English Rider (9 page)

“Ready to go?” Lisa asked, hurrying over. “Where’s Stevie?”

Carole snapped out of her unsettling thoughts. “Not here yet.”

“Yes I am,” Stevie replied, rounding the corner from the stable aisle at that moment. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Hold on,” Lisa said. “Prancer slobbered all over me when I was giving her some carrots. Just let me stop in the tack room and wash my hands.”

Carole and Stevie nodded and followed Lisa into the tack room. Once they all got a look at the scene inside, they gasped.

“What on earth happened in here?” Carole cried, staring in dismay.

The place was a mess. Normally Max and his riders kept the tack room in a sort of chaotic orderliness. Saddles, bridles, and other tack and equipment were everywhere, but like all the riders at Pine Hollow, Carole knew that once you learned the system, you realized that each item, no matter how small, had its own place. You also learned that you had better make sure each item was returned to its proper spot after use. Max didn’t appreciate sloppiness, and he didn’t hesitate to let you know it.

Carole could hardly imagine what Max would say if he saw his tack room right then. Half a dozen saddles had
been pushed off their racks onto the floor. One was even stuffed into the large concrete sink in the corner of the room. Bridles had been flung in a pile against one wall and looked hopelessly tangled together. A bucket full of spare bits had been tipped over and its contents scattered across the floor. And a couple of turnout rugs that had been neatly folded on a shelf the last time Carole saw them were draped carelessly over a trunk, their ends dragging on the dusty floor.

“Wow,” Lisa said, gazing around wide-eyed. “This is—I mean—Wow.”

Carole knew what she meant. In all her years at Pine Hollow, she had never seen such a mess. “What happened here?” she asked. “Could someone have done this by accident? A new rider, maybe, or a guest who didn’t know any better? Someone’s dog?”

Stevie shook her head grimly. “It would have to be some accident,” she said. “It looks like a tornado hit this place. Even a Great Dane couldn’t do this much damage in the time we’ve been gone.”

“That’s right,” Lisa remembered. “We were just here ten minutes ago, and this place was fine.” Suddenly she frowned. “Or was it?” she added. “Actually, we didn’t come in when we were here before.”

Carole shrugged. “Yeah, but Tessa and Phil did,” she said. “And no matter how weird they were acting, they definitely would have noticed if—” She let out a horrified
gasp. “Oh no!” she cried. “You—You don’t think
they
did this, do you?”

“No way,” Lisa said immediately. “They’re not that irresponsible.” She gulped. “Of course, they were kind of distracted. And neither one of them has spent all that much time in our tack room. If it was already a little messy when they got there … and they bumped into a few things while they were moving around …”

“They may have been too busy gazing into each other’s eyes to notice,” Stevie finished for her, her own eyes flashing fire. She ran both hands through her hair, glaring at the messy room. “This stinks,” she said fiercely. “It really stinks.”

“No kidding,” Lisa agreed. She glanced at her watch. “We don’t have time to deal with this right now. But if Max finds it, someone is going to be in big trouble.”

Stevie nodded grimly. “And if he finds out we were here and didn’t do anything about it, even if it wasn’t our fault—”

“We’re history,” Carole finished, drawing one finger across her throat. “We can kiss our horses good-bye for the rest of the summer.”

Stevie bent down and grabbed a handful of the scattered bits. “I can’t believe this,” she muttered, flinging them across the room in the general direction of the overturned bucket. “This is so unfair!”

Carole gulped. She could tell that Stevie was in no
mood for cleaning right then. She was too angry, and that was making her just as careless as Tessa and Phil must have been. In fact, although a few of the bits she had thrown had actually landed in or near the bucket, several others had missed completely and slid under the sink, where they would be even harder to retrieve.

“Wait,” Carole said, putting a hand on Stevie’s arm as she bent to grab another handful of bits. “There’s no sense in all of us having to hang around and deal with this.” She took a deep breath and quickly surveyed the room once more. “This mess really isn’t as bad as it looks,” she said. “I can take care of it myself.”

“Don’t be silly,” Lisa protested quickly. “We’ll all pitch in. Right, Stevie?”

Stevie nodded distractedly and kicked at one of the saddles on the floor.

“No, really,” Carole said. “You need to go home and deal with your mom, right?”

“Well … sort of,” Lisa admitted reluctantly, sneaking another glance at her watch.

“And Stevie, you really don’t want to hang around this tack room right now, do you?” Carole added.

Stevie shrugged. “That’s the understatement of the year,” she muttered.

“But you shouldn’t have to do all this work yourself,” Lisa said.

Carole started pushing her toward the door. Stevie
trailed along behind. “Don’t worry about it,” Carole said. “I’ll be fine. In fact, I’ll probably get done faster without a couple of distracted best friends in the way.” She smiled.

Lisa smiled back. “Well, if you’re sure … Thanks,” she said gratefully. “We’ll make it up to you next time.”

Stevie nodded. “Definitely.” She gave Carole a brief smile before her scowl returned. Then she headed for the door, muttering under her breath.

Carole and Lisa exchanged worried glances. Still, Carole knew that there wasn’t much they could do to help Stevie right then—other than trying to figure out what was going on. She would cool down in her own time. “See you tomorrow,” Carole said.

Lisa took one last look around the tack room. “Good luck,” she told Carole.

“Thanks,” Carole replied. “Same to you.”

When her friends were gone, Carole glanced around the room with a sigh. “First things first,” she muttered, grabbing the saddle out of the sink. She had to at least make things look marginally presentable in case Max or Red happened by. That meant picking up the saddles and bridles and shaking out and folding the turnout rugs. After that, she could start on the more minor stuff, like picking up the bits and cleaning the tack that had been on the floor.

She sighed. Despite what she had told her friends, this was going to be a real pain in the neck.

B
Y THE TIME
the tack room was spic-and-span once again, Carole’s mood was almost as bad as Stevie’s.

“There,” she muttered, hanging the last perfectly clean bridle on its assigned rack and stretching out her tired hands and shoulders. “All done.”
And if I ever find out who was responsible for this
, she thought grimly,
Stevie will have to stand in line behind me to throttle him. Or her. Or them
.

She still had a hard time believing that Tessa or Phil could have had anything to do with this. Normally she would have assumed that Veronica was the culprit. But this time, she had to admit, all the evidence seemed to point to her friends. A toddler or small child couldn’t have done it—the turnout rugs and some of the tack had been placed too high for a child to reach. A canine vandal seemed unlikely, since there were no tooth marks in any of the leather. Who else could be responsible, then, but a completely distracted couple paying more attention to each other than to what they were doing?

Carole sighed. Her head ached, and she didn’t feel like thinking about this anymore. She needed a distraction. Luckily, she knew just where to find one.

“Hey, boy,” she said gently, slipping into Starlight’s stall a moment later. The horse greeted her with a soft nicker, and Carole smiled for the first time in hours.

A few minutes later she reluctantly patted Starlight good-bye and left his stall. It was getting late, and she knew her father would be expecting her. Besides, her brief
visit with her horse had made her feel much better already. Horses had a way of doing that. It had always been that way—for Carole, at least. It made her feel very sorry for all the people who didn’t have daily access to horses.

She headed down the aisle, enjoying the quiet sounds of the stable around her. Everyone else seemed to have left, so all she could hear were the pleasant noises made by contented horses—the chewing of hay, the slurping of water, the occasional snort or nicker …

Suddenly Carole heard a sound that didn’t belong.

Clang! Clang!

She frowned. “What was that?” she muttered.

Clang!

She hurried forward, heading in the direction of the noise. It sounded an awful lot like a hoof hitting metal.

Clang! Clang!

Carole followed the sound to Topside’s stall. When she looked inside, she immediately spotted the problem. A large metal bucket was lying on its side in the back corner of the stall. Topside, a naturally curious horse, was kicking at it experimentally with his front hoof.

“Topside,” Carole called to the gelding, forcing her voice to stay calm and soothing. She opened the stall door and stepped inside. “Here, boy. Come up here.”

The horse turned at the sound of her voice. He nickered eagerly and hurried forward to greet her, nosing her hands and pockets for treats.

Carole found a stray piece of carrot in her pocket and
fed it to him. Then she walked to the back of the stall and picked up the bucket.

“How did this get in here?” she muttered. She glanced at the spot partway up the back wall where Topside’s flat-backed plastic water bucket usually hung. The hook was empty, and the plastic bucket was nowhere in sight.

Carole was starting to figure out what might have happened, and she didn’t like it one bit. She stuck her hand into the metal bucket and found a few drops of water still inside. Glancing at the floor, she saw that the straw bedding was wet where the bucket had been lying.

She took a deep breath, trying to stay calm for the horse’s sake. “It’s okay, Topside,” she said, giving the big gelding a pat on the shoulder. “I’ll go get you some nice fresh water. Don’t worry.”

She let herself out of the stall. As she hurried back to the tack room, she felt her fury growing uncontrollably. She knew that if she hadn’t found the metal bucket when she did, Topside could have stepped in it and injured himself badly—maybe even broken a leg. That was why Max used plastic buckets to water the horses, and why even those were always to be attached firmly to the wall rather than left loose. Leaving a metal bucket on the floor went beyond carelessness: It practically guaranteed trouble. Only the most careless, ignorant, or malicious rider would have done such a thing.

Carole’s hands were shaking as she grabbed a plastic
bucket from the stack in the tack room and filled it at the sink. Who could have done this?

Tessa. Her mind piped up with the obvious answer, though Carole did her best to shove it away. Tessa
must have done it. Tessa rides Topside. Tessa was in his stall just before she left. Tessa is careless. Tessa left the tack room a mess …

Carole took a deep breath, trying to find another explanation, but she couldn’t. As impossible as it was to believe that Tessa could have left the bucket there, it was even more ridiculous to imagine that Max or Red could have done it. And who else could it have been?

L
ISA GLANCED AT
the phone on the kitchen wall for about the thousandth time, wondering if she should call Carole or Stevie. She had been working nonstop ever since arriving home from the stable. At the moment, she was sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by signs, lists, charts, receipts, reference books, and who knew what else. Her mother had just left for the store to buy some more supplies and pick up more information at Mrs. diAngelo’s house, which meant even more work when she returned.

Lisa sighed and tore her gaze away from the phone. Doing all this work was bad enough, but doing it all alone made it even more tedious. It was tempting to call her friends to help, but she just couldn’t do it. Not after what had happened that day. She suspected that Carole was
probably still trying to sort out the mess in the tack room—and if she wasn’t, she was certainly too exhausted from all the extra work to want to start collating phone lists. As for Stevie … Lisa shuddered. Somehow she didn’t think Stevie was in any mood to deal with Mrs. Atwood right now. She was far too distracted by her suspicions about Phil. It might have been different if Lisa could have honestly reassured her. But she had to admit that things just didn’t look good where Phil and Tessa were concerned.

Speaking of Tessa … Lisa checked the clock on the microwave. It would have been nice if Tessa had come home to help. After all, adding a new event to the point-to-point had been her idea. Instead, she seemed to be planning to spend the whole day with Veronica—again. She hadn’t so much as called since the two of them had left with Miles.

Lisa sighed. There wasn’t much she could do about that, so she vowed to stop thinking about it. She didn’t have time, anyway—not if she wanted to finish all the tasks her mother had assigned her before she came home and handed out even more. Lisa grabbed the layout of the program in one hand and a dictionary in the other. “Back to proofreading,” she muttered to herself.