Bridle Path (5 page)

“Right, Stevie. The blue goes well with your eyes. Oh, yes, I’ve always liked you in blue. But have I ever seen you in anything
but
blue? Jeans, I mean?” The colonel was quiet for a while then, nodding as he
listened. He said “hmmmmm” occasionally. Carole waited patiently.

Finally her father handed her the phone. “It’s Stevie, for you,” he said. “She can’t decide what to wear on Friday to the horse show.”

Carole let out a breath of air. How could Stevie be concerned with what she was going to wear? The horses would never notice, and nobody else mattered at all! She took the phone.

“Hi, Stevie,” she said. “Wear those blue slacks, the turtleneck shirt, and your blue skiing sweater. I have a pair of flats that will go with that. I think they’re yours anyway.…”

T
HE GIRLS MET
in the locker area of Pine Hollow right after school on Monday. For once they were all on time. There was a lot of work to do and not much time to do it.

“Here’s the chart I made up,” Lisa said, handing each of her friends a printout—the result of all her work over the weekend.

“As you’ll see, there are jobs that can be done in one day, or really in just a few minutes, like checking the bales of hay for mold, and others that we will need to spread out over the whole five days because they’re so big, like reorganizing the specialized riding clothes in the attic. We’ll do some of that each day, okay?”

Stevie gaped at the enormous list and the elaborate chart in her hand. “Does anyone ever get time off for good behavior?” she asked.

“Of course,” Carole sniffed. “That’s what’s going to happen Friday night. That’s what we’re working for here, and I don’t think you should be joking about it.”

“I’m not joking,” Stevie said. “There’s nothing funny about all the work Max expects us to do.”

“Are you complaining?” Lisa asked. She was suspicious because of Stevie’s recent history of getting her friends to help her do things she really should have done herself.

“Oh, no,” Stevie said. “Really I’m not. That’s not what I meant. What I meant was that there’s so much work here that Max asked us to do that I hate to think how much more work he must have to do himself.”

Neither Carole nor Lisa had thought about it that way. In fact, they had both been thinking more along the lines that they’d thought
Stevie
had been thinking—that Max seemed to expect an awful lot of them. They’d completely misjudged Stevie and found themselves a little embarrassed about it.

“Of course you’re right,” Carole said. “I guess I was only thinking about us—not about Max. Poor guy.”

“Yeah,” Lisa agreed. “But what are we going to do about it?”

Both Lisa and Carole looked to Stevie for an answer to that question. She had one.

“We’re going to do everything he asked us—plus something.”

“What something?”

“I don’t know yet,” Stevie said. “The idea, though, is that he needs our help and he’s going to thank us by taking us to the horse show. We need to find a way to thank him for that.”

“Something special,” Carole said.

“Something
fun
,” Stevie said. And when Stevie decided on fun, fun was what they were going to have. Her eyes gleamed, but she told her friends that she wasn’t ready to decide exactly what extra thing they should do, so they might as well get to work.

Lisa went to check for mold on the older bales of hay. Carole and Stevie mixed a week’s worth of regular grains for the stable horses and a week’s worth of the special mix that Veronica diAngelo claimed the vet had prescribed for Garnet. Stevie wasn’t convinced that the slight difference in grains that Veronica required actually made any difference. Carole reminded her that it wasn’t their business to question Veronica’s vet.

“Even if Saturday is April Fools’ Day?” Stevie asked.

Carole groaned. “Oh, no!”

“What?”

“April Fools’ Day again! I hate it. You always take it as such a challenge, and I spend most of the rest of the month getting you out of the hot water you dive into so easily on the first of the month!”

Stevie poured a bag of grain into the mixing bin. “Why, Carole. How could you say such a thing?”

“Easily,” Carole said. “If I recall correctly, one year you replaced Mrs. Reg’s reading glasses with another pair, and she spent the whole day looking as if she were playing a trombone. And then there was the time you moved all the horses into different stalls. Max wasn’t too thrilled about that one. Oh, and it seems to me that Max was even less happy about the time you replaced the belt that goes with his breeches with one that was two inches shorter. He spent the whole day talking about diets. Then there was the gelatin-in-the-sink year—oh, yes, and the whoopie cushion under Mr. Martin’s saddle. Was that the same year you put the rubber horse manure in Mrs. diAngelo’s Mercedes-Benz?”

Stevie stirred the grains together thoughtfully. “I think they were all the same year,” she said. “The year before was when I—”

“Stop! I can’t stand it,” Carole said. “Your April
Fools’ pranks have been nothing but trouble. You just can’t get away with this stuff all the time, Stevie.”

“Do you mean to tell me that you didn’t like hearing Mrs. diAngelo scream like that?” Stevie asked.

Carole had to think for a minute. She could still recall the woman’s hollering and her indignant outrage as she tried to imagine how a horse had actually gotten into her car to make the deposit. She’d yelled at Max and the stable hand, Red. She’d even yelled at Veronica. Then, when she’d discovered the manure was only rubber, she’d yelled at Stevie—knowing that only she would come up with something like that. Stevie hadn’t minded at all.

“It was kind of fun,” Carole admitted. “But you’re not going to do it again, are you?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Stevie said. “This year I’m only going to do nice things.”

Carole thought that sounded like a good idea. April Fools’ Day and Stevie could be a pretty dangerous combination. She decided that she and Lisa might have to add “keep Stevie out of trouble” to their list of jobs for the week.

The next task they tackled was to look at the dress riding clothes that were stored in the attic of the house that Max and his mother, Mrs. Reg, shared. Max pulled the ladder down for them and showed
them where the light switch was. Then he left them alone.

Carole was the first of the three girls to enter the attic, but she felt as if she were the first person to visit in a century. The March sunlight filtered through dingy glass windows and seemed to hold dust particles in suspension. There was a dry, stuffy smell to the place, but it wasn’t unpleasant. It was as if the air had been as undisturbed as the trunks and dress racks that cluttered the room. Carole felt that she might be breathing the very same air that had filled the lungs of Max’s grandfather.

The room was large but might have seemed bigger if it hadn’t been for all the clothes that had been abandoned there haphazardly over the years. The floor around the ladder was circled by boxes that had obviously been shoved onto the floor of the attic without actually being stored.

Carole made a pathway among the cartons so her friends could join her. Lisa came up next and just looked around in silent awe. Stevie, on the other hand, had something to say.

“Wow.”

“Yeah,” Carole agreed.

“We get to look in all these boxes!” said Stevie. Stevie was a very curious person. A closed box had
always been a challenge to her. Now, however, as she took in the enormity of the task, she began to realize that this job might challenge the limits of even her curiosity.

“Okay, now, here’s what we should do,” said Lisa. Carole and Stevie listened up. Lisa always seemed to know how to tackle a big task. “We should begin by sorting. I think our categories are going to be (1) stuff to be thrown out; (2) stuff to be given away; (3) antique and historical clothes to be stored and put away; (4) specialty clothes to be stored for special occasions; and (5) everyday riding clothes that ought to be used. Now, for starters, let’s move all the car—Stevie? What are you doing?”

Even in the face of all of Lisa’s logic and organization, Stevie couldn’t contain herself. She’d opened the nearest box and was down on her knees pawing through its contents.

“You won’t believe this stuff, guys!” she said excitedly. “I mean, look at this!”

The next thing Carole and Lisa knew, Stevie had on a new hat. It was a pearl-gray bowler, and it looked very funny on her, especially because it was too big and pushed her ears out at odd angles from her head.

“The latest fashion!” Lisa said, giggling.

“Well, here’s one for you,” Stevie said, tossing a
black flat-topped hat at Lisa. It looked like a top hat, cut short.

Then she reached in farther and pulled out another top hat. This one she gave to Carole. While Carole put it on, Stevie went back into the box and began pulling out the clothes that went with the hats.

“These are for saddle-seat equitation,” Carole informed her friends, confirming their suspicions that Carole knew everything there was to know about horses. “You remember, don’t you? At the horse show in New York, we saw classes with the saddlebreds?”

The girls did remember then. Saddlebreds were the horses that had been trained to move with their front feet lifting high off the ground. They pranced more than walked. Their riders wore fancy old-fashioned clothes. The coats were cut long, almost like skirts.

“The clothes were cool, but I didn’t much like the way the horses moved,” Lisa said. “It just didn’t look natural to me.”

“I don’t think it
is
natural,” Stevie agreed. “They have to do a lot of training with those horses, and it can’t be much fun. Remember how nervous the animals were when we saw them?”

Lisa did remember. The slightest movement around the saddlebreds would elicit a strong reaction, as if the horses were afraid of everything.

“I didn’t know Max ever had saddlebreds around here,” she said.

“I don’t know that he did,” Stevie said. “But he’s got some clothes for them—and I think we’re going to have to try them on to be sure they’re in good enough condition that they should be kept instead of thrown away.”

Carole and Lisa certainly agreed with that. In a flash, all three girls were reaching for outfits to try on. They had to open six more cartons before they found shirts, vests, ties, and boots to go with the hats they’d started with, but it was clearly worth it. Within minutes they’d put on not only clothes, but personalities.

“Milady, would you care to take a hack in the park this afternoon?” Stevie asked, removing her hat and bowing formally to Carole.

Carole found herself transformed into a Southern belle. “Why, I declare, I do think I would!” she said, batting her eyelashes at the handsome squire she imagined in the baggy clothes Stevie wore. “But only if mah little sistah Lillibelle can join us.”

Stevie looked at Lisa, who cocked her hat down over her face shyly. “Why, of co’se Miz Lillibelle may join us!” she said.

“You want li’l ole me?” Lisa asked. She was having trouble, though. In the first place, the pants she wore
were too big, so she had to hold them up with one hand. Her other problem was keeping from laughing because she felt so silly. Finally she couldn’t hold it in. Carole and Stevie joined in the laughter. Then Stevie located an old mirror. The three of them took turns looking at themselves in the dingy glass.

Much to Lisa’s surprise, she didn’t look as silly in the mirror as she’d felt dressing in the clothes. Although the pants were too big and the whole outfit ridiculously formal, she looked good, and so did her friends.

“We look like show riders,” Carole said, admiring her own reflection.

“Either that or band leaders,” Stevie agreed.

“Not bad,” said Lisa. “Not bad.”

“But maybe there’s better around,” Stevie said, slipping out of her outfit. “Let’s try some more boxes.”

A part of Lisa told herself that this was silly. They didn’t have time to try on clothes and play. There was too much work to be done. Another part of her told herself that, after all, they did have to open all the boxes so that they could sort all the contents. And the best way to be sure what the contents were was to try on the clothes themselves. That was the part of her that won the argument.

The girls couldn’t believe all the things they found. There was an almost infinite variety of riding pants, shirts, ties, vests, and jackets. They even found a selection of culottes for women riders. Those were pants designed to look like skirts that could be used to ride sidesaddle.

Clothes began flying all over the attic.

“Here, try this on!”

“Look at this!”

“Eeowww—did someone actually
wear
this?”

“Riding a horse???”

“Look at how this vest hangs down below the jacket!”

“And how the jacket hangs down below everything!”

“It’s called a shad-belly.”

“Isn’t it called tails?”

“No, shad-belly.”

“Weird.”

Stevie began dressing Carole up in a pearl-gray outfit with one of the large split skirts. There was a ruffly white blouse that went under the jacket. She wasn’t sure it was the blouse that was originally intended to go under the jacket, but it looked nice. She found some gray boots that matched and a white riding crop. She ransacked three more boxes in search of accessories.
She was looking for a pair of white gloves. What she found, however, was a box of camping gear, and though it didn’t have white gloves, it did have white mosquito netting.