I had been. But that was hardly unusual. “Maybe Ricky can’t manage to ride the easiest horse in the barn and still carry on a conversation, but I’m capable of doing both. I think that the colt saw the horses coming before anyone else did. He panicked, plain and simple. I don’t think anyone could have stopped him from spooking so hard.”
“Juan says he started pulling up his horse just before your horse cut him off. He said he saw them, but you didn’t react at all.”
My mouth fell open. Bald-faced lies, really, from the best rider in my barn? Kerri gazed up at me, her face full of concern, and went on.
“He said that ever since the bad press, you’ve been distracted. Kind of half-here.”
She believed them.
I narrowed my eyes at her, and she stepped back, her hands leaving Parker’s neck. He nosed after her, wanting more attention, but I’d had enough.
How dare she believe them? How dare she sit and listen to them gossip about me, and believe their nonsense? What sort of friend was she? “Did you defend me at all? Did you tell them there’s no way in hell I would let anything in my personal life affect my riding?”
Kerri shook her head. “I don’t ever say anything when they gossip. What do you want me to do? I work with these people. While you’re having breakfast with Alexander, we’re eating tacos in the tack room. They talk, I hear them.”
“You could have breakfast with us.”
“I can’t be the teacher’s pet if I want to have anyone to talk to here. It’s a long day when no one talks to you.”
I’d certainly figured that one out this morning. “So that’s what being my friend means? It makes you the teacher’s pet?”
“A little bit, yeah. Of course it does! You’re the boss, Alex. You’re my friend, of course—but you’re the boss, too. Your employees are going to talk about you. That’s the way it works. If I’m always telling them to shut up about you, they’ll just do it somewhere else—and they won’t talk to me at all.”
I reined back hard, thinking only that I needed to be away from her, now. Parker picked up his head and backed up a few steps, chewing at the bit uncomfortably. Kerri stepped away, too, her jaw set and angry. I’d upset the horse and the human equally, and I should have felt bad about it. The horse, at least. All I could think was that if Kerri wouldn’t stand up for me, maybe I didn’t have the friend I’d thought after all. Maybe she’d gone back to the broodmare barn because she didn’t want to work with me constantly anymore. Maybe I’d read way more into our relationship than what was actually there. I wasn’t a person who had friends. I wouldn’t know.
Relaxing my hands to settle Parker’s hurt feelings, I wheeled the pony around with a touch of the reins to his neck. “Tell your friends that Superman couldn’t have stopped that colt,” I said as we went, without looking back. “And then find someone else to gossip about. I don’t pay people to talk shit about me.” I rode out of the barn, heels pressed to Parker’s side, before Kerri could reply. Maybe she didn’t have a reply. Maybe she shrugged and went back to her work, picking up the pitchfork and returning to mucking out the broodmare stalls. Maybe she thought Thank goodness that’s over.
All the way back to the training barn, I rehearsed the tale I would bring to Alexander, the you won’t believe this and the they have some nerve and the I thought we were friends. The last line made my eyes sting, hot and furious, but I blinked the damp away and wiped my cheeks and dried my hands in Parker’s mane. I wasn’t a child, and this wasn’t a barn spat between teenagers. This was work, and we would all do well to remember it. I should have been making friends and allies in the business a long time ago.
Well, now I would. Where, and how, that was something I’d worry about another day. The important thing was to stay tough and resolved in front of my staff. So they thought I was having a breakdown? So they thought I wasn’t paying attention and causing accidents? And just who the hell were they? How dare they doubt my ability? I was their boss—if they didn’t like it they could go ride for someone else.
I was prepared to vent it all to Alexander and then give the cold shoulder to everyone in the barn. But when I rode into the shed-row, I found the place in chaos.
Juan was shouting at Ricky, who was covered in dirt from head to toe. Luz, one of the more capable grooms, was holding the reins of a trembling colt, still fully tacked in saddle and bridle, while Alexander bent to pick up a foreleg. But every time his hand got close, the colt jumped backwards, legs churning dangerously. Nearby, the other riders stood and made suggestions, peanut gallery style. “Grab his ear, Luz!” “Gotta trank him first!” “Lip chain’s all you need!”
I hopped down from Parker’s saddle and let the pony walk off to his stall alone while I sprang into action. One thing you could say for the equestrian life, there’s never any time to sit around brooding about hurt feelings. Something was always breaking, someone was always getting hurt, the world was always turning and turning as fast as it could, hoping it could fling us off and be free.
The sore colt was diagnosed with a contusion on his fetlock, sustained after he and Juan’s mount had a collision on the track. They’d been spooked, Ricky said, and his colt veered into Juan’s. Just like yesterday, but with less fatal results. The neighbor horses had been at it again, galloping out of the fog like ghosts and disappearing again just as mysteriously. Ricky had seen them this time, and Juan—hell, everyone had. No one apologized to me for claiming that I was cracked in the head for blaming strange horses on yesterday’s accident. Of course not—they didn’t know that I had heard about their gossip. Today’s gossip wouldn’t be about me, I figured, it would be about who the hell was running those horses up our fence-line every morning.
Now the colt had been poulticed and wrapped and the grooms were raking the shed-row. The horses were pulling at their hay-nets, the riders were joking over tacos in the tack room, its green-painted steel door slid closed against the chilly morning air. Another day of training had come to a close. Nothing left to do now but find some breakfast and then go up to the broodmare barn for the vet visit. Something I was in no hurry to attend today. I walked the shed-row, leaving a row of boot-prints in the raked clay, to make sure that everyone had cleaned up their grain and had water in their buckets. The fog was swirling through the barn rafters, covering everything it touched with damp and cold, and I shivered.
I shrugged into an extra hoodie I’d left hanging on a peg in the center aisle, shoved my hands into the pockets, and immediately removed them again with handfuls of old hay. I guessed I’d been helping with hay-nets the last time I’d needed two sweaters. “This is a damned cold January,” I said, and Alexander grunted a reply that might have been a denial or an affirmation.
He was upset, of course. We had a serious situation on our hands. Some unknown trainer galloping horses next to our training track, two injuries, one catastrophic, in two days. And yet I had a guilty little sense of relief rubbing shoulders with my worry. Now that Ricky had lost control of his horse, I couldn’t be blamed for yesterday’s accident.. Sure, Ricky wasn’t the world’s greatest exercise rider, but he’d stayed on top yesterday, something that I hadn’t managed. Today, he was the one in the dirt. This was more than Alex losing her focus.
Not that anyone was going to acknowledge that fact out loud, but just knowing it made me feel slightly better about life in general.
Still, someone had to figure out who was running those horses, and if they were doing it on purpose. Suppose they were timing their gallops to match up to ours? It sure looked that way.
“This is suspicious,” I said, sidling up to Alexander as he leaned on the shed-row rail and stared out into the gray fog. “This whole thing with the horses next door. Very suspicious.”
Alexander shook his head. “No it’s not.” Of course. He didn’t want it to be suspicious, so it wasn’t. “You’re looking for conspiracies now.”
“Why would I want a conspiracy? Wouldn’t I rather this just be chance?”
“It is just chance,” he said instead of answering me.
“Of course. Two horses galloping up our fence-line at the same time that our horses are rounding the turn into the backstretch. Were these the same horses?”
“One’s a gray, one’s darker—bay, maybe, or liver chestnut.”
“So it’s the same horses.”
“Or they have two grays. And it was a different time of morning.”
“There are only two horses, and they’re holding them at the top of the field until they hear our horses coming around the turn,” I suggested.
“That’s very elaborate. And who is doing this?”
“The same people that sent me two hundred emails in the past three days informing me that I was a hypocritical horse killer? Even though the horse that I didn’t own, didn’t actually die? I found out who’s at the bottom of this, did I tell you?” I kicked at the footboard that held the clay in place, stopping the expensive footing from sliding out into the bahia grass and sand outside. “Citizens Against Slave Horses. CASH.”
“That’s their name? You’re not serious.”
“Oh, I’m serious. That’s who is leading the charge now. They have pre-written emails on their website and their Facebook page. And they’re taking credit for sending that woman to scream at me at the banquet. Take a look.” I thumbed through my phone and showed Alexander their Facebook page. He scanned the vicious posts and his face sagged.
“This is terrible.”
“I thought it was terrible when it was just emails. But there are physical threats in these emails, and now look what’s started happening just a day after they started arriving. Horses out of nowhere, staged to scare our horses—”
Alexander interrupted. “You’ve gotten threats against the horses or the farm or—?”
“Just against me, personally.” I looked out over the paddocks. The wind was picking up and the fog was starting to thin at last. I could see the black boards of the nearest paddock, where Tiger would be turned out once the grooms were finished up with the morning clean-up. “But so far they’ve only managed to hurt horses.” My sore shoulders didn’t count.
Alexander leaned his head against a support column and sighed. We stood in silence for a few minutes, watching the paddocks and trees slowly come into focus. It might just be a pretty day after all, I thought. The sun could even make an appearance and warm us up a bit. Behind us, the grooms hung up the long-toothed shed-row rakes with a clatter of metal. The sliding door to the tack room rumbled open, and there was a buzz of conversation, a staccato burst of laughter, released from the party within; then it was closed again and the training barn was draped in the silence peculiar to horse barns: a quiet made up of teeth pulling at hay-nets, shifting hooves rustling through straw, the occasional snort. It was never perfectly silent in a barn, but to our ears, the stillness was complete.
“If it was deliberate, and it is this group… who do you think is behind it all? Who’s the ringleader?”
I shrugged, but I was happy that he was at least listening to me. “It could be anyone in the world. Plenty of people have a bone to pick with racing.”
Alexander shook his head. “It’s not CASH, though. You’re forgetting, those are racehorses running down the fence-line. If they’re really being used against us, it’s racehorse people using them. There’s no way a radical group like this would team up with a racehorse trainer.”
“So someone who doesn’t like me in the racing business. That list is still pretty long. I’m not winning any popularity contests. You’re pretty well-liked, though. Maybe they’re hoping you’ll get fed up with my bad image and the trouble I bring to the barn and you’ll kick me out.”
“And what, marry one of their spinster daughters? This isn’t a Victorian murder mystery, Alex. But—as you say—someone who doesn’t like you personally…”
I chewed my lip. The conversation was kind of a downer. It’s one thing to know you’re an outsider. It’s another thing entirely to consider that there’s someone who dislikes you enough to attempt bodily harm. “You think it’s her?”
“It could be.”
“Mary bloody Archer,” I said bitterly. What had started with a few traded insults and one crazed man-eater colt had turned into a rivalry that was reaching Dick Francis proportions. “She doesn’t have to get me killed, either. All she has to do is make me sound like an even bigger idiot than I already do. And from what Kerri said earlier, she’s already succeeded.”
“What do you mean? No—wait.” Alexander hushed me and we were quiet while Luz went strolling by, whistling and swinging a chain shank.
She waggled her fingers at us as she passed. “I go to get Tiger now,” she explained.
“Thank you, Luz,” I said. “I appreciate you taking on the extra job.”
“I like him. But he crazy boy yesterday!” she laughed. “He go straight up—wooo! And I say, ‘you get down crazy boy,’ and give him a yank, and down he come, but he dance all the way to outside.” She paused and put a hand on her hip. “You need to ride him, Alex. He need calming down. He need hard work.”
“I know, Luz. But he’s supposed to have some downtime to just be a horse after all his hard work racing.”
Luz shook her head, still grinning. “If you say so, Alex. But I think he bored. He missing work. I go get him now.” She gave another wave and went marching down the driveway, her dirty sneakers crunching on the gravel. I watched her go, my mind slipping over to Tiger’s attitude problem for a moment. Was he only going to get worse, instead of better, with this lay-off?
“What’s the story, Alex?”
“What?” I turned back to Alexander, who was looking at me with an impatient expression.
“What did Kerri say?”
“Oh.” From one distressing subject back to the other one. I flipped back with ease; what’s a little more trouble? “Kerri wanted to know how I could let my attention slip so badly. Apparently the riders were all talking about the accident and blamed me for it. Saying that I wasn’t paying attention because I’m so upset about the bad press and everything. And you know they went gossiping all over town once they got off work. By now all of Ocala will be hearing some telephone version of this.”
“They’ll have a different story to tell tonight, though. That the same thing happened two days in a row and you weren’t there the second time. How can they blame you for this one? It’s terrible that it happened, but I think it clears you, too.”
I didn’t mention that I thought so, too. “Not causing an accident isn’t going to be enough get me out of this. I need someone on my side. Or I have to do something that’s going to make a difference.”
“You could sponsor a retired horse in training,” Alexander rubbed his chin in thought. “Or a Thoroughbred show? A class? Maybe Lucy knows someone putting one together.”
“Throwing money at the problem.”
“Well, you have some. If you’re short on allies, at least you can buy some good press.”
He had a point, but having money in the bank was one of the things people didn’t like about me. I wished it would be easy to get a little press for retiring Tiger after that clunker of a race, but we already retired all of our horses, so that was hardly news. Throwing money at a retirement charity l when we already spent plenty retiring our horses didn’t make a ton of sense either. “Writing a check just looks like guilt, and I don’t want to look guilty like that,” I argued. “Just sending the money to pay Market Affair’s vet bills makes me look guilty. I want to do something that stands apart. Something real.”
We looked at each other. Neither of us, I knew, had any idea what I wanted.
Finally I shrugged, followed by an involuntary little shiver. “It’s too chilly for me out here. Let’s go back to the house.” I pushed off from the shed-row railing and started for the golf cart.
“Alex,” Alexander said, not moving. “What if you rode Tiger?”
I stopped and looked back at him. His tweed c
ap was beaded with moisture, his breath was white in the cold air, and I knew he was feeling the chill as much as I was, but his face had brightened as if the greatest idea in the world had lit him up from the inside. I hadn’t the faintest idea what that might be. “What? I can’t ride Tiger for months. He’s had no lay-off at all.”
“But just look at him.” Alexander’s gaze flicked past me and he nodded. I turned just as I heard the hooves crunching on the gravel.
Coming through the thinning fog like a racehorse going to the post, Tiger pranced alongside Luz, who was swinging the leather shank carelessly in her hands, ignoring the Thoroughbred’s antics. He was swishing his tail, arching his neck, his forelegs and hocks rising up in a piaffe, then pushing forward in a lunge of power when she got ahead of him and gave the lead a yank to hurry him along. He’d lurch forward, hit the chain over his nose and skid to a prancing halt, and then the whole process began all over again. He clearly thought he was one of the rare dark bay Lippizanners. Or a racehorse.
Luz shook her head at him and laughed. “You a big dumb horse,” I heard her tell him, her voice carrying through the fog. “But someday, somebody gonna get on you and make you work hard. Then we see how bad you act for me.” She swung open the paddock gate and Tiger threw himself through the gap, spinning around to face her so quickly that dirt went flying through the air. I heard the clods hit the ground with a series of damp thuds. Luz pulled the gate closed behind her, carefully unbuckled the chain from the halter while Tiger stood rigid, every muscle tensed, and then she jumped backwards, swinging the lead shank at his shoulder while she went.
The lead never touched Tiger’s shoulder, nor even his hindquarters. By the time she had leapt behind the gate, the horse had spun around and exploded into a gallop, not even bothering to kick out as he went. All of his energy and focus was dedicated to running as fast as he could, and as he lapped the little paddock, sod flying up from his hooves, I realized that Tiger was working just as hard as he could, at the only job he knew. Then my eyes began to sting, watching him like that. Seven years old, and he’d done the same thing every day for four years. Of course being turned out in a field every day was confusing the hell out of him. Of course he was bursting out of his skin with nerves and boredom. I wiped at a hot tear before it could make its way down my cheek and give me away.
Turning For Home (Alex and Alexander Book 4) Page 9