Since there wasn’t anything they could do to help and since they’d made a deal with Skye to meet at the stable early in the morning, the girls had left the house early and now stood nervously in front of the city stable.
“You know, all my life, when something was going wrong, the one thing I could count on being right was horseback riding,” Carole said. “Now that horseback riding is what’s gone wrong, I don’t know how to handle it.”
“With horseback riding,” Lisa said sensibly. “Let’s go.”
Lisa climbed the steps and walked up to the desk to arrange for the horses.
Stevie was ready first. While Lisa and Carole finished pulling on their boots, Stevie paced in front of the window, looking out to see if Skye would arrive, but there wasn’t any sign of him. When a half hour had passed and he still hadn’t shown up, the girls realized that he wasn’t going to show up.
“That’s his problem,” Stevie said to Lisa and Carole. “Let’s not make it ours. Let’s go.”
The three of them tightened up their horses’ girths, mounted up, and headed for the park.
It was still early in the morning, much earlier than they had ridden on the previous days. There were a few joggers and some people walking their dogs, but aside from that, The Saddle Club had the park to themselves. The horses seemed eager to enjoy the early-morning ride. Stevie was riding a pinto who was full of spirit. The horse’s enthusiasm was positively infectious.
Within a few minutes, the girls were all trotting happily along the bridle path around the city’s scenic reservoir. The park was ringed by tall apartment buildings, providing a dramatic background to the trees and bushes.
“Let’s play merry-go-round,” Lisa suggested. It was a game they could play when they could ride three abreast. They alternated leading, but the leader could never be more than a half a horse-length ahead of the others. It was a game that required them to control their gaits very carefully. The girls had had a lot of practice in precision riding when they’d formed a three-person drill team. This was a challenge, though, and they all had fun.
Stevie’s horse was giving her trouble and she loved it. He was so full of spirit that he always wanted to be the leader. It took a lot of concentration to get him to slow down, just a bit, to let Lisa’s horse take the lead when it was her turn.
After merry-go-ground, they tried follow-the-leader. That was one of Stevie’s favorite games. When she was the leader, she dreamed up some of the kookiest ideas. Not only did she drop her stirrups, but she also made her friends drop their reins for a few seconds! They complained, but she knew they liked it.
Stevie couldn’t believe how fast the hour went. When Carole pointed out that it was time to go back to the stable, Stevie looked at her watch three times.
“Maybe Skye will be there waiting for us when we get back,” Lisa said.
Maybe he would be, Stevie thought. It was possible that he’d just overslept. Possible, she decided, but not probable. What was probable was that Skye was too frightened to continue riding.
One phone call confirmed it. Stevie was elected to call Skye. They didn’t know where he was staying, but they reached his manager’s office. Stevie couldn’t convince the secretary that she wasn’t just another one of Skye’s adoring fans. However, when she asked the woman where the manager was, his secretary said he was involved in a script conference—something about cutting out the horseback-riding scene in the movie Skye was filming.
“We blew it,” Stevie said, turning to her friends after she’d hung up the phone. “We tried to show him how wonderful riding could be and it looks like all we succeeded in doing was scaring him away for good!”
“We did try,” Lisa said sadly. “We did the best we could. It’s not our fault that he’s scared.”
“That’s true,” Carole agreed. “But what really bothers me is the idea that Skye might never ride again. Think what he’ll be missing!”
Stevie realized that Carole was right. She thought about how much fun they’d just had playing games on horseback during their early-morning ride. It wouldn’t be fair to let anybody miss that. They just had to find him and get him back to his riding lessons.
“This sounds like a job for The Saddle Club, don’t you think?” Stevie said. Lisa and Carole agreed with her about that.
WHEN THE GIRLS got back to Dorothy’s, they found Max and Mrs. Reg sitting in Dorothy’s living room. They were drinking coffee and talking quietly. As soon as they walked in, Lisa knew something bad was up—and the bad thing had to be about Dorothy.
“What did the X rays show?” Lisa asked.
Max and Mrs. Reg invited the girls to sit down. Max took a deep breath and began speaking.
“Dorothy’s going to be okay,” he said. “That’s the good news. She was right that she had a broken rib. In fact, she has three, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that she has something called a compression fracture in one of her vertebrae—those are the bones of her spine. It will heal. It should heal completely, actually, and Dorothy will be able to live an almost completely normal life. This is all very good news. The bad news is that the doctor said if Dorothy ever were to reinjure her back, and another riding accident could do it easily, she’d be much more likely to damage her spinal cord, and that could put her in a wheelchair for life.”
The girls looked at one another. The implication was sinking in.
Max continued. “What this means is that Dorothy DeSoto can never ride in competition again.”
CAROLE HAD DECIDED a long time ago that horses were what she wanted to do with her life. She hadn’t decided yet whether she wanted to raise them, train them, or heal them, but she knew she would always want to ride them. She could not imagine what her life would be like if that were taken away from her.
She followed Stevie and Lisa along the hallway of the hospital where Dorothy was recovering from her accident. Hospitals were good at helping people’s bodies recover from accidents, but what could a hospital do about somebody’s spirit, she wondered. How could Dorothy’s body heal, how could the broken bone in her back mend, when her heart must be broken? And, even more immediately, what could Carole do or say to help? She walked in silent thought.
“Six forty-two, forty-four … and here’s forty-six,” Stevie announced, peering into the strange room. Then she stepped in. Lisa followed after her.
Carole stood in the hallway, waiting for her own courage. Hospitals were difficult for her. She remembered all too vividly her visits with her mother before she had died. But this was nothing like that. Dorothy was going to make a full recovery. She’d walk, laugh, love, even run again. But she’d never ride in competition again. Never. The word kept repeating itself to Carole.
Stevie broke into Carole’s thoughts by bouncing out of Dorothy’s room and into the hallway. “Hey, get in here!” she said cheerfully. “Dorothy’s wondering if you want to see her!” From anybody but Stevie or Lisa, Carole might have been annoyed at the insistence. But her friends cared enough about her to know exactly how she was feeling and what she was thinking right then. And they knew that thinking sad thoughts wasn’t going to help anything.
She walked slowly into the room and pulled back the curtain that circled Dorothy’s bed.
Dorothy didn’t look so bad. She lay flat on her back with her arms at her sides. There was an IV in one arm, and a bandage on her forehead. She had a black eye. More important, however, there was a smile on her face.
Carole smiled back.
“I look great, don’t I?” Dorothy teased.
“You look wonderful,” Carole told her sincerely. “And you look a lot better than you did day before yesterday when poor Topside freaked. Does it hurt?”
“It hurts some,” Dorothy told her truthfully. “If I can keep from moving at all, I’m better off. But that’s not what you meant by hurt, is it?”
Carole looked down and shook her head. She should have known that Dorothy would understand what she was really asking.
> “Yes, it hurts,” Dorothy said. “I’ve ridden in hundreds of competitions, put on lots of demonstrations, traveled all over the world—as a rider. That’s gone. Ended. It hurts.”
Carole sat down on a chair by the bed and took one of Dorothy’s hands. It was all she could think of to comfort her friend. Dorothy squeezed her hand in thanks.
“But look, Carole, girls, I was a professional. I am a professional. My profession has risks and I’ve always known what they are. There are a lot of promising riders who get hurt and bounced out of the field at your age. That didn’t happen to me. I was lucky, really. I’ve been riding professionally for more than fifteen years. They’ve been wonderful years, but they’ve taken their toll, too.”
She paused to take a sip of water, then continued. “Sometimes I travel so much, I don’t know where I am or what language I should be speaking. I hate myself sometimes for thinking more about my colleagues as my competition than as my friends. There have been days when I’ve thought about my riding as a job, just a job, something I had to do because it was the only thing I could do. Those were bad days. Now they are behind me. So I will look on the bright side. I can still work with horses. I will probably be able to ride for pleasure. I can train horses, I can take care of them. I can do all kinds of things. I just can’t compete. It could be worse. If Topside had gotten spooked half a second earlier, we might have landed on the jump, Topside could have gotten hurt, and I might have been hurt worse.”
“Or less,” Carole added.
“Maybe,” Dorothy said. “But there’s no point analyzing what might have been. What I’ve got here is a case of what is, not what if.”
It was so simple, and so complicated.
“More flowers, Miss DeSoto,” a young man announced, walking into the room. Carole had been so concerned with Dorothy that she hadn’t even noticed the fact that the reason the room seemed so small was because it was packed full of flowers.
“It’s embarrassing,” Dorothy confessed to the girls. “I never saw so many flowers in one place! See who it’s from, will you?”
Lisa took the card from the flowers, a cheery arrangement of bright summer blossoms, and, as she read, the surprise showed in her eyes.
“It’s from Skye Ransom!” she said.
“Oh, how nice!” Dorothy said. “And won’t the young nurses here be jealous!” She laughed. “You were riding with him yesterday morning, weren’t you? How is he doing with his lessons?”
“He’s not,” Carole said. “He disappeared after your accident and he didn’t show up for the lesson yesterday. We talked to his manager’s secretary and it sounded like he got completely freaked. We want to talk to him, but we don’t know where to find him.”
“Oh, that’s terrible,” Dorothy said. “Just because I had an accident doesn’t mean he shouldn’t ride. There must be a way you can get hold of him …” She wrinkled her forehead to think. “Maybe call the florist?”
Lisa looked at the tag on the arrangement. “Bingo!” she announced. “The flowers come from the florist at the Plaza Hotel. I bet that’s where he’s staying.”
“Well, then you must go there,” Dorothy said. “If he’s staying there, you can at least leave a message for him.”
“But we don’t want to leave you,” Lisa said. “We just got here.”
“It’s okay,” Dorothy assured her. “Getting Skye back to riding is important. And from what I’ve seen of the way you girls work, it’s a job for The Saddle Club. Go to it!”
The girls grinned at one another. “Okay,” Carole agreed.
“But we’re just doing this for you,” Lisa said.
“Sure, sure,” Dorothy said. “I know, just to please me, you’ll sacrifice your precious time in New York to find this poor, ugly, uninteresting dweeb at the Plaza so you can talk horses with him, right?”
Laughing, the girls all gave Dorothy a little hand squeeze, and promised to come back for another visit soon and to report progress on the new Saddle Club project: Operation Skye Ransom.
“NEW YORK IS unbelievable,” Stevie said a half hour later as they emerged from a subway. Carole gazed at street signs, Lisa stared at a map, and Stevie thought out loud. “No matter how many people you ask for directions, you always get a different answer! And when you look at the map, Lisa, you always say they’re all right!”
“If this is Central Park,” Lisa said, pointing behind her, “then the Plaza Hotel is—”
“There it is!” Carole said. “I recognize it from movies. Look at all the limos in front of it!”
Stevie and Lisa looked where she was pointing. Stevie knew she was right. She recognized it, too. The threesome waited for the lights to change so they could cross the streets, and then made their way into the lobby of the world-famous hotel.
That was when they realized they didn’t have the slightest idea how to proceed.
“We ask for him at the desk,” Lisa suggested. It seemed simple enough. Since Lisa was the oldest of them, they decided she should do it. Stevie and Carole stood back and tried to look inconspicuous. They thought it could take Lisa quite a while to get the information. It didn’t take any time at all. Lisa was back to them within seconds.
“No way,” she said. “The clerk was really nasty. Said they don’t give out guests’ room numbers—especially to kids. I guess we’re not the first of Skye’s fans to figure out that he’s staying here.”
“But we’re not fans,” Stevie said. “I mean, we are, but we’re here to help him. Did you tell the clerk that?”
“I got the impression that the last girl who’d asked for his room number tried to convince the guy she was his sister—then his aunt. Believe me, they’ve probably heard it all.”
“So what are we going to do?” Carole asked.
“We’ll have to wait for him,” Stevie said. “We’ll go park ourselves near the elevators and he’s bound to come through sometime. And when that time comes, we’ll be here.”
“I think this may be a dumb idea,” Lisa said.
“It may be,” Stevie conceded, “but it’s all we’ve got.”
The girls followed the path through the lobby, which led to the elevator bank. There was an upholstered banquette there. They planted themselves on it and waited.
“I feel dumb,” Lisa said. “I mean, this is so obvious. The clerk I talked to keeps looking over his desk at us.”
“Maybe we should each buy a newspaper to read,” Stevie suggested. “Then, like in the movies, we can poke holes in it to peep through. Nobody will ever notice!”
“Nobody except the house detective over there,” Lisa said. She gestured toward a man in a brown suit who had been standing by the door and was clearly watching the girls. “But then, maybe we should do it. He probably hasn’t had a good laugh for a long—”
“There he is!” Stevie said, jumping up.
“Skye?” Lisa asked excitedly.
“No, Frank Nelson. Skye’s manager,” Stevie told her, starting to run. Mr. Nelson was almost out the door before the girls caught him.
He had a terribly worried look on his face and, at first, was not at all interested in talking to the girls.
“It’s over, don’t you see?” he said in exasperation. “You and your bright ideas. You got him scared to death. He’s never going to ride again. We’ve lost this deal—in the middle of filming—and we’re going to have a giant lawsuit on our hands, all thanks to—”
“But that’s the thing!” Stevie interrupted. “It’s not our fault and we want to help.”
“Big help!” Mr. Nelson snorted. “Sure, tell him how your friend got all banged up and will never ride again. According to the papers, it’s a lucky thing she’ll ever walk!”
Stevie knew that both Mr. Nelson and Skye were looking at the whole situation upside down. She was sure that if they could talk to Skye they could convince him to start riding again. And if they didn’t, he’d be missing the opportunity to do one of the most wonderful things there was—horseback riding
.
“You’ve got to let us see him!” she said, feeling almost desperate.
“I don’t have to let you do anything,” Mr. Nelson responded, more than a little irritated. “And right now, I’m on my way to a lawyer’s office. You girls can’t possibly understand, but there’s a lot at stake here!”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Nelson,” Stevie said. “We do understand that there’s a lot at stake. It’s just that what you think is at stake and what we think is at stake are two different things.”
He looked at her, interested for the first time.
“Besides,” Stevie said, ready for her final attack. “What have you got to lose?”
“Suite fourteen-oh-one,” he said. “Knock on the door like Dragnet—you know, dum-de-dum-dum. He’ll open it. He’ll know I sent you.”
DUM-DE-DUM-dum.
Dum-de-dum-dum-dah!
The door opened. There was Skye Ransom, wearing jeans and a polo shirt, with bare feet and tousled hair.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“Mr. Nelson said it was okay,” Lisa began. “We just wanted to talk to you.”
He looked at the three girls standing in the hallway for a moment. He started to speak, first with anger crossing his face, then all emotion hidden behind his actor’s mask. Finally, he said simply, “Come in.”
At first, Lisa was almost overwhelmed by the suite. It was elegant and opulent. It had a large living room—much bigger than the one in her parents’ house, and much fancier, too. At one end of it, there was a desk with a computer and telephone. A woman sat and worked at the keyboard.
“That’s Frank’s secretary,” Skye said, introducing them quickly. “So what do you want to talk about?” he challenged them.
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