Lost & Hound by Rita Mae Brown

Author:Rita Mae Brown [Brown, Rita Mae]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

October 12, 2022, Wednesday

A fire warmed the room, giving off an apple odor, in Ronnie Haslip’s living room. Unlike most everyone else in Jefferson Hunt Club, Ronnie lived in a modern house, which he built. The fireplace was set in white marble, which ran floor to ceiling, with a place to sit in front of it. A brass screen was in front of the glowing fire. On the simple mantel, a large mahogany Victorian clock, ornate, provided a contrast to the surroundings.

Freddie, Ed, Gray, and Ronnie sat around the glass coffee table. The Barcelona chairs, expensive, suited the living room, which was white and beige with large teal pillows in the corners of the leather sofa. Again, modern in design.

Each person had a notebook opened, a drink on the coffee table, hoping for money-raising ideas.

“Two years,” Ronnie stated.

“Two years for the grandstand repair, resurfacing the huge arena.” Freddie bit the end of her pencil. “The resurfacing will cost a fortune. People well…point-chasers,” she pinpointed those riders who lived in a certain district being part of a national equestrian organization. They needed points to qualify for the national shows. “They won’t come if we don’t use the new surface.”

“I don’t see how we can afford this.” Gray was not negative but he was cautious. “Let’s go back to money now. When this first came up at the breakfast, you all felt we could work out selling seeds from Elise Sabatini’s farm.”

“We can. Fifty-pound bags. She is harvesting milkweed, butterfly bush, huge sunflowers, and I don’t know what else, but she says she has tons, literally tons of seeds.”

“Did anyone know she was doing this? She had to have cleared and planted this spring?” Freddie wondered.

“No. This was her idea, an experiment, but she talked to Marty Howard. At any rate, she really did it and we can buy the seeds from her wholesale and sell them retail. We can advertise through our newsletter, and the newsletters of other clubs, that we are working to save monarch butterflies, bees, and so on.” Ronnie got up to toss another apple log on the fire.

“While I’m up here can I get anyone anything?”

“No thanks,” they said in unison.

Gray asked, “Where’d you get the applewood?”

“Old Dalby. Passed by and saw some old trees cut in the small orchard. Smells great, doesn’t it?”

Old Dalby was a fixture, sometimes also called Little Dalby.

“Does. Okay, the seed bags. We won’t know if it will make us money but we can try. As to the show ring, that really is a long haul.”

“It is, but it has the possibility to make a lot of money over time. The focus is on horses. It is a natural fit. The club used to do it, up to the late nineties,” Ronnie remembered. “It was a hell of a lot of work but it made money.”

“Work. You hire a course designer with a big name and a judge with a big name. The grounds need to be cleaned. You can rent out space for food, for vendors, and the class fees bring in money.

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