Finding Home

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Authors: Lois Greiman

BOOK: Finding Home
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F
INDING
H
OME
L
OIS
G
REIMAN
KENSINGTON BOOKS
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
To my mother, who couldn't think of a single reason I shouldn't skip class to learn how to artificially inseminate cattle. Everything I know that's of any importance at all I learned from you, Mom, and if I ever grow up I'm going to try to do it with the same rugged grace you have. God must have been feeling particularly benevolent when He gave me you.
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my deepest appreciation to Anoka Equine, Minnesota Hooved Rescue, Great Expectations Ranch, and all the other organizations that help horses in need. True compassion is a rare and wonderful attribute.
C
HAPTER
1
“H
ey, Case, you looking to buy another hairless goat?” Doc Miller was bent and arthritic and as wizened as an old apple, but he was still the best castrator in three counties, and not many octogenarians can say that.
“Tempting,” Cassandra said and gave him a cheeky half grin that clashed irritably with her taut nerves and jumpy stomach. The conflicting aromas of horse manure and hot dogs were making her digestive juices curdle like old milk, though those scents had long been the mainstay of Hope Springs Livestock Auctions. “But I don't think any girl deserves more than one bald Nubian.”
Doc chuckled. “Your daddy musta bust a gut when you brought that old buck home to the Lazy,” he said, and accepting a basket meal from Benny Hudson, a gaffer ten years his senior, half turned toward his seated cronies. “Clay Carmichael was the hardest-working SOB I ever seen, but he didn't like nothing that couldn't pull its own weight. His missus, though . . .” He shook his head and plucked a fry from the basket with knobby fingers. “She was like our Casie here. Had a soft spot for anything what breathed. That Kat, she could dance all night, waitress all day, and still be up feeding lambs before dawn. Some folks thought Clay didn't . . .” His words puttered to a halt. He shifted uncomfortably on the metal folding chair and twisted back toward Casie as if he'd forgotten her presence. “Sorry, Case, I didn't mean to stir up hard memories.”
“No.” She tried a full-fledged smile this time. It felt funny on her face. Out of place and strangely gritty below the frayed visor of the Marlboro cap she'd found in the back of Clayton's closet. “No problem. Don't worry about it.”
“So you're doing okay?” It felt as if the whole world were looking at her now. Waiting for her to make a decision, to do
something
. She wanted rather desperately to pull the cap lower, to let it swallow her whole. Instead, she cranked her smile into a taut grimace.
“Sure. I'm fine.” Casie May Carmichael was always fine. Despite familial deaths and absentee fiancés, despite trampled dreams, exhausting hours, and the looming ferocity of unmade decisions. “Listen,” she said and backed away a little, cheek muscles beginning to twitch. “I better get in there. They're just about done selling horses. Nice to see you, Doc.”
“You too,” he said, eyes intense below a forehead wrinkled like a basset hound's. “You take care of yourself, you hear?”
“Will do,” she said and, barely avoiding a ponytailed three-year-old dragging a show bridle, escaped into the auction room. The irony of her chosen sanctuary didn't elude her; she'd been avoiding the place for months. Just being
near
the inner sanctum tended to bring home unnecessary memories . . . and goats with alopecia.
“Three hundred dollars, three hundred dollars, three hundred dollars.” Skip Jansen's singsong litany echoed from the overhead deck behind the sales ring.
Inside, opposite the wooden bleachers worn smooth by a thousand overalled onlookers, the ugliest horse on the planet was being dragged about by a boy in a threadbare baseball cap. The mare was gray and bony, with a head like a ten-gallon jug and feet large enough to support a pachyderm. She had calcified splints below both knees and windpuffs above urine-yellow fetlocks. Two yards from where she trudged through the sawdust, a pudgy little ringman stormed the enclosure like a rotund crusader searching for infidels . . . or bidders. Both seemed in short supply, prompting a lower gambit from the auctioneer.
“
Two
hundred then! Do I hear two hundred, twohundred-twohundredtwo hundred.” Skip's voice echoed in the dank chill, but except for a few snickering comments among friends, his audience remained mute. Nevertheless, he rattled on like an overwrought jackhammer until finally yammering to a halt. “Come on, folks . . .” he wheedled, slowing the pace and ribbing the crowd with manipulative camaraderie. “Quit sittin' on your hands, or doing whatever else you're doing with 'em, and make us a bid. Gilbert's boy here needs a new pair of Lucky Brands.”
The crowd chuckled. Skip grinned, folksy as a shock of corn as he leaned toward the ring from his overhead perch. “This your horse, son?”
The kid bumped a nod.
“What can you tell us 'bout her?” It was a ploy as old as chewing tobacco: get the owner to warm the buyers' nostalgic bones with homespun tales of equine bonding, long hours on sunlit trails, and years of careful nurturing, but the boy tightened his lips and remained silent.
As for the horse, she stopped short. Spreading her hind legs, she spattered a half gallon of pungent urine onto the sparse wood shavings beneath her ill-kept hooves.
And the auctioneer punted.
“Well, looks like she's a mare,” he said, tickling the crowd. “So she can produce for y'. And she's got that perty dappled coloring.”
Cassandra shifted her gaze from the boy to the horse. “Pretty dappled coloring” was a euphemism for tuffs of hair that hadn't yet shaken loose in the dubious spring thaw and probably never would.
“Got good height, too,” Skip rambled. “Must be fifteen one if she's an inch. Can you ride her, son?”
The boy jerked an additional nod.
“Well, there you go. She's kid-broke and saddle-ready.” He was gearing up again, his singsong voice taking on that lethal velvet edge. “A bomb-proof gray that's roped some steers and rode some range. Who'll give me two hundred dollars? Two hundred, two hundred, two hundred.”
“Ho!” shouted the ringman and gazed toward the upper bleachers like a raptor spotting prey.
“Two fifty now. Two fifty,” the auctioneer chanted.
Relief slipped stealthily into Casie's bones. It was hardly her job to save every gimpy beast between Montana and Minnesota, but she was glad someone had made a bid. Someone was willing to give the old girl a chance. Turning, she scanned the seats behind her. The crowd was sparse at eight forty on a blustery Monday night, the bidder obvious.
He was a heavyset man with a kind face and gigantic ears. A Good Samaritan who . . .
“Damn,” said a cowboy who slouched against the metal rail beside Casie. “I'd be embarrassed to send that nag 'cross town much less cross the border.” Shaking his head, he spat tobacco into a dented Mountain Dew can. He seemed to be speaking to no one in particular.
“What's that?” Casie asked. She was civility personified. Cassandra Carmichael was always civil.
The cowboy shook his head and wiped his mustache with the back of his right hand. “Toby should have more pride than to ship her out. But I guess he don't have much choice since they closed them U.S. plants.”
Casie glanced at the mare again, stomach twisting with something akin to premonition. “Toby?”
“Toby Leach.” The cowboy jerked a nod toward the bleachers. “. . . Buys 'em for kill and ships 'em north.”
“Oh.” Cassandra tightened her fist around her modest engagement ring and glanced toward the Good Samaritan gone bad. He was laughing, as was the man in the battered Stetson who sat beside him. Laughing as though they didn't care if the horse was hauled from Hope Springs straight to hell.
But that wasn't
her
concern. She remembered that somewhat belatedly, then turned resolutely away, ready to flee, but the mare caught her attention again. The hair had been rubbed off the bridge of her bowed nose by a ragged halter as old as herself. Her dark skin looked rubbery beneath the frayed pink nylon.
“Do I have two fifty?”
So the old nag would be hauled up to Canada. Better that than a slow death of starvation and disease. Better that than . . .
But at that precise moment Casie's eyes locked on the gray's. As deep as forever, they reflected a hundred tattered memories. Memories of tears and laughter and half-whispered secrets. Of years of service willingly given. Of loyalty and trust and bone-wearing disappointment. She flicked her ears forward in one final hopeless query.
“Two fifty.” The words escaped Cassandra's lips unchecked.
The ringman twisted toward her in surprise; then, “Ho!” he yelled, jerking his hand in her direction.
Skip Jansen grinned, showing a misshapen, gold-capped molar. “Two fifty! I've got two fifty. Do I hear three?”
“I got three
cents,
” someone yelled and the crowd laughed.
“That's three hundred
dollars,
Emil,” chided the auctioneer, then picked up the pace again, slurring his words. “Two seventy-five then. Two seventy-five.”
The chubby ringman glanced past her. “Ho!”
Casie tightened her jaw. So Toby what's-his-face had bid again, she thought, and fought back a half dozen long-lamented weaknesses. Some of them concerned goats with unsatisfactory follicles. On more than one occasion, poultry had been involved.
“Three hundred now! Three hundred.”
The mare shifted her gaze toward Cassandra once more, one last beseeching entreaty. And for an endless second the world seemed to stand still, to pause, to wait in breathless anticipation as faded nostalgia streamed through Casie's mind.
“Okay,” she said and nodded, more to her own checkered past than to the ringman.
And that was that. Not another word from Toby, not another chance to back out. Not a prayer of acting like the practical, forward-looking woman she had vowed to become.
Instead, she slunk through the sparse crowd toward the back stalls.
Oh, she knew she should stay a while, wait for her tack to sell, collect her check. But she had no wish to withstand the ribbing she would take, no matter how well meaning; she'd come, after all, to make a little money, to clear a path for her escape from South Dakota once and for all. To allow her to bolt into her new life like a thoroughbred at the starting gate. Yet here she was buying a broken-down old plug that would delay her exit from the Lazy for at least another few weeks.
By the time she found her purchase, the mare was alone, standing with one hip cocked and bottom lip drooping, no halter, no hope.
After scanning the dirt floor, Casie found an abandoned twine string. Slipping it around the mare's neck, she glanced down the empty aisle, then gave the twine a tug. The gray remained resolutely immobile.
“Come on, mare.” Casie pulled again. The animal stretched her neck forward a bit but didn't move her oversized feet. “Listen. . .” She peered to her left, fearing she'd be found by some well-meaning condolence giver. But the aisle was filled with nothing more than hazy, misshapen shadows. She turned back to the gray. “I'm broke, I'm exhausted, and recent circumstances strongly suggest that I'm certifiably insane, so if you don't want to end up in Fido's food dish you'll move your sorry hind end,” she whispered, and the mare, old, but not stupid, followed her slowly from the stall.
The parking lot through which they trudged was pockmarked and dim. Casie tried to hurry the old mare along, but her newly acquired steed was not the sort to be rushed. Despite the snotty precipitation that spat at them from a hard, northwesterly angle, the mare shuffled along as if marching to a silent dirge. Half-frozen raindrops glimmered in the dull overhead lights and struck like needles, making it seem an eternity before they arrived at the trailer. An old stock type, it had long ago lost all distinguishable color. The door groaned like a crypt as it swung open. Inside, it smelled of dust and despair. Horse and human wrinkled their noses in unified distaste just as someone emerged from the auction house behind them.
Casie glanced at the looming building and the approaching newcomer. God save her from the well-meaning denizens of her birthplace, she thought, and stepping into the darkness of the trailer, gave the mare a tug.
There was nothing with which to tie her. Nothing to feed her, no way to entice her, but the gray followed nevertheless, stepping stiffly inside and heaving her bony hindquarters up with an audible grunt. Turning the animal loose, Cassandra hurried out without glancing at the oncoming pedestrian. Trying to pretend she was in no hurry, she strolled around the trailer, opened the driver's door, and slid behind the steering wheel. A pile of unopened mail, old wrenches, and empty cans crowded her. She crowded back, glanced to her right, and froze.
A shadowy figure sat in the passenger seat, hunched, dark, and silently waiting for her arrival.

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