Setting the Pace
Pine Hollow, Book Fifteen
Bonnie Bryant
My special thanks to Catherine Hapka
for her help
in the writing of this book.
ONE
“Did you decide on your music yet?” Stevie Lake asked Denise McCaskill as she stepped into the stall where an Appaloosa gelding named Chip was sniffing at his empty grain bucket. The horse cocked his head at her hopefully. “Sorry, boy.” She gave him a pat. “Not dinnertime yet.”
She continued to stroke the horse as Denise entered the stall. At twenty-four, Denise was only eight years older than Stevie, but she had a lifetime of experience riding and caring for horses. That was why Max Regnery, the owner of Pine Hollow Stables, had made her his full-time barn manager.
“Well?” Stevie asked expectantly when Denise didn’t answer.
“You mean for the reception?” Denise sighed and checked the dosage of the dewormer she was holding. “No. I guess that’s one more detail to think about.”
“Oh, but you’ve got to think about that!” Stevie exclaimed. She wrestled Chip’s head down so that Denise could shoot the dewormer into his mouth. The gelding pinned his ears back, shook his head, and rolled his eyes distastefully. Stevie gave the gelding’s shoulder a comforting pat and glanced at Denise. “The music is important. You don’t want to be scrambling at the last minute. Or dancing to one of Maxi’s or Jeannie’s CDs.” She grinned at the thought of what kind of music Max’s five- and three-year-old daughters liked as she followed Denise down the aisle to the next stall. There, a tall chestnut mare named Calypso was eyeing them suspiciously from the farthest corner. “But don’t worry. I’m sure Deborah can give you some ideas.”
“I’m sure she can. I just hate to lay one more thing on her when she and Max are already being so generous.”
Denise sounded frazzled, and Stevie shot her a sympathetic glance. Max and his wife, Deborah, had offered to throw a New Year’s Eve wedding for Denise and her fiancé, Red O’Malley, who was the head stable hand at Pine Hollow. The couple had been together for years, but recently, when Denise discovered she was pregnant, she and Red had decided it was time to get married. Now the wedding was less than a week away, and although Denise seemed more than a little nervous about the big event, Stevie could hardly wait.
Stevie entered Calypso’s stall and stroked the mare soothingly as Denise prepared the next dose of dewormer. “Don’t worry, all the fast planning will be worth it,” she assured the bride-to-be. “Phil and I are totally looking forward to it.” She smiled, imagining how romantic it would be to dance the old year away and greet the new one with her longtime boyfriend, Phil Marsten. For once they would have New Year’s Eve plans worth mentioning. “It’ll be a real change of pace for us from last year,” she added. “Of course, nothing can compare to listening to my brothers have an hourlong argument about whether Batman could beat Superman in an arm wrestling contest, but we’ll just have to make do with a nice, romantic wedding instead.”
“I’d vote for Superman myself.” Denise smiled, then glanced at the roof as a sudden gust of wind howled around the building. Stevie followed her gaze with a shiver, even though it was warm and cozy inside the stable. Until just a day earlier the weather had been unseasonably mild. But suddenly, on Christmas Day, winter had arrived full force, making the northern Virginia town of Willow Creek feel more like the North Pole. The temperature had dropped about fifteen degrees, and a cold wind had been moaning around the eaves and jostling the bare branches of the trees for the past thirty-six hours.
The conversation paused as Stevie and Denise focused on getting a full dose of dewormer into Calypso, who was always difficult to treat. They had just finished and were heading for the next stall, which belonged to a longtime Pine Hollow school horse named Diablo, when Stevie heard someone in boots approaching from the far end of the aisle. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw George Wheeler hurrying toward them.
The pudgy, pale, somewhat socially awkward sixteen-year-old was a familiar sight around the stable. George boarded his Trakehner mare, Joyride, there. Like Stevie, he was a junior at Fenton Hall, Willow Creek’s oldest and most respected private school. But although their paths crossed several times during the average day, Stevie couldn’t say she knew George well. He had a way of disappearing into the corners of life that made him hard to notice at all, let alone know. Shooting him a polite smile, she prepared to follow Denise into Diablo’s stall.
George cleared his throat. “Stevie?” he said in his soft, uncertain voice.
Stevie stopped and glanced at him again. “Yes?” she said, expecting him to mention something about his mare’s deworming schedule.
“I was just wondering,” George said hesitantly. “Um, have you seen Callie lately?”
Stevie blinked in surprise. It had been painfully apparent for some time that George had a monster crush on Stevie’s friend Callie Forester. At first Stevie had found the whole thing cute, especially when it had seemed that Callie was making an effort to befriend George. But lately George’s attention had become so relentless that it was making Callie uncomfortable, and the last Stevie had heard, her friend had told George in no uncertain terms that she wanted him to leave her alone. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t seen Callie in, like, three days,” she said. “I guess she’s been busy at home. You know, what with Christmas and all.”
“Oh,” George said, looking disappointed. “Right.”
Suddenly Stevie realized why George must be looking for Callie now. Three days earlier there had been some sort of accident out on the trails. George had been hurt, and Callie had been the one to call the paramedics. Stevie still wasn’t quite sure of all the details. She figured Callie would fill her in when she saw her next, but as near as she could figure it, George had been kicked by his horse while he was picking a stone out of her foot, and Callie had happened by in time to see him hit his head on a tree.
Feeling a little more sympathetic toward George—after all, even with everything they’d been through, surely Callie would allow him to thank her for helping him out of a crisis like that—Stevie smiled at him. “Don’t worry,” she said kindly. “I’m sure she’ll be along sometime today. After all, she’s got a new horse to take care of, remember?”
Noticing that Denise was waiting for her inside Diablo’s stall, Stevie shot George one last smile and hurried inside to help, thinking about Callie’s new horse. Callie had been a junior endurance champion in her old hometown on the West Coast. About six months earlier, her family had moved to be closer to her congressman father’s office in nearby Washington, D.C. Callie had been injured in a car accident soon after the move, but she was finally back in training. Less than a week earlier her parents had bought her a horse to train with, a spunky Appaloosa named Scooby that had all the makings of a fantastic endurance partner.
As Stevie and Denise emerged from Diablo’s stall a few minutes later, Stevie noticed that George had disappeared. At the same moment she heard a familiar voice calling her name. Turning to glance down the aisle, she saw one of her best friends, Lisa Atwood, hurrying toward her.
“Hey!” Stevie called brightly. “What’s up? Merry day after Christmas!”
Lisa grimaced slightly in return. “Thanks. Same to you.”
Stevie peered at her closely. “What’s the matter?”
Lisa shrugged and sighed. “Oh, just the usual,” she said with a touch of bitterness in her voice. “I just finished having another lovely discussion with Mom about moving.”
Stevie winced. By discussion, she knew that Lisa actually meant argument. There had been a lot of “discussions” going on in the Atwood household ever since Mrs. Atwood had decided, out of the blue, that she wa
nted to move to New Jersey, where her sister, Marianne, lived with her family. Stevie knew Mr. and Mrs. Atwood’s divorce had been hard on Lisa, but it had been even harder on Mrs. Atwood. Lisa’s mother had never really recovered from the blow of having her husband of twenty-seven years walk out on her, and she wasn’t afraid to share her pain with those around her, particularly Lisa.
Denise greeted Lisa and then glanced at her watch. “Since we’re done here, I suppose I’d better go see if Maureen needs any help with the schedule,” she told Stevie.
Stevie wrinkled her nose slightly at the mention of Maureen Chance, Pine Hollow’s newest full-time stable hand. She wasn’t sure why that reaction came so automatically. Stevie tended to like most people until they gave her a reason to feel otherwise. And Maureen certainly hadn’t done anything to her in the three and a half days she’d been working at Pine Hollow. Well, not unless you count sneaking a cigarette in the bathroom, Stevie added to herself, remembering how she’d caught the woman smoking despite Max’s strict rule against it. At the time she’d planned to say something to Max, but after thinking it over, she’d decided that was too much like squealing. Instead, she had determined to keep a close eye on Maureen whenever she could. If it happened again, she would have to say something. Stevie wasn’t a tattletale, but she knew better than to take any chances when it came to fire safety around the stable.
“Do you need us to do anything else?” Stevie asked Denise. It was a long-standing Pine Hollow tradition that all riders helped out with stable chores. That allowed Max to keep his staff small and his prices low.
Denise scratched her ear and shrugged. “If you wouldn’t mind, Patch and Congo need to be brought in from the south pasture,” she said. “Red is using them in a lesson this evening, so don’t worry about grooming. The students can do it.”
“Sure, no problem.” Stevie waved as Denise hurried off, then turned her full attention back to Lisa. “So let’s hear it,” she said bluntly. “Did she change her mind yet?”
Lisa sighed. “No. In fact, she seems more excited than ever about the whole idea. It’s like she thinks New Jersey is some kind of promised land where all her dreams will come true, and I’m the evil grinch who wants to steal her happiness.”
“Really?”
“Just about.” Lisa rolled her eyes. “Anyway, she really does seem psyched. She talks to Aunt Marianne like every hour on the hour, practically.” She grinned weakly. “Hey, maybe if I’m lucky, she’ll eat up so much money on long-distance bills that there won’t be enough left to pay for a moving van.”
Stevie smiled automatically, though she didn’t think anything that Lisa was saying was very funny. She sounds as if she’s starting to accept this, she realized uneasily. It sounds like she doesn’t think there’s even a chance of changing her mom’s mind anymore.
The thought was very disturbing. If Lisa wasn’t going to fight to stay in Willow Creek, what was stopping her mother from packing them up and leaving right after New Year’s as she planned?
For the first time the full weight of that possibility started to sink in. When Stevie had first heard about Mrs. Atwood’s plans, she had scoffed—no way would any mother force her daughter to move right in the middle of her senior year. Mrs. Atwood might be a little nuts, but she wasn’t totally crazy. At least Stevie hadn’t thought so before this had happened. Now she wasn’t so sure.
Lisa can’t move, she thought, suddenly overwhelmed at the thought of losing one of her best friends. She and Lisa and their other best friend, Carole Hanson, had been virtually inseparable for years, ever since they’d met at riding lessons back in junior high. She just can’t. Impossible. No way.
After all those years, though, she knew Lisa well enough to know that blurting out what she was thinking would only upset her friend more. Lisa was a planner, a rational, thoughtful person who liked to go about things the logical way. Stevie was more of a seat-of-her-pants kind of person, which could make her a little frustrated with Lisa’s cautious ways. In this case, however, she did her best to control her impulse, which was to start shouting about the unfairness of it all.
“Um, so did your mom say anything else?” Stevie asked cautiously. “You know, about actual plans or anything?”
“Not really.” Lisa shrugged. “By the way, shouldn’t we be heading out to get Patch and Congo?”
“Oh, yeah.” Stevie had almost forgotten their promise to Denise. She turned and walked toward the main entrance with Lisa at her side. “Come on, let’s grab some lead lines and get started. You know how Patch can be.”
As the two of them emerged into the biting wind and dull gray sunlight of the late-December afternoon, they were just in time to see a familiar rust-and-red car wheeze and sputter its way to a stop in the gravel parking area nearby. “Hey, there’s Carole,” Lisa said.
Stevie waved; then she and Lisa waited as Carole pocketed her keys and hurried toward them. “Hey,” she called when she was close enough. “What are you two up to? You’re not leaving, are you?”
Lisa shook her head. “I just got here.”
“We’re going out to catch Congo and Patch,” Stevie explained. “Want to help?” Normally she wouldn’t even need to ask, but those days Carole’s time at the stable was limited. She had cheated on a test a couple of months earlier, and as part of her punishment she was only allowed to come to Pine Hollow four times a week for two hours a day. Stevie knew that her friend was counting the days until New Year’s, when her grounding would finally be over.
Carole glanced at her watch, then nodded. “Lets go.”
The three friends fell into step as they hurried toward the pasture. “So how was your Christmas?” Stevie asked. Another condition of Carole’s punishment was that she couldn’t talk on the phone, so Stevie hadn’t spoken to her since seeing her on Christmas Eve at Pine Hollow. “Did Santa bring lots of goodies?”
“A few,” Carole replied with a grin. “Including a new pair of breeches and some training videos that I’ve been wanting.”
Noticing that Lisa was hardly paying attention to their conversation, Stevie elbowed her. “Hey,” she said. “Earth to Lisa.” She glanced at Carole. “You’ll have to forgive her. She’s still recovering from another ‘discussion’ about her mother’s crazy plan to move them away to the ends of the earth.”
“I can’t believe your mom is still on that,” Carole said, chewing her lip anxiously as she cocked her head and gazed at Lisa.
Lisa kicked at a half-frozen clod of dirt. “Believe it,” she said grimly. “She’s totally serious about this.”
Stevie blew out a loud sigh. “This is insane,” she said. “We’ve got to do something to change her mind.”
“Like what?” Lisa said with a hint of sarcasm. “Convince Aunt Marianne to move down here instead?”
Stevie shrugged. “It just seems like there’s got to be something we could do,” she said. “Like back when we were kids. Remember? We never would have stood for this sort of thing then. We would definitely be planning and scheming by now, not just sitting back and waiting for the worst to happen.”
Carole grinned. “You’re right,” she agreed. “Knowing us—or rather, you”—she stared pointedly at Stevie—“we would probably be trying to convince Lisa’s mom that New Jersey is about to be swept away by a tidal wave or struck by an earthquake or something.”
Stevie snorted. “Yeah, like she’d really believe that,” she said. “Personally, I was thinking more along the lines of paying off one of my brothers—probably Michael, he’s always desperate for money—to disguise himself as Lisa and move to New Jersey in her place.”
Carole giggled. “Good plan,” she said. “But I’m not sure Michael would be all that thrilled about wearing a long blond wig.”
“No problem.” Stevie shrugged again. “We’d just have to explain to Lisa’s mom that short hair is all the rage in New Jersey, so she cut it in honor of the move.” She smiled, imagining her thirteen-year-old brother dressed up in one of Li
sa’s classic khakis-and-polo outfits instead of his usual sloppy jeans and heavy metal T-shirts. She was actually starting to feel a little inspired by the conversation. Maybe the plans they were joking about were on the wacky side, but that didn’t mean there was absolutely nothing they could do to help Lisa out of her jam. All they had to do was think seriously about it, figure out the best way to proceed…
“Whatever,” Lisa said, her voice rather heavy. “Um, could we maybe talk about something else for a while?”
Stevie glanced at her friend and noted her sad expression. “Sure,” she said instantly. The last thing she wanted to do was bring Lisa down more.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to stop thinking about it, she thought, shooting Carole a quick look. Maybe the two of them could brainstorm about this later.
“I know what we should talk about,” Carole said as they reached the pasture gate. She swung it open and held it for her friends to pass through ahead of her. “The wedding. What are you guys going to get them?”
“Get them?” Stevie said blankly. Then she gulped. “Oh. You mean, like as a present? I sort of forgot about that.” Doing some quick mental arithmetic, she grimaced. She’d spent most of her holiday money, as well as the three-week advance on her allowance she’d wheedled out of her parents, on a gift for Phil.
Carole was watching her with an amused smile. “Don’t worry,” she told Stevie. “My relatives sent cash this year. I can loan you some money if you need it.”
“Thanks.” Stevie shot her a grateful smile. “Okay, so what are you getting them?”
Lisa shrugged. “Deborah said they’re registered at Dylan’s,” she said. “I guess we could go over to the mall together and pick out some stuff from the registry.”
Stevie wrinkled her nose. “You mean like gravy boats and crystal vases?” she said, glancing ahead as they approached a small knot of horses grazing on the stubbly winter grass. “Ugh. But that’s so boring.”
“I know,” Carole agreed. “I can’t imagine why they didn’t just register at The Saddlery instead.”
Setting the Pace Page 1
