Horsenapped! Read Online Free PDF Page A

every newspaper in the country!”
    “Wait a minute! We don’t want to sneak up on anybody!” Lisa interrupted Stevie’s daydream. “We just want to figure out where the horses are and who did the napping, and then we want to let the police take over. We don’t want to be heroines!”
    Carole nodded agreement. “I don’t know about you two, but the only thing that matters as far as I’m concerned is the safety of the horses.”
    Carole opened her soda can carefully. It didn’t explode. As she took a sip, she looked down at the ring, where the last junior rider was completing his dressage test. Carole stood up.
    “Time to go find Max and plant the idea that the diAngelos have Garnet.”
    “And then we’d better get out of here,” Stevie said. “There’s work to be done. I just got a great idea for a disguise, in case we need it. My dad has this old raincoat and a fake mustache …”
    Lisa almost laughed. When Stevie got an idea for a scheme in her head, she sometimes got carried away. An old raincoat and a fake mustache definitely meant beingcarried away. But, after all, Stevie was probably joking. Lisa hoped she was.
    One of the great things about The Saddle Club, as far as Lisa was concerned, was how different the three of them were. Stevie had her schemes; Carole was focused totally on the horses; and Lisa was logical. Their differences had always made them greater than the sum of their parts, but would it be enough this time?
    “Hey, I just remembered something!” Stevie said, brushing dirt off her breeches. “My mother has this gigantic magnifying glass. We’ll have lots of use for that!”
    Carole’s mind was on something else, as usual. “Maybe I should take out an ad in the paper with instructions to the horsenappers on how and when to feed those horses.”
    “Okay, first things first,” Lisa said. But nobody was listening.

 
    A CCORDING TO L ISA , the first thing they had to do was find out if Bodoni and Sat had been horsenapped along with Garnet. Stevie was convinced it was true, based on what she referred to as “circumstantial evidence.” Carole wasn’t certain what circumstantial evidence was, but suspected it had to do with the gum. What it came down to was that Lisa assigned Carole the job of finding out for sure.
    The next morning, the alarm next to Carole’s head went off very early. It almost wasn’t necessary, though. She’d been awake a lot of the night figuring out exactly how she was going to do what Lisa wanted her to do. Then, every time she actually started to drift off to sleep, she started worrying about the horsenappers takingproper care of the horses, and that made her wide-awake. She was glad when it was morning and she could at least stop worrying about one thing—sleeping.
    The three girls were all staying at Stevie’s house for the duration of the combined-training event because Stevie lived the closest to Pine Hollow Stables. Carole slipped out of bed without waking her friends. In the dim gray light of dawn, she put on her riding clothes and then, carrying her boots, crept downstairs to the kitchen. She drank a glass of milk and pulled on her boots. She and Starlight had some work to do and the sooner she started out, the better. Today was the cross-country riding part of the event. That meant Starlight would have
two
cross-country trips. The first one wouldn’t count for a ribbon, but it might help make a difference to Garnet, Bodoni, and Sat.
    Carole scribbled a note to her friends, saying she’d be back to Pine Hollow by midmorning. Then, she left the Lakes’ house, closing the kitchen door behind her quietly.
    A LTHOUGH C AROLE WASN ’ T always enthusiastic about getting up early, she was always happy she made the effort. There was something very special about stables and horses early in the morning. That was particularly true now, when early morning was the only time PineHollow wasn’t completely overrun by competitors, grooms, trainers, parents,