CHAPTER 22

I would rather ride Sam. There’s no question about that. Especially since the snow Cory talked about has started, tiny flakes drifting from a gray sky.

But a lot has happened since the pheasant spooked Sunny and the world sped by so fast I thought it was going to turn upside down. I think she and I will be okay.

We need to be. I still need to catch one of the horses and make sure the tunnel I saw at Pine Lake leads where I think it does.

The question is how to ride Sunny without Mom noticing. After what happened to Sam, she won’t want me taking horses anywhere.

But Sunny doesn’t know that. And when I put on first her saddle blanket, smoothing the hair underneath it, then the saddle, cinching it tight, she doesn’t budge. She swings her neck around to look at me once, her eyes big, kind, searching my face. Trusting me. Next comes the bridle, the cold bit and the throatlatch, then leading her around the back of the barn so Mom doesn’t see.

Now I’m on Sunny and she’s picking her hooves up high, her haunches coiled up under her, ears pricked forward. I’m trying to sit heavy, knowing she’ll be able to sense it the moment I hesitate. It’s hard, because the truth is, I’m nervous.

We follow the edge of a cornfield, sandwiched between forest and fields. Snow falls lightly, like lace. We have to be careful of the fence line—I don’t want her getting tangled up in anything, and sometimes when a piece of fence is down it’s hard to see clearly. Wire can cut into a horse’s skin fast and leave pencil-thin gashes up and down their legs, worse than Sam’s.

Plus, horses panic when they get caught, and panic makes everything worse. I know that from experience. When my flutter feeling starts, nothing seems to work out right.

Even though Sunny moves quickly, it takes a long time to get to the part of Cedar Lake I’m trying to reach. I try not to think too hard about the snow, and I do arm circles to keep my upper body warm.

There’s a mountain-biking trail that circles all of Cedar Lake, but it’s much too narrow and rocky for me to attempt riding Sunny around it. Fortunately, there’s also an area before the beginning of the trail that’s set up with a few benches and a bike rack. I figure I can leave Sunny there. She’ll be safe long enough for me to at least figure out if my guesses about this tunnel are correct.

As I slide off Sunny’s back and tie her to a tree near the bike rack, I grab the stone from the box and close my eyes. Tell me where to go, I think.

It would be weird to say the stone pulls me. After all, I’m holding it in my hand. But the air’s shimmering again, and I feel like I’m going where I need to. Like a magnet’s drawing me through the trees while cedar leaves brush against my skin. And sure enough, a cavern opens up, right where the lake meets the forest floor.

It’s exactly what I expected. Ringing the hollow are piles of beautiful black stones, just like the one from my box. Just like the ones from Pine Lake. The land curves, and I’ll have to step a bit into the water to see the opening up close.

I sink my foot about a half an inch deep. My boots are thick, and they don’t leak. Carefully, I move about two feet toward the hollow, holding the stone.

It looks just like the cavern on Pine Lake. Taller than I am, lined with sand and stone, and wide enough for a horse to pick her way through.

I close my eyes and I can practically see them: the wild horses. I can see their story unfolding right in front of me.

They tumbled into the hole in the ice here at Cedar Lake. At first the cold water shocked them, made them sputter. Jack, his wet arm stuck to the ice, pulling himself up and up, would have watched them sink, his eyes blurring with tears. The cold would have set into his limbs as he forced himself to turn away and worked to climb back onto the still-frozen ice.

But the horses somehow swam together, the wagon snapping loose behind them. And far below the surface of the water, where everyone thought they’d find their bones one day, the horses found a path out instead. A tunnel, dry and safe. They walked through and through, until they ended up at Pine Lake, where the shore was easy to reach and the woods thick and the mountains high. They climbed free of the tunnel and shed the last of their harnesses over frozen ice, and when spring came the tack floated into the lapping water for Jack to find a piece of it.

I scoop a few handfuls of stones into my saddlebag. They’ll be perfect to display for my project, alongside the horseshoe Mr. Hamilton found.

Then I scramble back up the bank, through the trees, shouldering the saddlebag that got a whole lot heavier. “Oh, Sunny! Guess what I’ve got for us!” I push through to the path and the bike rack and—

Sunny isn’t tied up anymore. She’s gone.

She was just here.

It hasn’t been that long since I made my way down to the lake. Has it? I check my phone.

Ten minutes—okay, longer than I thought. But still, she’s waited that long before. Did she get spooked, without Sam by her side? Did someone take her? Hardly anybody comes down these paths when it’s snowing. I look wildly around, cold air catching in my throat, a mix of leaves and snow crunching under my boots as I spin. Inside my chest, wings flutter awake.

“Sunny!” I call again, loudly singing her name. My voice echoes off the mountain on the other side of the lake. “Sun-ny!”

The snow’s falling more heavily and I suddenly remember walking through the woods with Andy in winter, how when I was littler he’d help me figure out which animals had passed through the forest because of their tracks. “Snow tells stories,” he’d say, then he’d kneel down and point to deep impressions, fresh powder just kicked out the back or compacted in wet ice. Deer. Fox. Possum. And once—Bear.

Snow. Fresh snow will tell me where to go. I need to look down, not up. And when I do, I find the first hoofprint. Then the second. I follow them, hoping they’ll wind up the path and cut into the woods past the lake, the ones that eventually run into cornfields and down to my house.

Gray and green branches brush my sleeves. The first blue jays of winter dive in front of my eyes. I walk and walk. As long as I follow Sunny’s hoofprints faster than they fill in with new snow, I should find her eventually.

There’s one major problem with my plan. I don’t know where I am.

I mean, I know the general direction of home. But it isn’t hard to get turned around in the woods. The snow makes it easy to see where I’ve been, but it’s tricky to tell how far I need to go… and it’s cold.

I check my phone: no reception. That’s typical by this lake because the mountains are wedged so close together, they cut the signal. The sparrows skitter against my bones, brushing their soft feathers along my heart. I shiver.

It’s okay, I think. You’ll find her.

The woods are shadowy now, not quite dark but getting there. Fading light on the blue-white snow is all I have. The hoofprints go on and on.

I keep walking, the stones knocking together in my saddlebag. My legs move steadily, but they burn. I need a rest, just for a minute. I lean against a tree and close my eyes while branches crack and sigh above my head.

Then, like thunder, a pounding. But not from the sky. It’s from somewhere else, farther up the mountain. My eyes fly open. I look around.

Hooves, curling up, then striking the ground. Tails, streaked with silver. Outstretched necks. I rub my eyes, trying to adjust to the growing dark.

The hooves slow a little as they bear down beside me, then widen and turn until I realize I’m surrounded by a circle of horses. They look at me with their liquid eyes, calm as ponds. They nicker softly, air whooshing through their soft noses. They bow their heads.

“I don’t know where to go,” I say out loud.

One of the horses tosses her head and I follow the motion, up to the top of what I now see is my favorite maple tree, the one with low branches and a huge V right in the middle, close enough that even when I was little I could always climb up, nestle in, and see far.

I thought I was so far away. But I’m almost home.

I follow the path to where the forest empties out in the pasture by our barn. A light, cold breeze brushes over my cheeks.

For just one moment, I turn back toward the trees.

A swish of tail, midnight black and the color of the moon.

Dappled-gray legs, dancing away.

Come back, I think. I need to catch you.

But that thought wisps away as another one grows. Sunny. I need to find Sunny.

“Claire?” a voice calls from inside the barn. A voice I know, but haven’t heard in so long it feels like a dream. “Is that you?”

My throat feels locked and dry. I stoop to grab a handful of snow and stuff it in my mouth, hoping it will get my tongue back to normal. “Um, yeah?” I call. I rise, open the barn door, and tiptoe in, past the hay wagon, to the stable.

Sunny’s there. In her stall next to Sam, crunching grain.

And the voice belongs to exactly who I thought it did.

Andy.

“How are you here?” I whisper.

“How are you here?” he shoots back. “Mom and Dad are freaking out! Dad’s in the woods looking for you, and Mom’s at the house hoping you’ll show up. When we saw Sunny here with her tack on, we had no idea where you could be. She told me to wait here just in case.”

I cross my arms over my chest. I have no idea how Sunny ended up back in her stall, but I decide to pretend like I’m not confused. Besides, I can’t believe Andy’s acting like it’s no big deal for him to just show up. “I was in the woods. Seriously, how did you get here?”

“I was going to surprise you,” he says. “I told Mom and Dad not to say anything, and I guess they didn’t. I really want to get started with my agricultural mechanics program.”

I can’t believe he’s finally home. Part of me wants to reach out, take his hand. But my arms feel stuck in place.

“So you just decided to leave? They didn’t make you stay?” Even as I speak them, the words sound soft and full of wonder. I sit on a hay bale and rub my shoulder, which hurts a lot, maybe from how I was lying down.

“They can’t,” Andy says. “I completed my full required time, so after that Starshine Center is voluntary. I thought I might stay longer, but my therapists did say I was making such great progress that it would be okay to leave. They’re setting me up with some meetings to go to here so I can stay on track.”

My head spins; the sparrows whirl. Then I feel something inside me harden. My voice turns cold. “Required time? If you could have left earlier, then why did you stay longer?”

Andy takes both my hands in his. “I knew it was the right thing, Little C. There’s a lot that I need to explain to you, stuff that was just too hard to say in a letter.”

I’m sure Andy wants to tell me the truth, even though I already know it. My heart somersaults. Seeing his face, his crooked baseball cap, his eyes with the stars in them, makes the cold in my voice crack open. “I missed you. I really wanted you to be here.”

“I know.” Andy squeezes my hands, then lets them go. “But it was good for me.”

“What about the rest of us, though?” Now my voice sounds as hard as the strike of a hoof on pavement. “What if it wasn’t good for us?” Andy’s extra time at Starshine meant more money. More loneliness and worry.

Andy bows his head and pushes his baseball cap back.

I grab my saddlebag and unzip it a little too roughly. “Look,” I say. “I know you don’t believe me about the horses, but I have proof. I—”

But the hair has disappeared. I dig through the stones, down to the bottom of the bag, but it’s gone.

“Never mind.” My voice feels like it’s going to burst into flame. I shake the saddlebag and fistfuls of stones tumble like water to the barn floor, black and silver, smooth and cold, more than I realized I’d taken.

Andy smiles, but his eyes are sad. “Hey, cool. Worry stones. You remembered.” He picks one up and rubs it in his palm. “Thanks, Little C.”

“I’m the one who really needs those,” I snap. “All I’ve been doing is worrying about you. And about the horses—like how I’ll ever figure out how to keep them, without you to help! Meanwhile, you were just trying to figure out what you could do without us!” The flame inside reaches so high it fills my eyes, and tears gather and spill.

Andy reaches out and touches my elbow, but I flinch. I need to finish my project before tomorrow, and being around Andy makes it hard to focus.

I leave him there in the barn with my saddlebag, surrounded by stones.