“Oh, the weather will clear up, my word as a gentleman,” he said solemnly.
She was being ridiculously paranoid, and she knew it. “Of course I’ll go riding with you,” she said suddenly, ashamed of her doubts. “I’ve just been waiting for someone to ask.” And if she waited for her husband, she thought, she’d wait until hell froze over. She rose and brought her dishes over to the sink, suddenly aware of Mrs. Morse’s subtle air of disapproval. “Follow me and I’ll show you the furniture.”
Within twenty minutes the room was stripped of every piece of furniture, and only the rug and drapes remained. She sent Ben and Toby off with their firm promises to return a couple of hours later for the second installment, and, armed with some tools she had purloined from Patrick’s tool shed, she set to work ripping up the carpet.
It had been glued down around the corners, and the residue was a nasty, sticky mess, requiring repeated scrapings, rubbings, and washings. But by lunchtime she had the soft, downy stuff dumped in the middle of the floor with the satin curtains and valances piled on top, and her room was beginning to look more like it should.
She dragged the stuff out into the hall and down the two little steps to the attic door. Dumping it in one corner, she stood back to take a closer look at her old furniture. And then she noticed what she hadn’t seen before. One of the drawers in the mahogany chest was partly open, and inside was a dried bouquet, the yellow roses faded and dead. And somewhere inside a warning bell rang. She stared at it for a full five minutes, trying desperately to force her memory to work, dosing her eyes and summoning up the past. But it remained out of reach, mocking, teasing.
By two o’clock that afternoon the bedroom was once again as beautiful as it must have been before she married Patrick Winters. The oak flooring shone with the glow only old and lovingly tended wood has, the small kilim rugs setting it off perfectly. The furniture belonged in the room, as that other stuff never had, each old and sturdy piece complementing the others. She climbed up on the huge old bed, a mate to the one in Patrick’s room, and stared around her with a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. If she could put this part of her life back together with just a little hard work, surely the rest of her problems could be dealt with as successfully. Perhaps there was hope after all.
As Toby had predicted, the day had cleared off nicely, and the early spring sun was poking through the clouds with increasing frequency. Toby had provided her with one of his own horses, a sweet-tempered lady named Bess with seemingly not a bad habit in her gentle body. The moment Molly was on her back she felt at home, and she realized that at one time she must have been a decent rider.
Toby confirmed this. “It’s good to see you riding again. There was a time, a few years back, when you were scarcely out of the saddle from one day to the next.”
“Really?” She wasn’t as surprised as she sounded.
“You and Patrick used to go to all the horse shows around, winning half the prizes at the very least.” There was a touch of envy in Toby’s voice, and she thought she could understand why. He sat his horse a bit like a sack of potatoes, his body stiff and unyielding. He was in perfect control of his spirited roan, but there was an unnaturalness about it, an awkwardness that struck the eye immediately. Clearly Toby had never won any prizes in the show ring.
Despite Molly’s proficiency, it took a while to realize that she wasn’t completely at ease on Bess’s back. There seemed a tension about the horse that she hadn’t noticed at first, just a small trace of nerves that communicated itself in the subtlest way. They followed the old road that encircled the farm at a leisurely pace, and Molly tried unsuccessfully to attune herself to the horse’s odd mood.
“Let’s go into the woods,” Toby suggested as they neared the farm again. “There’s a spot near the old well that should have some daffodils this time of year.”
“We’ve been out rather a long time,” Molly said uneasily, her hindquarters beginning to feel a little sore from the unaccustomed exercise. “Perhaps we should save it for another day.”
His face fell absurdly, and she felt a touch of guilt. “But daffodils were always your favorite flower, Molly,” he said plaintively. “Please. It would mean a lot to me if I could give you your first daffodil of the year.”
She didn’t want to encourage his odd crush. He always seemed to be watching her, covertly, his pale eyes strangely intense, and there was a peculiar undercurrent to his behavior that she hadn’t been able to define. The thought filled her with such a gnawing discomfort that she failed to notice where they were heading as the trees closed around them.
Suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, Bess gave a shrill, frightened shriek, rearing up wildly, and Molly felt herself sliding. She clawed for the reins, but it was hopeless, and she began to fall, through the air, as the ground rushed up toward her. The baby, she thought in sudden desperation, determined to protect something she wasn’t sure she believed in.
But it was too late. She was falling, falling, and there was nothing but the winter-hard earth to catch her.
Ten
She lay on the hard ground, the breath knocked out of her, stunned. She closed her eyes, struggling to breathe, waiting for the pain, the cramping to hit her. Her breath came back in a whoosh, and she held very still, listening to her body, listening to the sound of hooves as Bess took off into the forest. Just a few expected aches and twinges. If she was pregnant, it didn’t seem as if she’d done anything to hurt it.
Toby slid from his horse and knelt beside her. “Are you all right?”
Molly shook herself, sitting up slowly. “Fine,” she responded after a moment, feeling only slightly dazed. It hadn’t been the worst fall, she knew that instinctively, but it had still been oddly unsettling. She struggled to her feet and brushed off the twigs and dirt from her jeans. “And there’s Patrick,” she said, seeing his tall, lean frame at the far edge of the clearing, unable to keep the relief out of her voice. He was accompanied by Ben, and she waved to show she was all right before turning back to her companion.
Toby was standing there with a large rock io his hand, a troubled expression on his gentle face. “You could have hit your head on this and been killed,” he said, dropping the rock back to the wet ground.
She stared at him for a moment, unnerved, still shaken by the fall. “I wouldn’t worry, Toby,” she said finally in a determinedly light voice. “I seem to have an awfully hard head.”
His eyes met hers with a look of sorrow. “I have to tell you this before Patrick gets here, whether you like it or not.”
“What is it?” she asked with a trace of annoyance. Patrick was advancing swiftly, his long legs making short work of the distance between them. There was a look of thunderous rage on his face.
“Molly, someone or something spooked that horse.”
“What?” she exclaimed, giving him her entire attention now.
“I said that Bess was frightened deliberately. Someone tried to hurt you.” He looked frightened, really frightened.
“How could they?” she demanded. “You saddled her, didn’t you?”
He nodded. “But I left her in the stables alone when I came to fetch you. Anyone could have tampered with her during that time. A small burr under her blanket that would work its way into her skin after a while, a needle. Anyone who’s familiar with horses could have done it.”
