Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  Lacey sighed and got up to join us. “Let’s do this.”

  We grabbed raincoats and went running through the stinging pellets of rain and the strangely warm wind, still tingling with the sunshine from above and the bathtub temperatures of the Gulf of Mexico, and then we were flinging open the side door to the tack room — the barn doors were already down and bolted — and lurching inside. With a struggle, I shoved the tack room door shut again and slammed the deadlock home. The steel door felt reassuringly strong. The accordion shutter had already been rolled down over the small tack room window, and the room, though dark, felt safe and a little cozy, with its comforting scents of leather and neats-foot oil.

  Lacey switched the little TV on immediately and Freak-Out Freddy was back in our lives, wrenching off his tie and flinging it somewhere off set, where some intern was probably waiting for it. We had underground electric along the driveway from the main road — an unusual luxury from a forward-thinking previous tenant — and I had high hopes that we might hang on to electricity and the TV signal for a while. It was reassuring to know exactly what was going on out there, instead of just having to listen to it.

  And it was getting loud. The noise of a hurricane is indescribable until you’ve heard it; once it strikes your ears, you can never forget it. The most simple of sounds can trigger the memory of a storm. The sound of shopping cart wheels on the polished concrete floors of Sam’s Club never failed to remind me of the weird moaning of the wind outside my parents’ cinder-block house. Dropping a pile of books on the floor at the library one day, I’d been reminded of the bang and clatter of branches and unknown objects on the roof, walls, and storm shutters.

  So far, all we heard was the moaning of the wind and the staccato bursts of rainfall, but I knew that the truly ghostly sounds were still to come.

  We’d already laid in provisions, and I went over to the wet bar (played by the washtub sink where we mixed warm feeds and cleaned tack) and mixed a couple rum-and-cokes and pulled out a bag of potato chips. Lacey needed all the mellowing that she could get, and I thought the rum might go a long way towards chilling her out. And I just thought it would be nice for me. Riding out hurricanes were traditionally drinking parties. There was nothing else to do. We watched Freak-Out Freddy gesture frantically at the screen as he relayed reports of a waterspout moving onshore in Aripeka.

  “That’s a long way from here,” Lacey ventured.

  “Unfortunately, the storm is moving northeast, and Aripeka is southwest,” I said. “It’s north of Tampa.”

  “Oh,” Lacey said glumly, and I thought perhaps I should have left her knowledge of Florida geography where it was, happily in the dark.

  And perhaps we would have been better off if the power had gone out. Then we wouldn’t have known exactly what was about to hit us.

  “And this cell right here,” Freak-Out Freddy intoned, pointing with one stubby finger to a spot on the map that pretty much correlated exactly with where we were sitting, “is ripe to produce a tornado, in fact I’d say there’s already a tornado on the ground, but it’s very hard to tell because during hurricanes, tornadoes jump up and down, they come and they go so rapidly —”

  There was a sudden bang on the storm shutter. Lacey and I both spun around and stared at the dark window, but of course it was covered by metal and there was nothing to be seen.

  Bang.

  My heart sank into my shoes. I felt a numbing weakness spreading across my body. It was here.

  “What’s that?” Lacey ventured, voice quivering a little.

  “Branches,” I answered uncertainly. “Shingles. Fencing.”

  “The horses…”

  “Yeah.”

  We were pretending to be secure in the barn, yet we hadn’t trusted the barn enough to leave the horses in it. I told Lacey that we could survive a roof collapse, hiding under pillows and horse blankets. The horses would panic, tear down their stalls, kill themselves to escape. We left them out to take their chances and hope that the wind didn’t start throwing bits of tree and structure and fence at them.

  Bam bang bang.

  As it was doing now.

  The banging went on and on, and the wind rose to that frantic moan, like banshees howling just outside, and the steel door of the tack room began to shift back and forth with little thumps, as the dead bolt caught it each time, wiggling in the lock, and the rain was beating against it with such force that water began to trickle under the jam, and Lacey was curled up in a corner of the couch, clutching a blanket to her chest, eyes round with fear and horror, and Freak-Out Freddy was bellowing hunker down if you’re in Williston, right now, our friends up on the Nature Coast are really in for a beating now, the eye-wall is nearly there and it’s going to pass right over Williston in about half an hour… remember not to go outside if the weather lets up, because it will start again without warning once the other side of the eye crosses you. You will have to be in a very specific place for the rains to stop at all, just hunker down, stay close, if you lose power get that battery-powered radio on so that you can be informed — a disembodied arm handed him a sheaf of paper — folks here’s a confirmed tornado on the ground west of Williston, it’s been seen by weather spotters on highway 326 and it’s moving northeast very quickly — he wasn’t taking a breath and the storm was hammering at the barn, and the building was creaking and groaning and the wind was moaning on and on and on, and Lacey was starting to cry and I curled up around her, but I wasn’t her mother, I wasn’t even older than she was, and I couldn’t comfort her either because I was realizing that this was it, this was the worst, this was so far beyond anything I had ever experienced before. All the storms I’d known before were gamboling fillies in sunlit meadows compared to this disaster-nightmare-horror movie, and with a great shrieking groan the roof began to peel away and rain was falling down on our heads, the lights were out and the TV was off and Freak-Out Freddy was long gone, and I was pulling her under the couch cushions, pulling horse blankets down over us, hoping most of the roof would stay on, wishing wishing wishing it had just gone like I said it would go —

  And then the squall was past, very suddenly, and the rain let up, from a punishing downpour to a gentle splashing shower, and I looked up from beneath the little fort of sofa cushions and horse blankets I had piled on top of us. The wall between the door and the window was open to the air, the steel roof above us had peeled back like a tin can, and the sheetrock had soaked through and collapsed in the same instant that the roof gave way. There was a pile of wet white stuff in the corner, bits of the ceiling like snow draped across the tack trunk that sat there, and the rain was pattering down on it, spreading white goo across the tile floor in a growing puddle.

  Lacey was crying, face buried in the blanket, and we were both wet and smelled of horse, which really wasn’t that different from usual, and I was just thinking that maybe we should get into a stall down the aisle somewhere, away from the damage of the roof, when I heard a noise outside. A diesel engine. A slamming car door. And then —

  “Jules? Jules?”

  Lacey snapped her head back and I jumped up, slipping out from under her, and ran to unlock the deadbolt. I stepped out into the wet cataclysmic world, my boots crunching on the twigs and branches of what used to be my beloved oak tree. Now it was split and collapsed across the yard between the house and the barn. There were headlights in the parking lot and then I saw Peter Morrison, waving a flashlight and looking frantic.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “Peter! Oh my god, what are you doing out here?” My words were a little slurred and it occurred to me that I might be slightly drunk. I looked around wildly and saw that the roof of the barn had come to rest against my truck and trailer. Jagged sheets of metal trembled in the wind. “Shit,” I whispered. We were trapped here until I could free the truck. And I was strong, but I didn’t think I could pull half the barn roof away from the truck.

  “Came to check on you,” Peter said roughly, his voice rasping. �
�And the other one, your student — is she here?”

  Lacey came out, trembling, a polarfleece sheet wrapped around her. I could see the name embroidered across the blue hip in bright yellow script: Margeaux. “That’s Margot’s cooler,” I said, and she smiled in a dazed kind of way.

  “I love Margot.”

  “You girls can’t stay here,” Peter said impatiently. “Get in the truck.”

  “We have a truck,” Lacey said. “And a car.”

  I tugged at Lacey’s cooler and directed her attention to the barn roof that had decided to eat our vehicles.

  “Oh.”

  “We need to go, now,” Peter said.

  Obviously, Peter was insane. I turned back to him and shook my head dismissively. “I can’t leave. I have horses to take care of!”

  “You’ve got to,” he declared in that same rough voice, as if he had been expecting trouble from me all along. “That barn isn’t going to survive the other half of the storm. It’s coming. We’ll be right in the middle of it.”

  “How—”

  “Look at this,” he said, and shoved his phone at me. “Look at that radar picture. The eye? We’ve got a clear path to Reddick. If I floor it, we’ll make it.”

  I looked at the radar picture, and I swallowed. The eye was wide, full of dry air as the hurricane began to crumble away from its source of energy in the Gulf of Mexico, but the squall lines on the western side were illuminated in bright oranges and reds, easily as dangerous as the ones that had just rolled through. The ones that had just ripped the roof from over our heads.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” I said. Why had he come here?

  “I had a premonition. Now get in the truck.”

  “A premonition? You could have died —”

  “I still can, and so can you!” Peter turned on his heel. “Let’s go.”

  I was feeling a bit dazed by the whole situation, and suddenly couldn’t think of a good reason to decline his forceful invitation. We did need to go. There was nowhere to ride out the rest of the storm, and if it was half as bad as what had just rolled through, we really were risking our lives. I looked at Lacey and she nodded her head in the direction of the truck. “We should go,” she said. And then, “I’m going.” Lacey set off for Peter’s truck, leaving me to either ride it out alone, or come along.

  I went along.

  I clambered through the cramped back door after Lacey and looked back, unable, unwilling to close the door. Peter did it for me. Everything felt too sudden — I didn’t have time to make a proper decision. There was something missing. I looked back. The tack room door waved gently to us in the soft humid breeze; the ripped tin can of the roof wiggled back and forth above. Lacey huddled in the back seat, taking deep sobbing breaths, and I could barely see out the rain-riddled windows to try and assess the damage to my farm. The only saving grace was that there were no loose horses running around. It occurred to me that I hadn’t heard a sound from the horses all evening. Not a whinny, not a hoofbeat. And where the hell was Marcus?

  That’s what was missing.

  I smacked the door latch and flung myself back out into the starry night. “Marcus! Marcus!”

  A horse whinnied in the distance, and someone else returned the call. All was well in the horse world, apparently.

  Lacey was beside me, her hand on my arm. “We can’t stay here.”

  “Are you joking?” I whipped around and fixed her with an icy stare. She quailed and stepped back. “You want me to leave my dog?”

  Peter was out of the truck now, looking furious. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “My dog,” I snapped. “Marcus, Marcus, come Marcus!” I wished that at some point in the past five years I had spent a minute or two teaching Marcus to actually listen to me. I trained horses, not dogs. “Marcus!”

  Peter swung his flashlight around the property, illuminating the pools of water rippling in the breeze. “Look for his eyes.”

  We looked, but there were no green flashes of reflective eyes.

  “He’s under the house,” I realized suddenly. “Oh sweet Jesus.” I was terrified to go under the house. I wasn’t afraid of much, but I was claustrophobic as hell and the crawlspace under the trailer was one place where my courage could not take me. But Marcus loved to go down there, and on the few occasions when weather had spooked him, that was where he hustled his fat little beagle self.

  “Where does he get in?” Peter was all business.

  “Under the front porch, by the steps —” but Peter was already running, the flashlight’s beam bouncing off the house wall and dark windows as he splashed through the puddles in his Wellingtons. I took Lacey’s elbow in cold fingers, forgetting that I’d just given her a glare I reserved for my worst enemies. “He’s going to go under the house?”

  She was quiet, to her credit, I realize now. She didn’t try to shake me off. She just watched as Peter disappeared under the front porch, the flashlight, feeble now as its battery began to die, glowing through the wooden lattice around the deck. I thought of the mud and the bugs and felt my knees grow shaky.

  There was a shout and a yelp, and I tightened my grip on Lacey’s arm. And then he was emerging, dragging a shrieking beagle by its scruff.

  “He’s hurt!” Lacey put her hands to his mouth. “Oh my god…”

  I felt dizzy. I was going to faint. I closed my eyes. Marcus, Marcus, Marcus —

  “Shut up! Shut up!” Peter was shouting. “You’re fine! Shut up!”

  “He’s not hurt,” I realized, and my heart started beating again, the blood flooding my head and flushing my face. I was hot all over, but I was so relieved I nearly burst into laughter. “He’s just being his whiny asshole self. Marcus, shut up!”

  The dog went on yelping, twisting at the end of Peter’s fisted grip on his scruff. He really was too big to be held like that, I reflected. But it was better than being abandoned under a mobile home during a hurricane.

  “Here’s your dog,” Peter announced when he reached us, shoving the wet muddy mass of dog into my arms, and I took him gratefully. Marcus whined once more for good measure and then settled for licking my wet face. I hefted his weight — he really was a fat dog — and took the sloppy love, but my eyes were on Peter.

  He looked back at me for a long moment, and then shrugged, breaking away and turning for the truck. “We have to get out of here.”

  The dually engine roared and we were flying over the debris-covered roads, splashing through great puddles that threatened to overtake entire valleys, and part of me was urging him on, seeing the wind start to pick up in the trees outside, the rain starting to beat harder and with more determination on the windshield, and the other part was thinking with desperation of my horses, of all the boarders, and of Dynamo, my big sweet chestnut who taught me everything, and of Mickey, my shot at the big time, all out there in the fields, beneath those stormy skies, and how would I ever get back to them? The roads were being washed over, the squalls rippling the clouds behind us were felling trees across the drives and the highways, and I would be separated from them for days. Anything could happen. I had to get back.

  But that wasn’t going to happen now. Behind us, the storm must have already hit the farm by now. The barn would lose the rest of the roof. Ruined. Ruined. All of it. The house could easily be destroyed as well. Homeless, barnless, maybe horseless. I couldn’t go back. Ahead was Peter’s farm, cinder blocks and hurricane shutters and safety.

  It was a half an hour drive to Peter’s farm, all thirty minutes of it frantic, listening to the warnings on the radio. We shouldn’t have been out, and it was a wonder we didn’t have to swerve around more than three downed power poles, more than half a dozen toppled trees. Grimly determined, his jaw set, Peter never turned back from a flooded low spot, no matter how deep the water looked. The truck was made for this sort of heavy-duty evacuation drama, and I supposed we were never really in any danger of floating away and dying in a watery grave, despite what the meteorologist
s always said. I didn’t think we were, anyway. Freak-Out Freddy would have torn off his shirt and starting jumping up and down on it if he had seen what we were doing. But I had a strange trust in Peter, this trainer I hardly knew. There was something about him: he was very good at taking charge. I wanted to listen to him. I was tired of being in charge. He made it easy to settle back and let him assume authority.

  One thing: I was right not to go out on a date with him, I could see that much. That was the last trait I’d be looking for in a guy, if I was looking. Which I wasn’t. Obviously.

  The driveway to Peter’s farm, elegantly long, shaded by oak trees in the great southern plantation style, was a threat to life and property now. The trees were flailing dangerously by the time the truck went roaring beneath them. There were branches full of green leaves slapping against the windshield and being swept away with the furiously working wipers. Peter swore.

  “This place will never look the same.”

  “I’m sure it’s been hit by hurricanes before,” I drawled, somehow determined to be difficult in the face of his overwhelming personality.

  “Not like this. This is one for the record books. And we’re out driving around in it like a bunch of crazy people.” He pulled the truck up before the house. All the storm shutters had been rolled down, so that the big sprawling ranch looked like a pastel-painted bunker. Beneath the stereotypical Florida palette of candy-shell pink it was a fort of concrete blocks, standing firmly against the wind.

  “A house made of concrete, with more concrete poured down the middle of the blocks,” he announced, hauling my door open. “It’s like the blockhouses they built at launch pads. You could survive Godzilla in this house.”

  That was a weird choice of impending disasters, I was thinking, but he was dragging us both inside before I could reply. Even so, we managed to get soaked in the few short steps to the house. He slammed the door shut on the storm, turning the bolt and locking it all out, and I turned to see Becky, standing in the hallway, holding out fluffy towels.