A Lady's Luck. Ken Casper
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He poured himself coffee.
“I want orange juice,” Rhea said, racing over to the marble counter and reaching for the nearly full pitcher. Katie was beside her, competing for it.
“Whoa.” Brent rose from his seat. “I’ll pour. First, how about showing some manners by saying good morning to your grandparents?”
“Good morning,” they sang in unison.
“And Uncle Andrew,” Brent prompted.
They wished him a good morning, as well. Immediately Rhea asked, “Can we have our juice now?”
Suppressing a smile, Brent poured it for them. “How would you girls like to go on a trip?”
“To Disney World?” Rhea asked, wide-eyed. “Jennifer and her mom went there over Christmas. She said it was awesome.”
“I was thinking of England.” He handed them each a medium-size glass only half-full.
“I don’t want to go to England,” Katie told him with a pout. “I want to go to Disney World.”
“You’ll get to see the Tower of London,” Thomas told them.
“And we can hear the clock strike,” Rhea contributed. “Bong, bong, bong—”
“That’s Big Ben,” Andrew said. “The Tower of London is a castle.”
Katie frowned. “Then why do they call it a tower?”
“It’s where the queen keeps all her jewelry,” Jenna explained.
“You mean the queen lives in a tower?” Katie asked. “Like Rumpelstiltskin?”
“No,” her sister said impatiently. “She lives in Buckingham Palace.”
“But why doesn’t she keep her jewelry with her at home, like other people?”
Exasperated, Rhea said, “Because she’s not like other people, silly. She’s the queen, and she’s got so much jewelry she doesn’t have room for all of it in her palace.”
“When do you plan to leave?” Thomas asked his son.
“I don’t want to go to England,” Katie repeated, clearly not enticed by the lure of seeing a tower full of jewelry.
“In the next day or two,” Brent answered, “if I can make the arrangements.”
As they settled down to family breakfast, Brent mentally reviewed the other reasons he wanted to investigate Nolan Hunter, the Viscount Kestler. Over the past week Brent had learned that Marcus Vasquez, Melanie’s fiancé and Quest’s former trainer, was actually Nolan’s illegitimate half brother. Marcus had also confided to Brent that he suspected Nolan was not being completely up front about the breeding scandal, though he could offer no proof to support his allegation. Brent might have dismissed it as sour grapes over the issue of the Spaniard’s paternity, had he not overheard Nolan’s phone conversation.
A horse in Dubai owned by Lord Rochester had purportedly been sired by Apollo’s Ice. Not long after the Sandstone Derby, the horse was found dead. Poisoned. DNA tests revealed the stallion had not been sired by Apollo’s Ice, but by the same mysterious stallion that had sired Leopold’s Legacy. Brent had discussed the matter on the phone with Lord Rochester, but the Englishman had no idea who could be behind the fraud.
“What’s your game plan in England?” Thomas asked, after the girls had been excused to return to the barn to see the new pony again.
“I thought I might start at the Jockey Association in London, see what I can pick up there.”
“Marcus mentioned that Nolan’s younger sister Devon teaches in a private girls’ school near Oxford,” Jenna commented. “Briar Hills Academy, I think he said. You might contact her to see what light she can shed on the situation.”
“If you need help, son,” Thomas said, “all you have to do is call. You know that. One of us…all of us…can be on the next available flight to Heathrow.”
“I don’t have to tell you to be careful, brother,” Andrew said. “This scam is international and somebody’s making big bucks. The closer we get to the truth, the more desperate they’re going to get.”
Two
Tuesday, January 6
The two-hour flight from Louisville to New York, followed by a three-hour layover there and another six hours crossing the Atlantic, left Brent exhausted. He’d never been one to sleep on planes, and with his twin balls of energy in tow there was no way he could have gotten a wink if he’d tried. After charming the neighboring passengers to the point of weariness, the twins settled down in front of a children’s movie.
Finally he had time to review the one-sided telephone conversation he’d overheard.
“We’re safe, I tell you. The bastard doesn’t know a bloody thing,” Hunter had said.
Was the epithet simply a crude expression, or was he referring to Marcus Vasquez, his illegitimate half brother, who had been a trainer at Quest for a few months but left in December to become head trainer at Lucas Stables, where Brent’s sister, Melanie, was currently a jockey? The two had fallen in love and were planning to marry.
“He can think whatever he bloody well wants,” Hunter had protested further, “but he has no proof, so he’ll keep his mouth shut, if he knows what’s good for him.”
Proof of what? And if he was referring to Marcus, the statement wasn’t completely true. Marcus had told Brent he was convinced Hunter was behind the breeding mix-up that was destroying Quest Stables, but he also admitted he had no idea how the fraud was done, nor had he a lick of evidence to support his accusation. Marcus also confessed to hating Nolan Hunter’s father for abandoning Marcus’s late mother. Marcus was a damn good trainer, as Melanie’s recent Gulf Classic win on Something to Talk About attested, but his emotional involvement with Hunter robbed him of objectivity, though in Brent’s opinion, not necessarily credibility.
By the time the plane landed at Heathrow, they’d passed through customs and climbed into a taxi, the girls were finally showing signs of winding down. Wanting them to stay awake long enough to get to bed under their own power, Brent kept up a running narrative, pointing out the things he recognized on the trip from the airport to their hotel in London. The striking facade of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Trafalgar Square. Buckingham Palace. By the time he tucked them into bed, it was after one in the morning, local time.
He chuckled to himself. They were sound asleep before he even had a chance to pull up the covers. A three-ring circus entering the room wouldn’t have awakened them now.
He poured himself a small Scotch from the bar in the sitting room and sipped it as he reviewed his plans for the next few days. Touristy stuff mostly, for the girls. He’d first come to England months ago to see Nolan Hunter right after the DNA imbroglio became known. The man had let him talk to his help, as well as take additional blood and hair samples of Apollo’s Ice for further DNA testing, convincing Brent at the time that Hunter was on the up-and-up.
“Let’s think outside the box, as you Americans would say,” Hunter had proposed, while pouring generous quantities of fine Napoleon brandy into cut-crystal snifters, “and see if we can pull a Sherlock Holmes on this singular case.”
To no avail. Nolan Hunter himself appeared to be uninvolved in whatever was going on. He had actually remained in England, for example, when Apollo’s Ice was standing at stud in Kentucky, where Brent had witnessed the live cover that resulted in Leopold Legacy’s conception.
Brent checked on his sleeping daughters. The two could be exhausting, but they were unquestionably the joy of his life. He couldn’t imagine the world without them. He thought of his late wife, Marti. She’d never been to England. She would have loved it, but with two young children, they’d decided to delay any major trips until the girls were older. Now here he was alone,