The Shining Stallion (4 page)

“I've got to ask you, though—” Darby tried to stop herself because the question on the tip of her tongue wasn't about making coffee. “Mom, did Jonah used to make you pick your own punishment?”

“Darby, what did you
do
?” Her mother sounded horrified. “He only does that for big things. Like, once I—never mind. What did
you
do?”

Darby wondered why she hadn't realized that by tattling on Jonah, she'd be telling on herself.

She stared into the pan full of water. Little bubbles clustered together, then broke away from each other, racing for the surface.

“He didn't tell you about Mary's bracelet box, did he? Darby?”

“Um, was it sort of about an orphan and making amends?” Darby stalled, trying to sound confused. “I'm not positive I understood.”

“What I think is that I won't be led off on a tangent, young lady. Now, tell me what you did.”

The use of
young lady
was always a bad sign.

“I'll tell you later,” Darby said. Watching the water simmer, she realized something for the first time: Jonah hadn't called her mother when she'd been missing.

“Tell me now,” her mother insisted. “I'm due on the set in five minutes.”

Wisps of steam rose off the quaking surface of the water.

“I accidentally let Hoku get away—”

“You—” Her mother gasped.

“So, I went after her by myself—”

“But you left a note,” her mother said. “Right?”

Darby knew she wasn't giving her mother a very accurate picture of what had happened, but she just answered the question. “No, I didn't.”

There was a moment of stunned silence before her mother asked, “You weren't gone overnight, were you?”

“No!” Darby insisted.

Was her mother wishing she was close enough to shake her? Maybe she was simply amazed that Darby had done something that required her to put down her book.

“And you're fine?”

“Sure, I didn't get hurt.”
Much,
Darby thought, wincing as she touched her bruised face.

“Jonah must have been worried.”

“I'm afraid everyone was,” Darby admitted.

“Well then, you might as well go along with the punishment. What's it going to be?”

“Taking care of…” Darby hesitated. The word
stallion
might worry her mother, so she said, “Some horses, and helping out Megan. She's the ranch manager's daughter and I was supposed to be staying with her until I learned my way around better.”

“The buddy system,” Mom said approvingly. “That's always a good idea. You know that.”

“I do,” Darby said, and suddenly she heard rapid steps coming across the ranch yard. She couldn't have said why, but she felt guilty and eager not to be caught talking on the phone. “I better go, Mom.”

“Me too—but, Darby? Behave, will you, honey? I've never had trouble with you acting up. Don't start misbehaving now.”

“I won't, Mom.”

“That's my girl! Hug Hoku for me!” Then, with a smacking kiss, her mother hung up.

Darby pinched a toasted almond out of the granola. Just as she popped it into her mouth, two things happened.

Jonah walked into the kitchen as the coffee water boiled over. Hissing on the hot burner, it sent up a cloud of steam.

Jonah bumped Darby's hand out of the way and grabbed the pan's handle. After he'd moved it, he shook his scalded fingers.

Without looking at her, he muttered, “Go ahead and eat your breakfast, but while you do, I think you'd better tell me more about this horse in the night.”

“I really didn't see him that well,” Darby told Jonah.

“And yet you think he's a male. A stallion?” Jonah asked.

“Probably just because you told me about the
Shining Stallion of—”

“Mauna Kea,” Jonah supplied.

“Why do you want to know?” Darby asked.

“Just tell me what you can remember,” Jonah said. He didn't answer her question and suddenly she saw Jonah differently.

He looked totally Hawaiian—powerful and insightful, with his head thrown back like one of his fine horses. She could almost imagine him wearing the feathered helmets of old Hawaiian royalty.

“Is something wrong?” Darby asked.

“Close your eyes and take your time,” he coached her.

Then, breaking the spell, her grandfather turned away to sponge up the spilled water with maddening slowness.

Patiently, he pulverized the coffee beans in an electric grinder.

She would never be able to wait him out, Darby thought, so she closed her eyes. Trying not to look like a fake psychic, she made her mind call up a vivid memory of the dark horse.

“He smelled like he'd been running,” Darby said, “and when he went past, I felt a wave of warmth.” Darby opened one eye. When Jonah motioned her to keep talking, she tried to remember more. “He was almost totally silent. That's why I thought he might be wild—because he'd been stalked before,
and managed to escape. His coat must have been black or bay. When the moonlight hit him, he was shiny, but not bright. Not spotted, either, like a pinto or Appaloosa.”

Size?
Darby didn't know if the word came from Jonah or from her mind, nudging her to see the strange horse again, because, for some reason, it was important.

“He had lots of mane and tail, but he wasn't big. Not much taller than Hoku, but deep-chested. Strong looking.”

“When he passed you, where was he headed? Back to some other ranch—toward the Zinks' place, maybe—or on his way to Crimson Vale?”

Darby opened her eyes to see Jonah gesture toward the road.

“He went the other way.” Darby pointed toward the tack shed, the fox pens, and Hoku. “So you don't think it was just one of our ranch horses wandering around….”

Jonah's smile erased all traces of his commanding look, but she couldn't have said why until he agreed, “Not one of
our
ranch horses?”

Darby ducked her head. Jonah's expression said he liked her feeling possessive of the ranch and its horses. His approval felt impossibly good.

But the dark horse. She had to know more about him.

“Do you know who he is?” she asked.

“I might know
what
he is,” Jonah said, and just when Darby thought he was about to offer another supernatural explanation, he finished, “Bad news.”

C
onfident she'd done a good job cleaning the tack shed the day before, Darby thought it would be only minutes before she could mount Navigator and begin the new job Jonah had set for her: finding the strange horse.

“No one saw him, but you got a feel for him,” Jonah said. “Now, go down and tell Kit you're there to finish what you started.” Jonah moved his coffee cup in a gesture like he was making a toast. “He'll know what you're talking about.”

Darby rushed out of the house and across the ranch yard so fast, she nearly collided with Kit in the tack room doorway.

“What's this, now?” the foreman asked.

“I came to finish what I started,” Darby explained.

Kit looked up long enough to meet Darby's eyes. For him, that amounted to a stare.

“You in trouble?” Kit asked.

“I don't think so,” Darby said.

“Hmm.” Kit touched one thumb to his turquoise rock necklace and looked across the yard at Jonah.

Her grandfather stood under the candlenut tree, looking down, walking slowly.

Something was going on that Kit seemed to want to be part of, but he turned back to Darby with a resigned sigh and jerked his thumb inside the tack room.

“It's about these old grain bags,” he said.

Darby blinked as her eyes adjusted to the dim light, but she had no trouble recalling three gunnysacks that had once held the horses' grain. She'd seen them tossed in a corner. “I stuffed them in that bucket,” she said, pointing. “Just to get them out of the way so I could sweep.”

How boring was this compared to tracking down a wild horse? But Darby knew Jonah wouldn't let her leave before she finished up, so she rushed on, “Where was I supposed to put them?”

Kit pulled out one of the bags. As he did, something scattered on the board floor.

“Pieces of grain get stuck in the corners and left behind even when the bags look empty. Old grain
gets damp, spoils, and ferments,” Kit explained.

Darby's mind raced ahead. “And it draws mice?”

“Not if one of the horses gets in here first,” Kit said.

Like Kona,
Darby thought.

“That's what Jonah wanted you to know,” Kit said. He seemed to be edging out of the tack room.

“But, I locked the door when I left last night,” Darby said.

“Yeah,” Kit agreed, rubbing the back of his neck.

He seemed uncomfortable, but she didn't understand why. She'd sweep it up and be on her way. But then Navigator's big form blocked the sun falling into the tack room and Darby heard him snuffle.

Did he smell the spoiled grain?
Fermented,
Kit had said. Her mind flashed a nightmarish image of Navigator lying on his side, his belly distended from food poisoning.

“No, you get out of here,” she told him, and wind-milled her arms at the gelding. “Go on, get!”

Eyes rolling, Navigator backed away from the door.

“Jonah told me to always lock the door and I did,” Darby insisted.

“I know.” Kit frowned across the ranch yard at Jonah again. “But the boss wants the job finished up.”

“I can do that,” she said.

The job shouldn't be too dusty since she'd swept
last night, but she wished she'd put her asthma inhaler in her pocket when she'd changed out of her pajamas.

Darby carried the gunnysacks to a wheelbarrow, raked up bits of icky, soft grain, and even used her fingers to pick up a few last pieces. Some were coated in fuzzy mold. She couldn't stand the thought of the horses eating them.

When she could see no more grain, she stood up, scrubbed her hands against her jeans, and ignored her wheezing. She didn't want to go back to the house. She wanted to go ride.

Following Kit's directions, Darby found the ranch compost pile and raked dirt over the sacks while Navigator watched. Darby tried to exhale completely with each breath.

She looked over her shoulder toward Sun House and saw Kimo.

He rode a fractious blue roan, a cow horse in training. Darby wasn't sure of the roan's real name, but she'd heard him called Buckin' Baxter.

She couldn't believe Kimo rode him while carrying a shovel over his shoulder.

The first time she'd seen Kimo, she'd thought he looked square and sturdy as a stone house. He did, but the cowboy also had a Hawaiian flare that always surprised her.

Today, he'd twisted red flowers around his hat band.

“You need to turn that under, yeah?” Kimo extended the shovel as if she should switch with him. “This works better.”

Darby took it, careful not to spook Baxter, then glanced up to say, “Thanks.”

“Caught you lookin',” Kimo said. With a smile, he tugged his hat brim lower so she had a better view of the blossoms.

“I—” Darby turned away to hide her red face. She poked the shovel at the gunnysacks.

“Wait 'til we really decide to make fancy,” he teased.

“I wasn't…,” Darby sputtered. Kimo didn't sound offended, but she tried to explain. “It's just, where I come from”—she forced out the rest of the words—“guys aren't that into flowers.”

“Think they make me look sissyish?” Kimo asked.

“No!
I
don't. Besides, anybody who can ride Buckin' Baxter and balance a shovel…”

Kimo tilted his hat at a more rakish angle.

Darby closed her mouth before Kimo thought she had a crush on him or something. She really should just stop talking altogether.

“My grandfather?” Kimo said. “He tells us it's to show nature we love her. Me? I do it to make the girls smile.” Kimo kept talking over Darby's groan. “Besides, the wind'll come up later and their weight will keep my hat from blowing off.”

Kimo's easy explanation of Hawaiian ways made
Darby want to ask him about the hooves she'd heard that morning.

Before he could ride off, Darby blurted, “Did you see any stray horses when you were driving to the ranch this morning?”

“No, but I stopped a little. Brought Cathy fresh fish from her favorite pond in Crimson Vale. Are we missing any?”

“I don't think so,” Darby admitted, “but really early, before it was light, I thought I heard a whole bunch of horses outside my window.”

“And when you looked out, there was nothing there?” Kimo asked.

“How did you know?”

“Probably heard the tsunami horses,” Kimo assured her. “There was a little earthquake last night. That's what I heard on the radio. That always stirs 'em up.”

Darby wondered if you had to be born in Hawaii to understand the connections between the real and the imaginary. She never knew where Kimo and Jonah drew the line. In fact, she wasn't at all sure they did.

“Long time ago, some farmers down in Crimson Vale felt the Two Sisters—the volcanoes, you know—trembling, and thought there was about to be an eruption. They guessed a big storm would come after, and since they didn't have time to move their stock up that steep road, they just turned 'em loose. Most got drowned in the tsunami.”

“You know”—Darby didn't try to hide her exasperation—“this island has more ghost stories than any place I ever heard of.”

“Sure,” Kimo said with a shrug. “It's the youngest island in the whole chain. Everyone who ever died is still around.”

Baxter jumped back a step, pawed the dirt, and then Kimo turned him with a flourish and rode away.

 

Darby had almost finished burying the sacks for composting when she heard a clang of metal coming from behind the house.

She saw Megan hanging up a bucket. Darby was about to call out, but then the older girl sprinted for the house.

Megan was dressed for school and, as usual, looked perfect, even though she must have been doing some ranch chores before she left.

Darby missed hanging around with Megan, but it was her own fault. Since she had slipped away from the older girl to rescue Hoku, making a climb Megan thought was too dangerous, their communication was pretty much limited to glares, pressed-together lips, and “Pass the rice, please.”

“I'm a little lonesome,” Darby confided to Navigator, but that wasn't really it. She was sick of feeling like…

“A bungler,” she told Navigator, and the brown gelding sighed loudly.

In Pacific Pinnacles, neighbors asked her to babysit, to water plants when they were on vacation, to sign for packages delivered while they were at work. She'd been good at lots of things besides writing papers and taking tests. She could get around the city and she'd amused her mother by telling her about interesting stuff she'd read. Like one night just before she'd left, she told her mother what had killed most prehistoric men—skull fractures—and her mom had wanted to know more.

These days, though, she did everything wrong.

Navigator's warm breath stirred Darby's hair against her neck. She closed her eyes, reached a hand back to touch the gelding's neck, and thought,
maybe not everything
.

Somehow, she'd managed to get herself plopped down in the middle of horse heaven.

Smiling, Darby let Navigator nudge her. The big horse wanted her to do something fun.

“It won't be long,” Darby told him.

Hoku neighed longingly from her pen and Darby was wrapped in joyful chills. She had a long way to go before she could earn what had been given to her, but she'd do her best.

So what if she felt lonely along the way? She'd sometimes felt lonely at home, too. Here, she had horses!

“Let me go feed Hoku, good boy,” Darby said to Navigator, then lowered her voice to a whisper and
added, “Then, we're riding out to solve a mystery.”

The gelding lifted his head, and his eyes, circled by rust-colored hair, gazed at nothing Darby could see. A breeze strummed the leaves of the ohia tree and his ears pricked to listen. On her first day at the ranch, Darby had thought Navigator was black. Unless she looked really closely, and took the light patches on his muzzle and around his eyes into consideration, he still did. But Jonah had told Darby that Navigator's papers classified him as brown.

What his Quarter Horse pedigree didn't say was that Navigator was a wise horse. Jonah had named the gelding for warriors who'd navigated by stars, birds, and sharks, across hundreds of miles of ocean to reach Hawaii, because the brown horse never got lost.

Navigator blew through his lips, then trotted toward the tack shed, ready to be saddled and on his way.

As soon as Darby had her horse saddled, Jonah called for her to join him.

“I tracked this horse from your window,” Jonah said, pointing.

Darby couldn't make out any single set of hoofprints amid the many stamped all over the place, but she followed Jonah as he led her toward Hoku's corral.

“They disappear onto the grass, here,” Jonah said. “I'm thinking he went on to the fold, where he's hidden.”

Darby had never really looked much past Hoku's new corral, but she saw the grassland ahead, cresting and falling like a roll of green velvet.

“I want you to ride around looking for his hoofprints,” Jonah said. When he went on, his voice sounded secretive. “And I'd appreciate it if you didn't tell anyone else exactly what you were looking for.”

When he walked back the way they'd come, scuffing his boot over hoof marks to erase them, Darby thought,
If I'm going on a top-secret mission
,
I at least better know what I'm looking for
.

“Even though some of them are smaller than others,” she said sheepishly, “I can't tell the horses' hooves apart, not really.”

“You'll make these out.”

Leading Navigator by his reins, Darby squatted to look where Jonah pointed. She felt like a real cowgirl, studying hoofprints in the dirt, because all at once, she saw a hoof mark with a wavy edge.

“Is something wrong with his hoof?” Darby asked.

“I'll explain later,” he said, and when he looked up to see Kit approaching, Jonah kicked dust over that print, too.

“Need any help?” Kit offered. “I used to be a fair hand at tracking. Nowhere near's good as my little brother, though.”

Kit flashed a smile at Darby and she returned it because she had met the foreman's brother Jake, but
she wasn't thinking about Nevada. She was thinking about her Hawaiian grandfather and wondering why the horse she'd encountered this morning was such a secret.

 

Darby rode for hours, ignoring the tightness in her chest and the growling in her stomach. Hoof marks were here by the hundreds but she didn't see any like the one Jonah had shown her, and Navigator didn't lead her to the trespassing stallion, either.

When she stared at young horses playing chase far out near the Two Sisters volcanoes, Navigator carried her closer to watch. If she twisted in her saddle, trying to make out black volcanic rock running in straight lines, he veered around trees and up hills, taking her near enough that she decided they had to be manmade boundaries.

Once, Darby thought Navigator was on to a clue.

Luna greeted them with a raspy neigh and Navigator gave a glad whinny. The big bay stallion trotted along his fence, snorting some sort of demand.

“What's he saying?” she asked Navigator, but when the gelding failed to translate, Darby looked all around for an intruder and saw nothing but an interested troupe of mares and foals.

A pinch of guilt reminded Darby that Jonah had put her in charge of Luna, but what was she supposed to do? He roamed in his own open pasture. He had a water trough. The field had good drainage and
no mud holes where he could slip, no pieces of metal or wire to cut himself on.

Darby shrugged. She'd better ask for more instructions, because he looked fine to her.

She reined Navigator away from Luna's pasture, and the gelding didn't seem to want to go. When she gave a little kick, though, he gave in and jogged across Pearl Pasture toward an elegantly dappled mare.