Cat Breaking Free Read Free Page B

prance and sidestep than take the trail at a sensible walk. As the three women watched the woods, Ryan and Hanni perhaps envisioning baby rabbits, Charlie knew that what she had seen wasn’t rabbits. As they crested the next hill, she deliberately turned away.
    â€œI guess it’s gone,” she said, hiding her nervousness. Ryan and Hanni didn’t need to see what was there. The three women rode quietly for some time, caught in the beauty of the rolling green land and the muffled thunder of the waves crashing against the cliffs far below. The piping of a meadowlark shattered the air, as bright as tinkling glass. A hawk dropped from the clouds screaming, circling close above them; but the meadowlark was gone. In all the world, at this moment, there seemed no other presence but the birds and the innocent beasts of the forest. Of the creatures that followed them, only Charlie guessed their true nature. She told herself she was wrong, that probably those small, swift shadows were only rabbits.
    Ryan and Hanni soon strung out behind Charlie again into a comfortable riding distance. She looked down at the fog far below her, the fog she had loved since she was a child, imagining hidden worlds amongthe mist’s pale curtains. Even when she was grown, in art school in San Francisco, she had indulged herself in fantasies as she walked the city’s steep streets where fog lay thick. Peering into mist-curtained courtyards and gardens, she had imagined all manner of wonders; as if, if she looked hard enough, she would glimpse unknown and enchanted realms.
    Now below her hidden beneath the fog lay her own village, her home of two years—her home forevermore, Charlie thought, smiling. Molena Point was her own enchanted village—enchanted if one didn’t look too closely, at the dark side that any idyllic setting could reveal.
    Stroking Bucky’s neck, she thought how lucky she was to have moved to Molena Point. She was certain that fate had led her to Max. To have married Max Harper was more than a dream come true. She wished he were here, riding beside her instead of home at the station slugging it out with the bad guys, with the dregs of the world.
    So strange that she, eternal dreamer and optimist, had married a hard-headed cop. A man who, by the very nature of his work, was forced to be a cynic—at least in most matters.
    But not a cynic when it came to her, or to his horses and dogs. There was not, in Max Harper’s view, any reason to be a cynic regarding the nature of animals, for they were the innocent of the world.
    Max had promised that they’d take this trip together, soon. A belated honeymoon, to make up for their original honeymoon plans a year ago, when their wonderful cruise to Alaska was aborted by the bomb at their wedding. A bomb that was meant to kill them.
    That didn’t matter now; though the bitter aftertastewas there. They were together, that was what mattered. And despite the perfection of this weeklong journey, she could hardly wait to get home.
    She and Ryan and Hanni had ridden for three days down the coast, with a day’s layover at the Hellman ranch to get the sorrel mare shod when she threw a shoe. It had been an easy trip, no roughing it, no camping out in the rain, no pack animal to lead, though they had carried survival gear, just in case. They had stayed each night at a welcoming ranch, dining before a hearth fire, sleeping between clean sheets and stabling their horses in comfort; had experienced nothing like what the first explorers and settlers had known traveling these hills, sleeping beneath drenching rain, eating what they could shoot or gather, fighting off marauding grizzly bears with muzzle loaders. It was hard to imagine grizzlies on these gentle hills; but this had been grizzly country then. The early accounts told of bear and bullfights, too, staged by the Spanish vaqueros and American cowboys in makeshift arenas; and Charlie shivered at the