Dream Horse

by Bonnie Bryant

  THE PHONE NEXT TO Lisa’s bed rang. She and Carole both jumped at the same second, and Lisa knew that they both had exactly the same thought. Phil. They’d found him. Everything was okay. They didn’t have to worry anymore.

  But that wasn’t it.

  “Hi, Lisa? It’s Stevie. Why did you guys leave?”

  Lisa clutched the telephone hard. She’d known Stevie was going to call her. What she hadn’t known was what she would say. On the other hand, this was a fairly straightforward question. She could answer it.

  “Carole and I stayed with you for a while, but you were sound asleep, and it’s like you really need the sleep, so we left right before dinner.”

  “Oh, I guess I woke up a little while after that. Mom gave me some soup. I guess she thinks I’m really sick or something. She only ever gives me soup when she thinks that. I guess I’ve been a little weird lately, huh?”

  “A little,” Lisa admitted. “But the doctor says you’re getting better.”

  “If he thinks that, he ought to take a look at my dreams!” said Stevie.

  “What do you mean by that?” Lisa asked.

  “It was another horse dream,” Stevie said. “And this time it was about a blind horse. Maybe I just dreamt that because you told me about that mare you looked at. Blondie, right?”

  “Uh, right,” said Lisa. “Uh, wait a sec. Carole is here. She’s spending the night. Let me get her to pick up an extension, okay?”

  Lisa covered the phone and whispered to Carole that Stevie had had another dream. “You’ve got to hear it, too.”

  Carole ran and picked up the cordless phone from the hall and brought it back into Lisa’s room. They listened together.

  “I’m here, Stevie,” Carole said brightly.

  “Are you okay?” Stevie asked immediately. “You sound funny.”

  “I’m fine,” Carole said, trying to sound as normal as possible. These days it wasn’t easy sounding normal around Stevie.

  “Okay, so here’s what happened in my dream. This horse is struggling someplace.”

  “Like it’s sick or something?”

  “Oh, no,” said Stevie. “Not at all. She’s struggling because she has to climb something. It’s really tough going. She’s climbing a mountain maybe. There are rocks everywhere, but she doesn’t see them. All she can see is that she’s got to get there. Somehow, she knows it’s really important.”

  “What is?” Lisa asked.

  “Whatever it is,” said Stevie. “I don’t know. I mean, nobody’s told me what’s important. I just know the horse knows.”

  “Wow,” said Carole. “That’s an exciting dream.”

  “I think I should start writing these things down,” said Stevie. “These dreams I’ve been having are good ones. Don’t you think it would make a good story? Nobody would believe it, of course. But dreams are dreams.”

  “That’s right,” Lisa said quickly. “Dreams are dreams. These are dreams, aren’t they?”

  “That’s what I said, didn’t I?” Stevie asked. There was an edge to her voice, and Lisa knew she was pushing a little too hard. She didn’t want to upset Stevie, especially when there was so much she didn’t want to have to explain.

  “Of course,” Lisa said.

  “I sure wish I could be with you guys tonight. I’m tired of being sick. I’m even tired of being tired. I want to be well. I want to stop having strange dreams. Know what I think this is all about?”

  “What?” Carole asked.

  “I think my mind is so bored with being in bed all the time that it keeps on making up strange stuff.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” said Carole, but she wasn’t sure at all.

  “Well, to keep me from having wild dreams, you guys have to tell me everything you’re doing. What are your plans for tomorrow?”

  “Oh, we’ll just go to Pine Hollow and hang around,” Carole said. “We’ll check on Belle for you.”

  “Thanks,” Stevie said. “And tell her I will get better and I will ride her really soon, okay?”

  “Deal,” Carole said.

  “And we’ll stop by tomorrow, too,” said Lisa. “Probably late in the day.”

  “Phil said he’d come by, too,” said Stevie. “Have you talked with him?”

  “Um, no, not, er, today,” said Lisa.

  “Of course you haven’t talked with him today,” Stevie said, almost snapping. “He’s been up in that glider with his uncle. The two of them have been having a wonderful time, and Phil hasn’t even had the consideration to give me a call to let me know that he’s all right. I have half a mind to call him right now.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” Lisa said quickly.

  “Why not?” Stevie asked.

  “Well, it’s—I mean, probably if they were flying all day—um …”

  “It’s pretty late,” Carole said. “I bet those two were so tired they just fell asleep as soon as they got home.”

  “You’re probably right,” said Stevie. “I’ll call him in the morning.”

  “Um, Stevie?” Carole began.

  “No, I won’t,” Stevie said, correcting herself. “I don’t need to chase him down. If he wants to talk to me, his friend who is sick in bed, well, then he can just give me a call. I’m certainly not going to call him!”

  “Good idea,” said Lisa.

  “Good night,” Stevie said, and then she hung up.

  “Whew,” said Carole.

  “Definitely,” agreed Lisa.

  LISA AND CAROLE arose before dawn the next morning. They wanted to get to Pine Hollow early to look after Belle for Stevie and to take an early trail ride. Later in the day, the woods around Pine Hollow would be filled with other riders, a lot of them inexperienced. At daybreak they’d have the place to themselves.

  “I think dawn is my favorite time of day to ride,” said Lisa, vigorously brushing Belle’s coat.

  “I think my favorite time is any time,” said Carole.

  Lisa laughed. That was just like Carole. Even though they were all horse-crazy, Carole was probably the horse-craziest of them all. She brought Belle some grain and filled her hayrack.

  “Don’t worry, old girl,” Lisa said, patting the horse’s smooth nose and rubbing her cheek just where she liked it best. “Stevie will be back here in no time. She’ll be riding you again, and she’ll get you back to working on jumps so she can beat Phil—”

  Lisa stopped suddenly, realizing what she’d said. For a moment, she’d forgotten about Phil. There had been no call last night. None this morning. Phil and his uncle were still missing. She swallowed hard.

  “Oh, they’ll find them,” said Carole. “They can’t have gone far, and you’re the one who was telling me how safe gliders are. They couldn’t search last night because of the dark and the rain. But the sun’s out today. There will be helicopters and planes all over the place. They’ll find them and they’ll be okay.”

  “But they were flying right near Mickey Denver’s ranch. You remember what the terrain looks like over there—the mountains are rocky and they looked dangerous to me.”

  Carole was quiet for a moment. She dropped Belle’s brush into her grooming bucket and unclipped the cross-ties. Lisa patted Belle as Carole shooed her into the stall, and then Lisa clipped the lock shut.

  “I wish there were something we could do,” said Carole.

  “What could we do? I mean, shouldn’t rescuing be left to professionals?” Lisa asked. “We don’t even know where to begin.”

  “Or how,” Carole said.

  “It would be a real challenge as a Saddle Club project,” said Lisa.

  “For something this difficult, we’d have to have Stevie’s help,” Carole agreed.

  “We’d have to have more help than that,” Lisa said glumly.

  In the end, they decided there really wasn’t much they could do except hope that everything would turn out okay.

  “Let’s go on our trail ride. Maybe when we get back, Stevie’s mother will already ha
ve called Mrs. Reg to tell us that everything’s fine,” Lisa suggested.

  “Good idea,” Carole said.

  They saddled up and left the Pine Hollow paddocks behind. The woods were magically quiet at that early-morning hour. The leaves were still damp with rain from the night before. Lisa was enjoying the ride until the thought occurred to her that Phil and his uncle might be stranded in the woods somewhere. They might have been caught in last night’s downpour. They might be lost and scared … or worse.

  Carole seemed to be thinking the same thing.

  “Let’s go back,” she said to Lisa. “This isn’t working.”

  “I bet Mrs. Lake has called already,” said Lisa.

  “Are you starting to read minds, too?” Carole asked.

  “I hope not,” Lisa told her honestly. “I don’t think I’d like to know what’s going to happen—unless it’s all good news.”

  “Me neither,” Carole agreed, turning Starlight around.

  It only took them fifteen minutes to get back to Pine Hollow, even walking their horses for the last quarter mile. Mrs. Reg was there, but she didn’t have any news for them.

  “Who’s going to call you at this hour of the morning?” she asked.

  Carole and Lisa explained about Phil and his uncle.

  “Oh dear,” said Mrs. Reg. She scratched her head thoughtfully. “You know, there was a horse we had here once—used to run away all the time. At first my Max—the one you girls call Max the Second”—that was Max’s father—“he’d ride all over the place just looking for that fellow. Then he stopped.”

  Carole and Lisa waited a second until they realized that Mrs. Reg was done with her story. She often told stories, and they often ended abruptly. They didn’t usually end this abruptly, though.

  “So what happened?” Lisa asked.

  “Did he just disappear?” asked Carole.

  “Of course not,” said Mrs. Reg. “He was a valuable horse. But I can’t stand here telling you girls stories all day long. I’ve got to get to work, and from the looks of your horses, you’ve got some work to do, too. Do you think Starlight and Prancer want to wait all morning for their breakfast?” With that, she turned and walked into her office.

  Carole and Lisa looked at one another, shrugged, and dismounted. Sometimes it took a few minutes to figure out what Mrs. Reg’s stories were about. Sometimes they never figured them out.

  This time it took exactly as long as it took Lisa to remove Prancer’s tack.

  “Got it!” she announced over the stable wall.

  “Me too,” Carole said. “Max stopped riding all over the place to find the horse because the horse always came back on his own, whether they looked for him or not.”

  “That’s what I think, too,” Lisa agreed. She hoped that meant that Phil and his uncle would find their way to safety, with or without the help of The Saddle Club.

  She hefted Prancer’s saddle and bridle with her linked arms and carried them to the tack room. The door was partly closed. Lisa opened it wider by shoving it gently with her hip.

  “Oomph!” came a distraught voice on the other side.

  “I’m sorry,” Lisa said, edging into the room. But she wished she could take back her words as soon as she saw to whom she had apologized. It was Veronica diAngelo, who was examining her horse’s tack.

  “Well, you should be,” Veronica said. Lisa thought that was a pretty rude way to accept an apology, but she considered the source and decided not to make any more of it. “I mean, nothing seems to go right around here. First Red has done a careless job with my tack, and now you barge in here like you own the place.”

  Lisa swallowed what she really wanted to say. She’d learned long ago that it didn’t make any difference what one said to Veronica.

  “Gee, Veronica, we sure missed you yesterday.”

  “Did you?” Veronica asked, arching her eyebrows in a way Lisa hoped she’d never do herself. “Well, I had something else I had to do.”

  “What was that?” Lisa asked. She was immediately sorry. Asking Veronica a question like that always led up to a long boring story about how wonderful Veronica was. This time was no exception.

  “Well, I had another photo session for that contest that will take me to Rome.”

  “Oh, you mean you didn’t think the photographs of Stevie’s accident were dramatic enough?” Lisa asked.

  “Not really,” Veronica said, completely missing Lisa’s sarcasm. “But these are. I know I’ve got a winner. In fact, last evening, I made Mother take me to the mall to buy an Italian phrase book. I have to be able to say, ‘How much is that in dollars?’ and ‘Do you take credit cards?’ I had my photographs developed right away. Would you like to see them?”

  Lisa didn’t want to let Veronica trap her in one of her “admire me” conversations, but she couldn’t resist. She loved photography and was always curious to see other people’s work. She also wanted to know what Veronica thought was a prizewinning photograph.

  “Sure, Veronica, why not?” she said. She put Prancer’s saddle on its rack and followed Veronica to the locker area. Carole was there, taking off her boots. She seemed surprised when she saw Lisa and Veronica together, but she understood when Lisa explained that it had to do with photographs. She was curious about Veronica’s certain victory in the photo contest, too. She pulled on her sneakers and joined Lisa by Veronica’s cubby.

  Veronica pulled an envelope out of her designer handbag and handed it to Lisa. “See for yourself,” she said. “Personally, I think there are five or six pictures there that would win any contest, anywhere, but I’m not sure which is the very best of them. Lisa, didn’t you take some sort of photography class sometime? You might be able to help me choose …”

  Lisa closed her ears to Veronica’s prattle. She didn’t need a guided tour. The photographs had to speak for themselves. She pulled the prints out of the envelope.

  “… so I had Daddy’s pilot take me up. You can’t imagine how hard it was to make him understand that these couldn’t be just any old photographs …”

  The first photograph was simply blue. It took Lisa a moment to realize she was looking at a photograph of sky. She handed it to Carole.

  “… so I told him in no uncertain terms exactly what he had to do. You know how these people are …”

  The second photograph was of sky and clouds. It was pretty, but it didn’t seem very special until Lisa realized that it was taken very close to the clouds.

  “… and you can’t imagine how awful it was to bounce around in that thing. If I ever have my own plane—and I’m sure I will—it’s going to be larger so I’ll have a smoother ride …”

  The next photograph was of a mountainside. Lisa looked at it twice before she recognized it.

  “Rock Ridge,” she said, handing the photograph to Carole.

  “Well, of course it’s Rock Ridge,” said Veronica. “It was right near the airport. We never did go far away, you know. That silly man …”

  The next photograph had something else in it. At first all Lisa saw was the vague outline of a shadow against the cloud. The photograph was blurred.

  “… well, we hit some sort of air pocket or something there. It was terribly bouncy the whole time. You can’t imagine …”

  “Look, Carole, it’s a glider!” said Lisa. Carole looked over her shoulder. Lisa shifted that photograph to the back of the pile and looked at the next one. It was of the glider’s tail.

  “Is that …?” Carole asked. The girls squinted to make out the marking on the tail of the glider. Lisa switched to the next picture.

  “Number thirteen!”

  “It’s Phil’s uncle’s glider!” Carole said.

  Veronica preened. “Yes, it is,” she said. “Do you think Phil will be pleased?”

  Lisa was so stunned she couldn’t answer the question. She looked at the next few photographs. She saw that the plane had gotten much closer to the glider, and then there was a picture where both of the people in the glid
er had their hands up.

  “They’re waving at me!” Veronica announced proudly. “Of course, then that silly Hubert said we just had to go home. He spent a whole lot of time making a fancy turn. I think the man was just trying to make me sick to my stomach. I told Daddy all about it as soon as I got home and he said he’d give Hubert a piece of his mind. It’s no more than he deserves …”

  Lisa examined that picture carefully. There was something very odd about the way they were waving. But it wasn’t until she looked at the next picture that she realized what it was.

  In the next photograph, the glider was banking extremely sharply to the left and was aiming down!

  “Carole!” Lisa said. “This is it! This is what happened!”

  There were no more photographs.

  “Well, which one of the pictures do you think is the winner?” Veronica demanded.

  “We’ve got to do something,” said Carole.

  “Right away,” Lisa agreed.

  Lisa handed the whole stack of pictures to Veronica. There was no time to waste telling her what she’d done. There was never any point in trying to tell Veronica anything.

  “WAIT A MINUTE! What are we going to do?” Carole called to Lisa as she trailed out of the locker area after her.

  “We’ve got to get to a phone!” Lisa said. “We have to call the airport.” She darted into Mrs. Reg’s office, where there was a phone on the desk. But the phone was being used at the moment. Deborah was just hanging up.

  “Oh, just who I was looking for,” she began, but she stopped when she saw the looks on Lisa’s and Carole’s faces. “What’s the matter?”

  Lisa explained what had happened.

  “You mean Phil and his uncle are missing?”

  “Right, and Veronica had pictures—they must have crashed. We know right where they are! Or at least where they were last seen!” said Lisa.

  “It’s next to Rock Ridge,” Carole said. “We saw it in the photographs. Somebody’s got to be told.”

  It only took Deborah a few seconds to get the number for the airport and to relay the information. Deborah listened carefully for a few minutes and then thanked the woman and hung up.