by Terri Farley
Sam’s breath caught as the mare stopped just in time. A collision with that pipe panel would have hurt her badly.
Buddy would be fine, but Sam felt a pinch of worry over Penny. The sorrel mare was settling into her new environment, but her limitations couldn’t be ignored. Brynna needed help watching over Penny.
Sam knew she should help. Brynna trusted her horse sense. And she would help, just not now. She had to go to school. Not right after classes, either, because she’d be grilling Sheriff Ballard for information. But soon.
May sunshine had coaxed swaths of dandelions to decorate the grassy quad at Darton High School. Just like most other students, Sam and Jen were planning to enjoy lunch outside.
Jen wore new pink jeans with a turquoise tee-shirt and pink bows tied to the ends of her braids.
“Nice jeans,” Sam told Jen, as they waited in line at the snack bar window.
“On sale at Mix n Match at the mall.” Jen dismissed the compliment, but Sam could tell it pleased her. Then Jen made a shy announcement.
“I hope you won’t mind riding home on the bus alone today.” A smile tugged the corners of her mouth, though Jen looked as if she were trying to suppress it.
“No, I—”
“Because Ryan’s giving me a ride home!”
“Wow.” Sam forced herself to sound excited.
She didn’t share Jen’s infatuation with Ryan Slocum. Probably that was a good thing. It would be disastrous if they both had a crush on him.
That would never happen. She didn’t trust Ryan Slocum. She knew it wasn’t fair to judge him by the rest of his family, but she couldn’t help it.
“He said he had errands in town all week, and…” Jen paused to sigh. “He might pick me up every day after school.”
“Sounds like a romance to me,” Sam joked, even though she didn’t like the possibility much. She and Jen had their best talks on the long bus rides home.
As they turned with treats in hand, Sam’s spirits perked up. Just for today, Ryan was actually helping her. Now she wouldn’t be the one leaving Jen to ride the bus home alone, while she went to talk with Sheriff Ballard.
Being careful not to spill the chocolate milk shake that she called lunch, Sam swerved around a patch of bright yellow dandelions. They reminded her of the daisies Mom had stuck into her braided hair.
Sam pictured her own hair. It was almost long enough to braid. Would it bother Dad if she copied the hairstyle she’d seen in photographs of Mom?
“They’re weeds, Samantha,” Jen said as Sam tiptoed around more dandelions. “You can step on them.”
“Don’t want to,” Sam chirped, pointing her toes as she danced between them.
“Why are you so happy?” Jen asked. She considered Sam in a raised-brow side glance. “I thought you were grounded.”
Jen was right. She shouldn’t be happy. Misery would probably kick in after today.
Sam glanced at her watch. In less than two hours, Sheriff Ballard would pick her up and take her to the police station. Most people wouldn’t see that as a treat, but…
“Hello?” Jen said. “Anybody in there?” She pretended to knock on Sam’s head, then snatched her hand back as if she’d done something wrong.
“Just spring fever,” Sam said. “I think it’s affected my brain.”
“You shouldn’t make jokes like that,” Jen whispered. Her tone reminded Sam of yesterday’s creepy feeling.
“What did you hear?” Sam demanded, but she knew it was Rachel’s gossip.
Jen could have pretended she didn’t know what Sam was talking about, but she didn’t.
“Rachel’s saying—and Cammy is repeating it like an echo—that you’re having a delayed reaction to the head injury. Most people don’t believe them. It’s just the rumor of the week, you know?”
“What kind of ‘delayed reaction’?” Sam asked, though part of her didn’t really want to know.
Jen puffed her cheeks out like balloons, then sighed. “She says you’re having trouble talking—which is obviously not true,” Jen said, smiling. “And walking….”
As Sam looked down at her feet, she bumped into one of the big green barrels that served as campus trash cans. At once, she steadied it, to keep it from falling over.
She should have laughed. She tried to, but amusement stuck in her throat. Instead, she glanced around to see if anyone was watching.
“You’re no clumsier than usual,” Jen diagnosed. “And the other thing, about logic—I know it’s because of your mom.”
“What’s because of my mom?”
“Your obsession with the note.”
Obsession wasn’t a very nice word. Sam bristled, but she couldn’t get mad. Jen was the only person on this campus who understood her.
So she tried to explain. “That note is the only key to this mystery.”
“Have you considered,” Jen said, slowly pushing her glasses up her nose, “that it might not be a mystery?”
“Of course it is,” Sam insisted. She shook her head as if she could shake off Jen’s doubt. “Look, I’ve never done one nice thing for my mom. Not that I remember,” she hurried to add. “It’s almost Mother’s Day and finding out about this horse and pronghorn thing, and Mom’s death—well, I’m doing it for her.”
As she finished, Sam expected sympathy.
Instead, Jen crossed her arms and tapped her toe. She bit her bottom lip, as if fighting for patience.
The bell to end lunch rang. Students hustled by. Still, Jen watched her with judging eyes.
“Or,” Jen said, finally, “you could forget the past, and do something nice for your Gram and Brynna.”
Sam couldn’t draw enough breath to talk past her fury. Jen stood there, twisting one white-blond braid around her finger, ready to take Sam’s anger when she could finally dish it out.
“You’re my friend. You’re supposed to understand.” Sam looked around wildly. “I understood your obsession, when you were catching Golden Rose and trying to get your parents back together.”
“Enough,” Jen whispered, and Sam knew she’d gone too far.
Now people were staring. And wondering if what Rachel had said was true, since only a crazy person would be acting like this out in the middle of the quad.
“Fine! Just—fine!” Sam shouted, then stormed off to Journalism.
She took her time, easing off her backpack. She slid the zipper open slowly and extracted a notebook. She centered it on the desk, trying not to look up as Rachel came in, but she couldn’t help it.
The short pink dress Rachel wore was strapless, and though she’d tossed a matching sweater over her shoulders, no one was fooled. Rachel was breaking the rules and daring anyone to punish her.
But what else was new, Sam thought.
Rachel was watching her from under lowered eyelids. Sam could feel it, so she was relieved when RJay pushed her toward the class darkroom.
In the eerie light of the darkroom, he said, “I want you for photo editor next year, but you’ve got to do something to earn it.”
“Like what?” Sam’s mind spun, trying to shake off the fight with Jen and Rachel’s scheme to steal the editorship with gossip.
“Stay awake, and when I throw something your way, think fast,” RJay said, and then he left.
Sam stood in the darkroom a moment longer trying to decide what RJay had meant. He might have been talking about playing catch instead of staffing the school paper.
Guys were entirely too weird, Sam thought as she emerged from the darkroom and almost ran into Cammy.
Cammy was leafing through assignments on a clipboard Mr. Blair had hung on a nail. Although she kept her eyes downcast, she wasn’t signing up for anything.
“You really owed Rachel a chance to be on television for that…” Cammy’s ringlets jiggled as she spun her hand in the air. “That community service thing. Have a horse—”
“Have a Heart,” Sam corrected.
“Whatever,” Cammy’s blue eyes rounded i
n amazement, as if Sam could possibly think accuracy was as important as Rachel’s offense. “Rachel deserved to be on TV a lot more than you, you know.”
Cammy gave Sam a quick look up and down, then continued. “Rachel was furious, you know. All of spring break, when she was in Paris—she called me from Paris to tell me, even—she was really, really mad.”
Cammy gave the clipboard a push and it swayed back and forth on its hook. “Rachel never forgets stuff like that. She’s kinda, you know, into payback.”
Cammy drifted away before Sam could think of what to say. She refused to give Rachel the satisfaction of panicking, but she couldn’t concentrate on Journalism, or making a list of questions for Sheriff Ballard. She could only imagine Dad sending her back to San Francisco. She wouldn’t have to face Rachel’s sly hints that something was wrong with her, but her heart would break without Ace and the Phantom, Jen, and, yeah, admit it, she told herself, Jake.
Later, when she told Mr. Blair she felt sick to her stomach, Sam wasn’t lying. She took refuge in the girl’s lavatory, where it was cool and quiet.
She stared at herself in the mirror.
“Yuck,” she commented.
Her cheeks looked white, as if sprayed with a coating of salt. Tears had cut channels that still showed. She stuck her tongue out at her reflection, then glanced toward the bathroom door.
Good thing no one was there. Word would have spread even faster that she was a confirmed psycho.
Maybe she was. What kind of people carried bullet shell casings in their backpacks? Not normal ones.
Sam threw water on her face, then fluffed the dampness out of her bangs.
What was it Gram always said? This time next year, none of this will matter.
But it would. Mom’s death, and the manner of it, still mattered. Caleb Sawyer and his rifle, aimed directly at the Phantom, mattered.
Right before her eyes, Caleb Sawyer had proven he would take a horse’s life.
If Caleb Sawyer had caused Mom’s accident, he should pay for it.
Sam looked at her watch. Five more minutes of class. She could maintain her composure that long.
She’d squared her shoulders and started through the doorway when a grip closed on her elbow.
She didn’t have to look to know it was Jake.
“Do you know how embarrassing this is?” he hissed, pulling her around the corner near the drinking fountain.
“Hanging around the girls’ bathroom?” Sam managed. Her voice gurgled between a sob and a laugh.
“First I went to Journalism asking for you. Mr. Blair told me where you were, but some of ’em were giving me weird looks—” Jake broke off.
“Because of Rachel. Have you heard—?”
“Who hasn’t?” Jake interrupted.
Sam felt as if the world tipped beneath her feet. She put a hand against the corridor wall for balance.
“And who cares?” he added.
When she didn’t answer, Jake went on. “Call Sheriff Ballard and tell him not to pick you up.”
“No way,” Sam said. “I’m not giving up a chance to talk to him. Absolutely no way.”
“I’ll take you.” Jake’s voice was a disgusted growl.
Shocked by Jake’s generosity, Sam shook her head.
Since Jake shared the truck with his brothers, he’d endure hours of harassment if he let Sam ride along.
“Just do it,” he snapped.
Sam imagined the sheriff’s black-and-white off-road vehicle with the roof bar of red and amber lights pulling into the school parking lot. No one would miss seeing that.
She was about to accept Jake’s offer when the bell rang and a classroom door slammed open.
The first student into the hall was Jake’s loud-mouthed, baggy-panted friend Darrell.
“My man,” Darrell howled the word as a wry compliment. He nodded at Sam in heavy-lidded approval as he approached. “I knew you’d come around,” he congratulated Jake. “How you doin’, gorgeous?”
Darrell slid a hand over his slicked-back hair and Sam thought about magic. She’d really like to vanish, right out of this hallway, forever. But if she couldn’t have that, she wanted to make Darrell disappear.
In a single minute, classrooms had disgorged hundreds of curious students, and Jake’s hand dropped from Sam’s elbow as if he’d received an electric shock.
Jake could be a jerk, but he was her friend. Almost every mental picture she had of him involved a horse. He’d taught her to ride, to gentle, and more than that, to think like a horse. Only once, when he’d taken a terrible fall and broken his leg, had she really paid him back.
Jake always looked at ease on horseback. At school, he was shyer and sometimes, like now, his eyes held a flicker of uncertainty.
“I’ll ride with the sheriff,” she told him.
Even to herself, she sounded brave. But really, she had nothing to lose. People were already talking. How much worse would it be if she had a police escort out of the parking lot?
“Okay.” Jake sounded relieved. “But I’ll talk to you. I want to hear what Sheriff Ballard tells you, because I have an idea of my own about Caleb and the horses.”
Chapter Ten
The sheriff’s office was tucked into a corner of a new county building that housed other government offices in Darton.
On her way to the chairs arranged next to the sheriff’s desk, Sam took a quick look around.
The office held high-tech radio equipment, a computer with so many cords she couldn’t tell what was what, a fax machine, copy machine, and a coffeepot the size of a rain barrel.
Metal filing cabinets stood against one wall. A photograph of a large, smiling family was propped on top of one of them. The other wall held shelves of labeled boxes and an overloaded coatrack. Sam noticed a slicker, a quilted vest, waterproof overalls, a black jacket with glow-in-the-dark lettering that read “POLICE,” and more.
Sinking into the blue upholstered chair facing the desk, Sam felt a surge of security, followed by surprise.
Sheriff Ballard had been watching her, with his hands folded loosely on the desk blotter. Although he needed a haircut and a mustache trim, the sheriff was alert and prepared.
“How ’bout you tell me again what happened yesterday,” he encouraged her.
Sam was ready.
“I found this note in an old button box,” Sam said. She unfolded the paper and handed it to him. “It’s in my Mom’s handwriting.”
He nodded, gave the pink stationery a cursory look, then motioned Sam to go on.
“Jen and I—”
“Jennifer Kenworthy.”
Sam nodded, not at all surprised he knew. “We’d planned to go looking for New Moon, a black mustang that—anyway, we rode out to Antelope Crossing instead, to see the wild horses and kind of follow up on what my mom had written.”
The sheriff glanced at the note once more. In the quiet, Sam heard the emergency radio give the coded signal summoning a fire department miles away from Darton, but Sheriff Ballard just gestured for her to go on.
“I think my mom was concerned that there was antelope poaching going on and somehow it was putting the wild horses in danger.”
“Pronghorn season is in the fall,” the sheriff mused.
Sam stopped. “What do you think?”
“Go ahead and finish,” he urged.
He didn’t want her to get sidetracked, Sam guessed, so she explained how they had ridden into the area and seen the brown and white pronghorn grazing alongside the wild horses.
“Right away, the antelope took off. I thought they were running from us, but then the horses startled and we saw something glittering in the sagebrush—”
“Glittering?”
“Like glass or metal,” Sam explained. “Really low down.”
“At knee level? Ground level?” the sheriff prodded.
Sam thought for an instant. “Just above ground level. And then the horses were gone, all but the stallion, and he charged toward
the sagebrush….”
Sheriff Ballard looked amused, as if such dramatics over a wild stallion were to be expected from someone her age.
“He did,” she insisted. “I know it’s weird, but—”
“You go ahead, Samantha. Some of this pretty much matches that call we traced to Crane Crossing Mall.”
What had the Sheriff said about that call last night? She tried to remember.
“Who made the call? Do you know?”
“Doesn’t much matter,” he said. “Probably someone being a good citizen, afraid you two would get hurt. Go ahead about the horse, though. I’ve been in this business long enough to know anything can happen,” the Sheriff said, and Sam knew he was urging her to keep talking.
“When he charged, the guy stood up, and he had a rifle. I don’t know what kind,” she said, but she gave him the baggie with the shell casing inside.
Instead of looking excited, the sheriff nodded, slid the baggie to one side, and leaned forward. “Let’s hear the rest.”
“The guy was taking aim at the stallion and so I yelled at him and then he…wasn’t there. I know that sounds weird, too, but—” Sam took a deep breath. Saying so many odd things would probably discredit her. Still, she couldn’t do anything except tell the truth.
“It probably looked like that because he dropped out of sight,” the sheriff said. “I know the spot you’re talking about. It slants down to lower ground. All he’d have to do is back up.”
“Oh, good,” Sam said with a sigh.
“Did you get a look at him?” the sheriff asked.
“I tried,” Sam said. “But there was nothing, like, distinctive about him. I wasn’t close enough to see much, except that he looked normal. Average sized, you know?”
“And his clothes?”
“Jeans and an old brown leather jacket, I think.”
For the first time, the sheriff seemed to sympathize with her frustration. “Hardest criminals to find look just like ordinary men,” he said.
Sam noticed he hadn’t said Caleb Sawyer was that kind of man. He didn’t whip out a Wanted poster to show her, and he hadn’t even taken notes.
Instead, Sheriff Ballard rose, poured himself coffee and, without asking if she wanted some, made her a cup with spoonfuls of sugar and powdered creamer.