The Pet-Sitting Peril

by Willo Davis Roberts

  Mrs. Helen Sylvan had apartment two, across the hall from Mr. Haggard’s. It was identified by the same means as all the others in the place, with a scrawled numeral in black crayon on the brown painted door. Mrs. Sylvan also had a neat white card with her name on it, tacked below the crayon writing.

  Mrs. Sylvan was tall and skinny. Even her voice was thin and high-pitched. She had a cat named Eloise, a big white Persian that looked as if she were washed and brushed every day.

  Nick glanced around. The place was smaller than Mr. Haggard’s, and much fancier. There were knickknacks on white painted shelves—all kinds of little animal and human figures made of glass and wood and china—and crocheted doilies on everything. It was neat and orderly, with no books or papers lying around. The furniture was polished and there was no dust, though the sofa and chairs didn’t look as comfortable as the ones in Mr. Haggard’s place.

  “I wouldn’t trust Eloise to anyone who didn’t love animals,” Mrs. Sylvan said. “She’s very sensitive to things like that. She would know if you didn’t like her.”

  Nick glanced at the cat, who regarded him with wide, unblinking blue eyes. “I like dogs and cats,” he assured her, looking back at Mrs. Sylvan. “That’s about the only animals I’ve been around. I think I saw Eloise the other day, when I was walking in the back alley.” He didn’t mention that Rudy had nearly jerked him off his feet, lunging for the cat, and that he still had black and blue marks on his shins where he’d been dragged into a pile of garbage cans.

  Mrs. Sylvan’s lips stretched out thin. “She got out when Mr. Griesner came in to fix a leaking faucet. He doesn’t care for animals, and he’s careless. Whenever you come in or out, you must take care that Eloise doesn’t escape. She’s too valuable to be loose outside where she’s in danger from cars and dogs.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Nick said.

  “She has medicine to take three times a day.” She showed him the bottle and the eyedropper. “I’ll give her the morning dose before I leave. I’m a bookkeeper at Capland’s Department Store, downtown. I work on a shift where I start late and leave late, and sometimes I stop off to visit with my sister on the way home. But I can give Eloise her last dose before I go to bed. What I need is someone to come in in the afternoon, or even very early in the evening, to give the middle dose. You can start today.”

  That didn’t sound too bad a chore. After a few more instructions Nick put her key on the ring with Mr. Haggard’s keys and went on upstairs to apartment three.

  There was loud music playing, the kind that Barney liked and Nick hated, so they were always fighting over Barney’s radio being on. Sometimes Nick suspected that his brother didn’t really like that music, either, but was playing it mostly to annoy Nick.

  Behind him, from the foot of the stairs, Mr. Griesner, the apartment manager, yelled so that Nick jumped and spun around.

  “Turn that darned stereo down!”

  The music went on, unabated, and Nick cleared his throat. “I don’t think they heard you, sir.”

  Mr. Griesner’s hair was a gray wiry brush atop his head, touched with various colors where the light came through the colored windows around the front door, so that it was tinted pink and blue and a soft green. On anybody else it might have evoked amusement, but Mr. Griesner was a rather hostile man, Nick had decided. Nothing about him was funny.

  “Well, bang on their door and tell them to cool it, will you? Fool hippies, they must be deaf, and they’ll make all the rest of us that way, too. I told Mr. Hale we don’t need no hippies in this place, but he says anybody can pay the rent, let ’em in. Well, rent or no rent, they can’t play music that makes my ears hurt from clear down here. You bang on their door and tell ’em.”

  “Yes, sir,” Nick said, though he didn’t see why he should have to confront them. After all, nobody was paying him to be manager of the apartments.

  He crossed the upper hall and tapped on the door behind which the music throbbed and crashed. It would be a miracle if they heard his knock over the music. These tenants must be new; he was sure Mr. Haggard had told him, when he first started walking Rudy, that the house was filled with elderly people.

  The door swung open. “Yeah? What you selling, kid?”

  “Nothing,” Nick said. “Mr. Griesner said to tell you the music is too loud. Sir.”

  He didn’t know if the young man was a hippie or not. He did have rather long hair, and he wore blue jeans that Nick’s mother would have thrown in the rag bag and tennis shoes with his sockless toes showing through, but he was clean and he smelled of nothing worse than turpentine. There were paint smudges on his T-shirt.

  “Oh. Hey, Roy, turn down the stereo,” he yelled over his shoulder. Then he grinned at Nick. “You live here, kid? I didn’t know there was anybody your age around.”

  Nick explained about his pet care activities, and the young man nodded. “I noticed all the dogs and cats. We’re thinking about getting a pet of some kind, but so far there’s only Roy and me. I’m Clyde. He’s Roy.”

  The apartment appeared to be one gigantic room, with a kitchenette at one end of it. Intrigued, Nick stood in the open doorway. There was no real furniture, only a couple of beanbag chairs and some pillows and two mattresses with sleeping bags on them. But there were paintings.

  The music had softened, though it still reverberated so that Nick could feel the beat of the bass through the soles of his feet. “You’re artists,” he said, craning his neck to see the big canvas at the end of the room.

  “I’m an artist,” Clyde admitted. “Roy’s a musician.”

  Roy had long hair, too—dark instead of blond—that was tied back in a ponytail with a red rag. His jeans were even worse than Clyde’s and he wasn’t wearing any shoes at all. He nodded at Nick, more engrossed in his guitar than interested in meeting anyone. Nick wondered how he could play his guitar and hear it over the stereo.

  “You like painting?” Clyde asked.

  “Uh, yes, sometimes,” Nick admitted. The big canvas was a glorious splash of color, though Nick couldn’t quite make out what it represented.

  Apparently Clyde was used to that sort of reception to his work. “It’s a sunrise,” he offered. “Or a sunset. I haven’t decided yet.”

  Without looking up, Roy said, “Looks like Jacobsmeyer’s Drug Store to me.” And then, as Nick hesitated, wondering if his leg were being pulled, Roy added, “The night it burned down. Fire, man. Fire. We were living above it at the time, which is one reason we don’t have much furniture.”

  It was rather interesting, but Nick remembered he was supposed to be taking on a new job. “Uh, thanks for turning down the stereo,” he said. “I have to go. I’ll see you.”

  “See you,” Clyde echoed. Roy didn’t look up from his guitar.

  When the door closed, Nick went on across the hall to talk to Mrs. Monihan, hoping that Mr. Griesner would be satisfied with the reduction in volume, though the music was still pretty loud.

  Mrs. Monihan was the opposite of Mrs. Sylvan in almost every way, except that they both liked animals. She was short and plump, with a round face and a pale blue rinse on her white curls. Every time Nick had seen her, she’d been smiling, as she was now.

  “Come in, come in. I have my tickets, I’ll be leaving tomorrow.” She had been baking, and the apartment was fragrant with the scent of spices. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your taking care of Maynard and Fred. I couldn’t have gone to visit my sister otherwise. I haven’t been back to Chicago in twenty-five years, can you imagine? Viola visited me here once, about ten years back, but I haven’t been anywhere. I’m so excited!”

  Her apartment was bigger than Mrs. Sylvan’s or Mr. Haggard’s, and in some ways it was nicer than either of the others. It was neat, though not so much so that a person felt uncomfortable in it. There were books in the bookcases, papers neatly folded on the coffee table, and a plate of cookies set out for him.

  “Help yourself,” she said. “They’re oatmeal-spice, with raisi
ns.”

  Nick bit into one appreciatively, sinking onto the couch next to Fred. Fred was a cat, too; but he didn’t resemble Eloise in the slightest. He was gray-and-white striped, and big; where Eloise was half fur, Fred was mostly cat. He rubbed against Nick’s leg and purred when Nick stroked him.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Mrs. Monihan said now, regarding him through her glasses. “I’m going to be gone a whole month. That’s an awful long time to leave Maynard and Fred here alone all the time. I mean, even with you coming in a couple of times a day to see to their food and water, and taking Maynard outside a bit, they’ll get terribly lonesome. So I wondered, if maybe you couldn’t stay here?”

  Nick strangled on a cookie crumb. When he’d stopped coughing, he said, “What?”

  She leaned toward him, then reached up to adjust her hearing aid. “I’m sorry, I forgot to turn it back up again. When those young men had that music on so loud, I turned it off. What was it you said, dear?”

  “I said, what did you want me to do?”

  “Stay here. Sleep here, in the apartment. Not every night, but once in a while. Maybe two or three nights a week. It would mean so much to Fred and Maynard to have company. There’s plenty of food for late-night snacks. You could just come up after you walk Rudy.”

  “I don’t know,” Nick said slowly. “I’m not sure my folks would let me.”

  She looked so disappointed he almost relented and agreed to do it, though he didn’t really want to. And probably his mother wouldn’t allow it anyway.

  “Would you ask, dear? I’d pay you extra, of course. Couldn’t expect you to do it for nothing. Say, double the amount we agreed on for the other things you’ll be doing if you’ll stay two or three nights a week.”

  Double. Nick considered that, chewing his second cookie. Gosh, that would make quite a difference in how much he could contribute to the Disneyland fund. And if he kept really busy over here, he wouldn’t have to help Dad paint the house.

  Nick liked his father very much, and he knew he was an excellent teacher; all the other kids liked him, too. Only he wasn’t very mechanical, nor good with his hands; the only other time he’d painted anything, that Nick could remember, was two years ago at his grandparents’ farm, when Mr. Reed had painted the chicken house. Grandma had muttered under her breath that if she’d known he was going to make such a production out of it, she’d have been tempted to get rid of the chickens instead.

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to ask,” Nick told Mrs. Monihan now.

  “Oh, I do hope they’ll give you permission. It isn’t,” she said earnestly, “as if you’d be alone in the house, or anything like that. Those young men are just across the hall—you can tell when they’re home because you can hear the music—and there is Mrs. Sylvan downstairs, and Mr. Haggard, and Mr. Griesner is at the back of the house. You can tell your parents that.”

  • • •

  He didn’t get around to discussing the matter at home right away, though, because when he arrived there a short time later the place was a scene of chaos.

  The front door stood wide open, and Winnie was looking out, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, from which the filling oozed down her arm. Beyond her, the telephone was ringing, and the two little boys that Molly took care of were jumping up and down on the couch, squealing. His mother was shouting something down from upstairs. What was she doing home?

  Winnie stepped aside so that Nick could enter, pausing to lick a glob of jelly off her wrist. Through the dining room windows Nick saw that yellow paint had been spilled on the tarp covering the bushes next to the house, and there was nobody on the ladder. When he moved a little, he saw the paint can lying on its side with a yellow puddle around it on the cement.

  “What’s going on?” Nick demanded, and moved out of the way when his sister Molly raced in to take the children off the couch and his mother ran into the kitchen to answer the phone. He heard her say, “We don’t know yet how bad it is. We’re heading for the hospital now.”

  “Hey, Winnie! Is it Dad? Did he fall off the ladder or something?”

  Winnie shook her head. “No, Daddy’s not hurt. Well, he did come down the ladder so fast he spilled the paint, and he hit the corner of the house and skinned his elbow, but he’s all right.”

  Dad said when Winnie grew up she was going to be a real beauty. Right now she looked the same as all the rest of the Reeds: straight dark hair, big brown eyes, and a sprinkling of freckles across her nose. Nick had wondered how his father knew what she was going to look like when she grew up until he saw a picture of his mother when she was eight years old. Ah, Winnie was going to look the way his mother did now, that’s what Dad had meant. And since Winnie was a girl, it wouldn’t matter so much if she didn’t get very tall.

  “What’s going on then?” Nick asked her now, and had to wait until she’d swallowed a bite of the sandwich.

  “It’s Grandma Tate,” she explained. “She fell down the stairs at home, and they think she’s got a broken hip.”

  “Oh, wow. Broken hips are terrible for old people. What’re you doing here with the monsters?” he demanded of Molly as she herded the two little boys out of the living room toward him.

  “I came when I heard about Grandma, and I had to bring them with me. Nick, see what you can do about that spilled paint, will you? I’m going on back over to the Franklins’; that house is used to these kids’ wild ways, and this one isn’t. You and Dad ready to go, Mom?”

  “Yes. I don’t know how long we’ll be at the hospital; until they get the X-rays and tell us what’s going to happen, I suppose. Nick, dear, Charles is working, and Molly won’t be home until after six, so see to something to eat for lunch, all right? Oh, and call Mr. Sundling and tell him I won’t be back to work today.”

  Mrs. Reed worked in an office downtown, and the rest of the family were used to doing for themselves when she wasn’t around. After she and Mr. Reed left, and Molly had taken the Franklin kids home, Nick put out bread and cold meat and peanut butter, and he and Winnie, and Barney, when he came home, helped themselves.

  Barney had a couple of lawn cutting jobs that afternoon, so after lunch Nick did the best he could with the mess in the patio. It took him quite a while to get things cleaned up, and then, for lack of anything better to do, he did a little painting himself. He didn’t mind doing something like that when the whole family wasn’t around to tell him he was doing it wrong. He could have gone to see Sam, of course, but he didn’t want to leave Winnie alone, and besides, he wanted to wait and hear about Grandma.

  Mrs. Reed didn’t call back until late in the afternoon. Grandma was still being operated on, she said, so she and Mr. Reed would be having dinner at the hospital. Nick opened a can of soup for Barney and Winnie and himself and made toasted cheese sandwiches to go with it. There was chocolate pudding in the refrigerator, and after they’d each had a dish, they decided that since there wouldn’t be enough left to go around tomorrow when the whole family would be home, they might as well have another bowl.

  Nick felt comfortably stuffed as he headed back toward Hillsdale Street. He hoped Rudy would be content to walk instead of run, at least until Nick’s supper had settled.

  There was a U-Haul truck in front of the house next door, and Nick slowed to watch with interest. Somebody was moving in, he saw at once, a family with a girl about his own age and a boy about ten. The whole family was carrying boxes except the boy, who was hauling coiled garden hoses around the side of the house. It was almost a twin to 1230 except that it had been more recently painted and didn’t have as much fancy colored glass in the windows.

  The girl turned from the truck with a box labeled Books just as Nick came abreast. She was small and slim, with dark hair that blew loose around her shoulders. She was wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt and blue shorts, with blue-and-white running shoes like his own, except hers weren’t falling apart.

  She hesitated for only a few seconds, then gave him a faint smile and wen
t on toward the house.

  Cute, Nick thought. Why hadn’t he had nerve enough to speak to her? Say hi, anyway, and maybe find out her name. Barney would have found out her name.

  He kicked a pop can off the sidewalk, then picked it up to throw in the trash. Shoot, he wasn’t ever going to be much like Barney. Actually, he didn’t want to be, even if Barney could talk to girls.

  As Nick turned onto the walk to the Hillsdale Apartments, the boy next door called out, “Melody, where am I supposed to put this junk?”

  “Leave the hose at the side of the house,” the girl said, “right by the outside faucet. Put the toolbox around in the garage, I guess. Oh, and Dickie, Dad said to get those empty boxes out of the way. Stack them in the alley for now.”

  Melody, Nick thought, going up the steps. What a pretty name. He said it again to himself as he unlocked the front door. Melody.

  Rudy heard him coming and whined behind the door of apartment one, but that wasn’t where he was going, yet. First he had to give Eloise her medicine. He found the key to Mrs. Sylvan’s door and let himself in.

  Eloise was lying on the sofa. She lifted her head to gaze at him with enigmatic eyes. Nick liked that word. It seemed to him that everybody had enigmatic eyes; you couldn’t tell what they were thinking, most of the time. Maybe it was just as well, if they were all thinking what a shrimp he was.

  “Hi, Eloise,” he said. She didn’t blink or move. “Time for your medicine,” he told her, and got the bottle and the dropper.

  Eloise stayed where she was until he approached within a foot or so of her, and then she suddenly shot past him with a decidedly unfriendly sound.