Stable Vices (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 21) Page 3

  “I think I should stay with Bluebird,” I said, my voice faltering as Missy tried to lead me out of the barn and back to the house.

  “Let that pony get some rest,” Missy said. “He won’t get better if you’re hovering over him like an overprotective mother.”

  “I am an overprotective mother,” I said. “An overprotective horse mother and don’t say you wouldn’t do the same if it was Owen.”

  “I would,” she said with a sigh.

  I knew she wanted to add that Owen was a baby not a pony but thankfully she didn’t.

  “Look,” she said. “You won’t be any good to Bluebird if you are sick yourself. You need to keep your strength up so that you can take care of him. Okay? One shower, one hot meal and one nap. That’s all I’m saying. Then you can go and stand vigil outside his stall for as long as you want. But don’t forget that you still have lots of other horses that need work and attention too.”

  “They can wait,” I said.

  But I did feel guilty that I had three horses which needed to be worked and one miniature who pretty much demanded constant attention.

  “I think I have an idea,” I said. “If Jupiter doesn’t accept the foal today.”

  “She will,” Missy said.

  But she didn’t sound very confident.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I don’t think I’d ever enjoyed a hot shower so much in my entire life. The water ran over my stiff, sore muscles and I closed my eyes as the dirt ran off my skin and out of my hair and swirled down the drain. Dirt that was the culmination of the last day and night. The worst day of my life. Losing wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. I knew that now. Not having a healthy and sound pony was and I was going to make sure Bluebird got better and if he wasn’t happy jumping in the big classes against the horses then I wasn’t going to make him. I was going to listen to him from now on more than I had ever done before.

  By the time I came out of the bathroom everything was fogged up with steam and my fingers were all wrinkled like prunes. Missy was in the kitchen, cooking. Delicious smells of eggs and bacon wafted out of the frying pan.

  “I figured we needed real food,” she said, cracking another egg into the pan. “Not something that was cooked in a microwave.

  “I didn’t think I was hungry,” I said as two pieces of bread jumped out of the toaster and landed on the counter top. “But now I think I am starving.”

  We ate at the counter sitting on the bar stools, Owen in his baby chair giggling and throwing his toys on the floor. It was like for one moment everything was okay. I almost forgot about my sick pony and the abandoned foal and the fact that my father was missing but as I shoveled the last forkful of bacon into my mouth the bad feelings came flooding back.

  “Do you think we should file a police report?” I said.

  “For Sandy?” Missy asked. “For what? Abandoning her horse? I don’t think the police will care too much about that. I’m sure they have more important things to deal with.”

  “No,” I said. “For Dad. He wouldn’t just disappear. Something must have happened to him. Something bad.”

  “Your father is a grown man,” she said. “I’m sure he can take care of himself.”

  “But that is just it. He hasn’t been himself lately. Since the accident he’s been all weird and crazy. Who knows what he could have done. How can you be so calm about the fact that he has left us? That he is missing? What if he got in a car accident or something?”

  “I’m not calm,” Missy said, her voice flat. “I’m really mad at him but if I let myself be mad then when he comes back I’ll probably kill him and that wouldn’t be good for any of us.”

  “You’d really kill him?” I said, hoping that Missy meant metaphorically. “Maybe it’s better if he doesn’t come back for a while then.”

  Except it was too late to wish that because just then the door swung open and there stood my father with a box of doughnuts in one hand and a carton of orange juice in the other.

  “Morning,” he said with a smile. “I brought breakfast.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  For a moment I thought that the doughnuts would go flying. That the orange juice would splatter against the wall and the greatest fight in the history of all fights would take place. But I guess Missy was just too tired to bother and so was I.

  “Well didn’t you guys miss me?” he said, putting the doughnuts down on the counter. “Don’t I even get a hello?”

  “Hello,” I said.

  I opened the box of doughnuts, put two strawberry frosted ones on a napkin and went to my room. I didn’t need to be there for the discussion that would more than likely follow. Dad hadn’t had an accident. He wasn’t in the hospital. In fact he looked better than he’d looked for days. He wasn’t even using his crutches, just an old wooden cane that we’d found in the hallway closet when we moved into the house. He was feeling better, which was great but meanwhile we all felt like crap and the least he could have done was answered his phone and let us know where he was.

  I lay on my bed and ate the doughnuts even though I was still full from breakfast. I could hear their voices, muffled from beyond my closed door. Missy telling my father everything that had happened while he had been off doing whatever it was that he was doing.

  I waited for him to apologize. To tell her that he was sorry. That he got carried away. That he didn’t mean to just disappear but I don’t think he was sorry at all. I think he was glad. I think that whatever he had done and wherever he had gone, he’d had a good time and he was happy that he hadn’t been around to deal with all the mess that we’d had to clean up. The only good thing was that maybe if he was really feeling better then he could start teaching lessons again. Not that I would care anything about taking any lessons if Bluebird didn’t get better.

  I opened my laptop and started looking up his symptoms. They were too vague to be of any use. Horses got sick. They picked up viruses with fevers just like people did. But in the back of my mind was the fact that Bluebird had been at the show overnight. Henry had been there but he’d been asleep in his camper. What if someone had done something to my pony in the dead of the night? What if Jess or someone else had poisoned him?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I’d meant to go back down to the barn but at some point I hadn’t been able to keep my eyes open any longer and I woke up with my laptop on the floor and a half eaten doughnut smooched into my shirt. I looked at the time. It was after lunch.

  I ran through the house. No one was there. I thought my father might have resumed his usual spot on the couch, TV blaring and his snores mingling in with the sounds of whatever sport was playing but he wasn’t. Instead he was down at the barn, trying to man handle Jupiter into letting her new foal suckle. It wasn’t working.

  “Let him eat you fool,” he said through gritted teeth.

  Henry was in there too. All men on hand thinking that they could do a better job than us women had done but even they couldn’t stop Jupiter from doing everything she could to keep the foal away from her and he was starting to get upset. I could see him trembling.

  “You’re scaring him,” I said.

  “Do you want him scared or do you want him dead?” Dad said.

  “We can just bottle feed him,” I said. “Can’t we?”

  “You think you have time to raise a foal in-between your school work and riding?” Dad said. “Because think again. You don’t.”

  I looked at the foal, all long legs and fluffy hair. He hadn’t asked to be brought into this world and he hadn’t asked for his own mother to abandon him. It wasn’t fair. I wasn’t going to abandon him either.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  In the end we had to take the foal out of Jupiter’s stall. There was work to do and we didn’t have enough employees to pay someone to stand there and watch him and it wasn’t worth the risk of taking our eyes off the mare for one second. As it was she had now made it her mission to not just ignore th
e poor little guy but to charge at him with teeth bared and ears pinned.

  “What did he ever do to you?” I scolded her as we led the foal away.

  “Now what?” Missy said.

  My father had given up. He’d gone back up to the house saying that his ankle was bothering him. Missy had just made a sort of huffing noise. I didn’t ask her if he’d told her where he went. I didn’t think I wanted to know. It was better to imagine that he just went somewhere innocuous like a bar and not to think that he had done something worse.

  “I have an idea,” I said. “Come on.”

  We shuffled the foal down the barn aisle. He wasn’t very good at leading. We didn’t have a halter small enough for him and so Missy had wrapped an old t-shirt around his neck but the foal didn’t really get the whole point of being led and he wanted to go back to his mother even though the mare didn’t want him. He kept stopping and letting out a bleating cry. Any other mare would have gone ballistic if you’d tried to take her foal away. She would have been climbing the walls trying to get to her baby and screaming at the top of her lungs. Jupiter was silent. She didn’t care that we’d whisked her baby away. In fact I think she was kind of glad.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  We had reached Bandit’s stall, the little mini was standing there with the door open and the tiny miniature horse height stall guard that I’d found online the only thing keeping him from escaping and wreaking havoc. He pricked his ears as the foal looked at him with eyes bugging out of his head. Bandit was half the size of the foal but he was the only other horse on the farm that might make a good babysitter until we found a nurse mare. We didn’t have any other mares that’d had foals on the farm. No one who might take him in and care for him. And we couldn’t sit with him twenty four hours a day. He needed a buddy and Bandit was just going to have to step up and be that buddy.

  We put the foal in the stall with the miniature horse. There was plenty of room for the two of them. They sniffed noses and then butts and Bandit let out a little squeal. The foal jumped back on bandy legs, scared for a moment but he quickly recovered and went back to sniffing his new friend.

  “Think it will work?” I asked Missy.

  “I don’t see why not,” she said. “It’s just too bad Bandit can’t nurse him.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  I spent the rest of the afternoon checking on the foal and Bluebird and trying to work my horses. I barely had the energy to get up in the saddle but as my father used to say, horses wouldn’t work themselves and mine seemed to take pity on me in my fragile state because they were all good.

  Arion hopped over a low course that was set up in the ring without getting excited and trying to run away with me. Four went over the same jumps and didn’t try to rear or run out, although he did pin his ears just to make sure I knew that he really didn’t like jumping and he’d much rather be doing something else instead. And Hashtag worked out in the dressage ring like a champ. I didn’t have the strength it would have taken to jump him bareback and I didn’t want to stray too far from the barn in case Bluebird took a turn for the worse.

  I was just rinsing Hashtag off when I saw a familiar car pull down the drive and despite everything that had happened I felt a surge of joy because I knew it was my best friend and there wasn’t a time in my life when I had needed her more than I needed her now.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I put Hashtag in his stall and ran out to the car. Mickey jumped out but I did a double take, not even sure it was her. Her hair was wavy and highlighted, her skin tanned. She had sparkly pink nails and fancy sunglasses. She also seemed like she’d grown a foot, towering over me with long lean legs until I looked down and saw that she was wearing high heels.

  “You do know this is a barn, not a fashion show, right?” I said, taking a step back.

  “Taylor Swift wears high heels all the time. That’s why she always looks so polished and awesome.”

  “And you fell on your head and now think that you are the reincarnation of Taylor Swift?” I said, looking inside the car. “Do you have a cat in there too?”

  “A cat?” She laughed. “Are you kidding? Like my mom would ever let me keep a cat in the house with all her fish.”

  “Then I’m sorry to have to tell you this but you are not Taylor Swift.”

  She looped her arm through mine as we walked into the barn.

  “I know,” she said.

  And for a minute I was afraid that Paris had swallowed my best friend whole and spat out this sophisticated girl in her place, one who liked make up and boys even more than she had before she left but as soon as she saw Hampton her face lit up and she ran to his stall.

  “Did you miss me boy?” she cried, pushing the door open and stumbling through the shavings on her ridiculous high heels, almost wringing her ankle over in the process.

  “You know, my father has a pair of crutches if you end up needing them,” I said as my best friend threw her arms around her horse’s neck.

  Hampton, ever the stoic horse who didn’t like to wear his emotions on his sleeve, just sort of sighed but he let Mickey hug him because I think he could tell that she needed it more than he needed to push her off and go back to eating his hay.

  “Crutches?” Mickey said, looking a little misty eyed as she finally released her horse. “What has been going on while I’ve been gone?”

  “A lot,” I said. “And I did tell you on the phone. Stuff has been crazy.”

  “I wasn’t even gone for that long,” she said.

  “Trust me,” I replied. “In barn time, you might as well have been gone a whole year.”

  “But everything is okay, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Not really,” I said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  We sat in our favorite shady spot under the big old oak tree and I told Mickey everything. All the things that had happened since she’d been gone. There was a lot. Even to me it sounded crazy that so much could happen in such a short space of time.

  “Jordan gave you a horse?” she said, picking at the long blades of grass.

  “I just told you all of my crazy news and the only thing you got from any of it was that Jordan got me a horse?” I said.

  “But he bought you a horse,” she said again.

  “A miniature,” I said. “He’s hardly a horse. He’s not even a pony. He’s more like a large dog.”

  “But you saw him at the fair where you went with him on a date and you wanted to rescue him and then he bought him for you. I knew it. I knew you guys would hook up.”

  “We haven’t hooked up,” I said, starting to get a little frustrated. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “What was it like then?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I mumbled. “But not like that.”

  “It’s a good thing,” Mickey said. “Your relationship is progressing.”

  “Yes because now we are super in love,” I groaned, laying back on the grass and staring up at the snippets of blue sky that peeked through the leaves above.

  It was still hot. I was longing for fall. Those days when you opened the front door and stepped out into crisp, cool air. When the horses were fresh because the breeze lifted their tails and the humidity had gone, unmasking their true, playful selves. But we weren’t there yet. Not by a long shot. Just like my relationship with Jordan.

  “You mean it’s progressed to the ‘I’m not even sure what to say to him anymore’ stage?” I said.

  “But you still think that maybe you want to talk to him,” Mickey said. “For you that is progress.”

  “What about Jean-Paul?” I said, asking about the boy that Mickey had fallen in love with in Paris. “Did you patch things up?”

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

  I sat up, leaning on one arm and looked at her. It wasn’t like my best friend to not want to talk about a boy. Even bad breakups were usually rehashed over and over again during hours of stuffing junk fo
od into our mouths while Mickey vowed to never love another boy again, which usually only lasted until she saw the next cute one walk by. And she always wanted to talk about it.

  “What did he do to you?” I said.

  “Please.” She turned away, looking out to the fields. “Don’t push it, okay?”

  “Alright,” I said.

  I knew what it was like not to want to talk about things and Mickey was usually the one pressing me to talk but I knew that for her not to say, it had to be something really bad and I was going to have to get it out of her eventually. I just didn’t have the strength to argue with her right now.

  “So Bluebird is really sick?” she finally said.

  “Yes,” I replied, my stomach churning over.

  “And the vet doesn’t know what it is?”

  “She said it’s probably a virus,” I said.

  “But you don’t believe her?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just none of the other horses are sick. No one else scratched at the show. Where could he have got sick from? And Jess was there. Fake nice Jess. I don’t trust her. I don’t believe for one second that she has turned over a new leaf. I think it’s all an act. That she is just biding her time. Lulling us all into a false sense of security and then she’ll strike when our guards are down. She could have easily slipped Bluebird something while we weren’t there.”

  “You think she poisoned him?” Mickey said.

  “Don’t you? It’s just the sort of thing Jess would do. A good way to get me and my pony out of the way and clear the competition so that she could win.”

  “But she didn’t win, did she?”

  “Only because of the storm. I bet she would have won if it hadn’t been raining so badly.”

  “But you don’t have any proof though do you?” Mickey said.