Turning For Home (Alex and Alexander Book 4) Read online

  My fingers opened and I let go of everything and shoved away, as hard as I could.

  Time has a way of stopping when you’re in the middle of a bad fall. You have time to think—Oh, those hooves will land near my face, or—If I land on my hand I will break my wrist, or—most significantly—This is going to hurt. You have plenty of time to think and to imagine and to dread. But you do not have time to act. Not usually, anyway. You are only waiting for the inevitable.

  I don’t know how I managed to shove away from the colt as he twisted through the air, his jump arrested in mid-flight at the moment his hindquarters were swept from beneath him. I didn’t have a destination in mind, either. My body must have reacted independently, on its own agenda, not willing to be slowed down by my molasses-in-winter brain, working its slow comprehension through the pain it was about to experience. An alarm bell was ringing deep within some ancient self-preservation instinct, and it instantly pulled the trigger on the evacuation procedure when it became apparent that my horse and I would be switching places before we landed on the other side of the fence.

  When I hit the ground at last, time and brain functions resumed their previously scheduled programming, and I did what I always did before I’d even managed to suck a mouthful of air into my gasping lungs—I rolled myself into a ball and braced for impact from above. The ground shook when his massive hindquarters hit the ground next to me, and I squinted open one eye, hazarding a glance—and I would have sighed with relief if I’d had any breath left to do it with. The colt had fallen away from me, his legs falling to the left, where he couldn’t kick me as he scrambled and flailed to get back to his feet—

  Except that he wasn’t scrambling to his feet. I lay still for a second, then another, my cheek pressed against the dew-damp grass, and watched that big barrel of an abdomen. It rounded hugely where the ground pushed his barrel up, before narrowing delicately where the girth of the saddle crossed just behind his forelegs. And it wasn’t moving.

  I looked at his head then, stirring myself to get up, pressing an elbow and then a hand into the ground to get a better view, and then I knew.

  There was a rumble of hooves on the racetrack, hidden from me by the hedge, and then Alexander was leaning over just as far as he could without tumbling from his own saddle. His eyes fell first on the colt, and widened. I saw the panic streak across his face before he saw me, sitting upright, uncrushed. His tanned cheeks were white. “Are you hurt?”

  Oh, I was hurt all right. Every bit of me hurt. But I was a connoisseur of hurts, knowledgeable of all the finer points of aches, twinges, bruises, stabbing pains, and the peculiar delicacy of electricity firing through nerve pain. What injuries I had sustained this morning was more of the epsom-salts-soaks-for-days variety than the hospital variety. I sat up the rest of the way, cautiously, and found that everything still worked tolerably well.

  “I’m okay,” I croaked, still missing lungs full of air. “But him…”

  “Broken neck,” Alexander said grimly. “The old fall-over-the-rail trick. I wish they wouldn’t do this. I heard the Martins lost a good one this way last week. They say he died twice—he panicked, hit the rail, flipped over, and the vet found a broken neck and a heart attack.”

  The last crop of Serengeti Sun, I remembered, and I’d wanted to geld him. I stood up, wobbly on my tingling feet, and made my way over to the sprawling mountain of horse. His head had plowed into the dirt before his momentum flipped him over. Turned to one side, blood on his teeth and dirt on his face, he was no smaller than he had been five minutes before, galloping on the track. He was not diminished by death. He’d been a beautiful horse, for all his faults of temperament and clearly overactive pituitary gland. This was a loss, no doubt about it. Not just of life, but of blood. He could’ve been a star. He could’ve sired stars. He could’ve made more beautiful horses, fast and feckless.

  I sighed, my lungs working again at last, and leaned down to unbuckle the girth from my saddle. I slung the little exercise saddle over my hip.The rest of the tack I left to be picked up later. It was a long walk back to the barn.

  Evening came with more than its usual share of aches. I wanted nothing more than to slip away, run a bath, and sink down to my chin in hot fragrant bubbles, but just as I was psyching myself up to get off the couch and go upstairs, Alexander came into the living room looking harried, and I knew I’d left my escape too late. I got up anyway and collected the whiskey and glasses from the kitchen. He’d just spent an hour on the phone with the dead colt’s owner, and I could see he needed the same sort of medicine I had required after the fundraiser affair.

  He took the tumbler almost greedily from my hand and had knocked back a healthy gulp before I’d even sat back down on the couch. Then he smiled at me rather sheepishly, blue eyes twinkling like a naughty boy’s. “Thanks, love,” he said weakly. “He wasn’t exactly a happy customer.”

  “No, of course not. But this happens. He’s been in the biz long enough to know that.” As Alexander had said that morning, crashing the inner rail wasn’t an unknown accident amongst young horses. Horses could, and did, flip on fences and break their necks. It happened in training accidents with racehorses, but it also happened in horse shows, events, and steeplechases. I’d even seen a particularly stupid mare do it over a metal pasture gate when I was a kid. She really didn’t like being the last one brought in for dinner, but she was also a terrible jumper. I used to watch horses cross that spot for months afterward, waiting to see if she haunted the spot where she’d died, but no one leaped about in the Dead-Horse Patch manner, so that was one more fairy tale Enid Bagnold had told me.

  “Yes, but, this was an exceptional prospect,” Alexander said regretfully. “On paper alone, of course. He could have gotten some okay stud fees based on that sire alone, even if he never raced. And then—there’s the fact that you were riding him.”

  “Oh.” Because of me? I thought about this, holding a spicy swallow of scotch in my mouth until my eyes started to water. It slid down my throat, burning hot, and beat a warm trail through my middle section. Almost as good as a bath. “Because I should have been able to prevent it since I’m a trainer and more experienced? Because listen, I told you, no one saw those horses coming in the next pasture. They came out of nowhere. And no one saw where they went.” It had been discovered, through a rehashing of everyone’s recollections of the incident, that the colt was spooked hard by the sight of two horses galloping in the neighboring pasture, coming down the fence-line towards us. The field that had previously only housed placidly grazing black cattle had suddenly erupted into a training track, and the colt had panicked and turned left to get away from them.

  Who had decided to gallop horses in that field? It was a puzzle. The elderly couple, who occasionally would drive the pasture in an aged SUV, checking the fence, neither owned racehorses nor aspired to own racehorses. I’d spoken to them once or twice—the husband was old-time cattle people, a Florida cracker, who said that as soon as he’d stopped rounding up cattle on the thousands of acres of his old ranch, he’d plunked his ass in a nice comfortable truck seat and never looked back. Horses had been a vehicle and a chore to him, not a grand passion. I couldn’t imagine him buying a racehorse for a minute, even if it was just an investment.

  No, someone else was using that land now. Some foolish dreamer, probably, who thought they could condition a racehorse on uneven pasture land. What they’d save in not paying stall rental at a training center, they’d spend in buckets of poultice and time off work. But Ocala had never lacked for people more frugal than sensible, and horse racing attracted the penny-wise and pound-foolish members of society like flies to honey.

  “The problem is that right now nobody trusts you.”

  I stopped musing about the mystery neighbors. “What now?”

  Alexander studied his glass, looking pained. “This whole thing with the Everglades horses, with the protestors, that article, the lady at the banquet—people are talking, Alex. People ar
e questioning your judgement.”

  “Not our people. Not racehorse people.” Racehorse people understood that it was all being blown out of proportion, through misleading headlines and manipulative articles. They had to.

  “Some of them, too.” Alexander’s voice was sympathetic. The cloying sweetness of his tone, so unlike his usual dry drawl, scared me more than the actual words. If Alexander thought that I needed comforting over something that wasn’t even worrying me, he really did think that things were dire. I pulled my legs up beneath me, squeezed my toes together, wrapped my arms around a pillow, but it couldn’t ward away the chill creeping through me.

  “I’ve heard a little,” Alexander went on. “Mind you, I don’t think you’re the talk of the town. It’s not that. It’s a few people who think you are a black eye the sport doesn’t need right now, and what makes it worse is that you were paraded as some sort of champion before this. And the magazine story rubbed a few people the wrong way—maybe they have guilty consciences—and so they’re using this story as an opportunity to show that you’re no saint and they have nothing to be guilty about.”

  “I never said I was a saint,” I choked out. “I only said the truth. I said that racing needed a strong retirement structure to do right by our horses and then I explained everything that I do—that we do, to protect our horses—” I stopped and took a breath. Alexander was shaking his head gently, and I knew why. The magazine story was old news, water under the bridge, over and done with. I’d pissed people off with it, plain and simple. I’d said they weren’t good enough. I’d said they didn’t care enough about their horses. Whether that was true or whether they were simply thoughtless, cutting corners where they shouldn’t have been, didn’t matter. They were insulted. I’d said too much and I’d said it too smugly for the tastes of many, many people in the business.

  I should have been quieter. I should have kept my mouth shut. I should have just worried about my own horses. But how could I, when there were so many horses out there that no one else was worrying about?

  But it was all said now. “So who’s at the bottom of it? Who started this?” I asked, but I had an idea.

  Alexander took a sip of whiskey. “Do you have to ask?”

  Mary.

  “I called her a name one time…”

  “Not very professional, calling people names.”

  “Not very professional, telling the world I dump horses!”

  “She has a few friends,” Alexander went on. “Renee Adams, from what I hear. Some more, mainly some of the lower-level trainers who have time to gossip.”

  “Isn’t Renee the one who made her old claimer into a show jumper? I’d think she’d be on my team. She knows what these horses can do besides run. The others think they’re worthless as soon as they can’t find the winner’s circle.”

  “She is,” Alexander agreed. “But depending on how far on the other side of the fence some of them might be, they might think you just plain lied through the whole interview. That’s what the animal rights people are saying, anyway.”

  “We had coffee together at the Breeders’ Cup party last fall,” I said blankly. “And talked about her horse show record being better than her win record. How great off-track Thoroughbreds are at everything. And now she thinks I made it all up?”

  “A lot of people do. The anti-racing people do. And maybe she didn’t think the crack about her horse show record was so funny.”

  Well. But to be fair, she’d brought it up. “But they don’t even know me…” A feeling of desperation washed over me. I had thought I’d be safe amongst my own people. I had thought they’d close the ranks and protect me as one of their own. “Goddammit, Alexander, how long do I have to be in this business before I’m accepted?” I set down the glass with a bang that made him wince—that was good crystal. “Yes, I showed horses when I was a girl. Yes, I am a girl. Yes, I married into the business. But for God’s sake, I’m a stakes-winning trainer with good horses and I don’t deserve to be treated like a spy!”

  “Well, then you shouldn’t be talking to magazines like New Equestrian about what racing needs to change. You should be speaking to Thoroughbred Monthly. Don’t go airing racing’s dirty laundry to the horse show people.”

  I looked at him coldly. “Is that what you think?”

  “It’s not what I think,” he said mildly. “It’s what they think.”

  I sat back and chuckled to myself. “Oh, Alexander.” He lifted an eyebrow at me. “You were right. All those times you told me I really ought to make some friends? Now everyone that might have been on my side is just waiting for me to cut my own throat and get out of their way.” I shoved myself up from the couch. “And now, enough of this. I hit the ground today. I need a hot, hot bath.”

  Alexander poured another glass of whiskey and waved it in my direction. “I’ll be up shortly,” he said. “I just have to rethink my stallion plans… again.”

  I didn’t know what that meant. It reminded me of something else Mary had said—God, that woman said a lot, didn’t she?—something about big plans for our breeding program. I gave Alexander an absent kiss and went up the stairs, fingers trailing the banister’s smooth wood, wondering if he had planned to stand the big colt at stud here at Cotswold.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Maybe I hadn’t spent my years in Ocala making friends in the racing community, but at least I had Kerri. Still my assistant in name if not in reality, since she spent most of her time in the broodmare barn now that I was exiled from the racetrack, and really, before that. Kerri had been my assistant in Saratoga and Tampa and Gulfstream, and she’d been wonderful and committed and completely priceless… but now I was starting to wonder if her heart was really with the mares and foals.

  If that was the case, I really couldn’t blame her. I just missed her when she was sequestered on the hillside with her ladies and babies while I wrestled the older horses down in the training barn.

  I wasn’t in much of a wrestling mood today. All of the horses looked like more trouble than I wanted to deal with. And the riders in the training barn, well… none of them seemed in the mood to talk to me… or listen to me… or look at me… or acknowledge my presence in any way, shape, or form. It wasn’t exactly the confidence-booster one wanted after a near-death experience. I stuck to Parker, and when Alexander asked me if I wanted to gallop anyone, I said no. I couldn’t imagine the dead silence out there on the track, somehow smothering the rumble of hooves and the jingling and squeaking of tack, while every rider gave me the silent treatment.

  So instead, I bowed out of following the last few sets, citing my aching shoulders from yesterday’s fall (not a lie, by the way), and jogged Parker up the driveway to the broodmare barn. There were a few mares turning restlessly in their stalls, awaiting a mid-morning vet visit. The rest were outside, and they tossed their heads and flattened their ears at Parker as we passed their herd. Parker minded his own business. He was a wise old gelding. He knew better than to mess with a herd of hormonal mares.

  The wheelbarrows were already heaped with manure and straw when I turned Parker into the center aisle of the barn. A broodmare, open and in season and ready for a man, neighed a throaty welcome to my diminutive gelding. He whinnied a high-pitched response that made me roll my eyes, but the mare (who was, frankly, desperate) decided she was into it and hollered back. The others joined in, and the morning’s peace was shattered for a few minutes by trumpeting horses, all competing to be heard.

  Kerri emerged from a stall with a pitchfork in hand. She looked annoyed. “You had to set them off,” she grumbled. “They only just recovered from the trauma of turn-out time.”

  “I’m sorry.” I made my voice contrite, although I wanted to laugh at her dark mood. She’d learned those from me, little Miss Chipper. “I wanted a visit. I haven’t seen you in forever.”

  “You saw me two days ago.”

  “Ages ago,” I persisted. “We used to work together all day. Now it’s just me and Alexande
r and all those riders who are pissed at me about yesterday.”

  Kerri leaned her pitchfork against the cinderblock wall and weaved her way around the wheelbarrow. She waited until her hand was on Parker’s warm neck to ask, in a hushed tone, “Are you okay?”

  “My shoulders ache,” I said, wondering what all the whispering was about. Then I glanced up and saw that the other two grooms were peeking through the stall doors. I frowned.

  “No, I mean… are you okay?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I heard…” Kerri paused and bit her lip.

  “What did you hear?”

  “That you’re going through some sort of crisis,” she burst out. The words came in a rush. “That you rode so badly yesterday you caused the accident that killed that colt. That Alexander is pulling you out of the training barn until you get it together, and that the wagering board is thinking of pulling your license over the horse abuse scandal.” She sighed and shook her head. “I didn’t believe any of it, but then you rode up here in the middle of training, so…”

  I shook my head, incredulous. “That colt wasn’t my fault, for starters. Didn’t anyone mention the galloping horses next door? Or did we decide those are phantasms brought on by my breakdown, and they never really happened? Despite the fact that I wasn’t even the one who saw them. It was Richard and Michelle who saw them. And the wagering board thing is just plain made-up. I’m not even under investigation.”

  “I did hear about the horses coming up the fenceline,” Kerri admitted. “Richard says you should have seen them. He said everyone saw them and you were the only one caught off guard, and that you couldn’t control your horse, so you caused the accident.”

  “Oh really? That’s not what I heard. I didn’t hear Juan piping up that he saw them.”

  “That’s because you were talking to Juan instead of paying attention to the track.”