Turning For Home (Alex and Alexander Book 4)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  So why was the mob, such as it was, coming after me? Maybe Alexander had been right to mock me, maybe he was right to sneer and say I’d set myself up as, what was it? The Mother Teresa of horse racing. Maybe the things I’d said to the reporter had been too smug for my fellows in the business, trainers and breeders and owners who had never really liked that up-jumped gallop girl Alex Whitehall much anyway, marching around the paddock at Saratoga and Tampa and Gulfstream like she owned the place. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I didn’t know. I’d just been honest. I was responsible for my retirees, and I said so.

  As of today, I had one more retiree to plan for.

  Accountants would say that I couldn’t keep them all; common sense knew this to be true. They’d leave. Some would be runners, some would not. They wouldn’t be mine. It shouldn’t really matter.

  The filly pulled away from her dam and reared up, playfully swatting at the mare’s back with her little button-hooves. The mare shook her head at her foal, ears flattened—go play with your friends, leave me alone. The filly took the hint and trotted away, looking for someone her own age to bother. She found her sleeping friend and gave the colt a few taps with a foreleg; the sleeping colt jumped up, squealing, and took off across the silver pasture, the trouble-maker in hot pursuit.

  They were fast now, anyway.

  I was going to take care of all of them, no matter how hard. I promised it to them right there, by the light of the moon.

  But the moon has always had a mocking smile and I knew, I knew.

  It wasn’t a promise I could keep.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Down the shed-row, Tiger kicked.

  Alexander swung down from Betsy’s saddle and dropped the mare’s split reins on the ground. “Stand,” he commanded, and Betsy stood. Then he looked at me, with a gaze that demanded answers. What are you going to do about Tiger? his furious blue eyes were blazing. It was the same questions over and over. When was I going to send him to a trainer and get him out of this racing barn? Would it be before or after he injured himself kicking the walls—or just plain made us all crazy?

  When you have been with one person day in and day out, for years, you get pretty good at mental telepathy. It makes it harder to ignore the things you just don’t want to hear.

  Of course, sometimes he just shouts them at you until it’s impossible not to hear. As was the case when he called my phone at midnight the night after Tiger’s race, and I foolishly decided to pick it up. Well, the wine had made it seem like a good idea. I’d told him all about how I’d nearly run over a reporter with the truck and he’d told me all about what an immature irresponsible silly girl I was. And then we both said a few more unrepeatable things and then I told him that I was plenty old enough to make my own decisions and anyway, no one had actually died, and then I fell asleep with the phone tucked under my ear When I got up a few hours later, the imprint of the phone red upon my cheek, he was in the kitchen, making coffee as if nothing had happened. He hadn’t quite forgiven me, but we were getting along just fine.

  Until it became clear that I didn’t have a plan beyond bringing Tiger home.

  Down the shed-row, Tiger kicked.

  I dropped my eyes and studied the black and brown strands of Parker’s mane, lying soft and disciplined beneath my knuckles.

  Alexander stomped off into the office, probably in search of more coffee. I hoped the grooms had remembered not to let the coffee pot sit empty again. Last week, a new groom had tipped the last few drops of coffee into his mug, then set the glass carafe back down on the burner without adding more water and setting it to brew again. It would have been bad enough if Alexander had come back from watching a set of horses train and found that someone hadn’t bothered to make more coffee. It had been an outright disaster when he found that the pot had cracked on the burner. He’d sent the errant groom out for a box of coffee from Starbucks and made him pay for it with his own money.

  I’d suggested that someone just run over to the broodmare barn and steal the coffee-pot from that barn’s feed room, but Alexander was too caffeine-deprived to see sense. I had to admit, the extra jolt from the Starbucks coffee had been a welcome surprise. The second half of the morning went by at lightning-speed, and we were all done with training twenty minutes early. I hadn’t even felt compelled to take a nap afterwards, and the disgraced groom seemed pretty content with his punishment, too. Sometimes, things turned out much better than one could have ever expected. Maybe it would be luck if the coffee-pot had been neglected again this morning. I could use a little jet fuel this morning. Sleep had been hard to come by last night.

  Down the shed-row, Tiger kicked.

  I got down from Parker’s back, easing myself gently from the saddle and onto the clay of the shed-row a little more slowly than I might have done in front of Alexander. My knees hurt me more and more these days. I’d galloped two racehorses earlier, mature campaigners who were coming to the end of lay-offs and nearly ready to head back to the track, and now I felt like my left knee might come apart at the joint. I was going to have to lengthen my stirrups again, I thought, and if I kept lengthening them I wouldn’t be able to breeze properly anymore. You couldn’t get a workout from a racehorse if you were riding with a dressage leg on them. There was too much motion there, too much churning from those pistons of legs once they hit racing speed. The only way was to be balanced above the withers, crouched there with knees bent in an acute angle.

  I grimaced at the thought and made extra-certain that I didn’t walk with a limp as I pulled the reins over Parker’s curiously pricked ears and draped them over the shed-row rail. Parker needed a little more specificity in his ground-tie than Betsy required. If I dropped the reins, he’d go straight back to his stall when I dismounted, which was cute when we were done with work, but we were still in the middle of training hours and I’d like for him to stay where I left him.

  A groom sidled past with a newly-minted two-year-old who raised his hackles at the sight of Parker. The old Thoroughbred pinned his ears and gave the baby a side-eyed glare that sent the little brat into a prancing jig in his eagerness to get away. The groom laughed. I laughed. Parker snorted a snort that could have been a laugh.

  Down the shed-row, Tiger kicked.

  In the office, Alexander was pouring tar-black coffee into his tumbler. He held up the pot as I came in. “A refill, my dear?”

  His voice was stony.

  I was in trouble.

  “Yes, please,” I said tonelessly and handed him my own tumbler. He gave the cold stuff within a healthy splash.

  “You didn’t drink much of this.”

  “My stomach is all knotted up this morning.”

  He looked at me, pale eyebrows knitting together in his tanned forehead. “You’re going to do it today?”

  “I have to, don’t I?”

  “Well, I think that’s your decision, you know that.”

  Down the shed-row, Tiger kicked.

  “It’s his decision,” I said glumly. “He’s going to hurt himself.”

  “So where will you take him?”

  “I’ll talk to Lucy.” I accepted the coffee and took a sip. It was hot and inky and bitter and delicious, but it was doing my nervous tummy no favors. I set it down again. “We’ll have to pay her, since she won’t get a commission for selling him afterwards.”

  “But what comes afterwards? When he’s a show horse, but not for sale? What are we going to do with him? Have you considered the next step?”

  “We’ll pay someone to show him.” It was the right thing to do. Tiger deserved a career.

  “He won’t be in the barn anymore.” A gentle warning, to be sure this was the bed I wanted to lie down in.

  “No.” I let the word hang there in the chill morning air.

  He’d be gone. We’d had Tiger here for so long, it was nearly impossible to imagine the training barn without him.

  Alexander settled down into the cracked leather chair behind the office desk and swung idly from s
ide to side, regarding me with a bemused expression. “Did we ever plan for this, even for a minute?”

  I threw myself down in the other chair and surreptitiously stretched out my sore knee. “Plan for what?”

  “For his retirement. For a gelding that we bought out of sentimentality. We knew he’d be done racing someday, sooner or later, and then we’d have to find a new job for him. Any other horse, we’d sell. We knew we wouldn’t sell Tiger. Did we ever stop to consider what we’d do with him after retirement?”

  “I guess we thought he’d be a pony.”

  “He could still be a pony. He just needs some time and some seasoning with other horses.”

  “No,” I said stubbornly. In my mind, I knew Alexander was right—Tiger could be tamed, turned into a pony like Parker and Betsy. Both were growing older, both could use the break that a third pony could provide. But in my sentimental, stubborn heart, I didn’t want Tiger to be just another pony. I wanted him to win accolades, I wanted him to shine bright for his athleticism and his talent and his wondrous brain. I knew that a good pony was worth his weight in gold—but who would ever see him, buried here in the training barn, dragging around fractious yearlings and escorting stronger, better racehorses than he had ever been?

  I wanted more for my Tiger.

  “I’ll find a rider for him,” I suggested. “We’ll send him to a show barn.”

  “If he’s good enough,” Alexander added.

  “He’s good enough,” I said.

  Down the shed-row, Tiger kicked.

  “You don’t have to do it now,” Alexander said. “If you aren’t ready to part with him.”

  “What?” Where else could he go?

  “There’s a few empty stalls in the yearling barn. He could go over there at night, someone could bring him over to the paddock after training hours.” Alexander drummed his fingers on the table. “You’re going to lay him off for… how long? Six weeks? Two months?”

  “At least two months.” He needed time off to be a horse before Lucy started him into a new training program. Keeping him here for a lay-off wasn’t a bad idea, if we had somewhere to put him. Lucy had individual turn-out, but it was limited—he’d only be able to go out for a few hours a day, unless he somehow managed to stop being an idiot around other horses and could go out in the larger fields with her more sensible geldings. I wasn’t sure that was ever going to happen. He’d been alone, with no companions but Parker, for such a long time.

  This way, too, he wouldn’t be leaving. Not right away, anyway. I could keep my horse around just a little while longer.

  I smiled. It was the best news in five days, since the last race, since the Market Affair story broke and washed over me like tsunami. “Okay, let’s do it.”

  Down the shed-row, Tiger kicked.

  “Right now.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Tiger went to the yearling barn that evening with a spring in his step, and watched me walk away with a hurt look in his eyes—or so I imagined. The yearlings stayed in all night during the winter, so that they couldn’t get themselves into trouble with no one around for hours on end. He looked with disdain at the youngsters in the stalls around him and then rushed his stall door, whinnying into the red-tinged evening. I might have been worried enough to call the whole thing off, had he not gone back to his hay almost immediately, tearing off a bite and rushing back to the door so that he had a snack to keep him company while he stared me down.

  Incorrigible Tiger. I wanted to hide behind a tree and watch to see how long it took before he settled to his hay (I gave him maybe three minutes), but I had an actual, social commitment tonight. A fundraiser for some Thoroughbred charity at the Ocala Hilton. It was pretty good timing, actually… I just hated going to fundraisers. I wasn’t a dress and chit-chat kind of girl.

  I had more on my mind than Tiger and finding something nice to wear, just so that I could hide in a corner with a glass of wine all evening. I took a distracted shower, forgetting to put conditioner in my hair the first time, and then a second distracted shower, forgetting to rinse the conditioner out. By the third shower I was pretty sure I was not mentally fit to be in public. I flung myself on the bed, wrapped up in a white towel, and looked at the ceiling.

  Finally, Alexander, dressed in jacket and tie and ready to go, came upstairs and asked me what all the sighing was about, why I wasn’t dressed, etc. It was the invitation I’d been waiting for, and yet I couldn’t seem to put my worries into any sort of suitable frame. So I just blurted out the best summation of it all that I could manage.

  “Where do you think they’ll all go, Alexander?”

  The question had been gnawing at me all evening, worrying away at my conscience while my body went through the motions—driving the golf cart around the farm, checking the mares, helping with turn-out, filling water buckets. I had felt the bags of six pregnant mares and checked the cool hard tendons of four young colts, but I hadn’t truly seen a single horse that I had handled all afternoon.

  All I could see was the white star, the quizzical eye, the bushy forelock of Market Affair. Not as he’d been here, a bright-eyed colt with his whole career ahead of him, but as he was in the horrible photo.

  The photo had been arriving steadily as email attachments, as tweets, as Facebook posts, since around noon. It had gotten so bad that I’d had to turn off all the notifications on my phone, made my Twitter account private, deactivated my Facebook account. There were too many abusive posts to even keep up with reporting to admins, so I just let the flood bubble over while my phone languished unused in my jacket pocket. It had to end sometime.

  In the meantime, I’d seen the picture.

  Just once would have been enough. Now I knew what Market Affair looked like, or what he’d looked like at nine AM this morning. While I’d been sitting easily on Parker, sipping at my coffee and watching a set of promising two-year-olds gallop around the training track, Market Affair had been about to receive his first hoof trimming in months. After weeks wandering in the south Florida wilderness, his hooves were so soft and rotted that he was having trouble standing on pavement. In the photo, he was posed in front of a barn, his overgrown fore-hooves pushed pitifully out in front of his body so that he could bear more of his weight on his heels than on his tender toes. He was bald across his rump and back from rain rot, shaggy across his abdomen and neck from malnutrition, and everywhere his bones protruded from drum-tight skin. He was the picture of misery.

  Lucky for me, every photo came with a custom caption.

  You did this! Have you no shame?

  Yull go to hell for wat you did to this pore horse!!!

  So this is what Responsible Racehorse Retirement looks like to Alex Whitehall?

  #StopHorseRacingNow look what they do to their slow horses

  I waited for Alexander to ease my mind. He’d say something thoughtful and philosophical and reassuring, and I would feel much better.

  Alexander did not answer my question. He looked stern instead. I am sure this was the easiest course of action.

  “Get dressed, Alex. We should have left ten minutes ago.”

  “I don’t have anything nice to wear. Can I wear jeans?”

  “Of course you can’t wear jeans.” Alexander fixed me with an exasperated look. “You’re acting like a ten-year-old.”

  I flung open the closet doors so hard that the right one came out of the metal runner, swung wide, and slapped the wall. I jumped back to avoid getting hit. Alexander glowered at me.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d broken the closet door. I only kept my going-out clothes in the closet, after all, and I was never in a good mood when he made me put them on. Going-out clothes usually meant, as they did tonight, some annoying fundraiser that I had to smile through, covering up my yawns with a program or a glass of wine, wishing I was on the couch in my flannel pajamas watching reruns of Modern Family.

  I observed my meager supply of sundresses without pleasure. “I don’t have anything for cold
weather.”

  “It’s fifty-five degrees out there. It’s hardly snowing. Put on a sweater.” Alexander unknotted and re-knotted his tie and studied himself in the bathroom mirror, turning a little to check the symmetry of his work.

  It was very easy for men, they wore coats and pants to everything. I rummaged through my dresses and pulled out a brown dress that I’d had since high school. It was rather worn and had a spot near the hem, but no one was going to be looking at my knees, anyway. I shrugged myself into it, popped my arms through the cap sleeves, and noted the way my biceps strained the fabric. I hadn’t had nice arms like this in high school. All the dressage and jumping in the world couldn’t build up biceps like galloping racehorses.

  Alexander frowned at me in the mirror. “That dress has a spot on the hem.”

  How on earth could he see that? “No one will see it.”

  “I can see it from here.”

  I knew he didn’t need those spectacles. He just liked to balance them on the end of his nose. “Well, what would you suggest? I have three other dresses.” They were all basically the same: cotton patterned sundresses, sleeveless or nearly so, scooped neckline, knee-length, hardly glamorous. They were meant to be worn with flip flops. “Or I could wear my paddock clothes.” I had nice slacks and blouses for running horses, but all of them were marked around the hems with permanent mud stains from being worn around the barn and wading through the deep sand and clay of the racetrack.

  “Alex, when are you going to grow up and buy a nice outfit? We have these parties all the time and you never look presentable at any of them.”

  “We haven’t been to one of these parties since last spring,” I argued.

  “We need to go to more of them.” Alexander poked at his pale blonde hair with a comb, layering the strands into neat damp rows that would puff up into their usual disarray once they dried. “We need to be out in the local society a bit more if we’re going to stand our stallions with any measure of success. It isn’t just about their racing records, you know. It’s about relationships. There will be ten good stallions with stakes records standing freshman seasons next spring. After the nicking is done, mare owners be looking to see who their friends are.”