Paradise County Read Free

looked levelly back. Josh snorted with disgust, stood up, and shuffled from the room, the too-long legs of his baggy jeans dusting the floor as he went.
    After watching his son disappear up the stairs, Joe shook his head, then turned slowly around in the dark living room.
    The kids were fine, it seemed. Had he heard something, then, the TV maybe or some other noise Josh had made, that had been out of the ordinary enough to wake him up?
    Maybe. Probably. But while he was up, it wouldn’t hurt to check on the horses. He was almost as attuned to them as he was to his kids.
    Horses were his livelihood, and his passion. He bred them, trained them, cared for them. His own, in the shabby, black-painted barn out back, for love and what he could wrest out of the business, and, for a steady paycheck, those of Charles Haywood, in the immaculate, twin-gabled white barn up the hill.
    Listening with half an ear to the noises Josh made getting ready for bed upstairs—toilet flushing, sink running, floor creaking, the opening and closing of doors—Joe moved from the living room to the hall and then to the kitchen at the rear of the house. Sitting down in one of the sturdy, white-painted kitchen chairs, he thrust his bare feet into the lace-up brown work boots he had left just inside the back door, tied them, and stood up. Grabbing his University of Kentucky Wildcat blue nylon parka from the coatrack, he let himself out the back door, locked it behind him, and headed across the cold-crisped grass for his barn.
    It was a beautiful night, bright and clear, colder than usual for October, which was generally mild in Kentucky. Overhead dozens of stars twinkled in a midnight blue sky. The moon lacked only a sliver of being full, and shone round and white as a car’s headlight, illuminating the gently rolling countryside with its scattering of houses, barns, four-board fences, and two-lane roads.
    His thirty-three acres marched alongside Haywood’s six hundred and seventeen, but because his acreage had once been part of the Whistledown Farm property—the manager’s house, to be precise—the two barns were within easy walking distance of each other. His, on the little rise behind his own house, and Whistledown’s, atop a bigger hill and separated from his property by a single black-painted fence, were no more than half a dozen acres apart.
    As he approached his barn, the triangular-shaped pond to the right shone black in the moonlight, reflecting the night sky as faithfully as a mirror. The covered training ring, a three-quarters-of-a-mile indoor oval that allowed him to work his horses in inclement weather, sat silent and deserted at a little distance to the rear, looking for all the world like along, curved, black-painted train tunnel. Beyond the ring, an owl hooted in the woods bordering the back of the property, and from some greater distance still a coyote howled. Near the edge of the woods, just visible as a solid dark block against the variegated charcoal of the timber, stood his father’s small log cabin. The lights were out. No surprise there. Like himself, his widowed father was a horseman, which meant he was an early-to-bed, early-to-rise kind of guy.
    When he wasn’t drinking, that is.
    Joe stepped inside his barn, flipped on the light—an evenly spaced lineup of cheap fluorescent fixtures overhead, not fancy but adequate for the job—and looked around. Silver Wonder came to the front of her stall, blinking and snorting a soft question. Drago and Timber Country were next, thrusting their heads out of the open top of the Dutch-style stall doors, looking at him curiously. Down the row, more horses, some his, some boarded, popped their heads out. They knew the schedule as well as he did, and plainly wondered what had brought him to their domicile in the middle of the night.
    “Everything okay, girl?” Joe walked over to Silver Wonder and rubbed her well-shaped head. The ten-year-old brood mare nudged him, wanting a treat, and