“I like quiet when I work.” She likes me to be quiet. She selects a saddle. “We’ll put you on Angel Two.” I wonder what happened to Angel One. She nudges the saddle onto her hip and points at one for me to take.
“What about Belle Star?”
“No one rides Belle Star.” It’s like something out of a movie.
“If no one rides her, why do you keep her?” I say before I can stop myself.
Her eyes register surprise; then she smiles. “You ask a lot of questions.” A pause. “I don’t like it.”
We catch the horses, brush and tack them up. I am nervous but it comes back to me. The way you currycomb in a circle, avoiding the legs and the face and the underbelly. The way you run your hand down the back of the horse’s leg and squeeze to get them to pick up their hoof. When I go to pick up Angel Two’s back hoof, she curls her leg and strikes suddenly. I jump back.
Your mother laughs. “I forgot to tell you; she does that.”
“Is there anything else I should know?” I try again more gingerly. She strikes even quicker.
Your mom laughs again. “You have to whack her.” She hands me a whip.
Angel Two offers her hoof up perfectly. She’s smart.
We mount up and ride along the perimeter. The trail hasn’t been cleared, so it’s littered with piles of fallen wood, speckled with poison ivy. At one point, we pass under a widow-maker, a fallen tree suspended directly over our heads.
Your mother explains that there is only one guest trail. It goes up to Eagle Rock on one side and down to the Klamath on the other. “But don’t tell the guests that! They like to think they’re going somewhere new every day. Anyway, they never notice. It all looks the same out here.”
“What about the trail by Jed’s house?”
She pinches her nose. “What do you mean?”
“Where I found the cat. Where does that trail lead?”
“There’s no trail there,” she says like she can talk it out of existence. Suddenly I’m sure that trail is exactly where I want to start my search.
Angel Two moseys easily behind your mother’s horse. I perch forward in my saddle. “You said Jed lives in your son’s house?”
“Yes. We built it for his family.”
“Why doesn’t he live in it?”
She scowls. “You’d have to ask him that. Now this,” she says, as if realizing she’ll have to keep talking to keep me quiet, “is a mine shaft. Do you know what this area is famous for?”
I didn’t know this area was famous. “Bigfoot?”
“And the gold rush. They came out here in eighteen fifty-one, and they found gold. A lot of gold rush towns vanished but this place survived.” I think that’s debatable.
“I heard it was called Murderer’s Bar.”
“Where did you hear that? That’s a lie.”
I don’t tell her you told me. We drop down into the valley of the mine shaft. The earth becomes a wall of clover, a palace of green. “It’s beautiful.”
She nods. “This is the showstopper. You always want to give the guests a little history—but not that Murderer’s Bar stuff. You have to be careful what you tell people around here. Stories are contagious. Even the thoughts in your head can spread like a cold.” She pauses, like she’s lost her train of thought, then circles back. “The guests come out here and they say, ‘I don’t want to leave.’ Every year they say, ‘Addy, we never want to leave! We love it here!’ They don’t see the work. They don’t see how hard it is. And that’s what we want. We want them to come out here, see the beauty, sell the idea—we’re the real wilderness family. We don’t want them to see what it’s really like.”
“What is it really like?”
“It’s work.” We pass a row of blue tanks. “This is the water supply. Six cylinders. All of our water comes through here. There are separate lines: One runs to our house, another to the guest cabins—that’s yours too—and the far ones go all the way out to my son’s house and the ag lines in the pastures. In the summer, we have to space out the guest showers. If everyone showers at once, you know about it. I tell guests, ‘Two minutes.’ That’s long enough. We’re outdoors. You’re gonna get dirty.”
We ride down a low hill. “This is the shooting range.” She points to an open swath of land with targets lined haphazardly at the far end. “We have just about every kind of gun you can imagine. Four hundred and twenty-seven.” This number alarms me, and I immediately don’t believe it. I feel this way about a lot of what your mother says; there is something performative in every word. “Some are a hundred years old; some are the latest and greatest, tricked out with lasers, the works. We want to give our guests a chance to try everything.”
“I’m not really into guns.”
She touches her lower back. “I’m always carrying. Twenty-four-seven. You should be too. Out here.” Even though she has indicated it, I still can’t make out her gun. She twists in her saddle. “I better tell you it’s not too safe around. Especially down by the creek.” She points way out across the ranch below us, past Jed’s house. “You never want to go down there alone. And you oughta be armed. I can give you a gun if you don’t have one.”
“I don’t need a gun. What’s so dangerous about the creek?”
“There are gangs.” I find it hard to imagine a lot of gang activity out here in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps she reads my disbelief, because she insists, “Sometimes we get messages from the police: ‘Lock your doors and carry your guns. We just had another one leave San Quentin.’”
“Isn’t San Quentin kind of far away?” I remember Episode 1, about the four girls on the Murder Line.
“It’s close enough. And the police around here don’t do anything about anything. We had a man once, decapitated his wife. The police put out a message, asking people to call in with any tips. Well, there must’ve been about a hundred people called in. And all the time he was walking along Main Street in Happy Camp like he owned it, drinking in the Snake Pit.”
Her horse prances and she reins him in. She is a nervous rider, crouched, ready for anything. “I wouldn’t go off this property alone. I wouldn’t go anywhere for any reason. I wouldn’t go past the perimeter trail. I don’t want to get into a lot of talk, but you want to just stay here.”
Only then does it occur to me that she may be alluding to you, to what happened to you. Were you attacked by a gang? Is that what she’s afraid of? Are you the reason she is afraid?