“Tell me what happened, Nell.”
She told the story unemotionally. It was as if emotion, at least in this instance, had been burned out of her. At the end of it, Jury sat silent for a few moments, then asked, “Were you treated well-or, at least, decently?”
There was a hesitation so brief that no one, not even Vernon, would have picked up on it except for a person trained to notice brief hesitations. Jury looked at Nell; she looked away. There was a silence she was not going to fill. He didn’t probe, at least for now. Instead, he said, “And you couldn’t leave because of the horses. The mares.”
She nodded; she shrugged.
“You didn’t think your grandfather would do something to get the horses out of there?”
“They aren’t, you see, doing anything illegal, so the authorities wouldn’t be able to shut them down. What they’d have done-Dad and Granddad, I mean-would have been to take their guns and find this place and shoot the lot of them.”
Her voice was near strident, almost to the point of desperation. That was it, he thought. That was what the child in her had wanted, what every child in danger prays for, no, expects: the protector to show up and “shoot the lot of them.” Only, the protector doesn’t turn up. So you find yourself in a position where there’s nothing to fall back on. Her mother had died; her father lived in London, too busy for her a lot of the time; that left her grandfather.
“You seem to feel-”
The look she turned on him seemed to implore him to explain herself to her.
“To feel guilty. Why?”
“If I was able to get away, I should have gone home. And I was able to.”
“They failed you; why should you go home?”
That startled her; it startled her, but at the same time made her utter a small, relieved sigh. She was sitting on the edge of the sofa, balanced there, as if the suspense of this line of thought were a high-wire act. Then she laughed, but the sound was tight. “There was nothing any of them could do, though.”
“That might be literally true, but that’s not how you felt. They should have been looking for you-”
“They were.”
“But they stopped.”
For a moment she said nothing, then, “It was only reasonable to stop.”
“Vernon Rice didn’t stop.”
She dropped her head and seemed to be studying, as he had, the wavelike pattern in the carpet, a stormy gray growing fainter in color but the wave growing wider. “And you think that’s why I stayed away. That I was so spiteful-”
The notion of spite here was ludicrous. “Spiteful? That’s the last thing I’d think. No, I’m only looking for connections, for reasons.”
“Reasons. You think I’m lying to myself. You think the real reason I stayed there for all that time was for some sort of revenge. That my family couldn’t keep me safe. You don’t believe it was the horses.”
There was in what she said some deep truth that connected her with the mares. But Jury blamed himself for stating it so clumsily that she’d misunderstood. “On the contrary, I think the horses were absolutely the reason. By ‘connections’ and ‘reasons,’ I mean, how is it that you feel such compassion that you stayed when you could have left, and why were you willing to put yourself at risk again and again by going back, when you could simply have stopped? That first time, you could have taken Aqueduct and just ridden off. But you went back. Every time you went back it was more dangerous. You even went back to your room, your bed.”
“After the fourth mare I waited. So I needed to stay with the mares I had and take care of them. It was nearly three weeks between stealing the fourth one and the fifth, then the sixth. And after that, I just stayed in the barn. It was on Granddad’s property and we once used it, but not anymore.”
“You couldn’t have been far from there all along. How far was it?”
“I’m not sure; driving, I think it would be less than two miles.”
“And you didn’t know this Hobbs woman? I mean, before.”
She shook her head. “The farms are so far apart that unless you do business with one-” She shrugged and studied the rug again; it seemed to be the repository for their unspoken, perhaps unbidden, thoughts. “Being that close, all of this time…”
“But you still feel guilty.”
“Yes.” She looked up. “For the ones I left behind.”
Jury looked at her across this small sea of gray rug, at the pattern of barely distinguishable waves, by some illusion washing toward her, lapping at her feet. He felt a cold knot in his stomach, as if he had waded out into freezing water to reach her, but couldn’t. “The ones you left,” he said. For some people there was always something more to do, something more to save. “Did you think you could get all of those mares out?”
She nodded. “Maybe, at first. If I was clever enough. Brave enough.” Her smile was weak, as if she should never have expected to be either.
Astonished, Jury just looked at her. What she had already done was not enough to show her that she was both brave and clever. He hardly knew what to say in the face of such self-abnegation. He reverted to practical questions.
“This fellow who abducted you-would you know him if you saw him again?”
“I don’t think so, not to see him. Maybe if I felt him-”
She stopped so suddenly, Jury was suspicious. He thought of her former hesitation. “Nell, what else happened?” He knew the moment she looked at him and then didn’t look at him. Rather, she looked everywhere in the room, except at him. “This fellow, the one who abducted you, did he do anything else?”
She bent her head as if she couldn’t get it down far enough, far enough away from him. “It wasn’t him.”
Jury waited.
“Another one. Another man, but I only saw his face once, and not well. That’s because he came at night and made sure the room was always dark. He made me lie on my stomach and went at me that way. I never saw anything except his hands on either side of my face.” As if her listener might need this demonstrated, she put her own hands by her face, palms flat and turned inward. “Just his hands.” She seemed not to know what to do with them now.
Jury leaned over and took her hands in his. “This is part of the reason you feel you can’t go back.”
She was crying as she nodded. She said, “I didn’t fight it after the second time. To fight him off meant only that it would last longer.”
Jury moved to the sofa and put his arms around her. “None of this was your fault, Nell. None of it.”
“But you won’t tell anyone. Please don’t tell anyone. Vernon would kill him if he ever saw him.”
“No, I won’t.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to her where she still had her face buried in his chest. She reached out a hand, took it. Interesting she’d chosen Vernon, and not her father or grandfather, to kill the bastard. Jury thought: And if I ever see him. I’ll kill him.
She had apparently made herself presentable enough to sit back. “If Mum hadn’t died-”
The if stayed unfinished. The if was always unfinished, wasn’t it? And death was no excuse for abandonment. It never had been, never would be. Such is our complete unreason when it comes to loss.
Was it the shutout, Jury wondered, that had evoked in her this love of creatures that could communicate only through signs and gestures? Was it herself she saw in these helpless mares and because of that was determined to do what her mother never could? Nor, when it came to it, her father or even her grandfather, though they were far better than her mother. They had at least stuck.