The Long Ride (2 page)

“You got a ticket?” Stevie asked.

“No, I just got a warning, but it was almost worse than a ticket. I was going four miles over the speed limit in our hometown. The policeman stopped me, and when he saw who I was, he just gave me a warning. Dad was furious—at me and at the officer, though he didn't say anything to the officer. He was angry at him because he thought someone would find out and say I'd gotten special treatment! I was only going four miles over the speed limit. Really. Even the officer said that. Well, it would have been easier if I'd gotten a ticket. Instead, I got grounded. Dad won't let me drive for three months. Of course, that's nothing compared to what happened to Scott last year.”

“What happened to Scott?” Carole asked, suddenly curious about the driving challenges of the Forester children.

“Well, it's kind of a long story,” said Callie. “But—”

“Wow! Look at that!” Stevie interrupted. There was an amazing streak of lightning over the road ahead. The dark afternoon brightened for a minute. Thunder followed instantly.

“Maybe we should pull off the road or something?” Carole suggested.

“I don't think so,” said Stevie. She squinted through the windshield. “It's not going to last long. It never does when it rains this hard. We get off at the next exit anyway.”

She slowed down some more and turned the wipers up a notch. She followed the driver in front of her, keeping a constant eye on the two red blurs of the car's taillights. She'd be okay as long as she could see them. The rain pelted the car so loudly that it was hard to talk. Stevie drove on cautiously.

Then, as suddenly as it had started, the rain stopped. Stevie spotted the sign for their exit, signaled, and pulled off to the right and up the ramp. She took a left onto the overpass and followed the road toward Willow Creek.

The sky was as dark as it had been, and there were signs that there had been some rain there, but nothing nearly as hard as the rain they'd left on the interstate. Stevie sighed with relief and switched the windshield wipers to a slower rate.

“I think I'll drop you off at Pine Hollow first,” she said, turning onto the road that bordered the stable's property.

Pine Hollow's white fences followed the contour of the road, breaking the open, grassy hillside into a sequence of paddocks and fields. A few horses stood in the fields, swishing their tails. One bucked playfully and ran up a hill, shaking his head to free his mane in the wind. Stevie smiled. Horses always seemed to her the most welcoming sight in the world.

“Then I'll take Callie home,” Stevie continued, “and after that I'll go over to Pizza Manor. I may be a few minutes late for work, but who orders pizza at five o'clock in the afternoon anyway?”

“Now, now,” teased Carole. “Is that any way for you to mind your Pizza Manors?”

“Well, at least I have my hat with me,” said Stevie. Or did she? She looked into the rearview mirror to see if she could spot it, and when that didn't do any good, she glanced over her shoulder. Callie picked it up and started to hand it to her.

“Here,” she said. “We wouldn't want—Wow! I guess the storm isn't over yet!”

The sky had suddenly filled with a brilliant streak of lightning, jagged and pulsating, accompanied by an explosion of thunder.

It startled Stevie. She shrieked and turned her face back to the road. The light was so sudden and so bright that it blinded her for a second. The car swerved. Stevie braked. She clutched at the steering wheel and then realized she couldn't see because the rain was pelting even harder than before. She reached for the wiper control, switching it to its fastest speed.

There was something to her right! She saw something move, but she didn't know what it was.

“Stevie!” Carole cried.

“Look out!” Callie screamed from the backseat.

Stevie swerved to the left on the narrow road, hoping it would be enough. Her answer was a sickening jolt as the car slammed into something solid. The car spun around, smashing against the thing again. When the thing screamed, Stevie knew it was a horse. Then it disappeared from her field of vision. Once again, the car spun. It smashed against the guardrail on the left side of the road and tumbled up and over it as if the rail had never been there.

Down they went, rolling, spinning. Stevie could hear the screams of her friends. She could hear her own voice, echoing in the close confines of the car, answered by the thumps of the car rolling down the hillside into a gully. Suddenly the thumping stopped. The screams were stilled. The engine cut off. The wheels stopped spinning. And all Stevie could hear was the idle
slap, slap, slap
of her windshield wipers.

“Carole?” she whispered. “Are you okay?”

“I think so. What about you?” Carole answered.

“Me too. Callie? Are you okay?” Stevie asked.

There was no answer.

“Callie?” Carole echoed.

The only response was the girl's shallow breathing.

How could this have happened?

ONE

“Intermediate riding class will begin in the outdoor ring in five minutes!”

Carole could hear her voice echoing through the corridors of Pine Hollow Stables. It always gave her a kick to use the public-address system. With the flick of her finger, she could make a whole classful of girls and boys nervous. Nobody ever wanted to be late to class because nobody wanted to incur the wrath of a riding instructor.

Carole wasn't an instructor—yet. Though she did help the instructors from time to time, her official job that summer was to be the morning stable manager. She was at Pine Hollow from seven-thirty until noon every weekday, overseeing everything that happened, from ordering grain to assigning horses. Until she'd actually started the job, she'd had little idea of how much went on at Pine Hollow and how responsible she would be for it.

Carole had been a rider at the stable for about seven years—before she owned her own horse, before her mother had died, long before her father had retired from the Marines. From the first time she'd ridden a horse, when she was four years old, she'd thought the finest job in the world would be getting paid to work with horses. Now, finally, she was doing that.

School was out for the summer, and until she went back as a junior in high school in September, she'd spend at least half of every day at Pine Hollow.

In the past, filling in for the stable manager at Pine Hollow had been a fairly routine task. Max Regnery owned the stable, as his father and grandfather had before him. His mother had been stable manager for years, and she had run the place smoothly, almost invisibly. That had all changed the past spring, however, when Mrs. Reg, as she was universally known, had decided to retire. She'd moved to Florida, leaving the stable in her son's hands, and he was relying on his students to do the work his mother used to do.

Everyone was stunned at how much work Mrs. Reg had magically accomplished. Carole and Denise McCaskill—the girl who was the afternoon manager that summer—were trying to do everything they could to take the huge load off Max's shoulders, but they were finding themselves as overwhelmed as he was.

Two little girls stormed into Carole's office. More accurately, one girl stormed in, chased by another.

“Carole, I want to ride the pinto today,” whined Alexandra. “Justine rode him last week, so it's my turn now! You can't give me Nickel again. I had him last week and he misbehaved the whole time!”

“Don't even bother,” Justine said to her classmate. “Carole gave me Patch, so I'm going to ride him and that's it. You shouldn't even ask.”

“Carole?”

“You had trouble with Nickel last week because you weren't controlling him properly,” Carole said calmly to Alexandra. “You won't have trouble with him this week because you will control him properly, but you will have trouble with Max if you don't get to class on time.”

Alexandra glared. Justine smirked. Carole ignored them both. She flipped the switch on the PA system.

“Two minutes!” she said sharply. The girls fled from her office.

Carole wondered idly if she'd ever been as annoying as those two. She decided she hadn't been. Then she decided she
hoped
she hadn't been. She knew she'd liked some horses better than others, but as far as she could recall, there had never been a horse she hadn't liked. And there had never been a horse she hadn't been happy to ride.

No, she decided, in spite of the occasional irritating rider, she'd found the perfect job.

Ben, one of the stable hands, came halfway into the office, pausing nearer the door than the desk. Ben was like that. It was as if he didn't really want to commit to a conversation, but there was something he had to say.

“The stall is ready for that new horse,” he told Carole. “Almost, I mean.”

“Oh, right,” Carole said. She opened her drawer and took out the bronze nameplate that had come from the engraver that morning. FEZ, it read. She walked over to give it to Ben. With anybody else, Carole would have thought it was rude to wait to be handed something. With Ben, though, it was different. He was shy and never seemed to feel as if he belonged. He was as reluctant to go into Carole's office as he was to go into Max's.

The only place Ben seemed comfortable, in fact, was standing next to or sitting on a horse. Carole had never known anyone with as sure a touch as Ben had. He never hesitated with horses the way he did with humans. He could look horses straight in the eye and they'd do what he wanted them to do. People were another story.

Even if Carole had trouble understanding Ben as a person, she had no trouble understanding him as a horse handler. She could watch him work with horses for hours on end. She did, in fact. From her desk, she could see him while he did his chores around the stable, grooming, tending, training, healing, and caring for the horses that lived there. He might stammer trying to utter a complete sentence to a person, but he seemed able to convey a whole world to a horse.

Carole had watched him soothe a frightened horse through an entire vet visit the week before. Anyone else would have had to twitch the horse, squeezing its nose and upper lip with a chain loop that irritated and distracted it so much that it wouldn't notice what the vet was doing. Ben didn't use the twitch, though. He stood by the horse's head, holding it on a short lead. Ben patted its cheek and whispered into its ear. The horse never budged—even when Judy Barker, the vet, took a blood sample. Ben was amazing.

“Must be some special horse,” Ben said, looking at the small bronze plaque in his hand. Briefly Carole wondered what had instigated this rush of chatter from him, but then she realized it was the bronze plaque itself and Max's insistence that the stall be completely prepared before the horse's arrival.

“Some kind of VIP?”

“Uh, sort of,” Carole said.

“Horse or owner?” Ben asked.

Carole laughed. Ben wouldn't be anywhere near as impressed with an owner's pedigree as he would with a horse's. In this case, however, both were impressive. Carole picked up the folder Max had filled with information about the horse and its rider.

“The horse is an Arabian endurance specialist. He's got a lot of medals and ribbons to his credit. He deserves all the work you've put into the stall, plus the brass nameplate.”

“And the owner?”

“Actually, she's not the owner. She's renting Fez for the summer, option to buy and all that. Her name is Callie Forester. She's sixteen years old. She's won a dozen ribbons of her own.”

“Never heard of her,” Ben said dismissively.

“Not here. She's just moved here from somewhere on the West Coast.” Carole ran her finger down the sheet of paper, scanning the notes Max had taken from Callie's parents when they'd made the arrangements. “Oh, I get it,” Carole said. “Her father is a congressman. I guess he just got elected last year and Callie was finishing out the school year back home. She's here for the summer. Maybe longer, though it's not clear how long they've leased Fez for.”

“Okay,” said Ben. He backed out of her office, slinking into the shadows of the stable. That was just like him. He'd heard enough and wanted to flee to the safety of the horses that filled the stalls of Pine Hollow.

Carole knew she was horse-crazy, and she knew it was a trait she'd have all her life. Ben was horse-crazy, too. She liked that about him. Odd as he could be, that single fact about him helped bring them together.

Carole glanced at her watch. This was going to be a busy morning, and she didn't have time to waste thinking about Ben Marlow. One of the things that was going to make it busy was that she had to find someone to cover for her the day after next. She and her best friends, Lisa Atwood and Stevie Lake, had a long-standing date to go for a trail ride.

Stevie, Lisa, and Carole were so close that Carole couldn't remember a time when the other two hadn't been her friends—just the way she couldn't remember a time when she wasn't horse-crazy. Several years earlier they'd formed a club, and it remained a bond between them. It wasn't the formality of the club—not that The Saddle Club had ever been very formal—that kept them together; it was their common love of horses.

The girls were very different from one another and always had been. Carole was acknowledged to be the most serious about horses but the least serious about anything else. Sometimes she thought the only thing that really mattered to her was horses. Sometimes that didn't seem like a bad thing. Now, as she grew older, she was even more convinced that horses would be her life. Just two more years of high school and she could enter a university equine studies program. That was what she wanted more than anything.

While Carole was serious about horses, Stevie sometimes seemed to have trouble being serious about anything. She had outgrown her passion for practical jokes, and her friends were more than a little relieved that she'd given up playing pranks on her brothers. Stevie had three of them: Chad, now in college; her twin brother Alex; and her younger brother, Michael. When the Lakes started playing jokes on each other, things often got out of hand. But everyone had calmed down, or perhaps just grown up, now. Still, Stevie had an irrepressible spirit that tended more toward trouble than practicality.