Stable Manners (3 page)

Lisa was irritated that her friends would forget to ask her question.

“But didn’t she say the mare could foal at any time?”

“I don’t think so,” Carole said. “She just checked on her and nodded, like everything seems to be on schedule. She’s not due to foal for another two weeks, you know.”

Lisa knew. She was also convinced she was right that it wasn’t going to be another two weeks. She wished her friends would take her more seriously. Of the three of them, she was the newest rider, but she’d worked very hard and learned everything she could about horses in the relatively short time since her first ride. It didn’t seem fair that Stevie and Carole still thought they knew more than she did. Maybe the Know-Down would be an opportunity to show them how much she knew. Of course, by then, there would be a new foal to show them the same thing!

“Horse Wise will resume in five minutes!” a crackling voice announced on the stable’s PA system.

“Lunch!” Lisa said, suddenly realizing that she hadn’t eaten at all. Carole and Stevie hadn’t finished their sandwiches, either. The three of them hurried to the locker area, gobbled their food and drank their juice before returning to the feed room for the second half of the Horse Wise meeting.

“W
HERE
’
S
L
ISA
?” C
AROLE
asked Stevie. The meeting was over and the girls were waiting for Carole’s father. He’d been at the Horse Wise meeting because he was a parent volunteer. Now, it seemed, the volunteers were having a meeting of their own and the girls had to wait for that to be over. They didn’t mind. Any time spent at Pine Hollow was good time, even if it was spent standing in the driveway. Then, when the volunteers’ meeting was over, the three girls were all going to Carole’s house for a sleepover. That might even be more fun than the Horse Wise meeting.

“We have to remember not to talk about Cam and Phil too much,” Stevie reminded Carole.

“No problem. All we’re going to talk about is the Know-Down. There’s so much work to do with the study sheets that we won’t have time to talk about Cam and Phil. I don’t want to hurt Lisa’s feelings any more than you do.”

“Here she comes,” Stevie said. The two of them waved to Lisa as she emerged from the stables. She waved back, then signaled them to come over. They dropped their bags and trotted over to follow Lisa back into the stable.

“Look,” she said, when her friends caught up with her at the mare’s stall. “She’s still cranky and skittish.”

Carole observed the mare. She did seem a little frightened. Skittish was definitely the word.

“She’s only been here two days and this is an unfamiliar place,” Carole reminded Lisa. “Maybe she’s just afraid.”

“Maybe she’s about to have a foal,” Lisa said.

“Of course she is,” Stevie said. “In about ten days, maybe more. Maybe less.”

“Less,” Lisa said.

“You girls ready?” That was Colonel Hanson. The parent volunteers’ meeting was over and he pulled the car keys out of his pocket.

Lisa gave the mare a last look and sighed. Lisa
hated to leave, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. By the time she returned to Pine Hollow, there would probably be a foal waiting for her.

“I’ve got a new one for you, Stevie,” Colonel Hanson said, shifting his car into gear while he pulled out onto the road toward home.

“Ready,” Stevie said. Her eyes sparkled in anticipation. She and Colonel Hanson shared a love of very bad, very old jokes and they were forever trying to outwit one another with them.

“How can you tell when an elephant’s raided your refrigerator?”

“Easy-peasy,” Stevie snapped back. “Smell of peanuts on his breath.”

“Drat, I thought I had you with that one. All right, then. What has four wheels and flies?”

“A garbage truck. Why don’t you try something hard?”

“Hmmmm. Okay. What do you find in the middle of Paris?”

“Eiffel Tower?”

“Nope.”

“Right in the middle?”

“Yes, right in the middle.”

“That arch thing? The Arc de Triomphe?”

“Nope.”

Carole joined in. “The Louvre? Place de la Concorde? Notre Dame?”

They tried everything they could remember about Paris, including the Île de la Cité, the Bastille, and Versailles, which, Colonel Hanson was pleased to remind them, was about twenty miles outside of the city. “This is right in the middle of Paris,” he said.

“
R,
” said Lisa.

“Are what?” Stevie asked.

“
R.
It’s in the middle of Paris. P-A-R-I-S.
R
is in the middle,” Lisa clarified.

“Very good,” said the colonel.

“Groan,” said Stevie.

“Da-ad!” Carole complained. Secretly, though, she loved it. She was sure she had the best father in the whole wide world and the fact that her friends seemed to share her opinion always made her feel especially lucky.

Once they solved the colonel’s riddle, talk turned to horses. Carole and Stevie were curious about where Lisa had been during lunch. Lisa hadn’t had a chance to tell them about the Big Sis/Little Sis project she was doing with May.

“You know, I learned a lot about hitching a horse to a wagon when I was in Vermont,” Stevie said. “We used horse-drawn sleighs to collect maple sap.”

“And I had to hitch the ponies to the cart when we were giving rides at the fair Stevie organized—or rather
dis
organized—last spring. I can help you with it, too.”

There was a part of Lisa that was glad for the offer of help from her friends, but there was another part of her that wondered why they always seemed to think they knew so much when she didn’t. And then when she
did
know something—like the mare was going to foal any day now—they dismissed it, “Thanks anyway,” she said. “But Max said May and I were supposed to work on this together. I guess we’d better leave it that way. You guys will have your chance another time.”

Stevie and Carole exchanged glances. It wasn’t like Lisa to turn down help, Stevie thought. Lisa
must
be a little jealous of the fact that both Carole and Stevie had boyfriends coming to the Know-Down. She decided that they needed to make Lisa feel included right away. She turned to Carole.

“I can’t wait to get to your house so we can start working on the Know-Down together,” she said.

“Me, too,” Lisa agreed. Stevie was glad to hear that.

“Me, three,” Carole added. “In two weeks, we’re going to know every single thing on the study sheets.”

“We’ll knock ’em dead!” Stevie vowed.

At that the threesome shook hands.

Colonel Hanson pulled up into his driveway and the girls piled out of the car and headed for the house. They did want to get to work on their studying, which, since it was about horses, was what they’d want to talk about anyway, but first things first. They needed a snack.

Stevie took the milk out of the refrigerator while Carole located some graham crackers. Lisa found a jar of peanut butter. They were setting out plates, knives, and napkins, including a spot at the table for Colonel Hanson, when he appeared in the kitchen.

“Listen, girls, I have to go out for a while. I had a message on my answering machine. There’s a crisis at the office. General Amato is coming for an inspection on Monday and—oh, I won’t bore you with details, but it seems I’m needed. I won’t be long. Why don’t you help yourselves to a snack and I’ll be back in about an hour. Leave me some peanut butter, okay?”

“Okay,” they agreed, eyeing the jar warily. There was probably enough for all four of them.

“Uh, one other thing,” the colonel said. “Carole, I want you to stay away from my desk, okay?”

“Sure, Dad,” she said, but she looked puzzled.

“There are some papers there that are kind of private,” he explained. “I know you don’t go rummaging
through my things, but there’s some stuff there …” He seemed uncomfortable even saying these words.

Then Carole smiled in understanding. “No problem,” she assured him.

The colonel saluted, then left the girls to their feast at the kitchen table.

Once each had smeared an ample amount of peanut butter on a graham cracker and managed to down the first bite and chase it with milk, talk began, though slowly until the peanut butter cleared.

“Okay, now the Know-Down. Let’s start,” Carole said. Then she remembered that she and Stevie had sent their study sheets to Phil and Cam. “Have you got the sheets?” she asked Lisa.

“I had to give mine to May,” Lisa said. “She lost her own in what must be record time. Less than five minutes, I think. The girl’s amazing. Can I borrow one of yours and copy them?”

“Oh, dear,” Carole said, distressed. She explained to Lisa what had happened to them.

“What are we going to do?” Stevie asked. It wasn’t as if they’d never be able to replace them, but they’d all been counting on this sleepover to begin serious work.

“Dad,” Carole said as if it were an answer. “He’s a
volunteer. Max had to give a set of the sheets to the volunteers, too, didn’t he?”

“Of course,” Stevie agreed. “We’ll just wait until he gets back.”

“He might not be back for hours!” Carole said. “Just think what we could be learning while he’s gone.”

“But where did he put them?” Lisa asked.

“On his desk, I’m sure,” Carole said. “That’s where he puts everything.”

“And that’s where we’re not supposed to go,” Lisa reminded her.

“Oh, he doesn’t mean that,” Carole said.

“I thought he was pretty clear,” said Lisa. “He told you not to look on his desk.”

Carole smiled at her friends. “He told
me
not to look on his desk. He didn’t say anything about you guys. Didn’t you get that? See, it’s my birthday soon. He’s got something on his desk that’s supposed to be a surprise for me. I don’t know what it is and I really don’t want to know, but you can know if you have to. So, the solution is that one of you should go to Dad’s desk, find the papers, and then we can go over to Mrs. Jensen’s house and copy them on her machine. We’ll be back and have the papers on Dad’s desk within fifteen minutes. He’ll never know and whatever surprise
there is for me on his desk, well, you just won’t tell me. Okay?” Carole looked to her friends for their agreement.

“I think you’ve been spending too much time with Stevie,” Lisa teased.

The girls laughed. Then, since the whole thing
had
sounded a lot like Stevie Lake’s logic, they nominated her to be the one to go to the colonel’s desk. Stevie took a final bite of her cracker and peanut butter, a last slug of milk, and headed for the living room where the colonel’s desk was.

Stevie didn’t feel quite right about this. She thought Carole’s father was one of the nicest men in the world and she’d heard what he’d said to Carole and had thought it applied to all of them, not just Carole. On the other hand, there were those who would contend that Stevie was the most curious girl in the world and Stevie wouldn’t think of denying it. If there was something interesting about Carole’s birthday on her father’s desk, Stevie was dying to know what it was.

She turned on the light and walked over to the colonel’s desk. Colonel Hanson did everything with a military precision. Stevie’s own desk had papers piled high and dripping over the edge onto the floor. Colonel Hanson’s desk was completely clear except for a
few papers next to the telephone answering machine. Logic told Stevie that those were the papers he’d carried home from Horse Wise and put down next to the answering machine when he’d gotten his message about the problem at the office. There was a pad there where he’d made a notation about the call he’d gotten that had made him hurry back to his office.

Stevie made a mental note about the exact way the papers were lying on the colonel’s desk before she touched them. She didn’t think he’d worry about fingerprints, but he might notice if anything was out of place. Stevie picked up the papers and was relieved to recognize words that had been typed on Max’s old typewriter. At the top it said
HORSE WISE KNOW-DOWN
. It was just what she was looking for. There were seven sheets of paper, chock-f of information about horses, starting with one-point questions and going up to the four-pointers. The girls were in luck. Now all they had to do was to get the sheets copied and return the originals to the colonel’s desk before he got home. She was pretty sure they had time. She hoped she was right. Just to be on the safe side, she turned off the light before returning to the kitchen.

“Bingo!” she declared loudly, walking into the kitchen and rejoining her friends. “Now let’s get the rest of this done before your dad gets back. Call your
neighbor and see if we can come over now to make the copies.”

“Right after you tell me what my father’s giving me for my birthday,” Carole said.

A mental image of the colonel’s desktop flashed into Stevie’s mind. It was totally clear. There had been nothing on the desk except the note about the phone call and the Horse Wise papers.

“Nothing,” she said.

“I thought I could count on you,” Carole teased her.

“I really didn’t see anything,” said Stevie. “His desk was clear.”