J.M.J.

Hello, all! Thank you for checking out this story! I think it's going to be a lot of fun. I think the early chapters will cover the background pretty well, but if you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them! And as always, I'm happy to read any and all reviews!

Sign of the White Horse

Chapter 1

The carousel horses spun round and round and bobbed up and down. Nancy Nickerson wished that there was one thing in the whole menagerie that would stay still. She hadn't gotten motion sickness for years now, but the thought still haunted her and she had found with some rueful disappointment that she could no longer enjoy spinning or speeding rides. Even so, when she turned her attention to the faces of her daughters—rising up and down dizzily though they were—she could say with perfect honesty that it was worth it.

Nancy was standing alongside Katie's horse. Katie was the older of the two at seven. She tended to look more like her dad than her mom, especially with her dark hair, but she had inherited Nancy's expressive blue eyes. Where she got her temperament from was a mystery to both her parents. She was sweet and kind-hearted to the point that she could barely stand to see a wasp swatted, and at the same time, she tended to be very timid. Even riding the carousel made her nervous, and she wanted Nancy next to her.

Audrey was nothing like her older sister. She was only five and she had inherited Nancy's strawberry-blonde hair. She was afraid of nothing. From the day she had learned to crawl, Nancy could scarcely turn her back on her for a moment without her wandering off, looking for some "'venture," as she still tended to say it. Even now, she was two horses ahead of Nancy and Katie, paying no attention to them, as she eagerly talked to her best friend, Lance. George Eddleton was on the other side of her, making sure the two five-year-olds didn't fall off their horses.

It was the first Friday in June. First grade for Katie and kindergarten for Audrey had let out the week before, but their dad wasn't on summer vacation quite yet. Ned was a teacher at River Heights Junior High School, and the whole family was counting down the hours till school let out today and summer vacation would be officially begun. To make the time pass a little faster, Nancy and the girls had met at the park with Nancy's best friends, George and George's cousin, Bess Evans. George didn't have any kids, but Bess's son, Lance, was exactly two months older than Audrey, and the two had been the best of friends their entire lives so far. Between her two-year-old, Jayde, and Number Three well on the way, Bess had opted out of riding the carousel, which was the kids' favorite attraction at the park. Lance and Audrey made sure to wave at her and Jayde every time they came around.

"We're going to go camping this summer, in Yellowstone," Audrey was telling Lance in excitement.

"What's that?" was Lance's underwhelming reply.

"It's a place where they have lots of bears and buffaloes and things, and the water is in the ground, but it's already boiling, and sometimes it shoots right up out of the ground in a geezer," Audrey explained confidently.

"Maybe we could go, too!" Lance suggested.

"Sorry, Lance, but your mom doesn't like camping at the best of times," George spoke up, "and she definitely won't want to go on a long trip like that until your baby sister is born."

"Baby sisters aren't any fun," Lance grumbled. "Jayde is a little more fun than she used to be, but I wish I had a sister your age, Audrey. You're lots more fun."

George chuckled. "In a couple of years, you will."

"That's practically forever," Lance said in an aggrieved tone.

"If I had a baby sister, I'd let Katie play with her until she got to be the same age as me, and then I'd play with her," Audrey said.

"By the time she got to be your age, you'd be twice as old as her," George told her.

Audrey pursed her lips. "How old would that be?"

"Ten."

Audrey made a face. "That's really old. Not as old as you, though."

George made a face to match hers. "Yeah, you'd probably better just go ahead and check me into a senior citizens' home."

"What's that?" Audrey asked.

"It's where you go when you get done with high school," Lance asserted.

George grinned and decided not to correct him.

"How come you don't have any kids, Aunt George?" Audrey asked abruptly.

George's grin faded and a pained look replaced it. "Um…"

Nancy had heard the question and quickly intervened. "Audrey, did you tell Lance about what we did on Tuesday?"

"Oh yeah!" Audrey grinned at the memory and launched into a detailed account of their visit to the zoo earlier in the week.

The ride ended shortly after that. Nancy helped Katie down from her horse, which had stopped at its highest position so that Katie was nervous about dropping all the way down. Bess and Jayde met them at the gate leading out of the carousel. Bess noted George's rather downcast manner and cast Nancy a questioning glance. Nancy gave a little shake of her head to indicate that she would explain later.

"Did you have fun?" Bess asked the kids.

"Lots of fun!" Lance declared.

"The only thing that would be funner would be riding a real horse," Audrey added. "Can we ride real horses sometime, Mom?"

"We'll see," Nancy told her, as she felt Katie grip her hand fearfully to show how she felt about the idea of riding a real horse.

"Is Daddy done with work yet?" Audrey asked next.

Nancy checked her watch. "Not yet. School's not even out yet. It will be a few more hours." Seeing the dejected look on her daughter's face, she added, "How about we all have some ice cream?"

"Yeah!" both Audrey and Lance shouted before they went running toward the ice cream shop across the street from the park.

"Whoa! Hold up!" George shouted, darting after them.

Knowing George would keep them from running out into the street, Nancy and Bess came along a little more slowly with their calmer children.

"How did that Anderson case turn out?" Bess asked.

Nancy grinned wryly. "It turned out that the necklace was in her dresser the whole time. It had just gotten caught in a scarf."

As a teenager, Nancy had built up an impressive reputation as an amateur detective. She had loved every minute of it, and at that time, she had thought seriously about becoming a licensed detective, but several things had happened to make her change her mind on that. She and Ned had gotten married when she was twenty, and Katie had been born a year later. Suddenly, danger and excitement—just like spinning carnival rides—weren't quite so appealing as they had been. Then a couple of cases had taken a particularly dark turn, and Nancy had spent several nights unable to sleep while Ned had held her and tried to reassure her. She had rashly sworn then that she was giving up detective work forever, and Ned had surprised her by encouraging her to wait before she made a decision like that.

He had been right, in the end. Time had dulled the horror, and Nancy had slowly begun dabbling in mysteries again. She had been more cautious this time, taking on only local cases or favors for friends—like the Anderson case she had recently worked on—or cases unlikely to put her or her family in danger, for the most part. She had discovered that cold cases, in particular, held an appeal for her, even if they didn't often include any rush of enthusiasm. Even so, she was content to let mysteries become more of a hobby for her, while she put her main focus on her family. It was good just to have days like today.

The rest of the afternoon passed pleasantly. Nancy and the girls were home before Ned was. Being the last day of school, Nancy expected that he would have a lot of things to wrap up, and so she cautioned the girls that he might be late. Katie was willing to accept the situation, but Audrey sat by the window and watched, stubbornly thinking that that would make him get home sooner.

"Do you think anything happened to Dad?" Katie asked Nancy quietly when six o'clock came and Ned still hadn't arrived.

"Of course not," Nancy assured her. "It just takes time for him to finish up all the grading and put things away. He'll probably even have to go back on Monday to finish it all up."

"I guess," Katie said, sounding unconvinced.

She was sitting on the sofa, and Nancy came to sit next to her. "Why would you think anything happened to him?"

Katie shrugged. "I don't know."

Nancy put her arm around her. "Katie, is anything wrong? You've been upset for the last week."

Katie looked fixedly at her hands. "Some of the kids at school said that there are bad people who are going to try to get you and Dad."

"Oh." Nancy paused thoughtfully, trying to decide what to say. "Did they say why they think that?" she asked finally.

"It's because of you being a detective."

"I thought that was probably it. I suppose there are some bad people who don't like me very much, but a lot of them are in jail, so there's no reason to worry about them. Even if they weren't, it's really a stupid thing to try to take revenge. They'd just get themselves into more trouble, and most would be too smart to try that. And just in case there might be one that isn't smart enough to figure that out, we have the burglar alarm that we set every night. If any bad people ever tried to get in here, they'd see the stickers on the window and know that an alarm is going to go off if they try to get in. That will scare them off."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course, I'm sure."

"Daddy's home!" Audrey suddenly shouted, interrupting the conversation.

She was already to the door before Nancy or Katie could even react and she threw herself into Ned's arms the second he came through the door. Katie also ran to hug him, and between the two of them, Nancy scarcely had a chance to kiss him hello.

"You'd think I was a celebrity," Ned commented, tickling Audrey till she shrieked with laughter.

"Now that school's over, you'll never have to go to work again, right?" Audrey asked once she had recovered.

Ned laughed. "I wish it worked that way."

Audrey talked incessantly during supper, but Katie also seemed to cheer up. The evening was light and cheery, and after the girls went to bed, Nancy and Ned sat up for quite a while. Nancy told Ned about Katie's fears regarding him.

"I don't like it that she worries so much about things," Nancy finished her recounting. "Especially when it's about things that are almost definitely not going to happen, but I can't completely guarantee it."

"I know," Ned agreed. "I wish those kids at her school wouldn't give her ideas like that, but she would probably come up with them on her own even if they didn't."

"Did we do something wrong that she's so scared of everything?"

Ned shrugged helplessly. "I don't know what we could have done differently. I wonder sometimes if those kids at her school pick on her because of it."

"Oh, probably, and I hate the thought of it. There has to be something we can do about it."

"Maybe we can find her some things to do during the summer to get her more confidence. Things she really wants to do. She'll do anything we tell her to, of course, but it would help her more if it was something she could get really excited about."

"That's going to be a challenge to think of something like that," Nancy said.

Ned pulled her closer and kissed the top of her head. "You never know. Something might just come up."

NDNDNDNDND

Almost a thousand miles away, an ambulance was rushing toward a hospital in Vancouver, its siren blaring. The paramedics in the back were working hard to stabilize the condition of the unconscious young man on the gurney. He had been unconscious when he had been discovered on the side of the road, assumed to be the victim of a hit and run accident. His injuries were certainly consistent with that theory, but he wouldn't be confirming or denying it any time soon. He was completely oblivious to all the sirens and the tense, professional voices, the beeping of monitors and the radio transmissions. He didn't stir as he was brought into the hospital and examined. Stabilizing his condition was the first priority; worrying over who he was or what had happened to him was secondary and left to the police.

It was a grizzle-haired police sergeant named Roy Griffon who was put in charge of finding the answers to those questions. The nurses turned over the patient's clothes to him, and Griffon carefully went through every pocket. There was no wallet, no phone, no credit cards, nothing that could identify him. For that matter, there was nothing at all, save a piece of lint in the left pocket of the jeans. It struck Griffon as strange that the fellow would have absolutely nothing with him. He wasn't dressed for hiking, either, but from the condition of his shoes, he had apparently walked a long way. Griffon picked up one of those shoes thoughtfully.

It was a sneaker for everyday use. It was covered in dust and the sole was worn down so thin that this fellow must have felt the gravel right through it. There was even a hole where the big toe would have rubbed against it. The shoelace was nearly frayed off on one side, but the other still looked practically new. If Griffon was any judge, these shoes had been in much better shape a few days ago, and only a long and unexpected walk had put them into this condition.

He was about to set the shoe down again when something caught his eye. A corner from a scrap of paper was sticking up from under an insert in the sole. Griffon pulled it out. It had been torn from a little notebook and a phone number scrawled on it. Griffon felt almost certain that the area code was an American one. Underneath the number were five words: Sign of the white horse.