The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross Read Free Page B

guy detectives don’t bother with cases where they haven’t got a body and at least five suspects with a bellyful of hate. That’s what made this the perfect Fansler case. At least, pointing that out was how I got Kate to let me publish it.
    Somehow, Kate kept finding herself across from the Plaza, studying the horse-drawn carriages. She seemed to have developed a new consciousness of the things: they stopped being a familiar background and moved into the foreground of her awareness. Many years earlier, she and Reed, when they were newly met, had hired one of the carriages and tried to imitate the proper romantic attitudes connected with them. (Reed is now Kate’s husband, a word she loathes, but after all a fact is a fact.) They hadended up dissolved in laughter, at their own antics and the prattle of the driver, who took them for newlyweds and tourists, pointing out features of Central Park that Kate had known since birth. The ride had cost five dollars, which indicated how long ago that had been. The notices on the carriages Kate observed informed the romantic and unwary that the price was seventeen dollars for the first quarter hour. Despite these prices, business was good, to judge from the number of carriages lined up, especially on the weekends.
    On a warm, spring weekday afternoon Kate hired one. The driver was a young girl in a top hat, her blonde hair seeming to pour out below it to the middle of her back. Kate had approached the girl because she looked, somehow, easier than the male drivers to induce into conversation as opposed to barker talk. Her other attraction was that she had tacked onto the front of her carriage a neat placard announcing that she took American Express cards. The combination of the girl’s attractiveness and Kate’s lack of cash clinched the matter.
    “I’m not a tourist,” Kate said, when they had turned off into the park at Sixth Avenue. “I really wanted to ask you about driving these things. It looks like every child’s dream, of course. Do most of the drivers like horses? Do they always drive the same horse?”
    “Even tourists ask that,” the girl said, smiling to make the words pleasant. “Some of us do, some of us don’t, to both questions. Mostly we drive the same horse, but if we aren’t going to be out, someone else takes over, on a weekend, say. I always try to drive this horse; her name, though you might never guess, is Nellie. She’s one of the few mares; mostly they’re geldings.”
    “Do any of you own your horses?”
    “Not many anymore. You writing a book or something?”
    “Not even ‘or something,’ ” Kate said. “I’ve just got interested.”
    “Why don’t I give you the usual spiel without your having to ask the questions? Would that help?”
    Kate laughed, sitting back, enjoying the slower pace and the sound of the hoofs on the road. The park was closed to cars in the afternoon, and the forsythia was out. Kate couldn’t think why she hadn’t done this before. Because, she guessed, one thought of it only as a couple or family thing, while it was (though she saw not a single other carriage with only one person in it) an ideal solitary experience. Kate asked for the “usual spiel.”
    “We all keep our horses in the same stable, the carriages too. There’s a good bit of turnover in drivers. As I said, we like horses, or if we don’t we pretend to; it would never do to be mean to a horse in the public eye, and we’re always in the public eye–that last was not part of the usual spiel, as I’m sure you’ve guessed. There are rules governing the treatment of the horses. On the hottest days in summer, they can’t stay out too long, and they have to have water, and blankets in the winter. People worry a lot more about the horses than the drivers–I don’t usually say that either.”
    “There’s a novel by Aldous Huxley,” Kate said, “in which some animal lovers take an ill-treated horse away from the man who works it, and as a