Turf Wars (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 8)

by Claire Svendsen

  TURF WARS

  BY

  CLAIRE SVENDSEN

  Copyright © 2014 Claire Svendsen

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the Author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Your support of author’s rights is appreciated.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, places or events is purely coincidental.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Hampton could totally do that,” Mickey said.

  We were sprawled out on the floor in her bedroom amidst pillows and cushions, propped up in front of her computer watching live streaming from the Devon horse show. It was pretty much one of the highlights of a junior rider’s career to show at Devon. Steeped in tradition and excellence, equitation riders wanted to show in the oval ring and win that medal. It was something special and just within reach, if you had about a gazillion dollars.

  “He could totally do that,” I agreed, even though I wasn’t sure that Mickey could.

  I was trying to be nicer to Mickey. Our friendship was still on shaky ground but we were both making an effort and that was something.

  “But,” I added. “You’d have to get him a fake tail. Look, all the cool horses are wearing them.”

  We watched as another plain bay came into the ring with a thick, flowing tail.

  “I don’t get it,” Mickey said. “What’s the point?”

  “To make your horse look better than it really is?” I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  My mom got hair extensions once but they were cheap ones that looked all fake and fell out after a few weeks, clogging the drain and requiring a plumber to extract them. I didn’t think fake tails were much better. After all, what was wrong with real tails?

  “That horse is going to win,” I said as we watched a pretty gray canter around.

  The rider was perfect, barely moving as the horse cracked its knees up over every jump.

  “No,” Mickey said as a flashy chestnut came in the ring. “This one will.”

  But the chestnut gave a little buck in-between fences and added a stride in one of the lines. The girl came out of the ring with a scowl on her face and she didn’t pat the horse like all the other riders had done. Instead she just jumped off and threw the reins to a guy with a towel and a backpack.

  “She could have at least pretended to care about her horse,” I said. “They know everyone is watching.”

  “I don’t think she cares,” Mickey said. And I knew she was right.

  The girl with the gray did win the class. The Maclay medal was hung around her neck and they led the others in a victory gallop.

  “Do you think maybe one day I could win that?” Mickey said.

  “Probably.” I nodded.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go get something to eat.”

  “But the junior jumpers are next,” I cried. “I’ve been waiting ages.”

  She looked at me and rolled her eyes. “Oh all right, I’ll go make some sandwiches then.”

  I grinned. “Thanks.”

  “But just so you know,” she called out over her shoulder. “You owe me.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I shouted back.

  I lay there and watched junior riders take on jumps that looked enormous. They all seemed like they were far better riders than I was, sitting on their hot headed horses who galloped around the jump off course like it was a Grand Prix class.

  I thought of Bluebird and wondered if he really had it in him to take me as far as I wanted to go and not for the first time, I felt guilty about it. I also felt guilty about sending Fury back but Esther made the arrangements and Miguel didn’t seem to mind. He told her that he was going to turn the mare out for the summer anyway to give her brain the vacation it sorely needed and then bring her back in the fall and see what she was like. But I heard all that second hand. He hadn’t spoken to me and though I’d been waiting for ages to hear about the jumping team, I was pretty sure that now I had no chance of ever getting on it.

  But there were more exciting things to think about. A summer full of riding my pony and going to shows. Ethan had found a series of midnight shows held under the lights and we were going to try and talk Esther into taking us. And the big name trainer was coming in a few days.

  When Esther told us that she had rented out half of the barn to another trainer we were all a little upset. But then I heard that the trainer was the real deal. A really big name trainer who had a bunch of super-rich clients that showed on the A circuit.

  “Don’t the big name trainers come down to Florida for the winter, not the summer?” I asked Esther when I found out.

  “I don’t ask the questions.” She shrugged. “I just cash the checks.”

  And since she’d got that first check, things hadn’t looked so shabby at Sand Hill anymore. The barn got a new coat of paint and the fences were fixed. New jump poles and standards arrived and I begged Esther to let me try them out because they were so shiny and new and perfect but she said we had to wait. I wasn’t a fan of waiting. It seemed like it was taking forever for the new trainer and his horses to arrive.

  Mickey came back with a tray of sandwiches and a funny look on her face.

  “You’d better eat fast,” she said. “Esther just called. The new trainer is coming this afternoon.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mickey’s mom dropped us off at the barn. They seemed to have reached some sort of truce when it came to her riding, fueled on by the fact that her dad now felt horribly guilty about leasing out Hampton. He promised that when the lease was up, they wouldn’t sell him to Jess. Instead he would come back to Sand Hill and Mickey. But that didn’t exactly help Mickey out for the next five months.

  Willow, the sweet mare we had taken in for Granny Mae, had been sold. Now Mickey was reduced to riding the school horses just like I had once been. Only now school horses were in short supply. With the big name trainer coming in, Esther had moved everyone over to the right side of the barn and that meant stalls were limited. She’d already donated some of the older lesson horses to a riding program for the disabled and only kept the more versatile ones that could do it all from beginners to advanced students. And some of them didn’t even have stalls at all, like Bluebird. Which I couldn’t exactly complain about since first of all he actually preferred to live outside and second of all, I wasn’t paying anything. I worked for Esther cleaning stalls and helping out around the barn and in return she fed and housed my pony and gave me free lessons. But even lesson time was going to be tricky now that we’d be sharing the arena with the other trainer’s students.

  “What do you think they’ll be like?” Mickey asked.

  “I bet they’ll be lovely and we’ll all be the best of friends,” I said with a fake smile.

  “Very funny,” she said. “But what do you think they’ll really be like?”

  “They’ll be like a bunch of Jess clones, that’s what they’ll be like.” I sighed.

  “But why?” Mickey said. “You don’t know that. They could be really nice. Hey, maybe one of them will let me ride their horse?”

  “They aren’t going to let us come near their horses with a ten foot barge pole,” I said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

  “It means that they are all rich enough to ride with a big name trainer and their horses probably cost more than our houses so they aren’t going to want to have anything to do with low
lifes like us.”

  “We’re not low lifes,” she said.

  “Yes we are,” I told her. “We’re lower than a low life. We’re the scum on the bottom of the shoes of low lifes.”

  “Ewwwww,” she cried. “Gross.”

  “Yes, we’re gross. Now come on. Esther is probably really freaking out by now.”

  We found Esther standing in her office, staring at the wall of ribbons. It had been a long time since we’d pinned any blue ones to it. We hadn’t exactly been setting the kind of standard that Esther wanted to project for Sand Hill. But then again, she didn’t have the funds to pull off attracting the big clients anyway. The barn was nice but homely. There weren’t brass nameplates on every stall or polished half doors so that the horses could stick their heads out into the aisle. Instead we had dusty stall guards that every now and then a horse would lean on too hard and as a result, pop out of its stall like a cork coming out of a bottle. Appearances shouldn’t have been everything but in real life they were and they especially were in the horse world where you had to put on the pretense of being loaded, even if it meant all your equipment was paid for by plastic.

  “Hey Esther.” I leant on the door frame. “Everything okay?”

  “Oh, hey girls.” She looked startled like she hadn’t heard us coming, even though we’d been really noisy. “Did you know that I once competed at Devon?” She looked back at the ribbons.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “I had this hunter, Fairy Magic, she was the real deal. Quiet, scopey, she’d crack those knees and tuck them right up under her chin. She really loved hunter derbies and would take all the high options in stride. Jump those big fences like they were nothing. And one year? One year we actually won.”

  “No way,” I said. “You actually won?”

  “Look.” She pulled a dusty blue ribbon off the wall.

  It was so faded that it looked kind of turquoise in the light. She gave it to me and I ran my fingers over the gold lettering.

  “There was another ribbon too, a tri colored champion ribbon and a big check to go with it. After that I had people lining up to train with me.” Her voice faded away.

  “What happened to the mare?” Mickey asked. “What happened to Fairy Magic?”

  “I sold her.” Esther sighed. “I didn’t want to but it was an offer I couldn’t refuse. A big one. I used the money to put a down payment on a farm. On this farm.” She looked out into the barn sadly.

  “But that was good though, right?” I said.

  “Without a top horse, I wasn’t a top trainer anymore,” she said. “I wasn’t out there winning at all the big shows and eventually the students I had acquired, moved on to other trainers who still had winning horses.”

  I dashed forward and enveloped Esther in a bear hug. Mickey joined in, squeezing her tight.

  “You still have us,” I said.

  “I’m not sure that is going to be enough.”

  She patted us both on the back awkwardly and then pushed us away. She wasn’t big on displays of affection and definitely not from two of us at the same time.

  “Go and make sure the barn looks nice for Mr. Coppell. I don’t want a strand of hay wafting down the aisle to greet him.”

  “Mr. Coppell?” I said. “Frank Coppell?”

  “Yes, that’s the one, now scram.”

  “You know who he is, don’t you?” I whispered to Mickey as we left Esther brooding over her old ribbons.

  “No,” she said. “Who?”

  “He trained Missy Ellison.”

  “Missy who?” she said.

  “Never mind.” I shoved her down the barn aisle with a sigh.

  Mickey didn’t drool over famous riders like I did but nearly everyone who rode knew who Missy Ellison was because she was pretty much a junior jumping legend. She competed in her first Grand Prix when she was thirteen and was short listed for the Olympics when she was sixteen. She was the person I had modeled my riding life after and apart from not having billionaire parents who would buy me lots of horses and never even coming close to riding in a Grand Prix, I didn’t think I was doing too badly. After all, Missy started out in the pony jumpers too.

  They said Frank could take a mediocre student and turn them into a good one but he could take a good student and turn them into a great one. And I wanted more than anything to be a great one.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “They’re late,” said Mickey.

  We were sitting in the tack room. I was cleaning Bluebird’s bridle and she was picking tiny rocks up off the floor and throwing them out the window.

  “Why don’t you get a broom?” I asked her.

  She sighed. “Can’t be bothered.”

  The trailer was supposed to have arrived an hour ago and the longer it took to get here, the more despondent Esther seemed to get.

  “What if they’ve changed their mind?” she said when I stuck my head in her office.

  “Why would they do that?” I asked.

  “Never mind.” She shook her head.

  I knew she’d already spent the first month’s check that Mr. Coppell had sent, just like Mickey’s parents spent the lease money from Hampton on the new roof. We had new jumps and new paint on the barn and if they changed their mind and wanted a refund, I didn’t know what Esther was going to do. She could send the jumps back but it wasn’t like she could scrape the paint off. In fact, she would be in big trouble.

  I started to sweat, something I used to do when my mom had trouble paying the bills. That sick feeling rising in the bottom of my stomach like it did when the electric bill had final notice plastered across it in red and even though I wasn’t supposed to know about things like that, I couldn’t help but lay awake at night waiting for the power to get shut off.

  “They’re here,” Mickey finally cried as the sound of an engine rumbled down the drive.

  I breathed out a sigh of relief that Esther wasn’t going to be in trouble after all and ran out to greet them. Only there was no Frank Coppell with his trademark mop of gray hair and striped shirt or his snobby students. Just a commercial sized shipping van, swaying down the lane.

  The guy jumped out and talked to Esther for a few minutes, exchanging paperwork. When he was done, he went around the back and pulled down the ramp. I was just beginning to think that the three of us were going to have to take care of all the new horses ourselves when a battered truck pulled in. A young woman in her twenties jumped out and ran over to the trailer. She had on jeans and paddock boots, her long blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail.

  “Who do you think that is?” Mickey asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But she’s not one of the rich students, that’s for sure.”

  After looking inside the trailer, she came over with a smile on her face and an outstretched hand.

  “Melanie Wishbone.” She shook Esther’s hand vigorously. “Frank’s right hand man or rather woman. You must be Esther.”

  “Yes.” Esther nodded. “And this is Emily and Mickey, two of my students.”

  “Hi,” she said, her eyes glazing over us and no doubt noticing our less than stellar turnout. “Well I’m sure you’ll be seeing a lot of me. I pretty much run everything for Frank.”

  “I’ll give you the tour,” Esther said.

  We trailed behind at a respectable distance as Esther showed Melanie the feed room, tack room and the stalls that the new horses were going to be living in. Melanie nodded and smiled but beneath it all I could tell that our barn was somewhat less than what she was used to and not for the first time, I wondered why Frank was even coming here at all.

  “Don’t you guys normally all go up north for the summer?” I asked Melanie.

  Esther gave me a dirty look but I just ignored her.

  “Usually,” Melanie said. But she didn’t elaborate.

  The shipping guy led the horses in one by one, all wrapped up in boots and fleece. They were clipped and groomed to perfection, like prima
ballerinas. Even they seemed to look around the barn and stick their noses up at it. Melanie flitted from one stall to the next, removing boots and hanging buckets.

  “The waterers do work,” Esther said.

  “Frank likes buckets,” Melanie replied as she dragged out the hose. “Easier to tell how much they are drinking.”

  “And five times the work,” Esther mumbled under her breath.

  After that, she disappeared into her office. We sat and watched Melanie, who was probably the most efficient person I’d ever seen. She declined our offer of help but it was clear that she didn’t really need it anyway. All the horses and ponies were unwrapped with fresh hay and water in record time. But there were still a few empty stalls and I knew that Esther said she’d rented out the whole side.

  “Where are the rest?” I asked Melanie.

  “At Devon,” she said. “They’ll be down next week.”

  “At Devon!” I mouthed to Mickey who just raised her eyebrows.

  I wondered if we’d seen any of the horses that were coming as we watched the live stream that morning. And I realized that although Frank Coppell had injected some much needed cash flow into the dwindling Sand Hill Stables, having a trainer flaunting what Esther used to do and had lost right in front of her face was not going to be easy. No wonder she seemed so depressed. It was going to be a long, hot and really awkward summer.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The new horses were like robots. Super cute robots who all seemed to poop at the same time and never called out or kicked the walls for no reason like our horses sometimes did.

  “You can have these paddocks for turnout.” Esther pointed to the fields that had recently been renovated with the new boards.

  “Oh, they don’t go outside,” Melanie said.

  “They don’t go outside?” I butted in. “Ever?”

  “Of course not.” Melanie laughed like I was stupid or something. “They could hurt themselves.”

  From then on I just felt sorry for the expensive robot horses who could only look longingly through the bars in their stalls while our horses and ponies frolicked about in the lush summer grass.