Turning For Home (Alex and Alexander Book 4)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  Naturally, Alexander always knew best. “You ride him, Alex,” he repeated. “Skip the lay-off. Skip sending him away. You ride him. You both need it.”

  Luz looked up as she came trudging up the gravel path towards us. She grinned. “You see that crazy horse? What I tell you? Every day he the same. When he last race? Two weeks ago? He still want to go.”

  “He didn’t want to go in his last race!” I stretched my mouth into what I hoped was a smile and forced a laugh.

  Luz just chuckled, shaking her head, and went past us into the barn. When she had disappeared back inside the warm tack room, Alexander pushed himself off the shed-row rail and came around the doorpost to join me on the driveway. His calloused hand found mine and squeezed it tight. “You have an ally, Alex,” he said gently. “And you have a purpose. You have me, and you have a horse who needs a job. I don’t think you could pick a better time to spend extra time on the farm.” He looked up at the dark bay horse who was still cantering around his field, his sides heaving and his ears pricked. “You’re needed here.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  I wasn’t convinced so easily.

  There were a thousand reasons why Tiger shouldn’t be pulled out of a post-racing lay-off so soon, and at least a thousand more why even if he was, I wasn’t the trainer to start riding him. For one thing, I was his exercise rider.

  “Then he’ll already be more attuned to you,” Alexander argued.

  What about the fact that I hadn’t reschooled a racehorse in more than six years? I barely remembered what to do.

  Alexander just laughed at that one. I tightened my fingers on the golf cart’s steering wheel and told myself he was wrong. This was all going to blow over soon, after all. I wouldn’t be on house arrest forever. I might be missing Personal Best in the Mizner Stakes next weekend, but I wasn’t about to miss Luna’s next race. I’d been aiming her for an allowance debut at Gulfstream with the hopes of getting her into an overnight stake. She had been training like a monster at long last. When I’d last seen her two weeks ago, I’d given her three peppermints, told the exercise rider to let her go for five furlongs, and then stepped back and watched the jaws all around me drop as she smoked every other horse on the track. Then she came back and nosed at my pocket until I handed over the rest of my peppermints. That was my sweet girl! I missed her.

  Now that she was sitting on a win, I was determined that I would be the one to walk her to the paddock, saddle her up, and hand her off to the pony rider. I had to be.

  Thoughts full of my chestnut filly and my chestnut colt, I had just started to swing the golf cart up the driveway to the house when Alexander put his hand on my arm. “Let’s go up to the stallion barn.”

  I shrugged and kept the golf cart on the main drive, and we went rattling past the yearling barn turn-off and the sparkling dew-drop field where the young horses were out grazing, swishing their short tails. Ahead, the stallion barn stood alone on its hill, pleasantly symmetrical: a small square box within a square box made of six small square paddocks. Four of those paddocks were empty.

  The stallion barn was the one place on the farm that I didn’t visit daily. I rarely came up here without a mare to breed—the stallions were unquestionably Alexander’s horses. They’d been retired from racing to stallion duty long before I came on the scene. He went up every day while I was fussing over a yearling or attending a vet visit in the broodmare barn, to chat with the two old men who had helped him build up Cotswold Farm: stately, aging Thoroughbred stallions named Virtuous and Cotswold Ramble.

  When we pulled up to the barn, Alexander went inside and stood for a moment, looking around him as if he’d never been there before. There was a faraway look to his eyes that kept me sitting in the golf cart, giving him a minute. Then I decided I had a wifely duty to show support, or something like that. He was being weird and nostalgic—most unusual behavior for Alexander, who always kept his gaze facing firmly forward. I was the one who wasted time on what ifs and do you remembers.

  I came up behind him and touched his shoulder. “What are you looking for?” I asked gently, wondering if the answer would be physical and simple (most likely with Alexander) or existential and philosophical (a worrisome development for him if I’d ever heard of one).

  He sighed and reached out, knocking aside some cobwebs from the bars on the nearest stall door. The stall was dark and uninhabited, the clay floor swept clean and dry, the shutter on the window closed up tight. There were a few bags of shavings leaning against the wall, and a blue plastic barrel storing heaven knew what. Surely there had once been a horse in this stall, but not in my time here. “I wish there were more horses up here, that’s all,” he said, ending with another wistful sigh.

  I nodded, glancing around at the empty stable. The six-stall barn was nothing fancy—it was one of the first barns built on the property, raised before prosperity and success had expanded the farm into the training center it was today, and so it was no showpiece. The big farms in Ocala housed their stallions in massive stalls, with rubber-paved boulevards for aisles, lit by chandeliers and ornamented with brass fittings. Framed win photos decorated the walls, so that broodmares could see their swain’s past triumphs as they were led into the padded chamber of the breeding shed.

  Cotswold’s stallion barn was a nice-enough center-aisle design, with a concrete aisle, twelve-by-twelve stalls, and bars on the stall fronts so that horses could see into the aisle. There were sliding doors, and automatic waterers, and a wash-rack, and a tack and feed room. A breeding shed had been built behind the barn, large enough for a mare and stallion to have an assignation without any of the grooms getting crushed against a wall when things got exciting. And that was pretty much it. It looked like an old hunter barn. It was nice enough, as I said—much like the two Cotswold stallions, who were also nice enough.

  The view was what made the stallion barn impressive. Looking down the short dark tunnel of the aisle, the paddocks with their neat lines of black-board fencing dropped away in a gradual slope that showed off the spectacular spread of Ocala’s farms below. Our stallions might have been living with an unimpressive floor plan inside, but they had one hell of a view from their patio.

  “Has anyone been in the apartment upstairs lately?” Alexander asked, looking at the cobwebs draping the staircase next to the front entry. We both gazed up at the dark windows that looked down upon the barn aisle. In theory, a full-time stallion manager would live up there and always be able to look down on his charges when they were inside for the night. But we’d never had one, certainly not in my time on the farm. We’d never had enough horses up here to justify it. Two stallions didn’t get their own groom. One of the yearling grooms came up and took care of the boys after the yearlings were fed. Once they were turned out for the day, if there was no breeding in the books, they were left alone until supper time.

  This year, there was virtually no breeding on the books, besides our own mares. It hadn’t bothered me much, but I knew Alexander was a little disappointed. Or maybe a lot disappointed. Mary Archer’s words about a busy breeding season shouldered their way into my mind. What was he plotting?

  “Alex? Do you know?”

  “I think the apartment was cleaned out in the autumn.” Seasons got cloudy in my brain. I was usually wondering what time of year it was anyway. Florida can do that to you. “I’m pretty sure we had it done when we had the other dorms done. Oh! That’s right. One of the cleaning ladies said it was full of spiders and had a panic attack. They almost called an ambulance for her.”

  Alexander took a step towards the stairs.

  I took a step back.

  Doris hadn’t been faking that panic attack. She’d seen things. Terrible things. Ocala spider things.

  Alexander shook his head and turned away, walking down the aisle instead.

  Thank God. I wasn’t going anywhere near an empty old barn apartment full of spiders. If I went up those stairs and found an apartment full of giant spiders, I’d burn this en
tire barn down and move the stallions to the training barn.

  Spiders were not my thing.

  Definitely not Ocala’s signature spiders, which are as big as tarantulas and twice as fast, and just love hanging out everywhere you don’t want them to be, like in between your shower curtain and the liner, or on the ceiling of your bedroom, waiting for you to wake up in the middle of the night, open your eyes, see them watching you from a shaft of sparkling moonlight, and never fall asleep again.

  I shook my head to rid it of visions of spiders festooning the walls of the empty rooms over my head and looked for Alexander, who had wandered off. There he was at the end of the aisle, standing with his hands in his pockets, silhouetted elegantly as he gazed out over the sunlit valley. In the two paddocks immediately in front of us, his stallions grazed. Virtuous lifted up his dark head and watched us, grass dangling from the sides of his mouth. Cotswold Ramble just went on grazing. With his plain bay coat roughed out for winter and his big, Roman-nosed head buried in grass, he looked rather unfortunately like a plow horse. The sight was less than inspirational. But they had both been good runners, and they had both been solid mid-list Florida stallions.

  Still, no one had lined up to fill Ramble’s book in his freshman year, some eight years ago, and Virtuous had been a freshman so long ago that it didn’t really bear thinking about. They had never been the “it” stallions, but they had sired plenty of good runners, who ran their races and stayed sound. If only that was fashionable.

  I put my hand on Alexander’s back. “They’re good boys,” I offered, not really sure where his head was at. “You should be proud of them.”

  Ramble hadn’t had a winner outside the claiming ranks in two years, and Virtuous’s golden years had come and gone before I had ever arrived on Cotswold. Virtue and Vice was the brightest star he had ever sired, and we were still waiting for Virtue to truly mature and show us what we suspected he could do. They weren’t great stallions, it was true. But they were good stallions. It was just that a good stallion cannot have a good career without the mares to back it up. We had too few to support them, and the good stakes mares weren’t coming here. They were going to the stallions with big stakes careers. The A-listers.

  Alexander chuckled, but it was a rather mirthless sound. I curled my arm around his side and leaned into him, feeling his disappointment in his empty barn, his unsung stallions. I supposed that being in Australia for the breeding season last year had been tough on him. Seeing his brother’s massive operation, one of the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, and then coming back to Ocala, where these two old boys were grazing towards their retirement, while all the top stock in our training barns seemed to come from bloodstock sales or other farm’s stallions… it must have stung, and the sting hadn’t left all these months later.

  “Did you know,” I said, trying to turn his head. “I heard Len Robinson say you’re going to end up in the Hall of Fame some day, based on your whole career. He said it just last week at Mason’s Farrier Supply. He didn’t know I was in the room.”

  “I want to fill up this barn,” he said gravely, cutting over my prattle. “I want six stallions, and everyone in Ocala trying to get into their books.”

  I was startled into silence. Alexander rarely talked about building up the breeding business. We usually discussed how to get fewer horses on the property, not more. Quality over quantity, yes, but not quality and quantity. I supposed that if he meant to bring home one of the racing string, say Virtue perhaps, and stand him here next year, we could limit the stud book, and build up demand that way… he could be on to something. There were favors to call in, and we could buy a few mares to get some good looking yearlings to send to the sales. We could easily hire a stud groom and extra staff for the breeding season next year… I ran over potential candidates in my head. Luz certainly didn’t mind studdish antics, although it was a little unusual to have a female head stud groom… eyebrows would raise amongst the good old boys…

  Alexander turned and looked around the dark barn again. “Let’s get this place cleaned up. We’ll start as we mean to go on. We have all of the breeding season ahead of us. Anything could happen.”

  “Are you… are you going to buy stallions?” I doubted we could afford to start buying up successful racehorses, and the very idea of starting a syndication was exhausting. That’s all you, Alexander. I didn’t want any more stress in my life, and shareholders and lawyers would be ten times as obnoxious as everyday owners.

  Alexander brushed a thumb over a dusty nameplate, glinting dully on the closed door of an empty stall. Heaven’s Silence. The Roman letters glinted in the mid-morning sunlight, streaming in from the eastern end of the aisle. “Good horse,” Alexander said thoughtfully. “I bred him myself, in England. When they say they’ll put me in the Hall of Fame, this is the horse they are thinking of. But I’m not done yet.” He turned and looked at me, and his face was determined, as if he’d finally made up his mind after a long struggle. “I have a few ideas for this season. Something might change, you never know. But either way, we’ll be ready for the Cotswold boys when they come home, Alex. Our own stallions. Idle Hour, Shearwater, Virtue and Vice, Personal Best. I’m going to test them out there, and then they’re going to stud right here, with the race record to prove that they’re worth it. There’s a stall for each of them. And if we need more room, we’ll build it.”

  I nodded and tried to muster up the enthusiasm I knew he expected from such a grand proclamation, but inside I was hurt. I’m going to test them out there.

  I’m.

  Not we’re.

  Alexander really doesn’t want me at the races any more. I bit my lip and said nothing, letting him go on building his imaginary empire.

  Alexander was walking about the aisle, running his fingers through layers of dust, clucking and shaking his head at the state of the empty stalls, the unswept feed room. It all would have been cleaned up next week, I thought irritably. Before the breeding sheds opened. It wasn’t as if we were showing Ocala the face of a farm that had given up with our dusty barn and our neglected equipment.

  But of course, that wasn’t what I was upset about. I tried to bite back the words, but my temper simmered over, as it always did. “You’re really not going to let me go back to Gulfstream,” I said tightly.

  He didn’t look at me, just went on inspecting the barn aisle. “I can’t let you do anything, Alex,” he joked, a slight smile on his face.

  “You know what I mean. You don’t want me there. It’s not temporary. You want your name on those wins. You want people congratulating you when P.B. wins the Mizner, and then you want the magazines talking about you when he starts to rack up points for the Derby. That’s what this is about.” I was shaking with anger, my head spinning with outrage. I put a hand back on the stall door behind me, the one with the stall plate that read Heaven’s Silence. Alexander’s champion, the horse he had bred and broke and trained himself. All himself. I’d wanted that for myself. “Personal Best was always mine, from the day he was born—”

  “This is about your safety, Alex. The stallions have nothing to do with it,” Alexander interrupted. He turned and faced me from across the aisle, his eyebrows raised in surprise, and I could see that he had never expected me to be so upset by his announcement. He hadn’t heard the proud possession in his words. “Keeping you away from the races is about people making threats against your life because of a hate-filled media campaign. Why would you make it me versus you? What other ally do you have, my love?”

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. What could I say? My only ally… and here I was picking fights with him over the words he chose in a spur of the moment speech. My eyes were suddenly hot and stinging, and I swiped hard at them with the sleeve of my hoodie. “I’m sorry—”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I’m sorry, Alexander.” My heart was aching now, just as it had been filled with black rage seconds before. I was having more mood swings than a mare in foal these
days. “I’m just so overwhelmed with… with all the crazy.”

  He opened his arms, and I walked into them and placed my head against his chest. He folded me within his grasp, and when he spoke, his voice rumbled against my ear. “Crazy is the name of the game, my love. All I ask is that you lie low and let this particular crazy run its course. You have a little retirement work to do now.”

  I had retirement work to do. So Alexander said, and it made a lot of sense. Retiring a horse myself, maybe calling some press to let them know what I was up to… not a bad idea. But it still seemed so unorthodox to ride Tiger without the usual lay-off period. It flew in the face of every training principle I’d ever been taught—except for one: every horse is different.

  There was no doubt that Tiger was not like other horses. So I went out to ask him what he thought.

  In the mid-morning’s sudden new sunlight, blinding yellow and chipper as if it had been there all along and we’d simply made the fog up, I drove back out to the paddock by the training barn and leaned over the fence. But the dark bay horse, who once would have come trotting to the fence nickering a greeting, just gave me the cold shoulder, ignoring me in favor of ripping at the grass with his characteristic vigor.

  It wasn’t the answer I’d been hoping for.

  Maybe he did want to go back to work, and he was showing me how irritated he was with my lack of attention. Maybe this was how he told me he didn’t think it was funny, the way I’d stopped riding him every day, the way he’d been booted out of the training barn and had to live with those stupid yearlings (sorry yearlings, his words, not mine). Tiger in exile, bored and blaming me, swishing his tail over his haunches though there were no flies to brush away, just to let me know what he thought of me. Tiger walking his stall in the yearling barn, whinnying to his old friends in the training barn, destroying the bedding and making twice the work for the grooms. Tiger the demon, acting like a maniac when Luz led him over for turn-out and took him back again at night.