My Horse Escaped 14 Times in One Month, and Every Time I Found Him in the Garden of the Same Woman. She Was a Retired Opera Singer, and She Was Not Amused

The fourth time, she was waiting for me at the gate with a pair of garden shears.

“Mr. Pike.”

“Ma’am.”

“Your horse,” she said, “is eating my roses.”

He was.

Bandit, my eleven-year-old palomino gelding, was standing in the middle of her rose garden with a bright pink David Austin hanging out of the side of his mouth, looking at me like I’d interrupted something important.

I’m Desmond Pike. I’m 47, single, and I run a small horse ranch in the hills outside Sonoma, California. Trail rides for tourists, boarding for a few local horses, and a lot of fence repair.

Bandit had never jumped a fence in his life. He’s the laziest horse in Sonoma County.

Then, in March, a woman bought the old Barlow farmhouse on the other side of my east pasture.

And every morning since, at nine o’clock, Bandit was gone.

Now it was the fourth time, and the woman with the shears was looking at me like I was something she’d scraped off her shoe.

She was about fifty-five. Tall. Silver hair pinned up perfectly. A silk scarf. A face that could have been on a theater poster.

“I paid four thousand dollars for these roses,” she said. “They came from England. I have a homeowner’s insurance policy with a very specific clause about livestock damage, and I’m told it doesn’t cover *your* livestock.”

“I’m very sorry, ma’am.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Be fast.”

I led Bandit out of the garden.

At the gate, he stopped, turned his head back toward her house and let out a long, heartbroken whinny.

The woman stared at him.

Then she slammed the door.