Chocolate Box Girls: Coco Caramel by Cathy Cassidy Page A

my bones, but it looks like I am on my own with this.
    ‘I’ll be OK,’ I say
gruffly. ‘No problem.’
    After I ring off, Sarah and I text back and
forth for a while, until she is called down for dinner and a DVD. I imagine my sisters,
gathered round the table at Tanglewood, talking, laughing, eating, warm from the Aga. I
imagine them stretched out on the squashy blue sofas, watching TV, squabbling about who
should make the hot chocolates, whether it’s time for bed.
    An owl swoops by silently overhead, white
wings beating as it navigates the trees, making me jump. I wish I was at home with my
sisters, not huddled into my jacket, leaning against a tree, in the woods miles from
home, waiting for midnight.

12
    In the end, I don’t make it quite that
long. I doze a little and wake with a crick in my neck and an imprint of beech bark
along my cheek, so cold I think I may be frozen to the spot. If I don’t move soon
the search parties will find me, a few days from now, a huddled figure in a panda hat,
dead from the cold and lack of hot chocolate. I stand up and rub my hands together to
get the circulation moving, stamp my feet on the litter of fallen leaves and broken
twigs.
    My mobile says it is ten forty-five, but I
can still see lights in the windows of Blue Downs House. Surely they’ll be getting
ready for bed soon?
    I make my way out of the woods and walk
alongside the paddock, creeping closer to the house. Everything isquiet. I stand for a while at the stable-yard gate, listening, watching. Inside the
house, someone draws the upstairs curtains, switches off a light. I see the silhouette
of a woman pass one of the downstairs windows, carrying two glasses.
    A dog, tied up in the yard, sniffs the air
and looks towards me, straining at its rope.
Don’t bark
, I tell the dog,
silently.
Please, don’t bark …
    I think I hear a movement somewhere near the
stables, but although I listen hard for more sounds and stare into the darkness for any
sign of movement, there is nothing. Probably just Caramel shifting around in her
stall.
    I open the gate carefully, leave it ajar and
walk slowly, quietly, across the yard. The dog, a thin, bedraggled mongrel, watches my
progress keenly. It yaps once, but quietens when I begin talking to it in a low whisper,
gently. Dogs are quite like people. If you come across an angry one, you can sometimes
calm it down by acting cool and confident yourself – although this dog doesn’t
seem angry, just thin and lonely and perhaps a little scared.
    I cross the yard and peep into the first
stable, but it’s empty, as is the second. Approaching the third, I inhale the
sweet hay-and-treacle smell of pony.
    ‘Caramel?’ I whisper, pushing open
the stable door.
    A tall shadow looms at me in the dark and I
am so shocked and scared I lose the plot completely, jumping back against the stable
door.
    ‘Whaaat the – urgghhh!’ I yelp,
and a hand clamps down across my mouth so that the last word dies a muffled death.
    ‘Shut up!’ a gruff voice tells
me. ‘You’ll wake the whole place up!’
    ‘Mnnnhh?’ I grunt, wriggling
free and turning on my captor. My eyes open wide.
    ‘Lawrie Marshall?’
    ‘You again!’ he mutters.
‘Unreal. Are you stalking me or something?’
    Indignation just about chokes me.
    ‘Stalk
you
?’ I hiss.
‘Get a life, Lawrie – are you crazy? I’m here for Caramel, obviously. What
are
you
doing here?’
    Lawrie sighs, and I look past him into the
darkness to where Caramel is eating from a bucket of grain. I’m pretty sure Seddon
didn’t give her that … I guess Lawrie cares about the pony too.
    ‘You were right about Seddon,’ I
admit. ‘I was watching him earlier, running Caramel in the paddock. He’s
horrible! Do you think we should ring the RSPCA?’
    ‘That would only make things
worse,’ Lawrie says. ‘You have no idea how powerful Seddon is. He owns a lot
of land around here, knows all the right people. He’s clever too, and he gets away
with