“Jennifer Wolfe,” the attendant said. “That’s right. No, she’s right here. Fine, fine, I’ll tell her. Thank you.”
He looked at her through the glass. “Sorry, miss. This pass has been suspended. I’ll have to keep it.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Still shaking, Jenny stood along the pavement’s edge, calling Aidan’s phone over and over again. He didn’t answer. She kept switching off more and more quickly, before she could hear his voice again, that repeated outgoing message suggesting the caller send him a text instead (Aidan hated answering voicemails). She sent the texts, but they didn’t seem to go through. Either Aidan had turned off his read receipts, something they’d often joked they’d never do to each other, or his phone was switched off. Or he was simply refusing to look at her texts, letting the notifications stack up and up on his screen. Aidan had never minded having a lot of notifications on his phone. Once he’d let his inbox climb to 666 new emails just for the fun of it. Lana had finally grabbed his phone and run her finger down a long, unfurling line of emails, marking hundreds read in one impressive twenty-first century swoop.
Her only coherent thought, once the gate attendant had refused her entrance, put her press pass into a manila envelope, and told her the security manager was too busy to see her today, was that Aidan would be arriving soon and he could help her. Or if he couldn’t help her, at least he could get the photos and observations they needed to put up a post about the race tonight. She could get a meeting with the security manager tomorrow, and get this craziness sorted out without having to involve Lana or Mr. Farnsworth.
Without that hope, she wasn’t sure what else she could do tonight. She didn’t have a horseman’s pass for Saratoga. And something told her that even if she convinced Caitlin to try and sign her in as a visitor, the security manager was going to have something to say about it. She couldn’t put Caitlin in the middle of all this. It was clear that whoever was running this campaign against her—whether it was the Lawsons or someone else—had immense power over the racing community. Caitlin had none, and her career was just beginning.
Jenny was alone on this.
She called Aidan one more time, and again the call went straight to voicemail. Well, she thought, he’s not coming.
From the back porch of the grand old Victorian, Jenny moodily swiped through her phone while the crowds roared a few blocks away. When Denham’s filly Silky Susan won the Lucky Lass Stakes, by a nose over Cinnamon Sin, Jenny typed up a quick story using every bit of knowledge she had about the Denham barn: third-generation trainer, long history of stakes wins, a solid Saratoga record, a way with fillies which seemed supernatural. She searched around in the image database Aidan had built until she found a nice shot of Silky Susan in a morning workout, a golden-lit fog swirling in the background. The article went live with the click of a button, and she thought it was almost what she might have written even if she’d gotten to the track this afternoon, although it was nothing like what she might have managed had Denham agreed to speak with her this morning.
The sun was setting, the shadows lengthening across the lush tangle of flowers in the back garden, when Jenny’s phone rang. She looked at Lana’s name on the screen and sighed. She used to look forward to Lana’s calls—they had once meant something fun and exciting was about to happen, or at least a really good meal was on the horizon.
Now they were bound to be criticism.
“No photos from the winner’s circle? I take it Aidan isn’t there?”
“Hello to you, too.”
“Come on, Jenny, this is serious. What the hell is going on? Where is he? I can’t get through to him.”
“I can’t either.” Jenny stretched out on the wicker divan and wiggled her toes in the air. She should get a pedicure, she thought. Like Caitlin. It would be fun to have a little secret inside her staid backside boots. If she ever got back onto the backside. “I think his phone is off.”
There was an exasperated huff of air on the other end, and Jenny imagined Lana leaning back in her desk chair, as Manhattan lit up behind her, the hot city streets ignored in favor of all this work, for—what? Why let the fortunes of one little website start-up make them all so crazy? If it all went belly-up tomorrow, Jenny thought, she could still write about horses. She could still go to the races. Maybe not in New York, not right now, but somewhere. It wasn’t worth this level of drama.
Or maybe that was just the bottle of sauvignon she’d polished off all by herself talking.
“Jenny, are you there?”
Jenny snapped back to the conversation with difficulty. “The line was static for a minute,” she lied.
“It’s probably all these thunderstorms. It’s about to storm here. You’d think we’re in Florida. Anyway, why no pictures from the race tonight? I know Aidan’s not there but you could have gotten something recent. This workout picture is from Belmont.”
Jenny’s gaze drifted out over the shadowy lawn and up to the golden-lit elms that presided over the back end of the property. Behind them, the blue sky was suddenly punctuated by a glimpse of white clouds, their cottony texture billowing into the atmosphere. A Floridian instinct within her woke up and chimed an alarm. “Oh, you weren’t wrong about the storms, Lana. I’m going to have to get off the phone and go inside.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“No reception inside,” Jenny lied. “I wait out storms in the TV room, and it’s like a cave in there.”
“Fine. But seriously, next time? Photos? You have to. I’ll track down Aidan.”
“I couldn’t get onto the track tonight,” Jenny said abruptly. The clouds were growing more visible, rolling past the treetops. The leaves suddenly lost their golden glow and were plunged into a moody darkness as the sun finally set. “They took my press pass. Something happened after I saw that Lawson horse ship out the other day.”
“Jenny—WHAT?”
There was a squawk of static on the line—real this time—and a sudden cool wind blew through the trees, scattering leaves across the lawn and garden. Jenny hadn’t been raised in Florida for nothing. “Here comes that storm,” she said. “Gotta go.”
A long rumble of thunder rolled through the air, tumbling across the floorboards with a subtle vibration. Jenny raised her eyebrows, impressed. Maybe these upstate storms really were as monstrous as everyone boasted.
“Jenny, you can’t just drop that kind of bombshell and then leave—”
Jenny ended the call.
She looked at the phone for a moment, not at all surprised when a weather alert flashed onto the screen, and even less surprised when Lana’s name showed up again a few seconds later. With a few quick movements, she declined the call and blocked Lana’s number. She could turn it back on tomorrow, she thought, picking up the empty wine bottle and heading back into the house, but for tonight, she was finished.
The rain was still hammering against the windows a few hours later, but Jenny preferred its roar to the previous stillness which descended on the old Victorian now that she was alone. She had ordered a pizza and worked her way through most of it in order to counterbalance all the wine, then, suddenly feeling a little too far on the side of sobriety, she’d opened another bottle and retreated to the front living room, where she could loll on the chaise lounge and watch the rain pour down onto the quiet street, watch it flood the gardens where the rain gutters spat out their rivers, watch it pool on the front walk and spill over into the soft green grass, that strange northern grass which was like walking on a cloud, nothing like the thin, scratchy Florida grass, which grew best as a fine green mesh over a thick woven layer of brown and dead blades. Every lawn in the north was like a golf course, smooth enough to lay down on, to press your cheek against, to fall asleep on. Once or twice, after the first rush of wind and lightning and thunder had pushed through with a satisfying amount of violence but nothing remotely comparable, in Jenny’s expert opinion, to a Florida thunderstorm, she had thought about goi
ng out barefoot and walking around on that soggy lawn, imagining it might feel a bit like wading in a lake with a lot of seagrass in the bottom, but the knowledge that the rain up here was icy cold even in high summer was enough to keep her curled up on the chaise, wine glass in hand.
The chaise was also, of course, where her troubles had begun, just three nights ago, and so it was imbued with a layer of significance that the wine only enhanced. Here was where she had collapsed when she was soggy with liquor from the party, the act of keeping lubricated enough to do her freaking job having been enough to incapacitate her—and so, could she blame Lana for this? Lana should have been here, Lana was the party girl who could have handled all of those high society guests without requiring a substantial amount of booze—and here was where she had cried over her phone, which had taken thirty minutes and fifty dollars to fix downtown, not a lot of time or money when you considered the impressive emotional fall-out from what those tears eventually wrought… Aidan curling up beside her, Aidan kissing her, Aidan undressing her—or had she undressed Aidan? She had a foggy thought that she might have done. Just the realization that her one and only time with Aidan had been performed in a drunken haze, that she barely remembered it, that she couldn’t put the timeline of who did what or who started unbuttoning who first, was overwhelmingly depressing. She’d wanted to sleep with Aidan for three years, couldn’t she have managed to keep all that need simmering just long enough to be sober for the big event?
And so here she was again, once more emotional under the influence of alcohol, head tipped back on the curving arm of the chaise, waiting for something to happen.
There was a splash of car tires outside, the squeal of wet brakes.
Jenny sat up and pulled back the lace curtains, peering out into the rainy night. A cab had pulled up, and someone was getting out, pulling a coat up to cover their head, grabbing a bag, turning.
She dropped the curtains. “Shit,” she said, but her heart wasn’t thumping like that, pounding so hard against her ribs that she thought she could hear it outside of her body, because she was upset he was back. Quite the opposite. He was the only person in the world she wanted to see.
She just wished she hadn’t spent the whole evening leading up to his return drinking wine and eating pizza.
While she was still considering running upstairs to brush her teeth and put on something more alluring than the old t-shirt and loose shorts she’d been lounging in, the door opened and a very wet Aidan came shambling into the foyer behind her. She turned and looked at him over the back of the chaise. He had already fumblingly turned the lock and put his keys in the tray on the console table before he noticed her.
“Jenny,” he said, sounding surprised, as if he had forgotten she would be there.
There was only one possible way Jenny could have forgiven him for leaving her like that. If he had taken her in his arms, pressed him against her wet body, and kissed her long and deep. If he had apologized for everything, and explained that he had needed to talk to Lily first, make sure he wasn’t turning the beginning of their relationship into something secret and tawdry, and the urgency had made him forget himself. And maybe he’d lost his phone in his rush, and that was why he hadn’t been in touch. And he was sorry, and he loved her.
If those things had lined up, in any order really, Jenny thought, she would have given herself over to him, forgotten the past two days and the heartache she’d endured on her own.
Instead, Aidan looked at her blankly, and she realized he’d spent none of that time alone rehearsing his big speech to her. He didn’t have one. He’d only come back to Saratoga because he’d had to come back, for work.
“I’m going to bed,” Jenny announced, and turned on her heel. She made her way up the stairs, closed the door to her bedroom, and fell asleep before she had time to cry.
Chapter Twenty-Four
She remembered to cry the next morning, but quietly, so that Aidan couldn’t hear her. By now she was waking up before five o’clock automatically, so she was already in the kitchen, mug under the spout of the coffeemaker, when he came shambling downstairs, rubbing at his eyes. He smiled blearily at her. “These early mornings are changing me. Maybe this was a bad career choice.”
Jenny turned her back on him, poured sugar into her coffee. “You’re going alone this morning.”
“What? Look, Jenny, I’m really sorry about leaving so suddenly. You’re not—you’re not quitting or something, are you?” Aidan was wide awake now.
“Of course I’m not quitting,” Jenny scoffed, although nothing sounded better at the moment. “Something happened with my press pass. I’m probably going to need Mr. Farnsworth to sort it out. I’ll find something else to do while you’re taking photos. Just be sure to ID the horses you shoot so I can write some copy about them this afternoon, okay?”
Aidan pulled down a coffee mug from the cabinet above her head. He was painfully close to her, but she supposed she’d made that choice when she had decided to lean on the counter instead of sitting down at the kitchen table. She closed her eyes as his chest brushed hers.
“Sorry,” he said, stepping back.
“Idiot,” Jenny muttered, moving away.
“What?”
“I said: idiot,” Jenny hissed, and left the kitchen, balancing her coffee carefully against her stalking stride. He was quick on her heels.
“Jenny, we can’t fight about this. We’re working together. Come on!”
“We’re not working together today,” she stated calmly. “So I can be mad today. It won’t affect you at all.”
He stayed at the bottom of the stairs as she swished into her room, closing her door on him once again.
The question now, she told herself, was what she was going to do with her day. There was no point in asking how she was going to get through the next week, or indeed four and a half weeks, living in Saratoga with Aidan. If he wasn’t interested in her romantically, if their night together really had been nothing but alcohol and bad choices, then she was going to have to get over him once and for all. The prospect felt bleak and endless, an eternity of dark nights rolling out in front of her. But Jenny had been brought up to work, and when everything else failed her, she knew she had better lose herself in work. The problem of the press pass was not going to keep her from a day’s labor.
She sat down at her laptop and went through her drafts folder, considering old story ideas, wondering what she could pursue.
Then, suddenly, she knew exactly what she’d pursue.
The missing bay horse.
The rusty horse trailer took several hours to materialize, and when it finally did, Jenny nearly missed it. She’d been sitting in her little rental sedan for what felt like an eternity, watching the traffic slide back and forth on the road behind the track.
She didn’t even know if it would show up; after all, she had no inside intel to divine if the trailer arrived daily, picking up whatever horses the trainers decided they couldn’t feed or house another day, or if the day with the bay Thoroughbred from the Lawson barn had been an oddity, a random visit from a shady character most of the horsemen would have nothing to do with. She’d been both afraid and hopeful the latter was the case; after all, anyone caught selling their horses on to someone who funneled them to kill-buyers would lose their New York racing license. Of all the people she knew on the backside, it was hard to imagine any of them would be so callous, or so cavalier with their privileges. The only way it would make sense would be if they truly didn’t believe they’d be caught—or punished.
She glanced down at her phone, saw a text from Aidan saying he’d gotten great photos of several horses she liked, and was heading back to the house—did she want to go to lunch? She was frowning at it, trying to decide how to answer, when a squealing of brakes made her look up—and there it was, the rusty trailer, pulling into the backside entrance. She put down her phone, determined to watch that entrance without blinking until the truck and trailer reappeared.
/> Well, she amended, she could blink. But not look away. Not for anything. Her phone buzzed a few times more, and she flicked the button that set it to silent without looking down.
Only twenty minutes passed before the trailer was back on the road. Jenny gave it a few minutes’ head-start, letting a couple of convenient cars stack up between them for camouflage, before she pulled out of her parking spot and took off down the road. At stop lights, she was close enough to see the hindquarters of a horse in the back. Whoever was driving the trailer—probably that woman from the other day—had pulled in just long enough to load up a single horse and head out again.
They drove out into the countryside, and it became harder to hang back; Jenny was afraid the trailer would turn down one of the myriad side roads, most of them little more than rough dirt and so tiny that a truck and trailer might disappear into the forest before she had time to catch up and see where they’d gone. But after half an hour of nail-biting tension, trying to guess what was too close and what was too far away, she found that it wasn’t hard to guess the trailer’s destination at all. The truck and trailer pulled into a wide, gravel driveway which led to a large parking lot just off the road. The uneven ground was liberally scattered with parked livestock trailers and farm machinery. A two-story frame building perched alongside the high walls of a small indoor arena. Painted on the wall in peeling script: North Country Livestock Auctions.
There was nowhere to hide her car; Jenny looped around the median of the highway and parked across the street at a country store and gas station. She peered across the highway and watched as the trailer bumped around behind the indoor arena. There would be stables back there, she figured, or at least corrals. Someplace for the latest dumped horse to wait until the next auction—which was, according to the big sign along the highway, every Thursday night at seven, horses first, to be followed by tack and farm equipment.
The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel Page 23
