“So,” I said, watching their movements. “Stella’s love life?”
The green-haired girl, Bevie if I got the designations right, glared at me. The purple-haired girl went to the fridge and got out two beers. Popped them and passed her friend one. “Don’t let it get back that we told you,” Elisa said.
“Don’t,” Bevie said.
“It’s going to come out,” Elisa said. “The cops are going to figure it out and then they’re going to accuse us of withholding pertinent information.” That was a level of sophisticated vocabulary I hadn’t expected in a local girl who rode and worked part-time on a farm. I revaluated my perceptions.
“Do. Not,” Bevie said, her tone and her expression fierce.
“Not trying to make you uncomfortable,” I pretty much lied. “You girls ride for the horse farm?”
Bevie frowned and stuffed a chunk of cheese in her mouth.
Elisa didn’t look at her friend. “We go to TTU. Tennessee Tech University, College of Graduate Studies. I’m concentrating on agricultural engineering technology. Bevie is in agribusiness management. Most of the riders come from the college. Stella says older girls make less mistakes and are more dependable than high-schoolers.”
“Why does a farm need so many part-time riders?” I asked. “There must be twenty on the list.”
“Twenty-two,” Bevie said, sounding stern and smearing mayo on bread. She swigged her beer. I didn’t comment. She set the half-empty bottle on the bar top. “But most are seasonal riders. Eight of us work the horses all year.”
“It takes a lot of people to care for, condition, and train long-distance horses,” Elisa said. “Every endurance horse has to be worked and trained at least twice a week in off seasons, and light, but very specific, interval training leading up to a ride for competition. Stella wanted her animals worked under saddle, not so much on the walker.” She nodded out the window in the general direction of the mechanical horse walker. “They get bored. Stella didn’t like bored horses. Out on the trails they perk up. They get walked for long or short distances one day, they gallop short distances another, walk, trot, and canter on the other days. Hill work is especially important, and the trails go all through the hills around here.”
Which meant that the riders knew every trail over the entire acreage. Getting in and out was easy to them. I didn’t indicate that I found anything interesting and, because the girls were horse lovers, Elisa needed little encouragement to keep talking horse. They might not want me to know some things, or realize they were telling me things, but talking about horses fell into its own category. “I keep hearing the word endurance,” I said. “How long is an endurance race?”
“Twenty-five, fifty, or hundred. There’s even one that’s one twenty-five.”
“Miles?” I said, shocked.
“Absolutely, though it isn’t like on a Thoroughbred track, which are one-miles and longer, where the horses run full-out for the distance. Endurance races are about the long haul, so they trot, walk, canter, and—very rarely—gallop, though sometimes it’s hard to hold one back even after a hundred-mile trek. Horses are genetically wired to run,” Elisa informed me. “So basically, Stella’s training program means that every horse here gets lots of walking between hard work, fifteen to twenty-five miles a session. Working twenty-two-plus endurance horses—not counting training the yearlings and the horses too young to compete—means we have to be in the same kind of shape as the horses.”
“How many horses are at the farm?”
“At any given time, up to seventy, but that’s counting the foals, the horses under four years of age, geldings, and mares, but we concentrate on the twenty-two that compete.”
That was a lot of horses, and the scope of the farm and the money involved was coming clear. I nodded encouragingly.
“And we still have to go to school and work real jobs and do papers,” Elisa said, sliding her sandwich into a device that squished and grilled it. It smelled heavenly. “And most of us have families. Carmen has a kid, but she lives with her mom and she takes the kid on weekends so Carmen can study and ride.”
“That makes sense,” I said, wishing I had set my cell to take notes. But I had a feeling Elisa wouldn’t have talked so freely had I been recording or taking notes. Or if Occam had been here. “I’m not trying to pry into anything not pertinent to the case,” I said, “but we don’t know what will be important, what won’t, what will hide the