Horse Trouble (2 page)

“Look at this pin of Mrs. Reg’s,” Lisa said, holding it out to show her friends.

“Oh, the diamond is so perfect!” Stevie said. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could have a pin like that for The Saddle Club?”

Lisa looked at the very special silver horse-head pin on her shirt. She liked Mrs. Reg’s pin, but she wouldn’t trade her Saddle Club pin for anything. “I don’t know …,” she began.

“The conformation!” Carole said. Stevie and Lisa stifled giggles. It was just like Carole to look at the characteristics of the horse rather than just the beauty of the jewelry. “And with a head like that, it’s got to be an Arabian.”

Lisa and Stevie looked again, seeing the pin anew. Of course, Carole was right. The horse was definitely an Arabian—sleek and beautiful.

“What are you looking at?” Veronica asked, suddenly interested. Veronica’s own horse was a purebred Arabian mare named Garnet.

Lisa, Stevie, and Carole looked at one another. All had the same thought. Veronica was looking for a way to put them all down. They just
had
to make it impossible for her to do. There was a light in Stevie’s eyes.

“Oh, it’s just this pin of mine,” she said casually, holding it out to Veronica, who took it from her. “Kind of pretty, isn’t it?”

Since that was such an obvious understatement, it was enough to silence Veronica for a few seconds while Stevie collected her thoughts. “My brother Chad gave it to me last Christmas,” she went on. “It’s a nice piece of costume jewelry, don’t you think?”

If there was one thing Veronica thought she knew a lot about, it was real jewelry. Telling her that this was fake made it impossible for her to insult the jewelry or Stevie any further. All Veronica could do now was stare at the beautiful pin in her hand, unable to think of anything cutting to say beyond, “Nice, for a fake,” which she muttered reluctantly. Stevie beamed proudly.

And then the ruckus began. At first there was just a minor skittering sound, then an unmistakable squeak.
It was followed by a small flash of gray moving quickly across the locker-area floor. That, in turn, was followed by a much larger flash of black and white named Man o’ War. The gray was a mouse; the black and white was a cat in hot pursuit.

It was a fact of life that stables have mice. That’s why most stables also have cats to keep down the mouse population and Man o’ War was just doing his job. The girls, however, and most especially Veronica, wished he were doing it somewhere else.

Veronica leapt up onto the bench and began screaming. The mouse, now even more frightened, ran out from under the bench and stood in the middle of the floor, frozen in terror. It was the opportunity Man o’ War had been waiting for. He pounced. That made the mouse move. Fast. That made Veronica scream. That made the cat howl. The mouse fled toward the horse stalls. The cat followed—
very
fast.

That might have been the end of it except that the mouse chose to look for an escape route in the stall of one of the stable’s newest horses, an injured and retired racer by the name of Prancer. Lisa knew that most horses have at least one thing that scares them. In the wild such fears protect horses. They know what they have to flee from, and once they know, there’s almost nothing that can be done to alleviate that fear.
In Prancer’s case, the fear was cats. The moment she spotted Man o’ War climbing up and over the doorway to her stall, she began fussing. She whinnied and cried out.

From the sound of the horse’s cry, Carole recognized exactly what was happening and that it could be big trouble. Prancer was still recovering from a fracture in her foot that had cost her her career as a racehorse and might well cost her her life if it didn’t heal well. A frightened horse could get into awful trouble. She needed to be calmed right away.

“Come on!” she said to her friends. She didn’t have to say it twice.

The three girls ran to the stalls and found that the cat had the mouse cornered in the stall. The mouse was stunned by fear; the cat knew he had the upper hand and wasn’t about to move. Prancer jumped and kicked, preparing to rear.

Without even thinking about it, Carole and Stevie each grabbed a lead rope. If they could just get the ropes clipped to the horse’s halter, they’d have a chance to control her. But there was no way they could go into the stall when she was so upset. Sending one of the three of them off to the hospital wasn’t a very good idea.

Stevie and Carole climbed up on the stall door and
tried to reach for the halter. While they did that, Lisa did what she thought was the most logical thing. She took a broom and went into the stall next to Prancer’s. That housed a sweet-natured pinto named Patch, who watched all the events going on around him with only mild curiosity. Lisa hiked herself up onto the top of the divider separating the two stalls and reached down with the broom. She could just barely touch the floor of the stall, but that was all she needed. She stretched as far as she could and put the broom right next to the mouse.

This mouse was no fool. Just as Lisa had hoped, he understood that he was in dire straits and immediately scootched into the safety of the broom bristles, holding on for dear life. As soon as Lisa thought she might have the mouse, she lifted the broom back over the divider, left Patch’s stall as fast as possible, and took her hostage to the door of the stable, where she shook the broom. A stunned mouse fell out of the bristles. Within half a second he righted himself, looked around, and headed for the tall grass, where Lisa was sure his family was waiting for him. He’d have quite a story to tell them. She paused briefly to wonder how he would explain the miracle of the broom.

When Lisa got back to the stall, however, she found that only half the problem had been solved. The
mouse was gone, but Man o’ War was still standing in the stall and Prancer was still scared.

“Calm down, girl,” Carole was saying. Horses liked to have people talk to them. Prancer particularly liked it when Carole talked to her. The horse seemed to adore Carole, and it was obviously mutual. “Everything’s going to be fine. We’ll just get that cat out, and you don’t have anything to worry about. Poor cat’s just as scared as you are.”

Lisa looked at the cat. He didn’t appear scared, just confused. He couldn’t figure out where his dinner had gone!

“Try the broom trick again,” Stevie suggested, still trying unsuccessfully to reach for Prancer’s halter. For a second Lisa tried to figure out if the cat could possibly hold onto the broom’s bristles as the mouse had, but then she realized that wasn’t what Stevie meant. She reentered Patch’s stall, remounted the divider, and re-reached over with the broom.

The cat saw it coming and he didn’t like what he saw. Dodging with his head, he spun a full one hundred eighty degrees and dashed up and out of the stall as fast as he’d dashed into it. Then there was quiet. Prancer looked around, trying to assure herself that the cat was actually gone. Finally the horse relaxed as suddenly as she’d shied. She reached for her
hay feeder, grabbed a few strands of sweet hay, and munched. Then she looked up at the three girls still perched on the walls and door of her stall. A quizzical looked crossed the horse’s face as if to wonder what on earth all the fuss was about. The girls had been dismissed and they knew it.

“What teamwork!” Lisa said.

“This calls for a celebration,” Stevie agreed.

“TD’s?” Carole suggested.

It was just what they had in mind.

I
T DIDN
’
T TAKE
long before Lisa realized something was wrong. The three girls sat at their favorite booth at TD’s and talked about what had happened with Prancer, Man o’ War, and the mouse.

“You should have seen the look on that mouse’s face when I set him free in the paddock!” Lisa said gleefully. “I mean, his eyes were shining like, like—like …” She could see the bright shine in the little creature’s eyes, glistening in the outdoor sunlight nearly sparkling. “… oh, no.”

“Like what?” Stevie asked.

“Diamonds,” Lisa said, a look of horror crossing her face. She didn’t have to say it again or explain. The
moment she uttered the word, her friends knew exactly what she’d just remembered.

“Let’s go,” Carole said. The girls left TD’s in a shot, leaving behind a confused waitress.

“We’ll be right back!” Carole called.

“Right after we get out of prison!” Stevie added.

The restaurant door slammed behind them. They didn’t even hear it, they were running so fast.

TD’s was just a short distance from Pine Hollow. The girls often walked it after class, and it usually took them about ten minutes. This time they covered the distance in less than five minutes—at a run.

“It’s got to be in the locker area!” Lisa said breathlessly over her shoulder.

“Yeah,” Carole agreed. “That’s where it was when we had to save Prancer.”

“We’ll find it. Don’t worry,” Stevie said. They all liked the sound of those words. They just hoped they were true.

There was nobody in the locker area when they got there. That wasn’t surprising. All the young riders—the only ones who used this room, were long gone. Nobody would be back there until tomorrow. Lisa dropped to her hands and knees to look at the floor. Stevie looked at every surface in the place—tables, benches, and shelves. Carole focused on the tops of
the lockers, and when they proved clean (not of dust, just of pins), she began looking in the lockers.

There wasn’t a sign of the pin.

The locker area was small, and it didn’t take the girls long to be absolutely sure that the pin wasn’t there. To be definitely, positively, totally sure, they each switched levels and repeated the search. Then the three of them worked together to move the lockers away from the wall just to see if the pin might have slipped behind them. They found a riding crop there. They didn’t find a gold pin with a diamond in it.

“Veronica,” Lisa said. “She was the one who was holding it when the cat and the mouse came through. Maybe she took it.”

“Veronica would never take a piece of jewelry she thought wasn’t real,” Stevie said.

“Maybe so, but I think I’d better call her to see if she remembers what happened,” Lisa said. Stevie and Carole agreed that was a good idea, and Lisa went to use the phone in Mrs. Reg’s office. Normally riders were expected to use the pay phone, but in the case of an emergency, they were allowed to use the stable phone. Lisa thought this qualified as an emergency.

Mrs. Reg’s office was empty and dark. When she turned on the light and sat to use the phone, she was struck by the fact that the desk, which had been in its
usual state of disorganization when she’d last been in there just over an hour earlier, was now neat as a—she didn’t even want to
think
the word—pin. Perhaps Mrs. Reg was turning over a new leaf, Lisa mused quickly as she picked up the phone. Then she cringed as she thought of the more likely answer. Mrs. Reg had straightened everything up looking for her pin. Lisa hated the idea of causing anybody such trouble. She dialed Veronica’s number.

Veronica answered the phone herself, which was not surprising since it was her own private telephone line. Lisa explained that the girls had been looking for the horse pin and wondered if Veronica knew what had happened to it.

There was quite a pause. “Pin, pin,” Veronica said, repeating the word to remind herself what Lisa was talking about. “Oh, that old pin that Stevie’s brother gave her?” At least she remembered it. “I don’t know,” Veronica went on. “I think I threw the darn thing at the cat. Is that all you want to know?”

It was. Lisa told her so and hung up, now more worried than ever.

“Lisa, is that you?” It was Max. He was surprised to find Lisa in his mother’s office.

“I just had to make a call,” Lisa said quickly. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t have change.”

“No problem,” Max said. “Just don’t tell the whole world I didn’t make a fuss, okay?” He grinned at her. Max was really a wonderful person. That made it particularly hard on Lisa, knowing she was lying to him. “Isn’t it time for you to get home now?” Max asked. “We want you rested and well for tomorrow’s jump class. You’re doing very well, you know. I’m awfully flattered. You should be, too.”

“Thanks, Max,” she said, and in spite of the fact that her mind wasn’t on her riding, she was very pleased by his words. Max wasn’t usually very free with compliments. “I’m on my way now,” she said. “Stevie and Carole are waiting for me. Good night.”

She couldn’t leave fast enough. There was no point in staying at Pine Hollow. There was nothing there for them. They’d made absolutely sure of that.

The three girls left Pine Hollow for the second time that afternoon. Stevie and Lisa lived near one another. Carole was going home with Stevie because her father was picking her up at Stevie’s house instead of at the stable, since he wouldn’t be able to get off work for another hour. They didn’t talk much as they walked. Stevie had just one question.

“Was Veronica lying?”

Lisa mentally ran through the brief phone conversation again. She would have liked to say she thought
Veronica was lying, but the fact was she was just about certain she wasn’t. For one thing, Veronica had a real disdain for fake jewelry. She had a real disdain for anything that didn’t cost a lot of money. For another thing, in spite of all the awful things Lisa could say about her—and there were a lot of them—Veronica wasn’t a thief.