The Pet-Sitting Peril

by Willo Davis Roberts

  “Is there anything I can do for you before we leave?” Nick asked. It hurt the old man to move around much, so Nick had fallen into the habit of bringing him things.

  “No, thanks, boy. Unless . . . well, maybe my pain pills. They’re on the counter.”

  Nick brought the little prescription bottle and a glass of water. “You feeling worse, Mr. Haggard?”

  “Not feeling very good,” the old man admitted. “Have a nice walk now.”

  It was a good walk. Mr. Haggard didn’t care where they went, as long as Rudy was exercised for at least an hour, twice a day. But tonight Nick was so worn out with everything that had happened that instead of going to the park, or wandering very far, he just stayed in the neighborhood. And part of the time, he watched Melody and her family finish unloading the U-Haul. He didn’t talk to her anymore though.

  Nobody even noticed when Nick came home. The car was in the driveway, the hood still warm, and he remembered then that his parents had been at the hospital.

  Winnie was in bed, but everybody else was in the dining room eating hamburgers. Sometimes someone called in an order at the drive-in and then failed to pick it up, and Charles got the food at half price and brought it home for a late snack.

  Tonight there were cheeseburgers and pineapple milkshakes, and french fried onion rings. Barney sipped through a thick straw and grimaced. “Pineapple! Whatever happened to chocolate shakes?”

  “You come over and pay for it, you can have any flavor you want,” Charles told him. “You want a shake, Nick?”

  He was, he realized, starving. He helped himself and looked to his mother, who wasn’t eating but simply seemed to have collapsed into a chair in exhaustion.

  “How’s Grandma, Mom?”

  “Her hip is fractured. They’re going to do further surgery tomorrow. They’ll have to put a steel pin in it to hold it. Molly, get out a roast and put it on for dinner tomorrow, will you? I expect we’ll be there at the hospital for most of the day, until Mother comes out from under the anesthetic and knows we’re there and that everything is all right.”

  “Is she hurting bad?” Nick asked around a mouthful of cheeseburger.

  “Well, they’ve given her something for that, but yes, I think it’s very painful. She moans, even now, if she tries to move at all. Oh, my, it’s so late. Finish up here, kids, and everybody get on to bed. I’m going up now, I think.”

  And so, once again, Nick didn’t have a chance to discuss the matter of staying all night at the Hillsdale Apartments.

  The next morning, he got up and went over to Hillsdale early, thinking maybe he’d get one last chance to see Mrs. Monihan. And maybe somehow he could talk her out of needing someone to stay nights. But by the time he got there, she was already gone. So he fed both Fred and Maynard, and then he and Maynard went for a walk. Later he took Rudy out. Mr. Haggard sent him on a couple of errands, mostly to get some more of his pain pills. Nick thought the old man looked bad. He wondered if he ought to see his doctor. But he didn’t ask. After all, Mr. Haggard’s health was Mr. Haggard’s business.

  Every time he passed Mrs. Sylvan’s door Nick was glad that he didn’t have to deal with Eloise until later. Maybe by then she would have forgotten him. He didn’t think so, though.

  Things at home that day were even more hectic than they had been the day before. And Nick found himself minding Winnie most of the day. Not that he minded. He liked Winnie. But he had a feeling Barney wasn’t cutting grass all day. He could have helped so Nick could have spent some time with Sam.

  Later, just after supper, he went back to Hillsdale. Remembering his success with the towel the night before, he started out with the towel, and found it worked pretty well. Eloise didn’t like it, but he was a lot happier. And this time he saw to it that she didn’t escape. He took care of Fred and Maynard with no trouble. He hadn’t even considered spending the night so soon. So that didn’t worry him.

  Mr. Haggard didn’t mind where Nick went with Rudy, or what he did, so that night Nick ran with him over to Sam’s house, and then Sam walked back with him after they’d gone all the way around the park. It was dark by the time they headed toward the Hillsdale Apartments.

  “After you take Rudy home, let’s go back to my house and play Space Invaders,” Sam suggested. “My mom made doughnuts this afternoon.”

  Sam’s mother didn’t have a job away from home, so she was always making good things to eat. “Okay,” Nick agreed. “I’ll call from your house and make sure it’s all right with my mom. If she’s even there. My grandma fell yesterday and broke her hip, so my folks have been at the hospital with her most of the time.”

  “I guess it’s tough to break your bones when you’re old,” Sam said in sympathy. “They don’t heal the way kids’ bones do.” Sam was an expert on broken bones. He’d fractured an arm falling out of a tree and a finger catching a ball without a glove. “Come on, Nick, I’ll race you the rest of the way.”

  Nick won, as he usually did, though Sam wasn’t far behind. He’d have been even closer if Rudy hadn’t gotten in his way so that Sam tangled in the leash. Sam was a good sport, though. He didn’t complain about Rudy causing him to lose. Sam was a good best friend, Nick thought, and was glad Sam felt the same way about him.

  That night when they got back to the Hillsdale Apartments, the light on the porch was on, but the light in the hall was out. Nick told Sam how many times it had happened, and Sam was as puzzled as he was. They both listened closely when Nick opened the front door, but all they could hear was noise from upstairs. In spite of the dark, Clyde and Roy seemed to be having a party. As the two boys came in, the party spilled out into the hall, and the noise was even more deafening.

  That reminded Nick of the gas can he had seen the night before, and he told Mr. Haggard about it.

  Over the next few days, Sam went with him every evening. He helped with Eloise and Fred and Maynard, too. It almost wasn’t like a job, at all, since they raced and talked and enjoyed themselves. Nick wondered if he ought to feel guilty about getting paid for having a good time.

  On Friday night they brought Rudy home later than usual; Sam had gotten some birthday money from his grandmother, and he’d treated Nick to a hamburger. After Rudy sat watching them, drooling, Sam sighed and bought a third burger for the dog. “You can’t enjoy your own with him watching you that way,” he said.

  They joked until they got close to Hillsdale and then Sam said, “Hey, what is it about this place? First your hall light is out all the time, and now the streetlight is out.”

  They approached the corner of Hillsdale and Groves Streets. It wasn’t so dark they were in danger of running into the telephone poles at the edge of the sidewalk, but it was enough to make them careful, stepping off the curb to cross the alley.

  Rudy, knowing he was close to home and his “cookie” reward, strained against the leash. And then he suddenly plunged into the pitch-black alley behind the house, “whuffing” in the same way he had done that time when Nick had wondered if there was someone in the entry hall.

  Rudy was so big and so strong that when he veered, anyone trying to hold him veered, too. Sometimes, as now, Nick thought Rudy wasn’t even aware that he was dragging anyone with him.

  “Hey, what’s that?” Sam demanded. They both saw it at the same time, the bright orange tongue of flame brilliant against the blackness at the back of the house.

  “Fire!” Nick felt the leash jerk out of his hand as Rudy lunged forward, and he had no choice but to let him go. “Sam, it’s fire!”

  It was too dark to see—it wasn’t until later that they realized the streetlight at the other end of the block was out, too—but Nick had a sense of movement ahead of him, more movement than Rudy’s.

  He had no time to worry about the dog now. The house was made of wood—old, dry wood—and the trash stacked at the foot of the back wall was on fire. Flames leaped three feet, four, and then twice that high, and he saw that stacks of big cardboard boxes had carried the fi
re to the edge of the garage roof.

  “There’s a phone booth on the corner, across the street,” Nick cried. “Ring the alarm, Sam, and then bang on the front door and try to get people out of the house. I’ll try to find a hose and turn it on the fire; maybe I can put it out.”

  He didn’t wait to see if Sam followed orders. He just remembered that hose that Dickie Jamison had left beside the house next door, and hoped it was still there. He also wished desperately that he’d brought the flashlight. He stumbled toward the house, fell, and scraped his hands on something metallic, then groped along the ground for the hose. Oh, boy, it had to be there, he thought, his mouth dry and his chest aching with fear and exertion. It had to be there.

  There was enough light now from the fire to show him the hose, coiled like a great sleeping serpent. Nick was shaking so that he could hardly connect the hose to the faucet. His heart threatened to pound right through his chest wall.

  As he felt the gush of water through the plastic hose and tugged the loose end of it back toward the alley, he heard Sam pounding on the door up front and yelling. Behind him, a light went on in the Jamisons’ house, and a man’s voice called out, “What’s going on?”

  “Fire,” Nick gasped, and ran.

  Chapter Four

  The flames dipped briefly as the spray from the hose nozzle passed over them, then rose again at once, even higher, as the spray moved on.

  Nick’s heart was pounding harder than it did when he’d just run a mile, and his hands were so greasy with sweat he could hardly hold the hose. It was such a small stream of water, and already the fire had spread through the stacked-up cartons, especially the ones that had contained shredded paper packing material, so that the entire back of the garage seemed ablaze.

  He heard someone shouting, and then feet in the gravel of the alley behind him.

  “Get another hose,” a man yelled, and there were more running feet.

  “Call the fire department,” someone else said, but already they heard the sirens in the distance. Sam would have turned in the alarm from the phone booth on the corner in front of the house. Dimly Nick was aware of the pounding feet from somewhere nearer by, and excited voices.

  “Wet down the edge of the roof,” a man beside him said, and Nick recognized Melody Jamison’s father. He was carrying a red fire extinguisher, and Nick felt a profound sense of relief that he was no longer totally responsible for whatever was going to happen. “If we can keep that roofing from catching, maybe we can slow it down until the firemen get here.”

  Obediently, Nick focused the water on the edge of the roof that overhung the garage wall; he saw the logic of Mr. Jamison’s idea. The flames still leaped against the wooden wall, but the boxes were burning down a little now, and while the wall might be smoldering, the roof so far was not burning.

  Nick lifted his eyes and saw a small figure in the window above, at the top of the outside stairs. Fred sat on the window ledge inside, barely visible in the pinkish light from the fire below.

  The thought of Fred and Maynard—and Rudy and Mr. Haggard and even Eloise—being burned to death made him feel sickish. Were there enough people fighting the fire so that he could put down the hose and run inside to make sure the old man and all the pets were safe?

  Not Rudy, he remembered suddenly. Rudy had run down the alley, leash dragging behind him, just before the fire exploded into all this light. Nick turned his head and saw Melody Jamison and a woman he assumed was her mother, hugging their bare arms against the night chill, eyes fixed on the fire that, while no longer spreading so rapidly, was still burning brightly.

  “Here,” Nick said, and thrust the hose toward the girl. “Keep playing it on the edge of the roof, your dad said. I’ve got to get the animals out, just in case.” Melody gulped and obeyed.

  The sirens were nearer, now; in fact, as Nick ran around the corner of the house he saw flashing red lights and heard the roar of powerful engines. People were coming out of their houses all along the street.

  Sam was on the front porch, and the door was open. Mr. Haggard stood inside, his white hair standing up in wisps around his ears in the light that streamed from his apartment behind him.

  “The fire department’s here, I think it’ll be all right,” Nick said, out of breath. “It wouldn’t hurt to wait outdoors, though. I’m going upstairs to check on Mrs. Monihan’s pets. Rudy got away, sir, but I’ll find him as soon as the fire’s out.”

  He could smell the smoke very strongly as he raced up the stairs. There was no music and no light under the door where Clyde and Roy lived, and he was shaking so he had trouble getting the key in Mrs. Monihan’s lock. Maynard leaped into his arms the minute the door opened, and Fred pressed against him, too.

  “Come on, just to play it safe, we’ll go outside,” Nick told them, and snapped the leash onto the little dog. It was a good thing it was kept on the table just inside the door, or he’d have gone without it.

  He glanced briefly toward the back of the building and saw the reddish glow through the kitchen window, so he knew they didn’t have the fire under control yet.

  Maynard scampered ahead of him on the stairs, while Fred led the way, out into the cool safety of the night. The streetlight was out, as were the downstairs hall and porch lights at 1230, but everybody else in the neighborhood had turned on their outside lights.

  It seemed to Nick that a long time had elapsed and he continued to breathe heavily, though it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes since they’d seen that first spark in the darkness. Mr. Haggard, leaning on his metal walker, had managed to get down the steps onto the sidewalk, where some of the neighbors stood with him, talking.

  Sam was nowhere in sight. He must have gone back to where he could see the fire, Nick thought, and took Maynard on around the house. He hoped Fred was looking out for himself, as Mrs. Monihan had said he could.

  There were two fire trucks and about a dozen firemen. Their hoses were a lot bigger than the little garden hoses Nick and the neighbors had used; within minutes, the flames were extinguished, though the firemen continued to play water over the blackened debris, just to make sure.

  Mr. Jamison was coiling up his own hose, and he looked at Nick in the light from the fire trucks. “Good thing you moved fast, young fellow,” he said. “If that roof had gone up before the firemen got here, they might have lost the house. Not to mention the place we just bought.” He glanced at the house next door, only a few feet separating the adjoining walls. “I only hope Dickie wasn’t in any way responsible for this mess.”

  “Me? Hey, Dad, I haven’t been out of the house since before supper!” Dickie wiped at his nose, leaving a smudge from the soot that had settled there. “And I’m smart enough not to monkey around with matches, anyway.”

  One of the firemen came toward them, his face rather grim. “Looks like what burned is mostly junk, except for this back wall. They’ll have to replace that. Lucky it wasn’t a lot worse. Anybody know why there was so much trash back here? Surely the alley isn’t always that full of burnable stuff, is it? There’s no burning allowed in these alleys, you know. There isn’t room to get a barrel far enough from the backs of the houses.”

  “I don’t think anybody was deliberately burning anything,” Mr. Jamison said. “At least, nobody in my family was. We did haul a lot of packing boxes out here earlier this week. There were too many for the regular garbage collection, but someone was coming for them tomorrow. I had them all stacked behind our own place, until they could be hauled away.”

  “Some of them were over here,” Nick said slowly. It made him nervous, the way the fireman was looking at everybody, and he didn’t want to cast suspicion on anybody. But it seemed important to tell everything he knew, in case the fire department could figure out what had actually happened, so it wouldn’t happen again. “When the fire went up, I saw the boxes. Stacked up all across the back wall.”

  The fireman’s eyes locked on Nick’s. His skin had a reddish tint because of the l
ights that still flashed on the trucks behind him. “You the one turned in the alarm, son?”

  “No, that was my friend Sam.” Nick gestured toward him. “We both saw it at the same time, and I knew where the people next door had left their hose, so I ran for that. Sam turned in the alarm and warned the people in the house.”

  Mr. Griesner’s fuzzy head materialized out of the shadows. “Didn’t warn me. I didn’t know a thing until I heard the fire trucks. Boy, I don’t know what Mr. Hale is going to say about this. He hates to spend money to fix the place up, but he’s sure going to have to rebuild that wall.”

  “You live in the back apartment, sir?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. I’m the manager,” Mr. Griesner said. “My place would have been next to go, after the garage.”

  “These boys did a good job,” Mr. Jamison put in. “Moved fast, did the right things.”

  “How did the fire start?” the fireman wanted to know. “Anybody see what happened?”

  For a moment there was only silence and the small sounds of the drowned fire. The smell was sharp, acrid, and it hurt Nick’s nose and throat. He swallowed.

  “Sam and I were coming across the end of the alley, there, walking Rudy. He’s Mr. Haggard’s dog, from apartment one, in the front. We noticed the streetlight was out on the corner, and the one at the end of the next block, too, so the alley was darker than usual. Rudy barked and jerked me sideways and took off down the alley as if he were after something, and we saw the sparks. It was only a minute—seconds, really—before the fire was all over the place.”

  The fireman—Nick finally recognized him as Mr. Conrad, who sometimes took up the collection in church—was looking at him and Sam in a way that made Nick shift uneasily from one foot to the other. Not as if Nick were being helpful, but as if he were under suspicion!

  “You didn’t see what caused the sparks?” Mr. Conrad asked.

  This time it was Sam who answered. “Just a little flame, at first, and then a whole lot of fire. We couldn’t see what started it.”