The last file was dated two weeks before her death. I scanned its contents. More of the same. I was about to click out of it and begin a search spanning the rest of the hard drive when a line of text at the very bottom of a finance report caught my eye. It was spaced so far from the last entry, you’d have to either know it was there or stumble on it.
Another spreadsheet. This one different from the others. It was simple, columns and rows delineated with months and numbers headed by dollar signs.
The figures themselves didn’t mean anything to me. They seemed to be mostly random, but on closer inspection, they trended downward as time went on. If they’d been a graph, it would’ve looked like a gentle sledding hill. Not too fast, not too slow. Just right.
I looked at the spreadsheet awhile longer, then searched all the other files for something similar.
Nothing.
Just one spreadsheet buried at the bottom of a boring monthly finance report.
I closed everything out. Put the computer to sleep. Looked out the window.
Ryan Vallance had been in trouble. Which meant David was in trouble. Rachel had told me the business had been hurting for a while. How bad had it been hurting?
The photo album rested at the very bottom of a bookshelf in the living room. I took it to the couch and sat down, leafing through the plastic pages.
Here Mary was in her garden. Here she was on vacation in the Black Hills. Here was Robert naked in the bathtub, all of two years old. Here were Kel and me sitting astride horses in the meadow outside the house, waiting anxiously for Mary to quit taking our picture and bring us on the ride into the foothills a few miles away. I recalled how we’d been anticipating the ride for weeks.
The hot coal was back in my throat, and I pulled the pic of Kel and me free of its clear pouch. Held it for a second in the ashen light. Then I put the album back and went out into the rain.
Across the yard the stable stood grim and silent in the dampening weather. On instinct I bypassed the dryness of my car and jogged to the building, both glad and disappointed it wasn’t locked.
Old hay, grain, faint smell of manure. The high ceilings and exposed beams were coated in shadow. Some of it dispelled as my hand found the light switch. The alley running in front of the stanchions was spick and span like always. Mary hadn’t tolerated mess. She’d painted the exterior of the structure and had repairs done inside whenever an issue arose. She’d loved her horses, and they’d loved her.
What you love could kill you.
What else could?
In the center of the aisle, between the stanchion gates and the far wall where sacks of grain were stacked—this was where it had happened. Where they’d found her. If I wrote the scene, it would go something like this:
Mary comes home after work. She fixes herself a little dinner, maybe watches some TV, since there’s no one else there. A ride, she thinks. A ride would be nice after eating. She puts on her riding clothes, and there’s enough day left to get an hour, maybe hour and a half, in. That last light coming over and through the trees is special; it’s clear while making everything look different, like it’s all imagined. All a dream.
She goes to the stable, gets the tack and saddle situated, and tells Hocus he’ll be the one carrying her tonight. He whinnies, stamps—he’s ready. She goes to unlatch his gate and—
I turned toward the window, fully expecting to see someone standing there. It was empty. Just the rainswept yard, the wind.
Mary unlatches the gate and lets the big horse out, maybe brushes his mane a little before retrieving the saddle and then walks up behind him and—
I squeezed my eyes shut. No. The scene stops there because it doesn’t hold water. It was a plot hole a mile wide.
Turning in a slow circle, I counted the angles and corners that could hide someone. Looked at the empty stanchions, at all the blunt objects near the walls, the tools to bludgeon. If the house was haunted with Mary’s ghost—her presence, a lingering memory—this place was haunted by something else.
A shudder ran through me, and I rubbed the gooseflesh from my arms. It was time to go.
The rain had tapered slightly to a heavy mist. Halfway to my car I gradually slowed, then stopped, despite the blanketing moisture. The driveway was empty, and so was the meadow. When I brought my gaze up to the windows of the house, I braced myself to see the flit of movement, the twitch of drapes sliding back into place. Nothing.
And yet . . .
My scalp tightened, and the hair rose on the back of my neck.
In the car, three-point turn, out the driveway to the paved road, fifty, sixty, seventy miles per hour—the driveway growing smaller and smaller behind me, then it was gone.