“The two things you owe me from before. What happened to you and the horse, and what you do with your anger.”
“Dr. Lecter, when there’s time I’ll—”
“We don’t reckon time the same way, Clarice. This is all the time you’ll ever have.”
“Later, listen, I’ll—”
“I’ll listen now. Two years after your father’s death, your mother sent you to live with her cousin and her husband on a ranch in Montana. You were ten years old. You discovered they fed out slaughter horses. You ran away with a horse that couldn’t see very well. And?”
“—It was summer and we could sleep out. We got as far as Bozeman by a back road.”
“Did the horse have a name?”
“Probably, but they don’t—you don’t find that out when you’re feeding out slaughter horses. I called her Hannah, that seemed like a good name.”
“Were you leading her or riding?”
“Some of both. I had to lead her up beside a fence to climb on.”
“You rode and walked to Bozeman.”
“There was a livery stable, dude ranch, riding academy sort of thing just outside of town. I tried to see about them keeping her. It was twenty dollars a week in the corral. More for a stall. They could tell right off she couldn’t see. I said okay, I’ll lead her around. Little kids can sit on her and I’ll lead her around while their parents are, you know, regular riding. I can stay right here and muck out stalls. One of them, the man, agreed to everything I said while his wife called the sheriff.”
“The sheriff was a policeman, like your father.”
“That didn’t keep me from being scared of him, at first. He had a big red face. The sheriff finally put up twenty dollars for a week’s board while he ‘straightened things out.’ He said there was no use going for the stall in warm weather. The papers picked it up. There was a flap. My mother’s cousin agreed to let me go. I wound up going to the Lutheran Home in Bozeman.”
“It’s an orphanage?”
“Yes.”
“And Hannah?”
“She went too. A big Lutheran rancher put up the hay. They already had a barn at the orphanage. We plowed the garden with her. You had to watch where she was going, though. She’d walk through the butterbean trellises and step on any kind of plant that was too short for her to feel it against her legs. And we led her around pulling kids in a cart.”
“She died though.”
“Well, yes.”
“Tell me about that.”
“It was last year, they wrote me at school. They think she was about twenty-two. Pulled a cart full of kids the last day she lived, and died in her sleep.”
Dr. Lecter seemed disappointed. “How heartwarming,” he said. “Did your foster father in Montana fuck you, Clarice?”
“No.”
“Did he try?”
“No.”
“What made you run away with the horse?”
“They were going to kill her.”
“Did you know when?”
“Not exactly. I worried about it all the time. She was getting pretty fat.”