Turning For Home (Alex and Alexander Book 4)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “But today’s Tuesday! Why do you want to wear him out just a few days before the race? Shouldn’t he have time off?”

  “That’s not how it works. I want to build up his blood, and I want his attitude sharpened. He’ll associate the work with a race, so it’s good for him mentally and physically.”

  Jessica shook her head. “Rocket science. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Sounds completely different from showing. If I were showing on Saturday, then Wednesday I’d probably do a few little jumps, Thursday I’d do some flatwork, and Friday he’d have off.”

  “That’s not so different. He’ll just jog Thursday and Friday.”

  “Jog? Is that like, a slow canter?”

  “No, it’s a trot.” I shoved Kerri, who was laughing openly now. “Jog is trot, gallop is anything from a canter to a full gallop. A breeze is a fast timed work, racing speed.”

  “Why?”

  “Why is it breeze?”

  “Yes, why is it breeze?”

  I considered this for a moment before conceding the point. “Jessica, I have no idea.”

  “Well,” Jessica chuckled, stripping the tack off of Cosmos while he leaned against the cross-ties, working his jaw like a silly racehorse himself, “you have fun with that, then. And wait—isn’t your horse show on Saturday? The same day as your horse race?”

  “It sure is,” I sighed, and turned back to the job of untacking Tiger. “It sure is.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?”

  “I have to show Tiger,” I said. “That’s first and foremost. Alexander can run Personal Best” —even if it killed me— “But I tell you what I’m going to do… I’m going to head over to the training center this afternoon and give him a big kiss. Even if Alexander doesn’t want me to ride him in the morning, I’m still going to make sure I see him before his run.”

  Jessica, hidden behind her horse, sounded muffled when she said “That’s so nice,” but I was turning back to Tiger, who was in desperate need of a cool shower, and didn’t answer. Kerri just smiled at me, because she knew I couldn’t resist going to see my horses, and said she was going to the beach all afternoon, so I was free to wander wherever I wanted alone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  It didn’t take as much pleading as I had expected. Alexander seemed almost… eager? Relieved? Desperate?… for me to come out and do the honors of blowing out P.B. The horse had been a nightmare for the past month, by all accounts. Although he’d romped in the little race Alexander had dropped him into a few weeks ago (at my suggestion, I reminded myself proudly, meaning that I was still training my colt), he’d remained a pill on the training track and even in the shed-row. The only time he seemed happy was when he was out in his tiny paddock, and on the day he’d gone to the race.

  “But he was a monster in the paddock,” Alexander had warned ominously. “If he goes on acting out like this, we’re going to have a real problem in the Bahia. And I want you to ride him with an abundance of caution in the morning. I don’t need you getting hurt on your first time back out.”

  As if I had a history of getting hurt. I agreed demurely that I would ride Personal Best with all the delicacy of a nuclear scientist disarming a bomb, and silently cheered that tomorrow morning I was going to get to ride my baby. Even if I was going to have to miss the Bahia Honda Stakes in order to show Tiger, if I could settle his nerves and get his brain into a workmanlike place before the race, I’d be doing right by both my favorite boys.

  And Alexander, besides. I had a feeling it had been hard on him, taking all this on while I sat at home and played with Tiger. (And managed the two-year-olds, and dealt with the breeding and foaling, and managed the yearlings… but mostly, he would see it, playing with Tiger.) It wasn’t that he wasn’t capable of training alone—it was that for the past few years, with a few exceptions, we had done it together. Dissolving a happy and successful partnership for no good reason at all rarely made the job more fun or satisfying.

  Well, all of that was over now. Once the Thoroughbred Makeover was out of the way, I was renewing the partnership. I was taking horses to races again. I was standing beside Alexander along the rail again, waiting with a halter and a lead shank for our horse to come galloping home. CASH or no CASH. Protestors or no protestors. This nonsense had gone on long enough. I wasn’t willing to be punished for trying to do the right thing any longer.

  “I’m not your poster girl anymore,” I told my reflection in the rear-view mirror. “Find someone else to blame. I’ll be busy making a difference.”

  First things first, say hello to my horses that weren’t retired yet.

  I called up the training center and let them know I was coming. The security guard said that would be fine, and then he paused. “Alex, something you ought to know…” His southern drawl added an extra measure of fatherly concern to his tone. “We have a few protestors out here today.”

  “Protestors?” Alexander had said that was over. “I thought—not for me?”

  “I guess someone got wind you was in town. Don’t know. They showed up a few hours ago, after training hours. Almost like they knew you was comin’ over here.”

  My heart sank. I’d only told one person besides Kerri that I was going to visit.

  There were fewer of them than I had expected.

  I had been fearing a shouting crowd of hundreds, waving signs with my face and a big red x over it, but maybe I was just flattering myself if I thought I was worth so much attention. I’d never been a big-shot in this game—if I was a celebrity animal abuser, it was just amongst the lunatic fringe in CASH.

  When I finally got to the training center, cursing at south Florida’s ridiculous traffic the entire way, the front gates were closed tight as usual, but the security guard sitting in his car, parked just inside of them, was a change.

  So were the fifteen or twenty women milling about on the manicured St. Augustine lawn in front of the training center sign. Sunburned and disheveled, the pack of ladies were evidently taking a break from protesting. A few were sitting on their cardboard signs, backs against the ram-rod straight sabal palms that shaded the driveway, and one woman had taken off her flip flops and dipped her feet into the sparkling reflecting pool beneath the burnished lettering of the farm sign.

  Classy, I thought.

  Most of them were wearing flip flops, shorts, and tank tops, in fact, but that really didn’t mean much in this part of the world. Most of the time, it was too hot to wear anything else. There was every chance that these ladies were high-powered members of the equestrian community or, failing that, the Keep Everything Family-Friendly community. Soccer moms, PTA power brokers, Pony Club volunteers—anything was possible in an anti-racing protest. You didn’t have to be a member of anything in particular to hate horse racing, unfortunately. You didn’t have to fit any demographic at all. My sport had more enemies than friends these days, most of them deserved—but I was trying to do things right.

  I flung the truck into park and hopped out, ready to do battle.

  The women had been organizing the minute they saw a visitor pulling up to the gates—jumping up, gathering their signs, readying their rallying cries. The little hive had burst into a frenzy of motion, but when I slammed the truck door and faced them down, every last one of them froze in place.

  I looked down at myself and hid a little smile. Polo shirt, riding breeches, dress boots—from head to toe I was dressed in the uniform of the English equestrian. I bet that was the last thing these ladies had expected. I gave them a moment to enjoy their discomfiture. That’s right, girls. I look just like you. Assuming any of you ride. The really militant ones probably just let their horses graze, because riding would be cruel. Maybe they didn’t even own horses, because owning horses was cruel. Horses should be wild and free. Where wild and free was, I didn’t exactly know, but I doubted it included the sweet feed, alfalfa, and peppermints that a horse like Tiger considered requirements for life.

  “Ladies,” I said e
xpectantly, looking around the motley little group. “You have something you wanted to say to me?”

  There was a general murmur of confusion, heads tilting to whisper amongst themselves. It wasn’t hard to figure out that these uninformed rabble didn’t even know who I was. It was no wonder—my picture didn’t show up in the industry rags often, but when it did I was usually looking a bit more dapper and polished in my race-day attire, leading a horse from the paddock or standing at his hindquarters in the win photo. A far cry from the sweat-soaked, horse-stained, real-life version of myself standing in front of my detractors now.

  Then Jessica, whom I had somehow missed, stepped forward. She was wearing a t-shirt with a jumping horse on it and holding a homemade sign that announced “Horse Racing Kills Horses!” in large capital letters. The letters were very straight and even, I noticed. She had worked hard on it. More than I could say for a few of the other women holding signs today. Her face was flushed nervously. She opened her mouth to talk, but no sound came out.

  I shook my head at her. “Shame on you, Jessica,” I chided, as if she were a bad horse. “Acting like you were my friend.”

  She flinched and her eyes dropped to the ground. “Horse racing is cruel,” she muttered. “You can’t change the facts.”

  “You don’t know the facts, Jessica. You literally said that to me. You’ve never even been to the races, let alone see how the horses are cared for or trained. How dare you call me cruel to horses, after riding with me? You think I’m cruel to Tiger?”

  Before she could answer, not that she was going to answer, a redhead with positively demonic flashing green eyes shoved her aside. Her pony-tail was coming loose and she shoved loose strands behind her ears impatiently. “Are you Alex Whitehall?” she demanded. “Because we have a few things we’d like to say to you. If you are. Alex Whitehall.”

  I grinned. I’d recognize that accent and that stilted speech pattern anywhere. “I am Alex Whitehall, as a matter of fact. And I have a feeling you’re Cassidy Lehigh. Glad you figured out my first name this time.” I leaned back against the truck and affected a casual pose. My heart was racing and I was willing my face not to flush, but the truth was that despite the jangling nerves inherent in facing an angry mob that hates you, I was feeling pretty great. I’d dealt with some pretty shady characters in my time, after all. I’d put up with some real pieces of work, day after day, in Saratoga. Yet, here I stood, the trainer of stakes horses and the co-manager of an Ocala breeding farm. No one had been able to take my triumphs away from me yet. This rag-tag little bunch of sunburned suburbanites wasn’t going to, either. “You say what you have to say, and then I’ll tell you why you’re mistaken, and then you can all go home.”

  “You’re a horse-killer!” someone shouted, and there was a chorus of shush’s and yeah’s, mixed about evenly, from the group.

  Cassidy didn’t say anything at all. She just waited until her acolytes were quiet again, and then she spoke.

  “We’re here about the matter of Market Affair, the horse that you bred who was found abandoned in the Everglades,” she announced, her voice ringing out as if she was addressing a stadium full of people. “You paint yourself as some sort of—”

  “You okay, ma’am?” It was the security guard, who had evidently been taking a nap or something. He leaned out of his car window. “Everything okay out here?”

  “We’re fine,” I said. “Thank you.” I turned back Cassidy. “Do go on. You were about to tell me about the kind of person I pretend to be.”

  I’d absorbed a fair amount of English disdain in my years with Alexander.

  Cassidy flushed, but forged ahead with her airing of grievances against me. “You give your little interviews talking up your retirement programs, and all along this horse was being passed around from owner to owner, being run to death, and then tossed out in the swamp like trash. You’re a hypocrite, just like everyone else in this business.”

  “Assuming this were actually true, what would you want from me?” I was genuinely curious. Did they want a public apology? A large cash donation to a charity? My head on a pike?

  “So you don’t deny it?” There was a lot of hissing from the ladies. Pack of snakes, indeed.

  “Of course I deny it, because it isn’t true. I had nothing to do with this horse, although I’m heartbroken at what happened to him.” I shook my head. “He was a good colt, he was a beautiful colt, but he wasn’t my colt. Not for one second.” I found it amusing that I didn’t even need to mention Sunny Virtue. Cassidy must have done her homework on that one. You couldn’t pin too many false accusations on one person, or someone might notice how much lying you were doing. Just the one horse, though, was enough to get everyone riled up.

  “He was your colt!” someone else shouted. “Your farm bred him!”

  I held up a finger. “One,” I stated. “I wasn’t part of farm management then.” I put up another finger. Let’s make it easy for these kids to understand. “Two. He was a client’s horse. He wasn’t the farm’s. Whether I was ever his owner or not, if the horse doesn’t belong to me, I can’t control his care. He’s someone else’s property. And,” I went on, talking over Cassidy’s sputtering protests, “It is now a farm policy to track all of our horses to the best of our abilities and provide retirement assistance, but we still can’t force an owner to sell or change training policies. As I told the interviewer from New Equestrian. Which I assume is what you were talking about when you mentioned ‘all my interviews.’ I gave one. Now, if only Cassidy was as forthcoming with information, you all could be doing something else with your afternoon. Because she already knows all of this. She’s had this conversation with me before. Cassidy, notice that my story hasn’t changed in all these months? That’s because it’s true.”

  Cassidy squared her jaw and glared at me. I got the feeling that if she showed up at her neighbor’s house with Girl Scout Cookies, her neighbor bought those damn cookies just as fast as he could. She was a woman who liked being in charge, liked getting her own way.

  Funny, so was I.

  “If you have a problem with property rights and how owning things works, which I think is what is confusing Cassidy right now, you’re going to have to address that separately from any problems you have with horse racing,” I said. “Now why don’t you get on out of here and go ride your own horses.”

  Her eyebrow twitched. “We’re not going anywhere until the public knows that you’re no better than the rest of them.”

  I cocked my head. “The rest of who?”

  She smiled thinly, and it was so malevolent that I was immediately reminded of Mary Archer. Mary Archer… so pleased with herself when she broke the news back in Tampa. So obviously at the bottom of this whole mess. My dear lovely nemesis-next-door.

  “The rest of the racetrackers,” Cassidy hissed, her green eyes narrow and dangerous as a snake’s. “We’re tired of cleaning up your messes. We’re rescuers and we’re horsewomen, and we’ve been nursing your wrecks back to health and putting down your disasters for too many years now. You spit out horses year after year like machines producing cheap toys, and when you break them you toss them out like trash. But they’re not trash—they’re alive, and you’re going to be forced to take responsibility for them. All of you. This isn’t over.”

  “So let’s do it.”

  “What?” Cassidy cocked her head like a confused border collie.

  “Let’s do it. Of course this business needs cleaned up. Of course we need to fix these holes horses slip through and get rid of these fake horsemen who do things like dump horses, or run them until they break. Of course we do! What do you think, I like the way these people act?” I shook my head. “Stop lumping us all together. This is just like politics. You know how nothing changes because of who holds the power, who holds the purse-strings? We’re playing the same nothing-changes game here. It’s all politics. It’s regulations. It’s who has the money to push things through.

  “Remember,” I held up a f
inger—I was warming to my lecture, I was a breed advocate and that didn’t just mean selling Thoroughbreds as show horses—“Remember that racing is regulated by the individual states. The gaming boards. That’s where the change has to come from. So who here is a lawyer? Who is going to donate time to start putting together proposals, and taking delegations to Tallahassee, and changing the rules?”

  There was a silence in the group. A few signs came down, tired arms giving in to the dull reality. Cassidy’s wasn’t one of them, but she was starting to look like a lone psycho in a crowd slowly coming to their senses.

  A crowd that was realizing that standing here, yelling at me, wasn’t going to change a thing.

  Then, a woman in the middle of the pack spoke up. She was wearing a shirt with a rescue logo on the chest, a horse-head and a heart intertwined. Her bronzed skin was the result of years out in the Florida sun. She could have been a farmer, a rancher, a horsewoman her whole life.

  “I’m a lawyer,” she said, and I smiled. A person can be both. That was one of the great things about being a horsewoman—anyone from any walk of life could do it. All you needed was a love of horses and enough grit to work endlessly for them. “I can start this,” she went on. “We can get this ball rolling if we work together.”

  Cassidy turned and sought out her face in the crowd. “You sure, Danielle? You have a full farm right now. How’re you going to take this on? Don’t let this liar turn your life upside-down.”

  Danielle smiled a tired smile. “I can do it with all of your help, I guess. If we can gather together for a few hours to make a protest, we can gather at my kitchen table and look through some laws, start writing some new ones. It’ll take time, but… I mean…” She shrugged. “So does this. I could be riding right now, you know?”

  Jessica spoke up. “Alex is right. There are good people in racing—I’ve ridden with her and I’ve seen that she’s a horsewoman. If she says that it can be fixed, well… then we have to try to fix it. I can help.”