Free Horse Talk by Bonnie Bryant Page B

haven’t found anything yet,” Lisa said. The phone rang shrilly, and she grabbed it. “Hi, Judy! Hang on!” Lisa punched the speakerphone button. Her most recent gift from her mother had been one she really appreciated: a telephone with all the latest gadgets. “There. We’re all here, Judy,” she said, “and we can all hear you now.”
    “Hi,” Judy said. “I called to tell you you guys were right. There
is
a horse missing around Pine Hollow. I don’t know if it’s the one your caller saw, but it could be.”
    “Fantastic!” said Stevie.
    “It’s quite a story,” Judy continued. “One of the other vets around here takes care of the horses at Fox Meadow Farm.”
    “We’ve heard of it,” Carole said. Fox Meadow was a boarding stable similar to Pine Hollow, on the other side of Willow Creek. It was supposed to be a nice stable.
    “They have some students who compete in three-day eventing,” Judy continued. Three-day eventing was a type of riding competition that included crosscountry jumping. The Saddle Club sometimes enjoyed trying it at lower levels, but at higher levels it required a very athletic and specially trained horse. “One of them, a girl about your age, sold her first horse lastsummer and bought one that was more advanced. It was a gray quarter horse mare, and it had completed a preliminary three-day event.”
    “Wow,” Lisa murmured. She knew that, though the word
preliminary
sounded easy, preliminary three-day events were tough.
    “Yeah,” Judy agreed. “It was a great little horse—named April Morning. The mare was up in Massachusetts, but the girl—her name is Samantha—and her parents looked at some videos of it and decided to buy it. The trainer at Fox Meadow knew the person in Massachusetts who owned the horse, and everyone thought it would be a great horse for Samantha.
    “They arranged for April Morning to be shipped down to Fox Meadow. Unfortunately, the evening the horse was to arrive here, we had a really terrible thunderstorm. Do you remember, back in August?”
    “The one where all the lights went out?” asked Stevie. She remembered, because she’d used the blackout as an excuse to try to roast hot dogs in her family’s fireplace. The sticks hadn’t been strong enough, and the hot dogs had fallen into the fire. They really blazed.
    “I think so,” said Judy. “Anyway, just outside Willow Creek, on the highway exit ramp, the truck and horse trailer skidded on the wet pavement and rolled into a ditch. When the rescue squad got there, the driver of the truck was unconscious. The trailer waspretty smashed up, and its door wouldn’t open, but the rescuers couldn’t hear any noises coming from inside it. They assumed that either it was empty or the horses inside it were dead.”
    “Oh no,” said Carole.
    “When the driver woke up, back at the hospital, he told them he had had one horse, April Morning, on board. So they called Samantha and her trainer and the vet who told me the story, and they all went out to the site of the crash. Because of the power outage, there were lots of emergencies, and nobody had gotten around to pulling the wreck out of the ditch.
    “But the side of the trailer was open—it looked as if it had been kicked open—and April Morning was gone. There was a little bit of blood inside the trailer, but not much. Any other clues the mare might have left were washed out by the rain. They still haven’t found her.”
    The Saddle Club looked at each other in stunned silence. It was an incredible story. Carole tried to imagine the desolation of buying a horse and then losing it before you ever got to know it.
    “Girls?” said Judy. “Are you there?”
    “We’re here,” said Lisa. “We’re just trying to take it all in.”
    “Samantha and her family have been looking for April for over three months,” said Judy. “Up untilnow, they’ve concentrated their search on the other side of Willow Creek.”
    “And we found her!” Carole