Limits of Justice, The by John Morgan Wilson

struck out along the path to the stables, and when I reached the stable door I stopped, hearing nothing but my own quickening breath. Inside, in separate stalls, several fine-looking horses stood blinking languidly, flicking at flies with their tails. They were in various shades and sizes, and appeared to be strong, healthy, and well groomed, which pretty much exhausted my knowledge of matters equine. I passed beyond the stables and found open, rolling land beyond, interspersed with oak and eucalyptus. The ground sloped gradually up to merge with the more rugged mountains, which were public land, carved with enough trails, I imagined, for a rider to run a horse forever.
    Hoofbeats suddenly pounded toward me from behind. I whirled to see the dark horse coming back, a shiny black mare with flaring nostrils being whipped by her pale rider, whose delicate face I barely glimpsed as the horse bore down on me. I stepped quickly from her path, pressing myself against the stable wall as she galloped past, her sharp hooves churning dust. The rider brought her expertly around, reined her in, then guided her back until we faced each other and I was finally able to discern some maleness in his features. He was wispy and wan yet strangely beautiful, with a Raphaelite face that defied age and gender. Yet the face, for all its lack of definition, was disconcertingly familiar; it was the face in the photograph back on my kitchen table, or very nearly—the face of Randall Capri as a young boy. Or very nearly.
    While I shrank beneath the eaves of the stable, the rider reared the mare up on her hind legs like the wrought-iron steeds on the big gate, her lethal hooves flailing above my head, while he kept his dark eyes fixed on mine, demonic in his pallid face. He appeared as physically insubstantial and beardless as a boy, with the bearing and passion of a man—ethereal as an angel, as haunted as an archangel, and lost within himself like no one I’d ever encountered.
    Then he pulled on the reins, dug his knees into the mare’s ribs as she came down, and galloped away across the rolling landscape into the dying light.
     
    *
     
    Minutes later, I encountered him again. I was descending the long drive, nearing the gate. He stepped from the foliage near the stone cottage, and when I looked, I saw the mare tied up near the cottage steps, drinking from a trough.
    He faced me in the middle of the drive, seemingly unafraid.
    “Who are you? Why are you here?”
    His voice matched his features: feathery, genderless, ambiguous. He was dressed in a loose-fitting, long-sleeved white shirt and black leather riding pants tucked into black English riding boots. The outfit might have fit a slim, long-legged woman as easily.
    I spoke my name and told him about the book Charlotte Preston had asked me to write.
    “She wanted me to come here, to see Equus for myself.”
    “She’s gone now. Equus belongs to me.”
    “Charlotte left no will, no provisions for her estate.”
    “Mr. Preston wrote a note before he died, signed and dated. If anything happened to Charlotte while she still owned Equus, it was to be mine. My lawyer has the note. If Charlotte left no will, and no one proves the note invalid, Equus belongs to me.”
    “You must be George Krytanos.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Charlotte spoke of you.”
    “She had no reason to. She hardly knew me.”
    “She said you were very loyal to her father.”
    “She was going to sell Equus. It’s been my home for twenty-two years, the only home I know.”
    “You must have been quite young when you came here.”
    “Mr. Preston brought me here when I was ten. Twenty-two years I’ve lived here, with Mr. Preston and the horses.”
    “You don’t look thirty-two years old.”
    The light was nearly gone, but there was enough to show me the unnatural contours of his face, the shaping that seem forced upon it. “You must have been very fond of Mr. Preston, to stay on so long.”
    “I loved him, almost as