Hoof Beat (12 page)

Grateful to have solved the problem, she dropped the machine into her backpack and headed for Stevie’s. She’d had enough problems for one day!

“Y
OU DON
’
T HAVE
to say anything,” Carole told the weary Lisa when she arrived at Stevie’s. “Trudy has told us the whole story. And don’t worry, nobody’s mad at you. You did a fabulous job rescuing Trudy, and anyway, we knew you’d eventually see what was happening with Hoof Beat. After all, you’re our friend so you’ve got to be pretty terrific, right?”

Lisa smiled gratefully. “Thanks. It’s a good thing I’ve got friends like you because when you mess up the way I have, you really need them!”

Stevie tossed a half-inflated beach ball at Lisa. “Come
on
! Go put on your bathing suit. We’ve been waiting for you so we could have chicken fights!”

“I’ll be right back,” Lisa promised, grinning over at Carole and Trudy. She headed for Stevie’s room where she could change.

Stevie, who had been lying on her stomach on her towel, abruptly sat up. Although she was relieved to see the end of Lisa’s weird behavior, she realized that all her troubles were not solved. She put her elbows on her knees and cupped her chin in her hands with a sigh.

“There’s still one really big problem left,” she said to Carole, “and that’s your dad’s birthday money.”

“Something will work out,” Carole said.

“Nothing’s going to work. I’ve tried everything!” Stevie said.

“You’re such a pessimist,” Carole teased.

“Since when are you such an optimist!” Stevie retorted.

“I’m a realist,” Trudy interrupted. “A realist knows that if you work smart instead of hard, problems get solved.”

Carole and Stevie looked at her and burst out laughing. “Okay, smarty, what’s our next step?” Stevie asked.

“I don’t know,” Trudy told her. “I always know what to say. I don’t have to know what to do.” She rolled over to sun her other side and put on her lime-green and black mirrored sunglasses to indicate she was done with her pronouncements.

“Okay, so we’ll let the realist sleep,” Stevie said to Carole. “Here comes our resourceful journalist. Let’s see if she has any ideas.”

It was such a hot, sticky day that Lisa didn’t even
pause to greet her friends before she walked straight into the pool. She felt the cool water refresh her, almost cleansing the difficult day from her. She ducked into the clear water and swam the entire length of the pool.

She emerged, shook her head to clear the water from her eyes and ears, blinked twice, and said, “That feels wonderful!” She pulled herself up out of the pool, wrung the excess water out of her hair, spread her towel out by her friends, and lay down, content to do nothing. Stevie, however, wasn’t going to let her do nothing.

“Okay then, beg, borrow, or steal?” she asked.

“Huh?” Lisa mumbled, already feeling sleepy in the fierce sun.

“The fifteen dollars Carole needs for her dad’s birthday present,” Stevie explained.

“Hmmm,” Lisa said, reaching for the suntan lotion. “You know, I might have a solution for this. Let me think a minute.” She began thinking about the work she’d been doing for the paper. She had certainly hurt enough people with her thoughtlessness. It seemed only right that she reverse the process. After all, Mr. Teller was going to pay her fifteen dollars a week. The least she could do would be to give Carole one week’s worth.

“Hey, I could—wait a minute,” Lisa said. Suddenly, Lisa’s mind did a hop, skip, and jump. “I might even have two solutions to this problem.” She sat up and
looked at her friends excitedly. “Because I think I smell a—” She paused, thinking.

“A rat?” Stevie supplied. Lisa shook her head.

“A skunk?” Carole suggested. Lisa shook her head again.

“Well,
what
?” Trudy demanded, peering at them over the top of her sunglasses.

“I smell fresh paint!” Lisa announced.

“Of course you do,” Stevie said. “That’s all any of us has smelled at the stable for the last few weeks. The place stinks all the time!”

“That’s it!” Lisa said excitedly. “The answer.”

“It’s not an answer, it’s a problem,” Stevie said. “I can’t wait until they’re done. It’s taking forever because they just keep working on little pieces every day. It took them nearly a week just to finish up the locker area.”

“And that’s exactly what I mean,” Lisa said. “See, whenever you paint, you have to move furniture around. Then when you’re done painting, you move it back. Mostly, people would never really notice that the stuff had been moved, unless, of course, something didn’t get back where it belonged.”

“I think I see what you’re getting at!” Stevie said excitedly.

Carole and Trudy just looked confused. Stevie explained, “What Lisa’s saying is that the stableboys have been painting the locker area for weeks, and every time they do it, they move things—like the cubbies.
Stuff that may have been way back in the cubby might, just might, be jostled out the back and get stuck someplace where somebody might not find it!”

“Oh!” Carole said. “Wouldn’t that be something!”

“It sure would, and I’m not about to wait until Tuesday to find out if it’s true. Let’s go right now!”

Stevie didn’t have to say it twice. The pool would be waiting for them when they got back. The girls pulled on shorts and tees over their bathing suits in record time and headed for Pine Hollow.

The stable was a short walk from Stevie’s house, and they covered the distance quickly, barely talking at all. They were each too excited about the possibility of getting Carole’s money back.

“Back again so soon?” Max asked, watching the girls parade past his office door.

“We’re here on a hunch,” Stevie said mysteriously. He shook his head and picked up his copy of
Horse Show
.

The locker area was empty when they got there. The wall of cubbies looked the way it always did, pushed up against the freshly painted wall.

“Lisa, you and Trudy get that end. Carole and I will take this one. We should only need to move the cubbies about six inches to see if your theory is correct,” Stevie commanded, taking charge.

Everybody followed instructions. The block of cubbies was about ten feet long and almost five feet high. It was also two feet deep.

“One, two, three …”

They tried to pick up the shelves. They didn’t budge.

“This thing weighs a ton!” Carole said, speaking for all of them.

“It doesn’t matter what it weighs,” Stevie said. “I know we can move it.”

“Ah, the pessimist turns optimist!” Trudy teased.

“Save your breath for lifting,” Stevie suggested.

“Four, five, six …” Lisa said. No more success.

“Why don’t we try moving one end out from the wall at a time,” Carole proposed. “That way, we can get extra muscle working together.”

It worked. Quickly, they shifted to the other end and repeated the process. They did it again and again until Lisa, the smallest and skinniest of the crew, could squeeze behind the cubbies. Her friends stood on the other side and waited.

“One riding glove,” she announced, tossing a brown kid glove over to them.

“Won’t Veronica’s daddy be happy?” Stevie said with a smirk.

“Three riding crops.” They flew over the top, too. Carole wiped the dust off them and put them in the bucket where the crops were kept.

“A set of keys.”

“Meg’s, of course,” Stevie said.

“Some underwear—red with white stars on them!”

“I wondered what had happened to these!” Stevie
said, grabbing them quickly and stuffing them back into her own cubby. Carole and Trudy laughed at her.

“Anything else?” Carole asked.

“Just this,” Lisa said, her voice muffled.

“What?” Stevie asked, watching the top of the cubbies expectantly for the next item.

“Oh, just this old red wallet with fifteen dollars in it!” Lisa peered around the cubbies, a light gleaming in her eyes.

“All
right
!” Stevie yelled.

“I can’t believe it!” Carole said.

“It’s true. Believe it,” Lisa told her, giving the wallet to Stevie. “And wait a minute, there’s some other stuff here, too. I mean like money,” she said, once again disappearing behind the wall of cubbies. “Here’s a dime and three quarters, two pennies, and a—get this, it’s a silver dollar.”

“It must be interest,” Trudy joked.

Lisa emerged from behind the cubbies and handed the change to Stevie. “If it’s interest, it’s yours since it was your wallet.” Stevie put the change in her wallet, along with her own penny and Carole’s fifteen dollars.

“Okay, let’s move the cubbies back and get out of here. Our pool party’s still waiting to happen,” Stevie said. “And now we really have something to celebrate!”

Together, the girls shoved the cubbies back against the wall. They all felt so good about Carole’s money that moving the shelf back was a lot easier than it had
been moving it out. They stowed the recovered objects into each owner’s cubby.

“Well, that’s that,” Carole said, slapping the dust off her denim cutoffs. “The entire mystery is solved and everything’s been found.”

“Not everything,” Stevie said. “We found the gloves, the keys, and the riding crops, but what about Anna’s hat?”

Lisa recalled that Anna had mentioned the disappearance of her hat. She had a feeling about that, too. “I wonder if one of the painters found her hat and didn’t know what to do with it,” she said, thinking out loud.

On the wall facing the cubbies hung dozens of nearly identical black velvet riding hats. Since hats were required, any rider who didn’t own a hat could select one from the stable’s collection.

“The easiest place to lose a black velvet hat is in the middle of a bunch of black velvet hats, don’t you think? If we start on one end and work toward the other, I think we’ll find that one of these hats has Anna’s name in it.”

It took only a few seconds. Anna’s hat had carefully been stored on a very high hook, usually reserved for adult-size hats. Anna’s hat was put in her cubby, and the girls were ready to return to the swimming pool.

“Last one in is a rotten egg,” Stevie said.

“Nope,” Lisa corrected her. “Today, there are no rotten eggs. We’re all perfect!”

“Right,” Stevie said. “And if you believe that one …” Laughing, the four girls threw their arms around each other and headed out the stable door.

“Y
OU KNOW
, I love the city, but malls are great!” Trudy announced when Mrs. Atwood dropped all four girls off the following morning to buy Colonel Hanson’s birthday present.

“You mean you don’t have malls in the city?” Lisa asked.

“Nope,” Trudy said. “We’ve got lots of really cool stores in the downtown shopping area of Washington, but it’s really not the same. It’s neat to have so many different stores all in one building!”

“So, if we can’t get her to like the country because of horses, malls will do it!” Stevie said. “I can’t believe you have to leave tomorrow—I’m going to miss you. It’s been fun pretending I have a sister. Will you come out here next weekend and go to the mall with us?”

“You bet,” Trudy said. “Anytime. Malls are great!”
She glanced over at a group of boys dressed in colorful surfer shorts and tees who were hanging out in front of a burger place. The girls giggled.

“Okay, gang, enough sight-seeing—we’ve got work to do!” Lisa said, leading the group in the direction of the vintage-record store.

On the way, they passed the earring store where Trudy had gotten her shell-casing earrings. They also stopped at the department store and Happy Feet, the junior shoe store.

At the Preppy Puppy store, the girls couldn’t decide which puppy was cutest—a cocker spaniel, a husky, or a spotted dalmatian—but they had fun cuddling them all!

Carole laughed as an overeager Yorkshire terrier covered her face with wet licks. “He’s definitely cute,” Carole said as she handed him back to the saleslady. “But not nearly as cute as Samson,” Carole added to Stevie.

The Saddle Club practically had to drag Trudy out of the store. “Your apartment probably doesn’t allow pets,” Lisa reminded Trudy sympathetically.

After stopping for a soda, they went to the Scent Shop, where they sprayed themselves with a wild variety of perfumes.