Missed what happened at the barn? Read Part 2 here.
Last time, I left you standing at my barn door at midnight, rain pounding the roof, a stranger in a dripping cowboy hat telling me he’d come for his horse. Willow was screaming behind me. Raven was kicking his stall door like he wanted to take it off its hinges.
I’ve replayed that moment a hundred times since. Here’s what I did next, and why I still can’t sleep.
The Man in the Rain
I didn’t open the door all the way. I slid it maybe a foot, enough to see him and not enough to let him in, and I put my flashlight right in his face.
He was older than he’d sounded. Fifties, maybe, gray stubble, a long waxed coat, and a smile that stopped somewhere below his eyes. He tipped his hat like we were meeting at church.
“Dale Pruitt,” he said. “Sorry about the hour. That gray mare of mine got loose up the ridge yesterday. Name’s Duchess. I’d just like to load her up and get out of your hair.”
Duchess. He said it twice. And twice, Willow didn’t so much as flick an ear. She just pressed deeper into the corner of her stall, shaking.
“Funny,” I said. “She doesn’t seem to think she’s yours.”
The smile stayed. The eyes didn’t.
A Piece of Paper and a Locked Trailer
He reached into his coat, slow, and pulled out a folded paper in a plastic sleeve. A bill of sale, he said, all legal. He held it up to my flashlight.
The ink had run in the rain, but I could read the seller’s signature at the bottom. June Whitaker.
J.W. The same two letters burned into the back of that old saddle. My stomach turned over.
“Then you won’t mind showing that to the sheriff in the morning,” I said, and I took my phone out of my back pocket and called dispatch on speaker, right there in front of him.
That was the first time the smile slipped. “You’re making this a lot harder than it needs to be, ma’am.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But she stays here tonight.”
He stood there long enough for me to count my own heartbeats. Then he turned and walked back down the gravel. As his truck pulled away, the headlights swept across his trailer, and I saw something that made my skin crawl. The back gate wasn’t latched like a normal horse trailer. It was chained shut, with a padlock, from the outside.
Who chains a trailer for a horse he loves?
What the Old Saddle Was Hiding
The deputy on the phone promised someone would come out after sunrise. I didn’t go back to the house. I sat in the aisle with the lights on and the barn doors barred until the storm wore itself out and the sky over the ridge went from black to pink.
When you can’t sleep, you clean tack. It’s what my grandma taught me. So I pulled down the old J.W. saddle and started working oil into the leather, and that’s when my fingers found it: a slit in the lining under the fender, stitched over by hand, so neat you’d never see it.
Inside was a photograph, soft and curled at the edges. A silver-haired woman in a denim jacket, laughing with her whole face, sitting on a dappled gray mare in a field of wildflowers.
On the back, in the same pencil handwriting as the note, it said: June & Willow. Whitaker Ridge.
I had to sit down on an upturned bucket. I’d picked that name out of thin air. Willow. And she had been Willow all along.
When I looked up, the mare was watching me over her stall door, perfectly calm for the first time since she’d walked out of the ferns. Like she’d been waiting for me to figure it out.
Riding Up Whitaker Ridge
I know what you’re thinking. Wait for the deputy, Lana. And I meant to. But by eight o’clock nobody had come, and Whitaker Ridge was only six miles up the old logging road.
So I left Willow locked in the barn with my neighbor’s truck parked across the driveway, saddled Raven, and rode.
The woods after a storm are something else. Every leaf dripping, the trail turned to red mud, steam rising off Raven’s black shoulders in the sun. He was fired up, ears forward, like he knew exactly where we were going.
The Whitaker place sits right at the top, a little log house with a wraparound porch and a barn that’s seen better decades. The front door was unlocked. On the kitchen table there was a coffee mug with a dried ring inside and a wall calendar with Sunday circled in red. Today was Wednesday.
Then I heard hooves behind me.
The Rider With Creek-Water Eyes
He came up the lane on a big white horse, a man about my age in a sweat-stained hat, and he pulled up hard when he saw Raven tied at the porch.
“Who are you,” he said, “and what are you doing in my grandmother’s house?”
I should have been scared. Instead I just held out the photograph.
He swung off the white horse and took it like it might break. His name was Jesse. Jesse Whitaker. June’s grandson, home from a ranch job in Montana because his grandma had stopped answering her phone on Sunday. He’d been riding these hills for two days looking for her. And for Willow.
He had the kind of eyes you notice even when you’re trying not to. Clear and gray-green, like creek water over stones. Right now they were red around the edges.
“My grandma would sell this house before she sold that mare,” he said quietly. “Whoever showed up at your barn last night, that bill of sale is fake.”
I opened my mouth to tell him about Dale Pruitt and the padlocked trailer. That’s when my phone buzzed in my pocket.
A text from a number I didn’t know. Just one line:
Bring the mare to the river crossing before dark. Come alone, and June comes home.
Jesse read it over my shoulder. Neither of us said a word.
So tell me, honestly. Do I trust the man with the creek-water eyes I met ten minutes ago? Do I call the sheriff and risk everything? Or do I saddle Willow and ride to that river crossing alone?
Part 4 is coming soon. Follow Reiterin on Facebook so you don’t miss what happened at the river.