by Janet Rising
“At last!” breathed Amber, nudging Sorrel toward the front. Sorrel was only too willing to oblige, considering the front to be her rightful place. A bit like taking the championship at a show or leading a lap of honor, I thought.
We’d only gone a couple of hundred yards when I could hear Cherokee coming up behind us. Today’s complaint seemed to concern his breathing.
“I think I must have RAO—you know, equine asthma,” I heard him say to no one in particular. “That’s all I need!”
“That’s all WE need!” grumbled Sprout.
“I’m definitely wheezy today. Hummmph. Cheeeee. Oh dear. I don’t suppose the management will notice. I’ll never get the proper treatment. No haylage, no dust-free bedding. I’ll be broken-winded before you know it.”
“Hey, Crazy McSick-in-the-head, take a day off, will you?” Harry shouted from the back of the ride.
“Not all of us are fortunate to enjoy good health,” Cherokee shouted back.
Blissfully unaware of her mount’s complaints, Bean steered him over to ride beside me. Looking across, she pulled a face.
“What?” I said. Maybe I had said something to upset Grace. My mind raced but I couldn’t remember anything. Oh pooh.
“Something…has…happened,” whispered Bean, dramatically.
“What?” I asked again, turning in the saddle.
“Don’t look at me!” she hissed. “Just look straight ahead as though we’re not talking.”
“Oh, OK,” I replied, jerking my head round again and staring in front of me in what I hoped was a natural fashion, and doubting it. What was going on? Had Bean suddenly decided she didn’t want anyone to look at her? Had she grown a beard or something? I so wanted to glance across to check.
“Something very serious has occurred,” whispered Bean.
I looked around at the trees—anywhere but toward her. It could be a beard. I mean, that would be pretty serious, wouldn’t it? A very long silence followed. I wondered whether a Bean beard would be blond or some other color. One of the teachers at school had a ginger beard, even though his hair was sort of dirty grayish blond. Mind you, he was a guy. Of course.
“Well?” I said, looking at the sky.
“What?” replied Bean.
Oh no, I thought. Bean always did this. She lost track of what she was talking about and left you on hanging. I dangled for another minute before she deemed it safe to tell me the serious thing that had happened.
“Grace has been the victim of horse rustling,” Bean whispered in total seriousness and I struggled to understand what she was saying.
“Major has disappeared,” Bean declared. “Grace’s pony figurine has been stolen!”
Chapter 15
You know what this means, don’t you?” I said to Bean. We’d been riding for over half an hour and this was the first opportunity we’d had to ride together again following a canter, one near-fall from Amber, an emergency concerning Harry’s girth which Ellie hadn’t tightened and which had been uncharacteristically missed by Sharon (plenty of criticism from Annabelle at that!), and one dropped whip, courtesy of Zoe.
“Well yes, I think I do, but I don’t know what you’re going to say, so I could be thinking it means one thing and you could be thinking it means something else, but until you say what you’re thinking we won’t know whether we’re thinking the same thing,” said Bean without drawing breath.
My head hurt. She’d lost me after about six words. She was back on Planet Bean—a place where no one could reach her.
“Oooo-kaaaay,” I said slowly. “How about if I tell you what I think it means?” One of us had to get this ball rolling and if left to Bean we might never get on with it. I just prayed we had both reached the same conclusion.
“I think that the disappearances are all connected,” I began. Bean nodded furiously in agreement, thank goodness. “And that whoever has stolen Major has also pocketed your gloves.”
More nodding. “Exactly!” Bean exclaimed. “But you’re missing one vital thing.”
“I am?” I asked, a bit miffed that Bean might have thought of something I’d missed.
“Amber’s silver charm!”
“You mean…?”
“Yup!” said Bean triumphantly. “Amber’s charm must have been stolen, too!”
“That’s terrible!” I said. I was finding it difficult to look as though we were just having a chat about our ponies or body brushes or gymkhanas. I mean, this was getting a bit out of hand. It was serious!
“But who did it?” Bean hissed.
“It’s obvious who didn’t do it!” I replied.
“It is?”
“Well, it isn’t you, because you had your gloves stolen.”
“Right.”
“And it can’t be Grace or Amber, because they’re victims, too.”
“Yes, I see that,” said Bean, nodding again.
“So it can only be either Zoe or Ellie,” I said, feeling like Nancy Drew.
“Or you,” added Bean.
“Oh, thanks, I thought my innocence was a given!” I cried, giving her the evil eye.
“I know it wasn’t you, obviously, but you have to agree that if we apply your theory logically then you come under suspicion, too,” Bean explained.
“I suppose so,” I agreed, “but it wasn’t me.”
“No, I know. That’s why I’m telling you and we’re discussing it. But then, it could be one of the other victims. I mean, they might be trying to avert suspicion. Maybe, to cover their tracks, they just said they lost something, but really they’ve got their lost stuff stashed away in a safe place, together with the things they really did steal.”
I thought about that. It made sense. I was impressed by Bean’s reasoning. “In that case,” I said, raising my eyebrows, “you’re a suspect, too!”
“Oh, so I am! That sucks!”
“No one,” I said dramatically, “is above suspicion!”
“You’ve seen too many crime dramas,” said my friend.
“What are you two whispering about?” asked Zoe.
We both jumped about a mile in the air. I ask you, could we have looked any more guilty?
“Who’s going to win the tidiest-stable competition,” I lied, hoping I wasn’t going red.
Wrong thing to say. Zoe went off about how she was sure she was in the running, and that Amber didn’t stand a chance and neither did Grace or Ellie because of their inexperience—had we seen the bed in Harry’s stable, it was a disgrace—and she wasn’t one to brag but Dot’s stable was far and away cleaner than everyone else’s stables—even mine and Bean’s, even though mine was quite good. I gave her a forced smile in sarcastic gratitude, and she rode off, having said her piece.
“She’s such a bore when it comes to anything to do with competitions,” sighed Bean, who couldn’t be bothered with it all. “She’s a trainee Annabelle.”
“So who do you think it is, then?” I whispered, desperate to get back to solving the crime wave.
“Who do I think is what?” asked Bean.
It only took a minor distraction to make Bean lose the thread of a conversation. I couldn’t remind her about what we’d been talking about just then because we all had an awesome canter along some sandy tracks by a stream and then, when we pulled up at the end, Annabelle led the way down the bank and all the ponies enjoyed a paddle, putting their heads down to drink from the clear water. All except for Cherokee, that is, who stood on the bank snorting, despite Bean’s efforts to make him go in.
“You’ll never do it,” said Sharon, shaking her head. “No one ever has yet. He’s too much of a wuss.”
“This is great fun, I LOVE water!” yelled Harry, pawing at the stream and splashing everyone.
“Stop that!” said Sorrel. “My mane goes f
rizzy when it’s wet!”
“Don’t let Dot-2-Dot stand still, Zoe, she likes to roll in water,” Annabelle warned. “Keep her moving and if she paws at the ground, ride her out immediately!”
“Oh, I hope she goes down, I’ll laugh my socks off!” Amber cried, urging Sorrel in front of the Appaloosa, preventing Zoe from moving anywhere.
“Get out of the way, Amber!” shouted Zoe.
“No way, I want to see her drop you in the water!” laughed her sister.
“Amber, MOVE!” screamed Annabelle. But it was too late. Dot pawed at the water and sank to her knees, threatening to roll onto her side. Flapping her feet out of her stirrups in a panic, Zoe let out a piercing shriek, causing a mass evacuation of birds from the surrounding bushes. Shouting at Zoe to kick Dot on, Annabelle steered Tailor over toward her and gave Dot’s spotty backside a loud thwack with her whip. Leaping up again, Dot veered away from Tailor and Zoe slid off, hitting the water with a splash and a gasp.
Amber screamed with laughter and everyone else couldn’t help giggling. It was hysterical seeing Zoe sitting in the water spluttering and gasping with the shock of the cold water, Dot looking down at her as though she was crazy.
“That’s not fair—I wanted to lie in the water!” Dot moaned. “How come it’s all right for her to sit in it, but not me?”
“Because, Empty, dear, you’ll break your saddle tree, you dummy!” explained Harry.
“I don’t know why you’d want to sit in that water,” Cherokee called from the bank. “It’s cold and wet and you could catch your death. You never know what’s crawled in and died in it. And even fish poop you know. And ducks. You wouldn’t catch me going anywhere near it! Water’s teeming with germs.”
“D’you know what, Cherokee?” said Harry. “One day you’re going to wake up and realize that you were so busy avoiding things all through your life that nothing actually happened during it and you missed it all. What a waste that will be!”
“Dung heaps!” retorted Cherokee.
“Double dung heaps to you!” replied Harry, yawning.
“I think we’ll have our picnic here,” announced Annabelle, unaware of the raging equine argument. “It will give Zoe a chance to dry out.”
Riding out of the stream we all dismounted, ran up our stirrups and loosened the girths, tying the ponies by their harnesses to string Sharon wrapped round the trees. Sharon and Annabelle distributed the picnic from their saddlebags and backpacks: sausage rolls; chicken, cheese and pickle and egg salad sandwiches; chips; cereal bars; apples and bananas; and a slice of chocolate cream pie in plastic cartons for everyone. Of course, the apples found their way into the ponies’ mouths, but we fell upon the rest and were soon munching away.
“Ew, what’s that awful smell?” said Ellie, wrinkling up her nose and cautiously sniffing her sandwich.
“I can smell something, too,” I said, looking at the ground in case we’d sat in fox poop.
“Oh, it’s you, Zoe, you reek!” shrieked Amber, waving her hand in front of her face.
Zoe sniffed her T-shirt. “Oh, it is me,” she wailed. “It’s this stinky river water!”
Everyone moved away from smelly Zoe, which gave Bean and me the perfect excuse to sit ever-so-slightly apart from the others so we could continue our crime wave discussion.
“Is Grace going to tell Annabelle about Major?” I asked.
“I think she’ll have to,” whispered Bean. “I mean, it’s just not right, someone stealing her pony. It’s just mean.”
“Is she sure she hasn’t just lost him?” I asked. I don’t know why—I mean, there was Bean’s gloves and Amber’s necklace to take into account so it was fairly obvious someone was helping themselves. But the thought of one of us stealing stuff was just too horrible to consider. I felt for Epona in my pocket again. What if someone took her? What would I do then? Shuddering, I knew I couldn’t let her out of my sight, not for a second.
I looked around at my fellow vacationers. Who could possibly have stolen the items? Who hadn’t had anything stolen?
Ellie? I couldn’t take to Ellie. She just didn’t do anything to make you like her, but that was no real basis for suspicion. You couldn’t accuse someone just because you didn’t like them much.
Zoe? She might have taken Amber’s silver charm out of spite—there was certainly no love lost between the two sisters. But why would she take Bean’s gloves and Grace’s pony figurine as well?
Amber? Losing Silver could be a ploy to throw everyone off the scent; Amber was certainly clever enough to think of that, but I somehow couldn’t picture Amber with Major—she’d been really nice to Grace. I didn’t want it to be Amber, I liked her. I felt a pang of guilt. I wanted it to be Ellie because I didn’t like her. That was hardly fair.
It wasn’t Bean. It just wasn’t.
Grace? No, not Grace, she was too upset about Major for her to be faking it. But then, I thought, why couldn’t it be Grace? Her mother bullied her and there was no doubt she had hang-ups. Maybe it was her way of coping with it all, collecting things other people held valuable, or getting someone else into trouble by accusations.
I shuddered again.
“What’s the matter, Pia?” I looked up to see Annabelle looking thoughtfully at me.
“Oh, nothing!” I replied, a bit too heartily. Keep this up, I thought to myself, and when Grace does the big reveal, I’ll be the number one suspect. How great would that be? Luckily, Annabelle’s attention was distracted by something else. Unluckily, it was Grace, who couldn’t hold it any longer, and had started to cry.
Putting her arm around her, Annabelle steered Grace over to the shade of an oak tree, and we all pretended not to watch them having a chat. Poor Grace gulped a lot, dabbing at her eyes with a paper napkin and sucking her hair, and we could see Annabelle stroking the hair off her face and nodding.
“What’s going on?” Sharon asked us. “Have you girls been horrible to her?”
We all shook our heads and I hoped I didn’t look guilty. If I did, it was only because I knew why Grace was crying, not because I was the cause of it.
Eventually, they came back. Grace’s eyes were red and sore and Annabelle held her arm protectively round her shoulders.
“I need to talk to you all,” Annabelle said in a serious tone.
I glanced at everyone. Did Ellie look shifty? Was that anxiety I could detect on Zoe’s face? Did Amber look less confident than usual?
“Grace has mislaid her pony figurine,” Annabelle said carefully. “She last saw it in the yard this morning, and it may have fallen from her grooming kit. If anyone has seen it, or has it with them, perhaps you would let us know now because, as you can see, it means a lot to Grace and she is very upset at having lost it.”
Everyone looked at each other. No one spoke. No one put their hand in their pocket and pulled out Major with an apologetic smile. I exchanged confused glances with Bean. Major had been stolen, not lost, so why was Annabelle suggesting he’d been mislaid? And then, suddenly, I clicked. Making accusations about stealing probably wasn’t the best thing to do. Better to give whoever had stolen Major the opportunity to return him without any unpleasantness. A bit like the tried-and-tested formula ‘I’m going to close my eyes and count to ten’, to give whoever took the object the chance to return it, and we’ll say no more about it—only Annabelle didn’t know about Bean’s missing gloves, and she still thought Amber had lost her necklace out riding.
After an awkward few, very silent, seconds, Annabelle spoke again. “We’ll all help you to have a really good look for your figurine when we get back to the yard, Grace. I’m sure it will turn up there. There are plenty of places for it to hide!”
Another opportunity for whoever took Major to ‘find’ him, I thought. Clever Annabelle.
We bridled the ponies and mounted in sober mo
od.
Bean asked Zoe whether she’d dried out. Zoe put her hand on her backside. “Not quite, I’m still damp, thanks to my loving sister!” she glowered at Amber, who stuck her tongue out at her as she gathered up Sorrel’s reins.
“And you still reek!” Amber said.
Bean steered Cherokee over to Sprout’s side. “Do you think Major will turn up?” she whispered to me.
“Don’t know, he might,” I replied, checking my girth.
“I bet he doesn’t,” Bean said, frowning. “Who knows what will go missing next?”
I turned Sprout so that no one could see me transfer Epona from my vest pocket to the zipped pocket in my jodhpurs, where I could feel her against my hip bone. She dug in a bit and I would probably get a bruise, but I wanted her close, where I could feel her. No one was going to steal Epona away from me, I decided. I’d die if I lost her now.
Chapter 16
I’ve seen it! I know who’s winning what!” Amber declared.
“You are so full of It,” her sister replied, looking bored. We were in the chill-out room, waiting for the ponies to digest their feed. It was almost time for our lesson.
“What are you two talking about?” asked Bean, flicking through one of the many pony books lying around.
“The clipboard. Annabelle’s bible. I’ve seen it and you, Zoe, are not going to win anything. Not a thing. Ha! All that effort for nothing!”
“You’re lying—that clipboard is practically welded to Annabelle’s arm and when it’s not, it’s under lock and key. You’ve seen diddly-squat,” Zoe sneered, looking down her nose at her sister. “And you just don’t get it, do you? I don’t groom and clean tack so I can win things, I do it because I like to see Dot-2-Dot looking her best and wearing nice clean tack. I don’t want to be a scruff-bag, like you.”
“Who is winning?” asked Grace.
“Oooh, can’t say,” replied Amber, forming her mouth into an O shape and looking at Grace all wide-eyed. “Unless you pay me—I know you’ve got some Mounds bars in your bedside table, Grace. I might be able to let you know more if one of those was to come my way.”
