Hide & Seek - Alyssa Brugman [2]
'Then where is he?' Shelby asked.
Lindsey turned in a circle once again. 'I don't know.'
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'What do you mean gone?' Mrs Edel asked. She didn't look angry – yet.
Lindsey's mother leaned her rake against the fence. Her cheeks were rosy and wet from the rain. She stomped through the mud to Diablo's yard. Like the girls, she examined the enclosure thoroughly. The two girls waited in the stable, stamping the mud off their boots. The rain roared on the tin roof overhead.
Mrs Edel returned. She stood in the doorway – white-faced. 'He's gone!'
'That's what we said,' Lindsey murmured.
'I'm going inside to ring the police. You girls check in those paddocks.' She waved her hand towards the paddocks behind Diablo's enclosure and then ran towards the house.
Shelby and Lindsey jogged down the laneway between the paddocks, scanning as best as they could through the rain. Shelby's wet hair whipped against her throat in the wind.
They slid through the gate to the mares' paddock, which usually contained the visiting broodmares who were about to be, or had recently been served by Diablo. Usually, once the vet confirmed that they were in foal, the mares went back to their owners, or out to the back paddock. This meant that different horses were kept in the mares' paddock all the time. Since Lindsey's mother managed the breeding side of the business, while Lindsey and Shelby looked after the horses on agistment and ran the trail rides on weekends, Shelby never had time to get to know the visiting mares before they were moved.
Some of the mares huddled together under the long three-sided shelter, but others continued to graze in the heavy rain. Being late in the breeding season there were only a handful of mares in the paddock waiting to go home.
As the two girls approached, the closest mare spooked. She skipped a few steps and then cantered away. Other mares nearby were startled too, trotting and snorting with suspicion. Soon all the mares were circling nervously. Their hooves made a squelching noise in the mud and Shelby could hear the jingling sound from the rings of their rugs as they jig-jogged around the soggy paddock.
'Can you remember which rugs he was wearing?' Shelby asked. Even if they knew, all of the rugs were dark with rain and splattered with mud.
Lindsey shrugged. 'No idea. He has two socks at the back. That narrows it down.'
The girls looked for socks. It was hard to tell because the horses' legs were so dirty.
The mares had wide, strong faces peeping through hoods, and dark, solid legs poking out from under layers of rugs. With all their rugs on, the mares didn't look so different from Diablo himself.
'There he is!' Lindsey moved forward slowly and grabbed hold of the horse's hood.
'Are you sure?' Shelby approached from the near side and had a peek under the rugs.
'That's a girl horse. He's not here, Lindsey,' she called out to her friend.
'Let's try the back paddock,' Lindsey suggested.
Shelby followed her friend to the end of the mares' paddock. On the way she scanned the day paddocks on the other side of the laneway, but she knew if Diablo had been there Lindsey would have noticed when she'd moved the horses around earlier.
Just when she thought the rain was starting to ease, a fresh torrent beat against her. Her raincoat covered her legs to mid-thigh, but below that her track pants were soaked and heavy with water.
Shelby wiped her eyes with hands that were red and cold at the tips of her fingers, and frowned into the downpour. She looked down at her gumboots, glad at least that her toes were dry, even if the boots made it difficult to run.
The gate between the broodmares' paddock and the back paddock had a self-closing latch like a pool fence. Shelby thought that was odd, as none of the other gates on the property had latches like that. She didn't spend much time over this side of the agistment centre, so she hadn't noticed it before.
Once inside the back paddock the two girls raced up to the ridge, where they