English Rider

by Bonnie Bryant

  “Wow,” Lisa said, gazing around wide-eyed. “This is—I mean—Wow.”

  Carole knew what she meant. In all her years at Pine Hollow, she had never seen such a mess. “What happened here?” she asked. “Could someone have done this by accident? A new rider, maybe, or a guest who didn’t know any better? Someone’s dog?”

  Stevie shook her head grimly. “It would have to be some accident,” she said. “It looks like a tornado hit this place. Even a Great Dane couldn’t do this much damage in the time we’ve been gone.”

  “That’s right,” Lisa remembered. “We were just here ten minutes ago, and this place was fine.” Suddenly she frowned. “Or was it?” she added. “Actually, we didn’t come in when we were here before.”

  Carole shrugged. “Yeah, but Tessa and Phil did,” she said. “And no matter how weird they were acting, they definitely would have noticed if—” She let out a horrified gasp. “Oh no!” she cried. “You—You don’t think they did this, do you?”

  “No way,” Lisa said immediately. “They’re not that irresponsible.” She gulped. “Of course, they were kind of distracted. And neither one of them has spent all that much time in our tack room. If it was already a little messy when they got there … and they bumped into a few things while they were moving around …”

  “They may have been too busy gazing into each other’s eyes to notice,” Stevie finished for her, her own eyes flashing fire. She ran both hands through her hair, glaring at the messy room. “This stinks,” she said fiercely. “It really stinks.”

  “No kidding,” Lisa agreed. She glanced at her watch. “We don’t have time to deal with this right now. But if Max finds it, someone is going to be in big trouble.”

  Stevie nodded grimly. “And if he finds out we were here and didn’t do anything about it, even if it wasn’t our fault—”

  “We’re history,” Carole finished, drawing one finger across her throat. “We can kiss our horses good-bye for the rest of the summer.”

  Stevie bent down and grabbed a handful of the scattered bits. “I can’t believe this,” she muttered, flinging them across the room in the general direction of the overturned bucket. “This is so unfair!”

  Carole gulped. She could tell that Stevie was in no mood for cleaning right then. She was too angry, and that was making her just as careless as Tessa and Phil must have been. In fact, although a few of the bits she had thrown had actually landed in or near the bucket, several others had missed completely and slid under the sink, where they would be even harder to retrieve.

  “Wait,” Carole said, putting a hand on Stevie’s arm as she bent to grab another handful of bits. “There’s no sense in all of us having to hang around and deal with this.” She took a deep breath and quickly surveyed the room once more. “This mess really isn’t as bad as it looks,” she said. “I can take care of it myself.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Lisa protested quickly. “We’ll all pitch in. Right, Stevie?”

  Stevie nodded distractedly and kicked at one of the saddles on the floor.

  “No, really,” Carole said. “You need to go home and deal with your mom, right?”

  “Well … sort of,” Lisa admitted reluctantly, sneaking another glance at her watch.

  “And Stevie, you really don’t want to hang around this tack room right now, do you?” Carole added.

  Stevie shrugged. “That’s the understatement of the year,” she muttered.

  “But you shouldn’t have to do all this work yourself,” Lisa said.

  Carole started pushing her toward the door. Stevie trailed along behind. “Don’t worry about it,” Carole said. “I’ll be fine. In fact, I’ll probably get done faster without a couple of distracted best friends in the way.” She smiled.

  Lisa smiled back. “Well, if you’re sure … Thanks,” she said gratefully. “We’ll make it up to you next time.”

  Stevie nodded. “Definitely.” She gave Carole a brief smile before her scowl returned. Then she headed for the door, muttering under her breath.

  Carole and Lisa exchanged worried glances. Still, Carole knew that there wasn’t much they could do to help Stevie right then—other than trying to figure out what was going on. She would cool down in her own time. “See you tomorrow,” Carole said.

  Lisa took one last look around the tack room. “Good luck,” she told Carole.

  “Thanks,” Carole replied. “Same to you.”

  When her friends were gone, Carole glanced around the room with a sigh. “First things first,” she muttered, grabbing the saddle out of the sink. She had to at least make things look marginally presentable in case Max or Red happened by. That meant picking up the saddles and bridles and shaking out and folding the turnout rugs. After that, she could start on the more minor stuff, like picking up the bits and cleaning the tack that had been on the floor.

  She sighed. Despite what she had told her friends, this was going to be a real pain in the neck.

  BY THE TIME the tack room was spic-and-span once again, Carole’s mood was almost as bad as Stevie’s.

  “There,” she muttered, hanging the last perfectly clean bridle on its assigned rack and stretching out her tired hands and shoulders. “All done.” And if I ever find out who was responsible for this, she thought grimly, Stevie will have to stand in line behind me to throttle him. Or her. Or them.

  She still had a hard time believing that Tessa or Phil could have had anything to do with this. Normally she would have assumed that Veronica was the culprit. But this time, she had to admit, all the evidence seemed to point to her friends. A toddler or small child couldn’t have done it—the turnout rugs and some of the tack had been placed too high for a child to reach. A canine vandal seemed unlikely, since there were no tooth marks in any of the leather. Who else could be responsible, then, but a completely distracted couple paying more attention to each other than to what they were doing?

  Carole sighed. Her head ached, and she didn’t feel like thinking about this anymore. She needed a distraction. Luckily, she knew just where to find one.

  “Hey, boy,” she said gently, slipping into Starlight’s stall a moment later. The horse greeted her with a soft nicker, and Carole smiled for the first time in hours.

  A few minutes later she reluctantly patted Starlight good-bye and left his stall. It was getting late, and she knew her father would be expecting her. Besides, her brief visit with her horse had made her feel much better already. Horses had a way of doing that. It had always been that way—for Carole, at least. It made her feel very sorry for all the people who didn’t have daily access to horses.

  She headed down the aisle, enjoying the quiet sounds of the stable around her. Everyone else seemed to have left, so all she could hear were the pleasant noises made by contented horses—the chewing of hay, the slurping of water, the occasional snort or nicker …

  Suddenly Carole heard a sound that didn’t belong.

  Clang! Clang!

  She frowned. “What was that?” she muttered.

  Clang!

  She hurried forward, heading in the direction of the noise. It sounded an awful lot like a hoof hitting metal.

  Clang! Clang!

  Carole followed the sound to Topside’s stall. When she looked inside, she immediately spotted the problem. A large metal bucket was lying on its side in the back corner of the stall. Topside, a naturally curious horse, was kicking at it experimentally with his front hoof.

  “Topside,” Carole called to the gelding, forcing her voice to stay calm and soothing. She opened the stall door and stepped inside. “Here, boy. Come up here.”

  The horse turned at the sound of her voice. He nickered eagerly and hurried forward to greet her, nosing her hands and pockets for treats.

  Carole found a stray piece of carrot in her pocket and fed it to him. Then she walked to the back of the stall and picked up the bucket.

  “How did this get in here?” she muttered. She glanced at the spot partway up the back wall where Topside’s
flat-backed plastic water bucket usually hung. The hook was empty, and the plastic bucket was nowhere in sight.

  Carole was starting to figure out what might have happened, and she didn’t like it one bit. She stuck her hand into the metal bucket and found a few drops of water still inside. Glancing at the floor, she saw that the straw bedding was wet where the bucket had been lying.

  She took a deep breath, trying to stay calm for the horse’s sake. “It’s okay, Topside,” she said, giving the big gelding a pat on the shoulder. “I’ll go get you some nice fresh water. Don’t worry.”

  She let herself out of the stall. As she hurried back to the tack room, she felt her fury growing uncontrollably. She knew that if she hadn’t found the metal bucket when she did, Topside could have stepped in it and injured himself badly—maybe even broken a leg. That was why Max used plastic buckets to water the horses, and why even those were always to be attached firmly to the wall rather than left loose. Leaving a metal bucket on the floor went beyond carelessness: It practically guaranteed trouble. Only the most careless, ignorant, or malicious rider would have done such a thing.

  Carole’s hands were shaking as she grabbed a plastic bucket from the stack in the tack room and filled it at the sink. Who could have done this?

  Tessa. Her mind piped up with the obvious answer, though Carole did her best to shove it away. Tessa must have done it. Tessa rides Topside. Tessa was in his stall just before she left. Tessa is careless. Tessa left the tack room a mess …

  Carole took a deep breath, trying to find another explanation, but she couldn’t. As impossible as it was to believe that Tessa could have left the bucket there, it was even more ridiculous to imagine that Max or Red could have done it. And who else could it have been?

  LISA GLANCED AT the phone on the kitchen wall for about the thousandth time, wondering if she should call Carole or Stevie. She had been working nonstop ever since arriving home from the stable. At the moment, she was sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by signs, lists, charts, receipts, reference books, and who knew what else. Her mother had just left for the store to buy some more supplies and pick up more information at Mrs. diAngelo’s house, which meant even more work when she returned.

  Lisa sighed and tore her gaze away from the phone. Doing all this work was bad enough, but doing it all alone made it even more tedious. It was tempting to call her friends to help, but she just couldn’t do it. Not after what had happened that day. She suspected that Carole was probably still trying to sort out the mess in the tack room—and if she wasn’t, she was certainly too exhausted from all the extra work to want to start collating phone lists. As for Stevie … Lisa shuddered. Somehow she didn’t think Stevie was in any mood to deal with Mrs. Atwood right now. She was far too distracted by her suspicions about Phil. It might have been different if Lisa could have honestly reassured her. But she had to admit that things just didn’t look good where Phil and Tessa were concerned.

  Speaking of Tessa … Lisa checked the clock on the microwave. It would have been nice if Tessa had come home to help. After all, adding a new event to the point-to-point had been her idea. Instead, she seemed to be planning to spend the whole day with Veronica—again. She hadn’t so much as called since the two of them had left with Miles.

  Lisa sighed. There wasn’t much she could do about that, so she vowed to stop thinking about it. She didn’t have time, anyway—not if she wanted to finish all the tasks her mother had assigned her before she came home and handed out even more. Lisa grabbed the layout of the program in one hand and a dictionary in the other. “Back to proofreading,” she muttered to herself.

  “YOU KNOW, I hate to admit it,” Carole commented to Stevie and Lisa the next day, “but I’m actually kind of glad that Tessa decided to go on that trail ride with Veronica.”

  “I don’t hate to admit it at all,” Stevie replied, swinging Belle’s empty water bucket at her side as the three girls left the tack room together. “I’m definitely glad. By the way, Lisa, are you absolutely, positively sure that Tessa didn’t make any phone calls last night?”

  Lisa frowned. “I’m sure.” She knew that Stevie was worried that Tessa might have called Phil. But on this point, at least, Lisa could reassure her. “Like I told you, she was positively exhausted when she got home from dinner at Veronica’s place last night.” The words came out sounding more sarcastic than she’d intended, but she couldn’t quite make herself feel guilty about it. “She went straight to bed,” she went on. “Never mind that Mom and I were up half the night working on the point-to-point.”

  Carole didn’t seem to be listening. She was staring down at Starlight’s water bucket, which she was carrying. “Listen, you guys,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I think we should stop by Topside’s stall to make sure everything is okay.”

  Stevie shrugged. “Why?” she asked. “He’s not there. Tessa has him out on the trail, remember?”

  “I know.” Carole hesitated. “I just want to check, that’s all.”

  Lisa nodded. Carole had told her and Stevie about the incident with the water bucket. She really couldn’t blame her for being worried. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s meet there in fifteen minutes.”

  EXACTLY FIFTEEN MINUTES later, Stevie poked her head over the half door of Topside’s stall. “Uh-oh,” she muttered.

  Carole and Lisa walked up at that moment. “Uh-oh what?” Carole asked. “What’s wrong this time?”

  “Take a look for yourself,” Stevie said, stepping back to give her friends room. “Or rather, take a smell.”

  The others immediately saw the problem. Topside’s stall clearly hadn’t been mucked out in hours. Clumps of manure were everywhere. “Oh no.” Carole sighed. “I guess Tessa decided to wait to muck out when she got back from her ride.”

  “If she plans to do it at all,” Stevie muttered.

  Lisa shook her head in dismay. “We can’t leave it like this,” she said, wrinkling her nose at the dirty, matted bedding. “If Max sees it, he’ll have a cow.”

  “Great,” Stevie said. “Maybe Tessa would take better care of a cow.”

  Carole gulped. Stevie and Lisa sounded really angry with Tessa. She couldn’t really blame them. It seemed that every time they turned around these days, Tessa was causing extra work. Carole knew that Lisa hadn’t gotten to sleep until very late the night before. And she suspected that Stevie hadn’t slept much better—she had probably been up half the night brooding about Tessa and Phil.

  Carole was angry herself at the thought that Tessa could have been responsible for the mess in the tack room the day before—and especially for that loose water bucket in Topside’s stall. And now Tessa seemed to have left another mess that would have to be cleaned up by her friends.

  Still, something was bothering Carole about this whole situation. How could they have misjudged Tessa so completely? Back in England—and even last week here in Virginia, for that matter—Tessa had seemed just as responsible and hardworking as any of them. She had pitched in willingly to do her own work and help with everyone else’s. Carole had thought she knew the British girl. She had trusted her. Could she really have been so wrong?

  She thought about it as she worked beside her friends to clean out the dirty stall. But she couldn’t come up with any good explanation for Tessa’s behavior.

  She was rolling a wheelbarrow full of droppings and dirty straw out of Topside’s stall when she suddenly noticed something. She stopped and frowned down at her cargo. “Hey, you guys,” she called. “Did you notice anything strange about this manure?”

  Lisa poked her head out of the stall. “What did you say?”

  Carole carefully backed up and stopped the wheelbarrow in the open stall door. “Check it out,” she said. “It looks kind of dark. And soft, or something.”

  Stevie, broom in hand, glanced at the wheelbarrow and made a face. “Come on, Carole,” she complained. “It’s almost lunchtime. Do we really have to study Topside’s manure right now?”

 
; Carole shrugged, still feeling bothered by the unusual texture. “Sorry,” she said. “It just looks kind of weird …”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Lisa said a bit impatiently, leaning on the handle of the shovel she was using. “I’m sure the manure is fine. You’re just looking for trouble because—well, you know.”

  Carole shrugged again. She glanced down at the soiled straw, wondering if Lisa was right. Topside’s manure really didn’t look that strange. Still …

  Lisa noticed her hesitation. “Look,” she said. “We can check on Topside later, okay? If you still think there might be something wrong, we’ll tell Max.”

  “Okay,” Carole agreed, feeling a little bit better. She picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow and started down the aisle toward the back door of the stable.

  When she returned from her trip to the muck heap, Stevie and Lisa were talking about the scurry race. “We were just saying it might be fun to enter a team in the race,” Lisa told Carole.

  Carole nodded. “I was thinking that, too,” she said, glad her friends had changed the subject. She was tired of talking and thinking about Tessa, Phil, and Veronica. “And since the event was added at the last minute, it probably won’t attract nearly enough really good scurry teams like the Penningtons’ …”

  Stevie grinned, guessing what Carole was thinking. “So even a bunch of rank beginners like us might have a chance to land in the ribbons,” she said. “That decides it. Let’s do it!”

  Lisa, too, seemed relieved at the change of subject. “Do you think Max would let us use his pony cart?” she asked.

  “Sure.” Stevie shrugged. “Why not? He’s not that mad at us.”

  “Which horses would we use, though?” Carole asked worriedly. “None of ours are trained to harness, and that’s a pretty specialized thing. There’s no way we could get them ready before Saturday.…”