One Brave Summer (Quartz Creek Ranch)

by Amber J. Keyser

  On the other side of the barbed-wire fence, three teenagers lounged on the hood of the mud-splattered Jeep. A lanky, pale boy with slicked-back brown hair sneered at them. “I see you’ve got a new crop of losers.” The other boys laughed.

  Madison glowered at him. “Go back to Grandma, Thomas. We’re on a tour of the ranch. Good clean fun. Unlike you guys.”

  “Who, me?” Thomas held up his hands and made a face like he couldn’t believe the accusations. “We’re out collecting. Good clean fun.”

  She pursed her lips. “Right. I believe that.”

  Thomas flashed an oily smile. As Madison brought the Ranger back up to speed, he called after her. “I hope the parade goes better for you this year!”

  “Who was that?” asked Paley.

  Madison wiped a hand across her brow. “That’s the Goodsteins’ grandson and his dumb gang, the Rock Hounds.”

  “Are they into geology?” Sundee asked.

  “Supposedly. They sell rocks and minerals to the shop in town, I think, but they seem to be more interested in causing trouble.”

  Leila leaned forward. “What did he mean about the parade?”

  “Every year, we ride in the Fourth of July parade,” Madison explained. “Last year, they set off a cherry bomb right behind my horse, Snow White. She bolted down Main Street right before the parade kicked off. I missed the whole thing.”

  Chapter Ten

  Madison and the girls continued driving along the barbed-wire fence. So far, so good. There was no sign that Lorraine had broken through.

  “She’s probably sleeping in the shade somewhere,” Sundee said. “I want to go back. It’s too hot.”

  Leila nodded her agreement. “I was hoping we could do the soccer thing with Cupcake.”

  Madison shook her head. “We’ve got to keep going until we meet the guys.”

  Up ahead, the terrain was getting rocky, and the fence went up and down with the contours of the land. The track was getting worse.

  “Is that Fool’s Butte?” Sundee asked, pointing to the huge rock formation up ahead.

  Madison nodded.

  “How did you know that?” Leila asked Sundee, bracing herself against the bumps.

  “I was checking out a map of the ranch. There’s supposed to be an old mine in it.”

  “A gold mine?” Paley asked, already imagining a dragon’s treasure.

  “That’s what the pioneers thought when they came to Quartz Creek,” said Madison.

  “I get it,” Leila crowed. “They were thinking megabucks and it turned out to be worthless. And then to have it named after you—Fool’s Butte—ouch!”

  Madison stopped the Ranger at a spot where the track seemed to vanish in the jumble of boulders. “We’ve got to split up here,” she said, getting out. “Look.”

  The four of them were standing on the edge of a steep, rocky slope that dropped away to the right. The fence disappeared over the edge and was swallowed by a thicket of bushes and small trees at the base of the drop-off. Paley could see where it emerged in the distance on the other side of the ravine. Down below, where the ground flattened out again, there was a low, marshy area. Then it became the Goodsteins’ wheat field, stretching as far as Paley could see.

  “I have to drive the Ranger around this steep bit,” said Madison, pointing to the left where Paley could see faint wheel tracks taking a wide circle around the rocky area. “But Lorraine might have muddled her way down the ravine. There’s a spring down there that the cows sometimes like to drink at. Follow the fence line on foot. I’ll meet you on the other side. Holler if you see Lorraine.”

  “Are you sure that’s safe?” asked Sundee.

  Leila rolled her eyes and grabbed Paley’s hand. “Let’s go.”

  “Whatever you do,” said Madison, “don’t cross the fence onto their property.” The noise of the Ranger faded as they dropped over the edge.

  “I don’t like this,” Sundee whined as they clambered down the steepest part of the rock fall.

  Paley and Leila exchanged annoyed looks.

  “At least it’s cooler in here,” Paley offered, but Sundee kept whining about the sharp rocks and the possibility of rattlesnakes and who lets kids go chasing after cows anyway.

  Paley pushed through the thick shrubs and peered this way and that for Lorraine. The ground was getting softer. Paley figured she must be getting close to the spring. A few feet farther on, she stepped over a deep, hoof-shaped depression that was filled with water. Then another, and another.

  “Hey! Over here!” she called.

  Leila crashed through the brush toward her. “Awesome!” she said, grinning wildly when Paley pointed at the tracks. “Looks like cow to me!”

  Sundee caught up with them, panting and red-faced. “Did you find her?”

  “Practically!” said Leila.

  “Good,” said Sundee. “Let’s go find Madison and get out of here.”

  The other girls stared at her. “No way,” said Leila.

  “Yeah,” said Paley, “we’ve got to follow the tracks.”

  “Through the fence?” Sundee said, pointing past them. Sure enough, a small tree had fallen, taking down a section of fence, and the tracks were headed straight for the Goodsteins’.

  “We can’t let them get Lorraine!” Paley protested.

  Sundee put her hands on her hips. “We’ll get in trouble.”

  Leila threw up her hands. “We’re already in trouble. That’s why we’re at the ranch.”

  Sundee looked like she’d swallowed a toad.

  “Come on,” Leila said to Paley. “Let’s get Lorraine.”

  Paley looked from one mad face to the other, shrugged at Sundee, and followed Leila through the fence. After a minute, Paley could hear Sundee following them. The ground grew even softer. Their boots made a squelching sound with every step. Paley’s pants were splattered with mud. Her senses were on high alert, looking for Lorraine and listening for the sound of Thomas Goodstein’s truck.

  Just when she thought maybe they should turn back, Paley caught a flash of black and white behind a clump of bushes. There was Lorraine, knee-deep in mud. The cow pulled up a big mouthful of new wheat, gazed at the girls with liquid brown eyes, and chewed.

  “We’ve got to go, you guys,” Sundee pleaded. “The Bridles are going to kick us off the ranch.”

  Paley frowned at her. “Not without Lorraine. No one gets left behind!”

  “She’s huge,” said Sundee. “How are you going to get her to come? She’s not a dog.”

  “I don’t know. Let me think.” Paley wracked her brain. If only she could cast a Summoning Spell, but this was real life. Faint engine noise became audible over the birdsong and the sound of Lorraine chewing. She had to think of something.

  “My belt!”

  Leila beamed. “Yes!”

  “This is nuts,” said Sundee.

  “Well, go back to Madison, then,” Leila snapped. “We’re saving Lorraine!”

  Paley didn’t bother to watch Sundee stomp off toward where they were supposed to meet Madison. Instead she unbuckled her belt and looped it around Lorraine’s neck. The cow chewed and stared and chewed some more.

  Leila crooned at Lorraine. “It’s okay, honey. We’re going to save you from those nasty neighbors.”

  “Come on,” Paley urged, giving the belt a tug.

  Nothing.

  She pulled harder and looked at Leila. “What do we do?”

  Leila sucked on her lower lip, thinking hard, then she snapped her fingers. “Got it!” Leila wrenched up several large handfuls of wheat and held them in front of Lorraine’s nose. The cow nibbled. Leila backed up. “Keep coming, Lorraine. Tasty nibbles right here.” Together the two girls urged the cow toward the Bridles’ property. Leila kept offering food. Paley kept tugging. Every step sent mud flying. Paley could feel it splattering her face and arms, and she couldn’t stop smiling. Paley wanted to cheer out loud.

  Until they reached Sundee and caught sight of Mad
ison.

  “What in the—?” Madison slammed her hands on her hips. “Girls!”

  Paley’s victorious feeling sank right down into her soaked boots.

  “Look,” said Leila, with guilt-tinged cheeriness. “We found her.”

  Madison’s face was pinched. “You are on the Goodsteins’ property.”

  “But . . .” Paley began.

  Madison glared harder.

  “I told them not to go,” Sundee squeaked. Leila shot dagger eyes at her. Lorraine mooed and nudged Leila’s hand for another mouthful of wheat.

  Paley heard the rumble of a motor. “Is that them?” she asked, panic rising.

  “You’d better hope not,” huffed Madison. “Let’s go.” She got behind Lorraine and smacked her on the rump. “Pull!”

  With Madison in the back helping, they managed to get Lorraine moving. Once they were safely on the Bridles’ land, Paley risked a look at Leila. Her brand-new shirt was a mess and her hair was full of twigs from climbing through the thicket. Leila’s freckles were obscured under a splatter of mud. Paley couldn’t help it. She started to giggle. “You’re filthy!”

  A snort escaped Leila—a very unladylike snort. “So are you!”

  Paley tried to smother her giggles, but every time she looked at Leila, they came back, bigger than before. Back at the Ranger, Madison silenced them with a glare. She punched numbers on her cell phone so vigorously that Paley thought she might break it. The conversation with Paul was clipped and brief. “Yes. We have her. Bottom of the ravine. Yes. I know. I’ll let the Bridles handle it.”

  Handle it?

  Paley knew what Madison meant. She meant handle them.

  Still, Paley couldn’t stop grinning. No matter what awful chore the Bridles gave her, she and Leila had completed their quest, and Lorraine was safe. It was a victory!

  \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

  The zinging, happy feeling didn’t last long. As they drove slowly back to the ranch, leading Lorraine, the usually cheerful, chatty Madison was like a little black cloud of death. She only spoke to give commands. Shorten her rope up. Don’t pull on her neck. Sundee ignored them too, except once when she leaned in and said, “You’d better not get me into trouble.”

  Back at the ranch, the three girls were banished to their bunkhouse while Madison, Paul, and the Bridles conferred. Leila tried to get a card game going, but no one was interested. Sundee kept peeking out the window to see if anyone was coming. Paley thought it was all a lot of fuss for nothing. She was in the bathroom wiping the mud off her face when she had an idea.

  A great idea!

  “Hey,” she said, going back into the main room. “I know what our cabin name should be—the Mud Rustlers! You know, like cattle rustlers but unwashed.”

  “That’s funny,” said Leila. “I like it!”

  “It sounds illegal,” said Sundee, frowning.

  Leila threw up her hands. “Oh my gosh, Sundee. Stop being so perfect. What did you do to get sent here anyway? Get a B on something?”

  A wave of emotion flooded Sundee’s face. She spluttered like a teakettle overflowing. “Who told you that?”

  “Told me what?” Leila asked, confused. She looked to Paley for an explanation.

  Paley shrugged. She was as lost as Leila, but it was pretty clear Sundee was about to cry.

  “About the grades!” Sundee wailed.

  Leila held out her hands. “Calm down. I was messing with you.”

  But it was way too late for that. Sundee collapsed on her bunk in tears. Paley bit her lip. Sundee rubbed her the wrong way, but it was awful to see her so upset. She sat down beside her and patted her shoulder.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Sundee’s words were muffled by her pillow when she said, “I got a B in advanced math.”

  Paley looked at Leila. It was her turn to shrug. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  Sundee pushed herself up, indignant. “I have never had a B, not ever!”

  Paley thought of her own marginal performance in math. “Okay, then. That sucked, I guess.”

  “I got sent here,” she said, grimacing at Leila, “because I hacked the school computer and changed my grade to an A. But my teacher noticed and had the school look into it, and I got caught.”

  “Oh,” said Leila.

  “And I don’t want to talk about it again, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Paley, and Leila added, “Case closed.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The girls kept their promise, and when the Bridles came to talk to them, they explained that Sundee had tried to stop them from going onto the Goodsteins’ property. Sundee flashed them a grateful smile, but Paley and Leila didn’t get off the hook so easily.

  The next day after lessons, Madison and Fletch took Sundee and Cameron into town for ice cream. Paley sighed as she watched them drive down Bridlemile Road. “I want cookies-and-cream.”

  “I know,” said Leila. “They’re going to register for the Fourth of July parade, too.”

  “While we’ve got manure duty,” said Paley, staring at three huge piles of horse poop—fresh, medium, and old. Their job was shoveling the old, composted stuff into wheelbarrows and spreading it in the garden. And joy, oh, joy, they got Bryce on top of that. The way he’d been pushing Cameron around had not gone unnoticed after all.

  Ma Etty had handed out gloves and shovels and rakes, and now she and Mr. Bridle were sitting in the shade of the porch working on the ranch accounting while the girls suffered.

  All for rescuing Lorraine! It was so unfair.

  Paley jammed her shovel in the pile and hefted another load into the wheelbarrow. It didn’t smell as bad as the fresh stuff, but it was still gross. She tried to imagine she was shoveling rubies or diamonds into an iron-bound strongbox.

  It didn’t work.

  After an hour, they stopped for a water break and clustered in the shade of the porch. Bryce was flushed and sweating, Leila was too tired to talk, and the Bridles were deeply engrossed in rows of numbers when Paley heard a truck on the road. The crew cab pickup was so shiny new that road dust practically refused to settle on it. The vehicle pulled to a stop near the house, and two people climbed out. One was a heavyset man in a red plaid shirt and a trucker hat. The other was a squat, slightly bowlegged woman with short-cropped brown hair.

  “Willard,” the man said.

  “Good morning, Jim. Delia,” answered Mr. Bridle.

  The woman strode toward the porch, her eyes drilling into the Bridles. “We’ve got a bone to pick with you.”

  Mr. Bridle took a deep breath. “What’s troubling you now, Delia?”

  “There is new fencing in the ravine.”

  “Yup.”

  “Why’d you redo it?” Her voice grated on Paley.

  Mr. Bridle took off his hat and ran his fingers through his short hair, making it stick out crazy. “Well, Delia . . .” he began, speaking slowly and almost managing to keep the irritation out of his voice. “Etty and I are always trying to keep the place nice. Been ranching here a long time. Things wear out.”

  “If you really wanted to improve our property values,” she snapped, “you would stop having them kids around.” Delia Goodstein raked across them with her eyes. “I saw the tracks in the mud. Which one of you delinquents done it?”

  Paley felt like she’d swallowed concrete. Leila’s eyes were bugging out of her head. Bryce set his cup down with a bang. All of them kept their mouths glued shut. No one in their right mind would admit anything to that woman. She might bite your head off.

  Mr. Bridle broke the tension by rising from the porch and walking down the steps to meet the Goodsteins. “We’ve been neighbors for a long time,” said Mr. Bridle. “We don’t see eye to eye on much. I don’t see why I have to keep repeating myself. But here we are. Again. These kids,” he said in his steady, calm way, “are not delinquents. They are not trouble. They are not a problem for you or for me or for my lovely wife.”

  T
he woman sneered. “Your little angels broke into my—”

  Mr. Bridle cut her off. “Several of my guests rescued a cow that had gone astray. She was lucky they came along. I am lucky they came along. And Paul has repaired the fence, so we are finished here.”

  She put her hands on her hips and turned toward her husband. “Can you believe this? Can you believe him talking to me like that? Look at that one.” She pointed at Bryce, who was glaring like he wanted to show her what delinquent really meant. “He’s a walking mugshot. And you”—she fixed her ugly little eyes on Paley—“I can tell a criminal when I see one.”

  A hot rush of tears choked Paley. She squeezed her eyes shut to stop them from coming. She’d wanted to help Lorraine, not to cause trouble for the Bridles. Oh why, oh why did her parents send her here? She should be home in her cave doing the only thing she knew how to do.

  Delia Goodstein stomped down the stairs toward the pickup, sweeping her husband along behind her. Before she shut the door, she waggled one finger at the kids on the porch and said, “You’d better stay off our land! We’ll be watching you, and next time we catch you, you won’t get off this easy.”

  Everyone on the porch stood frozen until the truck roared off.

  As soon as they disappeared around a bend in the road, Ma Etty wrapped her arms around Paley. “That woman doesn’t know a thing about you. Not one single thing.”

  Mr. Bridle laid his hand on Bryce’s shoulder. “She is very good at jumping to conclusions and very poor at seeing the truth.”

  “Where’s the sugar?” spat Leila. “I’ll fix their stupid truck.”

  “Leila . . .” Ma Etty warned.

  “Why don’t you three finish up in the garden?” said Mr. Bridle.

  As they headed to the wheelbarrows, Paley wiped away tears. Leila’s offer of sabotage had helped. A little. A warm starburst feeling in her chest pushed back Delia Goodstein’s ugly words. But the tears were not cooperating.

  “You’ll get used to it,” said Bryce.

  Paley looked up at him. “Used to what?”

  “Used to people assuming the worst about you.” He went back to work without another word, slamming each shovelful into the wheelbarrow with such force that it shook. Paley didn’t think he was as used to it as he wanted her to believe. The red blotches on Bryce’s face seemed like more than the heat.