Stevie nodded. “That’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about, actually. I was wondering if maybe you could hold up the other target, because the easel that was holding it up collapsed and broke. I don’t know what else to do—everyone’s all set to watch.”
Deborah smiled warmly. “I’d love to help out in any way I can,” she said.
“Great!” Stevie practically yelled. In no time at all, she had maneuvered Deborah into position and reorganized the riders, who were beginning to get bored waiting.
Carole, Lisa, Stevie, and Betsy Cavanaugh, another experienced Pony Clubber, each had a team of younger riders to calm down, instruct, and root for. Carole and Betsy’s teams would be playing the baton game. Lisa and Stevie’s teams would play Super Soaker. After each girl had rebriefed her team about the games, Stevie nodded to Mrs. Reg that she could begin the races. The flag dropped, and they were off.
From the very first minute, the audience loved what they saw. Parents and siblings cheered on family members while the experienced games riders took mental notes on whom they should try to recruit. The baton race was fun to watch because the children were so small that jumping on and off Nickel and Dime—even though the ponies were about ten hands high—was no easy feat. Most of the time they half dismounted, half tumbled off.
Meanwhile the Super Soaker was unquestionably, as Stevie had predicted, the biggest crowd-pleaser. Everyone roared when the riders shot the water guns and missed wildly. As usual, they were racing so fast that their marksmanship left a lot to be desired. As long as some of the water hit the target, they were entitled to race back and trade off. At the opposite end of the ring, The Saddle Club stood between the two starting marks, cheering wildly for their teams.
After dusting off a couple of baton-race victims, Betsy Cavanaugh came to join them. “Stevie, I have to hand it to you. You really do make up the best relay races. Or at least the most outrageous,” she said.
“The riders are having so much fun—I’m sure more people will want to sign up for the Pony Club games next year,” Lisa said.
“The parents and adult students look like they wish they could have a turn,” Carole said.
“I must admit, everyone does seem to be having a blast,” Stevie said, looking around with a satisfied air.
“Everyone but that poor woman holding up the target, you mean,” Betsy said. She pointed to Deborah.
Actually, Deborah was having a blast—of water, that is—and she didn’t seem to be liking it. Most of the water that missed the target was hitting her.
“Gee, I thought she might enjoy getting splashed. I guess I was wrong,” Stevie said worriedly. The frown on Deborah’s face told her everything she needed to know.
“I’d love to get soaked on a hot day like this,” Lisa said.
“Me, too,” Stevie said. “That’s why I asked Deborah. I thought it would be fun for her to join in the typical Pine Hollow craziness. I’ve got to stop the race, though. She’s obviously not having any fun.”
“You can’t stop it now, Stevie,” Carole said. “They’re on the last time around, with only two more riders to go. Besides, she’s soaked already. Five minutes isn’t going to matter.”
“No, I guess it won’t,” Stevie admitted reluctantly. She’d have to apologize to the reporter afterward.
She turned back to her team. “Go! Go! Go!” Stevie hollered, watching the last rider on her team refill the water gun and take off toward the target. It was little Christine Kiernan, who had been pressed into service at the last minute, to make a complete team. She galloped down the ring, several lengths in front of her competitor, stopped on a dime, aimed—and got about two drops on the target and the rest on Deborah. Then she spun around and raced back to clinch the victory.
Stevie’s team members whooped it up. They all swarmed around her, telling her how much they loved the games and couldn’t wait to play more. Mrs. Reg came over and congratulated Stevie and Betsy, whose team had won the baton race.
Stevie thanked Mrs. Reg. “Well, I should be able to coach a team to win a game that I invented,” she said. The riders laughed.
“I’m glad you gave us that hint about the guns not refilling properly so you have to tilt the bucket,” Christine said.
“Shhhhh!” Stevie said. “Never give away trade secrets.”
Mrs. Reg shook her head at Stevie. “Tsk, tsk, Stevie Lake,” she said.
“The guns don’t refill properly?” Lisa asked.
“Well, it’s not exactly that—” Stevie began.
“Funny,” Lisa broke in. “This one seems to be full.” With that, she drenched Stevie with all of the water in the gun.
“Okay! Okay!” Stevie yelled. “I promise I’ll never play Super Soaker with those guns again!”
“All right,” Lisa said, relenting. “Lucky for you my team had so much fun, they didn’t care who won. Otherwise, I’d have to kill you.”
What Lisa said was true. Everywhere they looked, students and parents were discussing the games animatedly and grinning from ear to ear. Only Max seemed less than enthusiastic. He watched the happy scene from a slight distance, his brow furrowed in thought.
“Hey,” Stevie said suddenly, remembering her mental note to see about Deborah. “What happened to our target holder? We can compare clothes and see who’s wetter.”
“There’s no contest there,” Lisa said. “Deborah’s clothes looked like she got caught in a rainstorm. They were absolutely clinging to her. Anyway, she ran into the house as soon as the games ended. She probably wanted to change.”
“Maybe she should change her attitude at the same time,” Betsy Cavanaugh commented. “She doesn’t seem capable of fun.”
Although Stevie partially agreed with Betsy, she felt a pang of remorse. First the green hamburgers, and now this. The least she could have done was offer Deborah a towel. She knew from experience that it could be embarrassing to get soaked in front of strangers—Stevie’s brothers’ favorite summer pastime had been catching her off guard when their friends were over and spraying her with the hose. And even if she wasn’t the world’s most accommodating guest, Deborah was a guest of Pine Hollow, and she deserved the consideration that normally went along with that position.
Oh well, Stevie told herself, there’s nothing I can do about her right now, but maybe I can help Max. All day long he had been trying to make his announcement. Stevie, Lisa, and Carole—but mostly Stevie—had cut him off every time so that they could follow their own agenda. Obviously whatever it was meant a lot to him or he wouldn’t keep bringing it up. Worrying about the announcement had probably been what kept him from enjoying the games.
Stevie ran into the middle of the crowd, summoning parents, students, and single women from where they’d been sitting. She waved her hands to quiet the conversation. “Everyone, listen up!” she cried. “Max has an important announcement that he’s been wanting to make.” She glanced around for Max and spotted him standing in the driveway. To her surprise he was staring at a taxi that had just pulled up, a dumbstruck expression on his face.
“Uh, Max?” Stevie called uncertainly.
As she waited for a response, the door to the house slammed. Max turned toward the noise, followed by everyone else. They saw Deborah hurrying toward the cab carrying a big suitcase. She got right in, suitcase first, and didn’t look back as it drove away.
“Max?” Stevie asked more quietly.
He seemed to notice her for the first time. “Not now,” he said. Stevie barely heard him because he spoke in a whisper. Then he ran into the house.
“I have just one question,” Lisa said, joining Stevie. “What is going on?”
AS SOON AS the crowd had resumed chatting among themselves, Lisa and Stevie pulled Carole away from her Quantico friends for a quick conference. No one could come up with a good answer to Lisa’s question.
“Maybe there is something bad happening at Pine Hollow, and Deborah is going to report it,” Stevie said.
“Wh
at could possibly be happening here? Max is one of the most reputable horsemen in the business. He’d never do anything dishonest,” Lisa said.
“You’re right,” Stevie acknowledged. “Maybe she left because of the Super Soaker game. I’m sure Max thought it was another careless scheme of mine—getting her to hold up the target—and by leaving, she proved him right.”
“I think Deborah probably just got sick of being at Pine Hollow—she never seemed that keen on riding—and Max feels bad that he couldn’t win her over to it. He’s always so disappointed when people don’t feel the same way about the place as we do,” Carole said.
“Well, then it was pretty rude of her to just take off like that,” Stevie said. “She may be upset with me, but why take it out on Max? She could’ve at least thanked him for trying.”
“She probably would have but didn’t have time. I’ll bet there’s a fast-breaking story that she has to cover,” Lisa said.
Even though no conclusion seemed perfect, one thing was clear: Max was upset, and the girls wanted to help him as much as possible.
“I propose that we leave the women to their own devices for a while and get busy keeping the picnic running smoothly,” Carole suggested.
“Agreed,” Stevie said. “What’s left?”
“There’s the jumping demonstration by the short-stirrup kids, and after that the fireworks,” Carole said.
The short-stirrup riders were younger boys and girls who were in their first year of competition. They were eligible to enter the short-stirrup division at horse shows, and the fences they jumped were no higher than eighteen inches. Most of them rode small ponies like Nickel and Dime.
“Okay,” Stevie said, “so basically the fences need to be set up in the indoor ring. I’m sure they’ll want to regroom the ponies themselves—I saw May fussing over Nickel for hours this morning.”
“Don’t forget regular evening feeding, haying, and watering,” Carole said, ever mindful of the horses.
“Not to mention the stalls, which I’m sure no one has had time to muck out,” Lisa added.
Stevie groaned. “All right, then, let’s get to it. We’ll skip watching the jumping and work inside instead,” she said.
As usual, part of Stevie’s skill in organization was her ability to delegate most of the work to others. Before long moms and dads and older riders were dragging poles and standards to set up crossbars and tiny verticals in the indoor ring, dragging the hose from stall to stall to refill water buckets, and tossing hay bales down from the loft. The Saddle Club decided they’d do the mucking out.
Red O’Malley’s face lit up when he saw them coming with the big cart to haul used bedding to the manure pile. “Are you girls a sight for sore eyes,” he said. “My two other hands are off today, and I was wondering how we were going to finish all the stalls before dark. I thought maybe I’d have to ask some of those women who’ve been hanging around all day for some help.”
“Oh, Red, you wouldn’t,” Lisa protested. “They’d get completely filthy.”
“You all are filthy half the time,” Red pointed out.
“Yeah, but we’re different,” Stevie said.
“How?” Red asked, teasing them.
“Because we’re not twenty-five,” Carole said, kidding him right back.
“Yeah, so it’s okay for us,” Lisa said.
After telling them that they’d still be mucking out stalls when they were forty-five, Red thanked them and headed back out to the paddocks to start bringing the horses in for feeding.
“So how should we do this—three on one or three on three?” Stevie asked. She was referring to the number of girls per stall.
“As if you had to ask,” Lisa said.
They opened the nearest empty stall and began mucking, taking turns dumping the cart behind the barn. When they had finished four and started on the fifth and last stall on the aisle, Max passed by on the way to his office next door. He barely nodded in their direction.
“Gosh, I hope the jumping went okay—Max still looks kind of disturbed,” Carole said.
“He doesn’t look like a man who has thirteen women—intelligent, attractive, successful, or all of the above—waiting for him to return,” Stevie said.
“Do you think he liked any of them?” Lisa asked.
“Oh, yes,” Stevie replied. “I saw him talking with the Cartwright twins during the games demonstration. He looked so absorbed he hardly even paid attention to the games.”
“Really?” Carole said. “Because he and Holly looked like they were hitting it off quite well before.”
“Max and Holly would look good together. They’re the perfect height for each other,” Stevie said thoughtfully.
“Yeah, but if we’re talking looks, you’ve got to hand it to Tiffani,” Lisa said. There was a pause as they sighed in unison. By powers unknown to Stevie, Lisa, and Carole, Tiffani had somehow managed to remain a vision of model-perfect loveliness all day, in spite of the heat, dust, and horseflesh.
During the pause in conversation, the door to Max’s office squeaked on its hinges. Without really trying, they could hear Max and Mrs. Reg talking in urgent, hushed tones.
“Why be stubborn at a time like this?” Mrs. Reg demanded.
“It’s not stubbornness, Mother. I just know there’s nothing I can do,” Max answered.
“Nothing? That’s not true. You could go after her,” Mrs. Reg said.
“Go after her now?”
“That’s what your father had to do to get me back.”
“Forget it. It’s no use. She’s never going to speak to me again.”
“She?” Carole mouthed.
Stevie shrugged and put her finger to her lips.
Mrs. Reg said something inaudible. Max answered more loudly. “It’s off. Everything concerning Deborah Hale is off. I’m just thankful I was spared the embarrassment of asking her to marry me in public and then having her run off.”
The door closed again, and they heard footsteps retreating. They ran to the stall door and looked out into the aisle. Mrs. Reg was walking briskly toward the house wringing her hands.
Stevie watched her go, afraid to move or speak or even breathe. The Saddle Club had ruined the lives of two people. Not only that, they had ruined any chance of producing an heir for Pine Hollow. She glanced at her friends.
“I have a pit in my stomach the size of a black hole,” she announced.
“How could we have been so stupid?” Carole asked. “The whole time we thought Max was sick or going crazy because he kept sneezing and forgetting our names, he was falling in love! He must have just been incredibly nervous around Deborah. What were we thinking?”
Lisa just shook her head wordlessly. What they had failed to notice for an entire week was now as glaring as a Fourth of July firecracker: Max needed thirteen single women like he needed thirteen sick horses. He had already found a mother for Max the Fourth—none other than Deborah Hale. Now something had gone dreadfully wrong.
One by one Stevie, Lisa, and Carole started to tick off the problems they had created.
“We brought thirteen single women to the picnic where Max was planning to propose marriage to another woman,” Stevie said, getting right to the heart of the matter.
Carole winced. “Not only that, but he’d told her that the people at the picnic were his best friends.”
“So we made him look like a playboy,” Lisa said.
“Which is the furthest thing from the truth,” Carole said.
“And we made her cook green hamburgers,” Stevie said.
“And we let her get soaked by squirt guns,” Lisa said.
“And we didn’t get her a towel,” Carole said.
“Forget ‘we’ on those last three,” Stevie said. “I’ll take the blame.”
“She probably thought Max’s ‘closest friends’ hated her,” Carole said.
“So why stick around—” Lisa began.
“For more abuse,” Stevie finished.
“It was one hundred percent our fault,” Carole said.
“And one little announcement from Max would have made everything fine,” Lisa said.
“But we wouldn’t let him make it,” Stevie said.
“So it was two hundred percent our fault,” Carole said.
“We really messed up,” Lisa agreed.
“This could be our biggest mess-up ever,” Carole said. “The future of Pine Hollow is at stake, not to mention Max and Deborah’s happiness.”
“Right. So are we going to sit here, or are we going to stick our noses right back in and un-mess-up everything—or is that ‘mess-down’?” Stevie demanded.
“Whatever it is, we’d better get cracking, because Deborah is in a taxi headed for we-have-no-idea-where,” Lisa said.
“Lisa, I’ll take that as a go-ahead from you. Carole?”
“I’m in. If we don’t get Deborah back for Max, he might never forgive us. And he’s one friend I’m not willing to lose,” Carole added sadly.
IN A MATTER of minutes The Saddle Club had put away all the tools, dumped the manure cart, and reassembled in front of the stall. The first thing to be done was to establish a plan of pursuit.
“What’ll we say to her when we catch her?” Carole asked. Her friends knew that she was often better at knowing what to say to Starlight than to a person in a tricky situation.
“I haven’t quite worked out that part of the plan yet,” Stevie said.
“We’ll decide what to say when we find her,” Lisa said.
“Good,” Stevie said. “One, find Deborah. Two, think up something to say. Now, how on earth do we find out where that taxi went?”
“It was orange and white. That means it’s a Town taxi. Why don’t we just call the dispatcher’s office and ask?” Lisa suggested logically.
“Brilliant!” Stevie cried. “To the telephone!”
They sprinted to Mrs. Reg’s office. The phone there was allowed to be used only in an emergency—and no one bothered to ask if this counted as one. Carole found the number right away. Practically grabbing the phone book out of her hands, Stevie dialed. “Come on, brainstorm, don’t fail me now,” she muttered. She put the call on speaker phone so Carole and Lisa could hear the conversation and give advice if necessary.
Hay Fever Page 7
