PROLOGUE
A Midwestern horse show grounds on a hot, dusty July day. Riders walking, trotting, galloping their mounts in every direction, warming up, cooling down. An announcer’s cultured voice floating out over the crowd describes completed rounds, refusals and occasionally “an unfortunate parting of the ways,” the dreadfully polite and politely dreadful expression she uses to report a fall.
In the start box, a woman sits quietly on a small bay mare. The starter counts down beginning at “thirty seconds…twenty seconds…ten, nine, eight…three, two,one, go, have a safe ride!” “Thank you,” the woman calls over her shoulder after touching her heels to the pony’s sides. The pair canters easily, rhythmically to the first jump, a table, and sails over, the black tail of the pony teasing the air in her passing. They have done this before, many times, often winning. Somewhere in the area of the start box the announcer notes to the crowd that “number 126, Hilltop Edna Brown, and owner/ rider Theodora Lewis, are on course and have successfully cleared the first obstacle.”
Seconds pass, and the only sound the rider hears is the rhythmic pounding of the pony’s hooves across the dusty grass. The pony clears a fence of stacked timbers, then wheels around a pond toward a red painted coop. At that instant the unpredictable, the unplanned, happens. A tiny, excited Jack Russell Terrier escapes from his owner’s grasp and runs toward the approaching pair, barking furiously. The pony, no stranger to dogs, sidesteps to the right at the last minute to avoid crushing the diminutive canine but the rider’s momentum carries her forward, off the pony’s left shoulder, onto and then over the coop, her boots thudding against the hollow structure as her head and shoulders plow into the turf. She has time to register that she is still holding the reins, and then the darkness comes.
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