I didn’t hear Mom answer him, because I had discovered something interesting about the fence.
The snow had drifted up against it, blown by the wind to make a smooth hill. It was easy to climb to the top of the hill, and from there it was only a short hop to the ground on the other side.
Time for a nighttime adventure!
18
I went to Chelsea’s house first, to see if Duchess was out, but there was no sign of her except a yellow patch on the snow near her front door. I lifted my own leg over the same place so that she’d know I was thinking of her.
Normally when I got outside the gate, I went for a stroll along the creek—except, of course, if I saw Todd there. But because of all the snow, tonight I had to stick to the plowed road. Some people had already dragged their indoor trees outside, although at our house the tree still stood in the front window, glistening with lights and hung with shiny ornaments for Felix to attack. When I came across one of those discarded trees, I marked it with my scent. I could always smell just one more tree a little farther down the road, and so I stayed out later than I’d ever done before.
If I hadn’t gone so far, if I’d turned back just a little sooner, I might have been in time to stop what happened next.
Finally, a car turning into the street from a driveway up ahead blazed its headlights into my eyes. When it drove slowly by, the smell of it reminded me of the smell of Mom’s car, those times she and Ethan would come looking for me. I felt guilty for being so far from my boy, so I lowered my head and trotted for home.
When I turned up the driveway where Ethan and I had dug that morning, I stopped. My eyes and my nose together noticed several things at once, all of them wrong.
The front door was open, and wafting out was the warm scent of home. But another scent was laid on top of that—something chemical, sharp, both unpleasant and familiar. I’d smelled it in the garage before, and on the car rides I took with the boy. Gasoline.
That smell was so strong that it covered the scent of the person backing out of the open front door. All I had to rely on was my eyes, and in the moonlight, I thought I was looking at my boy. I trotted closer, just as the figure turned, tossing more gasoline from a jug in his hand onto the bushes near the front door.
I stopped. Now I was close enough to catch the scent. Todd.
He hadn’t seen me yet. The fur along my spine and neck rose as he took three steps back and pulled some paper from his pocket. From another pocket came a book of matches. There was a tiny scraping sound, and a flare of light popped up in Todd’s hand, brightness flickering against his stony face.
He tossed the burning paper onto the bushes, and a blue flame swept up, making a soft whoosh in the quiet nighttime air.
Todd didn’t turn. He stood watching the fire. And I never barked, I never growled. I just raced up that sidewalk in silent fury.
I knew good dogs didn’t jump on people. Good dogs didn’t knock them down. Good dogs didn’t bite.
But all of that didn’t matter. Somehow, I knew that what Todd was doing was wrong. He was trying to hurt the boy and my family. I could tell it from the crackling heat of the fire, from its charred smell of danger, from the dark delight rising inside Todd as he stood watching the burning house.
Even more than staying close to the boy, playing with the boy, comforting the boy, my job was to keep the boy safe. I had done that in the woods. I would do it here.
I leaped for Todd as if I had a pack at my heels, crashing into him with all of my weight, knocking him to the snow.
Todd yelled and thrashed underneath me, twisting and rolling. He kicked at my face. I snatched his foot in my mouth and held it, biting hard, holding on while Todd screamed. His pants ripped, and his shoe came off in my mouth. I dropped the shoe, lunging forward to get a second grip on his foot with my teeth.
Yelling again, Todd hit at me with his fists, but I kept my jaws locked around his ankle, shaking my head as if he were prey. I’d never bitten anyone, not like this, but I didn’t let go.
Then a shrill, piercing noise stabbed through the air. I jerked my head around to locate this new threat. Inside the house, I could see that the indoor tree was burning like a candle. Thick smoke poured out of the open front door.
Todd yanked his foot free, and I backed away, shaking my head. The noise hurt my ears and I wanted to run from it—but what about my boy?
Staggering to his feet, Todd limped away as fast as he could. I let him go, suddenly more worried than angry. I added my own alarm to the noise, barking and running from the front door to the driveway and back again. I pivoted and raced toward the back of the house, but the pile of snow that had helped me leap over the fence was on the wrong side. I couldn’t get over, so all I could do was bark louder than ever.
While I stood there, making as much noise as I could, the back door opened. Black smoke poured out, and Mom and Dad came with it, coughing and hanging on to each other.
Mom spun back to face the open door. “Ethan!” she screamed.
Dad pulled Mom toward the gate, and I met them there. They pushed the gate open against the snow and shoved past me, stumbling to the front of the house. They stood looking up at the dark windows of Ethan’s room.
“Ethan!” they shouted. “Ethan!”
I raced through the gate to the open back door. Felix the cat was on the patio, huddled under a bench. He yowled at me, but I didn’t stop. I ran inside.
The heat wrapped itself around me and choked me. Smoke forced its way into my eyes and nose. Unable to see, unable to smell, I tried to stagger toward the stairs, but it was hard to tell which way to go.
The sound of the flames all around was as loud as the wind when we traveled in the car with the windows down. My nose bumped hard into something. A chair? A wall? I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t find the stairs! I couldn’t find my boy!
Desperate for clean air, I sensed the coolness of the open door behind me and ran for it. Outside again, the fresh night eased my stinging eyes and my burning nose.
Mom and Dad were still yelling. Lights had come on across the street and in the house next door. Through the window, I could see one of our neighbors talking on his phone.
“Ethan!” Mom and Dad shouted. “Ethan!”
Fear was pouring off of Mom and Dad. Never, not even when Ethan and I were lost in the woods, have I felt an emotion so strong. Mom was sobbing, and Dad’s voice was getting louder and tighter, and when I started to add my own frantic barking to the noise, no one told me to stop.
My ears picked up the thin wail of a siren, but it seemed to be far away. All of the other noise was faint beside the roar of the fire, a sound so deep and loud that I felt it as a vibration in my entire body. The snow in the yard was starting to melt, clouds of steam rising as the yard sizzled.
“Ethan! Please!” Dad shouted, his voice breaking into a sob.
Just then, something burst through Ethan’s window, showering the yard with shards of glass. It landed with a plop in a mound of wet snow. The flip!
I raced to it and picked it up. That’s what I was supposed to do, right? I’d show Ethan that I had the flip. He’d be happy.
Ethan’s head appeared in the hole that the flip had made in the window. Black smoke puffed out around him.
“Mom!” he yelled. Coughs almost swallowed the words.
“You’ve got to get out of there, Ethan!” Dad roared.
“I can’t open the window. It’s stuck!”
“Just jump!” Dad answered.
“You’ve got to jump, honey!” Mom shouted.
The boy’s head disappeared back inside. “The smoke is going to kill him. What’s he doing?” Dad asked, standing rigid, staring at Ethan’s window. I ran to his side. With the flip in my mouth, I couldn’t bark anymore, but I wanted to. I wanted to make all the noise I could, race around the yard, do something with the terrible, frustrated energy building up inside me. But I didn’t. I leaned on Dad’s leg, trembling, waiting for my next sight of th
e boy.
“Ethan!” Mom screamed.
The boy’s desk chair crashed through what was left of the window. A minute later, the boy followed. But something—a foot, a knee, maybe?—caught on the broken bits of wood and glass still in the window frame. And instead of sailing over the smoldering bushes and into the yard, Ethan flopped right into them.
I dropped the flip to bark madly. Mom and Dad scrambled forward to drag Ethan onto the soggy grass, rolling him over until he lay on his back, his eyes closed.
“Are you okay, son? Are you okay?” Dad asked.
“My leg,” Ethan gasped, coughing.
I snatched up the flip and jumped to his side. My boy smelled burnt and bloody and hurt and frightened.
“Go away, Bailey,” Dad ordered.
The boy opened his eyes and grinned at me, reaching out a shaking hand. “No, it’s okay. Good dog, Bailey. You caught the flip. Good dog.”
19
I wanted to throw myself on Ethan, but I could tell that I shouldn’t touch him. Instead, I put the flip down gently beside him. Then I lay down on the wet grass and inched forward so that my nose brushed his face.
Cars and trucks began arriving, lights flashing. Men ran up to the house and began spraying it with big hoses. More people brought over a bed on wheels and lifted the boy gently onto it. They rolled the bed over to a truck.
I trotted right at the side of the bed, and when the men opened two doors at the back of the truck and boosted the wheeled bed through them, I tried to crawl in as well. But one of the men pushed me away. “No, sorry,” he said.
I stared up at him with disbelief and whined a little in my throat. I’d just gotten my boy back, and they were taking him away from me?
“Stay, Bailey. It’s okay,” the boy said from inside the truck.
I knew all about Stay. It was my least favorite command! I wriggled in frustration and whined some more as Mom climbed into the truck with Ethan. “It’s okay, Bailey,” she said, and looked up at someone in the crowd. “Laura? Could you watch Bailey?”
“Sure,” a woman said, and a hand closed around my collar. I knew from the smell that it was Chelsea’s mom. She was nice enough, but she wasn’t my boy. I pulled a little against her grasp, even though I’d been told to stay.
Dad climbed in to be with Mom and the boy, and the doors of the truck closed. It drove away.
I stared in astonishment and gave a single mournful bark. It was my job to keep the boy safe! How could I do that now? Why didn’t these people understand?
Chelsea’s mom did not let go. “Hush, Bailey. It’ll be okay,” she whispered. “They’ll be okay.” But I could hear tears in her voice, and I was not reassured.
She took me to one side and stood holding me, while the men with hoses kept spraying until the fire died. All that was left was a choking smell of ash and smoke.
“Has to be arson, no question,” said a man with a flat cap on his head, talking to a woman who’d just arrived in a car and who wore a gun on her belt. I’d learned that people who dressed like this were called police. “Somebody definitely set this fire,” the man went on. “The bushes, the tree, all of it went up at once. Family is lucky to be alive.”
“Lieutenant, look at this!” another police officer called.
Chelsea’s mother edged up to see what they were all looking at. It was Todd’s shoe. I turned my head away guiltily.
“Looks like there’s blood on it,” the man said, shining a flashlight on the shoe and the snow around it.
“The boy got pretty cut up going out his window,” someone else said.
“Yeah, over there. But not here. All I got here are dog tracks and this shoe.”
I knew that word “dog.” Was the word “bad” going to be said soon? I sank to the soggy ground at Chelsea’s mom’s feet. Maybe they wouldn’t notice me if I made myself very small.
The woman with the gun took the flashlight and aimed it at the shoe. “Well, what do you know?” she said. “Okay, you two. See where that trail of blood leads. Sergeant?”
“Yes, ma’am?” a man said, coming closer.
“Keep the traffic off the street and have those people move back.”
Chelsea’s mother bent down, stroking my head. “Something wrong, Bailey? You okay?” she asked.
I wagged, but not hard. Nobody was scolding me yet, but maybe they would be soon.
Chelsea’s mother froze. She lifted her hand off my fur and looked at it.
“Ma’am, do you live here?” the lieutenant asked her.
“No. I’m a neighbor.”
“Did you see anyone tonight, anyone at all?”
“No, I was asleep.”
“Okay. Could I ask you to join the others over there? Or if you’re cold, please just give us your contact information and you can go home.”
“Yes, but…” Chelsea’s mother said.
“Yes?”
“Could somebody look at Bailey? The dog. I think he’s bleeding.”
I wagged again, feeling a bit more hopeful. Nobody seemed interested in Todd’s shoe at the moment. Maybe I wasn’t in trouble?
The policewoman bent down. “Are you hurt, boy? How did you get hurt?” she asked. She pointed the flashlight at me and gently ran her hands over the fur on my throat and around my neck. I licked at her chin. I liked her.
She laughed, but then her face got serious. “I don’t think that’s his blood. Ma’am, we’ll need to hold on to the dog for a while. Is that okay?”
I was taken over to one of the cars, where a man with scissors snipped off some of my fur, putting it in a plastic bag. “What do you want to bet it’s the same blood type that’s on the shoe? I’d say our four-legged friend was on patrol tonight and caught somebody setting a fire,” the woman told the man with the scissors. She ran a hand along my back, and I heard approval in her voice. I wiggled with pleasure and felt my ears and my tail begin to get higher. I was still worried about my boy, but at least nobody seemed about to tell me I’d been a bad dog.
“Lieutenant,” another man said, walking up to us. “We followed that blood trail. It goes straight to a house about four down. He walked right there and went in at a side door.”
“I’d say we have enough for a search warrant,” the woman said, nodding. “And I bet that somebody in that house four doors down has a couple of teeth marks in a leg.”
For the next several days, I lived at Chelsea’s house. Duchess wanted to play all day long, but I wasn’t in a playful mood. I missed the boy. Was he lost again? Was he in trouble? How could I help him if I didn’t know where he was? I paced the house restlessly.
Mom showed up on the second day. I ran to the door to greet her and sniffed her all over. I could smell Ethan on her clothes, which made me feel better. I also smelled worry, and tiredness, and a strange, sharp scent that stung my nose and made me shake my head a little.
Even so, the smell of my boy cheered me up, so I played Duchess’s favorite game of Tug on the Sock for a while as Mom sat and talked with Chelsea’s mom.
“What in the world was that boy doing? Why would he set your house on fire? You could have been killed,” Chelsea’s mom said, shaking her head.
“I don’t know.” Mom shook her head, too. “Todd and Ethan used to be friends.”
I turned my head at the sound of Ethan’s name. Duchess used the moment to snatch the sock out of my mouth.
“They’re sure it’s Todd?”
“He confessed when the police took him in for questioning.”
“Did he explain why he did it?”
Duchess shoved the sock into my face, daring me to try to take it away.
“He said he didn’t know why he did it.” Mom wrapped both hands around her coffee cup, almost as if it was comforting her.
“Well, for heaven’s sake. You know, I always did think that boy was strange. Remember when he pushed Chelsea into the bushes for no reason?”
“No, I never heard that. He pushed her?”
Wi
th a sudden lunge, I grabbed the free end of the sock. Duchess dug her feet into the carpet and growled. I pulled her around the room, but she didn’t let go.
“Bailey’s a hero, now. Todd’s leg took eight stitches,” Mom said. When I heard my name, I froze. Duchess did, too. The sock went slack between us. What were the people talking about? Dog biscuits, maybe?
“They want his picture for the paper,” Mom went on.
“Good thing I gave Bailey a bath,” Chelsea’s mom said.
So that was what they were talking about? A bath? Not again! I’d just had a bath! I spat out the sock. Duchess shook it joyously, prancing around the room in victory.
“How is Ethan?” Chelsea’s mom asked.
Mom put her coffee cup down. The boy’s name and the flash of worry and grief coming off of her made me head straight for her. I put my head in her lap and she stroked my ears. She didn’t answer the question.
20
About a week later, Mom came to get me, and she took me on a car ride to a new place called the apartment. This was a small house built into a big building. There were dogs everywhere. Most of them were pretty little, but still kind of interesting. In the afternoons, Mom would take me out to see them in a big cement yard. She would sit on a bench and talk to people while I ran around, making friends and marking territory.
I didn’t like the apartment very much. It was small, and it didn’t smell like home and, worst of all, the boy wasn’t there. Felix the cat was, but that didn’t help matters any.
Both Dad and Mom left often, and they smelled like Ethan when they returned, but he wasn’t living with us anymore—not eating at the table, not lying on the couch, not sleeping in one of the beds. Ethan used to be the one to feed me dinner, and now Mom had to do it. Before the fire, that had been the best part of my day, but now I didn’t feel as hungry as I used to. Sometimes I even left food in the bowl.
The strange apartment and the missing boy made my heart ache. I wandered from room to room, especially at night. I didn’t want to sleep in a bed without Ethan.
Bailey's Story: A Dog's Purpose Novel Page 10