Horse Spy

by Bonnie Bryant

Since she was closest to the outside, Callie went and got sodas for herself, Stevie, and Carole. When she rejoined the group, they were talking about everything in the world except the fact that Lisa was going to be gone for the summer and how much they were all going to miss one another.

  She passed the drinks around and sat quietly at the end of the table. There wasn’t much for her to say. She didn’t really feel as if she belonged there. She wasn’t anybody’s best friend. It wasn’t as if they minded her being there, but she’d come along because Stevie had offered to drive her to a tack shop after they left the airport. She was simply along for the ride.

  “… And don’t forget to say hello to Skye.”

  “Skye? Skye who?” asked Alex.

  “Don’t pay any attention to him,” Lisa said. “He’s just jealous.”

  “You mean because Skye is a movie star?”

  “And say hi to your father and the new baby. It must be exciting that you’ll meet your sister.”

  “Well, of course, you’ve already met her, but now she’s crawling, right? It’s a whole different thing.”

  An announcement over the PA system brought their chatter to a sudden halt.

  “It’s my flight,” Lisa said slowly. “They’re starting to board and I’ve got to get through security and then to Gate … whatever.”

  “Fourteen,” Alex said. “It comes after Gate Twelve. There are no thirteens in airports.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Here, I’ll carry that.”

  “And I’ll get this one …”

  As Callie watched, Lisa hugged Carole and Stevie. Then she kissed Alex. Then she hugged her friends again. Then she turned to Alex.

  “I think it’s time for us to go,” Carole said tactfully.

  “Write or call every day,” Stevie said.

  “It’s a promise,” said Lisa. “Thanks for coming to the airport. You too, Callie.”

  Callie smiled and gave Lisa a quick hug before all the girls moved away, leaving her alone with Alex. They were going to miss her, but the girls had one another. Alex only had his lawns to mow. He needed the last minutes with Lisa.

  “See you at home!” Stevie called over her shoulder, but she didn’t think Alex heard. His attention was completely focused on one person.

  Carole wiped a tear from her eye once they’d rounded a corner. “I’m going to miss her.”

  “Me too,” said Stevie.

  Carole turned to Callie. “It must be hard for you to understand,” she said.

  “Not really,” said Callie. “I can tell you three are really close.”

  “We are,” Carole said. “Best friends for a long time. We’re practically inseparable.” Even to her the words sounded exclusive and uninviting. If Callie noticed, she didn’t say anything.

  The three girls walked out of the terminal and found their way to Stevie’s car. As she turned on the engine, Stevie was aware of an uncomfortable empty feeling. She really didn’t like the idea of Lisa’s being gone for the summer, and her own unhappiness was not going to be helped by a brother who was going to spend the entire time moping about his missing girlfriend. There had to be something that would make her feel better.

  “Say, Carole, do you want to come along with us to the tack shop?” she asked.

  “No, I can’t,” Carole said. “I promised I’d bring in the horses from the paddock before dark, so you can just drop me off at Pine Hollow. Anyway, aren’t you due at work in an hour?”

  Stevie glanced at her watch. Carole was right. Everything was taking longer than it was supposed to this afternoon.

  “Don’t worry,” Callie said quickly. “We can go to the tack shop another time.”

  “You don’t mind?” Stevie asked.

  “No. I don’t. Really,” said Callie. “I don’t want you to be late for work—either of you. If my parents decide to get a pizza for dinner again, I’m going to want it to arrive on time!”

  Stevie laughed, but not because she thought anything was very funny. She wasn’t about to forget the last time she’d delivered a pizza to Callie’s family. In fact, she wished it hadn’t happened, but it had. Now she had to find a way to face up to it.

  As she pulled out of the airport parking lot, a plane roared overhead, rising into the brooding sky. Maybe that’s Lisa’s plane, she thought. The noise of its flight seemed to mark the beginning of a long summer.

  The first splats of rain hit the windshield as Stevie paid their way out of the parking lot. By the time they were on the highway, it was raining hard. The sky had darkened to a steely gray. Streaks of lightning brightened it, only to be followed by thunder that made the girls jump.

  The storm had come out of nowhere. Stevie flicked on the windshield wipers and hoped it would go right back to nowhere.

  The sky turned almost black as the storm strengthened. Curtains of rain ripped across the windshield, pounding on the hood and roof of the car. The wipers flicked uselessly at the torrent.

  “I hope Fez is okay,” said Callie. “He hates thunder, you know.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Carole, trying to control her voice. It seemed to her that there were a lot of things Fez hated. He was as temperamental as any horse she had ever ridden.

  Fez was one of the horses in the paddock. Carole didn’t want to upset Callie by telling her that. If she told Callie he’d been turned out, Callie would wonder why he hadn’t just been exercised. If she told Callie she’d exercised him, Callie might wonder if he was being overworked. Carole shook her head. What was it about Callie that made Carole so certain that whatever she said, it would be wrong? Why couldn’t she say the one thing she really needed to say?

  Still, Carole worked at Pine Hollow, and that meant taking care of the horses that were boarding there—and that meant keeping the owners happy.

  “I’m sure Fez will be fine. Ben and Max will look after him,” Carole said.

  “I guess you’re right,” said Callie. “I know he can be difficult. Of course, you’ve ridden him, so you know that, too. I mean, that’s obvious. But it’s spirit, you see. Spirit is the key to an endurance specialist. He’s got it, and I think he’s got the makings of a champion. We’ll work together this summer, and come fall … well, you’ll see.”

  Spirit—yes, it was important in a horse. Carole knew that. She just wished she understood why it was that Fez’s spirit was so irritating to her. She’d always thought of herself as someone who’d never met a horse she didn’t like. Maybe it was the horse’s owner …

  “Uh-oh,” said Stevie, putting her foot gently on the brake. “I think I got it going a little too fast there.”

  “You’ve got to watch out for that,” Callie said. “My father says the police practically lie in wait for teenage drivers. They love to give us tickets. Well, they certainly had fun with me.”

  “You got a ticket?” Stevie asked.

  “No, I just got a warning, but it was almost worse than a ticket. I was going four miles over the speed limit in our hometown. The policeman stopped me, and when he saw who I was, he just gave me a warning. Dad was furious—at me and at the officer, though he didn’t say anything to the officer. He was angry at him because he thought someone would find out and say I’d gotten special treatment! I was only going four miles over the speed limit. Really. Even the officer said that. Well, it would have been easier if I’d gotten a ticket. Instead, I got grounded. Dad won’t let me drive for three months. Of course, that’s nothing compared to what happened to Scott last year.”

  “What happened to Scott?” Carole asked, suddenly curious about the driving challenges of the Forester children.

  “Well, it’s kind of a long story,” said Callie. “But—”

  “Wow! Look at that!” Stevie interrupted. There was an amazing streak of lightning over the road ahead. The dark afternoon brightened for a minute. Thunder followed instantly.

  “Maybe we should pull off the road or something?” Carole suggested.

  “I don’t think s
o,” said Stevie. She squinted through the windshield. “It’s not going to last long. It never does when it rains this hard. We get off at the next exit anyway.”

  She slowed down some more and turned the wipers up a notch. She followed the driver in front of her, keeping a constant eye on the two red blurs of the car’s taillights. She’d be okay as long as she could see them. The rain pelted the car so loudly that it was hard to talk. Stevie drove on cautiously.

  Then, as suddenly as it had started, the rain stopped. Stevie spotted the sign for their exit, signaled, and pulled off to the right and up the ramp. She took a left onto the overpass and followed the road toward Willow Creek.

  The sky was as dark as it had been, and there were signs that there had been some rain there, but nothing nearly as hard as the rain they’d left on the interstate. Stevie sighed with relief and switched the windshield wipers to a slower rate.

  “I think I’ll drop you off at Pine Hollow first,” she said, turning onto the road that bordered the stable’s property.

  Pine Hollow’s white fences followed the contour of the road, breaking the open, grassy hillside into a sequence of paddocks and fields. A few horses stood in the fields, swishing their tails. One bucked playfully and ran up a hill, shaking his head to free his mane in the wind. Stevie smiled. Horses always seemed to her the most welcoming sight in the world.

  “Then I’ll take Callie home,” Stevie continued, “and after that I’ll go over to Pizza Manor. I may be a few minutes late for work, but who orders pizza at five o’clock in the afternoon anyway?”

  “Now, now,” teased Carole. “Is that any way for you to mind your Pizza Manors?”

  “Well, at least I have my hat with me,” said Stevie. Or did she? She looked into the rearview mirror to see if she could spot it, and when that didn’t do any good, she glanced over her shoulder. Callie picked it up and started to hand it to her.

  “Here,” she said. “We wouldn’t want—Wow! I guess the storm isn’t over yet!”

  The sky had suddenly filled with a brilliant streak of lightning, jagged and pulsating, accompanied by an explosion of thunder.

  It startled Stevie. She shrieked and turned her face back to the road. The light was so sudden and so bright that it blinded her for a second. The car swerved. Stevie braked. She clutched at the steering wheel and then realized she couldn’t see because the rain was pelting even harder than before. She reached for the wiper control, switching it to its fastest speed.

  There was something to her right! She saw something move, but she didn’t know what it was.

  “Stevie!” Carole cried.

  “Look out!” Callie screamed from the backseat.

  Stevie swerved to the left on the narrow road, hoping it would be enough. Her answer was a sickening jolt as the car slammed into something solid. The car spun around, smashing against the thing again. When the thing screamed, Stevie knew it was a horse. Then it disappeared from her field of vision. Once again, the car spun. It smashed against the guardrail on the left side of the road and tumbled up and over it as if the rail had never been there.

  Down they went, rolling, spinning. Stevie could hear the screams of her friends. She could hear her own voice, echoing in the close confines of the car, answered by the thumps of the car rolling down the hillside into a gully. Suddenly the thumping stopped. The screams were stilled. The engine cut off. The wheels stopped spinning. And all Stevie could hear was the idle slap, slap, slap of her windshield wipers.

  “Carole?” she whispered. “Are you okay?”

  “I think so. What about you?” Carole answered.

  “Me too. Callie? Are you okay?” Stevie asked.

  There was no answer.

  “Callie?” Carole echoed.

  The only response was the girl’s shallow breathing.

  How could this have happened?

  “INTERMEDIATE RIDING class will begin in the outdoor ring in five minutes!”

  Carole could hear her voice echoing through the corridors of Pine Hollow Stables. It always gave her a kick to use the public-address system. With the flick of her finger, she could make a whole classful of girls and boys nervous. Nobody ever wanted to be late to class because nobody wanted to incur the wrath of a riding instructor.

  Carole wasn’t an instructor—yet. Though she did help the instructors from time to time, her official job that summer was to be the morning stable manager. She was at Pine Hollow from seven-thirty until noon every weekday, overseeing everything that happened, from ordering grain to assigning horses. Until she’d actually started the job, she’d had little idea of how much went on at Pine Hollow and how responsible she would be for it.

  Carole had been a rider at the stable for about seven years—before she owned her own horse, before her mother had died, long before her father had retired from the Marines. From the first time she’d ridden a horse, when she was four years old, she’d thought the finest job in the world would be getting paid to work with horses. Now, finally, she was doing that.

  School was out for the summer, and until she went back as a junior in high school in September, she’d spend at least half of every day at Pine Hollow.

  In the past, filling in for the stable manager at Pine Hollow had been a fairly routine task. Max Regnery owned the stable, as his father and grandfather had before him. His mother had been stable manager for years, and she had run the place smoothly, almost invisibly. That had all changed the past spring, however, when Mrs. Reg, as she was universally known, had decided to retire. She’d moved to Florida, leaving the stable in her son’s hands, and he was relying on his students to do the work his mother used to do.

  Everyone was stunned at how much work Mrs. Reg had magically accomplished. Carole and Denise McCaskill—the girl who was the afternoon manager that summer—were trying to do everything they could to take the huge load off Max’s shoulders, but they were finding themselves as overwhelmed as he was.

  Two little girls stormed into Carole’s office. More accurately, one girl stormed in, chased by another.

  “Carole, I want to ride the pinto today,” whined Alexandra. “Justine rode him last week, so it’s my turn now! You can’t give me Nickel again. I had him last week and he misbehaved the whole time!”

  “Don’t even bother,” Justine said to her classmate. “Carole gave me Patch, so I’m going to ride him and that’s it. You shouldn’t even ask.”

  “Carole?”

  “You had trouble with Nickel last week because you weren’t controlling him properly,” Carole said calmly to Alexandra. “You won’t have trouble with him this week because you will control him properly, but you will have trouble with Max if you don’t get to class on time.”

  Alexandra glared. Justine smirked. Carole ignored them both. She flipped the switch on the PA system.

  “Two minutes!” she said sharply. The girls fled from her office.

  Carole wondered idly if she’d ever been as annoying as those two. She decided she hadn’t been. Then she decided she hoped she hadn’t been. She knew she’d liked some horses better than others, but as far as she could recall, there had never been a horse she hadn’t liked. And there had never been a horse she hadn’t been happy to ride.

  No, she decided, in spite of the occasional irritating rider, she’d found the perfect job.

  Ben, one of the stable hands, came halfway into the office, pausing nearer the door than the desk. Ben was like that. It was as if he didn’t really want to commit to a conversation, but there was something he had to say.

  “The stall is ready for that new horse,” he told Carole. “Almost, I mean.”

  “Oh, right,” Carole said. She opened her drawer and took out the bronze nameplate that had come from the engraver that morning. FEZ, it read. She walked over to give it to Ben. With anybody else, Carole would have thought it was rude to wait to be handed something. With Ben, though, it was different. He was shy and never seemed to feel as if he belonged. He was as reluctant to go into Carole’s offic
e as he was to go into Max’s.

  The only place Ben seemed comfortable, in fact, was standing next to or sitting on a horse. Carole had never known anyone with as sure a touch as Ben had. He never hesitated with horses the way he did with humans. He could look horses straight in the eye and they’d do what he wanted them to do. People were another story.

  Even if Carole had trouble understanding Ben as a person, she had no trouble understanding him as a horse handler. She could watch him work with horses for hours on end. She did, in fact. From her desk, she could see him while he did his chores around the stable, grooming, tending, training, healing, and caring for the horses that lived there. He might stammer trying to utter a complete sentence to a person, but he seemed able to convey a whole world to a horse.

  Carole had watched him soothe a frightened horse through an entire vet visit the week before. Anyone else would have had to twitch the horse, squeezing its nose and upper lip with a chain loop that irritated and distracted it so much that it wouldn’t notice what the vet was doing. Ben didn’t use the twitch, though. He stood by the horse’s head, holding it on a short lead. Ben patted its cheek and whispered into its ear. The horse never budged—even when Judy Barker, the vet, took a blood sample. Ben was amazing.

  “Must be some special horse,” Ben said, looking at the small bronze plaque in his hand. Briefly Carole wondered what had instigated this rush of chatter from him, but then she realized it was the bronze plaque itself and Max’s insistence that the stall be completely prepared before the horse’s arrival.

  “Some kind of VIP?”

  “Uh, sort of,” Carole said.

  “Horse or owner?” Ben asked.

  Carole laughed. Ben wouldn’t be anywhere near as impressed with an owner’s pedigree as he would with a horse’s. In this case, however, both were impressive. Carole picked up the folder Max had filled with information about the horse and its rider.

  “The horse is an Arabian endurance specialist. He’s got a lot of medals and ribbons to his credit. He deserves all the work you’ve put into the stall, plus the brass nameplate.”

  “And the owner?”