Phantom Horse (11 page)

But instead she opened her eyes to the moonlit darkness of Pine Hollow’s hayloft. Her heart still pounding with the memory of the dream, she sat up and glanced at her sleeping friends. This was getting ridiculous. Was she ever going to be able to sleep again, or was this dream going to haunt her forever?

Carole decided there was only one thing to do. She had to go and see Starlight. Maybe avoiding him as she’d been doing was the wrong thing to do. If she could convince herself that he was just a normal horse, not a red-eyed phantom, maybe the dreams would stop on their own.

Once her eyes had adjusted to the dark, she carefully peeled back her sleeping bag and stood up. Stevie moaned and rolled over, and Carole froze. But after a moment Stevie’s breathing was once again deep and even. Carole silently let out a breath of relief and tiptoed toward the ladder.

Once down among the horses, Carole paused to listen. All around her were the familiar sounds and smells of horses at rest. Usually Carole found the stable at night a comforting and safe place. But tonight every corner seemed filled by dark shadows, and the black, square opening of every stall seemed ominous and forbidding. Taking a deep breath, Carole turned and entered the long corridor leading to Starlight’s stall. Max had installed small night-lights every few yards throughout the stable as a safety precaution, and now
Carole found their light, dim though it was, reassuring. As she glanced forward, she saw that the light across from Starlight’s stall was off.
The bulb must have burned out
, she thought. But her heart was beginning to pound. She walked forward and looked into Starlight’s stall. It was empty. Suddenly twin flashes of red light pierced the darkness at the end of the aisle. With a wild neigh, Starlight plunged forward toward her, his hooves flashing and a look of evil in his red, red eyes …

Carole awoke with a start to see Stevie’s anxious face peering down into her own.

“Carole! What is it?” Stevie exclaimed.

“Wh-What?” Carole murmured, trying to clear her head. Where was she? She knew she’d been asleep, but instead of feeling her warm, soft bed under her, she felt scratchy hay …

The hayloft. She and her friends were having a sleepover, and she’d had the nightmare again. Two of them, in fact.

“Are you all right?” Suddenly Lisa’s face came into view beside Stevie’s. “Your screaming woke us up. Were you having a bad dream?”

Carole sat up and looked around, reassuring herself that she was really awake this time. She could hear the gentle creaking of the floorboards below as horses shifted their weight, and the pungent scent of hay filled her nostrils. She knew it was no use hiding the truth from her friends anymore.
Taking a deep breath, she started to tell them all about the nightmares.

When she was finished, Lisa put an arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen when you told us about that first one,” she said. “I didn’t realize how scared you really were. I guess I was kind of insensitive.”

“That goes double for me,” Stevie added, joining in the hug. “I was so busy thinking about the mystery that I guess I didn’t really pay much attention to what you were saying.”

“Can you forgive us?” Lisa asked.

Carole nodded and hugged them back. “Of course,” she said. “It’s not totally your fault, anyway. After that first day I wasn’t sure whether I really wanted to talk about the dreams. I thought I was being silly.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Stevie, and that made them all laugh.

As the moon rose and flooded the hayloft with silvery light, the girls talked about the nightmares a little more. Stevie and Lisa racked their brains, but they had no more idea than Carole did about how to stop them. But at least Carole felt better for having shared the problem with her friends.

Finally Carole started to yawn. “Believe it or not, I think I want to go to sleep now,” she said, stretching and then snuggling down into her sleeping bag. She closed her eyes and smiled as she heard one of the horses just below nickering
to its neighbors. She wasn’t sure, but she thought it might be Barq. “I hope I don’t wake you up again. But for once I think I’m actually too tired to dream.”

And she was right.

T
HE
NEXT
DAY
the girls were up early. There was a lot to do before Horse Wise, even without Stevie’s pilferer-catching plan to worry about.

Carole felt more cheerful than she had in a week as she walked toward Starlight’s stall to check on him. She knew her almost full night’s sleep probably had a lot to do with it, but she was sure that talking to her friends had helped, too. If The Saddle Club couldn’t come up with a way to get rid of the nightmares, no one could.

But as soon as Carole saw her horse, most of her nervousness came rushing back. When he tossed his head in greeting, all she could see was the vision of him tossing his head in fury just before he came at her in the dream. That eager, happy feeling she had always had around horses, especially around Starlight, and which she had always taken for granted, was gone. Would she ever get it back?

As they worked, The Saddle Club girls were distracted. All three were worried about Carole’s dreams and looking forward to Phil’s bar mitzvah. Besides that, Stevie had laid her trap and was doing her best to lure someone into it. Every chance she got, she told anyone who would listen
about the fabulously rare ancient coin from Israel that she was giving Phil as a bar mitzvah present. She was careful to mention every time that the coin was in her cubby, tucked under her spare boots for safekeeping. She told Max about it. She told Adam Levine about it. She told Alec McAllister, the farrier, about it. She told Shannon and Joe about it twice. And every time Troy was within earshot, she made sure to mention it to whoever happened to be standing by—even if it was only Lisa.

Somehow all the chores got done, and soon it was time for the Horse Wise meeting to begin. Alec McAllister showed them how to use a gauge to test the levelness of the walls of a horse’s hoof. As he demonstrated, using the calm, easygoing stable horse Patch as a model, Stevie’s attention wandered. So did her gaze. She couldn’t help sneaking a look at Shannon every chance she got. But the only remotely unusual thing she caught the other girl doing was holding hands with Joe.

When the lecture was over and Max had dismissed the group, The Saddle Club hurried to the locker room. Mr. and Mrs. Lake were picking them up for the bar mitzvah in an hour, and they wanted to be ready on time.

The first thing Stevie did was check under her spare boots. The coin was still there. “Rats,” she muttered.

Lisa shrugged. “Tough luck,” she said, looking almost as disappointed as Stevie. She had noticed that Troy wasn’t with the group at the end of the farrier’s lecture, and she
had begun to think he might have actually fallen for Stevie’s trap. “Maybe Veronica was the thief after all.”

Stevie picked up the coin very carefully between her thumb and forefinger, carried it over to the trash can near the door, and let it fall with a thunk. Then she held up her fingers, which were stained bright red at the tips. “I guess the only one who’s red-handed around here is me,” she said glumly.

“Too bad. It was a good idea,” Carole said. “If anyone had snitched the coin, it would have been easy to spot them with that dye on their hands. Where did you get that fake coin, anyway?”

“My brother’s history project,” Stevie said. “Chad made it out of clay when he was studying ancient Rome last year. But the red dye was my special addition, of course.”

“Of course,” Lisa said. She sighed. “I wonder if we’ll ever find out who—”

Her words were interrupted by an outraged shout. The Saddle Club turned and saw one of the younger riders, May Grover, standing beside her friend Jasmine James. Jasmine looked worried, and May looked mad.

“What’s the matter?” Lisa asked, hurrying over to them.

“Someone stole Jasmine’s favorite barrette,” May announced loudly. “It’s real silver, and it has horses on it. She got it for her birthday, and now it’s gone!”

“Are you sure it’s really gone?” Lisa asked.

Jasmine nodded, looking close to tears.

May stamped her foot. “Who would dare take someone’s special barrette?” she demanded. “I don’t think anyone should leave here until she gets it back.”

Max heard the commotion and hurried in. “What seems to be the problem here?” Lisa drifted back to rejoin her friends as Max began questioning Jasmine and May.

“Weird, huh?” Lisa said quietly.

Stevie didn’t answer. She watched the scene, feeling confused and annoyed. The pilferer had struck again, but not where Stevie had been expecting. Now what was she supposed to do?

Just then she heard a noise behind her. She turned and saw Troy. He had paused in the doorway of the locker room, a curious expression on his face.

“What’s going on in there?” he asked Stevie.

“Jasmine’s barrette is missing,” Stevie replied. As she looked at the young groom, a flash of gold from the direction of his chest caught her eye, and she bit her lip to keep from gasping. Was that a fountain pen sticking out of his shirt pocket? A
gold
fountain pen—just like the one Adam had lost?

“A missing barrette?” Troy drawled. “Better call in the National Guard.” With a short, abrupt laugh, he continued down the corridor.

The second he was out of sight, Stevie grabbed a startled Carole by the arm. “Did you see that?” she whispered.

“See what?” Carole asked.

“What was in Troy’s pocket,” Stevie replied. “It looked like Adam’s pen! At least it was a pen and it was gold. I mean, I didn’t actually see Adam’s pen before it was stolen—”

“Did you see the top of it?” Lisa asked urgently.

Stevie nodded. “It had some kind of silver band around it.”

“That’s Adam’s pen,” Lisa said grimly. “I saw it after they gave it to him in school. I knew Troy was the pilferer!”

“But what do we do now?” Carole asked. “We can’t just go up to him and accuse him of being a thief, can we?”

“Not unless we have to,” Stevie said. “Come on. Let’s follow him. Maybe we can catch him with some of the other stuff.”

“Shouldn’t we just tell Max what we saw?” Lisa asked, glancing over her shoulder at the stable owner.

“Not yet,” Stevie said. Before Lisa or Carole could protest any further, she turned and raced out of the room. With a shrug, they followed.

As they left the locker room, the girls were just in time to see Troy stroll around the corner into one of the aisles of stalls.

Stevie held a finger to her lips as they neared the corner. “Shhh,” she cautioned, turning to give her friends a warning look. “We don’t want him to know we’re—Oh!” she gasped as she rounded the corner and bumped into someone.

It was Troy. “What’s going on?” he asked them, rubbing
his shoulder where Stevie had hit him. “Don’t you girls watch where you’re going?”

“Oh. sorry,” Stevie said. “Um, I guess we, um, ah—Say! Nice pen!”

Lisa did her best not to groan, and she suspected Carole was doing the same. If there was one quality that didn’t come easily to their friend Stevie, it was subtlety.

Troy looked confused for a second, then glanced down at his shirt pocket. “Oh. You mean this?” he asked, fingering the pen.

Stevie nodded. “Where’d you get it?” she asked, with an expression of what she hoped was complete innocence. “Oh, if you don’t mind my asking, that is. You see, my father’s birthday is coming up, and I’d love to get him something like that as a present, and—”

“I found it,” Troy interrupted her.

“Wow, really?” Stevie said. “Where did you find it? Was it in the student locker room?”

Troy stared at her suspiciously. There was a long moment of silence, during which both Carole and Lisa wished they could sink into the floor and disappear. They had the feeling Troy knew exactly what Stevie was driving at. But was that because Stevie wasn’t as subtle as she thought, or was it because Troy had a guilty conscience?

“I was just wondering,” Stevie said, beginning to babble a bit. “Because one of the students here lost a pen that looked a lot like that one, and I was just wondering if maybe it fell
on the floor and then you found it, and if so if maybe you noticed a few other things that are missing, or …” Her voice trailed off. Troy’s suspicious expression had just turned to one of dismay. Stevie held her breath. Maybe her questioning had worked. Maybe Troy was about to confess!

But instead of confessing, Troy just shouted one word:
“Princess!”

T
HE
S
ADDLE
C
LUB
exchanged confused glances. “Princess?” they repeated in one voice.

Troy was shaking his head grimly. “That darn dog,” he muttered. He glanced at the girls. “Come on,” he said, his voice completely neutral. “If you want to get your missing stuff back, I have a pretty good idea where it might be.”

The girls followed as the groom headed outside. He led them to a row of bushes near the main stable entrance and knelt down. Plunging his hand into the foliage, Troy fished around for a moment and then dragged a sleepy, startled-looking Princess from under the largest bush.