Nightmare

“Uh, this is Elaine Thomas from Hedgerow,” the woman on the phone began. She seemed a little upset. “It’s about King Perry.”

“Isn’t that the stallion that Delilah was mated to?” Carole asked.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Thomas. “But … But—”

“He’s okay, isn’t he?” Carole asked.

“No,” said Mrs. Thomas. “He’s dead.”

“Dead?” Carole wrote the word on the message pad as she spoke, but it looked odd to her. “Was there an accident or something?”

“No,” said Mrs. Thomas. “He was sick. The vet was just here. She says it was swamp fever. Tell Mrs. Reg to call me, will you?”

“Sure,” Carole said, hanging up the phone.
Swamp fever.
It didn’t sound good. She opened her book to the section on infectious diseases.

There it was—
swamp fever.
Her eyes scanned the page, and then she gasped.
Swamp fever
was the common name of a disease called equine infectious anemia. It was incurable, it was fatal, and, worst of all, it was infectious. If King Perry had it, what about Delilah?

C
AROLE
H
ANSON
SETTLED
into her seat on the bus. She smiled so broadly that it was impossible for the other riders not to notice how happy she was. She didn’t notice that they noticed. The only thing she noticed was her happiness.

She was on her way home from an afternoon at Pine Hollow Stables. Pine Hollow was her favorite place in the world, and that alone would normally be enough to make her happy, but today she was especially happy.

Pine Hollow was where she boarded her horse, Starlight. He was a half-Thoroughbred gelding, and as far as she was concerned, he was the most wonderful horse in the world. Considering how wonderful all horses were from Carole’s point of view, being considered the most
wonderful was quite a compliment. Carole had been taking a private lesson with Max Regnery. Max was her riding instructor, and he was the owner of Pine Hollow. He’d trained many riders and many horses, and he was very particular. In fact, Carole and her two best friends, Stevie Lake and Lisa Atwood, had once counted six mistakes that he corrected for the same rider at the same time! “Heels down, keep your arms steady, straighten that back, show your horse who’s in charge, you’re on the wrong diagonal, and fasten the strap on your riding hat!” And that was to a rider he thought was doing a pretty good job.

Today, however, he hadn’t said that at all to Carole. What he’d said to her was “Nice job, Carole! All your work with Starlight has really paid off. He’s behaving like a perfect gentleman and showing you to be the distinguished young rider that you are.”

Distinguished. He’d actually said
distinguished.
For a moment, Carole almost wished she kept a diary. This would surely be a red-letter day for that reason alone. However, that wasn’t all that had happened.

After her lesson, Carole had joined her friends Stevie and Lisa, who had been watching her. The girls were helping around the stable the way they usually did. That meant that Carole and Stevie and Lisa had been sitting on a bale of hay, talking about what Max had said, until Max’s mother, Mrs. Reg, came and told them there were four stalls that still needed mucking out and if they
needed a reminder, she could tell them where the pitchforks were kept. They didn’t need a reminder.

The girls understood that the only way Pine Hollow could keep its costs down was if everybody pitched in and helped. They were accustomed to making themselves useful.

Carole, Stevie, and Lisa often observed that it would be almost impossible for three girls to be more different from one another and yet completely devoted to one another. Their common bond could be summed up in one word:
horses.
They were all totally horse-crazy. In fact, they were so horse-crazy that they’d formed their own club called The Saddle Club. It was a simple club because it had only two rules. The first was that the members had to be horse-crazy. They all passed that requirement with flying colors. The second was that they had to be willing to help one another out, anytime, anyplace, anyhow. That was a trickier requirement because the girls got into tough scrapes, and it took a lot of imagination, some scheming, some precision, and a fair amount of luck to come to one another’s aid successfully. What they’d discovered was that helping could be a lot of fun, too, and that was why these three very different girls were always together.

Of the three horse-crazy girls, Carole was the horse-craziest. She was certain that whatever her future was, it was going to be with horses. Naturally, she’d always own them, or at least one. She’d also ride and would probably
compete. She might teach, too. And then, she loved training—and did it well, as Max had reminded her today—so maybe she’d be a trainer. Some days she asked herself if there was anything more exciting than watching a foal be born and then grow into a fine riding horse. Those days, she decided she’d be a breeder. She had spent a lot of time working with Judy Barker, the stable’s vet. She’d learned a lot about diagnosing and dosing ailing horses. Could there be anything more wonderful than saving a horse’s life? Perhaps she’d be a vet. Carole suspected that one day she’d have to make a decision—or at least cut out a few of the options—but for now, she had a hope that she could actually do all of them.

When it came to horses, Carole never missed the tiniest detail. She wasn’t as good as Max at spotting a half dozen mistakes at a time, but she never forgot to give a horse special feed when it was required. She might leave her own jacket at home on a chilly fall day, but she’d never forget to put a cozy blanket on Starlight so that he wouldn’t get cold at night. She might leave her school book bag on the table in the morning, but she’d never forget to bring her riding clothes to school.

Carole’s house was on the edge of town, which was why she had taken the bus from Pine Hollow. Sometimes she envied her friends their quick walk home from the stable, but living so far away gave her father a shorter commute to the Marine Corps base where he worked. He was a colonel. Carole lived alone with him
in the first house they’d ever had that wasn’t on a base. Carole’s mother had died a few years earlier of cancer. She had loved having a real home of her own, and Carole and her father loved it and took care of it for her now that she was gone. Carole didn’t talk about her mother very much, but she thought of her often. She treasured the memories of times spent with her, playing together, cooking together, just being together. Although Carole was quite certain she had the best dad in the whole world, that didn’t mean she didn’t miss her mother. Even now, riding on the bus, Carole wished she could tell her mother what a great day this had been.

Lisa Atwood was a year older than Carole and Stevie. While Carole could be quite forgetful about a lot of things that didn’t have to do with horses, it seemed to everyone that Lisa was just about incapable of ever being forgetful. She was totally organized. She was always perfectly dressed and groomed. She didn’t get smudges or rips. She never turned in a homework assignment late, and she almost never got anything less than an A. She was the kind of student who didn’t just read the three books the teacher required from the summer reading list, she tried to read all twenty!