“I tried to find out what I could. I thought maybe I’d be able to get you the evidence to clear your name but I wasn’t able to find anything. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “It wasn’t them.”
“What?”
“It was a tainted supplement. Something went wrong during the manufacturing process. At least that is what the investigator I hired was able to deduce.”
“So why on earth did you get suspended?” I said.
“Because I didn’t have all the proof I needed to show them and besides, those are the rules.”
“Well the rules are dumb,” I said.
“Trust me, I’m going to try and get it overthrown.” He sighed. “It’s just that it’s going to cost more money that we don’t have.”
“Then why is Missy threatening to send Arion away?” I said. “Even cowboy trainers cost money and besides, you know I’d never let her send him a way in a million years, right? I’d run away first.”
“I know you would,” he said. “And you’d better not. She’s just mad at him. That’s all.”
“So why did you go along with it?” I said. “Don’t you know what it did to me, finding him tossed out in the woods like a piece of garbage?”
“It’s complicated,” Dad said. “When you are older, you’ll understand.”
“I want to understand now,” I said. “Try and explain.”
But he just shook his head and I was pretty sure that I’d never understand. What Missy had done wasn’t exactly abuse but in my mind it might as well have been. She’d taken my horse and put him in a situation where he could have been seriously injured without anyone ever noticing. Not to mention the fact that the stress could have made his ulcers a lot worse. And thinking about Arion’s ulcers and the check that I’d written for the tubes of liquid gold, I remembered that I needed to find out about the Easter show.
“We’re still going to the big show, right?” I asked. “Because I need to ride as many horses as possible. I’ve got to win some prize money. And I can take Encore too, can’t I? You should have seen him at the clinic. You would have been so proud of him.”
“You can probably ride him in the show but it might be your last time,” Dad said.
“What? Why?” I said, my heart sinking.
I’d grown attached to the shy bay horse and just as we were starting to get along so well, he was going to be taken away from me.
“I have a buyer interested in him, someone from your clinic in fact.”
“Who?” I said suspiciously.
“The girl is Tara somebody or other I think.”
“No,” I said, standing up. “Absolutely not. There is no way you can sell a horse as nice as Encore to someone as horrible as Tara.”
“I don’t have a choice,” Dad said. “The owners want him sold and to be honest, I need the commission. You knew he was a sale horse when you started riding him. That is the nature of the horse business.”
“Well sometimes,” I said. “The horse business sucks.”
I was about to go to my room and hide before Missy got back when I thought of something else.
“Dad,” I said. “If Hunter Preston didn’t have anything to do with the drugging, then why did he seem to know Encore?”
“He used to have the ride on him,” he said with a sly smile. “In Europe. But he wrecked him. Pushed him too hard and too fast. That’s why the horse was in such a mess when he got here. He won’t let men ride him now. Only women. And I wanted Hunter to see that a teenage girl like you could ride the horse so much better than he ever could.”
“Well that could have backfired,” I said.
“But it didn’t.” He grinned, standing up and slapping me on the back. “You made me proud kid.”
“Thanks, I think,” I said. “Just try to remember that when Missy thinks it’s a good idea to do something else dumb, okay?”
Dad just sighed. He probably couldn’t wait until Owen was older so that he’d have a boy on his side and wouldn’t be stuck with two hormonal girls who were locked in a battle of wits and wills.
“Oh and by the way,” I added. “I think the reason that Popcorn has been so unreasonable lately is that she needs her teeth floated.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I was in my room doing schoolwork when Missy got home. Owen was crying and she seemed in an even worse mood than she had been before she left.
“The credit card was denied,” she yelled at my father. “I was standing there at the checkout with all this food and the stupid thing wouldn’t go through. And the cashier wanted to take it from me and cut it up. It was so embarrassing. I had to go to the ATM machine and get cash from my savings account while everyone stared at me. What is going on?”
I stood there with my ear pressed against my bedroom door, listening. There was no way I was going out there and walking into that but I wanted to hear what they were saying. I knew that things had been tight lately but I didn’t know they were that bad.
“I told you we were going to have to tighten our belts for a little while,” Dad said.
“Tighten our belts?” Missy screamed. “Tightening your belt is not going out to eat at restaurants or going without a new pair of boots. I almost couldn’t buy formula for your baby.”
I thought about all the things that Missy had bought for Owen since he’d been born. The fancy baby clothes that he grew out of in a month. The toys he didn’t play with because he was far happier with an empty box. The number of times that she’d rushed him to the doctors because she thought there was something wrong with him. All that money had added up. And I knew my father had spent just as much on the private investigator that he hired for the suspension hearing and even more on the farm that now sat half renovated and not finished enough for us to move into.
“You’d better get your act together,” Missy snapped.
“Things will turn around,” he said. “I just need to sell a horse or two and we’ll be back on top.”
“Well while you’re at it why don’t you sell Canterbury?” Missy said, her voice cold. “That horse is worth more than this house and he’s just sitting there. You don’t even ride him anymore.”
Canterbury was the horse my father had brought over from England when he moved back to the states. A big chestnut with the heart of a lion and the jump of a stag. I didn’t know much about Olympic horses but I knew that he had the potential to be one.
My father didn’t answer her. I knew that to him, selling Canterbury would be like asking me to sell Arion or Bluebird. He’d never do it. Not in a million years. But if we didn’t have money for food, would he even have much of a choice?
“Fix this,” Missy snapped.
And then they stopped talking to each other.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The vet said that I didn’t need to give Arion any time off while he was completing his ulcer treatment but I wasn’t ready to jump right back into training him again. I felt like he’d earned a vacation after everything he had been put through. Not that he seemed to mind. He seemed to think that his journey into the woods had been one great adventure. I thought otherwise. And Missy didn’t mention the cowboy ranch again. I guess she figured that if we didn’t have money for baby formula then we hardly had money to spend putting ninety days of training on a horse that she didn’t think was worth it anyway.
So I took Arion for long walks instead. Taking my dressage whip with me and making him do basic exercises on the ground. He was always eager to learn and thought it was a fun game. We went out to the jump field where some cavalletti had been set up and I let him walk over them and then we trotted together. He tossed his gray mane, his ears pricked and I didn’t really care if he never amounted to anything because he was good enough for me just the way he was.
But Bluebird was another story. If I wanted to take him to the Easter show then I needed to start riding him again. He’d had a whole week off thanks to his injuries and now that they were healed, I knew that he was bo
red. He was a pony who liked to have something to occupy his mind or he got into trouble, as was evidenced by his accident in the paddock. The only trouble was that after a week off, he was acting kind of crazy.
“Come on you,” I said as he pranced his way out to the ring. “Get it together. I don’t want to have to spend an hour lunging you just so that you are calm enough to ride.
But Bluebird thought that being back in work was just the best thing ever and he was so excited that he practically launched into orbit when I sat on his back.
“Oh no you don’t,” I said, closing my legs around him.
I pushed him forward so that he wouldn’t go up instead and we spent the whole ride cantering around the ring and trotting really fast. I didn’t even bother asking him to jump anything because even though I knew he would have, it was what he would have done after the jump that had me worried. I wanted him back on track for the show, not injured because of something else stupid he’d done.
“He took you for a ride,” Dad said when I came back to the barn an hour later with sweat running down my face.
“You could say that,” I replied.
After our talk, Dad seemed like he was trying to be extra nice to me, which made up for the fact that Missy was barely speaking to me. I still didn’t know why. The fact that my father had run out of money didn’t have anything to do with me.
“Well do you fancy a lesson later?” he said.
“Really?” I asked. “You mean it?”
Dad had been busy lately. Lessons were few and far between. I was hoping that when I got back Missy would be able to teach me as well, letting me in on some of the tips and tricks that made her the sort of rider that was noticed by the Olympic selection committee. But now it didn’t look like that was going to happen. I was starting to wonder if it ever would.
“Of course,” Dad said. “Besides, that Tara girl is coming to look at Encore so you might as well warm him up in a lesson and then he’ll be all ready for her to try him out.”
“She won’t be able to ride him,” I said sulkily. “I watched her ride at the clinic. She’s not the kind of person who will get the best out of him.”
“You’d better hope she can get the best out of him,” Dad said. “I need that commission money and I need it now.”
I stepped closer to my father so that the grooms and other riders who were buzzing around the barn couldn’t hear.
“We’re not really in trouble with money, are we?”
“Of course not,” he said.
But his eyes were lying and I knew that we were in big trouble so I was going to have to do something that I didn’t want to do. Hope that a girl I didn’t like could ride a horse that I’d grown fond of well. Which really sucked.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Wow,” Dad said later after Encore and I had just been around the course of jumps out in the field. “To be honest I didn’t think you’d learn much from Hunter Preston but you guys have really come a long way in just one week.”
“I didn’t learn much from him,” I said. “It was Leslie Green. I really clicked with her style of teaching. And I’m sure some of Hunter’s grumblings rubbed off on me as well.”
“He can be a bit of an old bear,” Dad said.
“Yes, you should have warned me of that before I left,” I said.
“You already didn’t want to go. If I told you that you were going to get yelled at for a whole week, I never would have got you into that truck.”
“True.” I grinned.
I walked Encore around on a loose rein while we waited for Tara to show up. I wanted to warn my father about her and tell him how mean she’d been at the clinic but I knew that I’d just sound like a baby. He didn’t need to hear about how catty the other girls had been and it wouldn’t change his mind anyway. I’d clicked so well with Encore that part of me had hoped that maybe I could talk my father into buying him but I knew that wasn’t going to happen now. Encore needed to be sold. I just wished it didn’t have to be to Tara.
Eventually a white SUV pulled into the parking lot.
“They’re here,” I said, pointing to the curvy girl in breeches and the tall thin woman who was with her.
“Great,” Dad said. “Don’t mess this up.”
“How on earth do you think I could mess this up?” I said.
“I know you,” he replied. “You’d find a way so just don’t.”
“Alright,” I said with a sigh.
I could have ridden Encore badly. Placed him at the fences wrong and let him mess up only I knew that even if I did that, he’d still jump them because he was a really good horse that would pretty much jump anything from any spot. It wouldn’t make one bit of difference if I tried to ride him badly because he’d just do his own thing anyway. Besides, Tara had already watched me ride him for a whole week. She knew he was good. She didn’t need me to show her.
“Maybe you could mess up just a little bit,” I whispered to Encore. “You know, just enough so that she doesn’t like you.”
His dark ears flicked back and forth as he listened to me but I wasn’t even sure that I wanted him to. I wanted to keep him and I wanted my father to have the money we apparently so desperately needed but I couldn’t have both of those things at the same time.
“I guess we’ll just leave it up to fate then,” I said as Tara and her mother walked towards us.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Tara was trying to be polite to me in front of everyone else but I knew that inside it was killing her. She had smiled politely as the introductions were made and then stood there trying not to look mad as my father instructed me and Encore over the highest and most challenging jumps. We cleared them with room to spare and finished to a round of applause. Encore made it look easy. He was going to be a perfect horse for whoever bought him so I wasn’t sure why Tara didn’t look happy about the fact that she was going to get to ride him.
She’d brought her own saddle so we had to traipse back up to the barn so that we could change his tack. Tara’s mother, a willowy woman called Violet, kept tripping over the dirt in her high heels. Her hands out and wrists flapping as she bobbed about like a drunk. My father almost had to catch her a couple of times. She didn’t seem to mind though. All she was interested in was Encore. Her daughter may not have known what a special horse he was but Violet knew.
“As soon as my Tara came back from that clinic and told me about your horse, I just knew we had to have him,” she said, her voice high and wispy like a summer’s breeze.
“He has a lot of talent,” Dad said diplomatically.
“He made your girl a winner,” she said. “She qualified for the Talent Scout series and my daughter didn’t. We need to rectify that darling, don’t we?”
“Yes Mom,” Tara said, looking at her feet.
In front of her mother, the girl who had been so brash at the clinic wasn’t wearing the pants anymore. It was almost too good to be true. In fact I was kind of enjoying myself.
Tara made a big deal out of switching the saddles and checking all of Encore’s tack. It was like she expected me to have slit the reins or put prickly stickers in his girth or something.
“Everything okay here?” Dad said, looking at his watch.
He had other clients to teach and although Tara and her mother potentially represented a big pile of commission, it wasn’t a sure thing. Not yet anyway.
“My Tara just likes to be thorough, don’t you dear,” Violet said.
“Yes,” Tara mumbled from under the saddle flap.
It was almost like she was stalling. Like she didn’t want to ride at all and then I realized that was exactly what it was. She didn’t have natural talent and she probably wasn’t comfortable riding a lot of different horses like I was.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “He’s very easy to ride. You’ll be fine.”
She looked at me with steely eyes.
“Drop dead,” she whispered back so that no one else could hear.
&nbs
p; And from that moment on I really did wish that she would fall flat on her face because she didn’t deserve a nice horse like Encore and even though my father needed the money, there were plenty of other nice people who could buy him instead.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Can I ride him in the ring?” Tara asked when she’d run out of things to check on the horse.
“The jumps are better in the field,” my father said. “And you’ll get more of a feel for him out there. You can even have a go at the water jump if you like. There are not many horses at this price point that will jump a Grand Prix sized water jump like that.”
He grinned at her encouragingly but I thought she just looked a rather sickly pale of green.
“Of course you want to try that, don’t you dear?” Violet said.
She shoved Tara out to the field, leaving me to walk Encore behind them like I was Tara’s own personal groom.
“Feel free to dump her right off into that water,” I whispered.
Encore’s ears flicked back and forth. I could tell that he wasn’t sure why we were going back out to the jump field since he’d already been out there and jumped his heart out once today.
Violet tripped her way back out to the field, telling my father about all the awards that Tara had won. He nodded and tried to act like he was impressed but I knew that he was just playing a part. It was an act. He had his salesman hat on and that meant that even if Tara rode horribly, he’d still tell her that he thought she’d done a wonderful job and that Encore was the perfect horse for her. Unless she did something dangerous or literally couldn’t ride him at all because I knew my father was desperate but even he had a line that he wouldn’t cross and he did still have his reputation to consider. He wasn’t some shady horse dealer who would drug a horse and fake its records so you thought you were getting a bargain when instead you were getting a horse that would more than likely try to kill you.
Show Time (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 17) Page 3