Show Barn Blues Read online

  But of course she didn’t go away. There was nowhere for her to go. There weren’t any other farms like mine within an hour’s drive, and we both knew it. Subdivisions and condos and resort communities were snapping up every inch of land, wet or dry, as fast as their bulldozers could roll over old scrub and pristine pasture, as fast as their diggers could dredge out canals and drain the swamps. I was the last one left. I was the only game in town. Everyone else had sold out, gone to Ocala or Georgia or out west, anywhere land and grass were as plentiful as tourists were rare.

  I was the last of the dinosaurs, and Kennedy was an endangered species herself, a dinosaur enthusiast.

  While Kennedy signed the boarding contracts, smiling away as she dotted the i’s in her last name, I mentally worked out the new language I’d be sending my attorney as soon as possible, maybe as soon as Kennedy left my office, that required all boarders to engage in a training/coaching program. “Seabreeze Equestrian is for serious training and competitive riders only,” something to that effect. This casual pleasure stuff was no damn good.

  “And maybe someone will want to come trail-riding sometime,” she suggested hopefully as she slid the papers back to my side of the desk. “I mean, it’s fun, right? I’m sure I can find a buddy.”

  I nodded and smiled and sent her on her way, waving as she walked down the landing that overlooked the Grand Prix arena, then I went silently back to the office to look down at her as she strode along the barn aisle, turning her head from side to side, taking in the horses as they gazed out from behind the bars of their stalls. “You better not,” I said aloud. “No poaching my students, girl.”

  I wasn’t going to make much having her here. I certainly couldn’t start losing income from other clients because she wanted to go play in the woods with her pony.

  Which, in my experience, didn’t always turn out well anyway. I glanced at the little photo of Sailor, leaning drunkenly in its cracked frame against a row of riding manuals, and sighed.

  I added the new Sailor’s name to the boarder list and asked Tom to prep a stall for the day after tomorrow. He nodded, his white-blond hair falling untidily over his tan forehead, and then asked if he could leave early that day. He mumbled something about a friend’s manatee expedition to some canal on the East Coast. Tom was a marine mammal enthusiast; for him, horses seemed to be a land-version of whales, and he found both were preferable to humans. “If Anna can take over for you in the evening feeding, sure,” I told him, and went off on a tour of inspection through the barn, leaving him to go find my working student and try to convince her to give up an evening off.

  Walking my barn made me happy. It was a grand barn, the stuff of dreams, and I loved it. Two paved aisles, with twenty stalls each, connected by a central bank of wash-stalls that doubled as cross-ties for students, owners, and grooms to tack up horses and have them ready for lessons. A soaring roof and open rafters to eliminate hot, stale air. A small apartment for the working student over the tack room at one end, my office up a narrow flight of stairs at the other. The central aisle led to the crown jewel of my success: the huge, shady covered arena, comfortably situated alongside the barn and always buzzing with riding lessons, schooling sessions, boarders idly chatting while they walked their sweaty horses on long reins after hard rides. The riders who moved to Florida from Up North (a designation that meant everything on the map above Jacksonville) took one look at the covered arena and signed on the dotted line as fast as their fingers could fly. The shade was the only thing that stood between them and giving up riding for nine months out of the year.

  Hell, I loved riding in my covered arena, and I had grown up riding under that unrelenting Florida sun.

  I leaned on the rail and watched a thin woman on a striking dapple gray warmblood trotting in big, irregular figure-8s. Colleen was better over fences than on the flat, probably because her Trakehner gelding, Bailey, was an auto-pilot jumping machine who could cart anyone around a High Amateur-Owner course without any real direction. But she put in her time on the flatwork anyway, and dutifully attended the fall dressage show I inflicted on all of my advanced students as a preparation for the winter jumping season, so I really couldn’t fault her for any lack of trying.

  Sometimes it was just hard to get back what had come so easily in girlhood, when you took off twenty years for career and husband and family.

  “A bit more leg, Colleen,” I called as Bailey jogged by with his nose in the dirt and a bored expression on his big face, and she grimaced and picked up her heels a bit, digging into Bailey’s dappled sides with the harmless little nubs of spurs I allowed the riders with less-than-enthusiastic horses. Bailey grunted, lifted his head, and gave me a side-eyed look of disgust, but at least his trot picked up some momentum.

  “Very nice,” I congratulated Colleen, watching them continue down the rail, and I tried to ignore the way she twisted a little to the right with every rise from the saddle. It really wasn’t important, not worth the misery it would take to try to fix. Some things like that, tricks of an aging body, you couldn’t fix. Hell, did I post straight anymore? Probably not. Things hurt that didn’t used to. Things stopped working. You got on and rode anyway, because that was what mattered.

  I walked back through the barn to the other side, and looked out at the paddocks. Sandy and small, they weren’t much to look at if you were used to green fields that stretched to the horizon, but for the suburban equestrian, they were certainly good enough. A cloud of dust rose from the nearest paddock, and four legs waved in the air. I sighed. Lying in the middle of that mess would be the one and only Ivor.

  “Get up, you awful beast!” I shouted, and a head that might have been white once, but which was now coated with black sand, popped up from the dirt to look at me. Ivor nickered, and I smiled despite myself. He was a lovely clown.

  “We have to ride, you know,” I told him, putting a foot up on the fence-rail and leaning over the top. He clambered up from the ground with an alarming lack of grace and jogged over, rumbling nickers from deep in his chest. He was talkative and desperate for attention, like a few other stallions I had known. It was endearing, and almost made up for the hard labor induced by having a glowing white coat beneath his habitual cloak of dirt. Unlike Bailey’s dark, steely dapples, Ivor fancied himself a unicorn, and the only dark hairs left in his maturity were wisps at his knees, fetlocks, and around the boney bits of his head. Otherwise, he was one big stain-magnet, a whitening-shampoo commercial, an argument for the selective breeding of dark bays.

  Now he tried to rub his filth onto my face and my spotless blue polo shirt. “Get off, get off,” I snapped, jumping back from the fence just as he shoved his head over, fluttering his nostrils in greeting. “I’m going to have to hire a groom just for you this winter, now that you’re going to do some Grand Prixs and need to look fancy.” Ivor flung his head up and down and brought a huge fore-hoof crashing down on the fence’s lowest rail. I leapt at him and clapped my hands like a child scaring a pigeon and he squealed and took off running around the paddock, creating a minor dust storm in the process.

  “Jackass,” I muttered, but I was smiling when I went back into the barn. Ivor always raised my spirits. We’d been together for a good six years now, and it was becoming the deepest relationship I’d had with a horse. Well, since childhood. Since Sailor.

  Still, no matter how much I loved that horse, it was nice to have someone else to clean him up.

  “Ah, Anna,” I said cheerfully, leaning into the spotless feed room, where Anna was sitting on a bucket and measuring out feed supplements. “How would you like to tack up a horse for me?”

  Anna looked at the dirt on my face and grinned. “I’m on it. Give me about a half an hour, though. Judging by how dirty you are.”

  I grimaced, to let her know that Ivor was exactly as filthy as she thought, and watched her put away the supplements and bags before she skipped away down the barn aisle. More of a rider than a groom, Anna would always try to wheedle her
way out of the more tedious cleaning and management work that kept the barn ticking over, in favor of anything hands-on with the horses — grooming, warming-up, bathing, schooling a lesson horse who needed a tune-up. She was either going to have to learn to like the nuts and bolts work, or marry rich, I’d told her more than once. Horses were fun, but the care and keeping of them was never-ending work.

  The people were no picnic either, I thought, as I heard raised voices in the boarder’s tack room. I poked my head in cautiously and saw, amongst the enamel-covered tack trunks and slipcovered saddles, the ever-contentious Stacy Hummel throwing up her hands, a poisonous expression on her ferrety face. “And then the sneaky bitch thinks she can just borrow my padded bridle, like I won’t notice, and lets out the throat-latch to the very end and now the leather won’t stay down in the keeper because her horse has such a fat face —”

  “Ladies?” I cut in, my voice solicitous. “Problem?”

  Gayle, round-figured and round-eyed and ready to run from the room, gazed at me in horror, her cheeks pink. Stacy flung back her blonde ponytail and faced me defiantly, looking every inch the cheerleader captain her small daughter would doubtlessly become. “Just Melanie taking Fallon’s padded bridle without permission! Nothing special!”

  I pointedly looked over at the neatly wrapped bridles hanging along the east wall of the tack room. Each one was labeled with a horse’s name in neat black letters on white tape. Every boarder got one bridle hook, and they were encouraged to keep spare or show bridles in their tack trunks. I noticed that Fallon’s hook was bursting with three bridles, hanging untidily one atop the other, and remembered seeing a bridle on the floor the other day. It was a rare enough incident that it stuck in my mind. I ran a tight ship. “Ah, I think I know what happened. I asked Anna to pick up the bridle on the floor and hang it up on an empty peg. She must have put it on Rowan’s hook by accident.”

  “And why would Melanie think Rowan’s plain old bridle magically became a self-padded bridle with brass fittings, ordering specially from England?” Stacy crossed her arms under her chest.

  “Because Melanie asked for an extra schooling session for Rowan yesterday and I had Anna ride him?”

  Stacy’s face fell just a little, possibly as much as it could, since I couldn’t imagine Stacy ever going so far as to admit she had been wrong.

  “Honest mistake, I think,” I went on soothingly. “I’ll ask Melanie what she did with Rowan’s bridle. Maybe she took it for repairs and forgot to tell me. In the meantime,” I looked meaningfully at the heap of leather hanging from Fallon’s peg, “you may want to put your extra bridles in your trunk, so they don’t fall down anymore.”

  Gayle smiled tentatively, always ready for peace. I wondered how she’d ended up cornered by the angry, brittle Stacy in the first place. Bad luck, I guessed. She’d never have voluntarily walked into the tack room if she’d known Stacy was in there. Gayle was afraid of most things, but she was terrified of mean people, and Stacy definitely fell under that heading. “Guess that’s alright then!” she burst out. Without another look at either of us, she tucked her saddle firmly against her side and raced out of the tack room.

  I beamed at Stacy, who gave me an unwilling quiver of the lips in return. “Always best to ask about these things, rather than to make accusations,” I said. “And show the leather to Tom and he’ll make the keeper fit again.”

  Stacy nodded tightly. “Thank you.” There was a pause. “I’m sorry.”

  I paused and waited, but the sky didn’t fall and no pigs went flying by. Maybe I had misjudged Stacy. More likely I hadn’t and she was just having an uncharacteristically weak moment since her expensive bridle had been slightly damaged. “It could happen to anyone,” I said brightly, and went on down the aisle before I could accidentally say something honest and tell her what a nasty piece of work I thought she was.

  Speaking my mind would be terrible for business.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Rain moved in that late that night, and the next morning I slept through my alarm, lulled into uncertain dreams by the watery gray light drifting through my blinds. I woke at seven thirty when the orange sun finally pierced through the mist and glinted on my face. I sat up, looked at the clock, and sighed. Thank goodness I wasn’t feeding the horses this morning.

  I picked up my phone, checked for messages from the barn, and when there was nothing, decided to take it easy for the morning. Boss’s prerogative. I padded out to the kitchen, the old wooden floors of the bungalow creaking beneath my bare feet, and made coffee and toast. My avocado-colored refrigerator hummed furiously, and when I leaned against the door so that I could peer up into a high cabinet for a new pack of coffee filters, it felt hot against my back. “Don’t die, fridge,” I told it, but I figured a trip to Lowe’s was in my near future. The appliances, which had come with the old house, were older than I was, and they’d been dying one by one. I still ran my hand adoringly over my new stove; the old one, with burners which refused to light when the kitchen was too humid for its liking, was not missed.

  But a green fridge was to be mourned. They didn’t make things that shade of Kermit anymore. My grandfather had loved it.

  I had just settled down at the kitchen table with coffee and my tablet, ready to read the morning paper, when there was a mechanical sound aside like the death rattle of a dragon. I put down the tablet with a sigh. Rodney had stopped by. I liked Rodney just fine — he was the last hold-out, along with me, of the old riding community that had once thrived here. I just wasn’t in the mood to chat this morning. Or most mornings, really. But what could you do? He was my only ally at zoning board meetings and community rallies. I got up and opened the door just as his cowboy boots hit the splintering boards of my sagging front porch.

  He smiled and touched the brim of his cap, old-fashioned and Southern to the bone. “Miss Grace,” he greeted me, weathered face splitting into a grin. He’d missed a few spots shaving, and the bristles on his tanned cheeks were white now. But the unkempt hair curling from beneath the feed-store cap was still a boyish dirty blonde, and there was no hint of age in his bright blue eyes. Which was impressive, because if I stopped and did the numbers, I’d probably find that Rodney Blake had already been receiving his AARP magazine every month when I’d moved back here more than a decade ago. The farm life would either age you young or keep you living forever, I guessed. I wondered which one it was doing to me.

  “Rodney,” I replied with real warmth, suddenly pleased to see him. “Come in and have some coffee.”

  Rodney wiped his boots carefully, leaving behind at least some of the morning’s mud on my mat, and stepped into the little bungalow, looking around appreciatively as he always did. “You sure have a fine house here,” he said, nodding at the living rooms walls. They were bedecked with framed horse show posters and a vintage Aer Lingus print advertising the Dublin Horse Show. The little room was centered around the sagging couch covered with a horse-racing throw. “I always did like this house. Your grandpa built it real solid.”

  “He sure did,” I agreed, my voice slipping back into a long-abandoned country cadence. “I love it so.” I adored my house — a 1920’s cracker bungalow, with all the termites and raccoons under the porch to prove it, dark and cool in summer and dark and drafty in winter. “Couldn’t be more different than those candy-shell pink mansions they’re building now, right?” I fetched coffee from the galley kitchen and set it down on the table, then thought and grabbed milk from the growling fridge. Rodney settled down in a creaking thrift-store chair and started in on the coffee. I sat back down at the other side of the table and waited for him to get around to his reason for stopping by. We were not social people, given to leaving our farm and our work just to drop by and say hello. He had something on his mind.

  “You thinking about selling?” he asked after a few sips.

  “I’m sorry?” I nearly choked. Although I got printed letters in the mail every few weeks, announcing that this realty company
or that developer was looking for properties in the area and was ready to buy, I always threw them straight into the recycling. There couldn’t possibly be a rumor in the neighborhood that I’d been considering selling up.

  “I heard the Roth boys were coming after you pretty hard. Heard you might be giving in.”

  “The Roth… I don’t even know who that is.” I tried to picture the most recent of the thin paper envelopes. Nothing came to mind. “Who told you that?”

  “Dean Roth.” Rodney sighed. “I’m selling to him.”

  I put down my coffee mug with a clink on the wooden table. The porcelain cow decorating the table’s center wobbled dangerously. “What now? Rodney, you can’t be selling. You’re all I have left.” Rodney and his twenty acres a few miles north on the highway, Rodney and his little lesson barn, ramshackle with age and losing a section of roofing every now and then when a big storm rolled through, Rodney and his collection of mutt ponies and horses, teaching kids how to ride in a big muddy ring for the past forty years, give or take — Rodney was a fixture in this community, much more so than me.

  If he left, there wouldn’t even be a community, I realized. Two barns left out of twenty was sad. One barn was a woman in denial.

  “I’m sorry,” Rodney said, shaking his head and looking into his coffee mug. The bill of his cap covered his face, but I could see his hands were shaking a little. Worry? Or age? I bit my lip. “I’m sorry, Grace, but it’s time. Taxes are already killing me, and now they want to run sewer and city water out there and it’s going to be a fortune. Something about protected swamps, filtering water. I don’t know.”

  I knew — the land behind Rodney’s farm had been rezoned. We’d both been at that meeting, and neither of us had really grasped the technical details, but I’d understood more of it than he did. That’s how I knew that the new golf club that was going in across the highway from him had managed to change their zoning from agricultural to residential, and that the land behind him had been changed from agricultural to protected wetland. Mitigation, making up for the loss of habitat where the golf club would be. Now his twenty acres would be next — maybe a shopping center with a new Publix, a Subway, a dentist, and a hair salon, a carbon copy of the one five miles down the road. Or maybe it would be two hundred new houses, painted shell-pink and peach, crammed in one on top of the other, surrounded with St. Augustine lawns and sprinklers that kicked on every morning at 6:15, rainy season and dry. Or perhaps a resort, its manicured grounds peppered with ostentatious date palms that were more at home in the Arabian Peninsula than in Florida.