The Pet-Sitting Peril

by Willo Davis Roberts

  “Fixing them’s cheaper than new ones. Take a couple of dollars out of my wallet; it’s on the dresser in my bedroom,” Mr. Reed offered. He climbed down to move the ladder, and as long as he was within earshot, Barney kept still, but only until Mr. Reed disappeared around the corner.

  “Be more careful around the windows, Nick. You’re such a slob, you’re getting it on the white part.”

  “That’s going to be repainted, too. It’s going to be white. So what hurt does it do if I get a little yellow there? I can go faster if I don’t try to be so fussy.”

  “You’re not too fussy, you don’t have to worry about that,” Barney said in obvious disgust. “Boy, Nick, you’re a real pig.”

  For a moment Nick contemplated reaching out with a brushful of paint and slapping it right across his brother’s mouth. The urge was so strong that it must have been written on his face, because Barney suddenly grinned.

  “Go ahead, Nick, start something,” he said.

  The brush actually trembled in Nick’s hand.

  “Temper, temper, Nick,” Barney said, waiting, ready to strike back immediately if his brother succumbed to his goading.

  Nick wasn’t sure what would have happened if they hadn’t heard their mother coming right then. Probably he’d have poked the paint-laden brush in Barney’s face, and Barney would have knocked him flat, and then Dad would have been mad at both of them.

  As it was, Mrs. Reed came out onto the patio, looking very tired.

  “How’s Grandma?” the boys asked at the same time.

  “Physically, she’s pretty good. She’s upset, though. Worried about the inconvenience she’s causing the family, and about whether she’ll be a burden if she can’t walk without a walker. Has anyone had lunch yet?”

  “No,” Barney said. “You want me to help get something, Mom?”

  How could he be so sweet and helpful sometimes, and so rotten the rest of the time? Nick wondered. None of that helpfulness came out in regard to Nick, that was certain.

  They all gathered around the kitchen table, still wearing their painting clothes, to eat chicken salad sandwiches, milk, and cookies. Nick told them about Mr. Haggard going to the hospital, and the responsibility he felt about the animals.

  “Mrs. Monihan wanted me to stay overnight at her place, to keep Fred and Maynard company. I haven’t done it, and it’s been kind of worrying me. And now Rudy’s alone, too, with Mr. Haggard sick. I kind of wondered if maybe I should sleep over there, at least part of the time.” Nick hesitated to see if they would immediately protest the idea, but only Barney responded.

  “Great! Why don’t you stay tonight, and I’ll have Chuck stay overnight and sleep in your bed. I never can have a buddy stay overnight because there’s no place for him to sleep.”

  “Well,” Nick added, “there are plenty of other people in the house all the time. And Mrs. Monihan will pay me double if I stay overnight once in a while. I guess her pets are used to lots of company, and Rudy sure is. I could tell he missed Mr. Haggard already, because he whined when I left him.”

  His parents looked at each other. “I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t stay over there part of the time,” Mr. Reed said, “Not move over, of course. There’s no need for that. You can eat your meals at home, and check in with us regularly when you do stay. I assume all the apartments have their own phones, don’t they?”

  It was as easy as that. Nick wasn’t sure if he’d really wanted them to agree or not, but it was settled now. He asked his mother to look in on Mr. Haggard the next time she visited his grandmother in the hospital, and after Mr. Reed had returned to his painting, Nick called Sam.

  “How about staying with me? There’s no Space Invaders game, but both apartments have TVs.”

  “Okay. If Mom says it’s all right, I’ll meet you there after supper,” Sam agreed. “We going to take anything along to eat?”

  “There’s still cookies at Mrs. Monihan’s. I’ll make some sandwiches, too, before I leave home,” Nick promised. He felt better at the idea of having company his first night at the Hillsdale Apartments.

  He did a little more painting with Barney that afternoon, got his shoe repaired, and then, after an early supper, ran on over to Hillsdale Street. He didn’t want Rudy to feel as if he’d been abandoned.

  Once more there was a strange car in front of 1230. This was quite different from the Cadillac driven by Mr. Hale; instead it was a blue van painted to look as if it had flames coming out of the front end. At least, there were a few painted flames; Clyde was adding more, while Roy sat on the curb, wiggling his bare toes in time to the music he coaxed from his guitar.

  Nick came to a halt. “Wow,” he said.

  Clyde looked up, grinning. “Like it?”

  “It’s great. Is it your car? Or are you doing it for someone else?”

  “It’s our car. We just bought it, a few hours ago, with part of the insurance check from when our stuff burned up. You know, we told you how we lost all our belongings in a fire over Jacobsmeyer’s Drug Store. I’m painting it to use as an advertisement, to show people what I can do, right? So maybe someone will pay me to decorate their van; I did one once of a dragon rising out of the sea. It was really neat, but some drunk ran a stop sign and totaled the van. Sure ruined one of my best paintings.”

  “Did you get an insurance settlement on that one?” Nick asked. Something was pricking at the back of his mind.

  “Oh, yeah, eventually.” Clyde bent with the small brush and carefully outlined, freehand, another leaping flame in bright red. “That time I used the money to get some furniture, but then it burned up. Roy and I decided we’d be better off with a van than with furniture, anyway; and maybe with this I can stir up some business, earn a little money, you know?”

  “I guess a lot of people would pay to have that kind of painting done,” Nick said. He stood there for a few minutes, watching. He had no artistic ability whatever, and he admired it in someone else; Clyde was definitely talented. Nick imagined he could feel the heat from the greedy flames that licked the black stripe along the side of the van.

  Walking Rudy a little later, though, he couldn’t help thinking about a few things. He talked it over with Sam, after he and Rudy picked him up. Sam came out carrying a couple of cans of Pepsi and a bag of his mother’s homemade doughnuts as his contribution toward the snacks.

  Sam listened intently until Nick had finished.

  “These guys told you that twice they’ve collected insurance money. Once when their van was wrecked and once when the stuff in their apartment burned up. You thinking maybe they had something to do with that fire here the other night? Like, they might want to collect again from the insurance company?”

  Nick jerked on the leash to slow Rudy down. He couldn’t carry on a conversation while running. Rudy looked at him, puzzled, but obediently slowed his pace.

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to accuse anybody of such a thing, but they’re still investigating it as arson, and if it was, somebody had to set the fire. We know we didn’t, whatever Mr. Conrad thinks. And Clyde and Roy have collected money before, because of a fire. It makes me wonder.”

  “You said you saw into their apartment, though, and it didn’t have much in it. Sleeping bags on mattresses, and a stereo set. The insurance company wouldn’t pay much for that kind of thing, would they? I mean, you’d have to have something worth insuring to make it worthwhile to destroy it and collect on it, wouldn’t you?”

  That was logical, Nick thought, relieved. “What little I saw was hardly worth insuring,” he agreed.

  “Of course, they weren’t in the building when the fire started,” Sam said, making Nick immediately uneasy again. “I wouldn’t stay in the place if I intended to set it on fire. Not unless I was positive I could get out in time.”

  “I guess if anybody was setting a fire for profit, they’d have to have quite a bit at stake, more than Clyde and Roy, maybe. I can’t imagine Mr. Haggard doing such a thing even if he
could get around well enough, and Mrs. Monihan’s gone, and Mrs. Sylvan . . .” He considered. He disliked her cat, and some of his feelings about Eloise sort of rubbed off onto the cat’s owner. But he didn’t seriously think such a dignified elderly lady would pile up boxes against the back of the house and set them afire. “Mr. Griesner, now, I don’t like him much, but he was in the house. And what I saw, looking in through his door, didn’t look very valuable to me. Not valuable enough to commit a felony to have somebody pay for it so you could do something with the money. The one who had the most to lose, if the house had burned to the ground, would be Mr. Hale, wouldn’t it? I mean, he owns the house, and Mom says these old Victorian places are getting valuable now, like antiques.”

  “He wasn’t in the alley,” Sam said. “Not when the fire started. He was at a meeting of the City Council, making a speech. I know because my dad was listening to the news on the radio this morning and he heard about it. He mentioned it to my mom because he always gets mad about whatever the City Council decides to do. He always acts like all the money is coming out of his own pocket.”

  “Yeah, mine, too,” Nick agreed. “Well, maybe it was just kids playing with matches, after all.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said. And then, as they trotted along behind the big Airedale, he added, “Except it’s funny about the lights, isn’t it? The streetlights and the porch and hall lights. All going out at the same time.”

  “Just about the time you say something that makes me feel better, you follow it up with something that makes me feel worse,” Nick told his friend. “Come on, let’s run the rest of the way to the park.”

  By the time they came back, Clyde had finished painting his van, and they paused to look it over.

  “He’s pretty good,” Sam conceded. “Do you think anybody would set a house on fire, though, in order to get a van so he could paint it like that?”

  “Not really,” Nick decided. “Come on, let’s take Maynard on a run. We’ll leave the stuff you brought in Mr. Haggard’s refrigerator, okay?”

  When they went into the house, Nick had the key out for Mr. Haggard’s apartment. Only to his surprise, when Rudy moved ahead of him and nudged the door, it swung inward before Nick could get the key in the lock.

  “Hey! I locked the door behind me, didn’t I?”

  Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. I wasn’t here. You must have forgotten to do it, Nick.”

  “Boy, I hope nobody got in and took anything.” Nick slipped the choke chain over Rudy’s head and glanced toward the mail he’d left on the table. “It doesn’t look as if anybody’s been here. I don’t think Mr. Haggard has much to steal; his TV is okay.”

  “Ah, nobody could get in from the street anyway, could they? They’d have to have the key to the front door, and you didn’t forget to lock that one.”

  “Yeah. I guess,” Nick said. He was relieved that nothing had happened, yet disturbed that he could have left the door unlocked. The Reeds didn’t lock their doors during the daytime, but it was different being responsible for someone else’s home. He’d be careful never to forget the lock again, he thought.

  They were on their way out with Maynard when they met Mr. Howard, the investigator from the fire department.

  Nick’s heart lurched in his chest. He would have gone on past with no more than a murmured greeting if the man hadn’t blocked their way.

  “Walking the dogs again?” Mr. Howard asked. It was an ordinary thing to say, but the way he said it wasn’t ordinary. Nick didn’t like the man looking at him in the way he did.

  “Yes, sir,” Nick said. “I do it every day. Several times a day.”

  Mr. Howard stood at the foot of the front steps looking at them, his hands in his trouser pockets. Because the boys were on the steps, Nick was on an eye level with the man.

  “Have you thought any more about that gas can you said you saw in the closet under the stairs?” Mr. Howard asked.

  The discomfort in his chest increased as Nick swallowed. “There wasn’t anything in particular to think about it,” he said. “First it was there, and then it wasn’t. I suppose somebody took it away after I told Mr. Haggard about it being dangerous in there.”

  “And who do you think might have done that?” The question was put in a calm voice that didn’t fool anybody. Beside him, Nick felt Sam stiffen.

  “I don’t have any idea, unless it was Mr. Griesner. He’s the apartment manager; he’d take care of a thing like that.”

  “Only he didn’t,” Mr. Howard said. “He doesn’t know anything about a gas can in the closet. Nobody told him about it, and he didn’t move it.”

  “Neither did we,” Sam said, indignation rising to match what Nick was feeling.

  Mr. Howard had very sharp gray eyes. He fixed them on Sam. “Did you see the can, too?”

  “No, but Nick said it was there, so it was. Nick’s not a liar.”

  For just a moment, Nick thought the man was going to challenge that statement, and he almost forgot to breathe. Then Mr. Howard stepped aside and let them go, without making any further response at all.

  “He doesn’t believe us,” Sam muttered under his breath as they strode away from the house.

  “What does he think? That I made it up? If I’d had anything to do with a can of gas around the fire, does he think I’d tell him about it? The heck with him. I don’t care what he thinks. We didn’t do anything wrong, and he can’t prove we did.”

  Still, he couldn’t help worrying about it as they walked on. Mr. Haggard hadn’t been feeling well, and maybe he hadn’t remembered to tell the manager about the gas can, and anybody in the house could have moved it. There hadn’t been any smell of gasoline at the scene of the fire, so there was no reason to think it had had anything to do with that, was there?

  So he didn’t understand why it continued to bother Mr. Howard.

  Chapter Seven

  It was a good thing Sam was with him that evening, or Nick would never have gotten Eloise’s medicine into her. He had waited until after Maynard’s walk, putting it off as long as possible. Even with both of them chasing her into a corner, and Sam throwing the towel this time to immobilize her, the cat managed not to swallow about half of what they tried to put into her.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Sam asked. “She’s too strong to be very sick, seems to me.” He sucked at a scratch on his thumb.

  “We better clean off your hand and put antiseptic on it. I don’t know what her problem is, and right now I don’t care. I wish I hadn’t told Mrs. Sylvan that I’d take care of her.”

  Eloise had retreated to the top of a china cabinet and surveyed them with big, malevolent eyes, cleaning off her white fur where the medicine had spilled.

  “Why don’t you tell Mrs. Sylvan you don’t want to give Eloise her medicine any more?” Sam asked. “She probably wouldn’t even want you to do it if she knew how we had to wrestle her around.”

  Nick shifted his weight from one foot to the other, staring at the cat. “I don’t know. For one thing, I don’t know who else she’d get to do it. I mean, can you imagine Mr. Griesner or Clyde and Roy coming in to give medicine to a stuck-up cat? And I agreed to do it, so I’m sort of obligated. Dad says if you agree to do something, you should follow through even if it turns out it’s not as good a deal as you expected it to be. It’s kind of a challenge, I guess.”

  Sam pushed back the lock of red hair that had fallen forward. “I suppose I wouldn’t like it, either, if somebody held me down and put nasty-tasting stuff into me. Oh, well, come on. Let’s get out of here and feed Maynard and Fred. I like them a lot better.”

  It was easy to like Maynard and Fred. They were both friendly, and Maynard, especially, was cute. He knew how to lie down on command, to sit, to beg, to shake hands, and to fetch things. Fred didn’t do any tricks, but the big gray striped cat would rub against them and his rumbling purr was clear evidence that he liked them, too.

  When all their chores were over, they had to decide where to spend the ni
ght. “Maybe you should stay one night with Rudy, and the next one with Maynard and Fred,” Sam suggested. “That would be fair to everybody.”

  “I’m getting the extra pay to stay with Maynard and Fred,” Nick pointed out. “Only of course before Rudy wasn’t alone, and in some ways he’s a bigger baby than Maynard. At least Maynard has Fred to keep him company. And the two of them don’t really seem to mind being alone the way Rudy does.”

  “I wonder if we could take them all into the same apartment? Would that work? Then everybody would keep everybody else company.”

  It sounded like a good idea, except for one thing. “Rudy chases cats,” Nick remembered. “I don’t think Fred would put up with much of that.”

  They decided to walk the dogs again, at the same time, with Nick handling the Airedale and Sam holding the leash for the little mop dog. Outside of the fact that Rudy didn’t seem to notice when he stepped on Maynard in the excitement of getting started on an extra walk, the dogs got along together all right.

  When they came back, it was nearly dark. The newly painted van belonging to Clyde and Roy was gone; in its place was a beat-up old pickup. A man in coveralls was getting a tool box out of the back of it, looking up to the sign identifying the building; a companion sat behind the wheel.

  “You kids live here?” the man asked as they passed him and turned in.

  “No. I mean, we’re staying here for now, taking care of some dogs and cats,” Nick said.

  The man was young, with a sandy mustache and rather longish hair under his cap that matched the coveralls. A name, Al, was embroidered over his breast pocket.

  The driver got out and came around the front of the truck. He was very skinny and dark haired, and over his coverall pocket was the name Greg.

  “This the right place?” he asked.

  “Hillsdale Apartments, right?” Al said, and Nick nodded. “Okay. The manager is supposed to live in the back. Do we ring the front doorbell, or go around the side?”

  “I think he’ll come if you ring the bell,” Nick said.