The Scariest Night

by Betty R. Wright

  No one said anything for a minute. Then Mrs. Lindsay opened her door. “We might as well look, I guess,” she said. “We can’t just drive away.”

  Erin heard Cowper let out his breath He wanted to go in as much as she didn’t want to. She was the only one who believed—and she was absolutely sure of it now—something unpleasant waited for the Lindsays in that building.

  They got out of the car and trailed across the street, Erin clutching Rufus’s travel case. A half-dozen concrete steps led to a door framed by concrete pillars. Stone lions with chipped faces crouched on either side of the top steps.

  Inside, the “castle” was much less grand. A small, dim foyer had a row of mailboxes and call-buttons on one side and a scarred wooden bench on the other. The air was musty.

  Mr. Lindsay examined the call-buttons. Only about half of the buttons had tenants’ names lettered next to them.

  “Grady,” he read aloud. “Superintendent.” He lifted his hand to press the button and then stopped. The rest of the family followed his stare to the sign taped above the mailboxes. It said: No Pets—No Exceptions.

  Erin, her arms wrapped tightly around the travel case, felt as if she were going to be sick.

  Chapter Three

  Mr. Lindsay recovered first.

  “Erin, go back to the car,” he ordered. “Quick now! Keep Rufus in his case, and roll down one window a little so you won’t get too warm. I’ll come out for you in a few minutes.”

  “But they won’t let him live here!” Erin wailed. “It says so right there—‘No Exceptions.’”

  “Nonsense!” He grasped her shoulder and hustled her toward the door. “It’s ridiculous to have a ‘No Pets’ rule in a place in this condition.”

  “If Rufus can’t stay, I won’t stay—” Erin began, but her father cut her short.

  “We don’t know yet whether any of us will be staying. We’ll let this Mr. Grady show us around before we decide. Now go—and don’t leave the car till I come for you.”

  In spite of the heat, Erin had goosebumps as she hurried back across the street to the car. Her father didn’t have to tell her to wait outside until he came; she’d never go inside that awful building if she didn’t have to.

  Still, the minutes passed slowly. Rufus seemed to know he was in trouble, and he whined piteously. Erin tried to comfort him, but she was too upset to be soothing. Ahead, the street stretched like a barren moonscape. Behind her, the view was the same, all the way to the big curve that had given them the first look at their apartment building. What would Heather and Meg and Emily think if they could see her now?

  “Please don’t be scared,” she whispered to Rufus. “If you can’t stay here, we’ll run away together. We’ll hitchhike back home.”

  Erin began to study the apartment building. It was six stories high, and many of the windows were empty. (Had some of the prisoners escaped from the castle?) Across the top of the building, every twenty feet or so, there was a smiling stone face. Long ago the faces had probably been beautiful, but rough Wisconsin winds had treated them badly. One had lost his (or her) nose.

  Erin let her glance slide downward. The corner windows on the fourth floor were so different from all of the others that she wondered why she hadn’t noticed them before. Swaths of pink net were looped back on either side like the curtains of a stage. From the edges of the draperies, bright-colored balls dangled and caught the light. What could they be? Erin shifted the travel case beside her and leaned over for a better look. Almost at once she ducked back. A round white face framed in ruffles was staring down at her.

  Why didn’t her father come back? A shadow fell across the street, and Erin looked up again, careful this time to keep her eyes away from those unusual fourth-floor windows and the watcher there. Clouds were piling up against the clear blue sky, and a distant rumble told her the weather was about to change. Rufus cried louder. He hated thunder. If he were at home, he’d be in the basement by now, curled up in the box the family called his storm cellar.

  “It’s okay, baby,” Erin murmured. She tried shifting the travel case to the floor, but before she could do it, the front door of the apartment building opened and her father came out. He looked serious—worried, Erin decided—but as he crossed the street, his expression changed. He tilted his visored cap over one eye and leaned through the open car window.

  “The coast is clear, sister,” he said in a gangster whisper. “Drop my raincoat over the loot, and I’ll smuggle it in.”

  Erin giggled in spite of herself. She helped her father arrange his raincoat over the travel case, and then she rolled up the windows and locked the car doors while he hurried across the street with the “loot.” When she joined him in the foyer, he was fumbling with a key, trying to get through the inner door without turning Rufus upside down.

  “I’ll do it,” Erin offered. A moment later they were in a long, dim hall, hot and drab but spotlessly clean.

  “What happens if we get caught?” Erin whispered.

  “We go into the dungeon for thirty years,” her father said promptly. He must have been thinking about castles, too. “The fellow who manages the place is a real fussbudget. He knows the building will be torn down by next year this time, but he’s not letting up one bit. It’s his palace—and he doesn’t want animals in it!”

  Some palace! Erin thought. The hall smelled faintly of garlic, and there were big holes in the carpet. All of the doors remained firmly shut, but her father loped along on tiptoe, looking over his shoulder and rolling his eyes as if Mr. Grady, the fussbudget, might be lurking anywhere. It was a relief to get into the ancient elevator and close the door.

  “Fifth floor, antique stoves and cats’ pajamas,” Mr. Lindsay intoned, switching from gangster to elevator operator. “Treasures for every taste.” He grinned at Erin, and she realized he was trying hard to cheer her up.

  Rufus chose that moment to let them know that he was not cheered in the least. As the elevator trembled to a stop at the fifth floor, and the doors slid open, a throaty howl came from under the raincoat. The Lindsays looked at each other in panic.

  “This way,” Erin’s father gasped, his face turning bright red. “Last apartment on the left.” They raced along the hall, with Rufus shrieking more loudly at every step. As they reached number 508, the door flew open and Cowper leaned out.

  Mr. Lindsay bounded through the opening, and Erin followed. “Good timing, Cowper, old man,” Mr. Lindsay gasped. “How’d you know we were coming?”

  Cowper gave him an incredulous look. “How could I not know?” he asked mildly. “It was either you guys or a herd of elephants.”

  Erin knelt and opened the cover of the travel case. “Poor baby,” she crooned. “Were you scared?” She reached for the big cat, but he leaped away and streaked across the tiled entrance hall.

  Straight ahead, an arch led into a living room. After a quick look, Rufus turned right and sped down a long hallway. Doors opened on either side, all the way to the end, where a tall chest of drawers covered most of the wall.

  “Let him go,” Mr. Lindsay advised. He was still puffing a little from their dash down the hall. “He’s safe now, and he might as well get used to his new home. You too, Erin,” he added. “Look around. Try it on for size.”

  So the decision had been made. They were staying.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  Mr. Lindsay pointed down the hall. “In one of the bedrooms, I think. Recovering from the kitchen.”

  A glance through the first door on the right told Erin why her mother had to “recover.” The kitchen was crowded and narrow, with no windows, very different from the sparkling white and blue kitchen in Clinton. An ancient gas stove on high legs faced the door, next to a battered refrigerator. A small wooden table and three chairs stood against the end wall under an oversized calendar.

  The next door on the right was a closet, and the one after that led to the bathroom. On the other side were three bedrooms—a large one and two smaller ones, eac
h with a single window. Erin found her mother in the last room, looking as if she’d just bitten into something sour.

  “Cowper says he’ll take this room if you don’t want it,” Mrs. Lindsay said. “It’s the smallest, but he doesn’t care. What do you think?”

  Erin shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.” She edged around the narrow bed to look out the window. Just below the sill there was a ledge, about eighteen inches wide, that continued to the end of the building. The ledge cut off the view directly below, but beyond it the scene was as desolate and ugly from up here as it had been from the car.

  Erin’s mother came and stood beside her. “You’re right, it’s pretty dismal,” she said as if Erin had spoken aloud. “But I think we can manage for a couple of months, don’t you? The apartment is clean, and there’s plenty of space. You’ll have a room of your own to fix up any way you want to.”

  Erin sighed. “I guess so. What’s that ledge for?”

  “It’s not for anything, as far as I can tell. Just a decoration. This building was put up a long, long time ago. They call an apartment like this a railroad flat because all the rooms open off a central ‘aisle.’”

  Together they went back to the middle bedroom. It was a little bigger than Cowper’s room but not much. A studio couch stood along one wall, and there was a desk in front of the window. A dresser and a padded rocker completed the furnishings.

  “Did you bring some posters from home?” Mrs. Lindsay asked. “They’d cheer things up a bit.”

  “A couple,” Erin said. She didn’t say so, but she doubted that her big pictures of kittens and bear cubs would help much. The room had a drab, sad look, as if no one had ever loved it.

  Something brushed against Erin’s leg. Rufus had returned and was looking up at her with a puzzled expression. Then he sprang past her to the windowsill and stared out.

  “We’d better check all the screens,” Mrs. Lindsay said. “We don’t want him out on that ledge.”

  Horrified at the thought, Erin went from room to room, checking. She discovered that the ledge ended with the bedroom windows. From the living room you could look straight down to the patch of straggly lawn that ran along the side of the building.

  “I think Ken Krueger must use only the front half of the apartment,” her mother commented. “The living room, the kitchen, the bathroom, and the big bedroom. And he’s certainly a saver,” she added, looking with disapproval at the stacks of magazines piled under the living room end tables and in corners. “I’m going to pack up a lot of this stuff and put it away in boxes for the summer.”

  “Good thought,” Mr. Lindsay agreed from the hall. He and Cowper had gone back to the car and were carrying in the first load of the Lindsays’ belongings. “We’ve got our own stuff to clutter up the place.” He pretended to totter under the weight of the suitcases he was carrying. “How about giving us a hand, Erin, my queen? The quicker we get the car emptied out, the quicker we can hit the road again and find the nearest pizza parlor.”

  Erin brightened. Pizza was a treat, even if it couldn’t possibly be as good in Milwaukee as it was at Brown’s Pizza Parlor in Clinton. She followed her father and Cowper to the elevator, carefully closing the apartment door so that Rufus couldn’t escape.

  She felt better still when she’d carried her suitcase into the middle bedroom and opened it on the studio couch. Tucked among the clothes were some of the treasures she couldn’t bear to leave behind for a whole summer. There was a snapshot of Heather and Emily; she propped that against a lamp on the dresser. There was the empty Joy perfume bottle Aunt Gina had given her, and there was the smiling baby raccoon, the smallest of her stuffed animals and the only one her mother would let her bring. The posters would come later. Just before they left home, the Lindsays had mailed two boxes of treasures to themselves at their new address.

  “You can have my radio in here when it comes,” Cowper said from the doorway. “Except on Thursdays. I’ll need it Thursday nights.” That was when piano recitals were scheduled on the public radio station.

  “Thanks,” Erin said and forced a smile. She knew the offer was his way of saying he was sorry he’d almost got Rufus killed. He never said things straight out.

  “Pizza bus leaves in two minutes,” Mr. Lindsay shouted from the kitchen. “Who wants to go?”

  Erin went out into the hallway where Cowper was looking curiously at the chest of drawers that stood against the end wall.

  “There’s a door behind that thing,” he said. “Mr. Grady, the superintendent, told us.”

  “Why would there be a door?” Erin could see no sign of one. “That’s the back of the building, isn’t it? There’s no place else to go.”

  Cowper continued to look at the chest, almost as if he could see right through it. “Mr. Grady said at first they were going to build little porches out there for all the rear apartments. But before the wrought-iron railings were delivered, the builders ran out of money. So they just sealed up the doors and forgot about the porches.”

  “That’s crazy,” Erin declared. She turned and started toward the living room, determined to ask her parents if Cowper was making up a lie.

  “There really is a door,” Cowper insisted, trailing behind her. “It just won’t get you anywhere.”

  “Figures,” Erin replied grumpily. “It just won’t get you anywhere” fitted this entire summer, as far as she was concerned.

  Chapter Four

  “I’m going to be late,” Cowper groaned. He pushed away his half-eaten cereal. “I know it.”

  “No, you’re not,” Mrs. Lindsay said. “You have plenty of time, Cowper. The class doesn’t begin until nine thirty, you know.”

  “But we don’t even know where the conservatory is.” Erin thought her foster brother sounded as if he were going to cry, which would be very strange. She’d never seen him cry, even when his mother and father were killed. “He isn’t a weeper,” Mr. Lindsay had said. “Some people aren’t.”

  Erin wondered if that was true, or if Cowper just didn’t care as much as most people. She was a crier, herself; sad books, sad movies, any story about a mistreated animal—they all brought tears to her eyes.

  “We could have a flat tire,” Cowper persisted, “or get lost—or run out of gas!”

  Mr. Lindsay squeezed a last spoonful of juice from his grapefruit and stood up. He saluted and tried to click his heels together—a wasted effort since he was wearing sneakers and they didn’t click.

  “We who are about to try, salute you,” he bellowed, and then he winked at Cowper. “Fear not! We shall accomplish this mission.” He marched out of the kitchen, and Cowper followed, looking unconvinced. Mrs. Lindsay went after them, and Erin was left alone. All alone. Don’t be a droop, she told herself sternly, but it didn’t help much. The bad time was beginning—a summer of excitement or a summer of nothing, depending on whether you were a genius or not.

  Maybe today was worse because yesterday hadn’t been too bad. Erin and her mother had found a supermarket four blocks away and had filled the refrigerator and cupboards with supplies. In the afternoon Erin and Cowper had watched TV—there were a couple of channels they couldn’t get in Clinton—and Mrs. Lindsay had baked Erin’s favorite cake (yellow, with fudge frosting). Erin had tried to pretend that this was the way their time in Milwaukee was going to be—the family doing things together—but she knew she was the only one who wanted that. The others were just waiting for their real summer to begin.

  Mrs. Lindsay reappeared at the kitchen door. “Come on, Erin,” she said enthusiastically. “Let’s take Cowper to his class the first day. Dad and I will probably have to take turns once our summer school classes start, so we all should know how to find the conservatory.”

  “Not me,” Erin said. “I don’t have to know.” She took another bite of her half-eaten toast. “I’ll be okay here.”

  “Erin!” Her mother sounded exasperated. “Please don’t be difficult. This is a good chance for you to see more of the city. It’s
really very beautiful, once you get away from this section.”

  “I’ll see it some other time,” Erin said. “I want to—to write a letter to Heather.”

  “I am going to be late. I know it!” That was Cowper in the hall, sounding more panicky than ever.

  Mrs. Lindsay looked over her shoulder. “Then promise you won’t let anyone in while we’re gone,” she said. “You know, Dad and I are going to try to arrange our classes so you’ll never be alone here for more than a few minutes.”

  “What could happen?” Erin scoffed. “I stay alone in Clinton sometimes.”

  “Alone is one thing,” her mother retorted. “Lonely is something else. It’s easy to feel lonely in an unfamiliar place.”

  She was right. As soon as the door closed behind them, Erin began to wish she’d gone along. The stillness thudded in her ears, and the string of empty rooms made her think of prison cells. Rufus followed her down the hall, his ears laid back, his eyes huge, as if he suspected danger at every doorway. When Erin tried to pick him up, he darted away and hid behind the studio couch in her bedroom.

  Writing to Heather proved impossible. Erin took out her box of stationery, but when she started to write, thinking about home and friends made her more miserable than ever. Did you see a ghost at the schoolhouse? She stared at the words and then crumpled up the paper. It would break her heart if the answer was yes.

  After a while she wandered back to the kitchen, where the breakfast dishes waited. Sara Crewe would wash them. Well, why not? she thought, yawning. Cleaning up the kitchen might be the most thrilling thing she did all day.

  She told Heather about it in a letter a couple of days later. Not that washing Ken Krueger’s faded china turned out to be fun. Not that she especially enjoyed stacking plates and cereal bowls in the tall, narrow cabinet or wiping down the table or scrubbing the scarred sink. But taking out the garbage was something else.

  Taking out the garbage had been an adventure.