Breeding Ground (32 page)

Then he sat quietly for a second, holding her hard against him, and suddenly heard a high thin voice quivering not far away, saying something that could've been “You gotta let me out!”

He'd barely heard it – the tiny soft whisper, that had sounded as though it came from across the aisle-way, close to the stallion's stall.

Alan laid Jo down carefully on the concrete and walked across to the opposite stall, which made Tuffian raise his head from licking the inside of his feed tub in the front left corner of the stall. He bared his teeth and kicked out at the back wall, his eyes glaring at Alan through the double pig wire fencing.

Alan stared down around the left side of the Dutch door on the far right of the stall, and saw a woman rolled up in the corner. Tara. Hair tied back. Blood on her blouse. Gloves on her clenched fists. Arms wrapped around her ribs.

He thought about leaving her there. But Tuffian was almost done with his grain tub, and the hay on the floor too, and Alan decided he couldn't.

Sam was in the stall on Tuffian's left, in the only other stall with a door on top. The top half was open, and Sam was watching everything Alan did, as Alan walked back to Tuffian's door and put his mouth against it.

He spoke as quietly as he could, watching Tuffian as he talked, who stood stiff-legged, staring at him, till he circled the stall again. “You will do exactly what I say or I'll throw you back in there. And now that he's finished his dinner, he's got nothing to think about but you.”

“I promise!”

“Yours aren't worth squat.”

“Please!”

“Crawl out when I open the bottom door.”

He moved slowly and unbolted it as quietly as he could, and as soon as Tara slid halfway out, he grabbed her by the arm and wrenched it behind her back. Tuffian squealed and thrashed around his stall as Alan dragged her over to Sam's door, opened it and shoved her in, then locked the top and bottom.

“No! Please!”

He bolted Tuffian's bottom door, then sat down beside Jo and leaned against the wall. He settled her back in his lap, stroking her hair, and talking to her, trying to get through.

“I need medical attention! I've got broken ribs, and a torn-up leg. My head's bleeding from a big gash, and being in a dirty stall with a filthy horse will get me all infected!” Tara said it like a tiny child, a sweet child, crushed by the world, unable to understand why anyone would treat her so cruelly.

“What'd you inject into Jo?”

Tara didn't answer. She shifted around, and pulled herself up, her fingers wound through the pig wire, and looked at Alan in the aisle-way. “I didn't. I just came to visit, to see if she'd talk to Spencer for me. I know she cares about him, and I wanted to explain my side of what happened.”

“And?”

“I found her right there on the floor. There was someone in the feed room, someone who must've turned on the tractor. I didn't see his face, but he came out and grabbed me from behind and hit me with a metal rod and shoved me in with that rogue stallion who oughtta get put down! He damn near killed me for no reason at all!”

Alan sat and watched her for a minute, while he stroked Jo's wrists. “Alice recorded your conversation in her study. You shoving her down the stairs, that got recorded too. She'd turned on the Dictaphone, and got down everything you said. You don't have a leg to stand on, and the sheriff's on his way.”

She started screaming then. Vileness and vitriol he tried not to listen to – till he heard her kick Sam, in the stomach or his chest, based on the hollow-sounding thump. Which made Sam squeal and rush to the back of the stall.

Alan opened both Sam's doors and grabbed Tara by the arm, twisting it behind her with his right hand as she flailed around and tried to hit him. He led Sam through the door with his left hand on his halter, then let him go in the aisle-way. Tara scratched the side of Alan's face and almost bit his wrist, before he threw her back in the stall and locked both doors.

Then he walked up to Sam, who was standing still on the concrete floor, sniffing Jo's head, and led him into the stall behind Jo and latched the bottom door.

He held Jo again, while Sam hung his head over the door and snuffled Jo's shoulder, as Tara screamed and cursed them both, even when she tore the water bucket off the wall and threw the water at Allan through the pig wire fencing.

Then he heard a siren, and told Jo he'd go to the hospital with her and stay with her there.

Excerpt From Jo Grant's Journal:

…I don't know whether I was in the hospital, or if it was the next day, so I don't know whether it was drugs or not, but I had another dream I don't expect I'll forget.

I was at home, trying to walk out onto the porch through the front doors, but they were hanging almost off the hinges, and I could hardly move them and wedge my way through without them falling and crushing me.

There were boards torn up on the porch floor, and holes in the walls behind me. And when I put my head up and looked at the sky, there wasn't one bird, or the sound of a squirrel, or the whine of a car on the road.

I looked down the hill all along the drive, and across the pastures toward the barns on my right, and toward Buddy's house on the other side – and there wasn't one single living thing as far as I could see, except grass and shrubs, stunted in the winter, with the wind blowing through. Not one horse. Not one dog, or barn cat. Not one person to be seen.

I let myself down onto the porch step, and it was hard going, getting myself down there, like every bone and joint in my body had seized up over night. I called out and no one answered. I hollered for Jed, and Sam, and Emmy, and heard no sound in reply. I called for Daddy and Mama and Tommy. And I set my hands down on my thighs – and saw right then they weren't mine. Not the hands I'd grown with. They were blue veined skeletal claws bunched up and attached to ancient arms thin as withered sticks. I was old, and dying, and sitting alone with not one single living thing to care if I lived or died…

B
etts came into Jo's hospital room just as Jo had begun to show signs of coming around so she and Alan were standing at the side of Jo's bed watching her together, when Jo opened her eyes and gazed at Alan as though she couldn't figure out how to focus.

She said, “Tara,” in a tight parched voice.

Betts smiled and squeezed Alan's arm, then walked out the door as he said, “The Sheriff's got her in custody.”

Jo faded away again.

By eleven-thirty that night, Alan had told her about Alice's Dictaphone. That the Sheriff's woman dispatcher had found keys to Alice's and Spencer's houses hidden in the lining of Tara's purse. That Tara had parked at the abandoned farmhouse on the old Clay farm just south of Jo's and walked to Jo's through the fields. That they assumed she'd been the person who'd left the cabinet door open the night before, and that she'd picked the time of her attack on Jo then, when she'd read Toss and Buddy's schedules on the blackboard in the feed room.

“She was raised around horses so she understood about tractors and manure spreaders, and how horses get tranquilized, so—”

“Was she trying to kill me with anesthetic?”

“Nobody knows. Tara's not talking, so all we've got is conjecture. Did she try to pull you toward the manure spreader?”

“The whole time we fought.”

“Peabody and I thought that might've been the case, and that maybe she intended to just drug you enough that you'd be easier to muscle into the blades or onto the P.T.O. shaft. That way it'd look like a farm accident, and there wouldn't be an autopsy that would find the Acepromazine. Does that make sense to you?”

“I guess so. Sure.” Jo was holding a hand above her eyes as though the ceiling light hurt.

“Buddy said there wasn't much Ace missing from the bottle. Maybe half a cc, and we doubt that that much got injected. The syringe had broken on the floor, and some was spilled there. You want me to turn off the ceiling light and turn on the bedside lamp?”

“Thanks. She kept dragging me toward the spreader, and she was strong. Stronger than I ever would've thought.”

“Adrenaline can do that.”

“Did Tuffian hurt her?”

“He broke some ribs and landed one heck of a kick on one of her thighs. She's got a huge hematoma. And you hit her pretty good with the sprayer too. She needed quite a few stitches.”

“I tried. I was getting woozy, and I knew I had to stop her soon. The sprayer head's got a pretty sharp edge.”

“She went berserk when I told her about the Dictaphone. She actually tried to tear the feed tub off the wall and kept kicking the walls and screaming.”

“She looked totally deranged when she attacked me. I've never seen anything like it.”

“I haven't either. Well, that's not true. I saw crazy things in the war. Even weirder, in a way, was that when the cops drove up, she stopped screaming and kicking. She wouldn't make a sound after that. She crouched down in the back of the stall and held her arms clenched tight against her body with her hands balled up in fists. From then until they took her away, her eyes kept jerking from one side to the other really fast, time after time. I think she was trying to act normal, trying to hold it all in, but she was absolutely enraged and completely off the edge. It was very peculiar. Very strange.”

“Yeah, and very scary. I don't want to see anyone like that ever again.”

“No. How do you feel now?”

“Rubbery. I've got a headache but it's not too bad. How are Booker and Spencer?”

“Stunned. Angry. Grieving badly. It's hard enough to lose someone unexpectedly, as you know from Tom. But to have it be murder too, that makes it even worse. You've got hatred, and forgiveness, and everything that's a part of both of those to cope with. I only talked to Spence for a minute on the phone, but he told me to tell you he was sorry you got hurt. Jack was here earlier. He stayed as long as they'd let him.”

“Thank them for me. Please.”

“I will.”

“So was that Tara Toss heard in the drive the night before she attacked me?”

“That's what we think.”

“Was that last night? Or the night before? Time's not like normal right now.”

“Last night.”

“So why did she come to the barn then?”

“Casing the joint, I suppose. Looking for a place to attack you. She could've already planned to use the manure spreader, and come to find it too. And then she saw the Acepromazine and the syringes. Though it could've been the other way around. She would've figured they'd be somewhere, but having them in the same barn, farthest away from your house, might've made it easier.

“We've got meds in every barn.”

“I didn't think to ask Buddy that. But the one thing we know for sure is she parked next door tonight.”

“You think she filled the syringe last night?”

“She could've. If it was ready to go, there was one less thing she had to make happen when you were in the barn with her.”

“When was she at Alice's house the day she killed her? Mary was there, and Richard, and Jack too, so—”

“Right around five. Peggy found out from someone in accounting that Tara left about twenty of. She said she was going to the restroom, but didn't come back. Maybe figuring no one would notice, when they were getting ready to go home.”

Jo nodded, propped up on pillows, then took a sip of water. “Is Sam okay?”

“Oh yeah, he's fine.”

“Emmy! Is anybody taking care of her?” Jo pushed herself up higher on her pillows, and her dark blue eyes looked strained and tired. Her eyebrows seemed to be protecting them too, pinched down around them, as though her head really hurt.

“Yep. Buddy and his wife moved into your house to stay with her. We haven't been able to reach Toss. He's still in the woods with his buddies.”

Jo nodded, and was quiet then, as a new night nurse came in and checked her vitals, and told Alan that the head nurse had made an exception for him to stay until Miss Grant regained consciousness, but now he needed to go. She'd be back in five minutes, and he'd have to leave then.

Jo looked wan and weak and exhausted. Her hair was tangled across a shoulder in a clump she would've hated, and her eyelids were starting to droop.

Alan stood and watched her for a minute, before he started toward the door. “I'm glad you're okay.”

“I guess I'm lucky to be alive. Right?” Jo's eyes were open again and as serious as Alan had ever seen them, and she'd pulled her lips in, and tucked them tightly together. “I mean with the injection, not just escaping the manure spreader.”

“Yes, I think you are.”

“Thank you for what you did.”

“You're welcome. You would've done it for me.”

“Probably.” Jo laughed then, weakly, and smoothed hair off her forehead. “I hallucinated some strange things. Sam turned into an elephant.”

“Did he?”

“I remember more than you might think, too.” She smiled at Alan, as though she were teasing him, waiting for him to react.

He looked as though he'd been stabbed for a second, before he recovered and smiled back. “Good. Well. We'll talk more tomorrow. I'll call you in the morning and find out when I can pick you up.”

Sunday, June 10th, 1962

Not quite three weeks later, Spencer walked into the plant at Blue Grass Horse Vans and saw his dad standing by the open side door of a big custom van they were building, looking into the space behind the cab where a bed and storage chest had been built in. Booker was measuring the walking space, with a clipboard under his arm.

“I thought I'd find you here.” Spencer walked up behind him, before Booker turned around.

“What's up?” Booker was even thinner than he'd been, the tendons in his throat standing out like metal bands, his jeans sliding off his hips, though the arms that grew up on a Lexington farm still looked thick and muscled.