Stray Horse

by Bonnie Bryant

  WHAT’S GOING ON IN LISA’S FAMILY?

  Lisa woke up at dawn. Her room was gray in the early morning light, and the house was as quiet as it had been the night before. She looked at her watch. It was 6:15. She didn’t have to be at school until eight. If she hurried, she could stop by CARL on her way to school and check on PJ. Her parents wouldn’t be up for another half hour. It would mean she’d miss them, but PJ was important, and she was sure they’d understand.

  Lisa hurried through her morning routine, then picked up her book bag and went downstairs. She scribbled a note for her mother and headed for the front door. As she passed the den, she noticed a pile of blankets on the sofa, and then realized it wasn’t really a pile of blankets. It was her father with some blankets on him. He must have gotten in really late the night before and hadn’t wanted to wake up Lisa’s mother. She blew him a silent kiss and went out the front door.

  RL: 3.6, AGES 008-012

  STRAY HORSE

  A Bantam Skylark Book / September 2001

  “The Saddle Club” is a registered trademark of Bonnie Bryant Hiller. The Saddle Club design/logo, which consists of a riding crop and a riding hat, is a trademark of Bantam Books.

  “USPC” and “Pony Club” are registered trademarks of The United States Pony Clubs, Inc., at The Kentucky Horse Park, 4071 Iron Works Pike, Lexington, KY 40511-8462.

  All rights reserved

  Text copyright © 2001 by Bonnie Bryant Hiller

  Cover art copyright © 2001 by Greg Noakes and Dennis Wisken, courtesy of Crawfords Australia No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82605-3

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Bantam Skylark is an imprint of Random House Children’s Books. SKYLARK BOOK, BANTAM BOOKS, and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  About the Author

  LISA ATWOOD OPENED her eyes. In the gray light that filtered through the window, it took her a moment to orient herself. She was home. It was a Saturday morning. Nothing unusual in that. She glanced at the clock on her bedside table. It was 6:30. She calculated backward. She wanted to get to the stable by eight. Half an hour to shower and dress, fifteen minutes to eat, fifteen minutes to walk over there. She could sleep for another few minutes.

  “Good morning, sleepy.”

  Lisa had almost forgotten that one of her best friends, Carole Hanson, had slept over.

  “Good morning to you,” Lisa said. “Been up long?”

  “No, I just woke up,” said Carole. “Is it time to get up?”

  “Not quite,” Lisa said.

  “We promised Stevie we’d call her at seven,” Carole reminded Lisa.

  “We’ve got half an hour, then,” Lisa said, pulling the covers up securely under her chin and enjoying the tranquility of the morning. She loved it when everything was quiet in her house. A car door slammed. Lisa turned on her side.

  “We should call her at quarter of and then again at seven,” Carole said.

  Lisa laughed. “Maybe we should have started calling her at five o’clock!”

  Stevie—short for Stephanie—Lake was the third of their inseparable threesome. Although the three of them were very different from one another in many ways, they had a common bond that was far stronger than their differences: They were all utterly, totally, absolutely nuts about horses. They’d discovered this bond soon after they’d met and had decided to formalize it by declaring themselves the first members of their own club: The Saddle Club. They gave themselves only two rules. The first was one none of them had ever been tempted to break: They had to be horse-crazy. The second had been a little dicier. They’d declared that they always had to be willing to help one another out, no matter what.

  Sometimes it seemed that Stevie was the one who needed the most help. Her friends liked to describe her as lots of fun and a magnet for trouble. Stevie had three brothers, one older, one younger, and her twin, Alex. A lot of the time when she was getting into trouble it was because she was determined to right some wrong she felt they’d done her. The Lake household was a minefield of practical jokes the boys and Stevie played on one another. More than once, Stevie had had to explain to her teacher that she really had finished her math homework, but she’d done it with a disappearing-ink pen, and if the teacher would just put the paper in lemon juice …

  Stevie was wild, fun, funny, and irrepressible. She was also a sound sleeper. Calling her to be sure she woke up in time for their Pony Club meeting was one of the easiest things her friends ever had to do for her.

  While Stevie was prone to practical jokes and wild schemes—and her will was almost always good—her results were uneven at best. She often complained that her grades in school would be better if she didn’t have to spend so much of her class time in the principal’s office. Her teachers didn’t see it that way.

  Lisa was the absolute opposite in that regard. She never handed in her assignments late, she never forgot to study for a test, and she never got less than an A on anything. Her clothes were always clean and neatly ironed, and her hair always stayed in place. She was calm, rational, and logical. Sometimes she took on more than she could handle, but her friends were always there to help her out when that happened. Lisa was the newest rider of the three, but as their instructor, Max Regnery, said, she was a very fast learner. Within a short time she’d just about caught up with the years of experience that Carole and Stevie had.

  Carole was the best rider of the three of them, and if they were all horse-crazy, Carole was the horse-craziest. She’d been riding since she was very young. Her father, a colonel in the Marines, had had to move from base to base when she was a little girl. The bases may have been different from one another, but they all had stables either on them or nearby, and Carole learned at an early age that when everything was changing around her, horses were her anchor. That had comforted and helped her through those moves and through her mother’s illness and death a few years earlier. She and her father lived not far from Quantico, Virginia, where he was now stationed. Quantico was near the town of Willow Creek, where Carole and her friends rode at Pine Hollow Stables and where the girls went to school. But Carole’s house wasn’t within walking distance of the stable, so she liked to sleep over at one of her friends’ houses when she wanted to be at Pine Hollow early on a Saturday morning. Both Stevie and Lisa were always happy to have her. In fact, the three of them were planning a sleepover at Stevie’s house for that night so that they could get to the stable early on Sunday morning as well. Sleepovers usually meant extended Saddle Club meetings, at which the girls could do their next-to-favorite thing, which was talking about horses. Their favorite, of course, was actually riding them.

  Carole pushed the covers away and reached for the phone. After three rings, a sleepy-sounding Stevie picked up.

  “Fifteen-minute warning,” Carole said. She hung up before Stevie could say something she might regret. “I’ll shower first,” Carole said to Li
sa.

  Lisa smiled. Like Carole, she was eager to get to Pine Hollow. But unlike Carole, she was glad for another few minutes in bed.

  While Carole showered, Lisa listened for sounds in the house. Her parents were usually up early on Saturdays, but she didn’t hear any movement downstairs. She had a few minutes of utter calm and peace. Who knew what the rest of the day would bring?

  When Carole emerged from the bathroom, Lisa went in, leaving Carole to make the final, dire call to Stevie. Twenty minutes later the two girls went downstairs together.

  The lights were on, but the house was unusually quiet. Lisa’s father was sitting in the den, reading the newspaper, a glass of orange juice on the table near him.

  “Good morning, Daddy,” Lisa said.

  “Morning, Mr. Atwood,” said Carole.

  “Good morning, girls,” he said, then shuffled his paper.

  Lisa and Carole went into the kitchen. Mrs. Atwood wasn’t there, but there were signs she had been. The kitchen table was set for them for breakfast; the coffee was made.

  Lisa selected a variety of cereals from the cabinet, poured juice for herself and Carole, and invited her father to join them.

  “I’ll just read the paper,” he said, remaining in the den.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “Hmph,” he answered.

  Lisa shrugged and sat down. They were out of milk. She put the cereal back and took some bread out of the refrigerator to make toast. She popped four slices into the toaster, and when they emerged she and Carole buttered them and spread on some jam. Breakfast was finished in just a few minutes. The girls then took some time to scrounge up sandwich fixings for lunch.

  It didn’t take long to assemble a couple of tuna fish sandwiches, slice some carrots, and find some cookies and chips and a can of soda for each of them. Carole was putting a napkin in each bag when the kitchen door swung open and Mrs. Atwood marched in, her face stony, apparently unaware of the presence of either Carole or Lisa.

  “There!” she sputtered toward the door to the den. “Now you’ve got the milk for your coffee. Are you satisfied?”

  She put the milk in the refrigerator and slammed the door. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table, scowling.

  Mr. Atwood came in, poured himself some coffee, and went to the refrigerator for the milk.

  Carole was uncomfortable with witnessing such a scene and found herself wishing she’d stayed in the shower a lot longer. Maybe she could run upstairs and get back in. Or maybe a hole in the floor would open up and swallow her. Another look around and she realized it wouldn’t have made any difference. Nobody seemed to have the slightest idea that she was there.

  “I got my history project back yesterday,” Lisa said brightly. “Remember the one about Julius Caesar? With the model of the Roman senate?” Nobody said anything, but Lisa continued. “I got an A on it.” Still no response. “I had to work really hard on that one—boy, you can’t imagine how hard it was to build a model of the Roman senate. It made a big difference that we’d been in Rome on vacation. So thank you guys for that!”

  “That’s nice,” her father said.

  “Oh, and I got a perfect score on the spelling test.”

  Lisa’s parents didn’t seem to register the fact that their daughter was speaking to them. They were each glaring at different sections of the newspaper.

  Carole wanted to help. “You always get perfect scores on spelling tests. Every other test, too!” she teased.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Atwood.

  Carole squirmed.

  “Well, I’ve got a science test coming up next week,” Lisa said. “It’s in earth science and that’s a really difficult subject for me. I’ve got to study especially hard for it.”

  No response.

  “What do you think we’ll be working on at Horse Wise today?” Carole asked. Horse Wise was the name of their Pony Club.

  “Max said it would be something different. That man really loves surprises!” Lisa said. “I can hardly wait.”

  The stilted conversation and the stony set of parents was more than Carole could bear. She stood up, getting ready to leave.

  “Isn’t it time for you to leave for the—uh—stable?” Mrs. Atwood asked.

  Carole’s thought exactly. “Come on, Lisa. Let’s get our stuff,” she said.

  The girls put their dishes in the sink. Normally Carole would have rinsed them and put them in the dishwasher, but she suspected Lisa’s parents wouldn’t have noticed if she’d flown them across the room Frisbee-style, and Carole simply couldn’t wait to get out of the kitchen.

  She followed her friend upstairs, unsure of what to say. She’d seen parents have arguments before. She’d seen parents and kids have arguments. But she couldn’t remember seeing anything that cold-blooded—and all about a carton of milk? Well, that was the point, she suspected; it wasn’t about a carton of milk. Arguments could be like icebergs. Only one-seventh was above water.

  “Lisa …,” Carole began.

  “Do you remember where I put my boots?” Lisa asked.

  “In your closet on the floor, where you always put them,” said Carole.

  A few minutes later Carole followed Lisa back downstairs, carrying everything they would need for their Pony Club meeting and the lesson that would follow. Lisa’s parents were still in the kitchen, still glaring at their newspapers.

  Lisa gave them each a hug and a kiss. Carole thanked them for letting her stay over.

  “Have a good day,” Mrs. Atwood said, but her smile looked forced.

  Carole thought that as soon as she got out of the house, she just might have a good day, and in any case she was certain she was going to have a better day than Lisa’s parents.

  She couldn’t do anything about that, she knew, but she could do something abut Lisa. It took her a while to assemble her thoughts. She wanted Lisa to know that it was okay, Lisa shouldn’t be embarrassed about her parents’ behavior and Carole didn’t care anyway. She remembered that her own parents used to have arguments sometimes. What she couldn’t remember, and wouldn’t say to Lisa, was ever seeing her parents seething like that.

  “Listen, Lisa,” Carole said carefully. “It’s okay and you don’t have anything to be embarrassed about.”

  “What?” Lisa asked.

  “You know—that,” Carole said. “The milk thing.”

  “My dad likes milk in his coffee,” Lisa said.

  It wasn’t the words as much as the tone that said Lisa didn’t want to talk—didn’t think there was anything to talk about. That made Carole think about icebergs again. Just one-seventh, she told herself.

  “I can’t wait to see what Max is up to,” said Lisa. “I mean, what could it be?”

  Carole let the first topic drop. If Lisa wanted to forget about it, if she wasn’t upset, that was good enough for Carole. “I can’t wait, either,” she said, and she meant it, too.

  “WELL, LOOK WHO made it!” Lisa joked, spotting Stevie, who was waiting for them in the driveway at Pine Hollow.

  “Thanks for waking me up. I wouldn’t have missed this for anything!”

  “What?” Lisa asked.

  “This meeting,” said Stevie. “It’s going to be soooo much fun.”

  “They all are,” Carole told her, heading toward the stable. “Because they’re all about horses.”

  “Well, this meeting isn’t, but it’s still going to be fun,” said Stevie.

  “So what’s the story?” Lisa asked, linking arms with Stevie and following Carole toward the cluster of kids already waiting for the meeting to begin.

  “I’ll give you a hint,” Stevie said. “It starts with a C and ends with A-R-L.”

  “Judy’s here?” Carole asked eagerly, scanning the grounds for Judy Barker, Pine Hollow’s equine veterinarian. CARL stood for County Animal Rescue League. It was a local shelter run by volunteers for abandoned and ill animals. Whenever the animal in question was a horse, Judy volunteered her time, and
Pine Hollow’s students often helped out, learning about animal care and veterinary medicine as they pitched in.

  “Nope,” Stevie said. “It’s Doc Tock.”

  Doc Tock was actually Dr. Takamura, but her patients’ owners usually shortened both the names. She was a small-animal vet. In her regular practice that usually meant dogs and cats, occasional parakeets and hamsters. At CARL, it could mean anything from aardvarks to wildcats.

  Max called the meeting to order and indicated that all the students should come over to where he and Doc Tock were standing. He began by introducing Doc Tock, though most of the students already knew her.

  “We’re going to do something a little different today, kids, and I’m going to let Doc Tock tell you all about it.”

  The students fell silent, eager to hear what was going on.

  “You were probably all in town for the big rainstorm last week,” she began. Lisa thought back to the violent storm, with strong winds, thunder, and lightning. Doc Tock continued. “There was a lot of obvious damage to the land. What isn’t quite so obvious to many people is that a storm like that is as destructive to the wildlife as it is to the woodlands. CARL has been inundated with new residents. We’ve got birds, squirrels, raccoons, a skunk, two snakes, a deer with a broken leg, plus several feral cats and the usual assortment of pet dogs, cats, and hamsters. In short, we’re overwhelmed, and we need some help. Max suggested that you all might be willing to come to our aid.”

  “We’re not doctors,” said May.

  “I don’t expect you to be,” said Doc Tock. “I’m just hoping you’ll be able to help with feeding and cleaning and maybe assist Judy and me in a few things. It’s just for this morning. Can I count on you?”

  “You bet,” Carole said enthusiastically. Although there was nothing she loved more than horses, other animals were close seconds and she was more than willing to help—even if it meant missing out on a couple of hours with her favorites.

  It turned out that just about everybody was willing to pitch in at CARL. The one exception, which surprised nobody, was Veronica diAngelo. Veronica was Pine Hollow’s richest and snobbiest rider. Her idea of helping someone out at Pine Hollow was to let the stable hands know there was a job to do. That way she never broke a sweat—or a fingernail.