Swimming with Horses - Softcover

Oakland Ross has written two previous novels, a travel memoir, and a short story collection. He worked as a foreign correspondent for several years and received two National Newspaper Awards and a National Magazine Award for fiction. Oakland lives in Toronto.

Prologue

They found Quinton Vasco’s body only a day after he went missing. Still clad in a black business suit, his corpse turned up amid a large field of alfalfa grass, a couple of hundred yards north of Number Four Sideroad in Kelso County. The site was not far from a trail that local teens had used in former days as a sort of lovers’ lane.

By this time, the police had discovered Vasco’s abandoned BMW nearby. It seemed he had walked from the vehicle into the field, entering by means of the padlocked gates; it was determined he had a key. He then proceeded on foot to the site of his death, evidently accompanied by a second person, his killer. There was no sign of a struggle.

Some said it was fitting that Vasco owned the property where he was murdered, although I can’t imagine what difference that would make, either to him or to anyone else, unless it was for the view. The view was stunning. Still, it all came to the same thing in the end. The man was dead, shot twice in the side of the head from very close range — this, according to the police report. The police also said there was something odd about the bullets that killed him. Their calibre — nine millimetres by eighteen millimetres — was pretty unusual, albeit not unknown. That summer, the Evanton detachment of the Ontario Provincial Police had received several baffling reports of local livestock being shot while grazing, invariably with bullets of this same unfamiliar configuration. Possibly, the killer had been getting in some target practice.

Many people would later insist that Vasco’s death must have been part of some deadly international plot, rife with intrigue and espionage. He was the inventor, after all, of the GC-45 howitzer, a massive cannon that was eventually sold to the white supremacist government in South Africa. But the actual verdict proved to be far more mundane. Kelso was a quiet region, you see, with little crime and few troublemakers. When acts of malfeasance did take place, suspicion tended to round pretty quickly upon a select group of known delinquents, a short list that included a certain Bruce Gruber. He was a grade eight dropout who worked as an apprentice mechanic at Weintrub’s Garage over in Hatton. He had a mean temper and had run afoul of the law more than once. He was not noted for his keen intellect.

What was more, Bruce Gruber confessed his guilt almost at once, and he stuck to his tale like a dog. He insisted that he shot Quinton Vasco “because I hated him,” which made sense if you know anything about human nature at all. It was said that Gruber acted in a jealous rage, which seemed on the surface to be entirely plausible.

All of this and more came out in the news and kept everyone jabbering for weeks. A murder? In Kelso County? Nothing like it had ever happened before. True, rumours would begin to spread toward the end of that summer about an alleged rape, a terrible business said to have involved that nice young Odegaard girl. Leslie was her name. For my part, I happen to have a fair idea of what was done to Leslie on that night, even if few others do. I may even have saved her from suffering worse harm. For almost everyone else, the episode was a matter of hearsay and conjecture — unproven and easily forgotten. Besides, the Odegaards quickly sold their store in Hatton and set out for parts unknown. People stopped talking about them before very long. I don’t believe that anyone was ever punished for the assault on that poor child, or not officially. Still, some higher form of justice may have been at work because, one way or another, Bruce Gruber went to jail.

As for the object of Bruce’s seemingly unrequited passion, she absconded, too. The South African girl, they called her. Colonel Barker drove her to the airport on the day that followed Quinton Vasco’s death, even before the man’s body was found. She left no message or, anyway, none for me. She just marched aboard an airplane and disappeared. Good riddance, everyone said. Her departure merely confirmed what they had believed all along.

That girl was trouble.

And she was. I know she was. I know that better than anyone.