Turning For Home (Alex and Alexander Book 4)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “Good plan.” Chasing loose horses was no way to spend a wet afternoon. I hit the brake to turn up the hill to the house, but Alexander shook his head.

  “Let’s just drive around and check,” he said. “We have a few moments more.”

  I looked into the rearview mirror, at the ominous fleece of white clouds hanging low over the trees in the distance. They glowed brightly against the pitch-dark storm behind them. Just a few moments.

  But I nodded anyway and followed the gravel drive as it curved left around the base of the hill, and then swung the wheel at the next turn-off and climbed the small slope up to the broodmare barn. The pastures glowed eerily in the otherworldly light, the afternoon’s low sun filtering through the encroaching layer of cloud in disconcerting shades of jade and emerald. But at least they were empty pastures.

  I pulled right up to the barn’s center aisle and we peered in. Manny and Martina waved from their folding chairs in front of the feed room, where they were sitting in a small ocean of convenience store wrappers. Kerri poked her head out of the feed room and waved. “All good!” she shouted, cupping her hands so that we’d hear her through the truck windows. So I wouldn’t have to get out and ask her, I figured. So we wouldn’t have to bother with the discomfort of a conversation.

  Manny reached for a bag of chips and gave us a cheerful wave of his own. He must have come up from the training barn to help the girls get the broodmares in. They were short-handed today, but Manny was always up to help out Martina. He offered her the chips chivalrously.

  “A feast for the storm,” I observed drily, turning away from the junk food debris.

  “Well, they got the mares in.” Alexander shrugged. “They’ll clean it up. Yearlings?”

  I nodded and circled around the barn. The yearlings were on the other side of the farm, far from reminders of their mothers. I drove back down the slope to the main drive, turned left, and sped past the training barn. The paddocks out front were empty. Tiger must be back in the yearling barn, his outdoor time cut short. I waved out the window to the boys in the shed-row entrance, drinking from Big Gulps and watching the clouds.

  The yearling barn, where our babies went after weaning in the fall and stayed until they moved to the training barn a year later, was a neat white structure with half-walls all the way around as well as between the stalls; white-painted chain link completed the upper halves of the walls. Nervous babies could always see their friends, but couldn’t climb or jump out. It was a lovely little set-up, but I wished we had found a way to add shutters, because the wind-driven rain was going to make for some wet stalls—and a wet Tiger.

  I made a slow circle around the barn, its snowy walls flickering weirdly in the shifting green storm-light. We waved to Luz and Erica, who were drinking coffee in the aisle in much the same relaxed positions as the grooms in the other barns. Luz pointed to Tiger, who was pricking his ears at our truck from an end stall, and waggled a finger around her head to let me know that he was still crazy. I waved to Tiger as well. I’d deal with his crazy later.

  “It looks like everyone laid in provisions before the storm,” I said as I pulled back onto the main drive. “Someone must have made a convenience store run before they had to bring the horses in.”

  “Well, they had plenty of warning. I told them back at one o’clock to have everyone in by three. The weather radio said that’s when the storm would hit Reddick.”

  There was a sudden flash of lightning. I looked at the dashboard clock: 3:07. “Damn. They're good.”

  Alexander chuckled. “So that’s everyone under shelter but us. Let’s head back to the house and you can tell me all about Tiger’s new life. And where you’re going to allow him to spend it.”

  I smiled. “About that…”

  “Yes?”

  “You win. His new life is with me.”

  So it was decided, once and for all.

  I would stay home at the farm, oversee the breeding season, light as it would be, and the training barn, though it would be nearly empty in a few more weeks, and ride Tiger every day. Alexander could continue with his plan to go to Miami without me, something which I never would have countenanced before, and he could make decisions about the racehorses’ training and race entries without consulting me.

  It was hard to take, even though I knew it was the smartest course. Staying low. Staying out of the limelight. Trying hard to be forgotten. After I’d fought so hard to be recognized as a trainer in my own right. After my break-out summer at Saratoga. After my first fall training horses in Florida. After all that, I was handing the horses back to him and taking on a retired racehorse to train for the show-ring.

  I felt like I’d done something wrong. I wasn’t just back-pedaling here. I’d done a complete U-turn.

  Or perhaps a change of direction across the center of the ring, in horse-training terminology.

  I went down to the training barn after we’d hashed it all out, the sky still rumbling with the remnants of the afternoon’s storm. The horses had all gone back out and were grazing in their wet paddocks, tails slapping at the constant mosquitoes. Tiger looked at me from the center of the paddock as I approached, his ears pricked with interest. In the next paddock over, Parker whinnied gently, hoping for carrots. A few other horses followed his lead, and their neighs carried through the damp air, crossing the paddocks and the training track beyond, alerting a few horses on the neighboring farm. But it was Tiger I’d come to see, and my pockets were empty of peppermints.

  He’d really gotten too nippy for hand-feeding anyway.

  Now he came over to the fence and leaned over, lipping eagerly at my hands, my shirt-sleeves, my hair. If it could get into his mouth to be gnawed and investigated and spit out again, dripping wet and slimy, Tiger wanted to know about it. He was mouthy as a colt, aggressive as a stallion, and as beautiful as he had ever been.

  I ran my hand along his muscled neck, beneath the fall of mane, and wondered how deep the temperament problems truly went. Surely with a little more time turned out, with some of his muscle gone to fat and some of his competitiveness gone to grass-gourmet, he’d recover his old sweetness. Even now, nothing he did—he was pulling at my shirt collar, he was stomping the ground in frustration when I pushed him away—was done with cruelty or bad temper. It was done with mischievousness, and an excess of energy and high spirits, and a brain that wasn’t being exercised fully. He was too smart to be a racehorse, I thought. Just as Kerri had said, he’d been running in circles for a long time, and he had tired of chasing his own tail.

  “I’m going to have to find something challenging for you,” I told him, and he waggled his ears at me and snorted. That for your challenges, he seemed to be saying. I ran my hand quickly up his face, rubbing at the tiny spot between his eyes, roughing up his thick black forelock before he could shake me off. But instead of pulling away, as he had begun to do lately, he pushed his head down so that I could scratch between his ears. The thick bush of forelock there hid a hard ridge of bone; just behind that, the unprotected junction of spine and skull that was one of a horse’s most vulnerable secrets. Not every horse would let human hands touch them here. Tiger put his head down and all but begged me to give his poll a good hard scratch.

  So I leaned over the fence and I did just that, ignoring the mosquitoes whining in my ears, as the sun sank into an orange mist in the west, and the thunderclouds grumbled and darkened in the east, and the night frogs were already peeping when he decided he had had enough and went back to his lonesome grazing.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Three winter days in Florida can feature the weather of three different seasons. On the evening after the storm front, it was cold and windy, and the grass sparkled with frost that night. I lay awake in the moonlight, listening to the music of drumming hooves on frozen mud, as the yearlings frolicked in the unusual cold.

  The next day was bitter-cold and clear, the yellow sun blazing away without sharing a bit of warmth. I helped the grooms break ice in
the water buckets and glowered at that false sun, my soaking wet hands blue and pinched. When I washed them under warm water, my fingers burned and stung. I bit my lip and tried not to be dramatic about it. I knew people handled horses up north all winter long in temperatures far worse than this; even Alexander was happy to trot out horror stories about the cold and the wet of English winters on the family farm. But that wasn’t my life. I was a Floridian, and my hands were so cold they hurt.

  It was traumatic for me.

  Don’t laugh.

  On the third day it was warmer at last. No frost on the grass, no ice in the water troughs. The fog had rolled in through the hills, and moisture dripped from the diamond mesh of the fences. But it wasn’t so cold, so what was a little fog? I smiled as I slipped into Parker’s saddle and rode him out of his stall, ducking my head beneath the stall door frame, and came up next to Alexander and Betsy, just outside the training barn.

  Alexander took in my lack of chaps and safety vest. “No babies today?”

  “We have a full house today.” It was a rare pleasure when all the riders showed up, but today they had, and Juan had even brought along a friend who needed work. We’d be done in record time, and I didn’t have to do anything but sit on Parker and look pretty. Or so Juan had told me when he introduced his friend, who was already wearing his skull cap when he jumped out of Juan’s little pickup. I stretched my arms up in the air, the reins loose on Parker’s neck, and groaned as my spine popped. “I’m going to try and take a little break. My body could use it.”

  “I do wish you’d stop beating yourself up,” Alexander said drolly. “If you age anymore beyond your years I’m going to have to find a younger wife.”

  “You should be so lucky.” I leaned over and smacked his shoulder. He made a face and rubbed his arm. “Your extreme old age is the concern here.”

  “Betsy, do you hear how she wrongs me?” Betsy, evidently fast asleep, flicked an ear in his direction and then resumed her nap, shifting her weight from one hind leg to the other. Alexander heaved a theatrical sigh. “Even my steadfast mare deserts me in my hour of need.”

  “Am I the steadfast mare, or Betsy?”

  He grinned.

  It was a good morning, or so it seemed. The first set went out and behaved themselves prettily. Amazing to think that they were growing up. The two-year-old races would start showing up on race cards before we knew it, and I could almost envision a few of the babies being ready to head to the track for their first published works, their gate cards, their tattoos, and then their first starts. They flicked their short little tails, only reaching down to their hocks, and nipped and played with one another on the way to the racetrack, but they put their heads down and worked on the track, and then came back huffing and puffing, their breath white in the cool dawn, their eyes focused and serious. Racehorses.

  The second set was going nicely as well, though I was watching these horses more carefully. There was one silly filly who looked at every little shadow on every little clod of dirt, and she was fully capable of turning the three pairs of working horses into a scattering flock of startled hens. I put her in the back and on the inside, where she didn’t have much to look at besides the heaving hindquarters of the horse in front of her, but still I was worried that she’d see something—a bug, a lizard—and launch a tremendous spook that would knock the composure and concentration out of every other horse on the track.

  “Did we ever figure out who had moved in next door?” Alexander was looking beyond the horses, who were cantering away from us, moving easily down to the first turn. His gaze was set beyond the backstretch, where the neighbor’s big back pasture was wreathed in morning fog.

  “No, never.” But things were getting more serious. Yesterday, what looked suspiciously like a make-shift training track had been dug up from the good grazing. No rails had gone up, but there was no mistaking the oval, nearly as long as ours, though not as wide. The sand had been harrowed, as well, with a track conditioner that dug deep into the sand and worked the heavier, more solid stuff to the surface.

  “Hmmm. What does that look like to you?” Alexander pointed. Just then, Parker and Betsy both picked up their heads and pricked their ears, as if they had seen Alexander’s gesture.

  I squinted through the half-light. The sun was trying to lift above the tree-line, tinting the fog a yellowish-gray, and all I could see was the dark shapes of a few lone palms that stood in the field. And then I saw the motion, just a glimpse through a swirl of cloud before it was gone again. “Was that a horse?”

  Alexander picked up Betsy’s reins. “I really hope not.”

  I looked back down the track at our babies. They were rounding the turn now, coming onto the backstretch. I knew that the riders’ heads would be down, their concentration on getting the youngsters to change back to their outside leads as they left the turn. They wouldn’t be ready if any new horses suddenly appeared, bursting from the fog like ghosts—

  —And then there they were, two horses, galloping flat out, the sound of their drumming hooves flowing through the wet air and washing over us, whizzing along the fence-line of the pasture, and our horses broke like a tide against a sea-wall at the sight of those strange horses coming at them, horses where there had been no horses before, enemy horses, demon horses. I was kicking Parker forward alongside Alexander and Betsy, but they were shocked too, and tried to turn their heads to head back to the barn. I dug my spurs into Parker’s sides, my hands held high to block his big strong neck from fighting me, and then we were charging forward to catch the babies as they came back towards the turn in a ragged bunch, some riderless, tails flagged, heads high.

  I turned my head as we galloped, looking for the horses that had appeared next door with such suddenness, but they were already gone, disappeared back into the fog.

  In the fourth set, two more horses appeared. The fog was thinning and I saw the white face of a chestnut flashing in the weak light. Different horses from the first two. So there were at least four.

  This time, a filly spooked hard—well, she was a stupid one—and Juan was almost unseated. He rode back to the gap afterwards with a hard look on his face. “You need to find this person and give them a hard time, or I gonna go over there and do it for you,” he growled at Alexander, and Alexander only nodded. What could he do? It wasn’t illegal to gallop racehorses next to someone else’s track. The only thing that we could do was be prepared. The riders over there weren’t having any issues; clearly they expected to see horses come out of the fog, since they could see that they were riding alongside another training track. We had been caught off-guard, and the results had been tragic. Now we just had to manage as best we could.

  “We have to be ready for them, Juan,” I said. “They’re not breaking any laws.”

  Juan gave me a dark look and rode on without replying.

  The perfect morning was spoiled, but let’s be honest—perfect mornings almost always are. We got on with it. After I checked legs and left the horses to their lunch hay, I slipped into the golf cart driver’s seat and waited for Alexander to climb in beside me. He did so with a sigh and groan, as if life were immeasurably hard. Juan had taken him aside after training was finished; I supposed he’d gone at him again about the new neighbors. After all that, he’d been on his phone for another half an hour, while I was going from stall to stall to run my hands down legs, with his face like a thundercloud the whole time. I didn’t know who he could be talking to, or what about, that was putting him in such a foul mood. But I was so frightened that it might be some fresh nonsense that I had caused, I didn’t dare ask.

  “It’s going to clear up today,” I declared prophetically, pointing at a patch of blue sky that appeared for a scant moment before the clouds filled in again. “Warm and sunny, that’s all I ask for.” Weather was always useful for changing the subject, right?

  Alexander grunted. He had the Gulfstream condition book in his hand and was flipping pages back and forth, wavering between
two races. I knew he was thinking of running Luna and I was trying very hard to put it out of my head. The thought of her being led to the paddock without my hand on the lead-shank was positively painful. I pointed at Tiger for a diversion, as he was out in his paddock, pulling at the brown grass with his usual viciousness. “Look how nice he looks this morning! I think he’s starting to put on some weight, lose that greyhound look.”

  Alexander glanced over at Tiger. The horse picked up his head and gazed back, dark eyes inscrutable. His dignity was somewhat compromised by the stalks of grass sticking out of his mouth on either side. He watched the golf cart with the pair of humans he knew best rattling by, and then he squealed, twisted his body in a corkscrew, and exploded across the paddock in a record-beating gallop. If he’d broken from the gate like that just once, I thought, he could have made the leap to stakes horse quite easily.

  He threw the brakes on at the corner of the fence, uprooted grass and black sand sailing through the air, and watched us drive away, his head high and his nostrils dilated. Alexander turned in his seat to look at the horse. “You going to ride that bastard or what?”

  I swallowed. It wasn’t exactly my first choice to get on a horse who seemed to have spent his two weeks of retirement working on his bucking form, no. But I had told everyone I was going to ride Tiger myself. Even Kerri knew—and approved!—so I had pretty much painted myself into a corner. “I thought maybe next week,” I hedged. “On the calendar it said an owner coming to look at Ramble this afternoon at three o’clock…”

  “I can handle that,” Alexander said crisply. “It’s John DeSoto and he has a good mare to bring to Virtuous. He’ll expect to see me personally.

  In other words, this guy John DeSoto was going to bring a mare to Alexander’s stallion because Alexander had asked him to, or called in a favor. He must be some old friend of Alexander’s. I knew the name vaguely, from fundraisers and sales catalogs and racing programs. Most of Virtuous’s business this year was coming from similar circumstances—personal favors to Alexander. Hopefully someone would owe him enough that he’d have to bring over a good mare, a big mare, not just whatever open maiden he had sitting out in a pasture. We’d had enough winless maidens come to Virtuous over the past few years to fill the training barn, and their foals had been as unimpressive as their dams. You’re supposed to breed like to like and hope for the best, not no-good to nice and hope for a miracle.