“I called Veronica, just like you said,” Lisa began. “But she wasn’t there.”
“So?”
Carole still couldn’t see anything to be worried about. But when Lisa continued, Carole understood. “I spoke with their housekeeper. It turns out that Mr. and Mrs. diAngelo are out of town for the day. So, the housekeeper is in charge of Veronica. She sounded totally frantic when I asked for Veronica and started blurting out all kinds of things, but the gist of it was that Veronica is missing! The housekeeper said she’d disappeared right after breakfast and they hadn’t heard a word from her and they are terribly worried.”
“Yeah,” Stevie said. “What if these creeps aren’t just horsenappers? Like, they think they’ve struck it rich when they realize they actually have the horse belonging to the diAngelos, so they get greedy and decide to swipe their daughter, too.”
“Veronica? Kidnapped?” Carole said numbly as the idea sank in.
“Wait a minute,” Lisa said. “The maid didn’t say anything about a ransom note. We don’t know she’s been kidnapped …”
“But we don’t know she hasn’t been!” Stevie said.
“Can we take the chance?” Carole asked. “I mean, if both her parents are out of town, who is there to help her?”
“I think we’d better have a Saddle Club meeting and we’d better not have it right here,” Stevie said, glancing around. “The paddocks have ears!”
Carole decided Starlight had cooled down enough. She put him in his stall, cross-tied him, loosened his girth, and the three girls headed for the hayloft. It was a quiet place where they could talk without anybody overhearing them. Stevie moved bales of hay around so they could sit in a close circle.
“Come on,” she invited her friends. “We have to figure out what to do.”
“It’s obvious what we have to do,” Lisa said. “We have to figure out if Veronica really was kidnapped.”
“We don’t have time for that,” Stevie said. “We have to assume she was and save her. Otherwise, it might be too late.”
“Fine, fine,” Carole agreed. “But just how do you propose to save her? We don’t even know where to begin looking.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about that,” Stevie said. “See, the way I figure it, the horses, and Veronica, have to be nearby. I wasn’t absolutely sure of that until Veronica disappeared. The horsenappers would only have taken Veronica if they’d been in the area. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have risked coming back. So, they’re here, and what does that mean?”
“Willow Creek’s a pretty small town,” Lisa reminded Stevie.
“Yes, so there’s no way they can be hanging out in any of the houses or farms. We know everybody. Somebody would notice them. Therefore, they’re not in a house.”
“Therefore, they’re hiding out in the woods,” Carole said.
“Precisely!” Stevie announced. “So let’s go find them!”
“How?” Lisa asked.
“Horseback, of course,” Carole said.
“Of course,” Stevie said, her eyes gleaming with excitement.
“Of course,” Lisa concluded.
THE GIRLS QUICKLY saddled their horses and prepared to ride into the woods. The trouble was, there were a lot of woods in Willow Creek. In fact, there was a whole state forest there, crisscrossed with trails that led to all kinds of remote places.
“Where on earth are we going to go?” Lisa asked logically.
“I don’t know if this is right, but I do know it makes sense,” Carole began. “If I were going to hide horses and needed access by road, plus essentials like fresh water, I’d take them to the rock quarry.”
“Hey,” Stevie said, genuinely impressed. “That makes good sense. It makes especially good sense because the woods right near Pine Hollow are filled with cross-country riders now. Smart horsenappers wouldn’t want to have their hideout turn out to be on the trail of forty or fifty riders! So, let’s check it out.”
The rock quarry was on the other side of the road from Pine Hollow. Whenever the girls rode on trails in the woods, they generally stayed on the Pine Hollow side, the one Max had chosen for the cross-country course, but Stevie had lived all of her life in Willow Creek and knew the entire forest very well. “Follow me,” she said. They did.
They took the road for about a hundred yards and then turned left on a fire road that led into the forest. The fire road was wide enough for all three girls to ride abreast.
“You know, it’s a funny thing, but I feel kind of sorry for Veronica,” Stevie remarked.
“I often do,” Lisa said. “Anyone who behaves that horribly must be a very unhappy person.”
Carole looked at her. “I never really thought of it that way,” she said. “I’ve only ever felt sorry for her horses, but I suppose we should feel sorry for her.”
“That isn’t what I meant,” Stevie interjected. “I don’t feel sorry because she behaves horribly. She’s had all kinds of chances to learn to behave better and she’s got everything in the world a girl could need to be happy, so there’s no excuse for her to misbehave and be unhappy. I actually was referring to the fact that being kidnapped probably isn’t exactly swell fun.”
“You don’t suppose the kidnappers have tied her up, do you?” Lisa asked.
“I don’t know about tied up, but if they’ve got any sense, they’ve got her gagged,” Stevie said, showing less sympathy than she had just a few minutes before.
“If I were Veronica, the worst part would be knowing that they could hurt my horse,” Carole said. The thought made her lean forward and pat Starlight reassuringly on his neck.
“Remember, though,” Stevie said, “this is the girl who wanted to turn her horse into dog food.”
“I don’t think she really meant it. How could anyone?” Carole asked Stevie.
“In Veronica’s case—hey, look at that!” Stevie said, pointing to the ground. She drew Topside to a halt. Lisa and Carole stopped to look, too, but they didn’t see anything. Stevie dismounted and walked forward slowly, holding Topside’s reins. If she was trying to look like an Iroquois tracker, Carole thought she was doing a pretty good job of it. Curious, Carole and Lisa dismounted as well.
“What is it?” Carole asked.
Then Stevie did something that only Stevie could get away with. She fished around in her pocket and pulled out a magnifying glass. “I told you we’d need this, didn’t I?”
Lisa stifled a giggle. “Okay, Sherlock, what’s up?” she asked.
Stevie held the glass close to the ground. “Aha, just as I thought!” she said.
“One more ‘aha’ and I’m going to be sick,” Lisa said. “Why don’t you just tell us what you’re looking at?”
Stevie stood up. “Well,” she said. “It rained night before last, before the event started. And then, remember how the ground was soft and muddy the first day of the event?” Lisa and Carole nodded. “Sometime after the rain, but before the ground got hard again, something heavy went over this roadway.”
“Hey, it’s a tire track!” Carole said, just spotting what Stevie had seen from the start.
Then Lisa saw it, too. “Oh!” she said. “But how do we know it’s our horsenappers?”
“We don’t,” Stevie said. “We just know that something went over this trail yesterday. It’s a possibility that that something was a horse trailer.”
“So it’s a possibility that we’re on the right trail,” Carole concluded.
“We’d better be careful,” Lisa said. Her friends agreed. They remounted their horses and proceeded.
It was easy then for the girls to follow the trail of the tire tracks. When the road forked, the tracks clearly went to the left. That didn’t surprise the girls. That was the way to the quarry. But when they got to the creek, there was a surprise.
“They stop!” Stevie said. “No more tire tracks on the other side of the creek.”
This time, Carole dismounted and looked carefully at the ground. She felt a little silly.
After all, she was no pioneer tracker. She spurned Stevie’s offer of the magnifying glass.
“I don’t see any sign of anything here,” she said at last. “Except some careless campers.” She picked up a gum wrapper and put it in her pocket. “I hate it when people do that.”
“I hate it more when a trail simply stops,” Stevie said.
Lisa scratched her head. “Look,” she said. “Maybe we were making a wrong assumption that the tracks we’ve been following were made by a horse trailer. Maybe the tracks didn’t have anything to do with the horsenapping at all. That doesn’t mean Carole wasn’t right in the first place that the horses are in the quarry. I think we still ought to look there, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course,” Stevie said enthusiastically. “And maybe the tracks stopping were actually intended to confuse us!”
Carole didn’t think that was likely and she told Stevie so.
“You have no idea of all the clever things criminals do to confound great detectives,” Stevie said.
Carole thought Stevie was probably right about that, but she had the funniest feeling Stevie didn’t have much of an idea about great detectives, either. She kept the thought to herself.
The girls got back on their horses and Stevie led the way along the now narrow trail to the rock quarry.
About a hundred yards from the quarry, The Saddle Club dismounted, hitched their horses to a tree, and proceeded to the quarry by crouching and creeping as silently as they could manage. They didn’t want to alert the horsenappers to their approach.
“How far?” Lisa whispered.
“Shhhh!” Carole hissed.
“Oomph!” Stevie grunted, tripping over a root.
“Shhhhhhhh!” Carole and Lisa said together.
“It hurts!” Stevie declared loudly, rubbing her knee.
“It’ll hurt more if we get discovered,” Lisa warned her.
“There’s nobody there,” Stevie said.
“How do you know?” Carole asked.
“Because we’ve been making enough noise to alert even the densest horsenapper to our presence.”
Carole and Lisa stood up and walked into the quarry. Stevie was absolutely right. There was no sign of life there, especially no sign of horsenappers.
“Not even a bale of hay,” Carole said in dismay.
“It was still a good guess,” Lisa said, trying to console Carole.
“No, it wasn’t,” Stevie said matter-of-factly. “It was a nice try, but it wasn’t a good guess because it was wrong.”
“You’re just cranky because your knee hurts,” Lisa said.
“No, I’m just cranky because this didn’t work,” Stevie said. Then she relented a little. “I’m sorry, Carole. It was a good guess.”
“Not good enough,” Carole said, and they all knew that was true.
Disappointed, they remounted their horses and headed back the way they’d come.
“I’ve got an idea,” Lisa said. “When we finish grooming our horses, I think we should go over to TD’s”—the local ice cream parlor—“and have a Saddle Club meeting. That’s where we usually have them and it’s where we do some of our best horse-talking. Maybe a hot-fudge sundae will inspire our brain cells to figure out exactly what the horsenappers have done with the horses.”
“Maybe it will inspire our brain cells to figure out exactly how we’re going to tell a whole bunch of grown-ups exactly how long we’ve known about the horsenapping and haven’t told anybody,” Stevie said.
“How do you think hot fudge will do on the answer to the ‘Exactly-how-long-have-you-known-Veronica-was-kidnapped?’ question?” Carole asked.
“Yeah, that one could be problematical,” Lisa agreed.
“Especially if something happens to her,” Stevie said.
“That’s an awful thought,” Carole agreed. “Even for Veronica. I mean, we’ve all been tempted to do something awful to her from time to time, but then we always knew—”
“Shhhh!” Stevie said, suddenly drawing Topside to a halt. Pepper and Starlight stopped on Stevie’s signal, too.
“What is it?” Lisa asked.
Stevie shook her head. She didn’t know. “I heard something,” she said. “It sounded like a horse.”
The girls stood silently. Carole watched Starlight’s ears, knowing that his good hearing would be even more alert to the sounds of another horse than hers would be.
“Who’s there?” a voice called out from around the bend of the trail, where it crossed the creek.
“Who’s there?” Stevie countered cleverly.
“It’s me!” the voice called back.
“Well, it’s us,” Stevie answered. Carole could see the proud grin on her face. She loved games like this. Carole hoped this was a game.
“It’s Donald!” the voice called. “Is that you girls? Stevie? Uh, Carole? And, um—”
“Lisa!” she called out. She didn’t like to be forgotten.
“Yeah, right. Lisa.” His horse rounded the bend. “There you are!” he said.
“What are you doing here?” Stevie challenged him.
“Looking for you. Is everything all right?”
“Of course it’s all right!” Stevie said. “Did you think we’d be in trouble riding in these woods? Why, I’ve lived here all my life. I know these woods like the back of my hand. There’s no way I could get lost. Besides, we’re not even that far from Pine Hollow and …”
“Okay, okay,” Donald said. “I’m just glad to know everything’s okay with you. I saw you all take off and when you didn’t come back right away, I was worried about you. So, when Max told me to take a break, I wanted to make sure you were okay. Do you mind?”
Stevie was surprised. Lisa was confused. Carole was touched.
“That’s awfully nice of you, Donald,” she said. “You’ve been working so hard these past couple of days because of the event. You didn’t have to follow us in here. We’re okay. See, we were looking for a trail—a track, really.”
Stevie couldn’t believe her ears. If she was hearing things right, Carole was about to tell Donald what they were up to. That was a bad idea. This was a Saddle Club project, not a stablehand project. She cut Carole off before she spilled the beans.
“Yes, a track,” she said. “Carole had this idea that there was a little railroad track in the old quarry, so they could run little cars out of there with granite on them. We rode all the way there and didn’t see a thing. So, if there is a track there, it’s a total secret to the whole wide world.”
Stevie made sure to stress the last few words. Carole got the hint.
“Yes,” she agreed. “It’s still a secret.”
“Very secret,” Lisa added.
Donald looked at them all quizzically. “I promise to keep your secret a secret,” he said. “But now, I think you’d better get back to Pine Hollow.”
“That’s where we were headed,” Stevie told him. “Are you going back now too?”
Donald nodded. He turned his horse around and retreated along the trail. The girls followed him in single file. They didn’t talk as they rode. There was an awful lot to talk about, but it would all have to wait until they got to TD’s.
“OH, NO, IT’S you!” the waitress at TD’s said, wincing at the sight of Stevie.
Stevie shrugged innocently, as if she couldn’t imagine what upset the waitress so much. Lisa and Carole giggled. They knew exactly what upset the woman. Stevie had a well-earned reputation for ordering awful mixtures of sundaes. Stevie always seemed to love what she ordered, no matter how unlikely the combination was, but those around her always suspected she just ordered them so nobody else would want tastes.
The waitress put down glasses of water and told the girls she’d be back in a minute to take their orders. Carole had the funniest feeling the woman was just trying to put off the inevitable.
The three of them were sitting in their favorite booth in the back of TD’s. Carole and Lisa sat next to each other. Stevie was across f
rom them, facing the door of the restaurant.
“Wasn’t that sweet of Donald to come after us in the woods?” Lisa said.
Stevie shook her head. “No, it was annoying.” The words sounded a little harsh to her. “Well, I suppose it was a little sweet, but I can’t figure out why he did it. Everybody knows we wouldn’t get lost. Besides that, I doubt Max gave him more than a ten-minute break. It must have taken him forty-five minutes to find us and come back with us. I’m sure Max wasn’t too pleased by that.”
Lisa leaned forward and put her elbows on the table. “Maybe not, but he must have been awfully pleased with all the work Donald’s been getting done these last few days. I’ve never seen anybody run as fast carrying tack as he does.”
“Awfully fast,” Carole agreed. “But remember how careless he was with the wheelbarrow around Topside? Sometimes he seems terrific. Other times he just seems terrifically rushed. I can’t make him out. Can you, Stevie?”
“Hmmm?” Stevie looked up distractedly from the menu she’d picked up. “Did you know they have a new flavor? White chocolate almond?”
Carole was a little annoyed that Stevie was more interested in the menu than she was in Carole’s thoughts about Donald, but she dismissed her irritation. They had all worked hard and deserved a treat. And creating treats at TD’s was a lot of work for Stevie.
“So, how are we going to tell people about the horses?” Lisa asked, coming to the subject.
“And about Veronica?” Carole added. “Stevie?” she asked, trying to draw Stevie’s attention from the menu, which, aside from white chocolate almond, never changed much.
“Right,” Stevie said, putting down the menu. “What are we going to tell them? Well, with any luck, we won’t have to tell them.”
“How’s that?” Lisa asked.
“One of two things will happen,” Stevie said. “The first is that the horsenappers will get in touch with the diAngelos again and/or with Alicia or Mr. Feeney, and somebody will pay the ransom and then that person and/or those people may and/or may not get his or her horse back but that doesn’t matter because once the diAngelos know, then the cat is out of the bag because Alicia and Mr. Feeney already know and the only thing that will ever be a mystery is what happened to the first note from the horsenappers?”
Horsenapped! Page 5