“I didn’t get an invitation to the party,” I said, because it was mean and middle-aged and utterly without humor, and I felt like all of those things.
Kerri stammered. “I—uh—I was going to ask about a snap for a stall webbing, and Roddy had seen this funny video —”
“We have snaps. They’re just in my desk drawer, so they can’t walk away. You should have asked me for a snap. Who broke theirs?”
“Oh … it was Idle Hour … I got him one. It’s fixed. Everything’s fine over there, really. I wouldn’t have come over here if things weren’t right.”
That much was true. I looked back at Roddy. He was still smiling, although it seemed flat around the edges; he was forcing it now. Good. He needed to be reminded that I wasn’t fooled, that I saw right through him. “I owe you a snap. Remind me,” I said, and he nodded and shrugged. “Snaps come and snaps go,” he said. “But beauty lasts forever.”
It was a stupid, throwaway comment that made zero sense, but it was meant to be some sort of compliment and I didn’t know if he was talking about me or Kerri or Idle Hour, and I thought about it a half-second longer than I should have. Then, furious that I had considered his intentions at all, I turned on my heel and walked back through the passage to my own shedrow. I paused at the corner and called, without turning my head: “I’m heading home in five minutes, Kerri.”
If she wasn’t ready and waiting in the car in five minutes, she could walk.
***
“Why don’t you like Roddy?”
“What?”
We were washing our borrowed dishes found in the dusty cabinets, and it was noisy in the crowded little kitchen. The clinking of cutlery and clanking of plates and pots echoed around the little square of cabinets and linoleum.
“Why don’t you like Roddy?”
“Oh.” I put away a couple of glasses. “I guess he wins too much.” It was a simple response with many, many connotations that any member of the horse racing community could have easily inferred, but Kerri wasn’t really a member of the horse racing community. Not yet.
“What do you mean, though? What does that even mean?”
“It means his win percentage is too high. It means I don’t trust the way he’s getting winners. He pushes horses hard and he never keeps a loser in his barn. Something isn’t on the up-and-up.”
She put down the sponge and looked at it hard, as if she expected it to rise up and speak to her. “You mean drugs? Drugging horses?”
I sighed. Kerri had yet to learn the value of being circumspect. Such things weren’t spoken in so many words. Saying words like drugging, to actually accuse someone of drugging their horse; it was a dangerous game, because a person reckless enough to give their horse performance-enhancing drugs could be reckless enough to strike back at someone who dared make the accusation. Strike back at them or their horses, which was a million times worse. “Drugs aren’t the only bad deals in racing,” I hedged. “It could be inside information. It could be a deal with jockeys or even other owners. There are a lot of ways to fix the outcome of a race. Almost as many as there are ways to win a race, but a lot more certain.”
Kerri shook her head. “But I don’t see how you could say something like that. We’ve only been here a few days, for one thing. And you never talk to him or watch him train, for another. Why can’t he just be a really good trainer? Why can’t it be that simple?”
“Because racing isn’t that simple, Kerri. Because every good horse has a bad day. Because every stable has its share of bad horses. He saddles a winner every other day. He sends multiple horses to the spit box every day. And he doesn’t have that many horses. He has what, twenty-some horses? His win percentage has got to be astronomical. It’s unnatural, Kerri. This isn’t how horse racing works.”
“Well, I like him,” she said stubbornly, and I was annoyed by her ability to focus on him instead of my instruction. Who was teaching this girl about racing, anyway?
“You stay away from him,” I snapped, and Kerri took a step away from me, alarmed. “And don’t tell him a damn thing about any of our horses.” I waited for her feeble nod, and then I excused myself from the kitchen, snatching a beer from the yellowed fridge on the way out.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Doubts
I had thought that being from Cotswold would give me just the tiniest veneer of respectability, take me a notch above the average, everyday rookie.
What I hadn’t counted on, foolishly, was that everyone in Saratoga, the old boys at least, knew Alexander from way back when. They’d worked for him, drunk with him, won money on his horses, and watched him disappear into the Florida sun like a retiree in Bermuda shorts with a sense of shock and disappointment. They didn’t just want to know how or where the old boy was, as they so often put it, crinkling their sun-wrinkled eyes as they grinned, but who the filly was who had locked him down at home and hearth for so many years.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied the first time the subject was broached. I dropped change in the cashier’s hand, and she smiled an absent smile, her mind somewhere off in whatever dreams a teenage cashier at the food stand on the backside of Saratoga Race Course might have, and ripped off the receipt that the ancient register ground out, handing it to me alongside a brimming black pit of coffee encased in Syrofoam, a burner-broiled brew that was no doubt as ageless and eternal as love itself. Vern Dunmore was laughing next to me, chuckling at my answer to his query, his ostentatious Stetson pushed back from his worn leather face to reveal a pasty-white brow that never saw the sun.
“Come on now, missy, none of us seen hide nor hair of Alexander since he shacked up with you. Wanna come up with some other explanation?” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “I hope you ain’t letting him get back to his ol’ ways!”
His ol’ ways. I felt a lurch in my stomach that I immediately resolved to ignore. There were no “ol’ ways” to worry about. Of course not. I knew that. Oh, sure, there was the occasional do-you-remember elbow dig when we ran into one of Alexander’s old cronies in the clubhouse at Tampa Bay Downs or in the pavilion at the yearling sales. But every guy gets around with girls to some extent, and that was doubly, triply true at the racetrack, after all. I ignored Vern, throwing him only a curt nod before I went sailing back to the rail to take my place among the other trainers, riders, owners, and assorted riffraff that made up the railbird flock.
But Vern Dunmore wasn’t the only one with a nose for gossip. I’d only been at the track two days, but it seemed as though every horseman Alexander had ever known on either side of the Atlantic had sniffed out that his young wife was here alone, and they all wanted to know why. And so the inquiries kept coming, and people kept … implying. That Alexander was some sort of James Bond figure with women (presumably because of the accent) and that my career as his one and only, though unusually long-lived, had reached its unfortunate but unsurprising natural ending. I got through the morning in an agony of blushes, pulling myself together by the time I got back to the barn after each horse, but by the afternoon, I had to fairly force myself to go back to the front side for the races. Kerri wanted to know what was wrong with me and I answered with a half-truth: that I was just missing Alexander.
I more than missed Alexander, of course. I wanted him back by my side so that I could throttle him for putting me through this. Who knew that he’d been such a pony-riding playboy? Who knew that I wasn’t just the talk of bored little Ocala but the entire damned horse racing community? I brushed my hair back into a pony tail and put on a straw hat instead of a ball cap, in some deference to the august environs of Saratoga’s historic paddock, and found the bravest face that I could in my rear-view mirror. I could do this.
But then it got worse.
Leaning over the white fence of the paddock rail, inspecting a short-tailed two-year-old being saddled for the second race, I suddenly found myself in the company of Veronica Hall. The Veronica Hall: society hostess, prominent owner and makeup company
spokeswoman just for giggles. She placed her crimson talons on the freshly painted wood and turned her five hundred watt smile on my startled face.
“Dear Alex,” she purred in a velvety Cape Cod accent, dripping with money and privilege. “I know exactly how you feel.”
This was unexpected. And exactly what I had feared. “Excuse me?” I asked, eyes wide and innocent. “I mean, not to be rude, but what are you even talking about?”
The sentence was grammatically rooted in my high school days and we both knew it. I was starting to actually resemble the silly girl everyone here thought I was. I was losing my cool.
Veronica’s smile lengthened across her smooth face. She leaned towards me, dropping her voice to a sympathetic hush. “When I lost Alexander, I thought I would never get over him. But I did just fine. You will, too.” She laid her hand on top of mine, twining her thumb and pinkie over my fingers, and then discreetly pointed with her index finger at the short-tailed two-year-old. “Him,” she whispered.
I looked in the direction she was pointing. “Is he yours?”
“Oh yes.”
“He’s lovely. Is his tail short because he had an injury or something, or is it naturally that way?”
“What?” Veronica Hall was furrowing her brow at me in a way that her fleet of makeup artists and dermatologists would surely disapprove of.
“The colt.”My voice faltered at her look of patent disbelief. Veronica Hall had been pointing at the colt’s trainer.
Her disbelief was quickly fading to amused pity, which would have been hard enough to stomach, but then she looked back at the trainer, a prominent man with one foot in a Hall of Fame nomination, and he flickered a smile at her before he went back to watching his horse, and I felt outright nausea at the realization that this wealthy bimbo had been … with … Alexander. So what if we hadn’t even met when these two were canoodling in the hay room? Could Veronica be any more different from me? Drawling and elegant and dripping with class, Veronica Hall, Hostess, was precisely the sort of lady one would expect to see on Alexander’s uppercrust arm. Maybe she was right. Maybe he had gotten bored slumming with the gallop girl, had a good time for a while but then just got bored.
Maybe, I elaborated, pulling away from Veronica without shame and wandering away from the paddock altogether, Australia and the farm had been a convenient excuse to get away from the domestic simplicity that my debonair lady killer of a husband now regretted.
Or maybe, I continued, I was being a ridiculous insane person who needed a smack upside the head. I headed for the Ben & Jerry’s tent behind the grandstand. I couldn’t understand my own thoughts, but Ben and Jerry always understood me. Chocolate chip cookie dough and I were likethis.
***
And so here we were: Night Three of the Saratoga Adventure/Experiment/Lost Cause, depending on how I felt like looking at it at any given moment, and I was staring at a plastic bag full of carryout as if someone had filled the Styrofoam boxes with moldy hay. Kerri came bustling out of the kitchen with two vast jugs of iced tea, which was apparently her speciality and which she consumed in astonishing volume, and seemed to run into my bad mood as if it were a brick wall some jokester had set up in the middle of the living room. She fairly staggered to the sofa and sank down beside me as if her knees had given out. Amber iced tea sloshed but couldn’t escape the jumbo glasses she had unearthed in a kitchen cabinet of mismatched souvenir glassware. Aladdin and his Genie friend grinned at me from either hand.
“What’s happened?” she started in immediately. “Horses? Did something happen while I was getting dinner? Is everything okay? When I left the barn everyone was fine—”
“Nothing happened.” She’d done the afternoon barn chores, the skipping off stalls and the topping off waters and the evening feeds and the fresh hay nets while I was off at the track scoping the competition, and she’d finished off the night with a bike ride to pick up dinner for us. Once that had been my role, staying behind to work while the trainer mingled and spied at the racetrack, and I couldn’t deny I was feeling nostalgic for that kind of job — one where everything was really, in the end, somebody else’s problem, and where I wasn’t the silly little chippy who hadn’t been able to hold on to the famous trainer.
“Something happened.”
I ignored her and ripped open a clamshell box to view its fried chicken insides. “This looks like exactly what I need.”
“Fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Mm hmm, comfort food.” Kerri opened up her box to reveal a much more sensible salad. “Have you talked to Alexander?”
***
I hadn’t, of course, except for a few quick words on Monday night, when we’d settled the horses in and come home at last. The time difference was confusing, there were whole days between us now, and we were both tired with new responsibilities and new surroundings. He was sixteen hours ahead of me. If I was lazing on my couch at seven o’clock on a summer’s evening, tearing into fried chicken and eating the skin with greasy abandon, he was out in the barns and thinking about lunch, on an Australian winter’s day.
“You should call him,” Kerri urged. “You miss him, Alex, and I’m sure he misses you, too. All alone in Australia … ”
“He’s on a farm with other people, he’s hardly all alone.”
“No friends, though, he doesn’t know anyone there.”
“He knows Polly.”
Kerri took a delicate sip of iced tea to test the flavor. She smiled. “Polly is nothing like you.”
I’d told her a little bit about Polly when I’d explained why I needed her to come to Saratoga with me. “There’s nothing wrong with being like Polly,” I said. “She’s clever and beautiful and a fine horsewoman. Are you saying I’m nothing like that?”
Kerri colored. “That’s not what I was saying … she just doesn’t have the same personality as you. According to what you’ve told me,” she added lamely. “She’s sort of a brasher, more sarcastic kind of person. You’re sweeter than that.”
I stared at Kerri’s rosy cheeks. “Sweeter?”
“I think so. You try to hide it. But if I see it, Alexander certainly does.”
I licked grease from my fingers and considered. In a way, she was kind of right. Maybe. “I’ll call him,” I decided, and Kerri clapped her hands. “I’m going to watch My Little Pony while you call him,” she announced, and I decided I was well out of the living room anyway.
***
“Oh … Veronica.”
“That’s it? ‘Oh, Veronica?’Come on, Alexander, what was that all about? I was embarrassed!”
“She …she had some horses with me. And we had a few dates.”
“A few dates. She made it sound like more than that.”
“We went to Bermuda together.”
“Bermuda?”
“I used to have a condo there.”
“A condo in Bermuda?”
“Can you please not do that tiresome thing where you repeat everything that I say, Alex? Yes, I had a condo in Bermuda. I sold it after that hurricane, I forget which one. Lolita or Yolando or something. It was my uncle’s, nothing special.” Alexander did not sound nearly as contrite as I would have liked when he admitted that he’d been having it on with that Veronica Hall person. He actually just sounded annoyed.
“I have never been so embarrassed in my life, Alexander. I have to tell you that. It was awful. And then she pointed out her new boyfriend, and he waved … ugh!”
“She has a new boyfriend? Who is it?”
I considered throwing the phone out the window. But it would take such effort. The air conditioner was growling and gurgling away in the lower half, and I didn’t know if the top half opened. I’d have to stand up on the bed and put down the phone and wrench at the window… no, not worth the trouble. I stayed where I was, feet on my pillow and head hanging off the end of the little double bed, hoping that the blood rushing to my brain would stop me from making a fool of myself over my husband. But it didn’t seem to be happen
ing.
“It was Pierre Dupont,” I said instead.
“She does love an accent,” Alexander chuckled.
I was silent. I was guilty of the same infatuation, although not necessarily with Pierre Dupont’s butchered English.
“Listen, Alex, it was just fun,” he went on. “I hadn’t met you yet, had I? So what’s the problem?”
What was the problem? He’d had girlfriends before he’d met me. So what?
“They’re saying that you’ve left me,” I said flatly. I looked at the bookshelf from my upside-down position. My head was starting to throb and my eyes to blur; I couldn’t read the names of the paperbacks the owner of the house had left behind for my amusement. I swung back onto the bed and reversed position, laying my head down on its pillow where it belonged. Alexander was spluttering. And then he stopped. I heard voices in the background: a woman and a man, and he replied, voice distant from the phone receiver, “I’ll be right there.” Then his voice came back to my ear. “Alex, my love, please don’t listen to a bunch of racetrack hacks. You never have before; I’m not sure why you chose today to start. I have to go; there are a load of mares coming in to the quarantine barn.”
“Who were you talking to?”
“What?”
“Who?”
“Polly and Jake, the broodmare manager. Please, Alex … ” his voice trailed off. “I love you. So listen to me. Have a beer. Go to bed. Get up and run some horses. Find races for them. And go and beat everyone who’s bringing you down.”
That was good advice. Beer, and sleep, and kicking everyone’s ass.
“Thanks, honey,” I murmured. “Go breed a lot of mares.”
Other People's Horses (Alex and Alexander Book 2) Page 11