Stable Vices (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 21)

by Claire Svendsen

  “I’ll have proof if Bluebird doesn’t get better,” I replied.

  “But if it really is poison then…” Mickey’s voice trailed off.

  “I know,” I replied with a lump in my throat. “He could die.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “He doesn’t look like he’s dying,” Mickey said.

  We were standing outside Bluebird’s stall, watching him. Mickey had changed into her far more suitable breeches and boots since she was going to ride Hampton but I’d begged her to come and see my pony first.

  “Do you think he looks a bit wobbly?” I asked her as Bluebird turned around.

  She was looking at her phone. “It does say that neurological symptoms could be a sign of poisoning. But maybe it was just an accident. He could have eaten a wild flower or something. Have you seen any of these around the farm?”

  She held up her phone and scrolled through pictures of blurry flowers. They all looked the same to me but I couldn’t recall seeing any.

  “I don’t let him eat when I’m riding,” I said. “Sometimes we’ll graze in the woods but only on the grassy patches and Henry makes the grooms check the paddocks once a week for weeds and loose boards. It couldn’t be that.”

  “You never know what he might have snagged while you weren’t looking. You should mention it to the vet.” She slipped her phone back into her pocket.

  “You really think that is more likely than Jess trying to poison him?” I said.

  “Don’t you?” Mickey looked at me like I was starting to sound a little crazy. “I’m sure there were lots of people at the show, even overnight. Why would she risk getting caught?”

  “Maybe she didn’t do it herself. Maybe she paid someone else to do it?”

  “Or maybe you are sleep deprived and stressed out and just acting a little crazier than normal,” she said.

  But she didn’t say it in a mean way. She put her arm around me instead.

  “I’m sure he’s going to be fine. Now let’s play with the foal for a while before Miss. Fontain tortures me for an hour.”

  “Alright,” I said. “But I’m still telling the vet that I think maybe Jess poisoned my pony.”

  “I know you will,” Mickey said. “Just don’t do anything else stupid.”

  “Me? Stupid?” I said. “I think you’ve forgotten what I’m really like.”

  “Or not,” Mickey replied with a laugh.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Mickey fell in love with the foal just like I knew she would. And what wasn’t to love? Foals were like babies, all fresh and new and full of potential. And I wasn’t even sure that he was a full Arabian. He had long legs and big hooves and part of me was already trying to tell if one day he’d be a good show jumper. But career options were a long way off considering getting him through foal hood was going to be enough of a problem.

  “Can I bottle feed him after my lesson, please?” Mickey begged.

  “Knock yourself out,” I said. “It gets messy though. Sometimes he forgets to suck and just slurps instead. You’ll end up wearing more of the formula than he drinks.”

  “I don’t care,” Mickey said, crouching down and hugging the foal.

  “Are you sure?” I said with a laugh. “The Mickey I know isn’t usually too fond of getting dirty.”

  “I’ll make an exception for this little guy,” she said. “And when are you going to pick out a name for him.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He doesn’t belong to us. We don’t even know if Sandy is coming back but what if she does? She could just take him and Jupiter away and we wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop her.”

  “But we have to call him something,” she said. “You can’t just keep calling him the foal.”

  “Butt head?” I said as the foal half fell over, crashing into my leg.

  Mickey gave me a dark glare.

  “Fine,” I said. “We’ll try and come up with a name but I’m telling you, my dad won’t like it.”

  “Your dad doesn’t look like he likes anything right now,” Mickey said under her breath as Dad walked past with a scowl on his face.

  He was still limping and using the cane but at least he was around the barn and not holed up in the house anymore.

  “Where did he disappear to anyway?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “And I don’t think I want to know. Maybe Missy and I can just forget about his little disappearing act and everything can go back to normal.”

  “Are you insane?” Mickey said. “That’s not how things work. Missy will want to talk about it for hours and they’ll discuss it until they are blue in the face. Someone will cry and someone will get mad and then eventually they’ll make up but they won’t be happy about it.”

  “You’re an expert now, are you?” I said.

  “No but my parents are and that’s the way they do it.”

  “Well we just try and ignore things like that and pretend they never happened.”

  “And how is that working out for you?” Mickey said as Missy and my father passed in the barn aisle and didn’t even smile at each other.

  “Well I didn’t say it worked.” I shrugged. “I just said that’s what we do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  The vet had said that she was going to come back out and check up on the foal and Bluebird so I hung around watching Mickey’s lesson while I waited for her. I thought for sure that Mickey would be rusty. She’d been gone for a while, almost the whole summer and I knew her legs had to be weak and her position sloppy but it was weird. She wasn’t riding badly at all. In fact she seemed to be riding better than ever. Even Hampton was doing well. Mickey’s parents had paid for Miss. Fontain to school him twice a week while they were gone and so he had retained all his muscles and his training. In fact it was like they were both better than ever.

  I knew there was only one reason that Mickey would have got better instead of worse and it was because she had ridden while she was away but where? And why hadn’t she told me? All she’d gone on about was beaches and shopping and hanging around with Jean-Paul all the time. The river boat rides and the picnics. Had it all been a lie? Had she been riding the whole time she was in Paris? What if there wasn’t even a Jean-Paul at all?

  I shook my head to clear it and ran my fingers through my hair, still not sure if I had even remembered to brush it or not. Mickey was right. I was losing it big time. First I thought that Jess had possibly poisoned my pony and now I was imagining that my best friend had been away on a secret riding holiday instead of a fun family vacation. If I carried on like this, I’d end up getting carted away in a strait jacket to the nearest mental hospital. I was going to have to pull myself together. Mickey was probably right. I was sleep deprived and stressed. Lack of sleep caused people to act crazy, didn’t it?

  I watched my best friend and her horse perform a perfect flying change and then another one four strides later. Four tempis were advanced work for a girl and her horse that had only just started training dressage over the last year. She had taken to it like a duck to water while Bluebird and I were still floundering around trying to find our wings in a world where horses ruled and ponies were just for little kids.

  I watched the vet pull in and went to greet her with a sigh. Maybe it would be best to just keep my poisoning theories to myself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  I told myself that I wouldn’t say anything but of course as soon as the vet walked into the barn, the words just blurted out of my mouth.

  “I think my pony has been poisoned,” I said.

  She looked at me like I was crazy, just as Mickey had done.

  “And why would you think that?” she asked with a frown.

  “He is a champion jumper. You hear about that stuff all the time. Racehorses being poisoned. Olympic hopefuls having their legs shattered with a crowbar.”

  Now the vet was really looking at me like I was crazy. “Where did you hear about stuff like that?” she said. “In the news
or in some book you read?”

  “It does happen,” I said. “I looked it up online. There have been lots of cases where horses have been poisoned and not even expensive horses either. Like maybe someone doesn’t like a person at their barn, like really doesn’t like them and they end up slipping their horse something. Well there are lots of people who don’t like my pony because he wins a lot.”

  “Do you have any proof?” she said.

  “No but …”

  She shook her head. “I’ll check him again but I really think he hasn’t been poisoned. It’s just a virus.”

  But the face she made when she checked Bluebird wasn’t the face of someone who thought it was just a virus. She grabbed his tail and pulled and he nearly fell over, stumbling to keep his legs under him like the foal.

  “See,” I cried. “It’s neurological. Like some toxin or something isn’t it?”

  “I’m going to draw some more blood,” she said. “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  I wanted her to tell me that he was going to be okay but I knew she would never do that. Vets didn’t like to. They weren’t going to tell you something that might not come true. The most they’d commit to was things like ‘I’ll do my best’ and ‘wait and see’ but I didn’t want to wait and see. I wanted my pony to get better now.

  After she’d finished with Bluebird, I showed her the foal and his new best friend. Bandit had decided that even though the foal was bigger than he was, since he was perfectly capable of bossing around the horses, bossing around a foal was a piece of cake. And the foal loved it. Bandit was teaching him things that his own mother was supposed to like how to be respectful and wait his turn and even though he was tough and bossy, when the foal slept, Bandit stood watch over him.

  “Well that is an interesting partnership,” Mary said.

  “We couldn’t leave him with his mother any longer. She wanted to kill him. What is wrong with her?”

  “Do you know if it is her first foal?” the vet said.

  “No idea.” I shook my head.

  “Sometimes mares will reject their first foal. Sometimes they’ll reject a foal if they’ve done it in the past. It’s hard to tell.”

  “It sucks,” I said.

  “Well let’s check him out,” she said.

  The foal passed his check up with flying colors. His vitals were good and he was alert and bright.

  “Do you think he’ll be stunted?” I asked her. “Will he always be messed up now?”

  “No,” she said. “Not necessarily. It’s not ideal but you’ve made the best of a difficult situation.”

  I felt a surge of pride. The vet thought we’d done a good job with the foal and that was a big compliment.

  “He’s so cute,” I said as the foal nuzzled Bandit and then lay down with a sigh.

  “He is,” she said. “But what are you going to do when his owner comes back?”

  “If she comes back,” I said.

  I’d been happy to see the back of Sandy. She’d lied and hit our ponies and sent our students to the hospital. We didn’t need people like her around polluting our barn with their toxic personality. But what if she’d known all along that Jupiter would reject her foal? What if she’d dumped her with us so that we’d have to do all that hard work and then a few months down the road she’d swoop in and claim him? We’d saved him. We were caring for him. That should mean that he was ours.

  “And if she does come back?” Mary asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we’ll sue for custody.”

  “Of a horse?” the vet said, looking at me like I was crazy again.

  “Why not?” I said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  Mickey was right. The fact that my father had disappeared on us had not been forgotten and it certainly had not been forgiven. That night Missy and Dad got into a huge fight. I stayed in my room with my headphones on, music blaring so loud it would probably rupture my eardrums so that I wouldn’t have to hear them. I liked Missy and I liked my dad and I didn’t want them to split up because I didn’t want to have to choose between them, even though it wouldn’t really be a choice because Dad was family and Missy was not.

  Deep down I knew that people fought all the time and just because they were having a massive argument, it didn’t mean that they were going to split up but it also didn’t mean that things were going well either.

  From what I’d heard, Dad wouldn’t tell Missy where he’d been. If he just told her then maybe she’d get over it but he was being all secretive and it was stupid. The truth was always better, even if it got you in more trouble in the first place.

  Eventually I fell asleep and when I woke up in the middle of the night the house was dark and they’d stopped fighting. I thought about Bluebird and was worried. The vet hadn’t said it but I knew she thought that he should have been showing some improvement by now. Maybe I should have been sleeping in his stall. I would if I was really worried about him.

  I tiptoed through the house and pulled on my boots by the door then slipped out into the starry night. It was warm, like walking through a blanket of thick air. There was an owl off in the distance, hooting gently and a soft breeze that ruffled my hair. Some of the lesson horses were out in the dark fields grazing and they came thundering down to the gate as they saw me walk by.

  “It’s not time for breakfast yet,” I whispered. “Go back to your grazing please.”

  They stomped their hooves angrily and rattled the gate but I waved my arms to shoo them away before they made any more noise and woke my dad or Missy up. They snorted and then took off at a gallop, thundering hooves fading away into darkness.

  Inside the barn was quiet, just the muffled stomp of a hoof in deep bedding and the gentle sigh of a sleeping horse. I walked quietly, peeking in on the foal and Bandit as I went by. The little guy was flat out on his side asleep while Bandit stood next to him with his head down and eyes closed. I was so proud of my little miniature and the fact that he now had a job meant that my father couldn’t tell me to get rid of him.

  When he first laid eyes on the mini he’d groaned and I knew that he’d been about to say something that he would regret because there was no way that I was going to let him tell me to give him back or sell him. And then I’d regret the things I’d say in return and we’d end up fighting just like he and Missy were. But if we didn’t have Bandit then the foal would be all alone and we’d have to sit with him all the time so that he wasn’t scared and so really it couldn’t have worked out better because Dad couldn’t say anything. Of course I hadn’t told Jordan yet that his gift horse had saved the day.

  Bluebird was lying down too. He looked up when I opened his door and tried to get up but sort of failed and flopped down on the shavings again. Tears welled up in my eyes. In a short matter of time my pony had gone from winning competitions to not being able to stand up? The treatment wasn’t working. He wasn’t getting better. The vet had given him a vitamin shot before she left. I’d wanted to laugh hysterically or maybe burst into tears. He was really sick. Why did she think that vitamins were going to make him better? He needed a new vet or to go to the clinic or something. He needed more than we were giving him and I was going to talk to my father in the morning about it. No, I was going to beg him because if anything happened to Bluebird then I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go on without him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  I slept in my pony’s stall. Well mostly he slept and I dozed here and there but for the rest of the night I watched him. His breathing. How he shuffled about in the bedding. He did get up eventually and I watched him drink. I tried to coax him to a eat handful of grain, sweet feed that I’d taken from the feed room, a treat so yummy and full of molasses that there wasn’t a horse or pony in the barn that wouldn’t eat it. He tried. He licked a little off my hand and chewed it but then gave up and walked away from me. It was breaking my heart and I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “We have to take Bluebird to the vet clin
ic,” I said. “He’s not getting better. He’s getting worse. I can’t lose him.”

  I was standing in the kitchen, shavings stuck in my hair and hay down my shirt. Dad was getting breakfast, the baby on one hip as he made coffee and warmed a bottle. It looked like he was trying to make things up to Missy so maybe there was a chance he’d want to make things up to me as well and the only way to do that was to help make my pony better.

  “I know,” Dad said. “Henry is already hooking up the trailer. We’re taking him this morning.”

  “We are?” I said, sinking down onto a chair since my legs wouldn’t hold me.

  The fact that my father thought my pony was sick enough to go to the clinic meant that he was really sick and that I hadn’t just blown his illness out of proportion in my over anxious mind.

  “I don’t know why you always think that I don’t care about you or your pony,” Dad said.

  “I do,” I said. “I just didn’t think you cared that much.”

  “A sick pony is a sick pony,” he said. “I’d do the same for any other boarder.”

  Which kind of took the special moment and smashed it to smithereens but my pony was going to get help. That was all I cared about and I didn’t really care how or why it happened. Just that it did.

  “I’ll get ready,” I said, realizing that I didn’t really want to go to the vet hospital smelling like I’d slept in a stall.

  “We’re leaving in forty five minutes,” Dad said. “Don’t take too long.”

  “I won’t,” I said, rushing out of the kitchen.

  I turned in the hallway, looking back at my father. He seemed like he was almost back to his old self but something was off about him. It wasn’t the pills. He’d quit taking them and lost that wild look he’d had in his eyes for a whole month. It was something else. I just couldn’t put my finger on it.