Nightmare

by Bonnie Bryant

  They had a lot of confidence in The Saddle Club. They were sure the girls knew what they were doing with horses, and they knew the girls could take care of themselves when they camped in the woods. In short, they’d been more worried about Delilah than about Carole or her friends. And they’d been right to be. Carole felt a certain warmth from knowing that. Max and Mrs. Reg really trusted them.

  The girls waved back at the welcoming crowd. Starlight and Belle picked up a trot. It was time to get home.

  A few minutes later, the girls were close enough to distinguish faces in the crowd. Since it was a Sunday and nobody had to be at school or work, the whole place was filled with welcoming faces.

  “I see your parents, Stevie,” Carole said. “They’re smiling.”

  “What about mine?” Lisa asked nervously.

  “There they are,” Carole said. “They’re smiling, too. And standing next to them is … is … is …”

  Could it be true? Carole squinted to be sure she was seeing right. After all, she hadn’t seen him in a while—maybe five days. He could have changed. No, her eyes weren’t fooling her. It definitely was true.

  “Dad!” she called out.

  Starlight broke into a canter. He knew when it was time to go fast!

  The next fifteen minutes were a blur of questions, hugs, and tears. The police took complete notes, and then, satisfied that everybody was happy and healthy, they closed up their command center and left the denizens of Pine Hollow to their reunion. All the other people who’d joined in the hunt for the girls hugged them, welcomed them, told them how relieved they were to know they were all right, and left them alone with their families and the Regnerys.

  “Are you home for good?” Carole asked her father after she’d given him his umpteenth hug.

  “No, honey, I’ve got to go back, but everybody is taking the weekend off, so I am, too. I just traveled a little farther than the rest of the group.”

  “Where were you, Dad? Can you tell me now?”

  “I can, but it has to be a secret between you and me. You can’t tell anyone, including your best friends. When I’m back for good, then we can talk about it, and I should be able to tell you some things, but for now—”

  “Colonel Hanson?” Stevie said, interrupting the father-daughter reunion.

  “Yes, Stevie,” he said.

  “I figured out the new answer to the old joke you told me,” she said.

  “And it is?” he asked.

  “You,” she said.

  He smiled and put his finger to his lips. “Can’t tell anyone that joke for a while,” he said.

  “I promise,” she said. “National security and all.”

  Then he leaned over to his daughter and whispered in her ear.

  “Really?” she said. “And I thought you wanted to take me to a desert!”

  He laughed then, long and loud. Carole thought it was the sweetest sound she’d ever heard!

  “So what are you doing here?” Carole asked. “I mean, how did you get allowed to come all the way home?”

  “It was after I spoke with Lisa and Stevie the other day. They kept telling me that you were doing just fine, no problems, there was nothing for me to worry about. I didn’t believe them for a minute. They were worried about you, but they didn’t want me to be. So I just had to get home. I couldn’t leave before last night, but here I am. And I’m all yours until Monday morning, when my transport takes off to deliver me back to, um, my destination. It isn’t long, but we’ll both stay at the Atwoods’, because our house is all locked up. And we’ll have the rest of today together. Want to go on a picnic or something?”

  “Actually, Dad, I think I’ve had enough of the great outdoors for a little while.”

  “How about going back to Lisa’s house and having a nice hot bath?”

  “Now you’re talking,” she said, and hugged him one more time.

  “I’m ready for a shower, too,” Stevie said to her parents. “Can we go now?”

  “Sure,” they agreed. Stevie did want to take a shower, but even before she did that, she had a letter to write with some really exciting news for one Elizabeth Wallingford Johnson.

  “OUCH!” CAROLE SAID, settling onto the top of one of Pine Hollow’s fences.

  “Is that still bothering you?” Lisa asked, perching next to her.

  Carole nodded.

  “It’s already been four weeks since Delilah threw you and you landed on those rocks and roots in the woods,” Stevie said, joining her friends. The three of them had been riding in Pine Hollow’s schooling ring after their Pony Club meeting and now decided to watch Max give a lesson while they chatted. Their horses were secured nearby, waiting to be groomed.

  “Think of it more like, ‘It’s only been four weeks,” ’ Carole said. “When I landed on the forest floor, I landed hard. Those are deep bruises, about which I can do nothing.”

  “Except complain,” Stevie teased.

  “I have to take my pleasures where I can find them,” Carole said, teasing back.

  “So these days, her main pleasures are reading the newspaper and complaining,” Lisa put in.

  “I’m starting to love the newspaper,” Carole agreed. “Every day I can read more about a certain top secret disarmament conference in a certain top secret location, and while it’s not exactly like getting a letter or talking to him every day, it’s nearly as good, especially now that the newspaper has started using phrases like winding down. I know Dad will be home soon.”

  “And in the meantime,” said Stevie, “he’s spending every evening and weekend scoping out neat places to take you when you go with him to a certain top secret location, right?”

  “Absolument,” Carole agreed in her best French.

  “Well, there’s other good news around here,” Lisa said. “All the horses still seem to be healthy.”

  “That is good news,” Carole agreed. “But we’re really not going to know for sure until the full forty-five days have passed. That’s another two weeks. They could be a long two weeks. Also, it’s possible for horses to carry the virus for a long time without showing any symptoms at all. That’s why they have to be tested frequently.”

  “Sure, but nobody really believes any of the other horses got infected, do they?” Lisa asked.

  “Nobody really knows,” said Carole. “And that’s the truth.” It was a scary truth, but all three girls knew they had to accept it.

  “Well, in the meantime, all the horses seem to be totally healthy,” Stevie said, bringing a slightly cheerier note to the conversation.

  “That is, if you don’t count three sore legs on Barq, Nero, and Nickel, and a case of colic that I diagnosed in Patch last week,” Carole said, more than a little proud of her latest diagnostic coup.

  “You’re really doing a wonderful job here, Carole,” Stevie said. “Your sharp eyes have saved two horses from having minor colic turn into major colic by spotting it early. Max must be showering you with compliments.”

  “Right,” Carole agreed. “He said, ‘Nice work, Carole.” ’

  “Wow!” said Lisa. “Max really went overboard with that!” She was joking, but they all knew that Max gave compliments sparingly. He expected his students to do well, and he didn’t remark when they merely did well. “Nice work” was a big compliment from him.

  “Hmmm,” Stevie said. “Seems to me it wasn’t all that long ago that you were furious because your history teacher—Mr. Mathios?—said you’d done nice work. Have you changed your mind about what constitutes a compliment?”

  She said it in a cheerful voice, but both she and Carole were a little nervous about what Lisa’s response would be. They hadn’t talked with Lisa about her history class and her competitive tendencies when it came to grades since Lisa’s announcement that she was going to get a C. They both considered that plan so un-Lisa-like that there hardly seemed anything at all they could say about it.

  Lisa was oblivious to their concern. “Oh, Mr. Mathios definitely train
ed at the same school of compliments as Max did! The other day, I did a presentation on Wood-row Wilson’s Fourteen Points, explaining them to the class. When I was done, he said ‘Very interesting,’ but when I got the report back, he’d given me an A-plus.”

  “Not a C?” Carole asked hesitantly.

  “No way!” said Lisa. “I did really great work. Why would he have given me a C?”

  “Um, Lisa,” Stevie began, “you told us you were going to prove that grades weren’t important by getting a C in that class.”

  “I almost forgot,” Lisa said. “It seems so long ago that I thought that. But it was a dumb idea from the beginning, and the only mystery is why you two didn’t tell me so. See, I’d gotten all hung up about Fiona Jamieson, and she’s not what’s important to me. I’m what’s important to me. If I need to get a good grade to feel good about myself, I have to work to get a good grade. I certainly don’t have to work to beat Fiona, and besides, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Why’s that?” Carole asked.

  “Something happened to Fiona. I don’t know what it was. But right about then, when Delilah died and you ran away and I was going nuts about getting a C, Fiona sort of fell apart, like she’d burned out or something. I have no idea what happened, but she’s been out of school as much as she’s been in since then, and her grades have really dropped. Not that anyone tells us who got which grade, but you sort of know. I feel sorry for her. I wish I could help.”

  Carole thought back to the day she’d met Fiona in the library. She remembered how angry she’d gotten at the girl, wondering if she had really been angry at Fiona, or at Lisa for being so foolish about a history class, or at herself for being so confused. Whomever she had been angry at, it was Fiona who had taken the brunt of it, and then, right after that, she’d fallen apart. Carole had never told her friends about her run-in with Fiona. She did now. She asked Lisa if she thought she might have hurt Fiona. She hadn’t meant to hurt her. She’d just needed to be honest.

  “Whatever caused Fiona’s problems wasn’t you,” Lisa said. “She’s been like she is for a long time. I know these feelings build up and then they sort of spill over. It’s happened to me, but I’ve been luckier than Fiona. I’ve had friends like you to help me when I start heading for trouble. Fiona doesn’t have any close friends. So, no, Carole, it’s not your fault. I promise.”

  Stevie reassured Carole, too, but she wasn’t quite as gentle as Lisa had been. “Look, anybody who’s pulling down an A-plus in a class and is trying to get extra credit is already nuts. You didn’t do anything that would make her more nuts, because how much more nuts could you get than that?”

  Stevie kept thinking about Fiona, but not in the same way that Lisa and Carole were thinking about her. It occurred to Stevie that if Fiona was no longer going to be a local history genius, then there was an opening for the next prodigy, and she was available for the job. Wouldn’t that surprise her friends! The same night that The Saddle Club had returned from the woods, Stevie had written to Elizabeth Wallingford Johnson about the discovery of Hallie’s hiding place. She was a little surprised that she hadn’t heard from the author yet, but she’d sent the letter to the publisher of the book, who would forward it to her, and that probably took a while. And, because she’d written such a wonderful book, Elizabeth Wallingford Johnson probably got a lot of mail and couldn’t answer it all at once. But as soon as she saw Stevie’s letter, she was sure to write or call. What a discovery Stevie had made! There, in the middle of the woods of Virginia, she’d found the exact rock that Hallie had described in her diary. There was no doubt about it. It formed a cave and it had the arrow shape chipped out of it. Carole and Delilah had camped at exactly the same place where Hallie and Esther had camped so many years before.

  “That was a great Horse Wise meeting,” Carole said.

  “I’ll like it better when we can have mounted meetings again,” said Lisa.

  Since nobody was allowed to bring any horses or ponies to Pine Hollow until the quarantine was lifted, they were only having unmounted meetings, because a lot of the members brought their own ponies to mounted meetings. It meant they were learning an awful lot, but it also meant that they couldn’t ride as a group or play games or practice skills on their own horses. It wasn’t surprising, then, that the girls had taken the time, after the meeting, to do some work together in the schooling ring.

  “I would have preferred to go on a trail ride,” Stevie said.

  “Well, we’ll be able to do that pretty soon,” Lisa said. “Like as soon as all the horses pass their next blood test, right?”

  “There’s a little matter of getting Max’s permission, too,” Carole reminded her. “Although he was slightly glad we were all with Delilah, he was not exactly thrilled about the police and the hundreds of people who went to look for all of us, and I definitely heard him mumble something about how we’d used up ten years’ worth of trail rides in those two days.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Stevie said. “We’ll talk him out of it.”

  “How?” Lisa asked, genuinely curious.

  “Somehow,” Stevie said. That was a word that tended to frighten her friends. If she didn’t have anything in mind, she was likely to jump on the first wild scheme that popped into her head, and those were always trouble—even when they were fun.

  Behind them Starlight gave a gentle whinny.

  “He thinks we’re ignoring him,” Carole said, looking over her shoulder at her beloved horse.

  “Well, he’s right,” Lisa said. “It’s time to pay attention to our horses and take care of them the way they want to be taken care of.”

  “You mean spoil them rotten?” Stevie asked.

  “That’s what they have in mind,” Lisa said.

  “Sounds good to me,” Carole added.

  The girls climbed down from the fence and set to work. It was a wonderfully ordinary set of tasks they had to do, and the girls knew they would enjoy every bit of it. Caring for horses was so necessary and so compelling that it was impossible to fret or worry about anything else—especially now that there seemed to be so little to fret about anyway.

  Carole was almost as certain as her friends that all the Pine Hollow horses would be found free of the EIA virus. She now knew where her father was, that he wasn’t in any danger at all (except for eating too much French food!), and she had a good idea that he’d be home soon, based on what she’d read about the conference in the papers. Freed of worry about horses and her father, Carole had settled in to a pleasant visit with the Atwoods. She was always on time for dinner and she was as happy to help out at the Atwoods’ as she was at home. Their house almost felt like home now, too.

  Carole picked up her grooming bucket and went to work on Starlight. Next to her, her two best friends were doing the same for their horses. What a trio they were, happy as could be as long as they were together and as long as that “together” included horses.

  Now, an even happier piece of news was that Lisa was back to within normal range on her schoolwork. She wasn’t going to kill herself, literally or figuratively, about getting straight A-pluses. Straight As would be good enough for her. And Stevie? Well, Carole and Lisa never had figured out what her problem was. Ever since their trip through the woods, Stevie had been relaxed and cheerful—so cheerful that Carole suspected she was keeping a secret, but Carole didn’t have a hint as to what it might be.

  Secret-keeping wasn’t Stevie’s strong point. In fact, Lisa and Carole talked about it once, and the longest either of them could remember Stevie keeping a secret to herself was fourteen hours—and she’d slept for eight of them!

  The only sour note these days was their sad memories of Delilah. After he had returned from the woods, Max had arranged to have her body picked up. The girls wanted to have Delilah buried on Pine Hollow property, but that was impossible because of the disease that had killed her. The last they saw of her was when a large van took her away. They had their memories, though, and those were
precious indeed.

  Carole tugged at a knot in Starlight’s mane, only vaguely aware that someone else was walking up to them. The person stopped next to the three girls. It was Mrs. Johnson, the woman who had been taking lessons from Max.

  “Stephanie?” Mrs. Johnson said.

  Stevie looked up at her in surprise. “Uh, yeah?” she responded. That was Stevie’s name all right, but not one she used much.

  “I didn’t know that was your real name,” said Mrs. Johnson.

  “I don’t hear it much,” Stevie said. “Unless my mother is really angry with me—or sometimes a new teacher will call me that on the first day of school.”

  “But you signed your letter that way,” said Mrs. Johnson. “Well, I certainly know how that is. It’s really no different from my situation.”

  Stevie was a little confused, but Mrs. Johnson had always seemed like a nice woman, so it would only be polite to wait and see what she wanted. Carole and Lisa listened, as rapt and as confused as Stevie.

  “When I was born, my parents named me Elizabeth. It’s a lovely name, just as Stephanie is a lovely name, but it’s sort of a mouthful, if you know what I mean.”

  “Sure,” Stevie said.

  “Especially with my maiden name—Wallingford. It’s just not fair to make somebody go through seven syllables to get one person’s name. So my parents called me Betty, saving me two syllables every time I introduced myself!”

  Stevie smiled. Then a bell started ringing. Wallingford sounded very familiar. But she couldn’t place it yet.

  “Of course, none of that mattered much when I married Mickey Johnson. That’s a simple last name and can take a fancy first name, but by then I was so used to being called Betty that I stuck with it most of the time. Except when I started writing.”

  “Elizabeth Wallingford Johnson?” Stevie said incredulously.

  “That’s me,” Mrs. Johnson said, offering her hand to shake.

  Stevie shook it. “I had no idea,” she said.