Authors: Lorena McCourtney
We got out of the pickup and walked over to the white rail fence. The young woman circled the arena and stopped by us.
“Hi,” she called, her smile friendly. “Are you looking for someone?”
Mac climbed up on the fence. I followed. He handed her a business card. She was younger than I’d first realized, not over twelve or thirteen.
“I write articles for various magazines, and I’m interested in doing something on horse farms in this area,” Mac said. “You have some exceptional looking animals. Would someone have time to talk to us about them?”
Her face lit up. “Sure! I’d love to. Do you know anything about Paso Finos?”
“Not a thing.”
She dismounted and stuck her hand between the boards. “I’m Beth Braxton. We have ten Paso Finos now, including the new filly born a couple weeks ago. Her name is Braxton’s Silver Princess. Grandma always puts Braxton in the name. For publicity, you know, so when the winner’s name is called at a show everyone knows where the horse came from even if you don’t still own it.”
Beth Braxton. Sylvia Braxton Haldebrand’s daughter. She’d told Mac that one of her daughters lived with a grandmother. This girl might be young, but she was taller than I am, and her offer of a handshake seemed surprisingly mature.
“Mac MacPherson.” Mac shook her hand and then motioned to me. “This is my assistant. She’ll be taking notes.”
Assistant
?
Taking notes?
I didn’t know whether to be pleased at a promotion or indignant at a demotion. Okay, whatever. I found an old scratchpad in my purse and waved it at her to certify myself as note-taker.
Beth tugged off the helmet. “Paso Finos are awesome animals – as you can see!” She affectionately patted the neck of the horse she’d been riding. He was sweating lightly and exuded a not unpleasant scent of warm horse. “Lots of people have never heard of them, but the breed goes way back and started from Barb and Andalusian horses down in the Caribbean islands, plus some gaited Spanish Jennet blood too.”
I looked at my hand after she let it go. It didn’t feel contaminated
,
but it did feel . . . strange. Even though she was too young to be involved in any Ivy-roadkill project, and she seemed bubbly and friendly, she
was
a Braxton. I guess I’d always suspected that the touch of a Braxton would leave a lurid stain, but my hand looked quite normal. Though a bit horsy smelling.
“They’re not large animals, usually under fifteen-two,” Beth added.
Mac smiled. “Interpretation?”
“Fifteen-two hands tall at the withers.” Beth pointed to the high point on the horse’s back, almost under the saddle horn. “A hand is four inches.” In spite of her maturity, she gave a teenage-ish giggle. “That’s just the way you measure horses. Weird, huh?”
“Not any weirder than nautical measurements like knots and fathoms,” Mac said.
“Do you want photos? Our Braxton Handy Ann won both her halter and trail horse classes when I showed her at the Southern Missouri Regional Show a few weeks ago.” She talked at gallop speed, as if afraid we might disappear before she could tell us all about Paso Finos. “And our new filly is awesome. I can’t wait to start showing her. Grandma just got us a new horse trailer.”
“Yes, I’ll need photos. My camera’s in the pickup.”
“Do you take care of the animals here?” I asked in hopes of getting into something more helpful than the oddities of measurements. “Or maybe your dad or someone else in the family does that?”
“Oh, I wish I could do it.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’d rather
take care of horses than go
to school. But Grandma says I have to get an education. Of course I
want
an education, so I can be a veterinarian. Grandma has a vet school in Colorado picked out for me.”
“You take a bus and go to school in town now?” Mac asked.
“I go to a private school. Grandma usually takes me. I can’t even get a driver’s license for
years
yet.”
Teenage groan.
“Do you have a Grandpa?” Mac asked.
“He died before I was born. But Grandma has pictures of him. He dug oil wells. She has an old one with oil spouting out of a well and splashing all over him.”
Oil wells.
That explained where some Braxton money had come from. Although Drake seemed to be making plenty on his own.
“Grandma says he liked race horses, and he won her in a bet on a horse race. But I think she’s just making that up. People don’t
win
people,” she scoffed. “But I’m glad she loves horses, like I do.”
“All the horses here belong to her?” Mac asked.
“Yeah, but I do the training and showing. Wayne, he’s the foreman, manages the farm, the cattle and stuff. Well, he does some of the horse training too,” she admitted, apparently too honest to claim it all for herself. “Dad doesn’t even
like
horses. No one does, except Grandma and me. Uncle Drake calls them a big money suck.”
For a moment I felt guilty taking advantage of Beth’s chatty innocence, but that didn’t stop me from asking, “What does your dad do?”
“He’s working for Uncle Drake now.” She broke off the chatter. “Oh, hey, I’m sure it’s okay if I talk to you, but I’d better go ask Grandma.” Beth draped the reins around a board and climbed over the fence with youthful energy and agility. “Be back in minute!” she called over her shoulder as she dashed toward the house.
Asking Grandma’s permission was admirable, but I was uneasy when I saw Beth had Mac’s card clutched in her hand. There was nothing to give my name away, but, in the Braxtons’ murderous search for me, they may have run across Mac’s name too. I felt a panicky impulse to jump in the pickup and
run.
But I got a firm grip on the arena fence and my nerves and rejected that thought. We might be in dangerous Braxton territory, but that’s where we had to be to get any information.
“What do you think?” Mac asked. “Can we find out anything useful here?”
“I don’t want to get this girl in trouble. We need to be careful what we ask her.”
Mac nodded, but when Beth returned, she bubbled with eagerness to talk.
“Grandma will be out in a few minutes. She has to look you over. She just had another birthday, and you know how old people fuss and worry about strangers. Like there’s a zombie or vampire behind every—”
Her face flushed as she apparently just then realized this was
our
generation she was talking about, but what I was thinking was that maybe Grandma saw any stranger as a potential boogeyman because some Braxtons
are
boogeymen. Or did Grandma even know that about her family? Maybe not, if she was wrapped up in horses and grandchildren. It must have been her I’d seen dancing with a toddler balanced on her feet at the barbecue.
“I didn’t mean
—
I
mean
Grandma’s really great! Mom says she’s old-fashioned as an eight-track tape, whatever that is, but she knows all about horse bloodlines and stuff. She’s teaching me to play chess too.”
We were getting way off track here, but Mac went with the tangent. “Do you like chess?”
Beth wrinkled her nose again. “Well, actually, it’s kind of boring. But Grandma says if I can beat her three times, I can get a tattoo. I know she thinks she’s safe with that, because I’ve never beaten her so far. But I’m going to!”
“What kind of tattoo?” I asked, mildly apprehensive as I considered the bizarre tattoos I saw everywhere.
“A butterfly on my ankle. A purple one. Or maybe a horse head.”
As tattoos went, those didn’t sound too bad, but this conversation wasn’t getting us anywhere. Beth apparently thought so too, although her idea of keeping the conversation on-track was telling us about horses.
An important point about Paso Finos, she said, was that they didn’t trot like other horses. They had this much smoother gait in which each foot struck the ground separately. (Hey, I was right! It was a different gait.) The slowest form was called the
paso fino
,
like the horses themselves. A little faster gait, about the speed of a trot, was the
paso corto
. The fastest was the
paso largo
. I had to ask her how to spell those words, and she knew.
“They’re all just like floating on air!” she added. “
She rushed on, enthusing about how the animals were noted for being sure-footed and intelligent. They made especially fine trail horses, both in show ring trail-horse classes and out on real trails. She wanted to enter an endurance race with one next summer.
She glanced at me every once in a while, probably to see if I was taking notes. I’d started out just scribbling meaningless words.
Pretty horses. Nice girl.
Bubbly
. But Beth really knew her stuff and I started taking notes for real. Maybe Mac actually could do a magazine article with this information.
When she finally slowed down, I asked, “If no one else in the family likes horses and cattle, what do they like?” I kept an eye on the rear door of the house as I asked. We probably didn’t have much time before Grandma arrived. She might not be so chatty.
“Oh, you know. Boring stuff. My sister is getting married this fall, so all she’s interested in is a wedding dress Grandma’s having made for her, and where to go on her honeymoon and all that.” Beth wrinkled her nose with disinterest in wedding details. “My cousin Zack is into gaming big time—”
“He
gambles
?”
Beth gave me one of those what-planet-do-you-live-on looks that I get way too often. “Not gambling.
Gaming.
Video games.”
“Oh.”
“Uncle Drake likes antique cars. There’s a bunch of them over in the barn.” She flicked a thumb in that direction.
My mind leaped away from how behind the times I was in teen-speak and grabbed onto
antique cars.
The man who’d managed Bottom Buck Barney’s for Bo Zollinger had a collection of antique cars back then. Had Drake Braxton managed to latch onto the expensive collection after both Bo and the manager of his used-car business wound up in prison?
“My cousin Deena is a podiatrist. She collects dolls, but only ones with real looking feet. Because that’s what podiatrists like you know.
Feet
.”
Beth’s can-you-believe-it? tone suggested how far down both dolls and feet were on her scale of importance. “My cousin Sam has a computer store—”
“Zollinger Brothers Computers?” I put in casually.
“Yeah. His brother, my cousin Tyler, they’re twins, used to be in the store too, but Grandma helped Sam buy Tyler’s half, and Tyler’s working for Uncle Drake too now.”
By now, all these cousins and uncles were colliding in my head, like cars in a demolition derby, but I figured we needed to grab any available information, even if it might seem irrelevant at the moment.
“Does Tyler have a family?” I asked.
“He was married, but now he just has girlfriends.” Beth giggled. “Way too many girlfriends, Grandma says. The last one had blue hair. It looked really neat.”
“Are you going to get blue hair?” I asked her.
“Are you kidding? Grandma’d freak out.”
“It sounds like a very caring, close-knit family,” Mac said.
“Grandma says that’s what wrong with the world today, that families don’t stick together like they used to.”
I saw Grandma come out of the house, and I snuck in one more important question. “What kind of business does your uncle Drake have?”
“Umm . . . I’m not sure. It’s down in Arkansas or Illinois or somewhere. Tyler used some of Grandma’s money he got from selling out to Sam to buy a plane, and he and Uncle Drake are always flying around to meetings and stuff. Aunt Iris goes too, sometimes. Tyler said he’d take me up sometime, but he’s never done it. I didn’t see anyone in the family for a while, when Mom and Dad got divorced, but then Grandma said I should live here and go to the River Hills Academy. Do you want to take a picture of Rascal before I put him away?”
I had more questions about Drake’s business, but Grandma Braxton was only a few yards away now. Although she apparently spent a lot of money on family – horses and private school for Beth, wedding dress for the sister, helping Sam buy out his brother’s interest in the computer company, probably podiatry school for Deena – it looked as if she didn’t splurge on herself. Mom-style jeans, faded at the knees and baggy around the hips. Shapeless plaid shirt. Gray hair frizzed into a too-tight perm. Scuffed cowboy boots. A build that had probably been petite when she was younger but had now gone a little dumpy.
I headed for the pickup to get Mac’s camera . . . running errands, that’s what we assistants do . . . and Grandma and Mac were shaking hands when I got back. I heard a kind of far-off whinnying sound, and Beth giggled as she unclipped a cell phone from her waist.
“My cousin Sam put the horse whinny ringer on the phone for me.” She looked at the screen, thumbed in a quick response and put the phone away. “He wrote some kind of special program for Grandma’s computer too, so she can keep track of all our horses’ bloodlines.”
Clever Sam, with all sorts of talent and resources with technological equipment. Had he also been helpful using technology to keep track of my whereabouts?
Up close, Grandma wasn’t stooped, like Tasha’s version of an older woman, but she didn’t appear to be making any effort to look younger than she was. Her face was rosy-cheeked with senior good health, but it hadn’t been Botoxed of wrinkles. Flour smudged her jeans. Maybe she wore cowboy boots even when baking cookies? But the diamond studs in her ears were big enough to act as beacons for lost ships, so she apparently spent some money on herself. Or maybe they were a long ago gift from oil-well-digging Grandpa Braxton.
Beth introduced me to her grandmother, making an assumption and calling me Mrs. MacPherson. I started to correct her, but I caught myself. I certainly didn’t want to give my real name. Mac gave me a quick wink, apparently not objecting to instant acquisition of a wife.
Grandma looked at Mac’s card that Beth had given her, then asked him bluntly, “Do you have identification?”
The question obviously startled Mac, as it did me. He reached for his wallet. “I have a driver’s license—”