Paradise County (14 page)

J
oe lay on his back with his hands folded behind his head, staring up at the shadowy white ceiling over his bed, wide awake although it was long after he was usually out like a light. Outside rain fell in sheets. All last summer Shelby County had endured the century’s worst drought: creeks had baked dry, crops had roasted in the fields, trees had lost their leaves. Now, when it was too late to do any good, it looked like they were getting a deluge of biblical proportions. He only hoped the roof didn’t spring a leak.

He could get up, go downstairs, have something to eat. Watching TV was not an option: about twenty minutes ago the electricity had gone out, as it frequently did when there was a storm. But he refused to concede defeat. Insomnia was not going to get the best of him. After Laura had taken off, leaving him in the lurch with three little kids, a pile of debts, and blasted-to-smithereens career aspirations, he hadn’t been able to sleep for years. Finally, finally, he’d conquered his demons, steered himself to a good place in his life, and been able to sleep again.

But today Alexandra Haywood had blown his comfortable life out of the water once more.

His salary for managing Whistledown Farm accounted for almost
half his income. Plus it came with benefits—health and dental insurance that he’d had to pay for, but at a greatly reduced rate because he’d technically been an employee of Haywood’s company. All that was a lot to lose in one blow. Then there were the horses—losing them was almost worse than losing the job. If it wasn’t for the effect the loss of income would have on his kids, it would be worse.

He had a contract, all right, but he wasn’t stupid: sometimes a contract wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. All that contract was going to do was buy him a little time. He could tell Alexandra Haywood and whoever else he had to that he meant to hold them to what the piece of paper said, and even threaten to bring a lawsuit against them if necessary. If he was lucky he might get a few extra weeks or months, and some kind of financial settlement on account of the contract being breached. But no matter what he did, if the estate was in the kind of financial trouble Alexandra Haywood claimed—and he didn’t think she was lying—sooner or later the Whistledown horses and the farm itself were going to be sold.

That being the inescapable reality of the situation, he might as well face it, and start making plans.

The first thing to do would be to get the horses settled as advantageously as he could. Each posed a different set of problems, from the most expensive—that would be Deputy Dreamer, a feisty two-year-old out of Mr. Prospector—to the least. Twelve-year-old Suleimann, who’d never placed better than third in his racing career, was worth maybe a thousand dollars.

He was going to have to buy Suleimann himself. A thousand dollars he could afford. Silver Wonder at around half a million? In his dreams. Unless, maybe, he could pull together a group of investors and work out some kind of deal.

What were the chances of that?

As far as his personal finances were concerned, the bottom line was that he was going to have to come up with another source of income. He could board more horses than he already did—without the Whistledown horses, there would be plenty of extra stalls in his barn. He could look for another farm to manage, but all the local ones that needed managers
had them, as far as he knew. Instead of training privately, as he had been doing for Haywood, he could open a public stable and train for a variety of owners. But building a lucrative public stable took time, and to do right by the horses and their owners would mean traveling a lot. Traveling a lot was something he would do only as a last resort, because there were the kids to think about.

In his considered opinion, the boys especially needed him home almost more as teenagers than they had as little kids.

He could always get a job at the Budd plant, the local industry giant that manufactured machine parts. Or at Ford in Louisville. The pay at either was good. The benefits were good.

Joe’s mouth twisted. At nineteen he’d been full of plans to become a hotshot horse trainer, convinced that he had what it took to be one of the best, one of the elite. He had dreamed of winning all the big ones, the Derby, the Breeders’ Cup, maybe even the Triple Crown. But then along had come Laura and the kids and the whole disaster that had been his married life. Eventually, when it had come down to choosing between making sure his kids were taken care of and chasing his dreams, his kids had won. He’d thought he had found an acceptable compromise when he’d gone to work for Charles Haywood: a steady paycheck along with the challenge of building a first-class stable on someone else’s dime. Now, at thirty-seven, he was reaping what he had sown: the stable he’d worked so hard to put together was being taken away from him because it was not, in actuality, his own, and he was reduced to thinking about taking a job in a factory to support his kids.

He should have seen it coming from the moment he had found Haywood’s body. He guessed he
had
seen it coming, although he hadn’t wanted to face it. When Alexandra Haywood had shown up so unexpectedly today, he had known as soon as he set eyes on her that her unprecedented appearance at Whistledown boded nothing good.

Exactly what part of
you’re fired
don’t you understand?
she’d asked mockingly.

His immediate reaction had been to think, You smug little bitch.

The kicker was that he’d felt sorry for her at Haywood’s funeral,
which he had flown to Philadelphia to attend. He had respected his employer, and liked him too. They had both wanted the same thing: to build Whistledown Farm into one of the premier racing stables in the country. During the two months a year Haywood had generally stayed at Whistledown, they had spent a lot of time together, owner and trainer, talking about horses, talking about the farm. Haywood had mentioned his older daughter often, sharing an anecdote about something or other that she had done, bragging on her brains, her beauty. One day, he’d always said, one day when she had grown up a little and gotten all the liberal-arts nonsense college had put into her head out of her system, she would come to work for him, and then he would train her to take over the reins of Haywood Harley Nichols; that’s how smart she was.

Joe had let the daughter stories go in one ear and out the other without paying much attention to them, chalking them up to a father’s natural partiality for his child. Thus he had been a little surprised, on first setting eyes on her at her father’s funeral, to find that Alexandra Haywood was indeed as lovely as her father had claimed. Blond and slender in her fitted black suit, beautiful in a fine-boned, touch-me-not kind of way, she had caught his eye as she’d walked to the front pew with her stepmother and sister after the rest of the mourners had been seated.

He hadn’t been positive of her identity until the reception following the service, but he’d guessed that she could only be Charles Haywood’s beloved Alex. He had watched her off and on throughout the service. It had been obvious that she was grief-stricken. Her face had been as white and set as marble as she sat between her sister and a thin, dark-haired man in an expensive suit who’d held her hand—probably the fiancé who’d dumped her today. She had listened to the black-robed Episcopal priest who conducted the service, the florid-faced man who delivered the eulogy, and the angel-voiced choir without once changing expression, although silent tears had coursed down her cheeks. Later, at the reception in Haywood’s big stone mansion with its marble floors and huge flower-filled rooms, he had hung around until he had a chance to express his condolences to her, although he’d felt as out of place as a fish in a tree. There’d been fancy people he didn’t know, fancy food he didn’t
like—smoked salmon and caviar on little triangles of toast came to mind—and, for entertainment, a tasteful pianist and Haywood’s young and beautiful widow, who periodically came through the rooms thanking everyone for coming. Joe had conversed with a few guests, sampled the food, expressed his condolences to the widow, and kept his eye out for Haywood’s older daughter. Finally she’d appeared, her eyes red-rimmed, her lips pressed tightly together as if she was determined not to cry. He’d gone up to her, introduced himself, shaken the hand she’d held out to him, and expressed his sorrow for her loss and his admiration for her father.

And yet it had been obvious, when she had shown up at his barn today, that she didn’t even remember meeting him. Well, he didn’t hold that against her. He was no stranger to grief himself, and knew the tricks it could play on one’s mind.

Angry as he’d been at being fired, he had, reluctantly, felt sorry for her again as she’d begged him for the details of finding her father’s body. It was clear that Haywood’s death had hit her hard. He supposed that years of taking care of everybody and everything had made him instinctively sympathetic toward women and children. In trying to counteract that impulse, which in this situation could do him nothing but harm if it caused him to abandon his determination to hang on at Whistledown for as long as he could, he’d been maybe blunter than he should have been. When she had grown visibly distressed he had cursed himself silently for giving in to her demands at all. In the end, when she’d persisted, he’d had to remind himself that Alexandra Haywood wasn’t his problem, and just walk away.

He had enough problems of his own without taking on hers.

He’d invested himself in Whistledown Farm in a major way, and now the dream was being yanked out from under him like a rug from beneath the feet of a character in an un-funny cartoon.

That was what was bothering him so, he decided. It was not the loss of the job, the paycheck, and everything that went with it, although all those were pretty important too. It was the loss of the dream.

So here he was, at thirty-seven, faced with starting all over again.

God, it was depressing to think about.

Then he wouldn’t think about it. He refused. Not tonight. Tomorrow would be soon enough to start making plans for the future.

Joe rolled onto his stomach, punched his pillow with more force than the reshaping of it called for, and tried again to go to sleep.

“God, I’m freezing! Hurry up, Alex!”

The roar of the driving rain muffled Neely’s words so that Alex could barely understand them. Wind-propelled sheets of water pounded the ground. The smell of wet mud rose from the saturated earth like mist. The mud itself churned around her feet with every step, sucking at her shoes, making each step an effort more taxing than trying to run in deep, soft sand. The night was dark, lit only by all-too-frequent flashes of lightning. Her fear of being chased was receding—even a homicidal maniac would think twice about venturing out in this downpour—but a shadow of it remained nonetheless.

Glancing up, her eyes shielded from the worst of the deluge by the blanket that now covered her like a hooded cloak with a fat rolled brim, Alex saw the dark, quilt-shrouded figure that was Neely swing a leg over the top of the four-board black fence which she herself had just reached. This was the second fence they’d had to climb. Neely, in flannel pajamas, had an easier time of it than did she in her long nightgown.

Had she really thought that it would be a simple matter to run down to the farm manager’s house for help?

Her knees were threatening to turn to jelly at any minute and her injured head ached badly. The good thing about the icy rain was that it had long since numbed the stinging of the cut on her crown. The bad thing was that she was soaked to the skin and frozen to her very marrow, so numb with cold that she doubted that she would feel it if she accidentally drove a nail through her hand.

Neely gained the ground on the other side of the fence and stopped, waiting for her. Huddled in the now-drenched quilt, her face a pale oval
in the darkness as it turned toward Alex, she was barely visible through the silvery sheets of falling water.

“Go on without me!” Alex shouted to be heard. The downpour was so loud that she was afraid her voice wouldn’t carry, but her sister must have understood, because she turned and vanished into the storm. For a moment, just a moment, Alex allowed herself to rest. Bowing her head against the rain, she leaned on the fence, trying to catch her breath. The rain drove through the already soaked blanket, pouring down her body with as little hindrance as if she’d been standing there naked. Deliberately she thought about what she was running from—the sound of breathing, the smell of burning, someone in the house who was possibly, at this very moment, giving chase—to give herself the strength to go on.

Thunder boomed. Lightning snaked across the sky, then with a bang as loud as an explosion hit frighteningly close. Galvanized, she moved. Yanking one foot free of the muddy quagmire, Alex hitched her nightgown up to her thighs, struggled to adjust the blanket, and climbed the fence. The boards were rough and splintery beneath her hands, and slippery with streaming water. Her feet in their leather-soled shoes kept slipping off the narrow edges. The rain was falling so hard that it hurt when it hit the bare skin of her legs. Glancing up as she swung a leg over the top, she saw that Welch’s white-painted farmhouse was faintly visible on the rise just ahead. Only a little bit farther …