Shying at Trouble

by Bonnie Bryant

  Shying at Trouble

  Pine Hollow, Book Six

  Bonnie Bryant

  My special thanks to Catherine Hapka for her help in the writing of this book.

  ONE

  “Lisa! Honey, I’m home!”

  Lisa Atwood looked up from her history essay and blinked in surprise. “Mom?” she called back uncertainly. She’d been concentrating so hard on her paper that she hadn’t even heard her mother’s car pull up. She stood, stretched, and headed out of her room and down the hall.

  Her eyes confirmed what her ears had told her—her mother was in a good mood for a change. Mrs. Atwood was bustling about near the door, setting down a pair of large shopping bags, shrugging off her light autumn jacket, and brushing her chin-length, graying brown hair out of her eyes.

  When she saw Lisa coming downstairs, Mrs. Atwood’s smile grew wider. “There you are, sweetie!” she cried, clapping her hands gleefully. “I was hoping you’d be home. I have a surprise for you.”

  “A surprise?” Lisa glanced warily at the bulging shopping bags, both of which bore the name of the clothing store at the Willow Creek Mall where her mother worked as an assistant manager. If anything could have ruined Mrs. Atwood’s lifelong love of shopping, it would have been working at that store. The manager was a smarmy slob who often expected Mrs. Atwood and the other assistant manager to make up for his laziness and stupid mistakes. The other employees were generally high-school or college students, and they didn’t usually last long enough for Mrs. Atwood to get to know them even if she’d wanted to. None of that had seemed so bad back when Mrs. Atwood had started working at the store part-time for a little extra spending money. But since she and Mr. Atwood had divorced, things had changed. Suddenly the stories didn’t seem so amusing anymore, and her tone when she described her boss’s latest outrages no longer held any trace of amusement or irony.

  Mrs. Atwood didn’t notice Lisa’s thoughtful expression. She was too busy digging through the larger of the two shopping bags. Lisa did her best to hold back a sigh as she watched. Somehow, her mother’s happy expression made her feel sad and wistful. It reminded her of how her mother used to be before Lisa’s father left, shattering his wife’s entire world. Mrs. Atwood had never exactly been a bundle of fun, but she had been satisfied with her life and her family. Lisa hadn’t had to worry about her back then. She hadn’t had to do most of the cooking and cleaning, either, or fill in as her mother’s only reliable friend and confidante.

  Mrs. Atwood stood up, clutching a bundle of shimmery midnight blue fabric. “Surprise!” she cried cheerily. She shook out the fabric with a flourish, and Lisa could see that it was a dress—a sleek, stylish dress with a high neckline and cap sleeves. “It’s a brand-new style we’re carrying this fall. The shipment came in yesterday, but I didn’t get around to opening the box until today, and as soon as I did I thought of you. It’s perfect for someone with your slim figure and your coloring. Do you love it?”

  Lisa did her best to smile and look excited, playing along. “It’s gorgeous, Mom,” she said, reaching out to rub her fingers over the smooth fabric, wincing a little as she noticed the hefty figure on the price tag dangling from one sleeve. Even with her employee discount, the dress had still cost Mrs. Atwood more than she could afford, especially for something so unnecessary. “It’s great. Um, I think it’s a little too dressy for school, though.”

  Mrs. Atwood laughed. “Don’t be silly, dear,” she said. “An outfit this special isn’t for school. I thought you could wear it the next time you go to a party or a dance or out on a special date with Alex. You don’t have many dressy outfits, and you’re at that age when you’re going to want to start dressing up more.”

  Lisa didn’t bother to tell her mother that her feelings about clothes hadn’t changed, no matter what age she was. Now seventeen, she still felt every bit as comfortable in neat but casual clothes—like the khakis and cotton sweater she was wearing that day—as she had at seven, or fourteen, or sixteen and a half. Her classic outfits complemented her classic looks—her straight, shiny blond hair; her large, expressive eyes fringed by long lashes; her slender figure. She wasn’t sure the new outfit was really her. It was a little flashy, a little trendy for her taste. But she didn’t intend to tell her mother that—not when she was so excited about her surprise.

  Surprises, Lisa thought ruefully as she took the dress and smoothed it carefully over her arm. She noticed that her mother was bending over the second shopping bag. She couldn’t help grimacing a little, fully expecting a pair of midnight blue pumps to come out of the bag to match her new dress. Surprises are supposed to be fun and exciting, but they never turn out quite the way they should, do they? Especially these days.

  As surprises went, the gift of an inappropriate outfit was hardly the most unsettling one Lisa had had to deal with lately. Lisa had never liked surprises much—she was a logical, cautious person, a planner, and she liked to know what was coming so that she could prepare herself. That was one reason she had been so thrown by the news she’d learned the week before about Prancer, a horse at the stable where she rode. Lisa had ridden Prancer almost exclusively for years—almost since the elegant Thoroughbred mare had first retired from the racetrack and come to Pine Hollow Stables.

  That had changed a little over a month ago, soon after Lisa had returned from spending the summer in California with her father. Max Regnery, the owner of Pine Hollow, had suddenly declared Prancer off-limits without explaining why. Lisa had wondered and worried about the mare for weeks before finally, accidentally, finding out the truth: Prancer was pregnant with twins, an unusual and sometimes risky situation for a horse. As if that surprise hadn’t been bad enough, Max’s revelation had been accompanied by the even more surprising fact that one of Lisa’s best friends had known about it all along.

  Lisa had met Carole Hanson and Stevie Lake on her first day at Pine Hollow some four years earlier. The three girls had bonded almost immediately over their love of horses and riding, even forming a club they had named The Saddle Club to give themselves an excuse to talk about their favorite activity even more.

  But the one thing that had always been even more important than horses to the girls was their friendship. That friendship had sometimes seemed surprising to outsiders, since the three of them were so very different in so many ways. In contrast to Lisa’s mature, steady, responsible personality, Stevie was always fun-loving, freewheeling, and a bit of a daredevil. Sometimes Lisa thought that the only thing steady about Stevie was her relationship with her longtime boyfriend, Phil Marsten. The two had been completely committed to each other since meeting at riding camp years earlier, despite the fact that they lived in neighboring towns and attended different schools.

  And then there was Carole. From the beginning, the girls had all agreed that Carole was the horse-craziest of the three of them. She boarded her horse, an eager, friendly, big bay named Starlight, at Pine Hollow, and her friends liked to joke that she spent more time at the stable than he did. That wasn’t far from the truth. Carole planned to spend her life working around horses, and she had started by taking on an after-school job at Pine Hollow, where she had quickly become an invaluable part of Max’s small staff. She never seemed to miss a step at the stable, even when she was busy with four or five different tasks at once, but she could be quite scatterbrained in the outside world, often forgetting the most basic things in a way that made super-organized Lisa squirm with frustration.

  Still, despite all their differences, the three girls had always been a tight-knit trio. Even now that they were all in high school and had a lot of new distractions and responsibilities, they spent a lot of their free time together. Until a few days earlier, Lisa could never have imagined that Carole
could ever do anything to jeopardize their three-way friendship.

  Even now that she’d had a few days to get used to the idea, Lisa could hardly believe that Carole hadn’t told her the truth about Prancer. Carole must have realized Lisa was driving herself crazy with worry, and that she could be trusted to keep a confidence. But Carole hadn’t said a word about Prancer’s condition, the real reason for Max’s ban on riding the mare. She’d let her friend wait and worry and wonder until finally someone else had told her.

  For the first couple of days, Lisa had been absolutely livid. But the more time passed, the more her anger shifted to regret and sadness. She wished there was a way they could all go back in time and try again. That way, Carole might decide to tell her the truth about Prancer and this whole stupid fight would never have happened.…

  But Lisa was practical enough not to waste much time on that sort of wishful thinking. She just wished she knew how to proceed—how to find a way to forgive Carole completely and get their friendship back on track. If that’s what Carole wants, that is, she added.

  Lisa sighed and forced herself to return her attention to her mother, who was busy unveiling a large tissue-wrapped item she had pulled out of her second bag. That self-satisfied little smile was still on her face as she glanced at Lisa with an almost mischievous gleam in her brown eyes. “But that’s not all,” she said. “Since you were getting a new outfit, I thought I ought to have one, too. Fair’s fair, right?” She held up another dress. This one was in her own size, pearl gray with shell buttons.

  Lisa blinked. She couldn’t see the price tag on her mother’s new dress, but she suspected it was just as expensive as her own. While shopping had remained one of Mrs. Atwood’s favorite pastimes even after the divorce, she rarely indulged anymore in this kind of impulse buying. What had brought on this sudden extravagance?

  “That’ll look great on you, Mom,” Lisa said.

  “Thanks, sweetie.” Mrs. Atwood held the soft gray dress against herself and preened self-consciously in the hallway mirror, brushing her hair off her forehead and pursing her lips appraisingly at her own reflection.

  As she watched, Lisa decided that maybe she shouldn’t spend so much time analyzing her mother’s behavior. She should just be thankful that she seemed happier than she had in ages and let it go at that.

  After all, Mom deserves a little indulgence once in a while, she thought, studying the lines around her mother’s eyes and mouth, the result of too many grim and lonely days and nights since Mr. Atwood had moved out. She’s been working extra hard lately. As if her regular hours aren’t tough enough, now that jerk has her doing inventory until the middle of the night, too. Lisa shook her head and frowned slightly at the thought. The night before, Lisa’s mother hadn’t gotten home until almost midnight, even though the mall closed at nine-thirty. When she spends her Saturday night like that, it’s no wonder she needs a little cheering up now and then. Right?

  She bit her lip. Besides, it’s not like I don’t have enough problems of my own right now, she thought a little defensively. Not only was there the situation with Carole, compounded by Lisa’s almost constant sense of worry about Prancer’s pregnancy, but most of her other friends seemed to be having troubles of one sort or another. Phil’s best friend, A.J., was acting weird, though nobody quite knew why. The only thing they knew was that the fun-loving, friendly A.J. they’d all known had been replaced by a silent, sullen A.J. who spent most of his time brooding in his room. Stevie and Phil had been so worried that they’d started looking for any solution they could find. The day before, they had arranged for all of A.J.’s friends to gather at his house to confront him and try to find out what was going on with him. An intervention, Stevie had called it. Lisa, however, couldn’t help thinking of it as more of a confrontation, since they didn’t know what was wrong with A.J. or how to help him. All they could hope was that if he realized how many friends he had and how worried about him they were, he would tell them what was wrong. Then they could all try to find a solution together. Lisa and her boyfriend, Alex, had attended the event, but as it turned out, it hadn’t done much good. As soon as he’d realized what was happening, A.J. had escaped to his room, locked the door, turned up the stereo, and that had been the end of that.

  At the same time, Lisa had found out about another disaster, this time involving a newer friend, Callie Forester. Callie’s family had moved to town several months earlier, and the week before, a friend from her old hometown on the West Coast had come for a visit. Upon her return home, the girl had written a gossipy tell-all article for her local newspaper. The article had been picked up by the national press, probably because Callie’s father, a congressman, had recently signed on to be the head of a controversial new welfare committee. He and the rest of the family had been terribly embarrassed by the article, but no one had been hurt more than Callie herself. Not only were all her most personal secrets printed in black and white for the entire nation to read, but it had all come about because one of her oldest friends in the world had betrayed her trust.

  And then there was Alex.…

  Suddenly Lisa noticed that her mother had turned away from the mirror and was looking at her. “Darling,” Mrs. Atwood said, “why don’t you go slip into your new dress? We should make sure it fits.”

  “All right,” Lisa agreed. Playing dress-up was the last thing she felt like doing. She had that history paper to finish and a dozen calculus problems to do. But her mother looked so eager, so happy, and she had so little happiness in her life at the moment.… “I’ll go put it on right now.”

  She hurried back up the stairs and down the hall to her bedroom. Tossing the new dress on her neat, rose-patterned bedspread, she automatically started pulling off her sweater. But her mind had already returned to its previous topic.

  A few years ago Lisa would have laughed at the idea that Alex Lake would turn out to be her soul mate. Alex had always been around, but it hadn’t been until the year before that Lisa had started to notice him as something more than Stevie’s smart, athletic, slightly goofy twin brother. All of a sudden she had realized that he was his own unique, special person, and around that same time something in the way he looked at her had hinted that he, too, had begun to see her differently. In the midst of her heartache and confusion over her parents’ breakup, her father’s remarriage, and the birth of her baby sister, falling in love with Alex had come as a wonderful, refreshing surprise—like stepping out of a stuffy, dark, overheated room into a crisp, breezy autumn morning.

  Her relationship with Alex had only grown stronger and deeper since then. That was why she was so troubled by the secret that lay between them now. Lisa had been doing her best to bury this particular concern deep down in the recesses of her mind, not wanting to deal with it when so many other things seemed more pressing. But she couldn’t ever quite forget that it was there, waiting, daring her to get too complacent. She knew she had to find a way to tell him soon, before too much more time had passed. If she didn’t, she would have to figure out how to live with the knowledge that their relationship, once so completely open and honest and trusting, now held a secret they didn’t share. She wasn’t sure she could tell him, especially when she thought of how he might react when he heard that she had almost decided to spend her senior year living with her father in California instead of returning home to Willow Creek, to him, but she wasn’t sure she had any choice.

  She quickly straightened the hem of the blue dress and surveyed herself critically in the full-length mirror on the back of her door. She had to admit that the dress didn’t look as strange as she had expected it would. In fact, she looked almost … snazzy. Sexy, even. She wondered what Alex would think if he ever saw her in it.

  “Not that I have anyplace to wear it,” she muttered to her own reflection. She and Alex often attended the dances that were held at Willow Creek High School, where she was a senior, and at Fenton Hall, the private school where he was a junior. While students at both schools tended to
dress up a bit more than normal for the dances, a fancy party dress like the one Lisa was wearing would be as out of place as a mule at the Kentucky Derby. “And it’s not exactly the kind of thing I’d wear to the stable or the movie theater at the mall.”

  She grinned as she imagined Max’s expression if she turned up to muck out stalls in that getup. Maybe I should get a matching gold-plated pitchfork, she thought a bit giddily. Or a special dressy hard hat with sequins and bows. She shook her head, amused at her own silly thoughts. Maybe her mother’s rare good mood was rubbing off on her.

  That reminded her that her mother was waiting downstairs to see her in her new finery. Giving herself one last glance in the mirror, she headed for the door.

  “Ta-daaa!” Lisa hurried down the last few steps with her arms spread wide, ready to twirl and pose to her mother’s heart’s content. But she stopped short, her face turning pink, when she realized that her mother wasn’t alone.

  “Look, Lisa!” Mrs. Atwood cried cheerily. “Another nice surprise. Carole’s here!”

  Carole was casting Mrs. Atwood a sidelong glance, looking a bit startled at the woman’s high spirits. Lisa was feeling plenty startled herself. She gulped, wondering what Carole was doing there. Had she come to make up, to apologize? Lisa had begun to wonder whether Carole even remembered they were fighting—she had barely cast Lisa a glance the day before when they were all at A.J.’s.

  “Hi,” Carole said tentatively as Lisa stepped forward. “Um, can we talk?”

  “I don’t know,” Lisa replied warily. “Do we have anything to talk about?”

  Mrs. Atwood was sizing Lisa up, beaming contentedly, completely unaware of the tension between the two girls. “Oh, darling!” she exclaimed. “I was right. That dress is absolutely perfect on you!”

  “Thanks, Mom.” Lisa forced herself to keep her voice normal. She wished her mother would go away so that she and Carole could say what they really wanted to say, whatever that might be, but she didn’t dare suggest it. Mrs. Atwood was so sensitive, and the last thing Lisa wanted to do was ruin her good mood.