Fenced-In Felix

by Cheyenne Blue

  “Betting fraud?” Pen bit her lip. “It makes sense. ‘Flame’ will have odds of two hundred to one or something, and people will bet big on her and clean up. But why go to the trouble of fabricating a microchip saying the real Flame is Fiery Lights? That’s a huge amount of effort for something that seems pointless.”

  Josie’s gaze came back from the wall and she said, “If someone challenged ‘Flame’s’ win and made the connection with Fiery Lights, all they’d have to do is suddenly ‘find’ Fiery Lights at Jayboro with the correct microchip. It’s possible.”

  “This is doing my head in.” Pen drained her coffee. “So what we need to do is look up the chip you just read from my Flame in the database. If we’re correct, then it should identify her as your Flame, ex-racehorse from South Australia.”

  “Yeah,” said Josie.

  “I think so,” I said at the same moment.

  “Don’t suppose you have a laptop with you?” Pen looked from Josie to me, and we both shook our heads.

  “I live about fifteen minutes away. Come with me, and we’ll use my computer.”

  Josie was silent until we reached the car. She once again took the driver’s seat.

  “It seems you were right not to trust me.” Her voice was low, defeated, and her gaze remained on the road. “I caught what you didn’t tell Pen. You wouldn’t have investigated Flame as much as you did if you’d thought I was trustworthy, someone to believe in. No wonder you pulled back from me.”

  I was silent. So often, words failed me around Josie in these situations. I couldn’t tell her that she was wrong, because she was exactly right. But equally, her willingness to investigate this, even if it meant she would end up having some blame, put her in a better light.

  “You don’t have to answer.” Josie changed down a gear with a crunch. “Your silence says it all. For what it’s worth, I’m very sorry. It seemed so harmless at the start. After all, I thought we’d gain a superficial kind of friendship, and then Flame would be reclaimed, my job at the pub would end, and I’d be on the road again. I didn’t expect to still be around. I didn’t expect to love living in Worrindi or enjoy working at the pub. I certainly didn’t expect to find somewhere like Jayboro.” She paused while she overtook a slow moving ute. Pen’s bright blue car remained just ahead as we accelerated onto the highway. “And I certainly didn’t expect to fall for you.”

  She crunched the gearbox again. “Little white lies can be easier when you move around as I do. You tell a prospective employer that you plan on settling in the town when you know you’ll be gone as soon as you’ve got enough money to move on. You tell them that yes, you’ve picked cherries, or tended vines, or worked bar, or done factory work, when you haven’t a clue. But you tell them because you need the job, and menial jobs are easy to pick up. They never know you’re new at it, or if they figure it out, they don’t care because you’re reliable and turn up for work on time and smile. At least until you decide it’s time to go, when you get your final pay and then disappear. So the little white lies I told you, Felix? They were unimportant and meaningless, until suddenly they weren’t.” She flashed me a glance. “I guess if you hadn’t been suspicious, we wouldn’t be here now.”

  “Josie, you’re not entirely right.” A montage of the time I’d spent with Josie scrolled through my head: riding together, laughing, her helping me with the horses, even cleaning the amenities block. Her ease with my friends, her relaxed manner with the campers and her great ideas. Kissing her.

  There the montage stuck, like a freeze-frame. Kissing Josie.

  It really had been one of the best parts of my life in recent times.

  “It’s okay. I understand.”

  She had obviously taken my tongue-tied silence for discomfort. But then Pen turned left into a small residential street, and then right, and left again and pulled up outside a small ’50s red brick house.

  Josie parked behind her, and we got out and followed Pen to her front door. Her house was old and worn but eclectic and comfortable. There was a shabby lounge, draped in a batik cloth in front of an old-fashioned glass coffee table, and shelves of books covering one wall. A cat greeted us at the door, a chocolate Burmese. He meowed and wound himself around our ankles. When Josie bent to pet him, he purred and arched his back in pleasure, green eyes slitted shut.

  “That’s Milo,” Pen said from the kitchen, which was around a wall of exposed brick. “Push him away if he’s a pest.”

  Josie picked him up and he snuggled under her chin in ecstasy. “I like him. I miss having a cat.”

  I wondered when she’d been stable enough in her life to have a cat. I followed Pen into the kitchen.

  “More coffee?” She indicated a space-age coffee machine on a cluttered bench.

  “Yes, please.”

  Pen made three coffees and then we rejoined Josie in the living room. Pen sat at her desk and booted her computer.

  “Do you want to do it?” she asked. “You’ve looked up the microchip database before.”

  I pulled the reader out of my bag and logged in to the database.

  I was pretty sure of what I’d see. Flame’s details. The real Flame, ex-racehorse Flame.

  The microchip was registered to Fiery Lights.

  CHAPTER 20

  Late morning found us sitting around Pen’s kitchen table, eating toasted cheese and chutney sandwiches.

  My theory was shot to smithereens in tiny shards around our feet. Why would there be two identical horses with the same microchip? Obviously, they both couldn’t be Fiery Lights. Now, I doubted that either was.

  Josie and Pen were similarly clueless, and we figured the best use of our time was to fill our stomachs.

  “It doesn’t seem that hard to duplicate a microchip.” Pen scooped a bit of melted cheese from her plate and licked her fingers. “The internet is full of stories about animals with the same chip. What is strange is what horse the chip is registered to.”

  “Could you ask Casey a bit more about her Flame?” suggested Josie.

  “I honestly don’t think she knows anything. I don’t think she’s knowingly involved.”

  Pen’s certainty was absolute. She didn’t believe for a second her friend could do that.

  I glanced at Josie, who was staring at the crusts left on her plate. I reached out and took her hand, wrapping my fingers firmly around hers. “Neither is Josie.”

  Josie’s head raised, and she stared at me with wide eyes. She didn’t speak, but her fingers squeezed mine back. The room faded away, and Pen’s chatter became muted background noise. What was important was Josie and me and our linked fingers and locked gazes.

  It was true. I did believe her. And while I didn’t feel wrong for distrusting her initially, the fact that I now believed—now knew—that it wasn’t in her character to attempt this sort of fraud made me feel warm. Happy. The potential between us that had drifted away during the days of uncertainty could return, if we wanted it to.

  I wanted it to.

  If I hadn’t come to this trust of Josie in my own time, if I had pursued something with her anyway, slept with her, fallen in love with her, built a life with her, this would always have been between us.

  Now it was open and clear.

  “Thank you,” she whispered and looked down at the table, but not before I’d seen her shining eyes.

  “—only two hours away. What do you think?”

  Pen was speaking, and I hadn’t heard a word of it. Going by Josie’s blank look, she hadn’t either.

  “Sorry, Pen, what did you say?” I said.

  Pen glanced from me to Josie and back again, then down at our linked hands. “Why do I feel I’ve just missed something big between you two?”

  I smiled but didn’t answer.

  “I just said that another horse that is also supposedly like Flame is in central Victoria, in a tiny town called Walmering. The person who mentioned the horse on the forum didn’t email me directly, but I’ve pieced it together from their sup
posed location and their previous posts about where they agist their horse. It’s only a couple of hours away. What do you think? We could get there and back before dark.”

  Josie answered for both of us. “I think we should go.”

  We took the hire car, and with Josie driving, we set off. We didn’t talk much. Josie concentrated on the road, and I looked at the landscape, so very different from where I lived. Here there were rolling hills, mainly still green and lush from winter rains. We passed through many small towns, the highway often running down the main street. The buildings were stone, all lowset. There were no highset Queenslander houses as I was used to. But Queensland’s houses were highset to catch the breeze and to stay out of the floodwater when it came. Here in Victoria, flooding obviously wasn’t as much of a problem, and the thick stone walls would keep out the heat in summer and trap the interior warmth in winter. There was history in these towns, and the overseas heritage was more evident, both in the style of building and the type of businesses. We passed a German bakehouse, an Italian restaurant, a South African biltong shop, a Korean barbecue restaurant, and a shop selling English smallgoods. There were also art galleries and plenty of cafés, community centres, and altogether more population in ten kilometres of road than there was in Worrindi and the communities scattered along the nearly four hundred kilometres of road to the Isa.

  Pen pointed out a few things of interest but was otherwise silent.

  When we reached Benalla, she pulled out her phone to get the address of the stables from the forum posts, then put it into the GPS. We turned down a smaller paved road.

  Twenty minutes later, she said to pull over. We were away from any settlement, on a dirt road surrounded by paddocks.

  “The yard should be a couple of kilometres further on,” she said. “What are we going to do? It’s not a trail-riding place, it’s a private agistment yard, at least according to the poster.”

  “Can we not go and enquire about agistment? Maybe one of us could do that, while the other two wander around, pretending to look at the horses?”

  “That might work. It depends on how busy they are. I have no idea if it’s a big place or not. I’ll do the asking.” She glanced down at her breeches and shirt. “I’m dressed like someone who knows horses. You two can be my out-of-state friends that I’ve dragged along for the drive. That way, if anyone challenges you as to what you’re doing in a paddock—” she flashed a grin “—you can pretend to be clueless.”

  The yard was rather run-down; a bare earth yard with half a dozen boxes on one side, badly in need of repair and paint. We exited the car, and I hitched my canvas bag with the microchip reader higher on my shoulder. There was no one around, but I could see three heads hanging over the stable doors. None of them were Fiery Lights. A quick glance into the other stables showed they were empty, although they were in need of mucking out.

  “Go,” Pen said. “I’ll hang around here in case someone comes.”

  Josie and I walked behind the boxes to where paddocks stretched down to a line of trees that looked like a creek. The wire was sagging in places, and Josie cursed as she ducked underneath and got her shirt caught on a rusty barb. There were three horses grazing in the first paddock, but even at a distance, we could see that they were stocky ponies, not anything resembling a thoroughbred. An adjoining paddock looked more promising. There were several horses, and although they were too far away to see clearly, they looked larger than ponies. Keeping to the fence, we walked in that direction.

  We’d just ducked under a second barbed wire fence when I heard the roar of a dirt bike behind us.

  “Keep going,” said Josie. “We’re ignorant tourists from Brisbane. Never been bush in our lives.”

  We were halfway to the horses when the dirt bike caught up with us.

  The helmetless rider swerved in front of us and screeched to a halt. “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

  “Hello.” Josie smiled. “Do you live here? We’re with our friend who’s in your yard asking about somewhere to keep her horse, and we thought we’d go and look at yours. How many do you have?”

  “You’re trespassing.” He folded his arms across his chest. “It’s not safe. There’s a bull in this paddock.”

  I hadn’t seen as much as a heifer, but it was a good excuse. “Oh, we’re not trespassing, as our friend is talking to the owner of the yard. I’m sure we won’t be long.”

  “I’m the owner, so your friend can’t be talking to me, can she? I don’t have any room for more horses. Look around. No grass.”

  I dutifully looked around; compared to my own paddocks, these were in a luxurious state.

  We seemed to have reached a stalemate. The bike rider wasn’t keen to let us go further. We didn’t want to leave without having a closer look at the horses.

  “Please, can we at least see the ones over there?” Josie made one final attempt. “I have peppermints. My friend told me that horses love peppermints.”

  The man heaved an exasperated sigh. I could almost see the thoughts in his head: where on earth did these two idiots come from?

  “Ladies, you’re trespassing, and if you don’t leave now, I’m calling the police. I don’t want one of you falling in a rabbit hole, breaking an ankle, and suing me.”

  There was no option. We walked slowly back, and as soon as the man saw we were leaving, he roared off in a cloud of exhaust, probably to see what damage our friend was doing to his yard merely by walking around it.

  We didn’t talk on the way back. I tried to get a look at the horses we’d been stopped from approaching, but they were too far away. Out of calling distance as well.

  Back at the yard, the man waited, holding the gate open for us to leave. Pen was already in the backseat of the car, so I guessed she’d got short shrift from the personable owner as well.

  We waved brightly as we exited, and when I looked back, I saw the owner putting a chain around the gate.

  “Any luck?” asked Pen. “He was barely civil to me, saying that he didn’t take agistments anymore, hadn’t for months, and where I had heard about him? I was vague, saying someone in Benalla, and I made up a name, but I don’t think he believed me.”

  “No luck from us,” I said. “Only ponies in the first paddock and we couldn’t get close enough to the horses in the second to even see what colour they were. Then he ran us off his land.”

  Josie, who was once again driving, had been quiet, but she abruptly made a left turn down a dirt road marked as a no-through road. “We might get to see them.” She changed down to second gear to manoeuvre over a washout. The undercarriage caught and ground alarmingly. “I saw a ute go past the other end of the paddock when we were talking to Mr Charming. If that’s a public road off this lane, as I think it is, we might get a closer look.”

  There was a track, although it was too rough for the car. We left it at the end and walked and came up on the other side of the same paddock we’d been in earlier. Even better, the horses were clustered under a tree near the fence.

  “Two chestnuts,” said Pen.

  But as we got closer, we could see they looked nothing like Flame. They were thoroughbreds, but one had a wide blaze and the other was a gelding.

  They came over easily enough when I called. Figuring we’d come this far, and so we might as well check, I ran the chip reader down each of their necks. The gelding had no chip at all, but the mare had one, so I stored that to look up later.

  Pen clicked a photo of each on her phone and we went back to the car.

  “Wasted trip.” I tipped my head back to the rest and stared out through the windscreen.

  “Let’s go and have a coffee or something before we head back,” Josie said.

  We found a small town with a coffee shop. Josie and I looked out of the window, watching life pass by in a small town. Even so, it was busier than Worrindi on a winter weekend. Pen was busy on her phone.

  When we’d nearly finished our coffee and some rather good Anzac biscu
its, she looked up. “Do you have flights booked back to Queensland? I’ve just logged in to a couple of forums, and one of them has an entire thread dedicated to horses that look like Fiery Lights. My Flame’s listed as well as the yard that we’ve just come from. Your Flame isn’t, but that’s not surprising. But there’s more. While most of the sightings are in New South Wales, with a couple in South Australia, there’s another one near Beechworth, which is maybe an hour away from here.” Pen put the phone on the table and looked at each of us in turn.

  “Another wild goose chase? I don’t even know really what we’re hoping to prove,” I said.

  “We’re looking for the real Fiery Lights. We’re clearing my name. We’re girl detectives on a jaunt. We’re having fun.” Josie grinned at me as she spoke.

  I was having fun. This was a time out of my everyday life. I’d barely left Queensland before, and now I was racing around the country chasing stolen racehorses. By now, I honestly didn’t expect anything to come of it, but it didn’t matter. We were here. The hard work was done in getting here. I might as well enjoy it.

  “We don’t have flights booked,” I said. “If we go off to look at this horse, it might mean another day down here.”

  “So?” Josie’s eyes sparkled. “We wouldn’t get back to Queensland tonight anyway. What about you, Pen? Do you need to be back anytime soon?”

  “Not me. As long as I’m back for work on Monday, I’m free as a bird.”

  “We could go and check out this horse. Stay overnight somewhere. Drive back to Melbourne tomorrow.” Josie wore an impish grin. She was enjoying this haring around the country, this derring-do.