The Scar Rule by Heidi Vanderbilt

Author:Heidi Vanderbilt [Vanderbilt, Heidi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Buchanan Books
Published: 2020-03-24T19:38:25+00:00

CHAPTER 16

BILLIE TURNED ON the laptop and plugged the flash drive she had gotten from Charley into the USB port. The first seconds were disorienting, fuzzy black-and-white footage of movement too blurry to discern. She realized the sound was off on her computer and turned it on. Southern voices. Indistinct words. A yell. A whinny.

She was looking at the inside of a barn. A man walked in front of the camera, toward a horse, pulled back his arm and punched the animal in the face. Billie flinched and pulled back as if it had happened in front of her. The man turned toward the camera, and Billie recognized Dale. He said something she couldn’t understand, stepped to the next horse, and did it again. And again. Down a long row of horses standing in cross ties, watching him approach, unable to escape. He slugged each in turn, hitting with detachment and force.

Billie paused the video. It didn’t make any sense. Why batter these horses, already tied in their stalls, helpless and immobile? She couldn’t watch anymore. Tears ran onto her lips.

When she worked for Frank, reporting on the horrors of child abuse and rape, she had learned when she got overwhelmed to take a minute to anchor herself. She had done that so often and for so many years, it had become second nature. My laptop, she told herself. These are my notebooks. My hands. My ranch. My home.

She wiped her face with her palms, rewound and pressed play, her hand hovering over the stop button, poking at it to slow down the action so she could actually see what was happening. She missed it on her first pass, rewound and looked again. This time she saw that a groom knelt beside each horse, palpating its front legs the way an inspector would at a show. The instant a horse flinched, Dale punched it.

“He’s stewarding the horse, teaching it not to react to the exam,” she whispered.

The camera aimed at the horses’ legs, following Dale. He bent down, lifted a front hoof, and squirted something from a bottle on its leg. The horse reared back then collapsed to its knees.

“Get up, you sorry son of a bitch!” Dale kicked it in the gut.

Billie watched the rest of the footage. Dale poking a horse with an electric cattle prod. Dale standing by while two grooms tried to drag a prostrate horse by its head. Dale burning a horse on the lips with a cigarette. Charley must have been the videographer, she realized. He had told her he was going to turn in more abusers than just Dale for the reward, and there were two grooms in this footage.

She pressed play again. This time she waited through more snow and smudges until, at last, there were new images, new voices. A woman talking, a man’s mumbled answer. The woman’s voice again. Eudora stepped in front of the camera, walking ahead of Charley down the barn aisle at the farm where Billie had worked.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.