Show Barn Blues Read online

  And wasn’t that just typical? I slid back his door and deposited the stallion back in his stall, where he went back to stuffing his face on hay with his usual abandon. How had I thought I could risk such an amazing horse, anyway? It must have been temporary insanity.

  Well, that was all over now. He’d have his week off while I took Hope and the gang to Fort Myers, and then in January we’d come out with guns blazing, ready to take on the international show jumping world by storm.

  Mama needed a new load of clay in her arena.

  Either way, I’d sleep better tonight knowing that Ivor’s sore shoulder wasn’t the end of the world.

  Probably.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Sleep well last night?

  That voice could cut through the sweetest dream. My eyelids flew open, and for a moment I wondered where the hell I was. Then I lifted my head from the back of my office chair and smiled apologetically at the hatchet-faced woman glaring down at me. Reality flowed over my shoulders in a chilly stream. That’s right. That’s where I was. “Oh, Colleen, I’m so sorry. I really didn’t, actually. I was up late with the vet. I meant to go down and help Anna get the trailer packed, and here I am sleeping the day away.”

  Colleen came into the office stiffly, holding out cherry-red talons. “Just came from the salon,” she explained, setting down her expensive handbag gingerly, careful not to expose her freshly lacquered fingertips to the embossed Ls and Vs all over the leather surface. I’d never understood why rich people wanted someone else’s monogram on their things. As a horsewoman, inscribing as many possessions as possible with my own initials was kind of a religion.

  “I don’t know how you’re going to ride in those,” I observed school-marmishly.

  Colleen regarded her fingernails critically. “They’ll have to go before the show, but I missed nice nails,” she responded gloomily, eyeing her fingertips. “I don’t ride until tomorrow afternoon, so it can wait. Anyway, I have to look fabulous at one of Tom’s parties tonight — you know how it is. A fundraiser, lots of wine glasses, lots of powerful men judging each other’s wives.”

  I didn’t know how it was, thank goodness. “I hope it doesn’t keep you out too late tonight,” I offered sympathetically. Colleen must feel upstaged by her husband at these events, and Colleen was not good at being upstaged.

  “Oh, it will.” She brushed the subject off. “I wanted to talk to you about something.” She glanced back at the open screen door, the blue winter sky sparkling over her shoulder. There wasn’t a cloud in sight. “I’ll close the door.”

  I furrowed my brow as she pushed back her chair and tripped back over to the office entrance in her beaded flip flops — she’d had her toes painted up too, I noticed — and delicately pushed the heavy door closed. When the latch had clicked, she turned around and gave me an insincere smile. “Let’s talk.”

  “Okay.” I pushed aside the receipts I’d been sorting through before I gave in to my heavy eyelids. “What’s up?”

  “It’s about the party I’m going to tonight.” She looked away nervously, something that Colleen never did, and I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. Was she going to move or something? Sell Bailey, stop Maddy from riding? I could see that fifteen-thousand-dollar pony cantering down the road, gray tail waving in the dust, taking my commission with it. “It’s for the Hannity and Roth Group.”

  I shook my head. The names didn’t mean a thing.

  “Developers? Built the Venezia Bay Resort, just down the road? Building that golfing community, the Preserve at Sunset Pointe?” I could hear the extra “e” in the word point. “You must know those places.”

  “Hard to miss.” I sat forward, suspicious of where the conversation was going—and damned uneasy. “Sunset Pointe was built on the last ranch in the county.” And it wasn’t called Sunset Pointe… it was just the Dale Ranch, back when old Willy Dale had been running cattle on two thousand acres of Florida scrub, savanna, and swamp. When he’d started, it had been one ranch in a sea of ranches, cattle marked with brands like it was the Wild West. When Florida had been the Last Frontier, not Alaska.

  “Well, they’re Tom’s clients. His biggest clients. And… he asked me to feel you out on this.”

  “If they want the farm, they can’t have it.” The audacity of those developers. Paving over the countryside like the gods were making more of it. Didn’t they know this was all we got? And Seabreeze was my heart and soul… I’d die before I’d let them tear down my barn and my paddocks and my sweet little cottage and obliterate every trace of my dreams. “I will never sell. They can build a hotel here when I die, but first they’ll have to spend a million dollars figuring out the trust.”

  “The trust?” Colleen narrowed her eyes. “What trust?”

  The trust I’d never gotten around to making a reality. “Let’s just say this land will stay native Florida forever, if I have anything to say about it.” I really needed to make some time to sit down with my lawyer. After HITS. After WEF. When I could breathe.

  “What about the back forty?”

  “The what?” My grandfather had called the hundred acres out back “the back forty.” No one else.

  “The woods behind the farm. The trails? That scrubland? You own that, too, don’t you?”

  “Oh yes, but it can’t be developed without buying this farm,” I explained. “There’s no road access. It’s landlocked.” Unless the golf course going in next door included some sort of access I hadn’t known about… I felt a little curdle of worry twist in my stomach.

  “It can’t be developed yet,” Colleen said comfortably. “And neither can the Wilcox property. Not yet.”

  “They bought out Hugh Wilcox?” This was sad news. Hugh had hung onto his old ranch long after he’d decamped for a houseboat out near Homossassa. That meant the parcel of land east of the lake would no longer be safe… I bit my lip as Colleen made a who’s that? face, shook her head, and went on with her story.

  “That’s why the country club going in next door hasn’t broken ground yet. They were trying to get the county to build a new road to connect back to the Wilcox property. Turns out there’s only one place they can do it without taking ten years or something crazy like that. Changing zoning, blah blah, legal speak. Because there’s technically already a road there. You know anything about that?”

  I sat upright, my heart hammering. The trail. Stories my grandfather told me came rushing back. They weren’t just stories. There was a reason it was so wide and straight and hard-packed.

  Colleen liked that. She leaned forward, looking chummy. “Here’s the thing — I’m not on anyone’s side. If it’s a good deal for you, great, you should do it. All I know is, I saw the maps in Tom’s office. There’s some old road that’s been on the maps since they started keeping records… I forget the name now, the Tomahawk Trail, maybe —”

  “Timucuan,” I interrupted automatically. “It would be Timucuan.”

  “Timoocoon,” Colleen repeated, waving a hand to dismiss a forgotten tribe. “Whatever. The Timmoocoo Trail was a road that ran from nowhere to over yonder, between old Indian villages maybe, which is why it’s not much more than a break in the bushes now, but it can be paved without all the environmental impact studies. Like, anytime the owner wants to pave it. So the part that runs from alongside the farm, back through your woodland, and into the Wilcox property — that’s now worth a fortune to them. If they can build a road back to that piece of land, they can skip years of arguing with the county and the state and the EPA.”

  “And the water management board.”

  “What does water have to do with it?”

  “Water has everything to do with everything here,” I sighed, suddenly feeling I’d had it up my neck with Yankees. “And the Timucuan Indians lived here five hundred years ago, more or less. That’s what the road name means. They must have had a game trail or something here.” I didn’t know if that was true, but my grandfather had claimed it was.

  I
wanted to go out there right now, and get away from Colleen and her red fingernails of doom and her thinly veiled threats from the developers. I wanted to climb onto Ivor’s back and gallop away from all this.

  Ivor was lame, I remembered sadly, and anyway, we had to get to the horse show.

  A trail ride would have to wait, as would everything else. Including this ridiculous meeting. “Colleen, I appreciate the warning. I have to get going now, though. We need to get the horses on the road.” I stood up to let her know I was serious, and barely managed to hold back a yawn. This was going to be a three-Starbucks drive south, at least.

  Colleen got up slowly, dramatically, as if determined to draw out the meeting on her own terms. “This is something you need to take very seriously, Grace,” she warned. She plucked up her bag with those cherry-red claws. “I want to make sure you get a good deal. I’ll be listening in tonight and get you as much info as I can. Values, land prices, that sort of thing.”

  I smiled politely. “I won’t be selling.”

  Colleen shook her head knowingly. “Let’s talk after the weekend. I think you’ll be surprised at what I uncover.”

  “After the weekend,” I agreed, and watched Colleen sway down the steep staircase to the barn aisle on her beaded flip flops, her red toenails flashing beneath the bright overhead lights. There was no way I’d ever sell one square foot of my land, but if she wanted to dig up some dirt on the developers, that was certainly her business. I had work to do. I turned back to the desk and started gathering up the show entries and horse registrations into the show binder. Time to get busy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I settled down in the little metal grandstand alongside the warm-up ring and watched my students canter around the ring, feeling the warmth of pride in my belly. There went Gayle, with her thumbs turned up like a dressage rider and her knees turned out like an equitation rider, but her heart was in the right place and she wasn’t hanging her weight off of Maxine’s mouth for once, so I couldn’t complain and really, neither could Maxine. There went Missy, rolling her thighs oddly with every canter stride, a mannerism I couldn’t quite figure out to correct, but I kept her out of the eq classes and it wasn’t a problem. There went Colleen, stick-thin and smug because she knew it, designer sunglasses tucked under GPA helmet and her perfect coif knotted in a bun and hidden away in its net, her lower legs a tad too forward and her shoulders a tad too back because she was waiting for Bailey to spook at something. Bailey, however, was not complying. He looked as quiet as a Labrador Retriever after a good swim, and I knew why.

  I’d fixed his wagon, all right. Mr. High Energy, bolting around like an idiot. Taken care of with those extra rides. He was fitter, but he was saner, too.

  I was just lucky the firm ground hadn’t done the same number on him that it had on poor Ivor, on bed-rest back at the farm. I resisted casting another wistful gaze towards the grand prix arena, where the colorful jumps had been raised up high for tonight’s first big class. Bad enough I wasn’t earning any prize money this weekend, I’d also had to forfeit the my entry fees when I canceled, and money classes weren’t cheap. I was out a pretty big sum, and with coaching and trailering fees I was still going to come out pretty close to dead even this weekend… not thrilling for an entire weekend away from home, working my tail off in the hot southwest Florida sun.

  “Phew!” Gayle pulled up Maxine along the rail in front of me and swiped at her sweaty face with the back of one glove. “Isn’t it supposed to be winter? It’s hot as hell here!”

  “It’s always hot here,” I agreed. “I don’t think Fort Myers gets even the little bit of winter that we get.” I couldn’t think of a single show down here at Foxes Corners where we hadn’t baked in the sun, unless it was raining the whole weekend, and even then it contrived to be hot. “You going to be okay?” Gayle wasn’t in the best of shape, and she always seemed to feel the heat more than my other students.

  “Oh yeah,” she panted. “I’m fine. Just… need a drink…”

  I dug in the soft cooler I’d brought along and pulled out a Gatorade. I hopped down from the grandstand and handed it over the rail. “Drink as much of this as you can.”

  Gayle tipped the bottle back, both reins scrunched up in her spare hand. Maxine sidestepped and Gayle spluttered, spilling purple drink down her front. Luckily, she was still wearing her pale blue Seabreeze Equestrian polo over her white ratcatcher. “Oh shit!” she gasped. “Would you look at that!” She batted at the stain, and Maxine began to jump around, utterly confused by the commotion in the saddle and the tugging on the reins. I slipped through the fence and snatched the bottle in one hand and the mare’s reins in the other.

  “Take off your hard hat and pull the shirt off as quick as you can,” I hissed.

  Gayle, flushed with heat and embarrassment, fumbled with her hat’s snap, finally pulling off her gloves and stuffing them between her legs and the saddle so she could get hold of the straps, and then got her hat off. She held it helplessly, trying to figure out where to stash it while she pulled the polo off, and I grabbed the hat as well.

  “Be quick, before a steward sees you!” No one was allowed on horseback without a hard hat at Foxes Corners. They were very strict… I suspected it had something to do with all the junior classes. There were ponies everywhere. Well, I’d have some ponies here myself before too much longer, I supposed. Gayle flung down the wet polo shirt and I handed up her hat. I looked the white shirt over. “Don’t think any of it got on you. We’ll get you a straw next time.”

  Gayle’s smile was pained as she buckled her hard hat back in place. “I’m so clumsy. I’m always spilling things on myself.”

  “Well, as long as you’re spilling things and not taking a spill, you’re doing just fine,” I said reassuringly. I handed off Maxine’s reins again and gave her a pat on the knee. “Why not take her over some of the fences at a slow, easy canter and then we’ll call her warmed-up, okay? No reason to overheat the two of you.”

  Gayle nodded and smiled, looking happier again, and she gathered up Maxine and sent the pretty gray mare cantering down the rail, remembering at the last minute before a collision with a very determined junior that she was meant to be on the inside, veered hard to the right, and nearly collided with Colleen, who was cantering up on her inside rein.

  I climbed back through the fence so I wouldn’t have to see any more, and found Anna sitting by my cooler, a friendly smile on her face. “Hey you, managed to sneak away from the stalls?”

  “Everyone’s out here or taken care of,” she said happily. “Thought I’d catch some showing before someone was shouting my name again.”

  I settled down next to her and pulled a Diet Coke out of the cooler. “Have a soda and watch my students give me gray hairs,” I suggested.

  She reached in and dragged out a bottle of water, dripping with melted ice. “I’ve had about eight sodas today,” she admitted. “Bad Anna.”

  “Shameful,” I agreed. “Oh look, there goes Gayle over the vertical.” We both winced as Gayle flubbed the distance, hit Maxine in the face over the jump, and sat on the cantle before the mare landed. But the gallant Maxine didn’t touch the pole with her hind legs, tucking them up tight and flicking her tail in the air for good measure. “Thank goodness,” I said. “I don’t want to have to run out there and put the pole back up.”

  Anna smiled politely. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.”

  “You won’t tell anyone.”

  “Anna, you’re my working student. You’re here to learn so that you can run your own barn someday. What kind of trainer would I be if you couldn’t talk with me honestly?”

  “Well, it’s kind of about that.” She took a drink of water, buying time. “It’s like… Gayle. Gayle is not a good rider. We can agree on that, right? Her horse is like, amazing. But Gayle would be lost without a horse like that. She’d fall off every time. So… is Gayle ever going to be a good rider? And if not… why not?”r />
  I opened my mouth, thought, and closed it again. Why wasn’t Gayle ever going to be a good rider? Easy answers crowded my mind, but I couldn’t say with any authority whether any of them were true. Because she wasn’t a natural athlete? Because she was edging towards fifty and had stopped riding for twenty-some years? Because she was a bit top-heavy and didn’t work out, so she had no core strength to keep her balanced?

  Because she had skipped riding foundations in order to pose on a perfect packer of a horse who could cart her around the show-ring?

  “It’s a lot of reasons,” I said hesitantly. “Probably a combination of a lot of things.”

  “But should she even be jumping fences of that size?”

  We watched Gayle jump Maxine over the oxer without too much drama, wobble on the landing, and just manage to save her own balance by digging her hands into Maxine’s neck. Maxine shook her head a little, ears pinned, but cantered on. “She’s only jumping 3’6” right now. That’s not huge or anything.”

  “No, but I wouldn’t have been allowed to jump fences like that if my form was so iffy.” Anna bit her lip. “Sorry. I’m not saying you’re doing anything wrong. I didn’t mean —”

  “No, it’s fine. I know what you’re saying.” I shifted my focus to Colleen for a moment, who was still cantering around in a perfectly balanced pose atop the mighty Bailey. “Here’s the thing — Colleen looks much better than Gayle, right? But they’re both about equal riders, believe it or not. Colleen might be slimmer and have more natural balance on a horse, but they’re both at about the same skill level. Which is — they can take a well-trained horse around a course of fences and look decent doing it.”