Photo Finish

Carole hurried forward and knelt down in front of the goat that was company for the expensive racehorse, Monkeyshines. “Are you feeling all right, Blackie?” she asked, scratching his head between the hard little horns. On a hunch, she leaned over and picked up the slightly soggy mouthful of hay the goat had dropped. She examined it for a second, then jumped to her feet. “Hey, you guys! Look at this,” she exclaimed. “This hay is moldy through and through!”

Stevie and Lisa hurried over to see for themselves. “You’re right,” Stevie said with a low whistle. “No wonder Blackie didn’t want to eat this. It would have made him sick as—”

“Monkeyshines!” Carole interrupted her. She rushed off down the aisle. “If Blackie stole it from Monk’s stall, there might be more. We have to get it before he does—if we’re not already too late!”

“W
AIT
,
HOLD IT
there, just for another second,” Lisa Atwood called out, fiddling with the focus on her camera. “That’s it.…”

Lisa and her two best friends, Carole Hanson and Stevie Lake, were in the outdoor ring at Pine Hollow Stable, where they all took riding lessons. It was Saturday afternoon, and their lessons were over for the day. Most of the other riders had already gone home, but Lisa, Carole, and Stevie hadn’t even untacked their horses yet. That’s because Lisa had asked her friends to pose for her while she took pictures with her new camera.

Carole, Stevie, and Lisa loved riding—and each other—so much that they’d started a group called The Saddle Club. The Saddle Club had only two basic requirements. The first was that all members had to be horse crazy. The
second was that members had to be willing to help one another with anything at any time, horse related or otherwise.

What Lisa was asking The Saddle Club to help her with now wasn’t very difficult. But it
was
getting a little boring. Lisa had recently started taking a photography class after school, and she loved it. Her mother was thrilled to see her taking such a strong interest in something other than horses. Lisa had started riding lessons at Mrs. Atwood’s insistence, since according to Mrs. Atwood riding was something a proper young lady ought to be able to do, along with playing tennis, the piano, and countless other things. But Mrs. Atwood had never expected her daughter to become horse crazy, and Lisa knew her mother didn’t quite approve. They had reached an understanding on the topic, but Mrs. Atwood still couldn’t help looking for ways to encourage Lisa’s other interests. And the way she’d decided to encourage her interest in photography was by buying her a brand-new, very fancy and complicated camera.

In the week since she’d gotten the camera, Lisa had taken pictures of everything she could think of—her friends, her house, her dog, and especially Pine Hollow’s horses. She already had dozens of pictures of the horse she usually rode, a pretty Thoroughbred named Prancer. She also had plenty of pictures of Carole’s horse, Starlight, and Stevie’s horse, Belle. And she had taken numerous pictures of Topside, Comanche, Diablo, Barq,
Delilah, Calypso, Nero, Harry, Romeo, Tecumseh, Dapper, Samson, Patch, Rusty, Chippewa, Garnet, Bluegrass, Geronimo, Nickel, Dime, Quarter, and every other horse and pony at Pine Hollow. She had pictures of them eating. She had pictures of them sleeping. She had pictures of them jumping, walking, running, and trotting. She had pictures of them being groomed.

And Carole and Stevie had been there for most of them.

Now Lisa was looking for new and more interesting ways to photograph the horses. At the moment, Stevie and Belle, a mischievous bay mare, were pretending to be circus performers. Stevie was standing balanced in her left stirrup. Her right leg was stretched out to the side, and her left arm rose above her head in a dramatic pose. Riding that way took a lot of balance, strength, and concentration even though Belle was moving at a slow, smooth walk. Even for a good rider like Stevie, it wasn’t easy.

“That’s it!” Lisa cried excitedly. She moved her hand away from the zoom lens just a little too fast. “Oh, nuts!” she exclaimed as her finger hit the lens and jarred it out of focus again. She frantically refocused as Stevie tried desperately to hold her position.

Unfortunately, Belle had other ideas. She was tired of the pose, and seized with a sudden urge to graze. She stopped abruptly near the fence and lowered her head, snuffling at the dusty ground in search of stray tufts of
grass. As the reins pulled her forward, Stevie slid to one side and nearly lost her balance. She managed to grab a handful of mane and started wiggling her foot around, searching for the stirrup. But then Belle quickly decided that she’d have better luck finding grass somewhere else. She moved off at a trot toward the gate, head held high, while Stevie scrabbled desperately for a foothold, hanging on to the saddle for dear life.

Carole, meanwhile, was doubled up with laughter. Lisa was giggling too as she finally got Belle into focus and started shooting. She got several good shots of Stevie’s precarious ride before the mare moved out of range.

As Belle reached the fence, Stevie finally lost her grip for good and slid off the saddle, landing on the ground with a thump. She got up and dusted off her jeans, sheepish but unhurt.

“Nice technique, Stevie,” a voice said dryly from just outside the ring. “Maybe I’ll let you lead Tuesday’s class, and you can give us all a refresher lesson on how to fall.”

Stevie looked up and blushed. Max Regnery, her riding instructor and the owner of Pine Hollow, was leaning casually on the fence watching her, a bemused expression on his face. Beside him were Deborah Hale, his fiancée, and Judy Barker, a local vet.

“Oh, hi, Max,” Stevie said. “I didn’t see you there.”

Lisa and Carole, leading their horses, joined Stevie by the gate and greeted the three adults. Lisa even snapped a quick picture of them.

“What are you doing here, Judy?” Carole asked, a little concerned. As far as she knew, the vet wasn’t scheduled to visit any of the horses for checkups that day. “Is anyone sick?”

“No, nothing like that,” Judy replied. “I’m here to be interviewed by our own roving reporter.” She gestured to Deborah.

“That’s right,” Deborah said. She held up the pencil and pad of paper she was holding, showing the girls the pages of scribbled notes she’d already made. “I needed to pick someone’s brain about horses, and Judy kindly volunteered.”

Deborah was a newspaper reporter for the
Washington Times.
She and Max had met when she had been working on a story at the local racetrack and she had needed to learn about horses. They had become engaged a short time later and were planning to be married soon.

Carole looked surprised. “Well, Judy knows practically everything about horses,” she said. When she had time, Carole liked to volunteer as Judy’s assistant. She had learned a lot from working with the vet. “But why not just ask Max?”

Deborah glanced at Max and chuckled. “Well, Max knows practically everything about horses too,” she said. “And I have been asking him dozens of questions, believe me—”

“Hundreds,” Max interrupted with a smile.

“Thousands,” Deborah admitted. “But the kind of
horses I need to know about for the article I’m writing are a little outside Max’s realm of expertise. You see, I’m doing another racetrack article. A big one.”

“Really?” said Carole, instantly all ears. Some time ago she had spent some time at the racetrack with Judy. She had even ridden in the post parade—when the horses parade in front of the stands before the race—leading Prancer, the horse Lisa rode. Prancer lived at Pine Hollow now because she’d been injured in that race and retired from the track. Her injury—caused by a weak pedal bone—kept her from being a good racehorse, but it didn’t stop her from being a wonderful saddle horse, so Max and Judy had bought her for Pine Hollow.

Max nodded. “I’m surprised you girls can’t guess what Deborah’s story is about,” he said teasingly, reaching out to scratch Belle behind the ears. “I thought you three knew everything there was to know about everything that has to do with horses. Did you happen to watch the Kentucky Derby last Saturday?”

The girls traded glances, then shook their heads. They all knew about the Kentucky Derby, of course. It was the most famous event in American Thoroughbred racing, when the top three-year-olds competed for a garland of roses—and a lot of prize money. But none of them had seen the race on TV that year.

“As I recall, that was the day you made us stay for hours measuring feed,” Stevie told Max pointedly.

He just grinned in response to that. “Anyway,” he
continued, “our Deborah here”—he put an arm around her proudly—“landed the plum job of covering the hot rivalry between the Derby winner and the horse that ran second.”