The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (6 page)

“I’ve heard all the stories, Greer,” Gin said. “Typical tiresome chat. I don’t pay attention to gossip.”

My mother laughed in astonishment. “Who are you trying to kid, Louella? Obviously, it’s all true. You are so transparent.” Greer was enormously impressed with herself and the skill with which she extracted information from Gin. There was something else, too. My mother would never admit to her fears, but her curiosity about Gula, so uncharacteristic, was unsettling. I wondered at its meaning.

“I prefer to judge people based on my own experience of their behavior.” Gin defaulted to loftiness. “All I know is that Gula’s conduct has been beyond reproach during his time here. I don’t care what you say. I don’t care what anyone says. Thanks to him, I shall finally realize a great dream!” Gin’s voice lurched several octaves as he struggled to find his emotional equilibrium.

“Now I get it. You plan to have yourself stuffed and Gula has offered to do the honors.”

Gin was still wrestling with my mother’s accusation. “Honestly, Greer, scared of Gula? Whatever in the world is there to be frightened by? Sometimes you make me cross.”

I looked at him sideways. Gin’s indignation wasn’t entirely convincing.

“Gin Whiffet, you are notoriously yellow. I have no patience for a cowardly man. Say what you will about Camp, but he has guts.” My mother tossed her head and stamped her foot, attracting the notice of Gin’s warmblood stallion, the notoriously temperamental Mercurio, who snorted noisily from behind the fence, sensing a kindred spirit. “I’m not afraid of anyone, let alone someone who makes it their business to be intimidating.”

“Do you think that Gula is intimidating?” I asked, surprised at her unexpected admission.

“Hardly,” she snapped. “Trying and succeeding are two different things.”

“The only person I know who makes it their business to be intimidating is you, Greer.” Gin cleared his throat, unaware that he had just conferred on her a great compliment. “So, I guess we’ve avoided the topic long enough. How do you feel about Michael coming home? How did Camp take the news?”

My mother tossed her lit cigarette to the ground, grinding out the burning embers with a precise stomp of her heel. She nodded in my direction, then looked back at Gin by way of exasperated explanation.

“Jimmy, why don’t you run along and check out the stable?” Gin said, winking over at my mother, persuaded that he had a talent for making orders seem like playful suggestions. “There’s a new foal that was born over the weekend and who knows? You might come across the puppy. We didn’t think to look there earlier.”

The Sisters had a limited tolerance for the companionship of children. It worked both ways. I was thrilled for the opportunity to escape their oppressive prattle. Besides, I wanted to keep looking for Vera. On the other hand, I was intrigued by discussion concerning Michael Devlin. My mother was obviously trying to get rid of me. Things so rarely went unsaid in the Camperdown household that when they did it usually meant I had stumbled across a mystery worth exploring.

As I was walking away Greer called out to me, “Find that puppy! Don’t you dare come home without her. If anything happens to Vera you have only yourself to blame.”

She turned her back on me and took up with Gin in her brittle way—the uninflected chilliness, the precision of her evisceration, her aloof sociability. She was a late frost and I could feel my toes curling.

I walked away, her heedlessness a listless wind against my back. I broke into a jog, then a run. Sprinting toward the barn, shouting for Vera all the way, I shivered to think my mother might be right.

Chapter Five

I
RACED ALL THE WAY TO THE STABLE, PRAYING FOR MY LOST
puppy as I ran. “Please, please, let Vera be safe at home with Camp,” I said, coming to a stop, eyes shut, hands forming a steeple, fingers touching my lips.

Gin had two barns. I sprinted past the big white stable, heading toward the yellow barn, which was smaller and less grand, a kind of poor relation. Off the beaten path, remote and largely unused, it housed a handful of mares and their foals. The first three stalls were empty, their residents turned out to pasture. I surprised a mouse in the feed room that popped out of a bag of oats and then just as quickly vanished into a worn section of barn board. Shoulders slack and feet dragging, I continued down the broad aisle of the stable.

A dapple gray mare whinnied at my approach, head extended over the door of her stall. Her tottering charcoal-black foal peeked out at me from behind her. “Come here, I won’t hurt you,” I crooned, extending my arm over the top of the stall door. Unlatching it, I slid inside; the mare greeted me with interest, pushing against me with her head, looking for a treat. I reached into my pocket and gave her a carrot. The baby horse cautiously approached my outstretched fingers, standing just outside my reach, bobtail flicking back and forth as his mother munched on my gift.

Sun streamed into the stall, thick yellow bedding of clean straw warm and glowing, breeze blowing soft and mellow through the stable. I felt more truly myself when I was with my dogs and my horse than I ever did with most people. Grabbing the mare’s mane, I hoisted myself onto her bare back, the foal looking on. Her back was hot from the sun’s rays; tail flicking lazily, she nuzzled through the hay, snacking. I lay down on her back, a human blanket, arms and legs extended downward, limp and defeated, my face pressed against her withers, soaking up her body heat even as she absorbed mine. For the next few minutes, I breathed in the dusky rich scent of horse, my adolescent girl’s version of an intoxicant, and I felt comforted even through my anguished thoughts of Vera.

I heard a muffled voice coming from somewhere both near and far. My first thought was that it was my mother and Gin. My second thought was that it wasn’t them at all. Hastily I dried my eyes, vaguely uneasy. My instinct was to get away from there, though I couldn’t say why exactly. I sat up to go but uneasiness, like a hand against my chest, held me in place.

Slithering back down to the floor, embarrassed and confused by my fear, I receded into the far corner of the big stall, wedging myself behind a stack of straw, the foal peering at me as I pulled my knees into my chest. The door to the tack room at the far end of the aisle opened and thudded shut, startling me. The foal’s head jerked up. I pressed myself against the wall, instantly alert, radar twitching. Someone was running down the long stable corridor and past the stalls, heading toward the door. It had a frantic quality, part shuffle, part awful scurry.

Panting, whoever it was ran first one way, then back, mindless and without direction, in terrible desperation—that panting! The tack room door opened again with a whoomph. More of the same fugitive flight sounds, like wings flapping against a windowpane. I felt as if a bird was trapped inside of me, flailing against my rib cage. It was hard to breathe; the air around me, only moments before so sweet and comforting, now felt thick and debauched, musky and wild, as if someone was pumping squalor through the vents. Suddenly something wicked oozed from every pore of that barn.

A horse whinnied in alarm.

There was a frenzied scuffle. It grew louder and louder and it came closer and closer, rhythmic and churning, my terror increasing incrementally in jolts of electricity. Dizzy and disoriented, a violent bang brought me round as someone or something landed against the stall door where I hid. My head snapped back. I buried my face in my knees and clamped shut my eyes and tried not to scream. I heard a ragged scrambling, a helpless floundering, and down the corridor the discomposing tread of dragging.

There was something else, something rasping, halting and breathless. Scared. It sounded like a word. “Why?”

The door to the tack room thumped shut and there was silence.

A
LL I WANTED WAS
to get out of there, but where to go? How to get there? Shaking with fear, I was incapable of sustaining a logical sequence of thoughts. I sat with my eyes shut for a long time. When I dared to unlock my eyes for a quick peek, the top corner of the stable door was visible from where I sat hunched against the wall behind the straw. That door represented freedom and home. Home! However was I to find my way back home? Even thinking about escape was proving too harrowing an exercise—any idea that I might be exposed made me lightheaded. Curling up into myself, I listened and waited. It was so quiet that even the slapping of the horses’ tails as they whisked away flies, the occasional muffled stamp of a hoof on straw, resounded like a thunderclap and I covered my ears, afraid of what I had heard, terrified of the erratic pulse of my own breathing.

I remained in that twilight state for what seemed like forever, a prisoner of shock and impending stasis. Too terrified to make the slightest movement, I sat rigidly in place for so long that when I finally tried to stand and walk it was like taking a mallet to limestone, parts of me crumbling with every stiff and painful step. The door to the tack room remained shut. I had no idea who or what was inside that room, or if they were still inside. Had they left? The tack room had its own separate entrance. My temples pounded. Should I stay or should I go?

I imagined the heart of the barn itself beating in unison with my own as I made my way slowly and mechanically upward until I was standing, holding my breath so successfully that by the time I reached the stall door I felt faint. Outside the stall, tiptoeing toward the stable door, barely resisting the urge to bolt, I counted each step as I quietly focused my whole being on that door. I was almost there when I heard a faint cry.

My knees buckling, I strained to hear, the insistent buzzing of flying insects and the crunch of straw now the only sounds. Then I heard it. Whining. How I wanted to find Vera, but why now? I looked cravenly beyond the door and into the fields.

Whimpering. It was coming from behind me. Behind me was the tack room. Behind me meant going away from the stable door, which had become the central focus of my life. Jostling currents of fear, anger, self-interest and my love for little Vera swept over me. I took two steps forward and then, mustering what little courage I had, I spun around and hastened back down the long center aisle of the stable, passing two more mares with foals and then a series of empty stalls. At the end of the aisle was a large box stall filled floor to ceiling with hay. Next to it was the tack room. The gray mother horse neighed in the background as I reflexively breathed in the familiar smells of horse and saddle, burnished leather, bridle and hay, humid straw, moist and woody exposed beams.

“Vera?” I whispered, frantic and with more hope than conviction as I neared the closed tack room door. My voice slowly drained of volume until it was little more than the silent formation of letters and rush of adrenaline that pulsated in my throat, thumping along with the sound of scraping nails against the opposite side of the door. Wanting to go back but compelled to go forward, the scratching growing louder with every step, I crept up to the large, heavy wooden door.

Momentarily faltering, I took three steps back. I couldn’t do it. I could not open that door. I was at the outer limits of my courage. This was a job for Camp, not me. The door opened a crack just as I was about to flee. Gasping, I dropped to my knees.

Vera! Her little tricolor face was there in front of me, ears dragging. She was smiling, her low-slung body wriggling with the joy of being found. She bounded toward me, wagging her tail and licking my face, clamping down on the red fringe covering my forehead. “Ouch!” I muttered, trying to extricate my hair from the unforgiving trap of puppy teeth.

“Thank you! Thank you!” I spoke silently to myself and to any god that would listen. Vera finally released my hair and, ignoring my hushed entreaties to stay, wheeled around, her long thick tail accelerating like a windshield wiper, circulating the otherwise dead air, whirring flecks of straw and hay and dust made visible by the sudden incursion of sunlight.

“Come here!” I hissed and darted after her. She stopped abruptly and I tripped over her hind end; lurching forward, I fell with arms outstretched, landing in an undignified splat.

“Dammit!” I lay there stunned, profanities springing up inside of me like internal bruises. I caught sight of something on the floor next to me. A clump of hair, russet hair and amber, the color of tree resin; the tips were wet, as if they had been dipped in crimson dye.

Panicked, I rolled over onto my side, the dull jab of something hard and intrusive poking and resistant against my abdomen. The toe of a riding boot. Scuffed and scratched, well worn—I stared at it long enough, focused on the leather’s matte finish. It took what felt like years for me to generate the courage to look up.

Deep-set black eyes stared down at me where I lay. I realized then that there is a third option to the primitive responses of fight-or-flight—spontaneous brain death. My first sputtering cognitive thought was a decidedly adolescent one: his pants were too short, hovering just above his ankles.

He held his hands out in front of his chest, rubbing them together as if he was warming them over an open fire. Tall and thin, unshaven, neither young nor old, with longish dark hair that curled round his shirt collar, he seemed to be growing, soaring smoothly upward to the rafters, reaching greater heights with each passing moment. Extending his arm, he took me by the hand and pulled me to my feet. His palm felt damp and limp, flaccid—something else I’ve learned, a weak handshake isn’t an accurate forecaster of strength of purpose.

I could have pulled free, but I was being held in place by a force greater than anything imposed by his grip.

“Well, now,” Gula said finally. “What are you doing here?” He sounded indiscriminately European, a mishmash of accented inflections, with a subtle British top layer. His gift for dry understatement conferred on him an unsentimental refinement.

Too frightened to speak—a unique experience for me—I looked around for Vera in the hope that she might somehow answer for both of us.

“You need to take better care,” Gula said, as he let me go and leaned his back into one of the tall stacks of hay. “I found her running up and down the aisle in here.” He spoke calmly, though I could detect a note of stern inquiry in his voice. ”How long have you been here?”

My mouth was so dry I would have had more success building a sandcastle than formulating a response.

“Not long?”

I shook my head.

“I see.” He reached out and touched my hair. It was warm in the barn, but I began to shiver.

“You have straw in your hair,” Gula said, removing a long yellow stalk and rolling it between his forefinger and his middle finger before casually putting it between his lips, teeth holding it in place as he began to chew. I looked down at the ground.

Vera came around the corner carrying something in her mouth. A shoe.

“Where did you get that? You bad puppy.” Gula reached down and grabbed Vera by the scruff of her neck, causing her to cringe. He took the shoe from her, started to stand back up and then in one fast swooping motion reached back down and slapped her across the muzzle, sending her rolling across the aisle of the stable. “That’s what happens to bad pups,” he said.

She yelped, and for a moment the blinds went down and I could not see.

“It looks like something Gin would wear, don’t you think?” Gula held up the shoe, a topsider, brown leather, expensive but frayed, and he laughed without laughing as he turned it over in his hands and then set it down on a window ledge.

His reptilian languor, the torpid absence of any overt aggressiveness, was more disturbing than if he had dragged me off by the hair. Gula and I had entered into a kind of listless war, and his lack of specific animation was disconcerting. I had an idea of how villains should behave, and he wasn’t playing along with my expectations. It’s terrifying to find yourself dealing with someone who hasn’t read the handbook.

He took up a spot in front of the tack room. Leaning his head back against the closed door—which, in my mind, had assumed the malignant proportions of the Berlin Wall—he closed his eyes as I struggled to remain upright, the force of his secret thoughts threatening to knock me down.

“So,” he said, using his foot to open the door a crack wider. “Do you want to come in? See my secret project? I’m working on something special. Are you interested?” Speaking in that quiet unperturbed way of his, he might have been folding laundry. The low haunting register of his voice had a kind of depraved elegance.

“I have to go home,” I said, finally finding my voice, each word scraping against the cloistered air.

“Where is your spirit of adventure? Home is highly overrated.”