“I thought something was going on. When I met with Wes last night, he tucked it down, but he was hurting about where you were. I promise you can trust me.”
Eleanor shivered at his words as doubt filled her head. “Thank you. Up for a ride?”
“Settles your anxiety too?” Brandon chuckled. “Ready when you are.”
They walked to the barn. “I’ll take Linus today,” Eleanor said.
Brandon walked beside her with a purposeful stride. “I’ll ride Bert.”
Hazel pulled Eleanor aside. “I need to go with you.”
“You ride?” Eleanor asked, surprised.
Hazel raised a brow. “Since I was six.”
The clear, crisp air made the horses friskier, but the three skilled riders had no trouble controlling them. The flooded ground from the night before was drying up, leaving a dense fog rising up like a blanket.
“Brandon, you have to see the pond. I asked Wes to put a table and chairs out there, and now that I’m thinking about it, maybe a few more. By spring, it’s supposed to be filled with flowers.”
The pasture opened into a large grassy field. Eleanor adjusted her seat and pressed her calves into Linus’s flanks. The horse whinnied and took off into a canter. Brandon and Hazel rode at either side of her. The breeze washed over her face, allowing the hair sticking out from her helmet to ripple in the wind. Her lungs filled with air, and she felt like she was without a care in the world.
Looking ahead, she saw the fog rising higher. “That’s the pond up ahead.”
A loud bang cut through the air. Eleanor screamed as the large animal Hazel was riding rose up on his rear legs, prompting the saddle’s belly belt to snap free. Hazel flew backward, hitting the hard ground with a thud.
Eleanor whipped Linus around to look. Hazel’s head was at an angle to her shoulders, her neck broken.
Brandon yelled, “Ellie, go…” His voice carried off into the wind, interrupted by a second shot. Brandon’s horse stumbled, and Brandon fell to the ground, gasping.
Fear pulsed through her veins. As she tried to flee, she remembered to hit the emergency alert on her phone. “Eleanor…oh, Eleanor,” someone called her name. A male figure emerged from the fog, and a third shot sounded.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“Ahh…” Her side burned, and pain tore through her. Linus turned, his ears going flat. Unable to maintain her balance, she fell to the ground, the wind knocked from her lungs.
The ground was cold and hard. Shivering, she tried to turn over onto her knees to get up. Two more men stood over her wearing black ski masks. “Stay down, bitch.” One kicked her ribs. The other man grabbed the phone from her hip and stomped it beneath his black boot. He squatted at her head, his coal eyes freezing her in place. “Do you know who we are?”
“No,” she squeaked out, sickened by the odor of alcohol.
“You committed treason. You betrayed us once. We cannot let you do it again. Keep your mouth shut, or Crockett will die, and so will two innocents,” the man at her head said.
“What innocents?” she gasped.
Fog lights were converging on the roadway. The man started humming “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
“Bye, Elora.” He stood, laughing.
Eleanor rolled and curled into a ball. Only her family called her Elora.
