Free Hard Hat by Bonnie Bryant

plaster. They wouldn’t replace them with drywall.”
    She picked up another receipt. “Four hundred thousand tiles,” she read.
    “For the bathroom?” Regina asked.
    “Only if it’s the bathroom in Grand Central Station,” said Stevie. “That’s almost half a million tiles. If they were going to tile this entire house, maybe—and on the outside, too.”
    “Doesn’t seem likely.”
    “This guy must be working on a lot of places at the same time,” Stevie reasoned.
    “Maybe,” said Regina.
    Stevie noticed then that there were filing cabinets around them. She pulled open a drawer. More paper. And the one next to it. More paper.
    “Weird,” said Stevie.
    Regina agreed.
    “This is one busy contractor,” said Stevie. Then she pulled open the next drawer. The only thing in it wasa notebook. Stevie picked it up to look inside, but there was a lock on it. She started thinking about what kind of information needed to be kept in a locked notebook in a locked room in an empty house. It all seemed very odd and, she decided again, none of her business. She wished she’d never wondered about it at all.
    “This is so dumb!” said Regina. “Boring, I mean. I wish we’d never even thought of looking in here.”
    “Me too,” said Stevie, knowing she meant that very sincerely.
    Stevie had the weird sensation that between her and Regina, she was the one with some common sense and she was going to need to draw on it to get them out of the house in one piece. She thought about Carole and Lisa. Although they weren’t there, there seemed to be ways they were always with her. So, what would Carole do? The answer was obvious. Carole would find a way to get a horse to rescue them. That seemed highly unlikely. Lisa, on the other hand, would very sensibly say that the thing to do was relax. They would be rescued.
    “So, what have we got with us?” Stevie asked, eyeing the backpack.
    Regina rummaged again and handed Stevie the bag of raisins and a warm can of diet soda. It didn’t look like much of a meal, but Stevie opened the raisin bag and chewed on a couple pieces of the dried fruit.
    “What else?”
    Regina stuck her hand in again. “I’ve still got the stethoscope,” she said. “It didn’t do us much good on the other side of the wall; I don’t know that it’ll be helpful in here.”
    “Probably not, but we can listen to each other’s hearts. Let me have that a second.”
    Stevie stuck the earpieces in her ear and held the other end to her own heart. It was beating, all right. She thought it was probably beating faster than it usually did, and it had already had quite a workout that night.
    Listening to her heart beat was not going to be a full-time occupation. She stood up and put the stethoscope against the wooden wall above a filing cabinet. There were no sounds at all at first, and then she thought she heard a sort of scurrying sound. She definitely did
not
want to know what that was.
    She took the stethoscope over to the concrete wall she knew was part of the front of the house, facing the street. There she could hear lots of sounds.
    “Water running,” she said.
    “Could be a water main or a sewer,” Regina suggested.
    Stevie hoped it was a water main. “There’s a subway!” she said. She pulled the earpieces out of her ears and could hear nothing. Back against the wall with the stethoscope, it was clear as could be.
    “It’s just a block from here. Sometimes I notice it late at night,” Regina confirmed.
    “Well, it’s definitely there,” Stevie said.
    She listened some more. She could hear people walking by out on the street. There was the sure and sharp clicking of a woman’s high heels. Stevie wondered where she’d been that night. Theater, dance? Maybe a fancy restaurant? Not that it mattered, but it was something to think about.
    Then there was another sound, something she never expected to hear.
    “Hooves!” she declared. “It’s a horse!”
    “Give me a break,” said