Keeneland : A Novel - Hardcover

CHAPTER 1

I was on my way to the race secretary's office when I was waylaid by the sight of crotchety Reno hosing down a high-hocked chestnut mare. He shouldn't have been there. Alice Piersall's barn had always been down the hill, closer to the track kitchen. I'd been sweating blood about running into some people, the wrong people, before I got my story straight, so I hadn't bet on having my first sparring match of the morning with that sour old man. I could've turned around, eased the corner at the next shed row, and mazed my way up the hill to where the hustlers were eking out their deals. They wouldn't care why I was back from New York without a husband or a horse to my name. But I'd had a bad moment when I parked my car, knowing I was going to endure a lot of hot eyes and tattling before I had my legs under me again. I'd pulled into Jack McClellan's reserved spot because I knew he wouldn't be up here until after the big race at Gulfstream. The hand-lettered Reserved signs hanging on the whitewashed fences didn't mean squat until the meet was open and there were races to be lost and won.

A long, bad moment. I'd stepped out of the Chevy only to feel my ribs go squish against one another like the gristle in a picked-over turkey carcass. I'd pounded them pretty good when I took the fall from our mare Sunny during her workout three days before, a stunt my husband, Eric, had planned as a gift for the creeps who'd bankrolled him into trouble. The odds on Sunny were supposed to go way up when word got out about her panicking in the gate and dumping her rider; that had been jerk Eric's plan. After being laid up with an injury, Sunny was due to run her first race in months at the end of the week. If I had any guts left by then, any meat shred of pride, I wouldn't pay attention to that race, no matter how much I loved that perfect horse. I'd forget about it. Flip right past the tout in the Racing Form and everything.

So my ribs were hurting, and my neck and thigh where Eric had punched me in some kind of speed-freak gangster desperation, and the foot which always went dead when I drove any kind of distance, a problem that went back to being stomped on by a bird-shy colt when I was still dumb enough to hotwalk horses in sneakers. I was hungry, but not the sort of hungry that waters your mouth with any idea of what to eat. I was tired too. None of these complaints was new -- except maybe the punches from Eric, which pissed me off even as they brought into my head a kind of cold, shrunk-up worry I hadn't felt before. What was new was the whittled sadness I had to swallow when I set foot on that swept pavement and took in a long, dewy breath of racecourse air. Cherry trees, budded dogwood, the low purr of a truck hauling fresh straw to the sheds. I thought it should cleanse me right then and there. Sweep away New York. Broom away Eric Ballard and the good love that was still French-braided with the bad. But it didn't. The foam bedroll stashed in the back of my car still looked like my ten-year-old bedroll. My two saddles, one uncracked helmet, cooler, duffel, lockbox, bridles, dress boots, and parka still looked like exactly what they were: hard-worn leftovers of a leftover life. I was a gypsy. Which made me no different than two-thirds of the folks working the backside of the track right that minute. It made me very different from the gal who'd left Kentucky two years before, though. The assistant trainer with a string of hotblood horses. The gleaming wife. The optimist who thought she could beat the game that beats everybody, every day, amen. I was back from the tough, year-round tracks of New York, the land of milk and big money, with nothing but lousy stories to tell and a box of stolen cash I couldn't bear to think about, much less touch.

It was a low-rent, prodigal return. No lookouts at the fancy stone gateposts. No messenger cries. I was just another saddle-sore working girl boomeranging back to where she came from.

And I run into Reno.

He was Alice Piersall's foreman and had been for a long time. I'd heard he was head man at one of the top barns in Florida when he was younger, but there'd been some kind of trouble there. He'd done piecework on the fairground circuit for a while before he fell in with Alice. He was too good for her grade of horses, and her operation was too small, but for all the years I'd known him, or known of him, it was clear that Reno was exactly where he wanted to be. There were bushels of stories about the man. How he'd been a famous child preacher in the Everglades, soloing in purple velvet and gold lamé. How he'd worked in the boiling cane fields with his brothers after his voice changed and the dove-spirit of the Lord left him for the tender throat of some other dark and shining boy. How he nicked a white boss man with a knife. How he ran a big-time trainer out of his own barn, following him right into the private dining room of the clubhouse and shouting the whole way because the man was messing with a horse's stone bruise and pretending that horse was ready to run. He'd lost his job over that one. I'd ridden for Alice off and on before I left with Eric for up north. I had a few Reno stories of my own. Most of them revolved around the legend of his temper and the fact that I was the kind of person most likely to set that temper off.

Now, this minute, there was no getting past the man. He had the mare half on the grass and half on the soaked gravel of the road, his tapered back to me while he doused her joints with cold water. I took a couple of dragging steps forward.

"Watch the rogue horse," he said as the mare shook her head, then lowered it to look at me. I almost laughed. The mare was no more rogue than a puppy was, but a man like Reno -- bossy and gruff -- couldn't resist the play. He probably hoped I was a high-heeled tourist.

"She won't hurt me, will she?" I downshifted into a spoiled belle accent. "I just want to feed her some sugar like Daddy lets me do the ones back home."

He froze for maybe two ticks before his oval, close-shaved head rotated in my direction. He was careful to keep one hand under the mare's ticklish chin and the other on the red industrial hose, cooling the horse, always doing his job. His eyes didn't show anything once they focused on me -- not surprise or dislike or even one unswept grain of pleasure. I expect I looked the same to him I always had: tallish, half dirty, my hair in a muzzy yellow braid down my back. He certainly hadn't changed. He was wearing navy blue work clothes, long in the leg, short at the sleeve, mildly faded at the pressed creases. No watch. Thick-soled army surplus boots he kept polished. And that same thin rawhide strip of a belt that featured no buckle to speak of and which always failed to cover the copper tab of his fly. His face was the deep, burnished brown of fine walnut furniture, the kind my mama coveted. He had high cheekbones and a long jaw, a wide clamped mouth. I could see the whites of his eyes were bloodshot, which was not a good sign. It meant his mood was simmering.

"Found you a daddy up north, have you? Ain't that always the way." He spoke to a point off to my right, then rotated back to his business, unconcerned, like a rattler surveying the desert from his rock.

I had to hand it to him. He knew how to wrist-snap his punches. My smart-aleck talk hadn't slipped past him. Hoping we were even, I headed uphill, where I trusted Joanie, the race secretary's assistant, would pour me some free coffee. I gave Reno a half wave as I went by, a movement akin to brushing sawdust from my jeans, but I didn't look at him again.

"She want to see you."

I stopped. Waited for him to go on.

"I know you looking for work, like everybody else."

I heard him drop the hose and swing the mare around for the walk back to her stall. Her hooves chittered on the wet