Ghost Rider (6 page)

“White Eagle, of course.”

With that, Kate reached for a marshmallow and speared it with a long-handled fork. She held it over the flames in the fireplace. It marked the end of the discussion as far as she was concerned. In a show of agreement and support, her friends followed suit. Soon five marshmallows were toasting over the fire, and Christine took over the job of tale teller.

Later that night, cuddled into her down sleeping bag, Lisa thought about all the things that had happened that day and tried to make sense of them.

First, there was the stallion. She could still see him rising above his herd of mares. He was simply magnificent—wild and free. Lisa wondered if he would be any less magnificent with a saddle and rider on his back. Was he so beautiful because he was free? That was a silly idea, of course. All the horses who roamed the country were descended from domesticated ponies, who had originally been brought to this country by the Spaniards who first explored and settled these lands. A horse that was beautiful free would also be beautiful under saddle, especially if he was lucky enough to have
a rider as good as Kate Devine to own and ride him.

Then there was John. And there was John’s story. Lisa knew she needed to think about John’s story, but first she just wanted to think about John. He wasn’t like anybody she’d ever met before. She liked that about him. At the same time, it frightened her a little bit. He was handsome, to be sure, but that wasn’t what frightened her. He seemed like at least two different boys at once. He was the kind, gentle, caring young man who sat with a mare for hours, watching and comforting her when his own father should have been doing it. That gave Lisa a start. Just where had Walter been while all this was going on? He
should
have been the one with the mare. Was John covering for him? Lisa decided not to think about that right then, either.

Then there was the other John. That was the mysterious John who wasn’t going to tell why Kate shouldn’t adopt the stallion. That same John was the one who had shown up at the bunkhouse, walked in uninvited (it was a good thing they were all wearing sweatpants and sweatshirts to sleep in!), told a confusing and probably untrue story clearly designed to make Kate change her mind about owning the stallion, and then just walked out. What was he trying to do? More important, why was he trying to do it?

Lisa’s mind replayed her conversations with John,
especially the story he’d told. In her mind she heard it over and over again. Finally she fell asleep with the image of the horse rising into the sky above the village, carrying the star-crossed lovers to their destiny. The image was to remain with her for a very long time.

“I
F
ONE
MORE
person asks me if they’re going to have to peel the grapes, I’ll scream,” Stevie announced.

Lisa laughed. Stevie was pretending to be angry, but the fact was she was in her element. All five of the girls were at the regional high school, where the basement had been turned over to them for the party that was to take place tomorrow. Students from the school wandered in and out during their free periods, offering to help decorate or otherwise get ready. Kate and Christine had special dispensation from their own schools to have the time off to put together the Halloween Fair—-as long as they got their homework in on time and got the notes they missed from classmates.

“Don’t worry about your homework,” Stevie told
them. “That’s one of the things The Saddle Club is the very best at.”

“You mean you’re going to do it for me?” Kate asked, teasing.

“No, not me,” Stevie assured her. “If I did it, you’d both flunk out. No, the one who does the best homework is Lisa. She can do anything!”

“Ahem,” Lisa said. “She can also follow instructions. Like I’ll be glad to help anybody with their homework. I don’t
do
other people’s work.”

“Whatever,” said Stevie. “Just don’t worry. We’ll come through for you.”

“You always have,” Christine said. “And that’s what you’re doing now, right?”

Stevie looked down. She was standing on top of a very tall ladder. “Actually,” she said, “at this moment I’m not so sure.” In one hand she had some orange crepe paper, and in the other was a piece of tape. The problem was she was going to have to put the two of them together on a spot she could reach. The best she could do was the edge of a fluorescent lamp.

“Okay?” she asked. Lisa was standing on the floor, holding the ladder to steady it.

“Sort of,” Lisa told her. “But you’d better hurry down now. Two more people want to know who’s going to peel the grapes.”

“Yeooooooo!” Stevie said. But she was laughing
when she got back down to ground level. “I think I’ve got an idea,” she said to Lisa, her eyes sparkling. That was usually a sign of a really good or a really bad idea. With Stevie it was sometimes hard to tell which was which. “The next person who asks me about the grapes will be assigned the job of putting up the rest of the crepe paper.”

John Brightstar sauntered into the basement. “Hey, good morning, girls!” he greeted them. “The ninth grade has a free period, and my teacher said I should offer to help. Any grapes need peeling?”

Stevie blinked in astonishment. “No,” she said sweetly. “But we have another job that’s right up your alley. Come on aboard.”

It turned out that John was actually the perfect person for the job of hanging orange and black crepe paper, because he was tall enough to reach the ceiling from the top of the ladder. It also meant that Lisa was assigned to retain her position of holding the ladder and steadying it. She held on very tightly.

Stevie didn’t waste a second. There was an awful lot of work to do and it didn’t seem as if there were anywhere near enough time to do it. Stevie mustered her troops to the area she’d designated as the horror house and began partitioning it off.

One section was where the awful things to feel—including the peeled grapes that blindfolded visitors
would be told were eyeballs—would be laid out. Stevie knew that peeling grapes was a boring job, but she thought she and the girls could do it that night in the kitchen at The Bar None. After all, they’d just need a few of them. What was the big deal? They’d also cook the pasta designated as brains and fill long oiled balloons with water and tell everyone they were entrails. Stevie was pretty sure they could think of some more disgusting things before the fair, too. She just had to put her mind to it.

“Okay, this is where we’re going to have the wind tunnel. Can anybody get their hands on a tube-type vacuum cleaner so we can reverse the air flow?”

Two hands went up. That solved that problem. It also gave Stevie two volunteers to run their own mothers’ vacuum cleaners, since Stevie was pretty sure the mothers would insist on it anyway.

“And next comes the ghost mirror,” Stevie said. “Is there a full-length mirror we can paint stuff on?”

There was. One of the high school students “borrowed” it from the girls’ room upstairs, and Stevie assigned an aspiring art student the job of painting a suggestive ghost on it. That way, the “guest” in the horror house would see herself or himself, plus a ghost. Anyone who pooh-poohed the ghost would be treated to the immediate appearance of somebody dressed in an identical outfit.

“It’s going to be great!” Stevie said. “Just make sure the ghost you paint is just a little wispy. We don’t want anybody to be able to see anything clearly. The kids’ imaginations are going to be doing an awful lot of work.”

“Got it!” the artist said, and then disappeared to “borrow” some paints from the art room.

“Next, we have to have something for the kids to fall down on that won’t hurt them.”

“Mattresses?” somebody suggested.

“Probably,” Stevie said. “But I’m open to other suggestions.”

“Rubber balls? We’ve got a ton of them in the gym.”

“We’d really need a ton of them,” Stevie said. “I mean, this has to be safe. In spite of what the kids think, we have to treat them like precious packages. We want them scared, not hurt.”

“You mean precious packages, like fragile things you ship places?” a redheaded boy asked. Stevie had the feeling he was on to something.

“Yes, very fragile,” Stevie agreed. “What’s on your mind?”

“Well, my father runs this mail-order business, and he just got a truckload—and I mean truckload—of Styrofoam peanuts. He uses them all right, but he doesn’t use that many, and it’s a three-year supply. The place that delivered them doesn’t want to take them back. You getting the picture?”

“Perfect!” Stevie declared. “I’m sure he can get a tax deduction for a donation to a worthy cause.…”

“Probably, but I think he’ll be happy enough just to get them out of the backyard. My mom won’t mind, either.”

“I hereby declare you in charge,” Stevie said. “And we’ll set that up over here.…”

There was so much to do, and it was all so much fun, that the girls barely noticed as the hours passed. By midafternoon, it seemed that Stevie had everybody in town—and certainly everybody in the school—jumping at her commands. Phyllis Devine pitched in and beamed proudly to see how well her team—The Saddle Club—was running the fair she was in charge of.

“Phyllis, you’re brilliant,” the principal of the school said, admiring how well everybody was working together. “I can’t get these kids to work like this to put on a dance for themselves, much less to put together a Halloween Fair for little ones. What’s your secret?” he asked.

“My magic ingredient?” She shrugged. “Hard to explain, but it all has to do with horses.”

Since there wasn’t a horse in sight (Carole was working on the pony rides
outside
the school), the principal couldn’t make any sense out of Phyllis’s remark. It didn’t get any clearer when Stevie, Lisa,
Kate, and Christine all started laughing, either. The confused principal returned to his office, where he could fill out some more forms.

By four o’clock it was time to call it a day. They could finish up everything the following morning before the fair actually began. Surveying the work they’d done, though, they could hardly believe they’d only begun that morning. In a mere six or seven hours they’d taken a perfectly normal school basement and rec room and turned it into a total disaster area. Crepe paper hung from every possible place, curtains had been set up to divide the horror house into its components, including a hiding place for the reverse vacuumers and a ramp that would lead to the sea of Styrofoam, and tables had been strewn everywhere. Only Stevie knew which activity would be on which table. For now it just looked like a mess.

Stevie put her hands on her hips and admired the room filled with half-finished projects. “Isn’t it just beautiful?” she asked. Only good friends would agree. They did.

“Okay, so what’s next?” Lisa asked. She stifled a yawn. She was tired from holding the ladder all afternoon.

“Next is costumes,” Stevie said.

“Wait a minute, we know what we’re going to be,” Carole reminded her. “We’re going to be mice.”

“Sure, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any work to do. We have to figure out how to make ears and check that we’ve got the makeup we need for our whiskers. There’s a lot left to do. We can’t waste a minute.”

“My mother promised me she’d help me with my costume tonight,” Christine said. “I’ll bet she can make six mouse ears in no time at all. Why don’t you come to my house?”

“Can she do a farmer’s wife?” Kate asked, suddenly inspired. After all, if her best friends were going to be the three blind mice, the least she could do was join them.

“In a New York minute,” Christine promised. “Actually, I think she’s got a gingham dress and an apron already. She might have to take the dress in a little, or else stuff it—oh, come on home with me and let’s see what she can do. In any case, you all will have a chance to see the adobe dollhouse.”

“Great,” Stevie said. “I’m really dying to see it.”

It took the girls a few minutes to tidy up a few (very few) things so they would know where to begin the next day. Stevie, Lisa, and Carole had each brought their basic mouse outfits—gray sweatpants and hooded sweatshirts—assuming that they’d end up at the store in town to look for something to make ears from. The fact that Mrs. Lonetree might be able to help them was
awfully good news. She was a very creative person and probably would make better mouse ears than they could ever hope to!

The best news, though, was that getting there was going to be half the fun. The girls had ridden their horses into town that morning and had let them loose in a corral the high school maintained for the students who rode to school. Now they would ride to Christine’s house and eventually back to The Bar None. That was always a pleasant prospect, but now all the more so since it was quite dark outside.

Stevie gave a final tug to the cinch on Stewball’s saddle and climbed aboard. “It’s a good thing horses can see in the dark,” she said. “Because I don’t think I can see a thing.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Christine told her. “Once your eyes adjust to the darkness, you’ll be surprised how much you can see—especially since there are a lot of stars out tonight.”