The sun dropped behind the tall hill that rose thick with beech and white pine and hemlock just west of the house and that was the end of the day. There was no sunset that evening or any other evening where she lived. Just day, then dusk. Across the way, on the other side of the river, her neighbor’s house was still bathed in golden light. It was mid-October, 4:30 in the afternoon.

            One of the geldings nickered from the other side of the fence. “I’m coming, boys."  She called Beamer, her border collie, who followed her into the barn where she scooped a quart of oats into each of two plastic buckets. As she poured the feed into Dusty’s tub, Candor stood on his side of the shed with his big head poised above the tub and Jesse began to feel the unreasoning happiness that usually showed up when she fed her two horses. Dusty dove in, making quick work of his quart.

           She fed Candor, pausing to give him a pat and stroke his neck. He had a long neck, but not too long for the rest of him. He was just a very big horse, long neck, long legs, broad back. Half Hanoverian, half Thoroughbred. At seventeen and a half hands, Candor towered over Dusty. But he wasn’t clumsy. For such a big horse, he was surprisingly graceful, light on his feet, his canter so smooth Jesse urged him into that gait more often than the trot whenever she rode him. He had a slow, comfortable canter that he’d keep up for miles, never fighting with her to step it up into a gallop. He was huge, but kind. Eyes like Candor’s were just what every horse buyer with sense looks for: big, calm, trusting. The eyes don’t lie. He was the sweetest horse Jesse had come across in a long time. He seemed to like the company of humans just about as well as that of other equines.

            And now, Jesse thought, how odd to have Dusty, too. To have two wonderful horses ­¾ an embarrassment of riches? She’d thought having Dusty would make her sad, but that had happened only when he was led off the big van that brought him from Colorado. He’d looked so worn out from the three-and-a half-day trip. But it was more than that. Her vision had clouded with sudden tears and she’d wiped them away as she took the lead shank from the scruffy van driver, who looked like he hadn’t shaved since he left Denver, and led Dusty up her driveway.

            Three weeks had passed since then and Dusty was beginning to settle in. A registered quarter horse with a circle T brand clearly outlined below his left hip, Dusty might seem out of place to the horse people around her part of Vermont, mostly dressage riders and three-day eventers. They thought anything not a thoroughbred or a warmblood wasn’t worth looking at. But Jesse didn’t give a damn. To her, Dusty was beautiful, a liver chestnut built wide and strong like the best of his breed, a bright blaze on his broad face. He was also as different from the other one as a horse could be. He didn’t come up to her in the field or follow her around the way Candor did. He was easily startled, though never acted crazy or did anything dangerous. There was a sternness in his demeanor, and other horses had better not mess with him. He didn’t initiate trouble, but if another horse did it got back twice what it gave and that was that.

            Like many a horse raised on a Wyoming cattle ranch, Dusty was tough, willing and all business. Almost all, thought Jesse, because already she sensed that he didn’t mind a soothing voice and soft stroke now and then, or a carrot, and she thought he was beginning to trust her.

            Now he belonged to Jesse. She watched as he snatched up a bit of hay and chewed it. She loved this horse. She loved him so much. Maybe even more than she’d loved Joe, who’d owned Dusty before.

CHAPTER TWO

            Jesse Sinclair leaned back, unlocking her seat belt despite the sign saying keep it on. The plane was in the air. Now she could relax. She’d order a beer when the flight attendant came by. She’d nap or watch the movie, whatever she felt like. It was a four-and-a-half-hour flight. No one could call her. Nothing needed doing or could be done. It was a bit of time out of time, this flight, and Jesse planned to enjoy it.

            She trailed her fingers through short, curly brown hair with new blonde highlights and thought over how she’d left things. Marian would take care of Beamer and water the house plants. Work would take care of itself, no doubt, with some other reporter getting to cover whatever stories would have fallen her way. Or having to cover them, depending on how you looked at it. Good stories, something exciting or interesting like the local farmer’s mysterious disappearance that Jesse delved into recently, that kind of thing she might miss. The routine stuff, the weather story or the political rally she was still occasionally asked to cover, those she could do without, and would, most cheerfully, for the next two weeks.

            Sarah sounded happy the last time they spoke. At 22, her only child finally appeared to be finding herself. With a new job managing a vet clinic in New Hampshire, and a new boyfriend, Sarah seemed poised to enjoy life and settle down, even. Maybe she and Eli would work it out, would get married someday, start a family, tattoos and all. Jesse gazed at the clouds, imagining chubby little tattooed babies.

            Maybe we’ll all get married someday, she thought. It had been twelve years since she’d divorced Sarah’s father. Even still I do not miss him. She smiled at her private joke. Divorce, when called for, was definitely high on Jesse’s list of good things, right up there with Steubben saddles and Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream. Maybe more like that over-the-counter stuff you buy when you have a yeast infection, and pretty soon the problem goes away.

            She shoved her feet as far as she could under the seat in front of her. She wore her black Ariats ¾ trim, short boots with laces. Everyone else would be wearing cowboy boots, she guessed, but the paddock boots were the closest thing she had, and even if they weren’t western, they were comfortable. If she was going to ride 100 miles across the wilds of Wyoming, she was determined to be comfortable. No new boots to wear blisters on her heels and toes while she broke them in.

            Time out of time. That’s what Grace called it.

            “Oh, Jesse,” she’d said. “It’ll be fun. We’ll be out there with the horses and won’t have to think about anything else.”

             “It sounds great,” she’d replied. “But Grace, does Joe have to come?”

            With someone else along ¾ there would be about eighty other paying riders, but she meant someone besides Grace and her in their own little group of two ¾ Jesse would have to share Grace, and she didn’t want to. She didn’t see her sister much, since they lived more than 2,000 miles apart, and she pictured them riding along, talking and laughing, cracking up at stuff that only siblings would find funny. She pictured them camping each night, sitting outside their tent, having a beer or two, watching the sun go down, talking and talking the way sisters do. She wasn’t happy about some guy coming along to spoil it.

            Joe. Jesse hadn’t met him but she knew a lot about Joe, Grace’s great pal and riding buddy and dancing buddy. A pal who had once seemed to promise something more. There’d been a time, how long ago was it now? A year, two years? Grace had wanted more. They’d dated casually, they’d gone on weekend rides, taking the horses way up in the mountains, camping out, riding places most had never seen and never would see, save the occasional backcountry hiker, the eagle, the elk and the mountain lion.

Some stories had scared the hell out of Jesse, like the time Grace and Joe went exploring in the wilderness area of the Pike National Forest. Crossing a snow-covered stretch of land, they found they’d wandered out onto the ice where deep water backed up behind an old beaver dam. The horses began to slip and slide while the ice creaked ominously and Grace’s big mare, Juno, almost went down, but somehow they made it back to solid ground. There were always stories like that, stories that made Jesse worry about her sister. More of a risk taker, to be sure. Grace would talk about their adventures proudly, happily, never dwelling on the danger.

            She’d sold Dusty to Joe, since the gelding was too well behaved to offer the challenge Grace needed. A gifted trainer, she always wanted to be teaching a horse something, improving it. After Dusty went to Joe’s place, Grace had found a filly, and at the same ranch a young gelding, huge already at two years, and Joe had bought him and named him Moose. So they each had two horses, one made, one green, and sometimes took them all up into the mountains, where they rode the made ones, Dusty and Mindy, and let the two-year-olds run free beside them.

            Joe had a small ranch an hour northwest of Denver, with half a dozen horses and about eighty Herefords. The ranch wasn’t self-supporting yet; to pay the bills he’d upgraded his pilot’s license and started a charter flight service about six years before. Once in a while he hired on to look for fossil poachers and other miscreants best tracked across the West from the air. But Colorado was filling up with people. He wanted to move out to Wyoming or Montana. That was part of his reason for agreeing, uncharacteristically, to be part of an organized event like the Outlaw Trail Ride. It would give him a chance see the country up close and at the same time give Moose some good experience. That had been Grace’s argument, and it had worked.

            Jesse had also heard he was a great dancer, a good cook, a kind man whose divorce had left him, even years later, scarred somehow.

            How many times had Grace called up, needing to talk about him, wanting feedback or just an ear, needing to figure out what she was doing with this man who most of the time seemed like a good friend, one who attracted her but didn’t seem ready ¾ or was it willing ¾ to take their relationship in a new direction. Grace was clearly proud of him. “He’s so ambitious, but easygoing at the same time. He’s just a lot of fun,” she’d said.

            The two had finally settled into being just friends, or at least it seemed that way. Joe wanted kids, Grace said. At forty-seven, she was past the time for children. He was only thirty-seven. And he liked living on an edge that was a little too far out there even for Grace. She knew he saw other women, that he dated. That was all right, she said. There were lots of reasons it was okay to be just friends, and Jesse had heard them all.