it lap the glass. “Okay. I understand that, Nell, but how would telling your father or grandfather jeopardize that, if you could convince them those mares are important to you?”
“For one thing, they wouldn’t be thinking up ways to get them out, which is what is needed and is what you’re doing. Dad wouldn’t do that; he and Granddad would have Cambridge police at Hobbs’s doorstep before you could turn around.”
“Yet… isn’t it police we want?”
“In the time it took to get a warrant, Valerie Hobbs could kill the horses. If she hasn’t done it already. I don’t think she has, though; it was just a threat.”
“What was?”
“Killing the horses. I made a bargain: I wouldn’t run if she’d let me take care of the mares.”
“My God.” Vernon turned away, angry with such recklessness, or was it such devotion to something he didn’t understand. “You could have gotten away long before you did.”
She sat back and looked at him. “Believe me, I’ve given myself more hell than you or anyone else could on that score. Look, I know it was awful of me not to go home. But, in a sense, I was home. I have been home for three weeks.”
It wasn’t as if she were denying her family for her own sake. Even as obsessive as she was about these mares, it wasn’t her own welfare she was concerned with. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I won’t keep pushing it.”
“Thank you. And there’s something else I’d like to do. I’d like to put them out of business.”
“The Hobbs woman will be out of business.”
“It’s not illegal, the operation she’s running.”
“No, but it is illegal to conspire with kidnappers. Put who out of business?”
“The pharmaceutical company that produces this hormone drug.” She reached into a pocket of the coat tossed over the back of the leather sofa and pulled out several folders, which she then tossed on the table between them. “At least, I’d like to do them some damage.”
Vernon looked at her. He would have laughed had she not looked so implacably serious. He picked up the folder picturing a sweetly posed mare and her foal. “You want to put it out of business-that’s what you’re saying? Nellie, Wyeth-Ayerst is a major pharmaceutical company in the States. It’s huge.”
“All the more reason, isn’t it? You’re a shareholder. You tried to get Dad and Granddad to invest. You said they should do ‘before the stock split.’ ”
Vernon was openmouthed. “How in hell can you remember that?”
“Because-” Because I always listened to what you said, because you were important to me, because I was always glad when you came to the farm.
There was a shift in her expression, a look not at all implacable, that Vernon could not read and wished he could, as if, like a horse, she had slipped her reins and could now run free, as if whatever drove her had stopped driving her for two seconds, and in that brief time, he felt he had her; had her worked out, clocked her pace, seen her colors. In the next second, the look was gone. It was amazing what could wash over a person in the blink of an eye. “Nellie, I’m a shareholder, but even if I dumped all of my stock tomorrow, it wouldn’t hurt Wyeth that much.”
“Oh, I know that. But you’re what they call a player; you have influence-”
Vernon tried out a self-deprecating laugh, but she didn’t break stride.
“-in the market.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Vernon held up one protesting hand. “You mean you want me to manipulate this company’s financial picture-”