Halt at X: A North of Boston Novel Read online

Off Track

  “She looks bad now, but you’ll fatten her up. You do that with animals,” Tori Bentley said, having just backed a skeletal thoroughbred mare off her two-horse trailer onto Lucinda’s driveway. Tori’s half-face smile usually cheered Lucinda, her Southern soul glowing bright on the wind-swept New England coast. But not today.

  Lucinda’s property — a formerly thriving McIntosh apple orchard with a venerable saltbox farmhouse and four-stall barn — had been left to Lucinda by her father’s sister Jean. This magnificent gesture by her favorite aunt had allowed Lucinda — still in graduate school at the time — and Bart — trying to make it as a commercial photographer — the chance to skip over the apartment phase, which would have been the only affordable option for the couple in Plumcliff on Cape Tilton.

  East beyond the orchard, white pines and gray birches gave way to pitch pines and scrub oaks, then steep-sided dunes colonized by tough salt grasses and bayberry bushes. Beyond that lay a mica-flecked sand beach where black-backed gulls surveyed the ocean on football-sized rocks and fed in the seaweed at low tide.

  “Sixteen-one?” Lucinda said, guessing the mare’s height. Her first horse was half a hand shorter, a Morgan cross gelding. She’d worked three summers in a row washing cars and selling lemonade to clam diggers, antique hunters, and tourists by the clam flats of Route 8 to save up for her first used hunt saddle.

  “She’s just a whisper over 16 hands. Pure thoroughbred but she looks a touch Arab doesn’t she?” said Tori. “Well, everything goes back to the Arab anyway. If you want to go back far enough.” Lucinda eyed the mare’s confirmation.

  “Maybe she’s not registered? An Anglo-Arab? God, it’s hard to tell. She’s a mess!” Lucinda said.

  “Oh, she’s registered all right. Registered and raced. We came straight here from the track.”

  Even against her mood, muddier than the mare, Lucinda smiled. Leave it to Tori to discuss thoroughbred ancestry when describing a horse in such a state. Lucinda’s eyes narrowed as she tried to see past the dried mud and ignore the scar above the mare’s left hock while simultaneously imagining more flesh over her spine and rib cage.

  The gray mare was a jumble of rocks, all slopes and angles and absent flesh. Four wraps, left on to sweat her lower legs, adhered like dried glue.

  She’d only mentioned to her oldest buddy that she was ready to think about horse hunting after 20 years since she sold her first horse, right before her first semester at Peabody-Hawthorne. So Tori Bentley, luxury stable owner and intrepid thoroughbred rescuer, immediately hauled over some emaciated equine remnant destined for the next meat auction pen. Not that there was much meat on her. What’s Lucinda supposed to do, send the poor thing back to be trucked hundreds of miles to Mexico to be tortured while processed for dog food?

  “Look, just give her a try. You’ve got your riding muscles again so what are you waiting for?” Tori said, offering another half-face smile. Lucinda’s frown excised more deeply into her face. It was the getting her riding muscles back that entangled her with Jay.

  Tori led the mare a few paces down the driveway and back to stretch her legs, or show her off, Lucinda wasn’t sure which.

  Coming back to a halt in front of Lucinda, Tori said, “Keep her at my barn if you need to. Damnation! I’ll keep her if you don’t want her, she’s — ”

  “She have a name?” Lucinda asked.

  The mare, her nostrils flaring a reflective rose pink, turned her head to watch Lucinda stroke her filthy neck.

  “She’s registered as Silver Palette Special. I think she was raced a season and a half, but she’s still young. Just turned five.”

  “Yes, and then it looked like they stopped bothering to feed her,” Lucinda said. She began a more systematic inspection starting at the mare’s head, with its subtly dishy profile, while unconsciously picking flakes of dried powdery mud off the mare’s coat, its color like those brownish gray Necco wafer candies Lucinda ate as a kid.

  “Actually, the track trainer told me she’d stopped eating about five days ago. Just staring at the wall. She’d been taken away from the track the month before and then was brought back a couple weeks ago. He was going to dump her at the meat auction next week.”

  Lucinda examined the ground between herself and the mare.

  “I know! It’s disgusting. But she’s a beauty, Cinda. You’ll see when she fills out. And she’ll bring you good luck. I see it in her eyes.”

  There she goes, thought Lucinda, the final sales pitch. She smells victory. Lucinda had refused horses from Tori before, but this was the first time Tori actually brought a horse over and shoved it under her nose.

  “Otherwise, as I said, I’d keep her myself. I was hauling her to my place, you know, but something told me to bring her here.”

  Tori ran her hand over the bony ridge of the mare’s shoulder. Victoria Dix Bentley was Vicki D. when she and Lucinda played together on the clam flats and beaches as kids and rode their first horses through the dunes and woods. Her first marriage to Savannah scapegrace Dennis Wheaton ended in financial and emotional disaster. Her second go at marriage, with architect and equine-property-developer Martin Moretti Bentley, rocketed her from high-end low income into the lower-end range of millionaires. She felt “Tori” better fit her new lifestyle.

  She’d always be Vicki D. as far as Lucinda was concerned, the same kid who, late on a February afternoon 26 years ago, jumped off her chubby quarter horse and threw one end of a slippery leather girth to Lucinda to haul her out of a three-foot hole in pond ice. Lucinda had fallen in after a startled deer spooked her gelding when they crossed the narrow earthen berm bisecting the pond. Knives of pain stabbed Lucinda’s legs and torso as she broke through the ice up to her armpits.

  After hauling Lucinda out onto the berm, Vicki D. propped her behind her own saddle and dashed back to the stable, leading the Morgan gelding. Lucinda, clutching her friend’s down-clad torso to stay on, shut her eyes against the sensation of her clothes stiffening like frozen cardboard. Into the sharp wind contracting Lucinda’s stinging skin, Vicki D. had called out, “This is a good day.”

  “You can’t starve out the soul, can you, Cinda?” Tori asked.

  Lucinda shivered despite the May sunshine. In addition to her gaunt frame, there was that mostly healed wound above the mare’s left hock and her left eye watered. Lucinda’s chest ached as her gaze lingered over the mare’s back and rib area, and she unconsciously rubbed her fingertips over the area of her shirt covering her own breastbone. If you don’t earn money, you don’t get fed. In fact, you’ll feed something else before too long. Yet some scrap of soul radiated from the eyes of the well-bred mare, thwarted as it was.

  “Know what’s up with that hock?” Lucinda asked.

  Tori considered. “It doesn’t look too bad. I’ll send Dr. Camille over. Hell! I’ll even throw in x-rays so you know what kind of feet you’ve got. Ultrasound if she thinks — ”

  “Tori, you don’t have — ”

  “I know I don’t, but I love supporting Dr. C. She’s an equine genius,” Tori said. “I’m sponsoring her in a study on laminitis. She was the first African-American to submit a proposal, and it beat out ninety-nine others for funding.” As Tori idly braided the mare’s forelock, Silver P. pressed her head against Tori’s chest and closed her eyes.

  Lucinda, although a professional fundraiser, could never fathom what it would be like to be so casual about money, to hold money so easily, so graciously, as if it were simply food in a pantry to share with friends. Tori’s paternal grandparents had moved from Georgia to this New England enclave and clawed their way up via a wholesale hardware business, and then her parents, throwing off any Southern connection along with hardware, began clamming and opened a small seafood restaurant at the bridge over the Green Heron River on Route 8. Despite growing up on Cape Tilton, Tori felt no ingrown New England compunction against showing off and sharing her wealth. Or even talking about it.

  Lucinda continued moving her h
and slowly over the mare’s flanks. The mare lifted her head off Tori and turned toward Lucinda. A rush of warmth bloomed in Lucinda’s chest when she looked into the mare’s copper-brown eyes, which were less cautious now, reflecting, perhaps, the mare’s astonishment at being groomed, and the constriction that seized Lucinda’s chest and stomach over the last nine months, since the day she met Jay, loosened. Tears dropped suddenly into the dust on her forearm supported by the mare’s severe shoulder ridge. More followed, and she wiped her arm across her eyes, leaving a brown patch over her dark eyebrows. Tori reached up and wiped Lucinda’s forehead with a pink bandana.

  “Cheer up you two! This is the beginning of a great new life for you both!”

  “Definitely for her,” said Lucinda.

  “And why not you?”

  Lucinda began untangling the coarse steel-gray mane. The mare relaxed enough to reach down and begin to graze.

  “Bart’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “Gone as in left me.”

  “No!” Tori placed her right hand on Lucinda’s shoulder, the hand graced with channel set sapphires in the low-relief 18k gold ring she wore every day to the stable. “Because of that silly Jay thing?”

  Lucinda barely nodded.

  “Shit,” Tori said. “I wish I had never sent — ”

  “Don’t.”

  “Shit. Double shit! A few months of — ”

  Just then Silver P. lifted her tail and produced some. The women looked at each other and simultaneously cackled with laughter.

  “Just like that pair class!” Tori said. “When you were 14 and I still a mere 13.”

  It was one of Lucinda’s favorite memories from her aborted horse show career — Tori and Lucinda won the pair class at the 4-H show on their bay geldings after one of the other pairs they were competing against, and were about to lose to, stopped to poop right in the front of the judge. Tori went on to excel in high-level equestrian competitions, and Lucinda targeted a career in education before choosing fundraising.

  They put Silver Palette in the paddock next to Lucinda’s barn that hadn’t been used since her aunt last harvested apples and made cider and honey in the 1970s.

  “Lesson one,” Tori said, tossing off gloom like a rain sheet. “The horses at that track stand in their stalls up to twenty-two hours a day with no turnout and no grass. So transition her gently. Keep her in the loose box and give her access to the small paddock for now while we build her stomach up for grass.”

  The mare, suddenly realizing she was free to move, snorted at the footing, then, buckling first at the knees, then at the hocks, lowered herself to the ground and rolled on her back with delicious abandon.

  “She probably hasn’t done that since she was a filly,” Tori said. “I can’t believe what kind of hell they have to go through.”

  “But she’s free of it now, Tori. Thanks to you.”

  Lucinda felt a strange sense of dislocation and suddenly realized this mare could be something to focus her energy toward to keep away… what? Bart had pulled out of the driveway just that morning in his blue van with his final haul of clothes, boxes of CDs, and photography equipment. He’d disappeared for a week — and then returned to say he couldn’t stay with her. He couldn’t trust her. Then he said something really odd — that he couldn’t trust himself, either.

  Tori began unloading bags of cedar shavings and bales of alfalfa hay from the trailer.

  “I thought you were taking her to your place,” Lucinda teased. “Why all these handy supplies?”

  “Well, I would have if you’d said no. But I knew you wouldn’t.” Tori’s lips eased into a smile of unconceited self-confidence.

  Lucinda felt something rushing toward her. Some great dark something.

  RaiseSmart

  The Puffy Muffin, the noisy, student-run breakfast-and-lunch place on campus, was packed with Monday morning students sorting out their heads after the weekend. Lucinda enjoyed mingling with the students there so she recharged at the Puffy Muffin whenever she could. After all, these kids were why she went through the circus act of raising money, but this morning she didn’t have time to chat. She was running late and had her order prepared for takeout.

  While she waited, she noticed Abby Fields in a booth under the new art student collage exhibit — speckled neon pastel layered arrangements in driftwood box frames with text messages burned into them. Last semester it was paintings of lobster traps in thickly layered acrylic. Abby, a newly minted Peabody-Hawthorne graduate originally from Minnesota, had signed onto a staff position to do communications and marketing work in the School of Management and Information Technology at the end of last summer. From the time of Warren Rindge’s hiring and installation as Abby’s supervisor in January, Abby had been lobbying for jobs in Aden’s school and in the library, without any offers yet. Abby stopped pecking at her laptop to catch Lucinda on her way past.

  “Ms. Beck,” she said. “Can I talk to you about openings in — ”

  “Nothing’s changed yet, Abby. Unless you can do major gifts,” Lucinda said, stopping briefly on her way past the booth. Lucinda glanced up at the unusual art, and then down into Abby’s face. Abby smiled, her bobbed brown hair sparkled with neon pink and green reflected off the artwork from above by the morning sun just arriving in The Puffy Muffin through the tall eastern windows.

  “You’ll let me know if anything pops up?”

  “We post all our jobs, so check the website. Got to get to a meeting. See you, Abby.”

  Lucinda headed outside and climbed the gradual incline toward the administration building. She glanced north to the gazebo, winced at the memory of Bart’s hands on the rotting railing, which had since been replaced, then hurried up the steps. The oldest section of the building, location of the president’s office, was originally the second residence of Edwin K. Thornbough in the 1820s and 1830s, the wealthy merchant importer of the Orient whose family founded the Town of Thornbury.

  Two wings with modern office layouts built in the same gray granite — known as Rantoul Hall — were added in the 1970s to give the Administration and Development Departments more space. Just south of Thornbough Hall, the president’s residence was the original mansion of the Thornbough clan built in 1785, the last building before the Atlantic Ocean to the east and a dense snarl of stunted fir trees to the south. To the west spread the rest of campus, down the pine-planted hill to the open quad and across two streets, where the athletic facilities abutted the train station and downtown Thornbury Crossing.

  Pausing outside her office, beside a brushed nickel door plaque that read Lucinda Tyne Beck, MA, ACFRE, Lucinda heard one of her Directors of Philanthropy, Warren, cutting off Aden with — “That’s not how I’d run an endowment campaign.” She opened the door.

  The large office glowed in varnished cherry wood. Three of her directors sprawled in the emerald green velvet armchairs her father bought her when she made VP. Aden eyed Warren with undisguised irritation. Warren straightened up from his slouching posture. Jennifer Liu, Director of Philanthropy for the School of Science and Engineering, jumped up and off-loaded the coffee and bag of muffins from Lucinda while she laid her purse and briefcase on her desk.

  “Good morning, all. Sorry I’m a bit late. I brought muffins for us, and I see you all have coffee already.”

  Jennifer passed around the bag of muffins. Warren got the bag first and chose the largest of the lot, blueberry. Then he handed the bag over his shoulder to Aden. Shaking his head, Aden handed it to Jennifer to choose next.

  “Is it true?” Warren asked. “About Bart.”

  Aden started, then smacked Warren on the shoulder with a rolled up Chronicle of Higher Education.

  “God, Warren!” Jennifer said.

  “Just concerned,” Warren answered, biting into the muffin.

  “It’s not pertinent, Warren. So let’s get on with it, shall we? I’m sure none of us has time to waste,” Lucinda said. “First we’ll do the usual quick rund
own for the month, then I want to brief you on the university thing.”

  Aden lowered the Chronicle to his side. Warren picked crumbs off his pinstriped pants. Jennifer and Aden exchanged glances over Warren’s head.

  Warren had been handpicked by Cliff Plunkett, when he was Chair of P-H’s Board of Directors. On his gangbusters resume, Warren claimed he led a successful 2-year, $20-million campaign for his last employer. Lucinda had tried to block his hiring, knowing that his I-know-best style wouldn’t mesh well with the more subtle P-H staff and donor culture. It was the first time in her career at P-H that Cliff had overridden her decision on a direct report, meaning of course that Cliff owed somebody something. Lucinda was withholding judgment while waiting for results, or some big slipup on Warren’s part. After nine years as VP, she’d learned which battles to fight and which to wait out.

  “Jennifer, why don’t you start?” Lucinda asked.

  The three of them unloaded for about fifteen minutes each, Warren taking twenty, on happenings in their respective major gift campaigns.

  After Aden wrapped up, Lucinda said, “So this ties in well with the university issue.”

  “It’s the way to go. Frank’s the one to do it, too,” Warren said.

  Aden looked down at Warren’s head and then up at the ceiling. As he fingered his Chronicle, then took aim, Lucinda shook her head. He lowered the newspaper.

  “Lucinda, please tell us the real poop. All we hear are rumors,” Aden said. “And they’re getting more outrageous. Especially some of the ones from the big donors, like that Frank is selling naming rights to the new stadium to the highest bidder and everything inside too, down to the last light bulb.”

  Warren sipped his coffee, submerging a smile.

  “The issue has come up — there are two board members leading it — Honor and Cliff — that it’s time to make Peabody-Hawthorne a university. Given the prestige this will bring and larger operating budget, Frank is in favor — ”

  “Obviously, it’s why they brought Frank in to lead the place. To take the obvious next step,” Warren said.