Turning For Home (Alex and Alexander Book 4)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “Like—long-term?”

  I nodded.

  “You have plenty of help in the training barn, so… you know…”

  “Last year all you wanted was to work in the training barn. If you want to be down there, you can be. Of course.” Don’t have gone back to the broodmares because you were tired of working with me. I smiled what I hoped was a winning smile, but it was probably just desperate.

  Kerri shrugged. “I guess I just didn’t want to miss the babies this spring.” She looked around as if searching for the right answer in the dry grass along the road. Nothing presented itself but a small brown lizard, racing his way towards the sizzling heat of a black-painted fence post. I waited.

  Finally, she met my eyes again. “Maybe we’ll go on the road together again next summer. That would be fun.”

  I nodded and smiled again and left it at that. But I doubted there’d be any girl-trainer road trips this summer. If Alexander took Personal Best into Derby territory, he wasn’t going to be in a hurry to give the horses back to me. I’d better start choosing which of our handful of two-year-olds I wanted for myself this fall. If I had to sit out the spring, at least I could be ready to come back ready to win in the fall. Hell, maybe by then, Kerri would be ready to come play my side-kick again.

  Kerri got back in the farm truck and backed it down the drive to the barn lane. I started to do the same, then noticed something in the bed of the truck. I stood up on my tip-toes to investigate—the mail bag. I’d forgotten all about it.

  I stared at the unwanted cargo for a moment, the bulging canvas bag bristling with bumps and points like some kind of poisonous prickly fruit. I had a feeling I knew what was inside, and I didn’t want anyone else to know about it.

  I bit my lip and looked back up at the house, trying to see through the dark windows. With the sun glaring down, it was impossible to tell if Alexander was still sitting in the breakfast room, if he was peering through the window and wondering what on earth I was doing out in the driveway. I decided to chance it. I’d go to the office in the garage and see for myself what was waiting for me in that bag.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad.

  By the tenth letter, I had stopped reading the words. They were all the same, and I’d read them before. It was the form letter that CASH had sent out last week and that had been emailed en masse to me and several racing websites.

  The words were hateful, and inflammatory, and libelous, and just about enough to make me forget every worry and every hope I’d had warring within on this tempestuous winter morning.

  Last week, the web editor of The Thoroughbred Project had actually emailed me after he’d received about two hundred of these emails. He’d assured me that he knew the accusations were false and that I’d never owned Market Affair, and he posted a column on his website about the whole situation.

  But a horse racing website was about as credible to an anti-horse racing activist as Fox News was to a liberal Democrat. I’d sat through enough political discussions with my father to know that much. Nothing that The Thoroughbred Project could post would ever reach the eyes, hearts, or minds of the angry online activists hitting copy, paste, and send on these vicious emails. The threats in them made Mary’s couple of horses galloping by each morning shrink into small annoyances, like finding mice had gotten at the feed bags before they’d all been emptied into storage bins. I was warned not to go to the track, not to get into my car, not to go to the feed store…

  “Or what?” I said aloud, flicking the corner of one bent envelope. “Or you’ll blow up my car? You’ll shoot me like a sniper? Bunch of cowardly hags.”

  I threw the small pile of letters I’d opened back into the mail-bag with all their little friends and leaned back in the desk chair, the springs squeaking in protest. “God,” I said aloud, and then, “Goddammit.” This was going too far. Things were getting too crazy. Now, I thought, now I could see the truth of Alexander’s fears for my safety. Giant bags full of hate mail, all coordinated by one radical animal rights group, felt like a declaration of war. Open season on Alex. As if they’d actually do anything. Writing a letter, sending an email, using words provided by another person’s hand—yeah, that was pretty different from putting an explosive under someone’s car.

  And yet… bad things happened. I felt the slightest bit nervous, and that made me even angrier.

  “What utter shit,” I muttered, and kicked the offending bag.

  People making assumptions and listening to other people’s unfounded accusations, that was what really made this so infuriating. They ought to see this office, I thought. They ought to see what I really do, in my non-existent spare time—well, it was non-existent before I got put on house arrest, anyway. I spun my chair around and surveyed the filing cabinets lining the office’s back wall. From rusty with age to shiny and new, they were full of horse records, some decades-old. Alexander never threw away anything, and I’d learned all of my business skills from him. The last filing cabinet on the left, under the poster for the 1998 Kentucky Derby—won by Real Quiet, a Florida-bred—belonged to me and my retirees. That was where I went now.

  The drawer squeaked open and there they were, names and foaling years written on tabs, dozens of them. Retirees.

  I riffled through the folders, pulling out files at random and opening them, noting the last check-in dates. The oldest one was ten months old—due for a check-in in another two months. The horse, a five-year-old homebred gelding we had raced lightly at three and four before sending to Lucy for retraining, was competing in the low jumpers with a doting owner down in Tampa. He’d never won us more than a few hundred dollars. He’d cost us tens of thousands in upkeep and training over the years. But that money spent was our choice, as breeders. A commitment we had signed up for the moment we bred his dam. We’d made him. We’d brought him into the world. He was our responsibility from birth to death, or until we found him a new owner who was willing and able to shoulder that responsibility for us. Even then, I wanted to keep tabs on him. Maybe Forever Homes weren’t a real thing, but safety nets were. I owed him that much.

  He was one of mine.

  Not everyone saw breeding horses that way, but it was part of my personal religion. Hell, it was all of it. Was there anything I believed in more deeply than my responsibility towards these horses?

  That’s why this attack hurt, even if Alexander and Kerri and Lucy and even Richie from The Thoroughbred Project all assured me that it was the work of scoundrels and hate-mongers. Because people preferred a scandal to a triumph, preferred to believe in bad before good, and these clueless emailers and letter writers who didn’t have five minutes to research some cause they saw on Facebook before they got outraged and clicked share, these people were bound to convince even more people, bring more equestrians and animal-lovers around to their cause, if they kept making all this noise, more noise than the people who might have defended me could ever make with their plain, boring facts.

  One thing was obvious—it was getting worse, and I had to defend myself. But I wasn’t sure how to do that when I was locked down at the farm.

  I looked around me at the filing cabinets, thinking of the horses and their stories contained within. If I was a writer, I could write their stories down, send them to a magazine or post them on a website. But that didn’t seem like enough. It seemed like too little, too late—and too quiet and unassuming, besides. So you think I’m a horse-murderer? Well here’s a little blog post saying I’m not.

  The office phone rang, startlingly loud. I slammed the filing cabinet shut and went back to the desk, where I regarded the phone without pleasure; it wasn’t usually my thing to answer it, but the secretary was off today and Alexander always got on my case if I didn’t do my fair share of picking it up. The phone didn’t care about my apprehensions and went on ringing shrilly, so I sighed and picked up the receiver. “Cotswold Farms, Alex speaking,” I recited in a monotone, thinking that playing with Tiger was probably exactly what I needed, and i
f I’d gone straight to the barn to ride him, I wouldn’t be stuck on the phone now.

  “Alexis Whitehall?” It was a female voice, sharp and Southern and laced with cigarettes, not unlike Mary Archer’s. I dropped my gaze to the caller ID on the phone’s display, but there was no number listed. Blocked. Oh, that was very reassuring.

  “Yes…” I said cautiously.

  “We’re watching you, Alexis Whitehall,” the voice snapped. “Everyone here at CASH knows what’s going on with you and your horses. This Market horse was just the tip of the iceberg, and we know it. You’ll be found out, and you’ll be brought down. We’re demanding that you lose your trainer’s license and owner’s license. You better enjoy your horses while you’re allowed to have them, because your little racket is almost over.”

  My mouth had dropped open during this little speech, which took slightly longer to speak than the printed page can reasonably describe, due to her slow Southern accent, but even so there was a long silence before I figured out how to use my brain to make words again. I wasn’t good on the phone. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I stammered finally, which probably was not the most coherent defense I could have come up with.

  “Oh, you know,” she said mockingly. “And now you are looking for somewhere to dump another horse that can’t run for you! Where is The Tiger Prince, Alexis? He hasn’t had a published work in three weeks! And after that terrible run in Tampa! What have you done with him, Alexis? Have you dumped him too? Did you run him through some sale and wash your hands of him, Alexis? Did you? Did you? Did you?”

  I jumped up from the chair, fist clenching the phone receiver, face hot and red. “First off, stop calling me Alexis. If you were really so aware of my every move, you’d probably know I haven’t been called Alexis since the first grade. Second off, I happen to be retraining The Tiger Prince myself. Third, who the hell are you? If you know my name, I deserve to know yours.”

  When she spoke again, her tone was more subdued. “This is Cassidy,” she admitted. “And I speak for thousands of concerned horse owners at CASH who don’t want to see another horse die because of your two-faced lies!”

  “Wow, that is harsh, since none of my horses have died and I have never lied.” I sat back down, feeling a little more in my element. She was just some stupid redneck. I could handle stupid. Stupid was easy. “It would probably be much easier for you to win this game if you had any, you know, actual facts to back up your stories.”

  “What about Sunny Virtue?”

  Just like that, I was thrown off my game.

  “Who?” I couldn’t think of a horse by that name. Although the Virtue part was a little troubling. There were plenty of horses with Virtue in their name who had started out at Cotswold, though a sizable proportion of those had left as fertilized embryos. Virtuous might not be fashionable, but he had seen his share of ladies.

  “Sunny Virtue,” Cassidy repeated, her tone razor-sharp. “Seven years old, last ran at Fort Erie two months ago, finished twenty-two lengths behind in a twenty-five-hundred dollar claimer, vanned off the track, hasn’t been seen since.” She was reading the words, her southern drawl dissolving into a staccato reciting of industry jargon I could tell she didn’t really understand. “He was bred by Cotswold Farms.”

  Bred by the farm? I’d never even heard of him. “I can do some research on that,” I offered. “But he wasn’t here when I came here. I’ve only been here five or six years, you have to understand. Even if he was born and trained here, he was gone by the time I started working here. And at a guess, I’d say he went to a sale and was never run by the farm.”

  “So you admit that once they’re gone, they’re not your problem anymore?”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “This was your farm’s horse and now you’re telling me you don’t even know his name. You are running a racehorse factory over there, just like the rest of them, Alex. You are a symbol of a rotten industry that has reached the end of its usefulness, and you are going down.”

  Before I could breathe a word in my defense, Cassidy from CASH had ended the call.

  “Well,” I said aloud, to the desk and the filing cabinets and Real Quiet and the win photos hung on the wall, “that was unpleasant.”

  Sunny Virtue…

  I got up and walked down the row of filing cabinets. If Sunny Virtue was seven and had been born here, the evidence would be in one of these drawers. My eyes scanned the labels. Top drawer, fifth filing cabinet against the wall, there it was—the label for his foaling year.

  The drawer groaned as I opened it, and I stood on my toes to flip through the hand-written labels on the manila folders. Ah! Virtuous Foals 20—.

  I pulled out the folder and riffled through the sheets within, detailing the live foal reports of the more than forty foals Virtuous had sired that year. I didn’t have the broodmare’s name, and none of the foal reports included the foal’s eventual registered name. It was possible that Alexander hadn’t even named the colt. If he’d sent him to a yearling or two-year-old in training sale…

  The words Sunny Susan caught my eyes and I paused, pulling out the typed sheet.

  Virtuous — Sunny Susan, February 14th, colt. An early foal, product of some careful planning by Alexander and his then-broodmare manager. I ran my finger down the page, searching for the foal’s owner. If he hadn’t been bred and owned by Alexander, none of this could even be pinned on us. If the broodmare belonged to a client…

  Broodmare Owner: Kevin Wallace. Foal Share with Cotswold.

  Just below that, scrawled in pencil: Wallace buy-out, full ownership of foal, June 14th. There was a bill of sale, notarized by Ida from the general store up the road, paper-clipped to the page. The mare and foal’s transportation report were the next paper in the file, noting that they had both left the farm on a Sallee van a week after the buy-out, thus ending the Cotswold—Sunny Virtue connection.

  I smiled and nodded, tapping the words. “Kevin Wallace, expect a call from your new friend Miss Cassidy, assuming she’s doing her research properly. This one’s on you.”

  I stowed the files again, shoved the squeaking cabinet drawer shut, and settled back down in the leather comfort of the desk chair. I needed a change, I thought. I needed to think about something completely different, to clear my head.

  There was only one sure way to clear my head after this mess, and that was to take a ride.

  I opened a desk drawer and pulled out a leather-bound black notebook I’d been saving for the right moment. It was a fancy little blank book, a notion I’d picked up at Barnes & Noble in town one day, killing time before a doctor’s appointment. I hadn’t needed it, but who doesn’t want a nice notebook lying around the office? Now I knew what to do with it.

  I plucked a nice ink-pen from the farm mug on the desk and opened the notebook to its creamy first page. I touched the pen to my lips and thought —what would I do with a retired racehorse on the first day of training? I went back to my teenage days, remembering the lawless auction finds I had turned into solid show horse citizens of the world. Every horse was different, but, I supposed, every horse really could be started the exact same way, no matter what he already knew or thought to be right. The pen hovered over the page, then I began to write, in smooth black strokes.

  Day One, Round Pen.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Day One, Round Pen.

  “Here we go, buddy…” I closed the door of the round pen and led Tiger to the center of the ring.

  It was a little round pen, no more than fifty feet across, with high wooden walls all around to discourage distractions and peeking. The perimeter was rutted with the hooves of many young horses; the center was a hump of dark sand, packed flat from boots turning as someone—Juan, myself, whoever was working the babies that day—followed the movements of young horses. We started our babies in here, usually long yearlings, although now and then a client sent a two-year-old or even, heaven forbid, a three-year-old, who hadn’t been b
acked yet. The walls kept their attention locked on us, the Gods in the center of the ring. The horses learned to read our voices and body language in order to know when to move forward, when to halt, when to change directions.

  The young horses learned that in here, the human was the head of the family, the boss mare, the herd stallion. They took those lessons with them once they graduated from the round pen and went on to shed-rows, pasture rides, and finally the training track.

  Well, now Tiger would learn it all over again, and he’d take it with him to the riding arena. Once I found one for us—I hadn’t quite figured that part out yet. A boarding stable might be our only option, once we had worked out his jollies in the round pen and done some stretching work in the paddocks. It wouldn’t be my first choice, but a boarding stable would have arenas with good footing, and jumps—how else would I find out if he liked jumping? (I suspected that he would.)

  But I was resolved to have him behaving like a gentleman before I tried to take him to a boarding stable, and for that, I was going to have to round-pen him until he remembered that I wasn’t just his galloping buddy—I was his boss.

  I unsnapped the lead-shank from his halter, looped it around my hand, and gave the trailing ends a friendly shake in his direction. “Go on, get!” I said encouragingly.

  And Tiger got, with all the panache of a prize bronco. With a tremendous snort, he flung himself away from me, grunted, twisted, and bucked high in the air. I gasped and ducked, just missing his flying hooves, though not the flying dirt. I was still spitting sand out of my mouth when Tiger got to the round pen wall, plunged to a halt, and whipped around to face me, his head high and his tail flagged. He flared red nostrils at me and snorted again, as if to ask me what the hell I was playing at.