The Girl in the Window
By
Valerie Douglas
Published by the author as a member of the
Alexandria Publishing Group
Kindle Edition
The Girl in the Window
Copyright © 2012 Valerie Douglas
With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from author.
Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the publisher’s permission. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000. (http:www.fbi.govipr). Please purchase only authorized electronic or print editions and don’t participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted material. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
License Notes
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Discover other titles by Valerie Douglas
Fantasy
The Coming Storm Series
The Coming Storm
Not Magic Enough
Setting Boundaries
Heart of the Gods
Servant of the Gods
Thrillers
Nike’s Wings
The Last Resort
Romance
Irish Fling
Dirty Politics
Directors Cut
Two Up
Lucky Charm
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter Twenty Six
Epilogue
About the Author
Dedication
To my father… goodnight Dad
To Mateo…who listened while I struggled with the usual writer’s doubts
And to Spirit Wolf…who inspired me and pushed this story into the light. I wish he’d lived to see it live
Acknowledgment
The author’s thanks to the marketing department of the Little Brown Jug, the premier race for harness racing trotters. Any errors are solely the fault of the writer…
Chapter One
The early morning summer haze hung over the fields. By the looks of it, it would be warm and humid later. Joshua watched the girl walk through the long grass between the yards toward the paddock and the horse in that soft light. She moved as gracefully as a doe, and, he sensed, was as skittish as one. It wasn’t the first time she’d come.
Raised by women – his mother, sisters and aunts – and the youngest of them all, he’d been brought up to respect and protect them. It was his nature. Just the sight of the girl brought his protective instincts to the fore. Something about her made him want to wrap her up and keep her safe. Although she seemed to have a fragile strength to her, she was too thin, too solemn.
The first time he saw her near the paddock he’d been tempted to warn her off, worried about the horse and the risk she took. That was until he noticed the way she looked around tentatively, warily, and he noted the time of day. On most days he wasn’t still at the house at this hour. That told him something. As did her actions. It wasn’t her first visit. As the days had passed, he’d learned she only came when the boys hadn’t arrived yet to do their chores.
So she knew their schedules.
‘Boys’ being figurative, of course.
Russ – Josh’s horse-trainer cum farmhand – was nearly twice Josh’s age. Will and Tony were only a few years younger than Josh.
He watched the horse as the girl approached the paddock.
The horse’s magnificent black head lifted, and tossed skittishly. The animal danced nervously from foot to foot. Sunlight glinted brightly from his glossy hide, a silvery shimmer of light. The breeze picked up his forelock and mane, and blew them so he looked as wild as she did.
Josh despaired over the horse, bought at a yearling sale.
It had had better than good blood lines. He’d guessed the horse had problems, given the price it was being sold at, but he’d thought the gamble had been worth it.
Now he wasn’t so sure.
Josh didn’t know the girl’s name – no one seemed to – he thought of her simply as ‘the girl in the window’. Every time he’d tried to learn more, she’d disappeared, running across the fields on light bare feet.
She didn’t come every morning – there were times when she just stood in the window of the old house next door looking out – but she did most mornings. It was as if she were drawn to come. It seemed as inevitable as the wind blowing across the fields of winter wheat, their silvery heads blowing like her hair.
The first time Josh had seen her walk across their yards so cautiously, watching so carefully, she’d bent to pick some of the ripening grain on her way. As an offering to the horse. One she brought each time she came.
And the horse rejected each time.
Yet still she came.
She wore the same faded blue-flowered dress this time as she had that first morning. The dress was thin cotton, and her hair, as fair as that ripe winter wheat, had lifted and blown in the breeze.
Even with no makeup on her face he could tell she was pretty in the way many young women were pretty, but she was maybe a little prettier than most.
Idly, he wondered, What color are her eyes? He would have bet they were doe-brown.
He’d never gotten that close to her, though. The one time he’d tried, he’d come around the corner of the barn only to find she was gone like the breeze. He might have imagined her.
When the irascible old man who’d lived next door had finally died, Josh had resigned himself to the idea that the house would remain vacant as so many old houses hereabouts did these days. Abandoned to slowly turn into even more of an eyesore than it had, the weathered gray of the boards and rickety fence becoming shabbier with time.
Some folks who acted as his neighbor did, distant and ill-natured, only needed some warming up.
Old man Winters hadn’t been one of them.
He’d been a tall, handsome man until the day he’d died. Proud, with hair that was still dark well into old age, although it had thinned. No amount of idle conversation had ever warmed him, he’d just glanced at Josh dismissively each time Josh tried and then walked away – if
he didn’t give Josh an outright disdainful look.
The wife hadn’t been much better when she’d been alive.
Josh had heard them of a summer’s day shouting at each other when the windows were open and neither had had a kind word to say to the other.
Some people were just that way, happy in their misery, and you had to leave them to it.
Then the old woman had died.
No more choleric arguments, instead the house had become darkly silent, hidden behind its curtains.
Even so, Josh had known when the old man began to ail.
It was hard not to notice. Where once he’d been fit he’d become bloated, with deep bags under rheumy eyes. Judging by the bottles that bulged his trash bags when they were set out by the road, the old man had found a solace common to many.
In an odd way, Josh had grieved for him, knowing the old man was coming to the end of his days even as at the same time a part of him had been relieved. At last, the man would be eased of his now long, lonely misery.
After the death of his wife, it clearly had been misery. The old man’s shoulders had slumped on the rare times he’d stepped out of the house to mow the lawn or do basic maintenance.
Josh hadn’t seen the day when the ambulance had taken him, Josh had been out testing the horse to find out how much training it had. To his relief, he’d found it had been at least schooled to the harness, if not to the bike – what laymen called the sulky or cart. That had been a relief. He wouldn’t have to start at the beginning.
Sadly, it had taken a few days before Josh had realized the old man was gone. Even more sadly, there’d been no one left to write his obituary. What had been in the paper had been scant, little more than a notice with his name, where he’d worked, and the prior death of his wife.
Afterward Josh had resigned himself to watching the house deteriorate even further.
Instead, after a short time, it had slowly begun to blossom. There were small signs of care.
Someone replaced the battered old aluminum mailbox, picked up the yard and mowed the grass. The grimy, hazy windows had been washed so they sparkled. Flowers were planted, bunches of inexpensive bright yellow daisies, along with purple and white coneflowers, bright and cheery.
He never saw anyone do it. For all he knew it might have been the pixies or fairies from the fairy tales his mother had once read to him doing the work.
Then one day he saw her.
The girl stood in the window, looking out wistfully.
Just a flash, and then the shadows swallowed her up again. He might have imagined her.
The daughter? some folks around town speculated. There’d been rumors.
Who knew there had been a daughter?
No one, it seemed, was sure.
It hadn’t been mentioned in the newspaper obituary.
Certainly, the signs had never been there. The old man had never had a single visitor over the years.
Suddenly, there was this girl. No one knew her name.
If she was the daughter why hadn’t she ever visited? Josh would’ve remembered if she had.
He’d definitely have remembered her.
He watched from his kitchen window as she approached the fence to the paddock, a sheaf of winter wheat in hand. Barely a mouthful for the horse, but better than the straw or grass it cropped from around the edges of the paddock.
It was more than Josh himself could coax the animal to eat from his hand.
The horse watched the girl in turn.
She stood at the fence patiently, and watched in return.
Deliberately, she stepped up on the bottom rail, put an arm across the top and held out her offering of rich green grain with the other.
Abruptly, the horse charged across the paddock away from her, and then came to a sudden stop, blowing, watching her from first one eye, then the other.
She never moved, she just watched.
Then, as graceful as a dancer, the horse paced around the paddock, his gait steady, even. A trotter’s gait. Beautiful, even, each hoof striking out neatly, perfectly, as if he were between the shafts of the bike. Pure magic. It tried pacing, tossed its head, and shifted back to trotting.
In that moment, Josh knew what it was he had. Lightning in a bottle. A shiver ran over him. His heart caught.
Breathless as he watched, Josh saw the girl smile, just the faintest curve of her lips.
She was succeeding where everyone else had failed.
Wild, everyone had said. The horse was wild. Some just were.
Well, Josh knew that, but there was something about this horse Josh somehow knew was reachable. There was more to him, to this horse. Something had happened to make him this way.
But that gait, that smooth flowing stride was something to see. So perfect, so effortless. Some horses were trotters. Some were pacers. And then there were those rare few who were poetry in motion.
Josh couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Even as young as the horse had been on the day Josh had bought him – the smooth flow of muscle beneath the glossy hide, the tilt of the horse’s ears, and the intelligence in the animal’s dark eyes had caught Josh’s eye. There was just something about it that called to him.
Sometimes there was just that magic.
At that moment in the back of his mind, Josh had heard his grandfather’s low, deep, gravelly voice, say, “That’s the horse you’re looking for, son. He’s got it all, this one. Just look at those legs, that chest. But it’s that look in his eye that will win it for you. He’s got heart, that one.”
Josh could see his grandfather in his mind’s eye – the grizzled, seamed face, the strong features, black eyes and straight dark hair that showed his native heritage in the way Josh’s own thick brown hair and brown eyes didn’t.
It was there though, that legacy. One he hoped to meet, to live up to.
Like his love of horses and horseracing, it ran in his blood.
Josh’s father had died before he could remember him – an automobile accident.
For Josh, surrounded by women – as much as he loved all of them – his grandfather had been the man in his life. Someone to emulate. He couldn’t think of a better role model.
Would he be half the man his grandfather had been?
He hoped so.
His grandfather had introduced him to racing, shared his love for it with his grandson.
It wasn’t the betting, it was the horses.
Even then, the sport had been fading from the headlines, dying slowly by greed, by the bigger and sometimes corporate stables with their need for fame and their demand for bigger purses to offset the cost of raising the horses and bragging rights. That had forced ticket prices up and driven away those who’d once come to fill the ‘cheap seats’, the folks who’d bet a dollar or two a race, who’d come for a day of fun at the track.
And for the love of it.
Smaller stables had been forced to the edges of the sport, to the county fair races. They simply couldn’t afford to compete.
It had been and always would be a gamble to find the right horse, to raise and train it, and only one in each race would take away the big money.
As much as he missed him, Josh was almost glad his grandfather had died when he did, because he didn’t live to see his beloved sport driven almost to extinction, to the point where many tracks had to offer slot machines and gambling to get people to come.
It was a devil’s bargain.
The casinos offered to keep the tracks alive in order to get their foot in the door. Once in, though, they didn’t want to invest in the facilities – in the stables or tracks. That remained to the owners, trainers, drivers, and the racing public. The last of which was growing smaller every year in the face of the video poker and slot machines which offered a quicker thrill.
But Josh still loved racing, he loved the thrill of seeing the horses run, of watching that smooth gait, of sitting in the bike, the rush of closing on the finish line.
O
nly the best drivers could make any kind of a living at it and most in harness racing made barely enough to get by. Like so much else, you did it because you loved it, not because you wanted to get rich at it. Few did.
Josh was a good driver, but he’d wanted more. More control, a better life. He wanted to be the one making the decisions, choosing the horses. And racing them.
So, with his carefully hoarded savings, he’d bought the farm and put it to work. The money his grandfather had left him though, he’d used to buy horses. It hadn’t been much, he’d had to invest it carefully, choose just the right horses.
He had a few others, all with good bloodlines on paper. They were good if not great runners, still trying to find their potential. One a trotter, one a pacer, and one still in training.
Then he’d seen this one in the distant paddock at the horse sale and he knew he’d found his horse. The one he hoped would make magic.
There was a music to the steady thunder of the horse’s hooves as it ran, a rhythmic pounding as the horse paced around the paddock, before turning abruptly as he drew too close to the girl on one side. Turning, he went back the other way around before he got too close there as well.
It reminded Josh of training a horse to harness.
First, you put the traces on them to let them get used to them. Some just looked around, clearly bewildered. Others tossed their heads. Once they got used to the harness and pulling a little weight, you put them back out to pasture to grow and build muscle. Hitching them to the training bikes was another thing entirely. Some just stopped, startled by the change, and the sudden weight, before they figured it all out.
The girl laughed at the horse’s antics, the sound surprisingly clear in the early morning silence, and a music in itself.
Josh had the sense that she didn’t laugh much, and wouldn’t have at all, if she knew he watched.
The horse stopped.
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