Pony Jumpers (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 2)

by Claire Svendsen

  “Can’t you stay for a little while? The music might not be that great but the food sure is,” Ethan said.

  “Yes, of course we can stay,” Mickey grinned.

  But the food Ethan picked out for me and put on a plate was like lead in my stomach. I knew that something bad was going on. I just didn’t know what it was.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Look at this,” Mickey said. “Carson won the Southern Pony Jumpers Cup three years in a row.”

  We were on Mickey’s computer, trying to find out anything we could about the pony that used to be called Carson and the girl who had once ridden him.”

  “But does it say who was riding him?” I asked.

  The picture was grainy but I could still make out that it was the same girl who had been in the photograph we found.

  “No,” she said. “Wait, yes! Sally Henderson.”

  “Google her,” I said.

  “Sally Henderson married Carson Samuel?” Mickey said.

  “Not her, keep going.”

  “Sally Henderson won the Floral cup for her amazing orchids?”

  “Ugh, that’s not her either. Why did she have to have such a popular name?”

  “Don’t worry,” Mickey said gently. “We’ll find her.”

  But the truth was that I suddenly wasn’t so sure that I wanted to know. I already had a sister who died in a horse riding accident. Did I really need to know about another girl who’d been hurt too? And what if it had been Bluebird’s fault? There was no way Mom would let me keep a pony who’d hurt someone, even if it hadn’t been his fault. She’d already lost one daughter and every day I felt like I was riding on borrowed time. Bluebird turning out to be dangerous would be the worst possible thing that could happen.

  “Here,” Mickey finally squealed after half an hour of searching.

  "What does it say?" I asked, heart in my throat.

  "Not much. She was injured at the last show of the season when her pony spooked and bolted out the in gate that someone had forgotten to close."

  "What happened to her?"

  "It doesn't say," she said. "But look at this."

  She shoved the computer in my direction. There was a black and white picture of the show grounds. Horses and riders standing around with an ambulance in the distance. I couldn't see Bluebird or Sally.

  "What am I looking at?" I asked.

  Then I saw it. The unmistakable carbon copy horses and their riders. Jess and Amber.

  "They were there," I whispered. "They were there that day and then somehow Jess ended up with Bluebird? That can't be an accident. In fact I wouldn't put it past Jess to have been the one who left the gate open."

  "Maybe," Mickey said. "But either way the pony spooked."

  "It wasn't his fault," I said.

  But it was starting to eat away at me. The next day when Esther asked me if I wanted to ride, I said that I needed to hand walk Harlow and the day after that I threw myself into helping with the camp kids.

  "When are you going to jump Bluebird?" Faith asked as she sat cleaning a bridle.

  “I don't know," I said. "When he's ready."

  "He looks ready now," she pointed.

  From where we sat on upturned buckets, I could just make out his white and chestnut face hanging over the fence. He nickered softly. I’d been avoiding him and he knew it. It wasn't fair. He hadn't done anything wrong. Or had he?

  Mickey spent hours trying to find an address or telephone number for Sally Henderson but so far we'd come up with nothing. The girl was a ghost. I just hoped she wasn't literally a ghost.

  "Do you think I'll do okay in the show?" Faith asked.

  The end of camp was looming near and the show was all the kids could talk about. Esther had ordered ribbons and they arrived in a big brown box. The kids spent ages fawning over the satin blues and reds. It had been the one thing they needed to really become serious about learning to ride. Turned out a little competition never hurt anybody.

  "I think you'll do great," I said and she beamed back at me.

  "Do you think maybe I can ride Bluebird?" she asked.

  "We'll see," I shrugged.

  But there was no way I was letting a camp kid on a potentially dangerous pony. I had to find Sally Henderson, I just didn't know how.

  "This is getting ridiculous," Mickey said as I watched her tack up Hampton. "You have to ride sometime. You can't be scared of a little pony. He's too cute to be dangerous."

  "I'm not scared of him," I said. "I just don't want to get hurt."

  "Everyone gets hurt Emily, you know that."

  "I just want to know the truth. Every time I ride him, I can't get that picture of Sally out of my mind. I need to know what happened to her and how Jess ended up with the pony. And I want to know what Jess did to him."

  "Can't you just let it go?" she asked.

  I didn't answer. She knew me better than that.

  "Maybe we've been looking in the wrong places," Mickey said that night.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well maybe she's on Facebook or something. How easy would that be?"

  Since I wasn't on Facebook, I had no idea but I watched as Mickey logged into her account.

  "Let's see if she's listed," Mickey said.

  Her fingers flew across the keyboard but I was staring up at the ceiling, thinking about what I should do with Bluebird. If I couldn't ride him then I couldn't keep him but how was I going to sell him like this? I didn't have much hope that we were ever going to find Sally Henderson.

  "Here she is," Mickey suddenly squealed.

  "You mean she's not dead?"

  I couldn't believe it.

  "Hardly," Mickey turned the screen so that I could see. "Look, her profile picture shows her standing next to a gorgeous looking horse."

  Mickey was right. There was the same girl we'd seen in the photograph with Bluebird only she was a little older and wearing makeup. The horse was a mahogany bay with a tiny white star on its forehead.

  "What else does it say?" I asked. My heart was pounding a million miles a minute. Sally wasn't dead. That had to be a good sign.

  "I don't know, her page is private. I'll send her a friend request."

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means we're going to have to wait."

  Mickey was so sick of me bugging her every five minutes the next day that she gave me her phone.

  "When is your mom going to get you a real phone anyway?" she asked.

  "When she wins the lottery I guess." I said.

  I knew that Mickey was only teasing me but her words hurt. So I didn't have the best phone or the best clothes or even the best pony. At least I'd worked hard for the things I had, unlike Mickey who had already sworn that she was never helping out with camp again. Of course she'd said that when Esther was out of earshot. I, on the other hand, was starting to enjoy having the camp kids around. At least teaching them was keeping my mind off everything else.

  I went to Bluebird's pen where he was standing in the shady corner, his tail lazily flicking the flies away. As soon as he saw me, he came to the gate.

  "You're not a bad boy, are you?" I asked him.

  He shook his head and blew his nose all over me.

  "I guess that's a yes," I laughed.

  I climbed over the gate and hugged his neck. He was warm and smelt of horse and dirt and goodness. It was everything I loved, so why couldn't I just enjoy him? I sat in the corner of the paddock on a pile of hay while he picked at the stalks around me, watching the sky turn from bright blue to dark gray. The wind picked up, tossing bits of hay around. One of the jump standards in the arena blew over.

  "What the heck is going on?" I shouted over to Mickey.

  "Tornado warning," she said breathlessly as she ran by. "Esther said to bring all the horses in.”

  "What about Bluebird?" I said but she'd already gone.

  I ran after her, helping to catch horses that were already pumped up by the wind and the adrenaline. Esther h
ad hold of the lead rope of a rearing horse as I bustled a pony into her stall.

  "What about Bluebird?" I asked her.

  There was already a rumble of thunder in the distance and the sky had turned black. The first drops of rain were already falling. Bluebird was pacing back and forth in his pen, ears pinned and head high. Every now and then he whinnied to the other horses in the barn.

  "If a tornado comes, it could blow his whole pen down," I said desperately.

  Esther looked pale. Tornados happened a lot in Florida but always to people other than us. This was the first time I'd actually seen her look scared.

  "Bring him in and put him in an empty stall," she said.

  I ran out to his pen as Esther shuffled the camp kids into the office. They were giggling and laughing as the wind blew gusts of shavings down the aisle. They didn't seem to know how bad the danger was but I did. Even being inside the barn wouldn't help Bluebird if a tornado came right over us. It would rip the whole roof off and maybe worse.

  "Come on boy," I said as I slipped his halter on. "You have to be good for me, okay?"

  He stuck his nose in the halter but as soon as I opened the gate to his pen he stood straight up on his hind legs and fought the sky with flashing hooves.

  "Whoa boy," I said calmly. "Everything is going to be okay."

  But he pranced his way to the barn, tail kinked over his hindquarters and I wasn't sure that everything was going to be okay at all because first he balked at the entrance to the barn and then I couldn't get him into the stall. He braced his hooves and set his neck, nostrils flared and snorting.

  "It's just a stall boy. Nothing to be scared of," I said.

  But Bluebird was having none of it.

  "I'll get a bucket of grain," Mickey saw the trouble I was having and ran off to the feed room.

  But even with the rustling grain in the bucket, Bluebird would not budge. He'd reach his neck out as far as he could to snatch a bite and then skitter backwards like the empty stall was the entrance to hell.

  "What's wrong with him?" I asked Esther.

  She'd come out of the office to see what all the fuss was about and the camp kids were now sticking their heads around the door curiously. Suddenly I felt like my pony was a freak show.

  "Surely he's been in a stall before," she said. "He's just being naughty."

  She took the lead rope from me. I wanted to snatch it back. To tell her that it didn't matter and I would hold him but by now the rain was pelting down on the barn roof, my voice caught in my throat barely a whisper.

  “Please be good,” I begged.

  But Bluebird didn’t listen.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Thunder cracked across the sky. Rain pelted sideways into the barn. And the chestnut pony with the white blaze and four white socks reared straight up to the sky. Tears streamed down my face. Even Esther couldn't contain him. He wouldn't go into the stall, it was too late to put him back in his pen and he was too worked up to stand quietly while the storm raged all around us.

  "What are we going to do?" I cried.

  Esther yanked the lead rope a couple of times, trying to get Bluebird's attention. Trying anything she could to get him to behave but it was too late. He was beyond our control. Afraid of things both real and imagined, his hooves slipped on the cement and he almost went down on his knees. As he fought for his balance, lightning cracked down from the black sky and hit a tree just outside the barn. The sound was deafening. Camp kids were screaming, Mickey had her hands over her ears and Bluebird snatched the lead rope from Esther's hands. He stood for a moment, suddenly calm in the realization that he was free. Then he bolted straight through the barn and out the other end. The last thing I saw of my pony was the flick of a chestnut tail as he disappeared into a sheet of gray rain.

  "Come back," I yelled and started to run but Esther grabbed my arm.

  "You can't go out there in that," she said. "You'll get yourself killed."

  "I don't care," I screamed. "Let go of me. I have to get my pony."

  "Your pony chose to run out there. He'll just have to wait."

  "He didn't choose," I sobbed. "He was scared. It wasn't his fault."

  "We did everything we could," Esther said softly. "He made his choice and this is mine. While you are here at the barn you are in my care. What would your mother say if she knew I let you run off into a storm like that? You could get hit by lightning."

  "I wouldn't," I sobbed. "Let me go. He could get tangled in his rope. Break a leg. He could die."

  I struggled and fought but Esther just pulled me tight. Folded up in her arms, I sobbed my heart out. Deep down I knew she was right but that didn't make it hurt any less. When I finally stopped crying she let me go.

  "Bluebird has a few things to learn when he gets back to the barn," she said. "And I'm sorry I haven't been able to help you as much as I would have liked with him. These camp kids have been much more work this summer than I thought they would be."

  "It's okay," I said. "It's my own fault for buying a pony that I knew nothing about."

  "No," she said, sitting me down on an upturned muck tub. "You did the right thing. I would have done it too. You saved him. He has you to thank for that."

  "Well he doesn't seem very grateful," Mickey said as she came and sat with us. "What was the matter with him anyway?"

  "He's a bad pony," Faith said as she left the other kids and came to sit with us.

  "No," Esther shook her head. "He's not a bad pony. Bad things have happened to him. That is all."

  "Like something bad inside a stall?" Mickey said.

  "Being tied with his head up and no food or water?" I added.

  "Hanging," Esther looked as us with wide eyes. "Where did you learn about that?"

  "Hanging?" I said.

  "Yes. Tie a horse with its head up for hours and eventually it will be so tired and sore that it will be obedient. Horrible practice. Some people use it to force the horse to go with its head low. It only works because the poor thing’s neck is too sore to hold its own head up. Haven't seen it done in years though."

  "We have," I said. "In Jess's barn."

  The words all came jumbling out as the storm raged around us. The papers we were looking for. The weird water schedule and the pony we found tied with her head up in the corner. How Jess claimed to know nothing about it.

  "She owned Bluebird," I said. "She could have done the same thing to him. Maybe that’s why he was so scared to go inside the stall. He thought that we were going to hurt him."

  "Could be," Esther said. "Or he was just being a brat. It was kind of hard to tell."

  "He was pretty bad," I agreed.

  The rain had slowed to a steady pour. I looked out into the bleakness. Whether he was just being naughty or whether he was really scared, it didn't matter. He was out there and I had to find him.

  "He won't have gone far," Esther said. "He can't get off the property."

  "Right," Mickey said.

  But as we stomped through mud puddles in the drizzling rain, I wasn't so sure. There were tree limbs down everywhere. Broken pieces of wood lying on the ground like giant spikes sticking up into the air. It would be easy for a galloping pony to impale himself on something when he was so freaked out.

  "Bluebird," I called out. "Come here boy."

  Mickey shook a bucket of grain. "Come on Bluebird. We've got food."

  But he didn't come. As the thunder receded and the rain stopped, we walked on.

  "What do you think Esther is going to do about the hanging thing?" Mickey asked, kicking a tree branch out of the way.

  "What can she do? She doesn't really have any proof. It's just our word against Jess. Why should anyone believe us?"

  "But we have to stop her," Mickey said.

  "I know. But how?"

  I wanted to stop Jess from hurting the new pony she had in her barn but right now I was more concerned with finding Bluebird. There were trees down on the trail.

  "These will make
cool jumps," Mickey grinned.

  But I couldn't smile. At the edge of the property a tree had fallen on the fence, flattening it.

  "Don't worry," Mickey said. "I'm sure he wouldn't have left the property."

  But three hours later, after we'd bribed the camp kids to help us look, it was clear that Bluebird was most certainly not on the property. He had vanished into the storm and was nowhere to be found.

  "I can't believe this is happening," I said.

  All I wanted to do was sit down and cry but I didn't seem to have any tears left. I'd thought that my biggest problem was Bluebird’s hidden past and not being able to jump him. Now I didn't have a pony at all.

  "Don't worry," Mickey squeezed my hand tight. "We'll find him."

  Esther was on the phone, informing the police and animal control that we had a missing pony and giving them a description.

  "It may be a while before they spot him," Esther said after she put the phone down. "They have their hands full right now with the aftermath of the storm. The power is out and trees are down all over the place."

  "I'm going back out to look for him," I said.

  "Me too," Mickey agreed.

  "I'd love to come and help girls but I have to stay here until the last of the camp kids are picked up,” Esther said.

  "It's okay," I said.

  Mickey and I ran back out of the barn.

  "Good luck," Faith's tiny voice floated after us. "I hope you find him."

  "We'll find him," Mickey said.

  "What if he's hurt?"

  "I'm sure he's fine."

  I started to run anyway. We only had a couple of hours left before the sun went down and I was sure that Esther would have a pretty dim view of us wandering around in the dark with flashlights. I didn’t think Mickey's mom would be too keen on it either and if my own mother found out then I could forget about coming near the barn ever again. Good job my mom seemed to have forgotten about me.

  "Look," Mickey said as we got to the break in the fence. "Hoof prints."

  She was right. Now that the rain had stopped and the sun had broken weakly through the clouds, I could see the churned up muck where a pony had spun about a few times before launching over the fallen fence.