Turning For Home (Alex and Alexander Book 4)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  Tiger was now acting like the proverbial old sheep, of course. I felt bad that the horse had spooked, but Tiger going for a little unscheduled gallop was hardly the most alarming thing Marcelle would see at the show-grounds. HITS was a major horse show festival that drew hundreds, if not thousands, of horses to one Ocala training center, where they all stewed together in a constant foment of spooking, worrying, bolting, and shying. Their warm-up areas were downright terrifying even to me, and I’d galloped racehorses on some pretty crowded racetracks. “That was a first-time accident, and I’m sorry. But seriously? If your horse is going to spook just because another horse gallops by, something tells me he isn’t ready for the show-ring after all. Some days, it’s like watching a carousel of loose horses go around you.”

  Jean’s beautiful face curdled into something fearsome to behold. “This horse has won more championships than that horse has won races. And I don’t expect that will change any just because you think you can teach him to pop a few fences. I know why you’re here, Alex. We’ve all heard all about you. You think you can fix your reputation by getting one of your beat-up old racehorses to a show? Not likely. And you aren’t going to be welcome in the show-ring just because no one wants you at the racetrack anymore.”

  Of course she knows. My toes curled in my boots, but my face stayed strong. You couldn’t let a bully knock you down on the very first day of school. Anyway, I was plenty mean, myself. Kerri said so. I asked Tiger to walk on, and we strolled right into that jumping arena, Tiger’s eyes bright and his head high.

  We moseyed right over to Jean and Marcelle. I saw her fingers tighten on her reins, as if she thought I might just keep walking and crash into her horse. I let her think so at first, but thought better of it and reined up a few feet away. I rested the reins on Tiger’s neck. He stood quietly, ears waggling. Bless you, Tiger. “Jean,” I said lightly, “You might want to do a little fact-checking before you start quoting anything bad that’s been said about me. Because it’s all been disproved. My hands are clean.”

  Jean smirked, though her grip on the reins remained tense. “Whatever. I don’t care about you and I don’t care about your racetrack trash. Just don’t let it get in my way, and we’ll both be fine.” She tugged at Marcelle’s reins, her shiny boots deep in the arena’s red clay, and then they were walking away, back to the barn. I watched them for a few strides. Marcelle’s gait was still even. That was a mercy.

  I looked over at the peanut gallery—four women on four geldings, all looking most impressed with the goings-on. “I really didn’t intend to have so much excitement on my first day here,” I dead-panned, and Kelly burst into gales of laughter. Melody, Maggie, and Chrissy paused a moment, unsure of which side they were on, and then decided to laugh along.

  I grinned and waved and asked Tiger to walk on. We made our way around the arena, pausing to inspect the jumps as we went, and letting him take a look at the other horses when we met up on our travels. He was a good boy, interested in everything he saw, but not spooking or silly, and that lifted my heart—at least, in part. The part that wasn’t heavy and disappointed in the way things had turned out—the scandal that wouldn’t die, the mere fact that I’d had to bring him to another barn, the presence of a high school mean girl like Jean. There were very large and unpleasant flies in the ointment, and I couldn’t ignore any of them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I came back to the farm after our first ride with one determination: I had to avoid Jean.

  Life was too complicated already, with the Archer mini-derby going on next door every morning, and Alexander preparing to enter Luna into an allowance race I had picked out for her, but would not be allowed to attend. Adding more work to the tab, a big gray colt had been sent to us from a friend with the training notation “needs serious help with the starting gate.” Meanwhile, the piles of hate mail and death threats were still flooding my mailboxes, both the virtual one and the physical one that stood at the end of the driveway. Each day the mail-lady (I mean, mail carrier, of course) stuffed the big mailbox chock-full of thin white envelopes, my name scrawled upon them in a thousand different scripts.

  Life was too complicated already. I couldn’t take on some high school nonsense at the boarding stable, where the pretty girl didn’t want me in her way.

  I didn’t even know why she had such a problem with me. When pressed, Kelly had shrugged and said that maybe it had something to do with my reputation as a racehorse trainer. “Not the crazy stuff that’s been going around lately. The good stuff. You know, you’re pretty well-known around here for doing something not a lot of women do, and doing it well.” She was hosing off her big liver chestnut gelding, Payton, after a ride. It was a chilly day and the steam was rising from his back and the puddles in the wash-rack. “Jean’s just getting started with her career, and she’s probably afraid you’ll threaten her standing with Elsie somehow.”

  It took me a moment to bite back a laugh. Kelly couldn’t be serious. “If I’m well-known around here, it’s a surprise to me.”

  “Oh, everyone knows who you are. You were in that magazine article, and then there’s been this whole abuse scandal, but you’ve been exonerated by everyone but the real crazies, so that’s not a problem. And like I said, most of the women here are like Jean and Elsie, show riders. Or like me,” she added with a rueful smile. “Taking riding lessons and hoping to get a little better before we get too old to ride. You went out there and made a career for yourself. Most of us wish we’d been brave enough to do that when we were still young enough. You’ve got a reputation, all right, like Jean said—but it’s really for being brave and taking chances, not for abusing horses.”

  “That’s so nice of you,” I said, but I hardly believed people really thought of me like that. Or that anyone thought of me at all. “But even so… I haven’t shown a horse in years. If Jean thinks I want to give up my career and steal hers instead, she’s just plain crazy. I never even hinted that I wanted to do anything more than retrain Tiger. For my own personal horse!”

  Kelly aimed a jet of water under Payton’s tail. The cold surprised him and he hunched up his back, tucking his hindquarters underneath his belly. She laughed. “Would you hand me a sweat scraper?”

  I dug a rubber-bladed squeegee out of the wire bucket hanging from the wash-rack wall and handed it over, accepting the hose in return. I turned off the water spigot while she got to work squeezing the excess water from Payton’s dark coat. “He’s gorgeous. I wish more Thoroughbreds came in liver chestnut.”

  “I wish they’d call it something else,” Kelly grunted. “Someone told me in Germany they call it dark fox.”

  “That’s pretty. Let’s use that instead.”

  The dark fox warmblood swung his sopping wet tail through the air, throwing a stream of cold water droplets over Kelly. She fixed him with an evil glare, which he ignored with aplomb. “He always does that,” Kelly fumed. “I know he does it on purpose. Elsie says horses do all sorts of rude things on purpose. She says it’s all in their sense of humor. Jean says they don’t know they’re doing it and not to give horses too many human characteristics. But I think I like Elsie’s explanation better.”

  I happened to think Elsie’s way, too. Tiger’s way of shoving his head against me so that I nearly fell over, for example. He loved to see me flailing and trying to keep my balance, and there was nothing I could do, no smack I could mete out with my puny little human hands, that was going to stop him from having his laugh. “The only thing you can do is stay one step ahead of them,” I suggested. “Watch.” I stepped up and took Payton’s thick tail in two hands, one just below the tailbone and one closer to its banged-straight tip. “You take it like this and you give it a hard swish—” I demonstrated, and the rest of the water in Payton’s tail went arcing through the wash-rack. “There. You’re safe now. It’s practically dry.”

  Kelly, standing by Payton’s head, raised her eyebrows. “I’ve never seen that before.”

 
“Racetrack trick.” I grinned at her. Then someone strolled up behind her, and my grin faded.

  Kelly saw my face change and turned around. “Hello Jean,” she said cheerfully when she saw our visitor. “That was some ride you had on Marcelle today.”

  “He’s fine, thank you for asking.” Jean’s voice was chilly when she spoke to Kelly, but her eyes were on me. I realized I was still holding Payton’s tail and dropped it. The damp hair fell to just below his fetlocks.

  “We all know he’s fine, Jean,” Kelly pointed out. “We saw him walking up to the barn without a single head-bob. All he did was hit a few jump poles, it’s not like he fell into a ditch or something. Plus… you wouldn’t have ridden him today if he wasn’t fine after yesterday.” She resumed her work with the sweat scraper, sluicing water from Payton’s dark coat, as if nothing was going on, but I could see her face was flushing. It was probably not in anyone’s best interest to go against Jean. I wondered why on earth she was doing it for me.

  “I’m glad he’s okay,” I blurted, anxious to make peace between everyone. “It was a silly mistake; Tiger thought that he knew exactly what I wanted. It’s hard to make a horse understand that everything he knows is wrong.” I laughed, hoping to get the same from Jean. But her face stayed hard. Only Kelly obliged me with a tinny little chuckle.

  “Keep away from my rides.” Jean spat out the words, her voice dripping with contempt. “We don’t need you and your racetrack tricks around here.”

  She strode off, not bothering to stomp, not bothering to flip her pony tail, not bothering to give me one last contemptuous look over her shoulders. I could read boss-mare body language like that, no problem. She was done with me. I wasn’t worth her time.

  As far as she was concerned, I had been given my orders, and I would obey.

  Kelly put the sweat scraper back in the wire basket and brushed hair back from her face with dirty fingers. She smiled at me weakly. “Ordinarily, I’d say, don’t give in to bullies.”

  “But this time?”

  “She’s usually done riding by two, two-thirty.” Kelly picked up Payton’s lead shank and snapped it onto his halter, preparing to take him back to his stall. I picked up a towel to dry his feet, then set it down again; they didn’t do that here. “If I were you, I’d save my rides for after that. I think I might for a while, too.”

  “So it isn’t going so well.” I concluded my story with a sigh and a smile, and sipped a little more wine. Then a lot more wine.

  Alexander considered this while he worked his way through a mouthful of eggplant lasagna. On cold nights, we pulled out the heavy stuff from the freezer. Comfort food, to warm us up after the evening chores were done and we were chilled through. Floridians had thin blood, and I was a native. Alexander had lived here so long he was nearly so. When the temperature got below seventy, I started piling on the sweaters. When the temperature got below fifty, I started making excuses to stay in bed under my feather duvet. It was supposed to freeze tonight, and I was sitting directly underneath a heating vent in response.

  “It’s no more than I would have expected,” Alexander admitted after he’d carefully chewed and swallowed his lasagna and then taken a thoughtful sip of wine and swallowed that as well. “Those horse show people are crazy.”

  All that thought for a statement so obvious? “All horse people are crazy.”

  “That’s so. But at least with racetrackers, you know the motivations. Money. The life they’ve always lived. A combination of the two. People trying to make a living jumping horses over fences and collecting satin ribbons… what’s their motivation?”

  I shrugged. “What was my motivation when I was a kid? I loved horses.”

  “Kids don’t count.” Alexander waved his hand, dismissing all children. “Kids aren’t running the businesses or paying the bills. It’s the adults that fascinate me. The sheer amount of time and money they’re willing to pay for a hobby.”

  “It’s not a hobby for Jean. She’s Elsie’s rider. The sales horses have to show and win in order to increase their value. It’s her career.”

  “But they’re hobbies to the women who buy the horses, right? For tens of thousands of dollars?”

  “Probably. For the most part.” I didn’t really know, but I figured most professionals weren’t buying horses that already had tons of show miles and the price to match. So that left the hobbyist, someone like Kelly, whose husband was a doctor and could afford her horse showing habit, to buy made horses like the ones Jean was trying to produce. “I see your point,” I conceded. “Why would Jean consider me a threat though?”

  “Oh, someone like Jean considers everyone young and talented a threat. Just avoid her, like this other woman said. Concentrate on Tiger. The barn politics need not concern you.” Alexander went back to his eggplant lasagna with renewed determination, confident as always that all of my problems were imaginary and so easily dealt with.

  I went back to my own plate as well. Let it never be said that Alex Whitehall went off her feed when she was worried. I tore off a chunk of bread from the fat loaf in the center of the table and doused it with a glutton’s portion of Irish butter. Butter to soothe my feelings, butter to take my mind off the fresh collection of death threats I had retrieved from the mailbox on my way back this afternoon, butter to distract me from Jean’s vitriol.

  After dinner I went down to the office to look at the letters. Alexander said to throw them into the recycling without opening them, but Alexander was made of tougher stuff than I was, and less curiosity as well. I had to know what they said, who they were from, who was behind them.

  So far, most of the letters had been from CASH. They must have been banking the entire future of their unknown organization on my destruction, because they had grabbed the story with their teeth and weren’t letting go. The letters were signed by different names, and came from different addresses, but they were printed form letters, straight from a website or an email being passed around in the comfortable protest grounds of the Internet.

  Thanks, Internet for making it so easy to hate without reason, I thought, sifting through the letters, opening the envelopes at random to let the paper slide out, the vicious words marching down the falling pages like rows of mechanical soldiers. It was so easy to spread outrage. You didn’t have to do anything more than open an email, skim the contents and grow angry, and follow the simple call-to-action instructions. Copy and paste the letter below and mail it to the offending party. Control C, Control V, Control P—three commands and you were halfway there. Lick a stamp, and you were part of a movement, you were making change happen, you were the voice for the voiceless animals. Who cares if you destroyed a human life or two? They were the enemies here, after all!

  We will not rest until you get what you deserve, you coward. Those horses deserve better than what you and the other monsters who run the horse racing industry dish out to them. These noble creatures are not your slaves, to be beaten until they run and then discarded to die when they are finished…

  “Of course they aren’t, you goddamn idiots,” I told the letter. “And if you knew a single thing about me, you’d know that’s not me.”

  I swept the whole pile of letters towards the edge of the desk and the recycling bin. They overflowed the bin and settled across the office floor like an avalanche sliding down the precipices of a mountain.

  They really were like snowflakes, too, almost completely alike but for the details—the slant of letters and numbers that scrawled out my name, the different stamps, the different postmarks. Proving to me that my enemies were scattered across the country, and what a relief that was, of course.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “Wanna hear a fun story?”

  Kerri, up to her eyeballs in leaping, bucking, kicking, farting, biting baby horse, grunted in response.

  I rubbed my nice quiet broodmare’s star, sending a flurry of white hairs down to my black boots, and thought happy thoughts about being the boss and not the assistant. “
So it turns out that Elsie’s barn manager hates me and Thoroughbreds and me and Thoroughbreds but mostly me.”

  Kerri wedged her knee underneath the foal’s furry abdomen and pinned the little monster to the wall. The foal, a vicious little filly that had me entranced with her constant fury since her birth twenty-four hours ago, squealed in outrage. “We should make her a gift of this one,” Kerri panted.

  “She’d feed it to the crows, and not just for those socks.” I eyed the filly’s four white stockings. “Flashy little snot. But I digress. She already hates me; I don’t have to give her a demon filly. She thinks that I’m a piece of horse-abusing trash and I’m only gearing up Tiger for the Thoroughbred Makeover because I’m trying to save my reputation.”

  “Well, that’s half-true.”

  I frowned and ran my fingers through the spiky little jungle of whiskers that grew thickly over the broodmare’s muzzle. She was ignoring me, her long floppy ears fastened on her wild child in the corner of the stall. The vet was coming down the aisle, clanking along like a pack-mule with her buckets and her bottles and her needles and her syringes. Shots and bloodwork, that was how we welcomed babies into the world at my farm. Old mama Seastar here knew it well. This was her sixth foal, and every one had been just as wild as she was docile. “Were you crazy at the racetrack, mama?” I asked her softly, as Kerri cursed at the floundering filly, scrabbling her soft little hooves against the stall wall. “Is that how you won all those races, huh?”

  Kerri quieted the filly again, her right hand tight on the little tail, her left hand locked around the skinny neck. “So she believes the hype from CASH and them. What about the rest of the barn? I know Elsie doesn’t.”

  “I don’t think she’s well-liked. But I’ve only met a few of the boarders. Most of them seemed kind of scared of her. Was she riding or anything at the barn when you were riding there?”