The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  Instead they just slipped off the chaise lounge, landing, still locked together, on the soft blanket that had slipped unnoticed from Jenny’s lap. Aidan lifted his head a moment, looked around at the chair legs and floorboards around them, and laughed breathlessly at her before he plunged enthusiastically back into her kiss. His hands were everywhere now, her hair and her cheeks and her throat and her arms, slipping the thin straps of her dress down to her elbows, running his fingers down the outlines of her collarbone. He traced a pathway down her cleavage and she thrust her chest up, biting at his lower lip, to let him know his hands were welcome to wander farther still.

  Jenny woke up on the chaise lounge as the birds outside began to cheer on the early upstate dawn. Her first reaction was confusion: why wasn’t she in her bed upstairs? Her second reaction was a wince: why did her head ache like that? And her third reaction was simply unfathomable: had they really done that last night?

  Or, to be more accurate, a few hours ago?

  She wiggled free from the blanket, which had been tucked around her with precision, and looked around for a moment, wondering where Aidan had gone. There were two cups of cold tea on the end table, murky brown and unwelcoming. She picked them up and carried them into the kitchen, hoping she’d find Aidan there, but the kitchen, breakfast nook, and dining room were all empty. The entire first floor, in fact, was Aidan-free.

  If he regrets last night, I’m sunk, Jenny thought, her heartbeat beginning to gallop in her chest. The overall effect, combined with her hangover, was of rising nausea, and she leaned on the newel post of the staircase for a long moment before she felt well enough to climb the broad wooden steps. She dreaded peeking through his bedroom door, seeing him asleep in his own bed. The idea that he’d left her downstairs and crept off to sleep alone after they’d had sex was absolutely horrific—almost as bad as the prospect of climbing the stairs in her current condition. But eventually she managed to take a deep breath and force herself to take one step, then the next.

  She paused on the landing, where a stained glass window picking out a galloping horse surrounded by yellow and blue diamonds let the early morning light filter over her face. There was a creak of aging wood, then another. He was upstairs, then. She sighed, closed her eyes for a moment, and then nodded to herself. She would not cry again. She would not build this into something it wasn’t. They had been drunk. They had crossed the line between friendship and—whatever came next. If that was all it had been, a drunken coupling, then they would have to simply carry on with their lives. It wouldn’t be hard for Aidan unless she let him know how very hard it was for her.

  His door was open; she stood in the doorway and watched him.

  He was packing, throwing clothes into a green canvas backpack, pulling the leather straps tight as he finished. He turned around, and there she was. She realized she was still wearing the flower-covered dress, the straps pulled clumsily over her shoulders, but her bra was gone, left somewhere downstairs. She had a momentary, panicked thought at the probable state of her makeup.

  “Jenny,” he said, his voice high and nervous. “I have to run back to the city today.”

  Jenny dropped the blanket she’d been holding, unconsciously, like a towel around her waist. She didn’t even realize she’d brought it upstairs until its soft folds fell around her bare feet. “Back to the city,” she repeated blankly. “But—you’re coming back?”

  “I’ll be back on Wednesday,” he said, averting his gaze, letting his eyes dart around the room, falling on anything but her. “Not in time for the backside, but for the races. Sorry.”

  “We were going to spend some down time together.” Jenny fought to keep the plea out of her voice. “What happened?”

  “I left something in the city,” he said hurriedly. “I have to get it.”

  “Aidan,” she said, “is this about last night?”

  The nausea those words brought with them was appalling. She clutched the elegant trim of the door; she dug her fingernails into the soft, endangered wood.

  “Of course not.” He finally looked at her, met her eyes. She thought he looked anxious, not loving or wistful or lustful, all of which would have been more indicative that he’d had a good time, that he was happy they’d crossed the line, that he wished he was staying to pursue this new aspect of their friendship in more detail. “I’m sorry about last night,” he said. “We were drunk, but I should have been more careful. I hope you’re not mad at me. I was afraid—I was afraid you might be.”

  Jenny stared at him. Her love ought to be cured right now, she thought, because this man was clearly an idiot and she surely could not be in love with an idiot. “I’m not mad,” she said crisply. “I wasn’t too drunk to make a choice.”

  “That’s—I’m glad.”

  They looked at each for a long moment. A blue jay cried sharply outside the open window, and a noisy truck went down the street. The world woke up early in these parts. At the track, the stables would be bustling, the horses all fed, the workers going to the track to get in their jogs and gallops. She could go down there, Jenny thought, maybe talk to some new people. It would give her something to do if Aidan was going to be gone. She watched him a second longer, waiting to see if he’d say anything else, if he’d tell her that it was her all along, that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it before, that they should be together, that good friends made the best lovers. But he didn’t. He just looked at her helplessly, a man who clearly had nothing to say and didn’t know what to do about it.

  Jenny was the first to turn away, and later she’d be proud of that fact. Even though pride was a cold comfort, it was at least something she could hang onto. “Travel safe,” she said, walking through the doorway and into the empty hall. “I’ll see you on Wednesday.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “Jenny Wolfe! Come over here and tell us how your parents are doing!”

  “Jenny Wolfe! I hear that colt of your parents is really taking off down there? When are they bringing him north for some real racing?”

  “Jenny Wolfe! The last time I saw you, your dad was still leading you around on his old pony.”

  What a thing to have happen on today of all days, she thought, waving her hand and acknowledging the calls. The very morning that Aidan left her behind, the entire track decided they were tired of giving her the cold shoulder.

  It seemed that after a solid week of wandering around both Saratoga’s backside and frontside, and the growing buzz around the writing and photography in Full Stride, Jenny was no longer persona non grata for the older trainers and riders, the ones who knew her parents but hadn’t wanted her in their shed-rows. The stiff nods had changed, overnight, into warm greetings, friendly chats, and the sort of weirdly sexual teasing that old men seemed to feel very comfortable dishing out to their friends’ grown daughters.

  And it was mostly enjoyable (maybe minus the creepy teasing from men old enough to be her grandfather): finding herself repeatedly called into tack rooms and barn offices or up to the snack bar near the backstretch chute; talking with men in cowboy hats and women sitting in golf carts, one hand patting the head of a dog sitting in the passenger seat. It helped put her heartache over Aidan out of her head, listening as they reminisced about good horses they’d run in the past and speculating enthusiastically about the Wolfes’ fall plans for Mister.

  “I don’t know if they’re coming to New York,” Jenny had to say again and again. “I’ll tell them you think they should, though.”

  She didn’t think her parents could afford to ship Mister to Saratoga, but she kept that thought private. Her mother had briefly told her that summer shipping was off the table, and Mister was staying at Palm Meadows until September, and Jenny had left it at that.

  She’d just stepped out of Claude McKee’s shed-row, a tidy little barn back near the Oklahoma training track, when a horse being led behind a neighboring barn caught her eye. It was past ten o’clock and the track was closed for the day, but there was still p
lenty of work to be done on the backside, whether it was blacksmith appointments or extra therapy treatments or just some pleasant grazing time for the horses. So there were plenty of horses out and about, and this one, a very plain bay, shouldn’t really have grabbed her attention. She watched him walk for a moment, brow furrowed while she tried to figure out who he was, and then the horse turned his head in her direction for a fleeting moment.

  She recognized the horse’s blaze and kind eyes immediately. It was the bay horse of Lawson’s, the one she’d seen in Tampa a few months ago. The one she’d given up searching for after a few more tries back in the city, forgetting about him as the morass of deadlines and the sheer weight of so many other horses bore down on her. There simply wasn’t time to remember all of the cute horses, even the ones who struck her fancy immediately, like this one had.

  Cutting behind McKee’s barn, she walked across the grass towards the bay horse, who was cheerfully following his groom around the corner of a neighboring shed-row. She came around the corner and saw the red and white stall webbings of the Lawson stable.

  She paused, her boots half on the dirt of the shed-row, half on the grass outside. The Lawsons were not like the other trainers she’d been holding court with all morning. They didn’t have fond memories of her parents, only tight-fisted clinging to the squabbles they’d been instigating for years. They weren’t going to be happy to see her.

  But, Jenny reasoned, if she could talk to the Lawsons about their horses, that would be a real story, not just a story about visiting with her friends. And that’s really what she had been doing all morning: visiting family friends, having coffee with them, and gossiping with them. There wasn’t anything wrong with that in the eyes of Lana or Mr. Farnsworth, and plenty of readers would enjoy that kind of coverage… but that wasn’t why she was here. She mustn’t slip into gossip columnist habits. There were already plenty of writers doing just that in the national racing journals, and it wasn’t the niche she’d imagined for herself.

  Jenny made up her mind and walked down the shed-row to the barn office, back straight and chin held high, ignoring the eyes of the grooms watching her trespass on their territory. No one said anything to her. They’d wait for the boss to sort her out.

  The office door was open, and she could hear Brice Lawson inside even before she poked her head inside. There was a grimy little woman sitting by his desk, looking irritated. “I told you, no one checks my pens,” she was saying, slapping a hand on the desk for emphasis. “I see anyone flipping lips, they’re out of there with a shotgun barrel at their back. Those pretty girls in their fancy boots? They don’t come back. They learn pretty quick this is the real world, not their little horse show fun and games.”

  “Thanks,” Lawson said, tapping a pen on what looked like a contract. “That’s good to know. He’s in the shed-row waiting.”

  Jenny realized a split second too slowly what they were talking about. She ducked back into the shed-row, intent on escape, but they’d already seen her.

  “Hey!” Brice shouted. “What are you doing out there?”

  Jenny took a deep breath and poked her head around the doorway again, pretending she hadn’t heard a thing. “Mr. Lawson, so sorry to interrupt! I just wanted to stop by, see if you wanted to join my column this week—”

  “I don’t have time for your column,” Lawson sneered. “I’m training racehorses here.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Jenny said, nodding. “I can see you’re busy. I’ll be going.” She made tracks down the shed-row.

  “I better not catch you in my barn again,” Lawson called after her.

  Jenny’s heart was racing, and she could feel it thudding in her head, which suddenly seemed to be having a relapse into her earlier hangover. She rushed out of the shed-row and ducked behind it. A few horses, leaning on their windowsills and gazing idly into the distance, looked her way in curiosity. They were all shiny and bright-eyed; Lawson horses weren’t mistreated or fed poorly or anything like that. They were just run very, very hard. The Lawsons didn’t fuss too much about retirement when a horse was dropping down the levels, ceasing to be competitive at one and easing down to the next. While Jenny’s parents took a drop in several levels as a warning sign that the horse was no longer one hundred percent sound, the Lawsons were of the school of thinking that there was always a race you could enter a horse in, no matter how cheap or low-class the running might be.

  The problem with that approach, of course, was that once a horse dropped from a thirty-thousand dollar race to a five-thousand dollar race, and reached a point where he still couldn’t win, the horse was likely too knocked up to be useful in other sports. Which made retirement difficult… if not impossible.

  The bay horse had looked fit, though she couldn’t have said, from just her quick glimpse of him walking, if he was sound. Nor did she know what level he was running at. There were dozens of races per week that she didn’t see or pay attention to; she only covered the big races, or entries with a special angle, for the website. All she knew was that his form at Tampa had been poor, and that the bottom level at Saratoga was much higher than the bottom level down in Florida, so it was unlikely he could be competitive here.

  I see anyone flipping lips, they’re out of there.

  Maybe it would be a cryptic statement to an outsider, but to a racetracker or a rescuer, “flipping lips” could mean only one thing: checking a racehorse’s tattooed ID number, located on the inside of the horse’s upper lip. A practice that unsavory horse dealers hated, because it was against the rules of many racetracks, Saratoga included, for a trainer to funnel a horse through an auction that worked with slaughter-house agents. The tattoo system was on the way out, but the practice would remain for years of horses moving through sales rings and auction houses.

  That woman in Lawson’s office was connected with kill-buyers. Jenny was certain of it. And if Lawson had a horse he wanted to dump, a horse who was right out in the shed-row waiting, it had to be the bay gelding who had stopped winning races months ago.

  You’re over-reacting, she told herself.

  But why else would that woman have said such a thing? They learn pretty quick this is the real world, not their little horse show fun and games. The sport horse equestrians who rescued Thoroughbreds out of kill-buyer pens on weekends. The girls in their fancy boots. That’s who she was talking about.

  Yes, Jenny, and what are you going to do about it?

  Jenny suddenly realized she was shaking and light-headed. And no wonder: she’d barely slept last night, she’d felt her heart break in her chest when Aidan announced he was leaving this morning, and she’d come to the backside looking for a cure to the common heartache… and it had worked, at first, but now all of that was catching up with her. All of that, and this drama with the Lawson horse. She never should have walked into his barn. She should have known there was no connecting with that man. Not as long as she was a Wolfe.

  She’d go home; she’d eat a sandwich; she’d try to lull her fevered brain into a nap. Time to be sensible. No Saratoga trainer was going to risk his stalls and standing by sending a slow horse to a kill-pen; she was just jumping to conclusions because she was underfed and overtired. She was looking for drama where there was none. It wouldn’t be the first time, according to her mother. Jenny pointed her boots towards her rental car, parked on the backside lane a few barns down.

  She walked resolutely away from the barns, past a patch of trees which usually were not worth a thought, then paused at what had been hidden on the other side.

  There was a rusty truck and horse trailer parked behind them, the windows rolled down and no one in the cab.

  There was nothing too surprising about a truck and trailer parked on the backside. The dilapidation was what struck her, gave her pause. Saratoga was not a place where you saw a lot of rust, and most horses who ran here traveled in style. This trailer was in such a state of decay, Jenny would have been afraid to put a horse inside for even a short ride.r />
  She glanced back over her shoulder at the Lawson barn. The truck and trailer were well-hidden from the barns by the trees… almost as if it had been parked here strategically. There were no other cars nearby; it was too early in the day for overflow from the track’s main parking areas to make it this far and with no racing today, no reason for it to happen anyway. It occurred to Jenny that the Lawson barn, sitting so close to the edge of the Oklahoma stabling area, was ideally located for someone who wanted to quickly get rid of a horse without any questions asked.

  There was a flash of movement in the corner of her vision, and without thinking about it, she slipped into the copse of trees, leaning back against a trunk. She was far from hidden, so she tried to casually tip her head back against the tree trunk, and lifted her phone, as if she was just messing around, killing time while she waited for her ride. The trailer was in full view, but just far enough away that she thought she could pull off the nonchalant look.

  There was the sound of hooves on grass, and the woman from the tack room walked past her, leading the bay gelding from Tampa. He was looking around with interest, his ears pricked, happy to be out for a morning walk after training hours. When he saw the trailer ahead of him, he lifted his head and picked up his hooves more briskly. Of course he’s a good loader, Jenny thought, exasperated with the horse. The one time being naughty would serve him well.

  The bay gelding hopped willingly into the trailer and nosed around, looking for hay, while the woman tied his lead shank to one of the metal struts. By the time he realized there was no hay and this was not the deluxe transportation he was accustomed to, she was already out of the trailer and slamming the door, flakes of rust snowing to the ground.