Tight Rein (9 page)

Belle didn’t like it this time, either. She threw her head up the moment Judy approached with the file, and she pulled Carole backward halfway down the aisle. All Judy’s soothing words and gentle movements weren’t enough to change Belle’s mind.

“Just like I remembered,” Judy said. “The thing to do here, girls, is give her a little tranquilizer. It’ll make things easier and safer for all of us.” She gave Belle an injection in her hip, and a few minutes later the horse was swaying woozily, her head hanging near her knees.

“Wow,” said Lisa, impressed. “That stuff really acted fast.”

“Yes, and it’ll go away fast, too. In an hour she’ll be completely back to normal.” Judy lifted Belle’s head and began again with the coarse file. Belle still pulled away slightly, but the spirit of resistance had left her. In a very short time her teeth were done.

“There, now she’ll be much more comfortable,” Judy said, giving Belle a pat. “Go ahead and leave her in her
stall, girls, but take out her food if she has any left. You don’t want her eating until the tranq’s worn off. Her muscles are so relaxed that she could choke.”

Judy stepped back and admired Belle as Lisa put her back into her stall. “She’s really in tip-top shape, isn’t she? Stevie takes great care of her. I hope Stevie’s back riding soon. Max told me the story.”

“All of it?” Carole asked.

“All,” Judy said. “Your midnight swim and everything.” She winked. “But I feel sorry for her, I do. Especially because of camp.” She finished packing her bags and left the stable.

Lisa leaned over the edge of Belle’s door. The mare was standing with her face to the wall, head drooping, hind leg slack. She looked truly wretched. Lisa had a hard time believing that Belle would be perfectly normal within the hour. “We should go get Chad right now,” she said to Carole.
Before the tranquilizer wears off
, she added to herself. Who would have guessed that Belle would need one? Judy said most horses didn’t.

“You don’t need to get me,” a voice said near Lisa’s ear. “I’m right here.”

Lisa jumped so quickly that she hit her elbow on the side of the stall. “Chad! I—I didn’t see you standing there.” Frantically she tried to remember what she had
just said to Carole. Had she said the word
tranquilizer
out loud?

“I just wanted to check on her, to see if she was any better than she was yesterday,” Chad said.

“See for yourself,” Carole offered, stepping out of Chad’s way.

He peered into Belle’s stall. He was wearing, Lisa noted with interest, a different soccer jersey. But his socks were definitely the same as yesterday’s. Lisa recognized the ladderlike run in the back of the left one.

“Maybe you need to do some laundry,” she suggested.

“Gosh,” Chad said, intent on the horse, “she looks worse. A whole lot worse!”

“It’s a progressive condition, you know,” Lisa informed him.

“The vet just left,” Carole added.

Chad nodded. “I know. I saw her truck. I tried to wave her down so I could ask her about Belle, but she just waved back and kept driving.”

Lisa offered a small prayer of thanks for that. “I’m afraid Belle’s much worse,” she said softly. “It’s no more than we expected, though. We’ve done all we can.”

“Her coat looks a lot shinier, though,” Chad noted. Lisa and Carole exchanged quick glances.

“Uh …” Lisa fumbled for a reason.
We washed the
dirt off her?
That wouldn’t go over well! “It’s a false bloom,” she said at last. “Like in those old books, when people are dying of tuberculosis and their cheeks get all red. They begin to look healthy again just before … before the end.”

“You think she’s got tuberculosis?” Chad sounded truly alarmed.

“No, no—”

“Lisa was just making a comparison,” Carole said. She added thoughtfully, “I don’t think horses get tuberculosis.”

“Well, that’s good,” Chad said, “or Belle would probably have it.”

Lisa and Carole didn’t know what to make of that statement, so they ignored it. The three of them watched Belle in silence for a while. The mare shifted her weight slowly between her two front feet.

“Is she eating?” Chad asked.

“No,” Lisa said mournfully. “Judy took her grain away. She said it could only hurt her, in the condition she’s in.”

“Wow.” Chad sounded impressed.

Another long silence ensued. Lisa began to wonder how they could get Chad to leave. If the tranquilizer wore off while he was watching, it would look like a medical miracle.

“We’ve got to do something,” Chad said at last. “What do you think she needs? What’ll make her better?”

“Only one thing,” Carole intoned in a deep, mysterious voice she’d picked up from watching fifties horror movies late at night with her father. “Stevie.”

Chad nodded. “I know,” he whispered. “I just don’t know how to get her here. My parents are still really upset. Maybe there’s something else we could do.” He looked up, and his face brightened. “Maybe,” he said, “we could ask Mrs. Reg.”

Carole and Lisa whirled around. Lisa tried to conceal the expression of horror that she knew was spreading across her face. Mrs. Reg, of all people, was coming down the stable aisle, heading straight for them! There was no escape. Lisa’s plan was ruined. Mrs. Reg would not for one second believe that Belle had so much as a mosquito bite, let alone advanced colic.

It was like, Carole thought, being trapped inside one of those late-night films. The aliens were coming to get you, and your feet couldn’t move. You couldn’t even scream. You could only watch, in horror, as your life—or, in this case, Stevie’s trip to camp—ended in horrible, oozing death. Mrs. Reg was not going to find their scheme amusing. Furthermore, she’d been nearby when Judy had given Belle the tranquilizer.

“Mrs. Reg,” Chad said, beckoning earnestly, seemingly oblivious to the two girls’ expressions, “Belle’s really sick! She looks like she’s dying! We’ve got to do something!”

“Let’s see,” Mrs. Reg said briskly. She came to Belle’s stall, looked inside, and then opened the door and went in. She ran her hands over Belle’s body, lifted her head, checked her gums, and looked carefully at her eyes.

Lisa wished an earthquake would come along and swallow her on the spot. Carole wondered why the monstrous space aliens never swallowed their victims whole. They always finished them off slowly, bit by agonizing bit.

Mrs. Reg ran her hands down Belle’s legs. Chad watched her with an expression of anxious hope. Lisa and Carole looked at each other. They both knew there was no hope.

Mrs. Reg stood up and came out of the stall. She looked at them solemnly. Lisa felt her heart skip a beat. Carole knew this was the end.

“Poor baby,” Mrs. Reg said softly, with a sad shake of her head. “I’m afraid there’s nothing anyone can do. She’s dying of a broken heart.”

Lisa’s heart skipped a beat again, for an entirely different reason. Carole wondered how often the space aliens turned out to be heroes—heroines?—in disguise.

Mrs. Reg gave Chad’s arm a sympathetic pat. Without a glance at the girls, she sailed back down the aisle, went into her office, and closed the door.

Lisa clutched the top of the stall in pure relief. Carole struggled not to laugh. Chad looked downcast. “I guess it’s really serious, then,” he said. Carole, still unable to speak, nodded solemnly, while Lisa averted her eyes.

“S
TEVIE
! S
TEPHANIE
! Stephanie Lake, come down here, please!”

Stevie jumped at the sound of her mother’s voice.
National Velvet
slid off her chest onto the floor, and she sat up and absentmindedly put it back on the bed, where she had been lying. She must have fallen asleep. She’d been dreaming of herself and Belle, sailing over Beecher’s Brook, winning the Grand National, the hardest steeplechase in all the world—Belle, the horse nobody wanted, and herself only a slip of a girl …

“Stephanie Lake!” Stevie blinked. Her mother called
her Stephanie only when something serious was going on. But what was her mother doing home in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon?

“Coming!” Stevie yelled.

“This had better be serious, young man,” Stevie heard her father’s voice say. Her father? What was he doing home?

Suddenly Stevie felt very curious. She paused just a moment at her mirror—making sure she looked suitably tragic and afflicted—and hurried downstairs.

Chad was standing in the entryway, holding his shoulders carefully square and his hands tight behind his back. He looked terrified—so terrified, in fact, that Stevie felt a rush of sympathy for him, until she remembered how her pink flowered underwear had looked hanging from the flagpole, waving in the warm summer breeze. No, Chad deserved whatever he was about to get.

Stevie sniffed sadly and slumped her shoulders. Her mother came briskly out of the living room. “There you are, honey,” she said. “Your brother asked us to come home. He says he needs to talk to all of us, including you.”

Stevie’s dad opened the door of his home office. “Come inside,” he commanded. He shut the door after them. Stevie heard it click and felt a satisfied thrill. Her dad shut the door only when they were in serious trouble.
For once Stevie knew she hadn’t done anything wrong. Chad must be quaking in his boots—or in his smelly soccer shoes.
“So,” Mrs. Lake said conversationally, taking a seat in the wing chair, “what was so important, Chad, that I had to cancel my afternoon meetings and come home? I expected broken bones at least.”

“Well,” Chad said. “Well, see …” His voice squeaked an octave higher, and he paused. Mr. Lake sat down behind his desk and swiveled to face his children, and as he did, Stevie caught the brief, amused look that passed between her parents. They weren’t truly angry, she realized. They were
pretending
to be angry. How odd.

Stevie didn’t think that had ever happened before. Chad, however, didn’t appear to have caught on. He looked genuinely anxious.

“Stevie can’t be grounded anymore,” he said. “You’ve got to unground her now, right away.” He spoke in a rush, his words tumbling out, as he shifted his weight nervously back and forth on the carpet. Stevie felt a flood of absolute joy. She tried hard not to show it.

“Chad,” his mother interrupted, “are you wearing your cleats?”

Chad looked down and swallowed hard. He quickly removed his soccer shoes and used his toe to scrub away the indentations they had left in the plush carpet.

“She can’t be grounded anymore,” he repeated.

“Why not?” Mr. Lake was a trial lawyer, and it showed in his tone of voice. He sounded as if he were interrogating a hostile witness.

“Because some stuff was my fault, too,” Chad said. “It wasn’t just Stevie.”

“What stuff? What wasn’t just Stevie’s fault?”

Chad shrugged uncomfortably. “All those pranks and stuff. I mean, Stevie did them, but so did I.”

Stevie coughed to hide a grin. This was turning out great—better than she’d hoped.

“And what exactly did you do?” Mr. Lake picked up a pencil and twisted it between his fingers. Stevie had been to court a few times to watch her father work. This was what he looked like there. If it hadn’t been for her flying-flag underwear, and her riding boots, and most especially camp, she would almost have felt sorry for Chad.

“I put whipped cream in her riding boots,” Chad confessed. He had started off with the most minor prank, Stevie noted. The whipped cream hadn’t been hard to wipe out.

“Is that all?”

“No—”

“What else?”

“I refilled her shampoo bottle with chocolate syrup,”
Chad said. Stevie flinched at the memory. The syrup had
not
been easy to wash out.

“Goodness, Chad,” Mrs. Lake said lightly. “You filled Stevie’s room with popcorn, too. I don’t know if we should let you have any more food.”

“What else?” Mr. Lake interjected sternly.

Chad squirmed. There was silence. “I glued the pages of her horse magazine together,” he said.

“What else?”

“I hung her underwear on the flagpole. But she turned my underwear pink!”

“It was an accident!” Stevie cut in. “I did his laundry! I was trying to do him a favor!”

“Oh, right, some favor,” Chad said sarcastically. “Like you didn’t do it on purpose.”

“What else?” Mr. Lake continued, in a louder voice. Stevie shut up fast. “Chad?”

Chad sighed. He seemed determined to make a full confession. “When you yelled at Michael last week for letting his bathwater slop all over the carpet, the water was really from a bucket I stuck over Stevie’s door. It just sort of sloshed across the hall.” He paused. Stevie figured that was all he was going to say. She knew she would never admit to more than that.

But Chad continued. “The night Stevie got the ladder and was spying in my bedroom, Mark and I were going
to use Super Glue to stick the little plastic horses from my old toy soldier set all over the tops of her boots. It was my idea,” he added hastily. “Not Mark’s. It wasn’t his fault. But see, Stevie saw us, and that’s why she started yelling, and that’s why she crashed into the flowers and stuff. And I put her boots back and I forgot to mention that they’d been in my room—” He glanced at Stevie. “I mean, I lied about it. So it wasn’t her fault. So she has to be ungrounded, right now.
Please.
It’s really important.” He shuffled his stocking feet. Stevie noticed the run down the back of his left sock. Hadn’t he worn those socks the day before?