Horse Spy

Three black sedans drew to a stop in the parking area. Twelve car doors opened at once and from each emerged a man dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie, wearing the same completely blank expression.

Steve froze, wondering what on earth was about to happen.

One of the men strode toward her.

“We’re looking for someone named Carl,” he said in moderately accented English.

“Nobody here by that name,” Stevie said. “No Carls at all.”

“Not Carl,” the man said, ever so slightly annoyed. “Carl.” He emphasized it as if saying it more loudly would make it clearer.

“There is no man here named Carl,” Stevie told him firmly.

“Not a man. A girl,” he said, the late-afternoon sun glinting off his reflective sunglasses.

“A girl? Carl?” And then it struck her. “Carole? You mean Carole Hanson?”

“That’s what I said. Carl.”

And then he held out his hand to show her something. It was paper. It had pictures of horses on it. And Stevie understood everything.

She signaled the man to follow her back to the schooling ring. As Stevie approached, Carole and Lisa stared intently at their friend, who was being followed by a very sinister-looking man in a black suit and shiny sunglasses.

“Oh, Carole!” Stevie sang out. “These guys have something to say to you!”

“L
OOK AT THIS GUY
!” Carole Hanson held out the glossy magazine to her two best friends. “He’s
so
good-looking!”

Lisa Atwood took the magazine. “Handsome!” she said. She passed the picture on to Stevie Lake.

“What a body!”

“What a face!”

“Have you ever seen such legs?” Carole asked.

“I bet he’s a great jumper,” Stevie agreed.

“He’d better be,” Lisa said, looking at the caption. “His owner has him entered in every major show in the country.”

“And I bet he wins them all—at least in jumping,” said Carole. “Have you finished that article in
Modern Rider?
” she asked.

“Sure,” Lisa said. “Swap you that for the new
Young Horsemen
, okay?”

“Deal,” Carole said. “How are you doing, Stevie?”

Stevie looked up from her copy of
Rider and Trainer
with a
big grin of contentment on her face. “I am so glad you know how to save your allowance and use it for magazine subscriptions,” she said. “Otherwise I’d never have seen this article on longeing. It’s going to do wonders for Belle’s balance. Mine too, I think.”

The three girls were sprawled on the furniture in Carole’s room, combing through back issues of all her horse magazines and enjoying every minute of it. They were in the right environment to enjoy horse magazines, too, because Carole’s room was simply filled with horses. Every inch of the wall was covered with horse posters—every inch, that was, except for the several square yards that were specifically devoted to photographs of horses—and some riders.

The girls often said that it would be hard to find three people who were less alike than they were, but they were firmly joined by their shared love of horses. In fact, they were all so horse-crazy that they’d formed their own club and called it The Saddle Club. It had only two rules. The first one was that all the members had to be horse-crazy. That was easy. The second rule wasn’t always so easy. It was that the members had to be willing to help one another out, no matter what.

It often seemed that the one who needed help the most often was Stevie. She was an expert at getting into trouble, often brought on by schemes and practical jokes, two of her favorite things (right after horses). She was a fair student at school, and she claimed that she’d do much better if her teachers didn’t always want to send her to the principal’s office and make her miss class time. Her teachers and the principal didn’t see eye to eye with Stevie on the root of that
problem. One of Stevie’s favorite targets for jokes and schemes was her brothers. She had three of them: one younger, one older, and one twin. She frequently felt a need to equalize her three-to-one disadvantage with jokes on her brothers. The results often got her in hot water at home as well as at school.

Lisa, on the other hand, was almost never in hot water. She was a straight-A student who had never been sent to the principal’s office. She was always organized. Her homework assignments were handed in on time. Her clothes were always clean and ironed, which contrasted with Stevie, whose idea of clean when it came to clothes usually meant something rescued from the
top
of her laundry pile.

Lisa had a brother, Peter, who was much older and was living abroad. This meant that her life was similar to that of an only child. She got a lot of attention from both of her parents, but especially from her mother. Mrs. Atwood wanted to be absolutely certain that Lisa learned all the things a proper young lady should know. Lisa swore she’d taken lessons in everything that anyone could teach—from the obvious, like piano and ballet, to the more obscure, like embroidery and etiquette. Lisa went to all these lessons obediently, but the only ones she cared about were her riding lessons.

Clearheaded Lisa could often straighten out the tangled threads of Stevie’s thinking and help solve the problems that their knots had caused. Lisa was the oldest of the threesome and also the newest to riding. In spite of the fact that her friends had years of experience beyond her own, she’d applied her cool thinking, her logic, and her determination to the
subject of horses and before too long had become nearly their equal in skills.

Of the three horse-crazy girls, Carole was the horse-craziest. She’d been raised on Marine Corps bases where her father, now a colonel, had worked. They’d lived in many places, but the one thing all the bases had in common was that they all had stables. Carole often observed that the one true constant in her life was horses. She’d always had them, and she swore she always would. She knew she would work with horses when she grew up; she just hadn’t decided what she’d do with them, whether she’d be a vet or a trainer or a breeder or a rider or a stable manager—or maybe all of those.

Carole’s mother had died a few years earlier of cancer, leaving Carole and her father to live alone in the first house they’d ever owned. All through her mother’s illness and Carole’s grieving afterward, horses remained a source of comfort. Carole missed her mother every day, but she adored her father. In fact, she thought he was just about perfect. He didn’t even mind that every surface in her room was totally covered with horses.

Carole flipped the pages of
Modern Rider
and got three sentences into the lead story when she realized she’d already read it. She tossed the magazine aside.

“So, what do you think about our new visitors?” she asked.

Her friends both knew what she was talking about. Pine Hollow, the stable where they rode together, was going to have two visiting champions.

“Polaris and what?” Stevie asked, forgetting the second horse’s name.

“Jennie’s Blue,” Lisa supplied. “I think she’s called just plain Blue, though.”

“Right,” Stevie said. “I didn’t get why it is they’re staying at Pine Hollow, though.”

“It’s because of Dorothy,” Carole explained. Dorothy DeSoto was a former student of Max Regnery, who was The Saddle Club’s riding instructor and the owner of Pine Hollow Stables. Dorothy herself had been a competition rider, probably headed for the international show circuit and the Olympics, when she’d been thrown in a bad accident that had hurt her back.

The good news was that she’d recovered. The bad news was that her doctor had explained that her back would always be vulnerable and she could never ride competitively again. One more injury and she might not be so lucky at all. Dorothy had taken the bad news in stride and made the decision to become a trainer. She had a farm on Long Island, New York, and two of her young students were fast becoming excellent riders. Those were the owners of Polaris and Jennie’s Blue.

“Max said that Dorothy’s back was acting up and she’s confined to bed for a while,” said Carole. “She asked Max to fine-tune the horses’ training before the show in Washington in two weeks. Their owners can’t do any work over the next two weeks—except for next weekend, maybe—so the horses will stay at Pine Hollow and get VIP treatment. Plus training.”