Double Standards (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 20)

by Claire Svendsen

  CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

  The next day an old battered horse trailer pulled down the drive.

  “Your friend is here,” I told Missy.

  She was sitting in the office, hidden behind towering piles of paperwork and as mad as I was at her for the compromises she’d made, I was still glad that she was there dealing with all the things that I wouldn’t have had a clue were to start with.

  “She’s not exactly my friend,” Missy said. “Not anymore. Friends don’t extort each other or make ultimatums.”

  “Well whatever she is, she’s here with a horse trailer.”

  “Great.” Missy sighed.

  I stood back in the barn, watching as Sandy pulled up and got out to unload her horse, this fantastic Trakehner mare that was supposedly in foal to the second best show jumper in Europe. I wasn’t sure what the point of telling people that was anyway. I mean if you wanted to be able to brag, wouldn’t it have been better to have bred your horse to the number one stallion instead?

  “This mare had better not be some prima donna,” I whispered to Missy.

  “Knowing Sandy, I doubt that she will be,” she replied.

  And as we watched Sandy unload the horse, I realized that not only was she a bad trainer, she was also a liar. While the mare was a gorgeous chestnut with four flashy white stockings and a big white blaze, she was not even close to being a Trakehner. She had those slender legs and pretty dished face that said she was clearly an Arabian. She was also so heavily pregnant that she looked like she was about to pop any day now.

  “I thought she said she wasn’t due for months?” Missy said.

  “She also said the horse was a Trakehner,” I replied. “We should probably think ourselves lucky that she didn’t unload a giraffe.”

  “But we’re not set up for foaling,” Missy said, starting to sound upset. “We don’t have any foaling stalls or straw or twenty four hour surveillance.”

  “Does Sandy look like she cares?” I said as Sandy dropped the lead rope while she was reaching into the truck for something and the mare wandered off. “She’ll probably just toss her out in the field and hope that she gives birth in the middle of the night so that she doesn’t have to deal with it.”

  “Not on my watch,” Missy said, storming off to catch the horse before she stepped on her rope and freaked out.

  CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

  Next to Bandit, Sandy’s mare Jupiter became the barns newest attraction. She stood there regally in her stall as people came up to the bars and pressed their faces against them, asking when she was due, which looked like any second. I felt kind of sorry for her. If I was going to have a baby, I knew I wouldn’t want people staring at me all the time like some kind of freak show.

  “I thought you said she was a Trakehner?” I asked Sandy when she brought some of her stuff into the tack room.

  “Oh, that’s my other horse,” she said.

  “Well who is this one in foal to?” I said. “The third best show jumper in Europe?”

  “Look kid,” she said. “I don’t need attitude from you so you can just cut it out. I’m here because you all need me so you might as well just get used to it.”

  “Whatever you say,” I said, holding up my hands and backing away.

  I knew that Sandy was a liar now. Probably even a compulsive one because she lied about everything else. She said she didn’t smoke but I caught her out the back of the barn lighting up by the hay shed. My father would have had a heart attack, he didn’t even like the grooms smoking on the property since it was pretty much a horrible fire hazard to have cigarette butts littered anywhere near a barn.

  She said she had another pregnant mare but I didn’t believe that either. She also said she could ride but she couldn’t. I watched her take Hashtag out to the ring and got immense satisfaction from seeing him refuse to jump for her just like he had done for me. She tried everything just like I had. Crops. Spurs. And she wasn’t gentle about it either. I’d used them as training aids. She used them like weapons just as she had when she took a crop to Ballycat but Hashtag didn’t care. He was way too professional to get all flustered about things like the silly mean woman on his back. He just cantered over to a particularly rancid pile of manure in the corner of the ring and dumped her off into it. I smothered my laugh with my hand and went to catch him before she started beating on him.

  “I’ll take him back to the barn,” I told her, wrinkling my nose. “You’d better go and change before the students see you.”

  “But I haven’t finished with him,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “Yes, you have,” Missy said from the end of the barn. “We have a walk in. She’s tacked up and waiting for her lesson out in the jump field.”

  “Fine,” Sandy hissed, trying to brush the manure off her shirt. It didn’t work. It was the wet kind and she only succeeded in smearing it around more. “But you’ll pay for that later.”

  “Thanks for that,” I told Missy as I took Hashtag into the barn.

  “I might not be able to stop her from riding him but I can keep her busy enough that she doesn’t have much time to. Besides, I think Hashtag has it under control, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, patting the horse on the neck. “I think he does.”

  I hadn’t known that the stoic horse had a sense of humor but it seemed like Hashtag was hiding more things up his sleeve than just our secret jumping sessions in the woods.

  CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

  By the time it got to the weekend, it was clear that my father wasn’t going to make it to the show. He barely made it off the couch and he hadn’t showered in days. I was starting to get worried about him.

  “Do you think he’s depressed?” I asked Missy.

  “Of course he’s depressed,” she said. “He broke his ankle.”

  “But don’t you think we should do something about it?” I replied. “Help him?”

  “How?” She looked at me and rolled her eyes. “What do you want me to do? Shove him off the couch? Stick a pitchfork in his hands and tell him that he’d better start cleaning stalls or he’s out on the street?”

  “He could at least shower,” I said. “Or brush his teeth. This isn’t like him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “That’s not fair,” I said. “You don’t know what he’s really like either. How long have you guys been together? One year? Two? That’s not long enough to get to know a person’s deepest, darkest secrets.”

  “Your father doesn’t have any deep, dark secrets,” Missy said, waving me away with her hand. “Now go and finish loading the trailer. We’re leaving in an hour.”

  “Want to bet he doesn’t have any secrets?” I grumbled under my breath as I went into the tack room.

  My father had a whole closet full of secrets and so did my mother and most of it revolved around the death of my sister and their subsequent divorce. I was still determined to get to the bottom of it but to be honest I was kind of afraid of what I was going to find if I dug too deep. Some secrets were meant to be buried forever but some didn’t stay buried, like the fact that maybe my father was a secret drug addict.

  “He’s not a drug addict,” Mickey had said when I told her my fear.

  She’d called to wish me luck at the show and to tell me that she wouldn’t make it back in time. Their flight had been delayed due to a strike at the airport in Paris and they had decided to take advantage of that fact and stay another week. It must have been nice, not having to worry about rushing back to their normal lives. I wondered who was taking care of Mickey’s mother’s prized fish because at this rate they’d all be dead by the time she got back.

  “He looks like a drug addict,” I told her, still thinking about the fish. “He spends all his time passed out on the couch and all he cares about is when it is time to take his next pill.”

  “He broke his ankle,” Mickey cried. “What do you expect?”

  “For him to suck it up,” I moaned. “Like he’s always te
lling me to do.”

  “So your father is weak like the rest of us. Oh well,” she said. “You should see mine. He’s got a sunburn that practically glows in the dark and has been whimpering like a baby ever since. If he had your dad’s pills, he’d be taking them too. Men are wimps.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  I didn’t tell her about the evil Sandy and how she was ruining everything. I was hoping that by the time Mickey got back I’d have got rid of her by then and I could pretend that she had never existed in the first place.

  “And how is Jean-Paul?” I asked her.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said sullenly.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I know you really liked him.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “Boys are jerks.”

  I thought about Jordan and how he’d acted at the fair with his friends and how even though he’d given me Bandit to make up for his behavior, I still hadn’t forgotten or completely forgiven him for abandoning me.

  “You’re right,” I said. “They are.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

  The second leg of the Talent Scout series was being held at the same show grounds as before so we’d already arranged to trailer in the night before like we did last time and Henry had begrudgingly agreed to take his camper and stay overnight. He wasn’t happy about it though. He started mumbling things like ‘not in his job description’ and ‘I don’t get paid enough for this.’

  I thought that Missy should be more concerned with keeping Henry happy than Sandy since he was pretty much integral to the smooth running of the barn. Without him the grooms wouldn’t know when to show up or what to do.

  He kept a black notebook that he carried around in his pocket with everything to do with the daily running of the barn. Horses that needed medication, which ones had special instructions for the day like extra boots for turn out or the fact that their owner was coming out to ride and requested that they not be turned out at all. Without him there would be a lot of unhappy clients at Fox Run, far more than there would be if we went without an extra trainer for a while.

  Sandy, on the other hand, seemed most upset that she wasn’t allowed to go to the show at all.

  “Shows are the best,” she said. “You know how good I am at them Meme.”

  “I need you to stay here and teach,” Missy said, trying to make it sound like it was an important job when it really wasn’t.

  All the best riders were going to the show and that meant Sandy would be stuck teaching beginner kids and those adults who were still in the learning to post at the trot phase.

  “My old barn would have let me go to the show,” she grumbled.

  “Why don’t you go back to your old barn then?” I whispered under my breath.

  Sandy glared at me as she walked off but I was pretty sure she hadn’t heard me.

  I was just about to tell Missy that she was doing a fantastic job holding things together using my best sarcastic voice when Glory, one of the resident hunter riders stormed up to Missy.

  “Mycroft has lost another shoe,” she said. “That is the third this month. Someone keeps forgetting to put his bell boots on and he isn’t being sprayed with fly spray either before he goes out. Now he has welts all over his stomach and I can’t ride him and we have a show in three weeks. This is unacceptable. When is Rob coming back to work?”

  She stood there with her arms crossed and steel gray eyes flashing daggers at Missy. She had manicured nails and didn’t look like she’d ever groomed a horse in her life let alone put on a bell boot. Her horse probably lost the shoe while she was riding him. She was obviously one of the clients we’d failed to convert to the notion of tacking up your own horse and the ones that still paid for that service thought they were better than everyone else.

  “He’ll be back to work as soon as his ankle starts to heal,” Missy said, trying to sound diplomatic when I knew she really wanted to strangle the girl.

  “Well when will that be?”

  “I’m not sure,” Missy said. “As soon as possible, I promise.”

  “Well you’d better start taking better care of Mycroft until then,” Glory said. “There are plenty of other barns that would be happy to take my money.”

  “They wouldn’t be happy to take her attitude,” I whispered to Missy as Glory stormed off.

  “What is it with everyone today?” she said.

  “It’s the heat,” I said. “Scrambles the brains.”

  “As long as it doesn’t scramble your brains at the show tomorrow then you’ll be fine,” she said. “Are you ready?”

  “Of course.” I nodded confidently but it was a lie.

  Other than our slightly weird cross country lesson, I hadn’t jumped my pony all week. I’d been more interested in taking Hashtag out into the woods and jumping him behind everyone’s backs and trying to come up with a plan to get rid of Sandy once and for all. For some reason the show had been the last thing on my mind. I kept putting it off, thinking that there would always be one more day to school my pony and now I’d run out of days altogether.

  Coming into the second show in the lead as far as points went and yet knowing deep in my heart that I hadn’t done my homework, wasn’t exactly the best feeling in the world and if I’d been riding anyone other than Bluebird, I knew I’d be in deep trouble but he was my jumper pony, if anyone could pull out a win in spite of me it was him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

  I kind of felt like we never left the show grounds. Everything was the same. We’d even been assigned the same stalls.

  “See?” I told Bluebird. “You should feel right at home.”

  He snorted at the fresh shavings that Henry had put in and then sighed. Luckily this time Socks had stayed behind. I wouldn’t be riding him in a speed class. Instead Sandy would be using him for lessons. I felt bad for him but at least having a lesson student ride him was better than having Sandy ride him, not that it wouldn’t stop her from going all homicidal maniac with a crop when she realized that there would be no one around to stop her.

  I’d wanted to bring Hashtag but I couldn’t exactly justify bringing a horse that wouldn’t jump to a hunter jumper show and I couldn’t tell Missy that I’d been jumping him either. Not yet. And besides, for all I knew just because he would jump out in the woods for me, didn’t mean that he would jump in the ring or at a show. He could freeze up and refuse, just like he’d been doing before. After all I’d never really fixed him. The fact that he was jumping was dumb luck on my part.

  I helped Henry and Missy settle all the Fox Run horses in and then I tacked Bluebird up. He pinned his ears at me as I put the saddle on.

  “What’s your problem?” I said. “You’re kind of grumpy all of a sudden.”

  But I knew that his bad mood had probably been brought on by my own. Horses were like mirrors, they reflected your own emotions back at you tenfold. If you were nervous, so were they, looking in the bushes for the monster they thought you must have seen in there. If you were mad, they were more likely to act out. I really tried to clear my mind before I mounted but it didn’t always work and today my mind was full of clutter. Things like the fact that my father wasn’t going to be here to help me and the knowledge that because I hadn’t properly prepared my pony, Jess and her super fancy new horse would probably beat us this time or Andy with his gray jumper Mousse. They were good too. And Dad wouldn’t be here to give me a pep talk like he did last time. This time I was on my own.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  We walked around the show grounds, Bluebird on a loose rein as I waved to people who were doing the same as I was. The night before a show was really too late for a schooling lesson, kind of like learning your lines the night before a play but Mom always did say that procrastination was my middle name. I found a small schooling ring that was open and got to work.

  Bluebird wasn’t impressed. He didn’t want to work, probably because he could tell that I didn’t either. He fretted and fussed and shook his head.
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  “The sooner we get this done,” I said. “The faster you can go back to your stall.”

  But Bluebird was having none of it. My usually perfect pony was being anything but and I knew that he couldn’t be perfect all the time but he had literally picked the worst time to act out ever, especially as he completely botched a flying change just as Jess walked Valor into the ring.

  The black horse was gleaming, his ears pricked and eyes bright. He looked like a champion while we looked like we belonged in the naughty pony class.

  “Will it bother him if we come in and school?” Jess asked politely, pointing at Bluebird who was pinning his ears at the big horse and looking like he was about to charge at any second.

  “He’s already bothered so don’t worry about it,” I said, pulling Bluebird away before he did something stupid and actually hurt the expensive horse.

  “I really can come back later if you want,” Jess said.

  “Forget it,” I said. “We’ll manage.”

  We went to the far end of the ring where I worked Bluebird in small circles. He wasn’t interested at all. He just wanted to go and investigate Valor or bite him, I wasn’t sure which. There was one jump in the middle of the ring and in the end I gave up any actual schooling and let Bluebird have at it. He flew over the fence and I circled him and took it again.

  “Well there is nothing wrong with your jump,” I said as he tossed his mane. “Just your attitude.”

  Jess was working Valor at the trot. He was going nicely all tucked in a frame looking professional. She didn’t bother and take her horse over the jump. I assumed she didn’t need to. It looked like while we’d been slacking off, she’d been doing nothing but working on her horse and herself. When we walked out of the ring, she pulled Valor in beside us.