Best Friends (10 page)

Outside they could hear the wind beginning to pick up, and sometimes it even seemed to moan. The stable’s windows were frosted from the cold so that even the ones they knew were fairly clean (because they’d cleaned them only a few weeks earlier) were impossible to see through. Inside they could feel the cold. There was no doubt that the temperature was plunging. When they’d come in from their ride, they’d removed their jackets and were comfortable with sweaters over their shirts. By nine o’clock, their jackets were back on.

“I’ve never eaten with gloves on before,” Lisa observed.

“Adversity builds character,” Stevie said.

“That sounds like something you heard from a parent,” Carole told her.

“Yep,” Stevie said. “Every time I complain to my mother
about anything, that’s what she says. By now I’ve got a lot of character, and I got almost all of it from my brothers!”

“I’ll take another sandwich,” said Lisa. She alternated eating with her right and left hands so that the empty one could hold the mug of hot cocoa. The girls were all grateful for the little microwave oven Mrs. Reg kept in her office.

By nine-thirty they were finished eating. All the horses had been checked and double-checked, all the doors were closed. The girls had used the dishes that Mrs. Reg kept near the microwave, and Carole volunteered to take their plates and glasses up to the house so that they could be washed, while Stevie and Lisa set up their sleeping bags in the hayloft.

Neither plan worked.

Carole zipped up her jacket, donned her woolly winter hat, circled her neck with her scarf, pulled on her gloves, and then picked up the plates for the short walk up the hill to the Regnery house. She opened the door. What greeted her was not the familiar stone path, nor even the stone path with a few inches of snow. The ground was under two feet of snow!

It wasn’t that two feet had fallen already, but the snow had drifted up so high against the barn door that there was no way she could get out, and she could see that the drifts between the barn and the house were even deeper in some places. She looked at the plates in her hands. It didn’t seem
worth the trouble to fight the forces of nature just to avoid washing them in the bathroom sink.

She closed the door and retreated to the locker room, where she removed a few layers of clothing. It didn’t take long to rinse the plates. She could get them up to the house in the morning; for now they were clean enough. She went to help her friends set up their beds for the night.

Carole ascended the ladder to the loft. “You know,” she said, feeling a change in the air as she did, “if hot air rises, it’s not doing much in here.”

Although Pine Hollow’s stable was pretty well built and snug, it wasn’t built like a house. The walls were only one board thick, and above the loft where there were no horses to worry about, nobody had paid too much attention to filling in the chinks between the boards. Carole swore she could feel a gust of wind. She wished she’d put her gloves back on before she came up.

“It is kind of chilly,” Lisa conceded, still admiring the work she’d done of laying out their sleeping bags and blankets.

“I can see the headlines now,” Stevie said, pausing for dramatic effect. “ ‘Horse-loving Girls Found Frozen at Stable.’ ”

“I’m glad you got the ‘horse-loving’ part in,” said Carole.

“I did that part for you,” Stevie teased.

“Okay, so it’s too cold for us to sleep here,” said Lisa. “What do we do?”

“We sleep in Max’s office,” Carole said. “He’s got a propane heater there, and as long as the propane lasts, we should be okay. In fact, I know where there’s a backup canister, so we’re definitely okay.”

That seemed like a great idea until they lay down. With no basement or insulation under it, the floor was cold.

“Straw!” said Carole. “If it keeps the horses’ feet warm, it’ll warm us.”

They started to wonder how they were going to explain the mess in Max’s office but decided he’d understand, especially if Stevie did one of her super-special explanations.

The straw did help a bit, and it even made the floor softer for sleeping. The girls set the heater going, safely away from the straw, turned out the lights, and slid into their sleeping bags.

Carole left most of her outer clothes on but thanked heaven for her father’s Marine Corps-issue down sleeping bag as she snuggled into it.

What an exhausting day and evening it had been. First there was all the planning, packing, and lugging, and then there was the trail ride and all the extra stable work.

“I can’t believe how much we got done today,” she said to her friends. But nobody answered: They were both sound asleep.

And Carole never got to tell them her news.

“O
H
,
STOP IT
!” Stevie said. Her brothers were all lined up outside her bedroom door, taking turns banging on it and then blowing in bone-chilling air. What a curse to have brothers like that!

They kept doing it, and Stevie got colder and colder. “I’m telling Mom!” she said.

“What?”

“Mom! I’m telling her. Dad, too!”

“Stevie, what’s up?”

Stevie opened her eyes. She was in a sleeping bag on a layer of straw in Max’s office. Her brothers were nowhere near. Carole and Lisa were sitting up on either side of her.

“What’s going on?” Lisa asked.

“I’m freezing!” said Carole.

“Something’s wrong,” said Stevie, abandoning all thoughts of her brothers.

She stood up and flipped the light switch. Nothing happened.

“Electricity’s out,” she said, glancing to where she knew there was a digital clock. She was greeted by darkness.

The three girls stood up, looking at one another in the eerie light generated by the space heater.

“We’d better see what’s going on,” Lisa said. “If it’s this cold in here, with the heater, something more than electricity has gone wrong.”

She held her watch up to the glow of the heater and announced that it was 3:17.

Carole opened the door. As soon as she did, she regretted it and shut it again right away. The stable was much colder than the office was. The thought of cold horses made her open the door again, once she and her friends had put back on any clothes they’d taken off before they’d gone to sleep. What greeted them was bitter cold and fierce winds.

“The big doors are open!” Stevie said, looking around the corner.

Indeed, the wind had been so strong that it had managed
to stress the latch to the breaking point. Both large doors had flapped wide open and were allowing wind and snow into the stable.

“We’ve got to save the horses!” Carole declared. Lisa and Stevie knew she was right. These domestic animals were no match for nature’s force that night.

The girls pulled their hats down on their heads and their scarves up on their faces. There was a lot of work to be done. The first job was to close the door and bar it shut.

“The doors won’t budge!” Lisa said.

“Of course not,” Stevie observed. “They’re blocked by the snow.”

It was true. The open doors had allowed the full force of the storm to enter the barn, and now they were completely blocked by more than a foot of snow. In fact, snow had filled the entire aisle of the stable. There was nowhere near enough warmth in Pine Hollow to melt any of it. An odd thing was that all the commotion of the wind and snow had set off the stable’s emergency sensor lights, so the girls could see the mess clearly.

“What do we do?” Stevie asked.

“We shovel it,” Lisa said logically.

“With what?”

“Manure shovels,” Lisa said. She brought two of them
out of the tack room, handed one to Stevie, and kept the other for herself. She turned to Carole. “You look after the horses while we shovel. Make sure they’re all right.”

Carole returned to Mrs. Reg’s office, where she knew she’d find a large flashlight, and began checking on the horses one by one, amused by Lisa’s take-charge mood. She was glad for it, in fact. While there was no doubt who the horse expert was among them, Lisa’s logic came in handy many times, and this was one of them.

There was a lot of work to do with the horses. Barq had worked his blanket loose and was shivering in the corner of his stall. Penny stretched her head out over the top of her stall, looking for comfort from Nickel. Carole put Penny in with him. The two ponies were best friends, and being together would give them a chance of sharing some warmth the way horses and ponies naturally did in the wild.

She did the same thing with Belle and Starlight, because they often spent time together and even now seemed happy to be together.

Danny was a problem. The high-strung gelding wasn’t at all used to adversity—as if being owned by Veronica weren’t enough adversity on its own, Carole thought. He was darting around in his stall, moving back and forth restlessly.

Carole reached in to soothe him. He pulled his head back and snorted.

“There, there, boy,” she said, using her best horse-calming voice. He stomped on the floor and backed away, his ears flat against his head and the whites of his eyes visible. He was one frightened horse. “It’s okay,” she said. “Don’t worry. At this rate, you won’t be seeing Veronica for days. Is that good news or what?”

He raised his front legs in a little rear. That frightened Carole. It wasn’t that she was afraid Danny would try to hurt her. She knew that wasn’t what was on his mind. He was just panicking, and he was likely to strike out any way he could, rearing, bucking, and kicking. A horse who had lost reason could do real harm to himself, get caught in or scraped by something, even break a stall wall. She stepped back and thought. Whatever was going on in the horse’s head, she wasn’t helping. He’d been agitated before she began trying to help him. He was practically out of control now.

“Don’t worry. I’m leaving,” she said, backing up. Her mere movement away from him seemed to calm him a little bit. She still didn’t like the way he looked or was behaving, but he was better than he had been. Maybe he’d calm down more once she and her friends got the snow out and the door closed. Maybe.

Carole went on to the other stalls, securing a blanket here, replenishing straw there. Then she looked at the metal water bucket in Peso’s stall. It was frozen. There was a good inch of ice all around it.

If Peso’s bucket was frozen, everybody else’s must be, too. She’d never seen anything like that. She went and checked the thermometer that Max kept by the door of the stable. It was twelve degrees Fahrenheit outside. It couldn’t be much more than that inside. No wonder the water was frozen.

Carole hurried to the faucet they used to fill buckets and turned the knob. Miraculously the water in the pipes hadn’t frozen. She took an empty bucket and filled it. The only way to be sure the horses got the water they’d need would be to take buckets to them one at a time and let them have a drink. There was no guarantee that the barn would warm up enough to melt the ice before the next afternoon, and horses needed more water than that.

Thirty horses. Thirty buckets. She had her work cut out for her. Stevie and Lisa could help once they’d finished their job.

At the other end of the stable, the job that Lisa and Stevie had taken on was beginning to feel impossible.

“Every time I dump a shovelful out, three more come in the door!” Stevie declared.

Lisa agreed. The wind was blowing hard and the snow was coming down so fast that they were barely keeping up with it.

“Let’s just do the part around the door,” Lisa said. “If we try to remove everything from the stable, we’ll never finish.”

“And we’ll freeze to death trying,” Stevie added.

Lisa didn’t want to tell her that that might actually be the case. It was better if Stevie thought she was joking.

“Right,” she said. “So let’s see if we can sort of sweep this stuff in the path of where the door swings—”

“Sweep! Good idea!” Stevie dropped her shovel and went back into the tack room, where she found a wide push broom.

“Perfect!” Lisa said. “Much better than these little shovels.”

It was a much better tool and it made a big difference. They’d done enough shoveling that there were only four or five inches of snow, but it was cold and dry and moved readily with the broom. The job they could do was hardly enough to please a fussy housekeeper, but soon they had half the doorway cleared.

“Let’s close this baby!” Stevie said.

The two of them got their shoulders into the job and were able to swing the big door shut. However, without the other door and a latch, there was no way to keep it closed.

Stevie leaned against the door to hold it in place and
scratched her head. Since there was so much padding from her woolly hat and scarf, the scratch wasn’t getting through, and she wasn’t getting any of her usual bright ideas.

Lisa held the push broom. She stepped back and looked at Stevie leaning up against the door, recalling how, so recently, they hadn’t been able to budge the door an inch because of snow.

“Bingo!” Lisa declared. “Stay right there.”

Stevie followed directions and didn’t move. Lisa took the broom and began pushing the snow that blocked the other half of the door, only instead of moving it outside, she moved it to the inside of the now closed door—under Stevie’s feet, around her ankles, all across the wide expanse of the door.