Free Million-Dollar Horse by Bonnie Bryant

old girl died, she was worth almost three million dollars. It was like a joke on everybody who’d ever laughed at Bart. But the bigger joke was still to come.
    “Are you sure you don’t want to tell this part?” Mr. Lake asked his wife. “I mean, you do more will and trust work than I do.”
    “Keep going,” said Mrs. Lake. “I’m enjoying eating.”
    “Okay, so Emma and Bart never had any children. All of Emma’s family was gone. The only one left who was related to either of them was a nephew on Bart’s side.”
    “Paul?” Carole asked.
    “Paul,” Mr. Lake confirmed. “Paul figured he was going to get every penny. While Emma was lingering on life support, he’d sold his own little house and was totally prepared to move into her house. He’d opened accounts at all the fancy stores in downtown Washington, and he’d put a down payment on some kind of—”
    “Yacht!” Stevie supplied.
    “Exactly,” said her father. “And a—”
    “Jaguar!” said Carole.
    “I guess. I just heard it was a sports car. Anyway, when Emma died and the will was read, Paul was in for a big surprise. Ben Stookey was her attorney, and I heard he’d done everything he could to talk her out of it, but he couldn’t. She left Paul a portion of her estate. There are rumors, but you never know. The rumors say it was about two hundred fifty thousand dollars. The rest of it she left in trust, with Ben as the trustee. For Honey-Pie.”
    “The million-dollar horse!” said Carole, understanding for the first time.
    “A good deal more than that,” said Mr. Lake. “Estimates—and, again, this is just rumor—are that the horse is worth about two and a half million dollars.”
    “And Paul?”
    “He spent every penny he had even before he had it. Paul is in deep debt.”
    “So, why doesn’t he sell the yacht and car and stuff?” Stevie asked.
    “Ah, there comes the residual beneficiary stuff. Paul will get most of Emma’s money eventually. When Honey-Pie dies.”
    Stevie’s mind was working so fast her mouth didn’t have a chance to catch up. Everything was becoming clear. Neither Ben nor Paul knew the first thing about horses—except that Paul seemed to know enough toknow what wasn’t good for Honey-Pie. He wanted the mare dead, and he thought The Saddle Club could make that happen for him!
    “Uh, may we please be excused?” she asked. Before her parents could even answer, the girls were taking their plates out to the kitchen. They needed to talk.

“I CAN ’ T BELIEVE Max would do that to us,” said Stevie. “Doesn’t he trust us enough to tell us what’s going on?”
    “Maybe he thought it was just our business to look after Honey-Pie,” Lisa said. “It doesn’t matter what her bank account is. We’d take care of her just the same.”
    “But the problem is that he didn’t warn us about Paul. All we heard was that he was hinting to Paul that
we
weren’t trustworthy,” Carole said.
    “But I guess what he was thinking was that we were totally trustworthy, right?” Lisa asked.
    It was Sunday morning and the girls were walking toward Pine Hollow. They’d been talking about the same thing since dinner the night before and they were fairlysure they understood two things now: Number one was that Paul Fredericks did not have Honey-Pie’s best interests at heart, and number two was that they did.
    “Isn’t that will too weird?” Stevie asked.
    “I like the idea of leaving a lot of money to a horse,” Carole said.
    “What can a horse do with two million dollars?” Lisa asked sensibly.
    “I guess I didn’t say that right. I like the idea of leaving money so that a lot of horses can be helped,” Carole corrected herself. “If I had two million dollars and nobody but a useless nephew to give it to, I’d give it to charity.”
    “I can change my name to Charity if you’d like,” Stevie offered. “Just let me know when you get the two million bucks, okay?”
    “Ha ha,” said Carole.
    The girls