The Painted Horse (3 page)

Carole put the saddle back on the saddle horse. She washed the seat, the flaps, and the leather underneath the flaps with the wet sponge. She struggled to get rid of a greasy black mark. “It’s called a jockey,” she whispered.

“Those marks are called jockeys,” Veronica said. “They must be removed.”

Lisa sighed with relief. The demonstration was going well. Veronica looked good, Carole looked good, and Pine Hollow looked good.

Carole dried the wet leather with a chamois cloth. “If it’s not dry, there’ll be lather,” she whispered. “When it dries, lather collects dust.”

“Make sure the leather is dry before you put on the soap,” Veronica said. “Otherwise the soap will lather. And the lather will dry and accumulate dirt.”

“Great,” Melody said. “But now we want to see you do something, Veronica. Why don’t you provide the finishing touches?”

Veronica picked up a dry sponge and a tin. The only problem was that she hadn’t picked up the tin of saddle soap. She had picked up a tin of black leather polish.

“Er,” Lisa said. “Wait—”

“I think I know what I’m doing,” Veronica snapped.

“Please,” whispered Carole, looking at the black polish with an expression of misery.

Veronica threw Lisa and Carole a scornful look. She lifted the lid of the tin and put her sponge in the black polish.

“Excuse me,” Carole said, reaching for the polish.

Veronica rolled her eyes and put a bold black streak across the saddle.

S
TEVIE
WAS
IN
big trouble. She knew she had to choose a special object for her paper—she really needed this grade. And she knew Ms. Dodge was keeping an eye on her. But she couldn’t make up her mind. Everything looked equally boring.

There was something called a highboy, which was actually just a large chest of drawers. Stevie couldn’t understand why something so boring had such an interesting name. And then there was a triangular chair.
Ten minutes sitting in that chair and you’d feel like a pretzel. And then there was a footstool covered with shiny black fabric.

“Isn’t that nice?” said Ms. Dodge with a sigh.

“I guess,” said Stevie.

“Do you know what it’s covered with?” said Ms. Dodge.

“No,” said Stevie.

“You’ll be interested, Stevie, because I know you love horses,” she said.

Stevie wondered what a footstool had to do with horses.

“That shiny black fabric is horsehair,” Ms. Dodge said.

Stevie jumped back. What a way for a noble horse’s mane and tail to end up—on a footstool.

Ms. Dodge couldn’t seem to tear herself away from that footstool. Stevie wandered out onto the balcony to look through the huge glass window at Central Park. She saw a squirrel scramble up a tree and scoop a nut out of a hole. A pair of blackbirds sat on the back of a bench, cawing at each other. One rose; then the other rose. They swept up into the sky.
There’s freedom out there
, Stevie thought.

“You’ve got to see this fire screen,” Mrs. Martin called to Ms. Dodge. Ms. Dodge hurried off to look.

There were people who thought fire screens were exciting,
Stevie realized. That was okay. It was a free country.

Stevie turned back to the window. Sometimes there were horses in Central Park. She knew this because she had ridden there on the previous visit when she and Lisa and Carole had met Skye Ransom.

If only she were on the other side of the glass. If only she were outdoors.

“Now, Stevie.” Stevie jumped guiltily. It was Ms. Dodge. “It’s time to select your object,” she said. “We’ll meet in the main hall near the museum store at four.” She smiled. “Don’t forget to get a postcard of your object.”

“No problem, Ms. Dodge,” said Stevie.

As soon as Ms. Dodge moved away, Stevie looked at her watch. She had a whole two hours. She looked at the park. It wouldn’t hurt to take a break from all this culture. In fact, she owed it to herself. A breath of fresh air was all she needed.

She walked through the Egyptian exhibit back to the main hall. To the right was the museum gift shop. Stevie could buy postcards later.

She wiggled through the knot of tourists and hurried down the stairs. She ran along an endless fountain and turned left. Suddenly she was in the park.

Fresh air. Freedom.
She raised her arms and a bird burst up out of a bush.

“Way to go,” she said to the bird. “Don’t let anybody keep you down.”

She climbed a sloping sidewalk until she was on a hill behind the museum. The road was filled with joggers, skaters, cyclists, and kids on tricycles.

Stevie felt excitement rise inside her. It was like the beginning of a cross-country event or the beginning of a hunt. If she’d been on Belle, she’d have leaned forward and said, “Go, girl.”

She was alone now, so she said it to herself. “Go, Stevie.”

Next thing she knew, she was part of the stream of cyclists and skaters and runners. She was on the move.

V
ERONICA
GASPED
AT
the black streak. Lisa gulped. This was really going to make Pine Hollow look bad. Their supposedly best rider didn’t know the difference between saddle soap and leather polish.

“Somebody got the lids reversed,” Carole said. “Veronica thought she was picking up saddle soap when she was picking up black polish.” The truth was that Veronica hadn’t bothered to check that she was taking the right tin, but Carole was trying to make the stable look good.

Veronica rolled her eyes significantly. She was clearly implying that Carole had gotten the caps mixed up.

Lisa was furious. No one was going to do that to Carole.

“It’s me,” she said. “I’m so absentminded. I just do these things. I don’t know why.”

Carole couldn’t believe her ears. Lisa was the least absentminded person she knew. But she knew that Lisa was only trying to protect the honor of Pine Hollow. “It was both of us,” Carole said quickly. She picked up a clean sponge and loaded it with saddle soap. Their only hope was to get the black polish off the saddle before it sank into the leather.

Lisa picked up another sponge, loaded it with more saddle soap, and started scrubbing, too.

Veronica crossed her arms and watched as Lisa and Carole struggled to remove the polish.

Lisa’s and Carole’s heads bumped as they scrubbed. This might be Veronica’s saddle, but it was a beautiful one. They wanted to make it like new again.

“Ohhh,” Lisa groaned as she scrubbed at a particularly tough spot. Finally it came away. She stood back. There was no trace of black polish.

Lisa and Carole looked at each other and sighed with relief.

“Thank goodness,” said Melody. “I really thought that saddle was ruined.”

“Yes,” Veronica said. “It was a close call. It shows what carelessness can do.”

Lisa nodded solemnly.

“I’d like to commend Lisa and Carole,” Veronica continued
in a sugary voice. “This shows that even if people make errors, they can fix them.”

The cameraman turned the camera to Lisa and Carole, who grinned bravely.

Meanwhile, Lisa was thinking that all her friends watched WCTV. They’d want to know how she could make such a silly error. From now on her life was going to be miserable. She looked over at Carole. She could tell that Carole was embarrassed, too.

“So what’s on for tomorrow?” said Melody, turning to Max.

Max thought for a second. “To tell you the truth, we’ll be cleaning bridles.”

Veronica’s eyes widened, but then she caught herself and smiled. “It’s one of my favorite things,” she said. “I love cleaning bridles.”

Lisa and Carole gave each other despairing looks. Tomorrow they would have to be even more helpful.

A
HORSE
-
DRAWN
CARRIAGE
rumbled past Stevie as she walked through Central Park. The carriage had white wheels and red seats, and the driver was wearing a top hat and a black coat with tails. The horse looked kind of bored, but it was a real horse.

Stevie followed the flow of skaters and joggers along a curving road. Eventually she came to a sign that said
BOAT
HOUSE
in front of a cheerful redbrick building
on the edge of a lagoon. At tables along the water, people were eating and talking. Stevie smelled the enticing odor of french fries.
Fries would taste good right now
, she thought.
With ketchup.
But she didn’t stop. It felt too good to be moving. She just wanted to walk outside.

As Stevie walked past the lagoon, she saw people in rowboats. Other people were in a gondola propelled by a man standing up and handling a pole. She had never seen anything like it. But she didn’t stop to investigate. She wanted to see as much of the park as possible.

The road turned right, and after a while she heard cheerful, tinny music. There was something familiar about it. She followed a path down the hill and saw a carousel with colorful wooden horses. She sighed. The horses in the carousel were beautiful.

Stevie had to smile. There was a line of small kids with their parents. Stevie remembered that when she was little, riding the carousel in the Willow Creek mall had been the scariest and most exciting experience of her life. Stevie got in line, even though she felt a little silly because she was a lot younger than the parents and a lot older than the kids.

When she got to the head of the line, the ticket seller, who was a chubby man with fuzzy hair, said, “How many?”

“Just one,” Stevie said. “There’s only me.”

“You can ride more than once,” the man said with a smile.

When Stevie was little, she never got to ride the carousel for as long as she wanted. Now she could ride forever.

“Give me five,” she said. “No, ten.”

The man smiled more broadly and counted out the tickets.

When the carousel stopped, half the kids didn’t get off. There were only two horses left when it was Stevie’s turn to get on. She chose a black one and climbed on. She grinned happily. New York was starting to be a lot more fun.

“Excuse me,” said a man with a baseball hat on backward. “Please strap yourself in.”

“Me?” said Stevie. “I know how to ride.”

“It’s the rules,” the man said, smiling at her.

Stevie put the leather strap around her waist and buckled it. She remembered how safe the strap had made her feel when she was little. A bell rang, and the carousel lurched into motion. She thought about how when she was little the carousel had seemed as fast as the wind.

There was a squeal of fear from a little kid in front of her. “I’m here,” his mother said, putting her arms around him.

Stevie’s horse moved up. She imagined she was rising over the treetops. The horse went down. It was like sinking into the earth. Up and down. Stevie put a hand on the horse’s neck. “You’ve got nice gaits,” she said. “Very regular and smooth. If you weren’t wood, we could ride off into the sunset together.”

“You can’t do that,” said the man with the baseball hat. He had climbed on the moving carousel and was taking tickets. “The carousel has been here since the turn of the century. This horse is about ninety years old.”

“He looks pretty good for a ninety-year-old horse,” Stevie said.

“He’s one of my favorites,” the man said with a smile. He walked forward to take more tickets.

“I like you,” Stevie said to the horse. “I’m going to give you a name. I think I’ll call you Ralph.” When the carousel stopped moving, Stevie whipped her camera out of her backpack and took a photograph of Ralph.

Stevie rode and rode until it seemed as if Central Park were moving and she and Ralph were standing still. Finally her tickets ran out. She climbed off the carousel and wobbled. She had been going around so long that she’d lost her sense of balance. In fact, she felt kind of strange.

Standing on the grass was a mare with a rich brown
coat and large, intelligent eyes. The mare had long white socks on the right side and short white socks on the left. She looked almost like Belle, Stevie’s horse.

I’m going crazy
, Stevie thought.
I miss Belle so much I imagine that she’s here.
She looked up and saw, to her relief, that the mare was real. She was being ridden by a policeman in a blue uniform. He had friendly blue eyes and a sandy mustache.

“You wouldn’t believe it, but your horse looks just like my horse,” Stevie said to the policeman. “It’s uncanny. My horse has the same color coat, the same eyes. The only difference is that Belle has short socks on the right and long socks on the left. Our horses are opposites.”

“Where’s your horse?” asked the policeman.

“Back home in—” Stevie suddenly stopped. She didn’t want this policeman to know that she came from Virginia. Then he would want to know how she had gotten here. And if she told him she came with a school group, he would want to know where the rest of the group was.

Stevie took a deep breath. “Belle is home on my grandfather’s ranch.”

“And where’s that?” asked the policeman.

“Idaho,” said Stevie. Chances were that the policeman didn’t know much about Idaho.

“Why aren’t you in school?” the policeman asked.