Echo Come Home

by Megan Rix

  Other residents came out of their rooms to see what was going on.

  ‘Are we having a barbecue?’

  ‘What’s a dog doing here?’

  ‘Hello, Champ.’

  ‘He’s like my old dog.’

  ‘He saved me,’ Violet told them, as the matron arrived.

  The matron was not pleased to find a dog in the corridor. The home had a strict no-pets policy.

  ‘What’s it doing here?’ she wanted to know.

  But the nurses only shrugged and shook their heads. They didn’t want Violet to be in trouble.

  ‘He saved me,’ Violet told the matron.

  But the matron wasn’t listening. She was staring at Echo. The little dog didn’t have a collar and they couldn’t have stray dogs wandering about the building. It might have fleas. Word would get round that the home was unhygienic.

  ‘Go on now, shoo,’ the matron said, waving her hands at the little dog.

  Echo hesitantly stood up, not sure what was happening.

  ‘Shoo!’ the matron said again, and she picked up a magazine and shooed him all the way down the corridor and out of the back door.

  She’d only just managed to shut him outside where they stored the dirty laundry in a lean-to when the duty doctor came in the front way.

  ‘Hello, doctor!’

  ‘Matron.’

  The doctor listened to Violet’s chest through his stethoscope.

  ‘Try not to talk too much,’ he said. ‘Your throat may be sore for a few days because of the smoke.’

  But Violet didn’t listen to him. ‘If it wasn’t for that little dog, I wouldn’t be here,’ she croaked.

  ‘What little dog?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘A stray,’ the matron told him. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve sent it on its way.’

  ‘He saved me,’ Violet said, clasping the doctor’s wrist.

  ‘You should have called the RSPCA to check if it was microchipped,’ the doctor told the matron, as he shone a light in Violet’s eyes.

  But she hadn’t, thought Violet, and now Echo was gone.

  The laundry lean-to that the home used to store dirty laundry, although covered from the rain, was open at the sides to the elements. Echo tried lying on the hard stone floor, but it wasn’t as comfortable as Violet’s bed. The porridge had made him thirsty and, as Echo was a very agile little dog, it was no problem at all to hop up on to the sink and lick at the dripping tap. Then he jumped down on top of the sheets and bedding and towels in the trolley that was waiting to be taken away by the laundry service the next day.

  This new bed was much more comfortable than the floor and Echo buried himself deep down among the linen and was soon fast asleep.

  CHAPTER 20

  The first thing Jake noticed when he woke up was how empty his room felt without Echo in it. He’d got used to that furry face sharing his pillow. But not this morning.

  He went downstairs and turned on the laptop on the table in the kitchen while his mum made him some toast.

  First he clicked on the Dog Lost page to see if there’d been any sightings of Echo. Then he looked at the Facebook page he and his mum had created the evening before.

  At 11 p.m. Tony’s older sister, Tara, had shared Jake’s post about Echo having been stolen on her own Facebook page.

  One of Tara’s Facebook friends was Li, whom she went to college with, when he wasn’t working at his dad’s Chinese restaurant.

  Li was horrified to learn that Echo had been stolen and could now be wandering around lost thirty miles away in Wellston. It was so unfair. After everything he’d been through, he’d finally found a home, but now he was back out on the streets. Li shared Jake’s post with his 1,003 friends and added the photo that he’d taken of Echo eating noodles.

  It was such a cute, funny photograph that it and Jake’s original post were passed on from friend to friend until Echo’s picture had been seen all across the world and back again.

  ‘Mum,’ Jake said, looking up from the computer, confused. ‘Mum … I don’t understand …’

  Under the original post that Jake had put up about Echo being missing, and then the second one where he’d added that they now knew the little dog had been stolen and had escaped, hundreds of people had posted comments. Everyone wanted to offer advice or sympathy or to try to help him find Echo.

  ‘We know how it feels. We lost our dog …’

  ‘Have you tried shaking Echo’s biscuits around the neighbourhood …’

  ‘Might not have gone far …’

  ‘We’re thinking of you …’

  ‘Hope you hear something soon …’

  ‘Dognappers should be sent to jail …’

  The comments went on and on.

  ‘I didn’t know so many people would care about him,’ Jake said, his voice catching in his throat.

  Jake’s mum squeezed his shoulder, as she brushed away the tears that rolled down her face. The response was overwhelming.

  The local breakfast news was on the TV and Jake’s mum turned round quickly when one of the two newscasters said the word ‘Echo’.

  On the screen was Li’s picture of the little dog eating noodles.

  ‘Finally, we’d like everyone to be on the lookout for this little chap,’ the newscaster said. ‘His name’s Echo and he’s a hearing helper dog …’ Up popped a picture of Echo in his hearing helper dog coat.

  ‘He was stolen from Addison Park yesterday afternoon at around four p.m. The thief took him to a house in Wellston where the brave little chap managed to escape, leaving his collar behind. Anyone who has any information that could be helpful should inform the police or the dog warden or Helper Dogs. Echo belongs to a young man called Jake Logan.’

  ‘I bet Jake’s really missing him,’ the other newscaster said. ‘Come home soon, Echo.’

  Jake and his mum both jumped when the kitchen door swung open.

  ‘Dad!’ Jake cried.

  ‘Heard what happened so I came back,’ his dad said, pulling Jake into a hug. He held him tight as Jake let the tears that had been stinging his eyes fall.

  ‘I can’t bear it,’ he sobbed.

  ‘We’ll find him, son,’ his dad said. ‘Someone must know something. What have you done so far?’

  Jake and his mum told him.

  ‘Posters?’ his dad asked.

  ‘Yes. For Dog Lost. The posters are great and they’ve been really helpful.’

  ‘We should make posters to put up all over town and then all the way up to Wellston,’ his dad said. ‘Is it a clear photo of Echo on the Dog Lost posters, Jake?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Let’s get printing.’

  ‘How many shall I do?’

  ‘A hundred to start off with. No, better make it two hundred.’

  Jake’s mum put the kettle on while they did the printing. Once his dad had drunk a quick cup of tea, he and Jake set off.

  They were putting a poster up on a lamp post in the centre of town when a voice said: ‘’Scuse me.’

  Jake looked round to see a dishevelled man with a beard heading towards him. He looked up at his dad.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Jake’s dad said.

  The man reached into his coat and pulled out a crumpled bit of paper. He held it out to Jake. ‘For you.’

  Jake took the paper and looked down at the drawing on it.

  ‘Echo,’ he gasped, as he stared at the pencil sketch. It was definitely Echo’s little furry face, although his coat was longer. Jake would know that funny, quizzical look anywhere. ‘Have you seen him? Do you know where he is?’

  The man shook his head. ‘Haven’t seen him in months. Just went off one morning and never came back. We used to call him Bones because that’s what he liked to eat whenever one of us could afford one.’

  ‘Did you used to collect money outside the supermarket?’ Jake asked slowly. He remembered a homeless man being there one day. He had had a dog with him. A dog that had looked a bit like Echo now he thought
about it, but with a longer, straggly coat.

  ‘There and a few other places. George mostly did the collecting with him outside the supermarket. That was his spot. I’m Harvey, by the way. Sometimes – not always – Bones came to sleep under the old bridge with us and I welcomed his company. So did the others that used to sleep there before it was demolished.’

  ‘Where are you sleeping now?’ Jake’s dad asked, reaching into his pocket for some money. But Harvey wouldn’t take it.

  ‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a new home now. The Fresh Start Hostel over by the park. Never thought I’d have a proper roof over my head again, but it’s OK and they give us lockers and a padlock so our things are safe.’ He breathed in noisily and then smiled. ‘Good food too. They’re trying to organize a fishing trip to the river and all sorts of other activities. Don’t think I’ll join in though. Not much of a joiner-in … But George will. George likes fishing.’

  ‘Will you keep a lookout for Echo?’ Jake said. ‘He’s my hearing dog and now he’s missing. He could be anywhere from here to Wellston.’

  Harvey nodded. ‘Will do and I’ll ask the others at the hostel too.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Jake’s dad and Jake nodded.

  Soon all the takeaway restaurants on Echo’s old feeding road had put posters in their windows.

  ‘When he comes back, I’m giving him one super-deluxe, extra-large noodle meal on the house,’ Li said.

  He looked at Jake’s sad face. ‘Hang on in there,’ he said.

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Now all we need to do is put more posters up from here to Wellston,’ Jake’s dad said.

  Vicky and her friends, plus Mum and the volunteers from Dog Lost, helped to put up the posters everywhere they could. Tony and Tara lent a hand too while Lenny shared the information about Echo being stolen on different assistance dog charity websites.

  Jake couldn’t believe that so many people would want to help or care so much. It gave him a strange feeling inside. Not a bad feeling, just an unfamiliar one. He, and Echo, had lots more friends than he’d ever imagined and every one of them wanted to help.

  ‘We’ll bring some more paper with us tomorrow,’ Tony said.

  ‘And ink. We’re running low on that too,’ said Tara, as they headed off with another stack of posters.

  ‘Thanks,’ Jake said.

  He’d spoken to far more people since Echo had gone missing than he usually did in months, but there were still no definite sightings of the little dog by the end of the day.

  Jake was determined to do everything he could to find Echo.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Vicky asked him, when they were finally all at home and waiting for the takeaway Dad had ordered.

  ‘Printing out a map so we can mark any sightings of Echo,’ Jake told her.

  The dog warden had told Jake that when dogs were lost they tended to travel in a triangle trying to find their way home. She’d explained to him that the triangle could sometimes be miles long.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Jake’s dad.

  ‘I’m going to use red pins for definite, or almost definite and most likely, sightings. All other colours for possibles but not so definite.’

  Jake put the first red pin in Addison Park because it was the last place Echo had been seen. And the second one in the centre of Wellston. He sighed. Echo was so very far from home.

  CHAPTER 21

  It was six o’clock in the morning when the laundry-service truck arrived. Echo was fast asleep, deep down among the sheets, pillowcases and towels, but he woke up as soon as the trolley wheels started moving.

  The next moment there was an electrical whirring sound as Echo peeped out from the top of the sheets. His stomach flipped as he felt the trolley going upward.

  His paws scrabbled to get a footing among the pillowcases. He was just about to jump out of the trolley when the whirring sound stopped and the laundry truck door slammed shut. He was trapped inside!

  Echo whimpered in the darkness as the truck drove off, but had to stay where he was. When the truck stopped ten minutes later, he was still hidden among the dirty washing.

  He didn’t move as the trolley was taken off the truck and into the industrial laundry. Finally, when the trolley had stopped and he’d listened for a long while to make sure there was no one about, he started scrambling among the sheets, pushing them this way and that as he made his way to the top.

  Only Echo was wrong about there being no one about.

  The woman loading the washing into the machines saw the linen in the trolley from the old people’s home moving about. She screamed and grabbed a long-handled mop and started hitting the trolley with it.

  ‘A rat! A rat!’ she cried.

  Echo’s front paws reached past the top sheet and the next second he nimbly jumped out of the trolley, avoiding the mop. The woman stared at him in amazement and breathed a sigh of relief. Not a rat after all, but a lovely little dog.

  ‘He-llo,’ she started to say, but Echo was already racing out of the laundry room, up the driveway, through the gates and away down the street.

  He ran past the tree with a cat sitting among the branches, looking down at him, over the road with a drain smelling of sour milk, through the bushes where a hedgehog lived, down an alley where a dog barked from behind a fence and out on to the street on the other side.

  A police patrol car spotted him a few minutes later.

  ‘Tom, stop!’ the policeman said to the driver. ‘That looks like the lost dog my daughter showed me on Facebook. Let’s get a closer look.’

  Tom swerved to the side and pulled up. Echo looked warily over as the car door opened.

  ‘Here, dog, here,’ Tom said.

  ‘His name’s on the tip of my tongue,’ the other policeman said. ‘It’s …’

  But Echo didn’t wait to hear the policeman say his name. As the other one edged towards him, the little dog stepped back and then turned and ran into the park as the two policemen chased after him.

  ‘Stop!’

  ‘Wait!’

  They did their best, but they were no match for a streetwise little dog.

  Echo had remembered everything he’d learnt as a stray dog living on his wits and instinct and now he used it all to avoid being caught.

  Voices calling to him were ignored. Hands stretching out to him were shunned. When he stopped to drink from a puddle, he was on the alert for the slightest movement. If anyone came close, he was ready to run.

  More and more sightings of Echo were reported back to Jake and there were soon lots of red pins on his map. But no one had found Echo by Sunday night.

  Jake didn’t want to go to school on Monday and his mum let him stay home.

  ‘Just for today.’

  At lunchtime, the postman rang the front doorbell.

  ‘It’s addressed to Echo,’ Mum said, bringing in a parcel.

  Inside was a ball and a note from a complete stranger saying, ‘This is for Echo when he comes home.’

  ‘Oh, that’s really kind,’ Mum said, as Jake read the note to her. ‘They must have seen the photo of Echo with his ball that you put on Facebook.’

  ‘He’ll love playing with this when he comes back,’ Jake said. He didn’t look up at his mum because his eyes were blurry with tears.

  But apart from the parcel there was no other news about Echo. Jake squeezed Echo’s ball over and over, liking the way it sprang back to life when he pressed it.

  Downstairs Vicky put her fingers in her ears. ‘That sound is driving me crazy! I’m going to tell him to stop,’ she said.

  But Vicky’s mum shook her head. ‘He’s not annoying you on purpose. He can’t hear it.’

  Finally, Jake stopped when he came down to check if there were any more sightings of Echo. There were but none of them seemed very likely. Some were even in different countries.

  He looked at the Dog Lost website and then posted on Echo’s Facebook page:

  ‘Still looking ☹’

&
nbsp; Comments came back almost immediately.

  ‘Don’t give up!’

  ‘You’ll find him.’

  ‘Our dog came back to us after being missing for five years …’

  Jake yawned and rubbed at his tired eyes. He didn’t want to go to bed without Echo being there. But Jake’s mum reminded him he had to go back to school the next day.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll let you know if I hear anything,’ she said. ‘Anything at all.’

  CHAPTER 22

  Echo followed the river all through the starry, moonlit night. It took him past moored barges and rowing boats as it led him away from Wellston town centre. Gradually, the houses and back gardens he passed gave way to factories and warehouses as he reached the outskirts of the town and finally the countryside beyond. At first, his paws trod on paved river pathways, then rough stony ground, until finally there was no path.

  The early-morning dew soaked Echo’s paws and the fur on his short legs as he made his way through the overgrown grass along the riverbank. His paws were sore and his legs ached.

  The sun was high in the sky when a dog barked and Echo stopped. He looked over at the wooded copse where the sound had come from. The bark wasn’t that of a happy dog playing, or an angry dog, or even a warning. This bark was something quite different: it was a desperate cry for help.

  Echo ran into the copse to find the dog that had made it. He didn’t have to go far into the trees before he found an elderly German shepherd dog. He had been tied to a post and the string had become wound tightly round him as he’d desperately tried to break free.

  The dog had stopped barking and was now howling in hopeless despair instead. He was so tangled up in the string that he could barely move and his grey-whiskered muzzle couldn’t bite through it. His old eyes saw Echo coming towards him. He tried to wag his tail in greeting, but even that was caught up in the string. Echo looked up into the sad, desperate dog’s eyes and wagged his own tail in greeting. He put his nose to the other dog’s and then licked his furry face to tell him not to worry.

  Echo walked round the dog, looking at the string, as the old dog whined. The string was thick and strong, but that didn’t stop Echo. He tugged one end of it with his teeth, and kept on tugging, until the knot came unravelled, toppling Echo over as it suddenly came loose.