Stables S.O.S.

by Janet Rising

  “She’s found what she’s been looking for,” Bluey told me. “Only she didn’t know it was here so she wasn’t actually looking for it, so we had to help a bit.”

  “It’s been right under her nose all the time,” said Drum, “only she’s been concentrating on all that recent stuff. If she had our senses, she’d have known it was there all along.”

  “We thought you’d find it by yourselves,” Bambi butted in, “but no. Honestly, it’s a wonder you people can do anything without us.”

  “Now quit it with the headlock, will you?” Drum asked.

  “What’s going on, Pia?” Releasing Drummer, I turned around to see Cat, Bean, Katy, and Dec all looking at me quizzically.

  “I’m not sure,” I told them, looking down at Jessica scrabbling away in the mud, her white linen pants caked in dirt. “But it seems the ponies did this deliberately to unearth something the Time Detectives crew missed.”

  “I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it!” Jessica yelled, hugging James (Hey, you can cut that out, I thought).

  “What is it?” asked Katy.

  “It’s priceless, just priceless!” Jessica told us, her eyes shining. “I’ll have to get the team in of course, but by the look of it there’s an original Roman mosaic under here.”

  “And that’s…good?” asked Bean.

  “Good? GOOD? It’s better than good!” Jessica yelled. “If it is what I think it is,” she continued, “Mr. Collins can kiss good-bye to building any houses on this site!”

  Nobody heard what Robert Collins had to say about his priceless Roman mosaic, but it turned out that it wasn’t actually his. National Heritage changed their tune in an instant and suddenly decided that the site belonged to the nation. The end. A little fickle of them, we all thought, still annoyed at their initial attitude when they hadn’t wanted to know, but as they were ruining Robert Collins’s development plans, we decided to forgive them.

  “So now what will happen to Laurel Farm?” Katy had asked, when Jessica told us that filming would continue, and once they had enough for their revised episode, National Heritage would take over and protect the site.

  “They’ll probably want to remove the mosaic and take it somewhere else to clean it up and display it where it can’t be damaged by the elements. They’ll definitely want to see what other Roman remains lie around here, I mean, the Romans didn’t just build mosaics in the middle of nowhere. There was probably a villa here,” Jessica had told us, back to her usual smiley self. She was also back in her pristine clothes—some light blue pants and a tight navy sweater under a cream jacket. An azure blue gemstone swung from a chain around her neck and a large gold ring swamped her hand. Her dark hair was tied back with a scarf. Since her lapse after the ponies’ bouncing about on the site, she was back in control and looking her usual, smooth self.

  “So does that mean…?” I asked, gulping.

  “Yes, Pia, Robert Collins will not be building on that land.” Jessica laughed. “It will take National Heritage a long while to uncover the mosaic properly, and until they’ve examined the whole site, any building work is on hold. Permanently! They’ll probably want the ponies moved, though,” she added. “After all, they’re not exactly careful where they put their hooves, are they?”

  That’s where you’re wrong, I thought. The ponies knew exactly where to put their hooves. She didn’t think finding the mosaic was accidental, did she?

  “Who knows what two-thousand-year-old Roman treasures are yet to be discovered,” Jessica said, smiling in excitement.

  I bet there’s more than a villa, I thought to myself, remembering that I found Epona a mile or so away. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’d been a whole fort or something nearby, too.

  “But that’s the ponies’ field,” said Bean. “Where will they go?”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much,” Jessica assured us. “Robert Collins will receive compensation for the land—and we’ve looked into it. The farmer is perfectly willing to sell the field next door so the ponies can go there. You’ll just have the gate in a different place—and, of course, the ponies won’t have such a great view, but I don’t suppose they’ll mind!”

  “But what’s to stop Robert Collins building on that field?” asked Katy.

  “Oh, that won’t happen!” said Jessica. “Once this field’s had a thorough going-over, National Heritage will probably move on to that one, letting you have the old field back. There’s no telling how big a Roman site might be.”

  “That’s fantastic!” yelled Bean, breaking into a smile.

  “And don’t think we’ve forgotten the icehouse!” Jessica said, beaming at us.

  I had. Totally. Once I’d realized it couldn’t stop Robert Collins building Laurel Heights, I had banished it from my thoughts.

  “The Time Detectives are, even as I speak, taking a look at things over there now and examining it inside. Alex is over there with them,” added Jessica.

  “What could they possibly find over there?” pointed out Dee. “It’s just full of nothing.”

  “Interesting, though,” Jessica said, “it’s an ingenious construction. It will make a fascinating footnote to our show. The public loves that sort of thing. Anything dark and spooky does very well.”

  We all stared at the mess that used to be our ponies’ field. Much more securely fenced now (even though Drummer had assured me they wouldn’t go near it now they’d found what they’d been looking for), the Time Detectives had erected a tent over the precious mosaic to protect it from the weather, and it was surrounded by even more hills of mud and old stones dug up by equine hooves and human machines. The field looked more like a bomb site than a pasture.

  “Let’s go and look at the other field,” suggested Katy, and we all marched from the gate to the other side of the school to see the field in question. It was bigger than the existing field, with four big trees dotted around it, a border of hedging, and some gentle slopes.

  “It’s actually really nice,” said Bean.

  “The ponies will love it,” I said.

  “We’ve really done it!” said James. “We’ve really saved the stables. Stables S.O.S. has actually worked.”

  “I can’t believe it, not after all this time,” murmured Cat.

  “Thanks to the ponies,” I said. I was going to give Drummer the best meal ever tonight, I decided, with carrots and apples and sugar beet. He so deserved it—and so did the others.

  “If only Mrs. Collins wasn’t going into a home,” said Katy.

  “Oh, yes, poor Mrs. Collins,” said Bean.

  “What’s all that noise about?” I said, turning back to the yard. There was a big commotion going on, and we all walked back to find out what it was. One of the Time Detectives, the girl with the pigtails who never wore much, was talking to Jessica. I say talking, but she was panting, her breath coming out in distressed gasps, and she looked as white as a sheet. We all went closer, shamelessly wanting to find out what had stressed her out so much.

  “Start from the beginning, Chelsea,” Jessica told her, holding her arms. They were shaking, I noticed.

  “Horatio found it!” the girl said, shuddering.

  “Found what?” asked Jessica gently.

  Horatio? I thought. There’s a cool name. It could only be the Time Detective with the beard. He was so a Horatio.

  “It was right at the very bottom, under some branches someone had thrown in. Horatio had already gone all the way down with Alex, and they were lifting up the branches and looking underneath. Horatio was swinging his flashlight when it shone right on it…” She gulped again and shuddered, her hand over her mouth as though she couldn’t bear to talk about it.

  “Oh, come on,” James muttered impatiently, “get a grip!”

  “On what?” Jessica asked.

  “It was lying
there—all white and…and…oh, it was horrible, just like in the films, only it was really there,” said Chelsea, her face in her hands.

  “I’m bored now,” I heard James whisper to me. I stifled a giggle. What Chelsea said next made it no laughing matter—and it cured James’s boredom, for sure.

  “We found a body!” Chelsea said dramatically. “There’s a skeleton at the bottom of the icehouse!”

  James, Cat, and Dee were all for saddling up and galloping up to the icehouse for a look-see. Katy, Bean, and I were definitely in the other camp—the one which considered that to be a very bad idea.

  My thoughts immediately flew back to what Jazz, the runaway girl had said when she’d first gone into the icehouse. It has the feel of a grob, she had said. And grob, she’d explained to me, meant tomb. She was dead-on! And, remembering other things that my pony had said, I was going to tackle Drummer as well. He’d kept it from me—he’d known all along. What else did he know about the surrounding area that he wasn’t telling?

  Of course, in the end nobody could go to the icehouse because Jessica called the police and the whole area was marked off with POLICE DO NOT CROSS tape. Which was spooky considering that had been Bean’s idea when the ponies had trashed the dig site.

  The whole stable could talk of nothing else. Who was the mysterious skeleton? How long had they been down there? Was it an accident—someone falling in and breaking something so they couldn’t climb out—or did it indicate something far more sinister?

  “If it’s recent, I think I’m going to do a Tiffany,” said Bean, shuddering.

  “What do you mean?” Cat asked her.

  “FREAK OUT!” yelled Bean, losing it already.

  “Oh, it’s probably years and years old, Bean,” said James.

  “I bet it’s Adam Rowe,” said Dee, her eyes like saucers. “Slowly suffocating in an underground tomb is a pretty bad death.”

  “You don’t know he suffocated,” said Katy.

  “Or do you?” asked James, holding the front of his polo shirt like it had lapels and addressing us in a pompous voice in the manner of a prosecutor. He turned to Dee. “It seems to me, Miss Wiseman, that you know more than you should!”

  “Who’s Adam Rowe?” asked Cat. Oh no, I thought, not again.

  The next day Jessica told us that the police had found another body. There were two bodies in the icehouse.

  “The police are treating it as suspicious,” she said to her enthralled audience—us.

  “You don’t say!” Drummer said across the stable in his best sarcastic voice.

  “What do you know about it?” I yelled back. Jessica looked at me like I was a stirrup short of a saddle.

  “I’m saying nothing,” replied Drummer, innocence personified. I hate it when he does that.

  “Are you going to find a body a day?” asked James, grinning.

  “If only, James,” Jessica replied. “Our ratings would go sky high!”

  News of the police findings trickled back to us over the next few days. The bodies were old, from early last century. They were a man and a woman. And then, the news that gave us all the heebie-jeebies—they had been murdered.

  “How do they know?” Bean asked Jessica, once she had managed to disentangle her from digging around the Roman mosaic. The field was full of people—some from National Heritage—all clambering over and around it, determined to examine every inch. It had become impossible to turn the ponies out, and the new field next door had been hastily commandeered, much to the ponies’ delight—it had much more grass, so they were all out gorging and acting like they were deaf whenever we called them to go riding.

  “There are all sorts of tests they can do, Bean,” Jessica answered her, “and the fact that the male skeleton has a huge hole in the back of his skull is a big clue. The woman, apparently, had her neck broken.”

  “Ugh, how horrible!” Bean said, making a face.

  “The big news,” Jessica continued, “is that they found a valuable gold ring still on the man’s finger, and this is the lead they’ve been looking for. They can identify him from it.”

  “Why didn’t whoever murdered him take the ring?” James asked.

  “It’s a very distinctive ring,” Jessica told us solemnly. “I doubt the murderer would have been able to sell it without being traced.”

  We had to wait several days before we got the next exciting installment, not from Jessica but from Alex Willard. He had been so enthralled by developments that he had stayed on longer than he’d planned and told us the new piece of the puzzle. Did I say exciting? I meant MIND-BLOWING!!!

  “It’s now certain that the skeletons are one of the Rowe family and a local girl called Agatha Turnball who used to work at the big house,” he told us. “Are you all right, Bean?”

  Bean had turned white. She tended to do that whenever the name Rowe was mentioned, and I’m sure I paled, too. James, however, together with Dee, grabbed the news with ghoulish glee.

  “Another member of the Rowe family!” Dee said, her eyes shining. “Just how long did the house belong to the Rowes?”

  “Oh, hundreds of years,” Alex told her.

  “It sounds like they all had exciting lives,” said James, “getting themselves murdered all over the place.”

  “I wonder why that Rowe was murdered,” said Dee.

  “And the girl, don’t forget she was a victim, too,” Katy reminded us all.

  “Everyone had thought they’d run off together, and that was why the son never inherited,” Alex continued.

  “You mean the one in the icehouse is the eldest son?” I asked, realizing the significance of it. He’d disappeared, but he hadn’t gotten as far as everyone had thought. I shuddered. Everyone had believed the eldest son had eloped with his lady love from the village, but in fact, the two of them had gone no farther than a dark and dismal tomb in the depths of the woods.

  “That’s so sad!” cried Katy, her hand flying to her mouth. “And I thought it was so romantic, the two of them running off, not worried about the fortune he was leaving behind, unable to face the scandal of him marrying beneath him, yet even less able to live without each other. But all the time they’ve been in the icehouse, dead.”

  “Who killed them?” asked James.

  “The younger son of course!” yelled Dee.

  “Well, nobody actually knows for sure,” Alex said, “but it seems fairly likely.”

  “After all,” Dee butted in, “he killed the old man, too!”

  “That was my idea!” said James, a bit annoyed.

  “Oh, who cares who thought of it?” said Dee. “I bet that’s what happened, don’t you?”

  “Absolutely!” said Katy. “The youngest son murdered both his brother and Adam, his father. What a nasty piece of work!”

  “I think you’re probably right,” said Alex, “but why do you think the father was called Adam?”

  Poo. Explain that one, I thought.

  “Wasn’t he?” Katy asked innocently.

  “No,” said Alex, frowning. “The father was called Ralph and the youngest brother was Luke.”

  I felt a huge wave of relief. That séance was pure nonsense after all.

  “It was the eldest son,” said Alex, “the one we found in the icehouse with a hole in his skull where someone had hit him with a sharp instrument. His name was Adam.”

  Everyone gasped and fell silent. Except Alex. He had no idea how that small sentence could have such an effect on his audience.

  “Well, if that’s not a ‘bad death,’” said Dee, shakily, breaking the silence at last, “then I don’t know what is.”

  “Oh, look out, here comes know-it-all,” murmured Drummer, shaking his head and making his tie-up ring on the wall rattle. I stopped picking out his shoe and looked up to see who he
was talking about. I didn’t know Drummer called him that, I thought. How rude!

  “I’ve come to say good-bye,” Alex said, giving me a hug. “Take care of yourself, Pony Whisperer Pia.”

  “Oh,” I said, “must you go?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Alex replied, grinning. “I have work to do, you know. This little escapade has been very interesting, but I have equine clients at home that need some therapy. And when you gotta go, you gotta go!”

  I suppose my plan for Alex and my mom would never have worked out really, I thought with a sinking heart. And besides, if it had, we would probably have moved to Alex’s place and, much as I loved the thought of living such an equine fairy tale, deep down I didn’t want to leave Laurel Farm. Drummer certainly didn’t. Now that we’d saved the stables I didn’t want us to go anywhere. What had I been thinking?

  The trouble with you, Pia, I told myself, is that you don’t think things through. Stop and go through the consequences of any plans next time.

  “Oh, and Jessica asked me to give you this,” said Alex, handing me an envelope. He winked as he said it, which I thought was odd. “It’s for all of you, all of you who helped Jessica find the mosaic.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Drummer indignantly. “She didn’t find it, we did—Moth, Bluey, Tiffany, Bambi, and I. Jessica found diddly-squat.”

  “Shhhh!” I told him, thinking how ungrateful the ponies would be about a thank-you card, which was obviously what the envelope contained. They’d rather have a sack of carrots, I thought.

  “What’s Drum saying?” asked Alex.

  “He’s just sorry to see you go,” I lied, stuffing the envelope in my pocket with Epona.

  “Coward!” snorted Drummer.

  “If you ever need any help with any more adventures, you know where to reach me,” Alex said, smiling. “And say good-bye to your mother for me, won’t you. She’s a wonderful woman, and that Mike is a lucky man. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re asked to be a bridesmaid before too long.”