Heart Horse (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 27)

by Claire Svendsen

“I don’t think Jordan can control his mother any more than I can,” Dad said. “And the way she feels right now, full of rage and fury, she’ll do whatever it takes to make us pay for our mistake.”

  “We have to find Wizard,” I said.

  Dad just shrugged. “I think Taylor is right. He’s dead or he’s been stolen. Maybe someone found him and thought they could get away with keeping him after all.”

  “I still think Jess has something to do with it,” I said.

  “And we have no way of proving that,” Dad replied. “Now let's get to work.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  When Faith found out she could go to the show with us she was so excited that I felt bad that I’d ever thought about not letting her come. It would be the first show she’d been to since the schooling affair we trailered off to when we first arrived at Second Chance Farm, all proud of ourselves that we’d branched out on our own and keen to pick up some new clients. Now we had clients, some of which we didn’t really want and they’d all turned out to be more trouble than they were worth.

  Dad had been talking about forgetting the whole boarding thing since there was no money in it anyway and turning our farm into a sale barn. He had a good eye for resale projects and I was great at the training part. The only thing was that I couldn't bear the thought of loving all these horses and having them sold out from under me. Dad said that it was the only way we’d get ahead. That if we made a few big sales then we’d have enough money to fix up the whole farm. I wasn’t convinced but there wasn’t really time to talk about it before the show anyway.

  “Will you help me clip Macaroni?” Faith asked.

  Her pony had a super fuzzy coat and it hadn’t seemed to matter when she was just plodding around on him in her western saddle with a broken arm but now that he was coming to the show he needed a makeover and a proper one. Not the sort of hack job that Faith would give him.

  “Sure,” I said, even though I didn’t want to.

  Breathing in clouds of dirty pony hair wasn’t exactly going to be good for my lungs but I sucked it up and told Faith to get the clippers and stuff ready. She stayed to help since Macaroni thought the clippers were either too hot or too tickly and she had to distract him with treats while I did his belly and his ears.

  “Can we give him a heart on his rump?” she said. “It is going to be Valentine’s Day soon. Don’t you think it would look cute?”

  “I don’t think this is the kind of show where they’ll think things like that are cute,” I said, thinking of how I was starting to sound like Mickey.

  “Oh, alright then,” Faith said, her face crestfallen.

  So I left a hairy heart on the dun pony’s rump and when Faith saw it she hugged me so tight that I thought she was going to cut off my circulation.

  “Thank you Emily,” she said.

  Now I just felt guilty. Dad was right. After the non-sweating issues that Macaroni had last summer, Faith had to sit out most of the show season and I knew that her love for the pony was bigger than her desire to further her career but I also knew that she still wanted to compete. Would she be ready to sit on the sidelines again all summer and would it be fair to Macaroni to keep him medicated and under fans just so that he didn’t overheat and die?

  He needed to be sold to another little girl, one who lived up north in a cooler climate, one whose legs didn’t dangle past his belly when she rode him. I didn’t know how we were going to convince Faith that selling her pony would be the best thing for him when I was freaking out about selling future sale prospects that I hadn’t even met yet. I was sort of hoping that one day she would figure it out for herself, hopefully before her feet were dragging on the ground when she rode.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Dad gave us lessons nearly every day and I managed to make it through most of them without hacking up a lung but at night I coughed black and green goop into the sink and there was a pain in my lungs that I couldn’t shake. It wasn’t just a cold and it wasn’t going away but I was hoping to ignore it until after the show. After all, I was putting on a pretty good job of pretending that I was okay. Except I think Cat knew. She kept looking at me funny and then she’d make me another bowl of soup or force some vitamin C into me.

  “Have you tried breathing in steam?” she said. “It’s supposed to help.”

  “Are you joking?” I replied.

  I barely made it through a shower without feeling like the steam was filling up my lungs instead of air, leaving very little room for actual breathing.

  “You should go to the doctor,” Cat said as she picked up her backpack.

  Things seemed to have settled down at school for her after the storm and I didn’t worry quite as much that she was going to kill someone out on the roads with her friends. In fact I wasn’t even sure they were her friends anymore but I didn’t like to ask. But she’d stopped coming home late and she’d stopped drinking, as far as I knew, and she was far more interested in how I was feeling than my mother was.

  “I’m honestly fine,” I told Cat. “I feel much better.”

  “You are a bad liar,” she said with a grin as she went out the front door to catch the school bus.

  She was right.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I used the upcoming show to try and forget about Wizard. I wanted to be out there every day looking for him but it just wasn’t practical and riding over the same paths day after day wasn’t going to bring him home. He was further away than that. Or closer. Hidden in Jess’s barn, the other horse she’d taken with her to her lesson. The second dirty stall that maybe hadn’t been used by one of Jess’s other horses. I still didn’t trust Sam but I wasn’t brave enough to sneak over there in the middle of the night and find out. But maybe Jordan would. The next time he came over, I told him so.

  “I don’t think your neighbor has stolen him,” he said.

  He looked tired. Worn down. I bet his mother was laying into him every day, yelling about how if the horse didn’t come back she was going to sue us. And what about Jordan? He was the one who’d brought Wizard over here. Was she going to sue him too?

  “But you don’t know that for sure,” I said. “You know they are sneaky, horrible people who poisoned my pony and have hurt horses in the past. Jess will do anything to hurt me and hurting you hurts me.”

  “No it doesn’t,” he said but he just sounded sad.

  This was coming between us, breaking our relationship up before it had even begun. I could feel him pulling away, probably worn down by his mother telling him how horrible we were day after day.

  “We will find Wizard,” I said. “I promise.”

  “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Jordan said. “Besides, I think maybe he’s just trying to make his way back home to our barn. Some of my buddies are going to come over and we are going out in the woods on our bikes. I think we’ll find him out there.”

  But he didn’t sound any more convinced than he had when I’d told him my suspicions about Jess. He went off to find my father, saying that he’d promised to help finish fixing up the fences and he left me standing in the barn by the open tack trunk that I was packing for the show.

  “Is he mad at you?” Faith asked.

  She’d been in Macaroni’s stall, practicing braiding his mane for the show and hadn’t made a noise, listening quietly to our conversation. I didn’t really mind. It wasn’t like any of it was a secret, not anymore.

  “Yes, he’s mad at me,” I said. “You’d be mad at me too if I lost your pony, wouldn’t you?”

  “I think I’d die,” she said. “But it wouldn’t be your fault.”

  “There always has to be someone to blame,” I said.

  “But why?” Faith leaned on the bars of her pony’s stall, her face all curious.

  “Because if you can blame someone then you feel better and you don’t have to think about how some of it might have been your fault or no one's fault. Sometimes bad things happen and there is no one to blame and that makes it h
arder to get over.”

  “I still don’t understand,” she said.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t really understand either. Now let's look at those braids you’ve been working on.”

  The braids were impressive, all lined up neat and even in a row down the pony’s neck. Even the one in his forelock was tight and round.

  “Good job,” I said and I meant it.

  Faith could have easily turned into one of the spoiled girls at Fox Run who didn’t know how to braid to save their life and paid someone to do it for them. Instead she had taken it upon herself to learn and practice and now she could braid almost as well as I could.

  “You’re good enough to do all the horses,” I told her. “Fancy doing Bluebird and Arion on the show day too?”

  “No thanks.” She laughed. “My fingers are bleeding as it is.”

  And suddenly I was glad that Faith was coming to the show after all. She’d be my buffer between all the bad things that were happening and me. I wouldn’t have to think about Jess or whatever horrible things she was up to if I was helping Faith and I wanted to make sure the kid did well in her class. I wanted her to come back home with a blue ribbon and a gold cup and the memory that it had been a great show because Dad was right. As soon as the weather turned and winter sprung into summer with only a day or two of spring in between, she was going to have to make a difficult decision. One that was really too tough for a child to make. To keep or sell your first pony and the consequences that would go with the choice you made.

  Those other girls, the Fox Run ones that didn’t know how to braid or groom or do anything for themselves? They’d be over the moon that they were on the verge of getting an upgrade to a bigger pony or maybe even a small horse. Moving up the levels and begging their parents for the most popular and sought after pony on the sale circuit. But Faith would only see it as I would, a hole ripped in her soul that would never heal. Each pony leaving his hoof prints on her heart.

  I felt bad for her and I vowed to make the Valentine show the best one ever, even with the loss of Wizard weighing heavily on my own heart. But it would be the perfect place to hang flyers and talk to people. There would be riders from all over the county and further afield. Someone there must have heard something about a loose black horse galloping about the countryside because horses didn’t just vanish off the face of the earth. That was impossible.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  In between working Arion and Bluebird and getting them ready for the show, I was still responsible for training Oscar. Since the storm things had died down between Molly and Cora. No one had told them about Wizard but I think that they knew and so they came out to the barn with sad faces and spoke in whispers, now talking about us instead of each other. And Cora didn’t really come out that much anyway. After she’d seen the way that Oscar could jump she’d proclaimed him to be too good for her. She was going to sell him at the end of the month when his training was up and that was that. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do to talk her out of it.

  I’d tried everything from offering free lessons to taking her out on the trail but the fact of the matter was that Oscar didn’t like leaving the farm and even though I’d taken him out a couple of times since the first disaster, he fussed and fretted and worked himself up into such a state that he ended up spinning round in circles until I turned him for home. Cora would never stick in the saddle if he pulled those sorts of antics with her. She’d be off in a ditch somewhere and then maybe the next home he found wouldn’t be a nice one where someone wanted to jump him. It would be the knacker’s yard because he’d been labeled a dangerous horse even though he was no such thing.

  I took him out to the ring, shivering in the cold north wind. It blew through the trees and tossed about leaves and twigs. Every now and then it would whip down the lane and make a roaring sound like a train. Oscar didn’t seem to mind. He was more worried about where Canterbury was. I’d specifically left my father’s big chestnut out in his paddock so that Oscar could see him. Every now and then he would look over and whinny and Canterbury would pick his head up and answer. It may not have taken ten minutes to get the horse out of his stall now but that didn’t mean he still wasn’t needy.

  I patted his neck. “You’re so silly,” I told him. “What are you going to do when Cora sells you?”

  I wanted to say, if she can sell you but I knew as soon as any halfway knowledgeable horse person saw the way Oscar could jump, they would overlook his annoying habits as the quirks of a talented competitor and Cora would get her asking price, whatever that price would be.

  “Are you sure we can’t afford him?” I asked Dad.

  He was out in the ring making a new course for our lesson later and had said that I could jump Oscar over it as well. He looked at me like I was a little kid asking for the most expensive Christmas gift in the world, knowing that he didn’t have the money to buy it and that come Christmas morning, I’d be one sad and disappointed child.

  “You know we can’t,” Dad said. “Why do you even ask?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged.

  It wasn’t to make him feel bad. Maybe I was just clutching at straws, hoping for a miracle, sort of how I was holding the pain in my side, hoping that would just miraculously go away too.

  “Are you sure you are up to jumping today?” Dad said. “You look pale and you’re clutching your side. What is wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong.”

  I asked Oscar to trot and forced the cough that was brewing in my throat back down again. If Dad knew how sick I really was, he wouldn’t let me go to the show. That would mean that Jess would definitely get to ride and maybe next time I’d be the alternate. I couldn’t let that happen.

  I focused on getting Oscar to concentrate on what he was doing and to not spook at the fake flowers that my father was moving around as fillers for the jumps. It took my mind off my cough, his rhythmic trot and my posting that went along with it. Up and down, legs swinging in unison. His mouth supple at the end of the reins. His bay ears pricked as he flexed his jaw. I could feel the leather between my cold fingers, an extension of my arm. The way my legs closed around his sides to push him on and how when he did, I relaxed into the saddle. It was a million and one things all caught up in one moment. One tiny moment on the back of a horse that wasn’t even mine and I could see it all. It was like somehow everything slowed down, the wind, the trot, the sound of Oscar’s breathing mingling with my own. Time was like sand through an hourglass, falling through space until only the last grains were left and they were falling slowly, effortlessly and I was falling with them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  “Are you okay?”

  It was Dad hovering over me and I was on the ground only I couldn’t remember how I got there.

  “What happened?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “Did Oscar spook?”

  I sat up, making sure that all my limbs were working. Everything seemed to be fine, except for the fact that I couldn’t remember what had happened. I also couldn’t stop coughing.

  “No, he didn’t spook,” Dad said. “You just sort of flopped out of the saddle like a wet fish.”

  “Thanks Dad,” I said as he helped me to my feet.

  Oscar was standing there looking at me like I was crazy because he’d obviously been going along nicely when I just fell off or fainted or whatever had happened.

  “That’s it,” Dad said as I coughed again. “I’m taking you to the doctor.”

  “We don’t have a doctor, remember?” I said.

  “Fine, the walk in clinic then,” Dad said. “You can’t compete like this. The show is only days away. How well do you think you are going to do if you can’t stop coughing on course and then you just faint like that?”

  “I didn’t faint,” I said defensively, hating the fact that maybe I was more like my mother than I thought I was.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dad said. “You are going.”

/>   “Fine but I have to finish schooling Oscar first. The last thing he needs is to learn that if someone falls off him, he gets to stop working.”

  I brushed the arena dirt off my butt and got back in the saddle. It took more effort than I wanted Dad to see but I managed to finish schooling the horse and even jumped him over a few fences before Dad told me that was enough.

  “But he’s got plenty of energy left,” I said as Dad motioned for us to stop.

  “He may have but you don’t,” Dad said. “Get off and go in the house and get changed. I’ll take care of the horse.”

  “Fine,” I said but I wasn’t happy about it.

  I was sulking in my bedroom pretending to find something clean to wear when Cat stuck her head around the door. She’d obviously come back home from school on time again.

  “Your dad said that I have to make you come down so that you can go and get checked out by a doctor,” she said.

  “I don’t want to go,” I said, sitting down on the bed in a huff.

  “Don’t you want to feel better?” Cat said.

  “Of course I do,” I said but I realized that maybe part of me didn’t.

  I was punishing myself because of what had happened to Wizard. Maybe if I stayed sick and felt sorry for myself then I wouldn’t have to think about the guilt and the fact that I should have done more to find him or at least done more to stop him from running away in the first place.

  “Look,” Cat said. “It can’t be easy riding with half a lung full of air. Go to the doctors so you can get better for your show and win all those pretty ribbons. I’ll come with you if you like.”

  “Really?” I said, wanting to tell her that showing wasn’t really just about the ribbons but not having enough breath to do so.

  “Really,” she replied, holding out her hand. “Come on. We’ll go together.”