Everyday Horses (Three Sisters Farm Book 1) Read online

  Everyday Horses

  Genevieve Mckay

  StonePony Studios

  Copyright © 2021 by Genevieve Mckay

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Untitled

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Untitled

  Everyday Horses

  Genevieve Mckay

  Chapter 1

  The letter arrived in early spring, just as the snow began to melt.

  It had been six months since Mom had slipped out of her hospital room and abandoned us. Half a year since she’d stolen the keys to our ancient blue mini-van and peeled out of that rainy, half-empty parking lot without a backward glance.

  Six months since she’d left us without any hope of her return.

  We stared down at the sodden envelope in dad’s trembling fingers.

  “Just tear it up,” I said, my voice cracking on the last word.

  Dad shook his head silently, his long beard brushing back and forth against the table. He’d been letting it grow out ever since mom had left and now you could hardly see his face.

  “We can’t tear it up, Fina. It’s from Mom.” Aspen, my eight-year-old sister, fixed her wide-eyed gaze on me and I couldn’t help but think of that awful day at the hospital all over again. The one I’d worked all winter to forget.

  “I need some space,” Mom had said in a hard voice that didn’t even sound like hers. “I can hardly breathe with all of you people crowded in here. It’s too much.”

  She’d had a point. The hospital room wasn’t large and there were seven of us crammed in there. We’d been visiting her all day, every day, since she’d been admitted. Since the stormy, nightmare day she’d lost the baby.

  She’d sat up straight in bed, flinging her thin legs over the side and throwing the blankets back with a flourish. It was the first time she’d gotten up by herself in nearly a week.

  She marched to the bathroom and when she came out again, she’d changed out of her hospital robe and pulled on a blue house dress. It was a familiar, handmade one that she wore all the time on our homestead. But here, under the overhead glare of the hospital lights, it looked shapeless and clumsy. She held her battered leather purse clamped under one arm and she’d even attempted to put on make-up.

  “Mom, you look silly,” Aspen had said, giggling nervously.

  I didn’t blame her for being weirded out. Normally Mom hated things like cosmetics, so I had no idea how she’d managed to get ahold of a lipstick that was so vibrantly red. But the way she’d smeared it outside the borders of her lips was terrifying and she’d outlined her eyes in a thick ring of black to match. She looked unhinged, to tell the truth.

  Dad had said nothing but his eyes got wider and wider. He began to swallow and clear his throat in that nervous way he did when he was working himself up to actually have a disagreement with someone. Something he normally managed to avoid at all costs.

  “Silly?” Mom had said, looking at Aspen like she didn’t even know her. Like my little sister was an insect to be squished. “Well, that’s about the level of support I expected from you people. Typical. I’m getting something to eat. And I don’t want any company.”

  She’d clutched her purse tightly to her chest, turned abruptly and strode into the hall. I could hear the angry phwap, phwap of her worn-out leather shoes all the way down the corridor to the elevators.

  I’d put my arm around Aspen’s rigid shoulders and gave her a reassuring squeeze.

  “She didn’t mean to snap you Aspen. She’ll be all right after she’s had some food.”

  Pushing back the uneasy feeling in my chest, I sat down to help my sister work on her drawings.

  But when an hour had passed and mom still hadn’t come back from the cafeteria, dad had started to get worried.

  “I’m just going to pop out and look for your mother,” he’d said, rubbing a hand nervously across his face, “you kids stay here. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “Why is mom acting so weird?” Rem asked as soon as dad was gone. He glanced up from the portable chess set he and his twin brother Sal were hunched over, frowning at the closed door.

  All week long we’d read and done art and played board games until we were completely sick of them. Anything to pass the time and stave off the boredom that came from sitting around all day. The twins were in a chess tournament-for-two that had lasted the entire time and showed no sign of stopping.

  “She’s grieving for the baby,” our older brother Sebastian said quietly, opening his eyes. He’d folded his long legs into a half-lotus pose in one corner of the room where he’d been trying, unsuccessfully, to meditate. “You know that. She’s just sad.”

  He’d tied his normally wild dread-locks back and had tried to make himself inconspicuous. But he still looked like an oversized young Viking crammed into a space that was much too small for him.

  “But, why can’t she be sad at home?” Rem asked in bewilderment. “Why would she want to stay here?”

  Nobody had a good answer for that. Spending a week in the city had been practically torture for us. We stayed in the hospital all day with mom and at night we went back to a tiny little motel room right downtown. Outside, the sound of the city; cars, sirens, and so many people kept us from sleeping. We wanted nothing more than to go home.

  Our homestead was a medium-sized acreage nestled right in between two mountain ranges. Most of it was untouched wilderness but we’d carved out a small farm with a big garden and some pasture for the goats and my Shire mare, Beatrice.

  A wild, twisting river ran behind our farm, carving through the rock. In the summer we could swim in it and in the winter, we stayed far away from its steep, icy banks. One wrong move and you could be swept away and never heard from again.

  It was a beautiful, peaceful spot and we hardly ever stepped foot off it if we had a choice. I couldn’t remember a time that I’d been away from the farm, or from my horse, this long.

  “That’s why we’re here to support her,” I said finally. “To convince her to come home. Dad will get her to come around. He always does.”

  My words sounded more convincing than I’d felt. Even before she’d lost the baby, mom had been acting strange. She’d been distant and cold to all of us lately, especially dad, as if she didn’t want anything to do with us.
She just stayed in her studio most of the time, listening to loud music and working on some secret project.

  We hadn’t paid that much attention at first. Mom was an artist after all and had the tendency to be moody and snappish sometimes. But this time it felt different.

  Dad didn’t come back to the hospital room for a long time but when he did, we knew from the bleak expression on his face that something was wrong.

  “It’s your mother,” he’d said, striding into the room with his hair standing up on his head and a wild look in his eyes. “She’s gone.”

  “Gone?” Sal asked. “Like…she died?”

  “What? No. I mean she’s disappeared. She’s missing.”

  Apparently, while we’d been occupying ourselves, the rest of the hospital had been in an uproar looking for mom. It was a small facility, built to care for the needs of the small, remote communities that dotted this part of the Island. And there just weren’t that many places to hide. But, as hard as they searched, it was like she’d vanished into thin air.

  It wasn’t until an hour later, after the police and the hospital staff had a chance to review the security cameras, that we started to get an idea of what had happened.

  The grainy video feed showed that mom, instead of heading to the cafeteria, had come straight off the elevators and marched purposely through the hospital’s automatic front doors. Right out into the rain-soaked afternoon. What had happened to her after that was anyone’s guess.

  A volunteer search party was quickly formed. And we all spent hours combing the wooded grounds outside the building, calling her name. But there was no sign of her.

  It was the middle of storm season and the weather was awful. Rain thundered down and the wind roared sideways around the building, soaking us all within seconds.

  It had all seemed so surreal at the time. Like it was a dream. I couldn’t stop thinking that mom hadn’t even been wearing a coat or a sweater to protect her.

  It was around that time that dad suddenly realized that the keys to his van were missing from his coat pocket. And that discovery led them to the realization that the van itself was gone.

  There weren’t any security cameras set up in the back parking lot. But when they reviewed footage again, this time more slowly, they managed to catch a shot of our van speeding out of the parking lot as fast as it could, jumping over the curb as it shot up the road. There was an instant where we could all clearly see that the person in the driver’s seat was mom. It was too far away to make out her expression but it was definitely her.

  “I don’t understand,” Dad said over and over to the officers who were helping us. “Why would she leave? Where would she have gone?”

  But nobody had any answers.

  That first night after her disappearance was awful.

  There wasn’t any point of us staying in town another night. We had to take a two-hour cab ride all the way back to our homestead since we didn’t have the van anymore. And when dad went to pay and his card declined, we discovered the next surprise Mom had in store for us. Our meager family bank account, along with all the money we’d carefully stored up for the winter, had been drained to zero. She hadn’t left us with even a penny.

  There was a province-wide alert put out for her that night. There was even speculation that she might have been kidnapped at gun-point and had been forced to steal our van and our money. And honestly, that version was more preferable to thinking that she’d deliberately abandoned her family.

  But pretty soon the police came to believe that mom had been acting all by herself.

  “It was most likely the strain of losing the baby,” the kindly social worker who had come to check on us said, “the human mind is fragile. It can only take so much sometimes. Has she had a history of mental illness?”

  “No, of course not,” Dad said, rubbing his tired eyes.

  There was a long silence while the social worker looked at him with sympathy.

  “Well, she is sad sometimes,” Rem said slowly.

  “And she gets cranky,” Sal added. “Really cranky.”

  “She hasn’t been herself lately,” I said, thinking about how much she’d been pushing us away lately.

  Dad looked at us all in surprise.

  “Well, we’re going to do our very best to get her back home safely to you soon,” the social worker said. “It looks like you have a wonderful place here.”

  She looked around the yurt with interest, taking in the high overhead trusses and the big skylight.

  “Our parents built this together,” Sebastian said, “just before I was born.”

  It was always neat to see people’s reactions the first time they saw our home. The yurt was circular with a high ceiling that tapered to a peak. The framework was wood but the interior walls and ceiling were made from a thick canvas. There were solar panels on the roof and a wind turbine that fed the batteries that powered everything. And our woodstove did most of the heating and cooking.

  The floors were dark walnut wood and my parents had made all the furniture by hand over the years. The main yurt held our kitchen, living room and a study center where we used the computer to do research and homework.

  Originally, our home had been just the one big room. But as our family grew bigger, smaller satellite yurts were attached to the main one with narrow corridors. These were our bedrooms and there was another, separate one for mom’s studio.

  My little sister Aspen was handling mom’s departure the hardest and as soon as she started peppering the social worker with a stream of questions I slipped outside to the barn.

  It was really more of a shelter than a barn. It was just three stalls covered with an overhang. A place where Beatrice and the goats could escape from the weather.

  Next to the shelter was a massive barn for hay, bedding and storage and it was attached to our dad’s woodworking shop too.

  “You’re the best girl, aren’t you Beatrice?” I murmured as I carefully curried the mud out of her fluffy, winter coat.

  Beatrice was a Shire, with a dark bay coat and a thick mane and tail. She stood over sixteen hands, had a thick white blaze down her nose and four white socks that came up past her knees. She had beautiful feathers that flowed down over her hooves. When it wasn’t wet and muddy out, they were snow white but now, in storm season, they had been stained a deep brown.

  She’d snorted contentedly, just glad that her people were all back home again. Our neighbour, Ambrose, had shown up a few times to top up the animals feed and water but it wasn’t the same. Beatrice liked having her humans around her.

  We hadn’t known it at the time but there had been a lot of media coverage over mom’s disappearance. All of our faces had been splashed all over the television and the internet. Since our parents hadn’t allowed us to have a television at home, we all sort of missed our fifteen minutes of fame.

  But apparently a reporter had been at the hospital that day, when we’d been searching in the rain. Unbeknownst to us, she’d snapped a photo of all of us kids huddled together under an awning, looking disheveled and miserable. And it was that photo that was used every time the story was updated on the news.

  Not that there was much to update after the initial search petered out. Mom had just vanished without a trace.

  And, after the first month, we actually had bigger things to worry about than mom’s disappearance. Like trying to survive a winter on the homestead without any money for bills or groceries.

  Normally, our homestead ran like this: we worked hard on the farm all summer, sold produce, art and the wooden furniture my dad made, at the farmer’s market from spring to fall, and banked enough money to make it through the winter. The savings account that mom had drained had been meant to last us right until the following summer when the markets started back up.

  Luckily, we had a full pantry and cold storage stocked with row after row of dried and canned food. We had a small greenhouse with some winter vegetables and had a supply of root vegetables packed away in
sand to make them last longer.

  We’d also gotten our winter supplies of hay and feed in before mom had gone missing so at least the animals were taken care of.

  But still, bills had to be paid and there were just some things that we hadn’t thought to grow for ourselves. There were things we needed like toilet paper and flour that we didn’t make at home.

  Not having a vehicle anymore meant that the younger kids had to start homeschooling since there wasn’t a bus that passed anywhere near our remote homestead. And we definitely couldn’t afford to buy a new car.

  Sebastian and I had already graduated from high school; him on time and me a couple of years ahead of schedule. Neither of us were ready to move away from our farm and go to school yet but we were both enrolled in online college courses.

  Sebastian was obsessed with world economics; I mean that guy could study numbers and global policies all day long if you let him. He wanted to do something with the United Nations someday. I could totally see him being a diplomat or something; he was so smart and he was always the peacemaker of our family. He was usually the only one who could make mom see reason.

  I just took whatever classes I felt like. Usually, literature or creative writing. I honestly had no idea what I wanted to do with my life; the only thing that really interested me was working with horses.