Candace Carrabus - Dreamhorse 01 - On the Buckle

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About the Author

The Good Horse, The Bad Man & The Ugly Woman

on th
e

buckle

DREAMHORSE MYSTERY #1

Candace Carrabu
s

Copyright © Candace Carrabus Rice

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
 

reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or

by any means, including photocopying, recording, or
 

other electronic or mechanical methods, without the

prior written permission of the publisher, except in the
 

case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews

and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by
 

copyright law. For permission requests, email the
 

publisher with the subject “Attention: Permissions
 

Coordinator,” at the address below.

Witting Woman Works

[email protected]

www.thewitting.com/WittingWomanWorks.html

Ordering information:

Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity
 

Purchases by corporations, associates, and others. For
 

Details, email the publisher at the address above.

ISBN-13: 978-0989605717
 

ISBN-10: 098960571X

Cover design by Candace Rice

Cover images
 

© Alejandro Duran | Dreamstime

© Timbrk | Dreamstime

This one is for Mom.

Miss you!

Q

A very special thanks to
 

Dr. Terry E. Newton
 

of Bowling Green Veterinary Clinic
 

for veterinary advice.

on th
e

buckle

- 1 -

The truth is, my parents are alive. Pretending they’re dead makes their absence in my life tolerable. When the letter came from their attorney—crap—who would have guessed they had a lawyer? Anyway, it was like they were dead because it referred to money I might receive, “amount undisclosed.” That was just like them. Jesus. Amount undisclosed. What the hell was that supposed to mean? It could be five dollars for cripe’s sake.

I tightened my horse’s girth from where I sat in the saddle, and she swished her tail in irritation, tossed her head. We both needed a good gallop.

The letter said my parents had “made arrangements.” That’s a thinly-veiled Dad euphemism for “here’s what I want you to do, and I’ve fixed it so you have to.” He always gets his way. I went along like an idiot—hadn’t seen or heard from them in years, and I still went along.
 

I’m like a dog. I can say that because I have a dog—Noire—running alongside. Doesn’t matter how I treat her—and I treat her good—she’d be happy to see me.
 

Always hopeful. That’s what it was. I was hoping this time they’d finally come through for me—that it would be more than five dollars.
 

I can talk myself into anything.

This was the situation: In the next month, on May first, I would be twenty-nine years old. The letter from an attorney said there was this trust fund for me. To get it, I had to keep a job for one year by the time I was thirty—even a job working with horses—and I had to leave with a glowing letter of recommendation. That goes to show they were still keeping tabs on me, probably through my uncle. God forbid I should know where they were or what they were doing.

We hit the straight stretch and I gave Cali her head. She eased into gallop.

My first mistake was telling my cousin, Penny, about the letter. She’s more like my sister since my aunt and uncle raised me, and I lived with Pen and her husband, Frank. She’d shifted into gear, scoured the want ads of all my horse magazines, sent out my resume, and came up with a doozey of a job for me.

Penny had sat one wide hip on the edge of the bed and flipped her long, dark hair over her shoulder. “You have to do something, Vi,” she said. “You haven’t kept a job for more than a few months solid ever.”

She didn’t have to remind me. The breaks between had become longer. It was getting so I could hardly keep Cali in hay. If it weren’t for the tolerance of Penny and Frank, I’d have had to sell the nag.

“Penny,” I’d said. “I ride horses, fancy show horses, remember? The kind that jump really big jumps for really big money. I do not give trail rides.”

“It’ll be a nice break for you. All that competition is stressful.”

Stressful. Yeah, right. What was stressful was the owners. All they cared about was winning, not whether their horses were happy or healthy or even ready for the next level. Penny knew all about the blowup with my last client over his horse. He says he fired me, but I walked out because I wouldn’t make his horse do something that would get one or both of us hurt. And I don’t mean the owner.
 

I tried a different tack. “Yeah, but Missouri? For cripe’s sake, Pen, what do they have out there, corn fields?”

“I’m sure they do have corn fields. But St. Louis is a big city. They have baseball, museums, a good symphony …”

Crap. Penny is thorough. She’d done her homework, and she is always reasonable. I’m not. It’s a bad habit. Can you really expect reasonableness from someone with a name like Viola? Jesus. It’s the twenty-first century.

“Like I’ll have time for the symphony when I’m taking care of twenty hack horses and who knows how many boarders and…I’m not teaching riding lessons, right? You told them I don’t teach?”

She nodded, and I continued without taking a breath. “Anyway, you know I don’t care about sports, and I’m not going to be anywhere near St. Louis. How could you do this to me?”

“I have not done it
to
you. I’ve done it
for
you.”

She’d raised her voice. She was folding laundry and snapped the life out of a couple of pillowcases by way of calming herself before continuing.
 

“You’ll be a little over an hour from St. Louis. It takes that long to get to Manhattan, so don’t make such a big deal about it. You hardly ever go into the city anyway. Now get going, before they change their minds or you run out of time.”

I’d used every excuse I could think of. Penny overrode all of them. She’s not usually bossy, but had reached her limit, being pregnant. They needed my room for a nursery. I wouldn’t have a home to come back to when the year was up.
 

So, I made plans to haul myself and Noire and Cali to Winterlight, the Malcolm family’s public riding stable out in God’s country, for a year of keeping their horses fit for fox hunting, giving trail rides, and “helping out around the farm.” That, I knew, could be anything. I hoped they didn’t expect me to milk cows or slop hogs or anything like that. Working at a hack barn was low enough.

I ride jumpers, and I’m good at it. When I get in the saddle, some channel opens that is closed to most others. I used to get paid well to jump horses around grand-prix courses with jumps so high it would make your hair stand on end. It put me in a zone of some kind where nothing could touch us—if I was on a horse I knew was ready, a horse that could do it. If I was on a horse that wasn’t ready, I’d get a sick feeling in my stomach and do my best to find a way out of it.
 

When the unthinkable happened because I didn’t listen to my gut—a deadly crash at a square oxer in the middle of a difficult triple combination that left a gelding with great heart in a heap and having to be put down, when that happened, and I went to the emergency room with a fractured sternum and more bruises and contusions and sprains than I could count, and I spent several days in intensive care on a respirator, only to hobble out to face a law suit from the irate owner who demanded I push his horse beyond his limits, I quit for a while and tried giving lessons.

Made me wish they had put me down.

Maybe a year of forced trail riding would be a good break. I would do my time and get the glowing letter of recommendation.
 

Before I left Long Island, Penny made me promise not to “smart off,” drink, or get involved with my boss. Maybe she was right, but I only smarted off because the people I worked with were such idiots. The drinking thing I have under control. And Harry, well, who could resist Harry? Apparently no one, male or female. Harry didn’t discriminate that way either. I don’t like to share, so it was best to move on.

~~~

I pulled into the drive of Winterlight toward late afternoon on the last Saturday of April, and stopped. The ground rose and the road topped a hill, blocking my view of the place. A light cloud of dust hovered beyond the hilltop—probably someone riding in a dry arena.
 

Nothing said I had to do it. Nothing said I had to collect the mysterious trust fund.
 

The problem was a child. That’s why I stopped with the engine idling roughly, Noire eyeing me expectantly, and Cali pawing the floor of the trailer. They wanted to get out and run. I wanted to get out and run the other way.