Turning For Home (Alex and Alexander Book 4)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “Nothing,” he said. He closed the laptop.

  “Alexander, what did you do?”

  He went to the bedroom door, opened it, and disappeared into the dark hallway. I sighed and went after him.

  The printer was humming away in the upstairs study, industriously printing off a few pages of something that Alexander was evidently very keen to get his hands on before I did. He plucked them off the tray as soon as the printer spat them out and held them up above my head. Annoyed, I let the towel drop and snatched with both hands, finally grasping one page. I yanked it from his hand.

  Alexander smiled nervously. “Now don’t be mad—”

  I looked at the entry form in my hand. My name was on it, and so was Tiger’s. That was our address, and that was our credit card information. I glared at Alexander. “What. Did. You. Do.”

  He shrugged and smiled beatifically, as if no one could ever be mad at such a charming fellow. “I thought it would be something fun for you to work towards.”

  “A horse show in like three months? On a horse who raced three weeks ago? Are you crazy?” I felt a little faint.

  “If you can’t manage it, you can always just scratch,” Alexander said reasonably. “But if you do manage it, well, this way you aren’t missing out because you didn’t want to enter.”

  “I can’t scratch, Alexander.” I handed the entry form back to him and shook my head. “The person running this is the person behind the CASH bullshit. The person running this is going to tell the whole world if I can’t get my horse ready for her little show.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  There wasn’t a good way to tell Tiger that we couldn’t screw this up now.

  Especially when he’d just dumped me in the mud.

  Still, I had to try. “Tiger,” I called from the puddle where I had landed. “Tiger, it’s really important to Mummy’s career that we get this right, or the rabble might just get what they want and run me out of the horse business.”

  Tiger, who after sunfishing and bucking and twisting on the pretense that he had heard a horse in some nearby pasture galloping, was too busy inspecting the high walls of the round pen to bother responding.

  I sighed and got up, shaking the dirty water from my jacket and brushing the dark mud from my breeches. This was what I got for shooting for the stars. A dirty bum and the potential to look even worse in front of my detractors than I already did.

  Tiger saw me heading in his direction, swished his tail, and promptly trotted off, his hooves buffeting the round pen walls.

  “I get it,” I sighed. “You don’t want to work. You’ve been telling me that all week.” I went back to the center of the round pen to kick at the dirt and think.

  Day One had come and gone seven days ago. In the meantime, in between foaling out Zelda and two other mares, breezing an older horse coming off a lay-off for Alexander to take to South Florida on his next trip, and waving goodbye to Alexander and the older horse while they went down to run Shearwater in a minor stakes race, I’d had five more rides to describe in the little training notebook.

  Day One might have gone better than expected, but Day Two had not followed in its footsteps. It took Tiger thirty minutes to meet me in the center of the round pen and end our session with a little snuggle-time.

  On Day Three he simply ran around the pen whinnying, trying to look out over the high walls, because he heard the yearlings galloping in their pasture. This went on for twenty minutes before I finally gave up.

  On Day Four he caved after about twenty minutes and I took the opportunity to mount up and ride, and then he reminded me of how strong his neck was after years of galloping heavy on the bit. The speed he managed to reach in the tiny round pen was truly frightening. We were not on the racetrack anymore, but I was apparently the only one who noticed.

  On Day Five, we achieved a nice quiet trot around the pen, with halts in the center and changes of direction that weren’t the ugliest things in the world, and I reminded him that he was fully capable of carrying his own head and indeed was expected to if we weren’t galloping. I was sufficiently pleased to give him a day off after that.

  So here we were today, Day Six, and he had decided that if he could put his head down without my hands on his mouth, he might as well take that opportunity to just put his head between his forelegs and buck.

  I guess he hadn’t needed that day off.

  It shouldn’t have been this hard, I thought, while the horse prowled restlessly around the pen, snorting at the walls that shut out the world around him. I’d been riding this horse for years, granted in a different saddle and with different expectations, but still—was it so much to say, ‘Okay Tiger, now instead of trotting and galloping around a racetrack, you’re going to trot and change directions in the round pen?’

  “Should we just go back to the racetrack and try it there?” I asked, and Tiger flipped one ear in my direction, as if the idea caught his fancy.

  That wouldn’t be the right move, though. Back on the racetrack, he’d known exactly what to do for years—and he wouldn’t understand why I was telling him to change everything. He needed a new environment. The pasture idea had been thrown out. I had no interest in taking this beast out and trotting around the vast reaches of the yearling pasture. Tiger was still way too much horse, too fit and too full of himself, to be shown such freedom. He needed walls and containment, not open frontier.

  We needed an arena.

  We needed a boarding stable—as awful as that sounded.

  I’d always had to board my horses as a kid. I was a suburban kid, and even though five-year-old Alex had argued with conviction that we had plenty of grass for a pony, and I’d do all the clean-up required, ten-year-old Alex grasped that a quarter-acre plot wasn’t space for a pony or a horse. So it had been a boarding stable life, with all the politics and petty wars that went on in such places. Put five or ten or twenty tween girls in one place and see how well they all get along. Then make them incredibly competitive and horse-proud.

  Then back away slowly.

  We fought like alley cats, and in between fights we built and betrayed alliances with one another so often that a dedicated historian couldn’t have kept them all straight.

  Then there that nervous feeling when you were sitting in the backseat of your parents’ car, driving up the barn lane—the fear that something might have happened to your horse while you were away. Maybe he had gotten kicked and no one had noticed when they brought him in from the field that morning. Maybe he hadn’t cleaned up his hay and was standing dejectedly in one corner of his stall with the beginnings of a bellyache that could end up a life-threatening colic. I’d never been good at trusting my possessions to others, and that went trebly for my horse, even when I was just a kid.

  I was pretty sure I wouldn’t handle it well as an adult, either. I was having trouble just allowing my racehorses out of my sight, even with Alexander checking them regularly and an assistant trainer that he trusted implicitly. I’d cheerfully sworn off boarding stables after I’d become a resident at Cotswold Farm and seen how sweet it was to have your horses under your own watchful eyes night and day. Now I had the wrong sort of farm for my horse. Wouldn’t you know it?

  Tiger came to a reluctant halt and watched me as I walked over to take his reins. “You’re a nerd,” I told him, and he blew his red-rimmed nostrils at me in response. “But you’re my nerd. What am I going to do if I’m always worrying about you somewhere else? It was one thing to send you to Lucy. She’s better at horsekeeping than I am. But how am I going to find someone else I trust as much as Lucy?”

  Tiger didn’t have any answers. He never did. His only response to anything at all was to run, and that answer wasn’t left to him anymore. So, it was all up to me.

  Kerri, however, had a few answers of her own. She’d been bouncing around the Ocala-area barns for a while before she came to Cotswold. She had a relevant response to every single trainer I suggested. With Kerri perched on a tack trunk,
I sat at the desk in the training barn office and looked up local boarding stables. I ran my finger down a list of hunter/jumper barns and listened to her one-sentence reviews.

  “Stay away from Driver’s, he’s a maniac and thinks drugs are the answer to everything.”

  “Monica Parsons is nice if you like having your tack borrowed when you’re not there.”

  “Jilly Hopkins? She hates Thoroughbreds. She wouldn’t even consider Tiger.”

  “Oak Ridge Farm is great if you like ten-year-old girls in pigtails bouncing around on ponies.”

  “Jessica Ryder is moonlighting in adult movies.”

  I paused, finger still on the farm listing. “That’s not necessarily a strike against the farm, you know. If she wants to be in porn that’s her business.”

  “She does the filming at the barn,” Kerri went on. “It’s a series of movies called Ryder’s Up.”

  I considered the remaining stables on the list without much hope. I was sure each of them had something desperately wrong with them, according to Kerri. Since Kerri and I tended to hate the same things, I trusted her judgement. It was one of the reasons we got along so well. “This list is about tapped out,” I sighed. “Is it possible there’s someone in Ocala that hasn’t made your hit list?”

  “In hunter/jumpers? No.” Kerri had a bag of potato chips she’d unearthed from some secret tack room stash, and she began eating them, one at a time, with great ceremony while she considered the stables she had known. “In eventing, maybe. That’s where you should be looking. They love Thoroughbreds.”

  “I know. I grew up eventing, remember? But I don’t know all these new people who moved in since I started racing.” The eventing barns in Ocala seemed to have grown by the hundreds since my teenage years. Trainers flocked to the warm weather and the year-round eventing. I sighed. “And I haven’t talked to my old trainer in years, so I can’t ask her. I don’t even know if she’s still riding.”

  Kerri shook her head at me. “You shouldn’t lose touch with people so easily,” she said sagely. “Out of sight, out of mind—that’s you in a nutshell.”

  “Save the lecture and help me figure this out. Or I’ll send Martina home and leave you all the broodmare stalls to do alone.” Six pregnant mares and seven foals sharing stalls with their dams all night made for some wicked messes. All that wet straw they left behind was heavy.

  “Okay, okay.” Kerri ate a few chips and affected a pose of deep thought. “I got it,” she said after a minute. “Get on the web and type in Roundtree Farm.”

  “Are the people nice there?”

  “Sometimes. Why not. Type it in.”

  I shook my head and typed the letters into the search bar. My pinkie pounded the enter key. Then I waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  “What the hell is with the internet connection in this barn?” I roared, waving my hands around.

  Kerri laughed so hard she had to put down her potato chips. “That sentence,” she cackled, gasping to catch her breath. “I’m sure no one has ever had to say that before ever. You have the most first world problems ever, Miss Alex ma’am.”

  I ignored my disrespectful assistant and glowered at the computer screen. But it turned out it wasn’t the internet connection so much as the horrendously designed Roundtree Farm website. The entire background appeared to be a massively oversized image. The original was probably very nice, and so high-resolution that it could have been printed as a wall poster, but in this particular case all a viewer got a glimpse of was flared nostrils, wide eyes, a foamy mouth open around the bit, veins standing out on a muscular neck, and water droplets flying through the air. It was a time capsule website. The copyright year was 2002.

  “Someone’s way too proud they ran around Rolex,” I observed as the photo finished loading, revealing that it was the front half of a horse leaping down into the Head of the Lake at Kentucky Horse Park. “Who is this person?”

  “Elsie Carter,” Kerri said. “She’s nuts, but she’s very good. She did Rolex back in the nineties.”

  “I’ve never heard of her.” I squinted as words revealed themselves, nearly impossible to read against the backdrop of the leaping horse. “Do I really want nuts?”

  “Nice-nuts, not mean-nuts,” Kerri clarified. “Like us.”

  I struggled to read the description on the screen. Full-service boarding facility, dressage arena, jumping arena, cross-country jumps, center-aisle barn. Best feed and hay, owner lives on site. All of the high-end farm amenities were covered, but it was the bold print towards the bottom that interested me. No Princesses — No Drama.

  I guffawed, and Kerri smiled delightedly. “You see? She’s nuts, but in a good way.”

  “No princesses! I love it! So you’re telling me this will be a drama-free boarding stable?”

  “Oh, hell no. You’ll find a boarding stable full of unicorns before you’ll find one that’s drama-free. But it’s better than most, and Elsie doesn’t much care what you do with your horse. She’s not going to be standing around judging you. She has her own horses to ride. I rode someone’s horse there a few years ago and it was the most drama-free barn on the planet. I loved it. But I never had enough money to board there.”

  “It’s expensive?”

  “The nice barns always are. And this place has it all. You need the right barn if you’re going to get him ready to show in a few months. A barn with other riders, jumps, a little bit of bustle…”

  She was right about that. Taking Tiger to his first horse show had to be carefully planned, or he’d think it was just another ship-in to the races. Boarding him at a show barn with a little hustle and bustle could help him get over his brain’s connection between busy stables and racing.

  A barn owner who minded her own business while her boarders were bouncing around in the arena was another plus. I wasn’t itching to get my terrible equitation dissected by some frowning hunter/jumper or dressage trainer while I was busy trying to get Tiger to act more like a gentleman and less like a rampaging bronco. It was going to be bad enough having other boarders around to see how my riding position had devolved after years of defensive chair-seat posture (for the babies) and hunched-over posture (for the galloping). “You call her for me,” I suggested.

  Kerri folded over the top of her potato chip bag and hopped down from the tack trunk. “I’ll do you one better,” she said. “I’ll take you to meet her.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Roundtree Stables turned out to be just a few minutes away, down a winding road that wrapped through rolling pastures studded with live oaks and criss-crossed with dark brown fencing, the kind of countryside that made real estate agents salivate at the prospect of relocating here so that they could specialize in equestrian properties. I even saw a few people I knew along the way, out driving around their properties or heading into town or, in one case, checking their mail from the comfort of a golf cart, a Jack Russell terrier wagging his stump of a tail from the passenger seat. I waved and Kerri honked the truck horn whenever there weren’t any horses around, which wasn’t often. There were horses everywhere. That was the whole point of Ocala, if you asked me, or Kerri, or any of the folks we saw along the way.

  When she slowed the truck at last, it wasn’t for a big brick-paved driveway with a sparkling fountain marking the farm entrance, or a cast-iron gate with the farm logo filigreed in loops and curls in the center. It wasn’t even paved. Kerri turned off the country road onto a rutted grassy track that led off into a hammock of ancient oaks, their overreaching branches so thick the driveway seemed to be disappear into the gloom despite an outwardly sunny day. The entire atmosphere was very haunted house.

  I looked out at the rusty mailbox on its leaning wooden post as we went past. There was no name or number on the mailbox.

  “Kerri,” I said lightly, “There are easier ways to murder me.”

  She laughed. “I told you Elsie didn’t care what anybody thought. Don’t worry, the barn’s great
.”

  I looked into the jungle of oaks and palms pressing close to the truck windows on either side. “And how do you know her again?”

  “I rode a friend’s horse there.”

  “How many times?”

  “Like… six or seven times.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Dunno… three years ago?”

  “And you’ve never been back?”

  “It’s fine.” Kerri glanced at me and smiled. “Really. It’s a nice barn. My friend isn’t there anymore, though.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She stopped paying her board and Elsie had to kick her out. There was a padlock on the stall door and everything. It was a mess.”

  A tree branch slapped against the windshield of the car.

  “She doesn’t associate you with this friend, right?”

  “No, no, we got along great. Everything’s fine.”

  I hoped so. The way this driveway was looking, I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up in a clearing just big enough for a rusty shack, complete with a shotgun-bearing crazy woman ready to send us on our way.

  The kind of place I’d always suspected Mary Archer had come from. Thinking about Mary Archer did not give me any confidence at all.

  When the driveway finally widened into a clearing, Kerri gave me a told-you-so grin, but I was too busy admiring the little farm to feel too annoyed. I looked back and forth, taking it all in. “This is lovely,” I breathed. “Damn, Kerri, this is a hidden gem for sure.”

  Roundtree Farm was small, no more than twenty acres, at a guess, and yet at first glance it had everything a boarder could want for their horse. For their show horse—it was definitely different than any sort of racing stable. A center-aisle barn with ten windows sat before us—real, open, unbarred windows, with horses poking their heads out and blinking curiously to see who was driving the unfamiliar truck. Even from a distance, I could see that each horse had a neatly pulled mane and groomed coat.