Chapter Two

Escape

“Hey, Dori. Where are you going?”

“Riding school. I’ll be back in the fall. Have a nice summer, you guys…you poor slobs,” she added softly as she closed the car door and started the engine.

With that, Dori left her little group of former high school friends and drove off for six weeks at a crack riding academy in New England. She had told only a few people about this and actually wanted no one to know because she was sure that her horsy friends would bug her about going to school for something that they all thought they were perfect at already. Dori knew better. She had been riding for some years, mostly western style, and she secretly yearned for the more exacting and sophisticated disciplines of the English seat. When she received a small, personally addressed brochure inviting her to attend the New England Mountain School for Equestrians, she hounded her father mercilessly until he agreed to come up with the tuition for the full summer session. Dori was 19 and had graduated from high school. She’s spent a year at the local community college getting reasonable grades, but she dropped out, bored with the freshman subjects and ho-hum classes.

“I’ll go to the University next year,” she told her single parent Dad. He accepted this, knowing in his mind that she was unlikely to return to college. In any case, he thought, the summer school would keep Dori from getting into trouble with the local riff-raff – half were well-heeled society types, the rest were trailer trash from the other side of town. Both groups rode, albeit at different levels of skill and with somewhat different financing. The little Virginia community had the luxury of having lots of horses and plenty of space for riding.

So, with her little white car packed to the roof with her clothes and gear, Dori said goodbye to her buddies and headed for the interstate and the distant mountains of Vermont.

On the map, Green River Center, VT, was the nearest town to the school. They told her to phone when she got that far and someone would come and pick her up. Because she was too early, she drove on through the quaint New England town and tried to guess where the school might be. By three o’clock, she had given up and called the school from the Howard Johnson’s Motel. An hour later, she was met by a woman and a man in a bright red four-wheel drive Range Rover. They were both well turned out in what Dori could tell was expensive and fashionable riding attire: white turtleneck shirts under dark blue down vests, perfectly fitted beige breeches, black boots that Dori thought were probably Hermes, and black leather gloves. They introduced themselves as Karen and Greg. They formally shook hands, the couple using the typical German quick grip, once up, once down, then a quick release motion that Dori had encountered