by Emma Kragen
“Well, you certainly don’t have to pay me if you’re staying with Mrs. Stevens.”
“I need that job.”
Dolores was impressed. Emma did want to pay her own way in the world. “Well, okay. If I ask him, he will give you the job,” she said with a smile Emma had never seen before—and one that Emma hoped she would see more often.
Mike had been inconsolable about Yeti’s capture, and Emma was just angry—angry enough to want to do something about it. But what could a kid do? Emma then decided she couldn’t be a kid right now; she had to be an adventure hero for real. However, an adventure hero knows when she is outnumbered, and knows when it is time to go undercover. That’s when Emma knew she had to ask Dolores to get her that job with the dogcatcher.
Emma started working that afternoon. Norman and bug-face Melvin had set up the city’s new “dog pound” in an old abandoned buggy-whip factory. Its vast interior provided plenty of room for all the criminal dogs, which they kept in all manner of makeshift cages. They had covered the floor with hay to catch the dog “doody” that Norman hated so much, and they fed them very little, which kept them hungry, which Norman, for a particular reason, thought was a good thing. But it did mean that they whimpered a lot, and that got on Norman’s nerves.
After Norman had told her what to do, which entailed a lot of lifting and carting and cleaning, he went into his “office,” a room in the back. Emma took the opportunity to look around. The sight of all the dogs, whimpering in cages, just about broke her heart. But she couldn’t help them all. Right now she had to find Yeti and the puppy, for she had promised Mike she would. After searching what seemed like hundreds of cages, she finally came across the one that contained Yeti. And next to it was a small cage with the puppy in it. She petted them both and whispered, “Don’t you worry. I’ll get you all out of here soon.” She was just trying to figure out how to unlock the cages when, suddenly, a greasy-gloved hand grabbed her braids and pulled her away from the cages.
“I told Dolores that hiring a girl would be stupid,” Norman said into Emma’s face, his hot, stinky breath making her cringe more than the pain of having her hair pulled. “But then I discovered that the girl was the dog-loving, trouble-making girl, and I thought that it would be good to have her right here with me, so I could keep my eye on her.” He pointed a grimy finger at her nose. “You remember that as far as I’m concerned, you’re no better than another stray dog. Now get back to work!” Norman pushed Emma away from Yeti and the puppy, and the puppy growled at him, and Norman growled right back.
That night, Norman made Emma work late, and she got back to the Stevens farm after Mike had gone to bed, so she was not able to report on her undercover work. In the morning Mrs. Stevens didn’t have the heart to wake her early, so she drove Mike to school, then drove back to get Emma.
At the school Coach Cullimore was giving it his all in rehearsing the kids in “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” He plotted out their moves on a blackboard like he would football plays, and tried in his tone-deaf way to lead them in singing. Neither effort was succeeding—which Mrs. Stevens could plainly see as she and Emma entered the assembly hall. The coach did not see her enter, so it was the most pleasant of surprises when suddenly, instead of the off-key caterwauling he was leading, there was music, sweet music, as Mrs. Stevens started playing the piano, and the kids started singing in tune.
“That was great!” the coach said when the song had been successfully sung. “We have been saved by Mike’s mom!” he announced to the kids with great relief.
Emma had made her way up to the stage, and Mike approached her anxiously. “Did you find Yeti?” Mike asked. Emma told him that she had, but she had not been able to rescue them. “But we have got to get them out of there!” Mike said loudly just as Coach was trying to organize one more go at the song.
“Em and Mike, come on, you’re holding up the game.”
Mrs. Stevens started playing again, and Emma grabbed her cardboard partridge tree. “You got to get her out of there fast.” The conversation continued behind the cardboard.
“I will,” Emma assured.
“Promise?” Mike pleaded.
“I promise,” Emma declared like the stalwart adventure hero she was determined to be.
After the rehearsal, Coach stepped over to the piano. “See, I told you your piano playing would make all the difference.” Mrs. Stevens smiled at the compliment. “You know, it’s really nice of you to help us out like this,” he continued. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” Mrs. Stevens said. “Anything to feed the dogs.”
Ah, yes, the dogs, the coach thought. How are we going to help the dogs?
12
Caught!
In the few months he had been in Doverville, Coach had grown quite fond of his students. They were an enthusiastic bunch, but more importantly, they were a positive bunch. Times were hard, yet they kept up their spirits. Some of that is natural to children, but he was convinced that his kids were special. So, in order to solve the dog-feeding dilemma, he gathered his students at the Stevens farm and put a question to them.
“All right, kids, I have your math assignment. Now, you remember how to do story problems, right? You’ve got a basket with ten apples in it. You take two out. How many are left?”
“Eight,” one of the kids answered.
“Right. Well, now, just think dogs. How many do we have, Mikey?”
Mike started counting the dogs in the yard. “Okay, so we got . . . four Cocker Spaniels, ten Dalmatians, and seven Chihuahuas.” As he counted, Miranda, the smartest kid in the school, kept a running total. “We got five Retrievers and seven Boxers, five Basset Hounds, two black Labradors, and nine Lab puppies.” “And Max,” Mrs. Stevens said.
“And a Poodle in a doghouse,” Mike finished up, but then remembered something and turned to the coach. “And you have to count Yeti and the puppy, because Emma’s going to get them back.”
Max was curious. There was so much going on outside of the barn. He heard the voices of many children, but they weren’t quite the voices of play. There was something more serious about their voices. Max started to leave his doghouse. He so much wanted to see what was going on, but he stopped. No! There was no voice of Mr. Whiteside; he would only leave for the voice of Mr. Whiteside.
“Okay,” the coach said. “So how many kids, how many dogs, and how many meals for each of us to find?”
Miranda, after some swift calculations on an abacus, proudly announced the answer. “There are twenty-eight pupils, plus Coach Cullimore and Mrs. Stevens. There are fifty-two dogs, but you can’t really count Yeti and the puppy until Emma actually brings them back. Each dog eats twice a day, so that means each of us must provide three and six-tenths meals per day.”
But exactly how were they to do that? Mrs. Stevens looked to Coach Cullimore; Coach Cullimore looked to the students; the students looked to Mrs. Stevens. No one had an answer—until Emma spoke up.
“Do you guys ever collect bacon grease around here?” They all looked at Emma, totally perplexed. “I used to collect cans of bacon grease from the neighbors once a week to sell to make soap.”
“Dogs can’t live off bacon grease,” Mike rightly said. “No,” Emma said confidently because she knew the solution. “But they love table scraps—makes them think they’re people. The sign says there are 887 people living in Doverville. If half that many gives us scraps, that’s . . .”
“Four hundred fourty-four, rounded up,” Miranda announced.
“Uh, that’s optimistic,” Mrs. Stevens cautioned.
“But even half that many . . .” Emma was determined.
“Two hundred twenty-three,” Miranda calculated.
That sounded a bit more realistic. “Well,” Coach said, “scraps are thrown out anyway.”
“I used to collect a lot of bacon grease,” Emma added.
“That’s only seven and a half houses per person per week,” Miranda the math wiz said.
&
nbsp; “How can you visit half a house?” Mike wanted to know.
Despite that, everyone was enthusiastic over the plan and was just signing up to do their bit, when they heard the warped putt-putt and rude backfires of the Fearsome Machine, which drove up fast and came to an abrupt stop.
“Merry Christmas, dog lovers, merry Christmas!” Norman shouted out as he dismounted from his high seat with a piece of paper, a nail, and a hammer in his hand. He marched over to the side of the barn and nailed the paper to it. It was a notice that read: BY ORDER OF THE MAYOR, ALL DOGS MUST BE REMOVED ON OR BEFORE MIDNIGHT DECEMBER 24. “A little extra time, Mrs. Stevens, in the spirit of the season.” He chuckled an unpleasant chuckle. “But I can assure you if those dogs are still here on Christmas Day, they are mine!” Then he spotted Emma. “There you are.” He walked over to Emma and grabbed her by one of her braids. “Come on, you’re late for work.” He dragged Emma toward the Fearsome Machine. Mrs. Stevens rushed to stop him, but Mike stopped her and reminded her that Emma working for Norman was their only hope of getting Yeti back.
Norman gave Emma the task of cleaning out all the cages. Emma wanted to feed the dogs, but Norman said they had already been fed. If they had, it hadn’t been much, and many of the dogs whimpered with hunger. “Keep them quiet,” Norman ordered. “That’s part of your job, too, to keep them mangy mutts quiet.”
Emma kept hoping Norman would leave or go in his office, but he stayed close and kept an eye on her. The advantage was that she could also keep an eye on Norman, and she soon learned where he kept a large ring of keys, the keys to the various dog cage padlocks. Norman had used one of the keys to open a cage and take out a Border Collie, which he then dragged away. Emma put down her cleaning tools and quietly followed him, seeing where he hooked the key ring on a nail in the office before going out again to help bug-face Melvin put the Collie into another cage by the front. Emma went into the office to get the keys, keeping an eye through the door on the two men. Suddenly old Scratch jumped on top of the old metal filing cabinet Emma was standing by, meowing an alarm. Quickly, Emma opened the top drawer and pushed old Scratch in, then closed it. Then she grabbed the keys and ran out of the office.
She made her way to the puppy’s cage and opened it, took him out, and held him tight. Then she turned to Yeti’s cage, but the cage door was already opened, and Yeti was gone. The surrounding dogs were getting excited and starting to bark. “Hey,” she heard Norman yell from a distance, “I told you to keep them dogs from yapping! Shut them up!” But Emma had moved to the back of the old factory and found another room to hide in.
Norman, growing suspicious, started to look for her. “Bad things happen to bad little girls—you hear me?! Where are you?” Then he came upon the puppy’s empty cage. “Ho, ho, you have gone and done it now.” He called bug-face Melvin over, and Emma could see from a crack in the door that they were plotting something horrible. She decided to move farther back into the room, and there she discovered something strange. On a roll of hooks dangled dog collars, a lot of dog collars! Why were they here? Why weren’t they on the dogs? And where were the dogs they belonged to? Emma got a sinking feeling. What had bug-face Melvin and Norman been doing with the dogs? And then she saw that one collar had a name marked on it in ink: YETI. Right then and there Emma knew that she could not just rescue the puppy; she had to rescue all the dogs!
Emma looked back into the main part of the dog pound and didn’t see Norman anywhere. She went in and started opening up all the cages with Norman’s keys, releasing Labs and Collies, Retrievers and German Shepherds, then she herded them to a big side door.
As soon as she opened the door, she was hit in the face with a bright light. It was the headlamps of a truck. She squinted to see bug-face Melvin scurrying to gather the newly freed dogs. Then a hand, a greasy-gloved hand, came down on her shoulder from behind her, and she heard the faint cackling of Norman Doyle’s voice and smelled the less-than-faint scent of his breath.
13
Dolores to the Rescue
The next day was Saturday, but all the kids had agreed to come to school in the morning for another rehearsal of the Christmas program. Afterward they would go out to collect table scraps for the dogs. When Mrs. Stevens and Mike got up that morning, they found that Emma was not in her bed. They thought that maybe Norman had made her work late again and she had decided to stay in town with Dolores. They figured they would see her at the rehearsal.
As Mike and his mother were driving into town, they saw several dogs running in the street. They looked at one another. “Emma!” they shouted. “She must have let them out of the dog pound.” Mrs. Stevens explained what they both were thinking. They stopped the truck and scrambled to round up the dogs, managing to get seven of them into the truck. But Yeti was not among them. And where were Emma and the puppy?
When Mrs. Stevens and Mike came into the assembly hall, Coach and the kids were in the middle of rehearsing the moves the coach had worked out on the blackboard. Girls with flutes were playing pipers, and boys with gold foil cardboard rings were holding them up high; other boys were leaping like lords, while a few girls were making the motions of milking cows. The coach had not yet figured out how he would indicate geese laying eggs. None of this was poetry in motion, and on top of that, their partridge in a pear tree, Emma, was not there.
“Sorry we’re late,” Mrs. Stevens said as Mike ran to the stage and she positioned herself on the piano bench. “But something came up that was really worth being late for.”
“Where’s Emma?” Coach Cullimore asked.
“She didn’t come to school?”
The coach shook his head no and exchanged a worried glance with Mrs. Stevens. But they knew how independent Emma was. Besides, they had a rehearsal to finish, and over fifty dogs to feed.
Had they known where Emma was, though, they would have dropped everything and rushed to her rescue. Emma was crouched in a cold corner of the old buggy-whip factory, locked into a large cage with only her puppy to keep her warm.
After the rehearsal Coach Cullimore drove half the kids to one end of the town, and Mrs. Stevens drove the other half to the other end so the kids could start knocking on doors collecting scraps for the dogs. The excitement over their mission was quickly extinguished, as the kids experienced one door slam after another. The residents of the town dismissed them as pesky beggars.
Then Miranda, who, as you know, was the smartest kid in the school, got an idea. “Look,” she said to the other kids in a huddle, “we’ve been rehearsing Christmas carols for days. Why not give them something for what we’re asking? Grown-ups love that stuff!”
The next time they knocked on a door, the man answering it, roast beef sandwich in hand, was greeted by a choir of kids singing “Gloria” as backup to Mike’s sterling performance as “Tiny Tim” complete with crutch. “Kind sir,” Mike began, “it’s Christmas. Our dogs are very hungry. They’re good little fellows, they are. In the kindness of your heart, could you spare a little something left over from your lovely dinner?” The man thought for a moment. About what we can have no idea. But whatever his thoughts were, they turned to kindness, and he placed his sandwich in the bucket Mike offered up. This same gesture was repeated over and over throughout the rest of the day, including at the butcher’s, which made John the butcher feel better than he had felt in many days.
When the kids got to the Stevens farm that afternoon, they had plenty of food for the dogs. Mrs. Stevens was thrilled. But they still had not heard from Emma, and Mrs. Stevens was worried. She called Dolores to see if Emma had spent the night there, but Dolores said no, she had not seen her. But she also told Mrs. Stevens not to worry, for she had a pretty good idea where Emma might be.
Angry and determined, Dolores grabbed her hat and coat and drove her old Model T Ford to the abandoned buggy-whip factory and confronted Norman, her “boyfriend.”
“I don’t know what you’re so sore about, Dolores.” Norman ran after her as Dolores made her way
through the building, looking for Emma. “I was just trying to teach her a lesson.”
“Where is she, Norman?!”
“Around the corner.”
And around the corner Dolores found Emma. “A cage?!” She ran up to Emma. “Did they hurt you?”
Dolores ordered Norman to open the cage, which he reluctantly did. “Come on, honey, I told you it was a stupid idea to give a girl a job like this. She let all the dogs out!”
“I’m not listening to you, Norman,” Dolores said as she walked Emma and the puppy out of the factory.
Norman grabbed Emma away from Dolores just as they were leaving. “All right, now, that is enough! I know what’s going on here. Oh, yeah, you want a favor, then it’s all sweet talk and perfume and oo-la-la, and all the time this ragamuffin kid’s more important to you than I am. Well, the kid is fired, and the dumb mutt stays here.”
Dolores had never really hit a man before. She did not consider it ladylike. But she smacked Norman good on his arm, and in shock and pain Norman let go of Emma.
“We are through, Dolores!” Norman yelled after her as she took Emma and the puppy to her car.
“Fine!” Dolores yelled back.
“I mean it!” Norman emphasized.
“Wonderful!” Dolores was happy to agree.
“Thanks for getting me out, Aunt Dolores,” Emma said at the car.
“Do not call me that! I could crack your daddy’s skull for—”
“It’s not his fault that I’m so much trouble.”
“Trouble? You are ruining my life,” Dolores corrected. But did she mean it? She suddenly looked at Emma, reached into her pocket, and pulled out an envelope. “Your daddy’s letter finally got here. Why didn’t you tell me what happened to your mother?” Emma had no answer, for she did not like to talk about her mother’s death. “Look, I don’t know what your daddy told you about me—about us—but, well, a long time ago I knew your daddy real well, and all I can say is you just better not go depending on what he says because even when he makes a promise it’s not something you can trust.” Dolores could see that this was hurting Emma, but Emma, she figured, needed to know, so she wouldn’t be hurt anymore. “I’m just saying he is not likely to be here by Christmas—or ever, for that matter. Now, get in!”