Dream Horse (10 page)

Stevie pulled her covers up and slid down into her bed a little. “Thanks, Lisa,” she said, smiling weakly. “It confuses me a little bit when I don’t feel well. All I really want is to be myself again.”

“That’s all we want, too,” Carole assured her. “And I didn’t mean to upset you. I was just being foolish and thoughtless.”

“You two are never thoughtless,” said Stevie. “You’re my best friends.”

“Yes, we are,” Lisa said.

With that, Stevie’s eyelids closed, and in what seemed like a second, she was breathing deeply and evenly. She was asleep.

Lisa tiptoed over to the window on the far side of Stevie’s room and motioned for Carole to join her.

“I thought she was okay,” Carole whispered.

“Me too,” said Lisa. “At first she seemed like the same old Stevie, and then, all of a sudden, Miss Concussion came back. Weird.”

“Well, maybe it’s not so weird,” said Carole. “Maybe
we are making up all these connections between Stevie’s strange dreams and the things that are happening. Maybe it is just total coincidence.”

“Maybe,” said Lisa. “And maybe when she gets tired so fast because of her concussion, she just seems to have an instant personality transplant.”

“I want the good old Stevie to come back and
stay
back,” Carole said.

“Me too,” Lisa said. “As long as we’re here, we might as well stay and wait until she wakes up. Then we won’t mention any strange coincidences related to anything she might tell us she dreamed about. That should make her feel better, right?”

“Sure, but will it make
us
feel better?” Carole asked.

Lisa smiled at Carole, because that was exactly what was going through her mind. “Probably not,” Lisa conceded. “The only thing that will really make us feel better is when Stevie stops behaving like—”

“Phil!”

The cry from Stevie startled Carole and Lisa. They turned to look at Stevie, who was still asleep.

Lisa giggled. “Oh, so she calls out his name in her sleep!”

Carole laughed, too. “I guess when you’ve got a really nice boyfriend like Phil—”

“Look out!” Stevie cried. There was a terrible look of fear on her face, even though her eyes were closed.

“Oh no, she’s having a nightmare,” Lisa said.

“We should wake her up,” Carole said. She started to walk over to Stevie’s bed.

“No,” Lisa said, tugging on Carole’s sleeve. “I don’t think you’re supposed to do that. See, if someone’s having a nightmare, you’ve got to let them finish it. Nightmares usually come out all right, but if you cut into the middle of it, the dreamer never knows what the real end is. I read that in a magazine somewhere.”

“Pull your feet up!” Stevie cried out. She waved her hands frantically in front of herself, almost as if she were blind and trying to reach out in the blank darkness.

“Are you sure about this?” Carole asked Lisa.

“Well, I’m sure I read it in a magazine,” Lisa said. “But I can’t guarantee you the person who wrote the article had any idea what they were writing about.”

“The trees!” Stevie yelled. With that, she sat bolt upright and her eyes flew open.

“Stevie, are you okay?” Lisa asked.

“What is it, Stevie?” said Carole.

Stevie scratched her head. There was a puzzled look on her face, far from the panicked look she’d had during
her dream. “I know this sounds strange,” she said, “but Phil is in a tree.”

Lisa and Carole exchanged looks. The last thing they wanted to do was to upset Stevie any more than she had been. That was what they’d promised one another.

Lisa smiled warmly at Stevie. “I’m sure he is,” she said.

“I bet it’s a nice tree, too,” said Carole.

“Are you guys nuts?” Stevie asked.

Carole and Lisa were wondering the same thing.

P
HIL COULD BARELY
speak. He and Uncle Michael had been up in the glider for almost an hour, and Phil still couldn’t believe it was real. He’d been in many airplanes, but the feeling of a glider was entirely different. It was more as if they were floating than flying. An airplane, Phil realized, vibrated from the engines. The glider rode gently on the wind. Phil could hear the wind everywhere, whistling past the ship and
whish
ing around the wings. It was a natural sound, unlike the clatter and roar of the huge engines airplanes used to stay aloft.

The glider seemed to rise then, and Phil knew Uncle Michael had found another thermal to give them lift.
They banked, turning gently to the right, circling within the thermal. Phil looked down. Four thousand feet below them lay the foothills of Virginia’s mountains and the rolling countryside of Willow Creek.

Phil squinted to see if he could get his bearings. He and Uncle Michael had flown east, and he wondered if he could recognize any landmarks. Something in a field below moved. Phil smiled. That wasn’t a field, that was a paddock. And that wasn’t just something. That was a horse. He studied the land carefully. Could it be?

“Look! There it is!”

“What?” Uncle Michael asked.

“It’s Pine Hollow! That’s where Stevie rides her horse! She lives nearby, too. Let me see, it’s …”

Phil tried to envision the walk from Pine Hollow to Stevie’s house. There was the main road, and then Stevie’s street curving off to one side, and then there were three houses on the left and two, three, four on the right, and then—

“It’s Stevie’s! That one with the swimming pool, see it?”

“And the three bikes on the front lawn?” Uncle Michael asked.

“There would be four there if Stevie weren’t sick now,” Phil said.

Uncle Michael laughed. “I used to drop my bike on
the lawn, too,” he said. “Now, let’s go see how things are doing back at the mountains,” he said.

With that, Uncle Michael leveled the craft and began flying back to the west, toward the mountains and Rock Ridge.

“H
UBERT
!” V
ERONICA WHINED
into the microphone of her headset. “I told you not to let them out of our sight!”

“I thought you wanted to take pictures of clouds and mountains,” said the beleaguered pilot, who sat right in front of her. “Clouds are up there and the mountains are—”

“I already took a picture of the dumb mountain,” said Veronica. She growled under her breath, making little effort to hide her irritation from Hubert. Hoping Hubert would do something for her to please her father was one thing. Being nice to him while he did it was another. Veronica looked through her camera’s viewfinder. To the west, she saw big white fluffy clouds piled on big white fluffy clouds, topped by a deep blue sky. She snapped six pictures in quick succession.

There, that ought to get her to Rome. Now, where was Phil Marsten?

At Veronica’s insistence, Hubert brought the airplane to a lower altitude. Veronica didn’t see how something
without an engine could go very high. And they couldn’t have gone far. Veronica thought that Phil and his uncle Michael were totally nuts to fly in that little plane thing without any power, or else they were very brave. It probably took a lot of skill to fly a plane without an engine. Probably it took a lot more skill than dumb Hubert would ever have.

Skill. That was it. Pictures of clouds didn’t really meet the contest requirement of pictures that showed somebody doing something that required skill. But a picture of someone flying a glider—now that showed skill. Probably.

If she could take a picture of Phil’s uncle Michael, then Phil would be really impressed when she won the contest. It would also be an excellent way for Veronica to point out to Phil that she had a good deal more to offer than Stevie Lake.

Veronica grinned proudly. She loved it when things worked out perfectly for her. And this was going to be perfect. If only Hubert would find them!

“Why don’t you call someplace on the radio to find out where they’ve gone,” she said.

“Unfortunately, that will only work if they’ve called the tower to say where they are,” said Hubert.

“So?”

“Yes, Miss,” said Hubert. He clicked on the radio obediently. The radio operator in the tower said he had no idea what the flight plan was for the glider.

Veronica was about to suggest that Hubert call another tower when she was spared the trouble. For there, coming from the east, was Uncle Michael’s glider!

“There they are!” Veronica squealed. “Don’t lose sight of them.”

“Yes, Miss,” said Hubert.

“N
OW
,
THE RIDE
here may be a little rougher than it was out over the valley,” said Uncle Michael. “That’s because we’re near the mountains. We’ll get updrafts off the ridges, but we may get rather sudden downdrafts, in which case, we’ll need plenty of airspeed to get through them. So we won’t get too close to the mountains. However, the care we have to take is worth it because of the views we’ll have along the tops of the ridges. This area is spectacular from any angle, but this is my favorite way to see it.”

Phil looked to his left through the clear plastic canopy. The view took his breath away. The ridges of the mountaintops rushed past beneath the glider. Their path was so smooth and effortless that it seemed to Phil it
must be the mountains themselves that were moving. He smiled at the thought, knowing, of course, that that was ridiculous.

Suddenly there was a roar. The glider bounced downward and jogged to the left toward the mountain ridge, then leveled out.

Unconsciously, Phil grasped the arms of his seat. “What was that?” he asked.

“That was an airplane,” said Uncle Michael, gripping the stick tightly. “Some dumb hotdogging pilot who isn’t paying any attention to what he’s doing—or ought to be doing, anyway. He has no right to pass us on our right when we’re so near the mountains!”

Phil saw the tail of the small plane that had whooshed past them. The glider shuddered in the wake of the other craft.

“Jerks!” Phil called out.

“That won’t do any good,” said Uncle Michael. “But this will.” He reached for the radio to warn off the airplane. Phil kept his eye on it nervously.

“He’s turning, Uncle Michael,” he said.

“Good. They want to get out of here before I report them to the tower.”

“No, I mean they’re turning around. The plane is coming back this way!”

“N
OW THIS TIME
, get close enough so I can get a decent picture of the people in the glider!” snapped Veronica.

“But Miss—”

“I’m not going to win this contest with a picture that doesn’t show anything.” She could imagine Phil’s handsome face in her photograph already.

Veronica held the camera up to the window of the small plane and prepared for her winning shot. She could see the glider approaching them rapidly. It was level and soaring smoothly near the mountain ridge. Phil’s uncle was in the front seat; Phil was in the back. If she tried to take a picture as they passed them going in the opposite direction, she’d only have a split second. It wouldn’t work at all. They would just have to make a big circle and come back and fly parallel to the glider, as they had when they’d passed it the first time. In a few seconds, the planes whizzed past one another too fast for Veronica to take any picture—much less a prizewinning one.

“Turn around and then come along beside them,” Veronica instructed Hubert. “Only this time, get closer than before.”

“I can’t do that, Miss.”

There was something serious in his voice. Veronica could tell Hubert didn’t like her orders. The last
thing she needed was to have him start disobeying her.

“Hubert,” she said sternly, “didn’t Daddy tell you to take me where I asked you to?”

“I want to, but I have to be concerned for your safety,” he said meekly.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, all I’m asking you to do is to reverse direction and catch up to that glider thing again. Planes make turns all the time, Hubert, or are you too new a pilot to know that?”

Hubert opened his mouth to protest, but nothing came out. He began to turn.

Veronica had known he would. She just had to remind him that he had to do what Daddy asked and that he was an inexperienced pilot—perhaps a bit too inexperienced to be working for someone as important as Daddy. Some people just needed to be reminded of things before they would do what they were supposed to do. Hubert would obey her now. She sighed with relief and returned her attention to her camera.