At least it would be better than talking to herself.
3
NO ONE CAME TO SWIM in the pool all morning.
After a while Katie got tired of sitting there looking at the empty swimming pool. She discovered that if she concentrated very hard, she could make the water splash up over the edge and run in rivulets back over the tile. Someone had left their shoes and socks beside a deck chair, and she leaned forward and tried very hard, until the water rushed over the edge of the pool in a wave sufficient to wet the shoes and socks.
Nobody came and found them, however, and Katie got up and began to walk around the deck. There were no name cards beside the doors on this inner courtyard, and all the draperies were drawn so that she couldn’t see inside. She thought living at The Cedars Apartments was going to be pretty boring.
There was a plain door sandwiched in between the sliding glass doors; and when Katie opened it, she found herself in a short corridor that led out to the main one. Well, maybe she’d give herself a tour of this floor, at least, since she didn’t want to go back to 2-A. Not while Mrs. H. was there.
The card beside the bell of 2-B said Michaelmas. No Mr. or Mrs., just the last name. And in front of the door sat a cat.
He was a big gray tom with a few black marks on his face that gave him an evil look, and he crouched there in a position that made Katie drop to her knees before him.
“What’s the matter, cat? You look sick.”
I am sick. I hurt.
Surprise held her rigid. The cat hadn’t spoken to her, of course, he hadn’t. Yet the words hung in her mind, as clearly as if she’d heard them.
“Where do you hurt?” She didn’t touch him, only hunkered down so that they were face-to-face. He had yellow, unblinking eyes.
The door opened so unexpectedly that Katie nearly fell over.
“Oh, there you are, Lobo—well, who’re you?”
The lady who stood in the doorway—Mrs. Michaelmas?—was as old as Grandma Welker had been. She wore a red and green and blue printed muumuu in electric colors, and her white hair hadn’t been combed yet today. (Later she would learn that Mrs. Michaelmas’s hair never looked as if it had been combed.)
“I’m Katie Welker. I live over there.” She gestured at the door of 2-A.
“Well, glad to know you. I’m Annie Michaelmas. And that wretched creature,” she pointed at the cat, “is Lobo. Lobo means—”
“Wolf,” Katie supplied.
“Oh, you speak Spanish?”
“I can read a few words of it,” Katie said modestly. “Lobo is sick. He hurts.”
“He does?” For once a grownup didn’t act as if she were crazy or weird. Mrs. M. bent to pick him up, and Lobo struggled in her arms. “Where do you hurt, baby?”
“I think it’s a bladder infection. Bladder infections really hurt. My grandma had one once.”
“I did, too. And you’re right. They hurt.” She cradled the cat against her brightly flowered bosom. “I guess I better take him to the vet’s, eh?”
“I think so.” Katie could see beyond Mrs. M. into a comfortably cluttered apartment. There were books and magazines all over it, in shelves and on tables and even on the floor. Her interest quickened.
“I don’t suppose you’d lend me something to read, would you, until I can go to the library? Monica—my mother—says her books aren’t suitable for a ten-year-old.”
Mrs. M. looked down at her nearsightedly. “Are you ten? Well, I guess we can’t all be giants, can we. Sure, I can lend you something. What do you like? True detective stories? Science fiction? Murder mysteries?”
Katie nodded. “Anything, as long as it’s good.”
“Come on in and look around. What’s your name?” Mrs. M. asked.
Katie told her, and followed her into the apartment. There was a television, but there were newspapers lying on top of it and over the edge so that they covered up part of the screen. She guessed that Mrs. M. spent more time reading than watching TV.
“Make yourself at home,” Mrs. M. said, depositing Lobo gently on a couch with orange and brown flowers on it. “I’ll call and ask when Dr. Grant can see Lobo. You hungry? I got some nice fruit there on the table. Help yourself.”
Katie selected a bunch of purple grapes and walked between a big shabby leather recliner and a chair with blue and green stripes and a red pillow in it, to reach the bookshelves.
Behind her, Mrs. M.’s voice boomed. “Four o’clock? OK, I’ll be there.”
She turned back, running a hand over Lobo’s drooping head. “We’ll take care of you, baby. Don’t you worry, my friend. You find anything to read?”
Katie assumed that last question was directed at her, unless Lobo was better educated than she thought he was.
“I’m still looking. What’s a Pimpernel?”
“The Scarlet Pimpernel? You never read that? That’s one of the best books anybody ever wrote,” Mrs. M. told her. “You take that one along; you’ll like it. I’ll bet I’ve read it twenty times. Maybe more.”
Katie accepted the book and sucked a grape out of its skin, swallowing the two parts separately. “When I finish this, can I come back and get something else?”
“Sure, why not. Listen,” Mrs. M. said, “I know how it is at the vet’s. I’ll sit there for half an hour and just when it’s my turn to take Lobo in somebody’ll bring in their St. Bernard for emergency major surgery and I’ll have to wait another hour or two. The paper boy comes to collect tonight, if he’s on schedule. Will you watch for him and pay him? I got the money right here. He usually comes about five.”
“OK,” Katie agreed, accepting the bills.
“Name’s Jackson Jones,” Mrs. M. told her. “And he’s a tall, skinny kid with one blue eye and one green one. You can’t mistake him.”
“Really?” That sounded even more peculiar than having silver eyes, having one blue and one green. “All right, I’ll watch for him.”
“When you finish The Scarlet Pimpernel,” Mrs. M. said, “try this one.” She put another book into Katie’s hand. “You like westerns? Louie L’Amour?”
Katie decided she liked Mrs. M. as much as she disliked Mrs. H. And since it was getting on toward lunchtime and the grapes weren’t quite enough to stave off her hunger pangs, she decided she’d better go home.
She had to go back out on the inner courtyard deck and in through the sliding glass doors because the front door was locked and she didn’t have a key. She jumped when Mrs. H. spoke from the kitchen; somehow she’d hoped the sitter would just leave, even if that wasn’t an ethical thing for a sitter to do.
“Where have you been?”
Katie shrugged. “Around.”
“Well, suppose you take yourself into your bedroom and make up your bed. You’re big enough to be responsible for that.”
Had the woman decided that she’d imagined the things that had happened earlier? Had she talked to Monica and quit, or had she changed her mind? Maybe, Katie thought, she ought to make sure Mrs. H. didn’t have second thoughts about staying on in this job. She didn’t even have to concentrate very hard to smooth the sheets on her bed, and then the blanket, and finish up with the spread. She couldn’t shift the pillow as well as she’d have liked, so it was left crooked, but not much.
Mrs. H. was getting angry when Katie just stood there with what she took to be a stubborn look on her face. “I’m here through today,” she said in a harsh voice, “and while I’m here, you’ll do as you’re told. Straighten up your room.”
“It’s straightened,” Katie said, and mentally whisked up a Kleenex and deposited it in the wastebasket.
“I looked in there ten minutes ago,” the sitter said, “so don’t tell me any lies.”
“Why don’t you look in there now?” Katie asked, and walked past the woman and into the living room. She would have liked to sit in the big leather chair, but it smelled of tobacco from when Nathan sat there, so she chose a smaller platform rocker.
She heard Mrs. H.’s h
eavy footsteps, as the woman peered into the doorway of Katie’s bedroom, and then had to look up from the book she had just opened when Mrs. H. towered over her.
There was something menacing about her. Katie’s heartbeat quickened; what would she do if Mrs. H. touched her? Could she stop the woman from hitting her?
“How do you do it?” the sitter asked.
“Do what?” Katie assumed the air of injured innocence that had so baffled and frustrated her grandma, her teachers, and the other adults around her.
For a moment more Mrs. H. stood there, then she turned and marched out of the room. Katie heard her in the kitchen. She wished she’d been there to overhear what the sitter had said to Monica on the phone. She assumed Mrs. H. had quit and wouldn’t be back tomorrow.
Katie was so absorbed in The Scarlet Pimpernel that she forgot to watch the time. She had seen Mrs. M. go out, carrying Lobo in a cardboard cat-box, on their way to the veterinarian’s. She was wearing a wine and pink and red flowered dress and carrying a gigantic white purse. And then Katie became so deeply immersed in the book—“It’s like you were drugged or something, you don’t even know what’s going on around you,” Grandma Welker used to say in annoyance about Katie’s reading—that when the doorbell rang she jumped a foot.
Drat! She’d forgotten she’d promised Mrs. M. to watch for Jackson Jones, the paper boy. And she wanted to see his different colored eyes.
Mrs. H., who had stayed in the kitchen reading a True Confessions all day, got up, but Katie beat her to the door. She saw, guiltily, that it was past five, and she hadn’t watched for the paper boy at all.
She hadn’t missed him, though.
He did have one blue eye and one green one, although you probably wouldn’t notice it right away unless you were looking for it. He was quite tall, and skinny, and he stared at her uncertainly.
“Mr. Redmond here? I’m collecting for the paper.”
“No Mr. Redmond lives here,” Katie told him. “My mother moved in a week ago.”
He said a word that Katie had once said and had her mouth washed out with soap for it. “This is always happening to me,” he said. “People move away without paying their bill. That’s why I try to collect from most of ’em every week instead of by the month. There are so many cheats.”
“Did he owe you very much?” Katie asked in sympathy.
“Four dollars and a half,” Jackson Jones said. She guessed he was three or four years older than she was, though it was hard to tell for sure. He was so tall, and she was so small. “You people want to take the paper?”
“I don’t know. I’ll ask my mother when she comes home. I can tell you next time you come around.”
The boy sighed. “Oh, I’ll come around again tomorrow, probably. There’s one guy in this building always makes me come back at least three or four times before he pays me. Mr. Pollard. He lives upstairs, in 3-A.”
“I’ve met him. He’s a real jerk,” Katie agreed.
“He’s not the only one on my route, but he’s one of the worst. He used to say he didn’t have the right change; and then when I started carrying some, he hadn’t cashed his check, or only had a fifty dollar bill, or something. Well, I’ll check tomorrow and see if your mother wants the paper.”
“Oh! I almost forgot!” Katie dug into her pocket for the money the neighbor across the hall had given her. “This is from Mrs. Michaelmas. She had to take Lobo to the vet, and she asked me to pay you.”
He took the money and wrote out a receipt. “She’s a nice old lady, Mrs. Michaelmas is.”
“She lent me some books. There don’t seem to be any other kids in the building to play with, so I’m glad to have something to read.”
“Nah, there’s no other kids. I’m surprised they let you in here. People hate kids these days. They keep them out of most of the best places. Good thing we got our own house and don’t have to rent, my Pa says. We got seven kids. Nobody’d rent to a family with seven kids.”
Katie felt a surge of envy. “I don’t have any brothers or sisters. Is it fun?”
Jackson Jones stopped writing on his pad and stared at her in amazement. “Fun? To have three sisters and three brothers? You gotta be kidding!”
Katie knew Mrs. H. was standing where she could hear them, and she moved into the corridor and closed the door behind her before she remembered that that would make it lock and she didn’t have a key.
“What’s it like, then?”
“Being in a big family? It’s like a madhouse. We got two bathrooms, but you can hardly ever get into one of ’em. Two of my sisters are fifteen and eighteen, and it takes them an hour apiece just to get ready to go to school in the morning. And I have to share a room with my brother Wally; he’s seventeen, and he’s an absolute slob. He leaves his pop bottles and his apple cores around until they grow mold, and he always has the light on when I want it off, and the other way around. He borrows my socks and underwear because he forgets to put his in the hamper so they never get washed. And nobody ever gets an allowance because Pa says with seven kids it’s all he can do to keep us fed, so everybody has to earn his own spending money. That’s hard to do when people won’t pay you after you’ve done the work. Here, this is Mrs. Michaelmas’s receipt. I let hers go for a month if she wants me to, because she never makes up excuses why she can’t pay me. What’s the matter with Lobo?”
“He has a bladder infection.”
“Oh. Well, I hope he’s gonna be OK. He’s a good cat.” Jackson Jones leaned forward to look at the new card Monica had inserted in the holder beside the door. “Your name’s Welker?”
Katie nodded. “I’m Katie. Mrs. M. already told me your name—Jackson Jones. Do they call you Jack for short?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Even my mother calls me Jackson Jones, practically all the time. ‘Jackson Jones, I told you to clean up the basement!’ or ‘Jackson Jones, don’t you dare put your feet on that clean bedspread.’ That kind of thing. Well, it’s time old Pollard was coming home. Maybe if I catch him out on the sidewalk, he can’t pretend he doesn’t hear me ringing his bell.”
“Good luck,” Katie said, and then she had to ring her own bell so that Mrs. H. would let her in.
No matter what Jackson Jones said, she’d bet it was more fun to be a member of a family than to be an only child. Maybe if you had brothers and sisters, they wouldn’t think you were so peculiar they didn’t want anything to do with you. And at least there’d be people around; it wouldn’t be so lonely.
She had left her book lying open in the chair, but she didn’t immediately return to it. Instead, she walked to the little front balcony, to see if Jackson Jones had any luck with Mr. P.
Mr. P. was there, all right. He’d just walked from the bus stop at the corner, and he was hot and perspiring. Katie heard Jackson’s voice before she saw him as he came out of the front door below.
“Hello, Mr. Pollard. Could I collect for the paper? You owe me for two weeks, now.”
“Not right now, kid, I’m in a hurry. I’ve got a date, and I’m going to be late for it. Come back tomorrow, OK?”
He brushed past Jackson Jones, who stared after him in mingled anger and frustration.
Katie couldn’t see what happened, but she knew. She heard the front door slam in a sudden gust of wind—she used everything she could to build up the force of that wind—and Mr. P. swore and stumbled backward. If she craned her neck, at the end of the balcony she could see the top of his head, bald except for the strands of hair carefully combed across it. He was holding a hand to his face and blood spurted over the hand and dripped onto the sidewalk.
“Gee,” Jackson Jones said. “You OK, Mr. Pollard? Did it break your nose?”
Mr. Pollard had to put down his briefcase to dig out a handkerchief, with which he staunched the bloody flow. He spoke indistinctly through the handkerchief. “What made the door blow shut? There isn’t even any wind.”
“Just a freak gust, I guess. Listen, Mr. Pollard, everybody else has p
aid me, and it would really save me some time if you could give me the money now. If you don’t want to wait for the receipt, I could put it in your mailbox.”
“I told you, I’m in a hurry.” Mr. Pollard bent to retrieve his briefcase and hurried inside, slamming the door behind him.
Jackson Jones scowled after him, then glanced up and saw Katie on the balcony. “See? I told you.”
“He’s a jerk, all right,” Katie agreed.
Jackson Jones got on his bike and rode off down the street, and Katie went back into the apartment. From inside the front door, she could hear Mr. Pollard’s feet pounding on the stairs. Opening the door a crack, she watched as he rounded the top of the flight to the second floor and started up to the third.
She wondered if his briefcase opened only with a key, or if it was one of those cheap ones that had little clasps. She thought she could manipulate those things, so that the briefcase would pop open . . .
She heard Mr. P. start cursing before the cascade of papers came sliding behind him down the stairs. Miss K was just coming up from the ground floor when he reached the second floor landing; both of them saw Katie, standing in her own doorway, and Mr. P. gave her a look that was sheer hatred.
“Good heavens,” Miss K. said. “What happened to your nose?”
“The door blew shut on it,” he said, sounding muffled as he bent over to scoop up his papers. “And then the catch broke on my case.”
“Here, let me help you.” Miss K. stooped to pick up the papers nearest to her. They looked as if they might be insurance policies. “Does it hurt very much?”
“It hurts like the devil. I don’t suppose you could spare any ice, could you? So it won’t swell so badly?”
“Sure, I can let you have some ice.” Miss K. glanced toward Katie and smiled.
“Good. I’d appreciate it. Listen, are you busy tonight? For dinner? I don’t know how this is going to look when I get it cleaned up, but if I’m not too much of a mess, would you like to join me? I thought maybe that little Italian place over on Third Street . . .”
The Girl with the Silver Eyes Page 3