Wild Horse Spring

by Lisa Williams Kline

  The boys didn’t see us at first. I overheard Buzz Cut say to Curly, “I’m afraid of my dad. Are you?”

  “Kinda,” Curly said.

  Then Buzz Cut and Curly started playing with their cell phones, laughing at something.

  “Hey,” I said to Diana and Cody. “Check it out.”

  “Uh-oh,” Cody said. “Those guys.”

  At that instant they both looked up, saw us, and started laughing.

  We walked away quickly and focused on a small tank nearby that contained a yellow octopus with eight delicate arms. An aquarium volunteer, a heavyset bald man with glasses, sat next to the octopus as the three of us stood in front of the tank and looked. A Mr. Potato Head lay at the bottom of the tank next to the octopus.

  “We put Mr. Potato Head in there with all his attachments—arms and legs and eyes—and she took him apart. She’s very intelligent, and she loves to play. She’s like a puppy dog,” said the man.

  “Really?” Cody said, interested. It was true—Mr. Potato Head was missing everything. His eyes and legs were scattered around among the stones on the bottom of the tank.

  “She is so much fun to watch,” the man said.

  “That’s amazing. I didn’t know octopuses were playful,” I said. I thought it was sweet the way the man had become attached to the octopus.

  “She’s a year old, and they only live for two years. I imagine she won’t be with us much longer,” the man added wistfully.

  A sign on the tank said Do Not Tap on the Glass. Someone behind us reached out, with a snicker, and tapped the glass. I turned around and saw it was Curly.

  The volunteer said, “No, no! That sign is serious. That octopus is very easily stressed. If she gets stressed, she turns red, and sometimes she’ll release blackish-blue ink.”

  Diana darted over toward the boys. “Been riding ATVs much at night lately?” she hissed at them.

  “What are you talking about?” Buzz Cut said. He gave her an angry look.

  I could feel my heart beating wildly. Diana thought the boys had been the ones to hit the horse. Could they have done it? We did see them chasing the horses on the ATVs. I was embarrassed, so I walked away and stood in front of a small tank, trying not to listen.

  “What’s your problem?” Curly said to Diana. Then he went back to the octopus tank. “Hey, let’s see if we can get this octopus to squirt black ink.”

  “That’s enough, young man,” said the volunteer. “I’ll not have you harassing the octopus. Move along, please.”

  “Hey, Diana,” I said, heading for the next room. “Come on!” I hoped to distract her from the boys. She glanced at me and didn’t speak, then gave the boys a dirty look and walked with me to the next room.

  The next room held a huge tank called the Graveyard of the Atlantic. About five sharks glided through the water, around and around a sunken submarine replica. I wondered how many times the sharks did that every day. The big tank made a humming sound that made me feel jumpy. Smaller fish shaped like torpedoes slid by the glass. Their round eyes, angled in their sockets, staring at us. A dark gray fish with a large head and whiskers swam by.

  The three of us stood in front of the huge tank, looking in. I held myself very stiff, and the tension between us felt like a force field. The two boys appeared in the doorway of the room, but when they saw us, they ducked out.

  “I’m so glad that horse is all right,” Cody finally said to Diana.

  And I knew what had brought them together. It was what they had shared last night with the horses.

  Waiting to see if Diana answered, I caught her furious face reflected in the glass of the aquarium. Then she saw me looking and walked away, leaving Cody and me alone.

  Cody sighed. “Did the cop ask Diana a lot of questions?”

  “Yes,” I said. I looked at him, trying to control the emotion on my face. “Did they ask you a lot too?”

  “Yes.” He nodded. “They think I hit the horse. It was so hard listening to that horse in pain in the dark. The sheriff asked me over and over again why I was out there. He didn’t believe I was looking for bioluminescence.” He looked down the hall in the direction Diana had gone.

  “She’s mad at me,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I told on her,” I said. Now I was ashamed I’d done it.

  “Why did you tell?”

  Because I had a crush on you and was jealous. Of course I couldn’t tell him that. I just shrugged and stared at the shark tank. A yellowish green eel with an evil smile slithered out of one of the submarine’s algae-caked portholes.

  “They would have found out anyway,” he said. “I told them I was there with her.”

  I nodded, feeling a little better. “Diana thinks those guys did it.”

  Cody looked at me but didn’t say anything. Then, when he spoke, he changed the subject. “You’re stepsisters, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Cody nodded. “I have two stepsisters at my dad’s house. They fight all the time. About everything.” He grinned and spread his arms wide to show the wide array of topics his sisters fought about.

  I laughed. “That sounds like me and Diana!”

  He waved his arms. “I stay away! Danger, danger!”

  I laughed again.

  “But seriously, most of the time they’re fun.”

  And just like that, the tension between us was broken. His gaze, when I looked at him, was completely open.

  “Should we look for Diana?” he asked.

  And it occurred to me that maybe he didn’t “like” either Diana or me. Maybe we just reminded him of his stepsisters.

  “Sure.” I turned away and headed back toward the entrance of the aquarium. I didn’t know what had happened to the two boys, but it was a relief, because I didn’t see them again. Finally we spotted Diana outside, standing at the edge of the sound. A low gray cloud smudged the horizon, and a chill wind blew off the opaque gunmetal water. Diana’s shoulders were hunched over, and her skinny arms were crossed over her chest.

  Should we go after her? She was always starting some drama and expecting people to come running after her. What if we just didn’t? What if we left her out there wandering around? That would serve her right.

  But, without even discussing it, Cody and I headed out toward Diana and the shoreline. The water was choppy, and we could see, in a haze, an arching bridge in the distance.

  I was thinking about apologizing to Diana when my cell phone rang. I thought it might be Daddy, wondering where we were, but it was Mama, just calling to see how I was doing. I stopped to talk to her, and Cody walked on.

  “Are you and Diana gettin’ along okay?” she asked. I could picture her in the kitchen, or out in a lawn chair by the pool.

  “Fine,” I lied. Last time I told her about fighting with Diana, she called up Daddy and yelled at him. I wasn’t about to tell her anything like that again—not about falling off the ATV, about the horse getting hit on the beach—nothing.

  She started telling me about going boating with Barry and then to a college graduation party for one of his friend’s sons—and as I listened I watched Cody catch up with Diana. He tried to talk to her, but she walked away. Was Diana mad at him too? I’d thought she was only mad at me.

  “Honey, do you think you can stay with Daddy and Lynn for a few extra days after you get back from the beach?” Mama was saying. “Barry has a layover in New Orleans, and I want to go down and spend a couple of days with him.”

  “Sure, I’ll ask.” In fact, I was going to ask to stay with them permanently. Or at least I had been planning to until all this happened with Diana. Would Diana not want me to live with them now?

  Cody was following Diana now, and finally she turned and listened to him, and started talking to him, and then I could tell that she was crying. They must have been talking about the horse.

  I told Mama I had to go, then hung up. I stood at the wooden railing and watched Diana and Cody. Next to the water, the grass
es moved, making a clicking, rushing sound in the invisible breeze. I had so many confused feelings about everything—about where I was going to live, about how I was going to get along with Diana, about the police coming today to interview us. I took a deep breath. Then another, and another, until I felt myself relax slightly. After one last deep breath, I followed the walkway to where Cody and Diana were. Heading that way, it became suddenly clear to me: the thing that Diana was really mad about was the horse getting hurt, not me telling.

  And the second thing that came to me was this: we had to get Cody out of trouble, and the only way to do that was to find out who really did hit the horse. And to do that, we had to work together. Maybe it was those other two boys. Maybe we had to come up with some way to prove that they did it.

  As I came up, Diana stopped talking, tossed her head, and started to walk away, but I grabbed her arm. “Diana, stop! Look, I’m sorry I told on you. It was wrong of me. But we need to stop fighting.”

  She knitted her brows and shot a look at Cody. “It’s obvious why you told on me.”

  “Why?” Cody said, glancing from one of us to another.

  I really hoped she wouldn’t tell him why. “Well, I said I was sorry,” I said quickly. Please don’t tell that, I thought. “Now the main thing is to find out who did hit the horse. And how can we do that? There’s got to be a way,” I said. “And we can’t keep fighting with each other. We have to work together.”

  Nobody spoke for a minute. We just stood together, as the wind whistled through the grass and a seagull flew by, calling plaintively. A short distance away, a long-necked great blue heron lifted into the air, flapping its big, triangular wings as if in slow motion, its spindly legs pointing straight out in back the way a superhero flies.

  Diana studied my face, with her eyes narrowed, then took a breath and put her hands on her hips. “I bet it was those two guys we just saw in the aquarium.” She looked at Cody. “Did the policeman say he was coming back?”

  “He said he might have more questions. He took pictures of the ATV to see if it showed any damage.”

  “So the ATV that did it might have damage?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Cody said.

  Diana said, “So when we get back this afternoon, we need to look for the ATV that did it. One of those guys had an ATV the same make and color as yours,” she said to Cody.

  “We should ride our bikes around the neighborhoods until we find it. If it takes us the rest of the week,” I added.

  The tension was broken at last. We stopped and got sandwiches and salads, and then went to the Wright Brothers Museum. Lynn and Daddy seemed to have talked about everything in the aquarium, and by now they were calmer and were joking around with us. They were holding hands, and I thought that was a good sign.

  The plane inside the visitor center was a copy of the Wright Brothers’ plane, since the original is in the Smithsonian Institution. It had broad glider wings made of white cloth stretched over a frame of amazingly thin strips of wood. A model of a person who was supposed to be Orville Wright was lying on his stomach near the small engine. We went outside and walked over to look at the house and hanger that the Wright Brothers used. The hanger wasn’t really any bigger than a garage. Their house had a ladder inside that they climbed to get to the sleeping loft, and an old-fashioned stove inside for heat. I bet they were freezing, because their flight was in December and I was cold today and this was April. The distances that the brothers had flown on their first four flights in 1903 were marked out on the sandy ground behind the visitors center.

  We went outside to walk the distances, but it was so windy and flat, and I felt so relieved not to be fighting with Diana anymore that I just ran to the first marker, with my hair whipping in the wind and my jacket making a flapping sound. Then Diana ran to the second marker, which was a tiny bit farther, and Cody ran to the third, which was a little farther than that. We all ran together to the fourth marker, which was much, much farther, almost a thousand feet, or a fifth of a mile. After that we ran across the field and up a hill, on curving paths, to a huge white stone memorial. Up there, in all directions, we could see Nags Head and Kill Devil Hills. The wind was crazy, blowing our hair straight up in the air, pasting our jackets against us or billowing them out. We could see the ocean on one side and the sound on the other.

  “There’s a reason why the Wright Brothers chose to come here from Ohio,” Daddy shouted when he and Lynn joined us. “All this wind!”

  Diana and Cody decided to race down the hill from the memorial back to the visitors center, which must have been a mile. I offered to be the starter.

  “On your mark, get set, go!” I dropped my arm and they took off, their skinny legs flashing like scissors. Diana was matching Cody stride for stride as they ran down the hill. She was running the fastest I’ve ever seen her run, straining to beat him, but as they passed the halfway mark, Cody started to pull ahead. I ran along behind, to try to stay close enough to see who won, and I started yelling at the top of my lungs into the wind.

  “Go Diana! Go! Come on, you can do it!”

  She put on the steam, lengthened her stride, and almost caught him, but then at the end he leaned forward and kicked in a burst of speed and ended up beating her by about five yards.

  I couldn’t even run the whole way, it was so far, and when I got there, they’d both collapsed and had laid right down on the ground, out of breath and laughing. So I fell down onto the warm, sandy grass too. It felt so good not to be fighting anymore, and to have a plan to help Cody.

  17

  DIANA

  Funny how mad I had been at Stephanie before, and now I wasn’t. She’d told on me, but so had Cody. He’d had to tell the truth to the police sergeant. And what Stephanie had said, about helping Cody by finding out who really hit the horse, had made sense. Really doing something to help the horse was so much better than running around just being mad. It was funny that Mom and Norm were suddenly okay with us hanging out with Cody, mostly to prove to Cody and his mom that we didn’t think he was guilty of hitting the horse.

  And since last night my feelings about Cody had completely changed.

  Back at our house, Stephanie texted Cody and said to meet us out by the turtle’s nest. We were rushing out onto the beach with our bikes to meet him when Mom stopped me, her cell phone in her hand.

  “I thought I’d call your dad, Diana, and double-check to make sure everything is on for tomorrow. Why don’t you wait a minute before you go bike riding?”

  “Do I have to?” As much as I wanted to see Dad, I didn’t want to listen to Mom talk to him. If he wasn’t going to be there tomorrow, I didn’t want to know right now. Besides, we only had a couple of hours of daylight to search for the ATV.

  Mom cocked her head and looked at me with suspicion. “You’re not even interested in talking to your dad on the phone?”

  “I just talked to him yesterday. I’ll see him tomorrow.” I headed down the walkway, a hand on each handlebar, as Mom yelled for us to be back by dinnertime at seven–thirty. Stephanie was right behind me. We stood near the turtle’s nest with our bikes, waiting for Cody. The tide was low and the sun was just above the trees in back of Cody’s house, throwing long shadows on the beach that made us look like girls on stilts and our bikes look like the ones in the circus with gigantic wheels. A cool late afternoon breeze ruffled the hairs on my arms. With sharp cries, a few seagulls landed near us and strutted across the sand, waiting to see if we had any food.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t want to talk to your dad,” Stephanie said.

  “We have a lot of searching to do before dark.” It had also occurred to me that going to see Dad would mean Stephanie and Cody would be together without me for a whole day.

  “I get it,” Stephanie said. She was redoing her shiny, dark ponytail, something she did almost every hour.

  We didn’t have to wait long before we heard the rumble of the ATV engine. Cody flew over the dune, airborne, a
nd then landed and skidded to a sideways stop. The seagulls scattered.

  “Hola,” he said.

  “Whoa!” I laughed, and Stephanie kind of jumped back with a little squeal.

  “Okay,” he said. “What should we do? Should we split up or what?”

  “I don’t like to be by myself,” Stephanie said.

  “Let’s stay together. We can go up each path from the beach together and investigate the houses in each neighborhood.”

  “And what are we looking for?” Stephanie asked.

  “An ATV that’s damaged. And it might be hidden somewhere, like inside a garage, especially if the guy thinks the cops are looking for him,” I said. “If we find one, we’ll take a picture of it with a cell phone to show to the police.”

  “Okay!” Cody said and gunned the ATV motor.

  Stephanie and I jumped on our bikes, and the three of us headed down the beach. At the first path through the dunes, we rode as far as we could on our bikes, and when the sand became too soft to ride through, we dropped them and continued on foot. Cody continued on the ATV, driving slowly so he wouldn’t leave us behind.

  Three houses were arranged around a sand cul-de-sac. Like our rental houses, the driveways were no more than packed-down sand. No ATVs were in sight, and none of the houses had garages. We headed back to our bikes, rode down the beach to the next neighborhood, and repeated the pattern.

  “This is going to take a long time,” Stephanie said, wiping sweat from her temple as we rode up the path to the third set of houses.

  Later we passed the place on the beach where it had all happened. High tide had washed away most of the hoof prints and tire tracks, but above the waterline we could still see some. We stopped and stood there in the darkening light for a few minutes, without talking. I thought about the thing that had happened there. I could hear the mare’s groans again and see her trying to lift her head, with Dark Angel neighing and pacing nearby. The sounds of their pain were so vivid in my memory.

  Cody took off his helmet and held it in his lap, bowing his head.

  “Come on,” I finally said. “Let’s catch whoever did this.”