Emmy and the Home For Troubled Girls (15 page)

T
HE NIGHT WAS FILLED
with the gentle creaking of crickets. The pool, lit from beneath, glowed a soft, watery blue. On the patio, a girl and two rats waited, motionless, as Meg tiptoed across the flagstones, trailing a blanket.

She sat down, settled herself with the blanket around her shoulders, and looked at Emmy and the rats expectantly.

Emmy shut her eyes. This was going to take a
lot
of explaining.

“Get rid of her,” snapped Raston. “We have to find my sister.”

Emmy looked at Meg helplessly. “Would you just—go back inside and pretend you didn't see anything?”

“Nope,” said Meg promptly. “There's something going on, and I want to know what it is. Besides, I've already pretended I didn't see anything. Like that time on the boat when you jumped in after a rat, and
in your room when you shouted down a mouse hole, and then yesterday on the field when Kate hit that rat with a rock and you started yelling at us to stop.”

“Sissy was
hit
?” cried the Rat.

Joe lifted his pale, furry head and stared at Emmy as if he had never seen her before. “She was hit?” he echoed. “And you didn't tell anyone?”

Emmy looked at him miserably.

“Okay,” said Meg after a pause. “And now you can tell me why that rat is speaking English. And why the other one is squeaking.”

“Forget it, Meg,” said Joe, his voice suddenly flat and emphatic. “There's no time to explain. We've got to find the rat that Kate hit.”

“Who
are
you?” Meg exclaimed, staring down at the pale-colored rat. “How do you know my name? And
what
is this all
about
?” She stared Emmy down.

Emmy stood up wearily. “It's too long to explain. Seriously, Meg, just go back inside and cover for me, will you? I'll tell you everything later, I promise.”

Meg shook her head.

“Okay, then don't,” said Emmy bitterly. “Everything else has gone wrong, why not this? Go ahead, get me in trouble, tell everyone I'm weird, whatever—just move out of my way, because I'm
leaving
.”

Meg shrugged. “Then I'm coming with you.”

Emmy looked at her, nonplussed.

“I don't want to get you in trouble,” Meg said quickly. “I just want to be in on whatever it is you're doing. I mean, talking to rats? Running off in the middle of the night?” She grinned. “That's way cooler than anything I've got planned.”

“Come on, come on,
come on
!” cried the Rat, dancing in his impatience.

Emmy looked Meg square in the eyes. “If you're in, then you're in all the way. Will you let the Rat bite your finger?”

“What?”

“You heard me. The Rat bites your finger or you don't come with us. I'm not going to spend the whole time explaining what everybody is saying.”

“Can it be the English-speaking one?” Meg frowned.

“Oh, criminy,” said Joe. “Stick out your finger and get it over with already.”

“Ouch!”

“All right, that's done,” said the Rat. “Can we get moving now?”

“Hey!” said Meg, pointing. “The squeaking one talks, too!”

“No kidding,” said Joe.

They had gone half a block when Emmy realized she was still in her pajamas.

“Of course we are!” said Meg. “That's what makes it so fun!” She bounced alongside Emmy, holding one end of the blanket that they had slung between them as a carrier for Joe and the Rat.

“What's so great about being outside in your pajamas?” Emmy wanted to know.

“Well, none of my other friends would do it,” answered Meg.

Emmy padded over well-kept lawns and smooth driveways, her bare feet pressing on hard asphalt, then damp thick grass, then asphalt again.

“See, you're different,” Meg went on. “All I do is ride bikes and hang out with friends and have sleepovers and swim. Your life is much more interesting. You have these weird adventures, and you talk to rats, and it's just so
cool
.”

Emmy sighed. “It gets cooler,” she said resignedly.

The rodents in the blanket sling made no comment. For once, Raston and Joe weren't complaining, or fighting, or saying anything at all. It put Emmy on edge.

“Do you want to go straight to the field?” she
asked nervously, looking down into the sling. “I'm not sure I can find the hole in the dark. Maybe we need a flashlight.”

Joe's voice came muffled from the blanket. “I think we should go to Rodent City and get a search party together. There are lots of burrows in that field.”

“We should tell the professor, too,” Ratty added, his voice high with worry. “He's a doctor, isn't he? Sissy might be hurt.”

Emmy immediately suppressed a mental image of Sissy dragging herself into the tunnel. “He's a professor,” she said slowly. “I don't know if he's a doctor.”

“But he knows all about rodents,” said Joe. “He probably knows more about rodents than anyone in the world.”

“Are you still talking about the rat that Kate hit?” asked Meg with interest. “Because she'll need a doctor for sure. I mean, she was bleeding and everything.”

The Rat gave a sharp, anguished cry.
“Bleeding?”

There was nothing Emmy could say. There was nothing she could do except just to keep on walking, block after block, hanging on to her end of the blanket. The sling seemed to grow heavier, as if the silence within had weight, like a stone.

At last they came to the park bench on the green. Meg and Emmy set the blanket gently down on the grass. Emmy hardly dared look at the Rat.

“I'm really sorry,” she said in a choked voice. “I never meant to leave her.”

“Sissy would never have left
you
,” said the Rat, slipping into the Rodent City tunnel without a backward glance.

Joe curled his tail, carefully avoiding Emmy's eyes. “You'd better go wake the professor,” he said somberly. “We'll meet you at the art-gallery steps in a little while.”

Emmy and Meg rang the bell of the Antique Rat until Brian came to the door. He invited them to wait inside while the professor got dressed, but Emmy declined. It was easier to sit outside, in the dark, where she wouldn't have to see the professor's face when Brian passed on the news about Sissy.

The girls sat on the park bench, looking up at the lighted attic window of the shoe shop, and Emmy told Meg everything. Somehow she felt she wanted at least one other person to understand that she really hadn't meant to be so awful.

At last the door of the Antique Rat opened. Emmy
stood up, glancing at Peter Peebles's place. She wondered if his house was as full of mouse holes as her own. It had obviously been easy for Joe and the Rat to go in and out. They must have left Thomas still sleeping … For a little while more, then, Thomas wouldn't know what she had done.

There was a sudden stinging behind Emmy's eyes, and a tightness in the back of her throat. She held herself rigidly and blinked. She was
not
going to cry. She followed Professor Capybara and Meg, with only a single look back at the lighted attic window in the Home for Troubled Girls.

She couldn't rescue them. She couldn't even find out why their light was on in the middle of the night. Mrs. B or Miss Barmy could be using the little girls for slave labor, for all she knew, but there was not one thing Emmy could do to stop it.

Meg took her arm and gave it a comforting squeeze, but the same stiff feeling that had kept Emmy from crying was with her still, and she didn't squeeze back. She felt as if something inside her had frozen solid.

She sat hunched behind Meg and the professor on the gallery steps and watched as rodents streamed
from the crack. Each one carried a stick with a bit of greasy rag wrapped around the end.

Buck emerged, a wooden match between his teeth, and scraped it along a chunk of broken sidewalk. It flared suddenly, and he lit the first torch.

One by one the rodent faces were illuminated. The tips of their fur shone golden, and their beady eyes glinted with reflected fire. Emmy recognized Ratty, and Joe, and Mrs. Bunjee, and even Gus the dancing gopher, but Chippy was nowhere to be seen. Cheswick and Miss Barmy were missing, too, a fact for which she was dully grateful.

The torches were all ablaze. The rodents waited, a silent, furry mass. Emmy met their collective gaze and slowly rose. There was a hiss from somewhere in the crowd.

“None of that!” said Buck sharply. “She's here to help. When she brings us to the place where Sissy was last seen, dive into every tunnel and burrow you can find nearby. Use your noses!”

Emmy led the way across the street, through the schoolyard, to the soccer field, and stopped at the great tree where the girls had sat the day before. “I think it was here,” she said in a low voice. Meg nodded agreement.

“All right. You humans stay out of the way,” said Buck, not unkindly. “With your big feet, and all these rodents running around in the dark …”

Professor Capybara bowed gravely, pulled out his pipe, and went to stand in the street.

Emmy followed at a slower pace. She was a little shy of the professor, who hadn't had much to say to her, and she sat on the curb a short distance away. Meg sat beside her, and for a time they watched the small flickering torches moving here and there on the field, low to the ground.

Meg curled up her knees and rested her chin on her forearms. “I'm sorry about throwing rocks with the others. I thought that rat was going to bite you.”

“That's okay.” Emmy looked intently at the torches. They were clustered in one spot now, unmoving.

“I can see why you didn't protect her at first, though,” Meg went on. “It's like, do you help the one getting hurt, or do you side with your friends? It's hard either way.”

Emmy cast her a grateful look, and turned back toward the field. The torches were moving again, all together, and getting larger as they advanced. The
shifting flames outlined a wedge of bobbing, furry heads, with an unlit patch in the center.

“They've found her,” whispered Meg.

“Yes.” Emmy forced the word past the cold dread in her throat.

The procession came near. Two burly squirrels carried a limp, gray form on a stretcher. As they passed, Emmy saw the dark blood that crusted Sissy's side and a thin trickle of red coming from the newly disturbed wound.

The professor bent swiftly, putting his ear to Sissy's chest, touching the side of her neck, pulling back the closed eyelids with his thumb.

“She's alive,” he said soberly. “Where was she?”

One of the gophers jerked his paw back in the direction of the field. “I found her in an abandoned rabbit warren. It branched off from the main tunnel to Rodent City, but I don't know how she could have missed the signs.”

“She can't read.” The Rat rubbed his eyes with the back of his paw.

“Why didn't she use her nose, then?” piped up a meadow vole.

“She had a cold,” said Mrs. Bunjee. “She couldn't smell
anything.
”

“She'll probably have pneumonia by now,” said the gopher, shaking his head. “The burrow was damp. That's probably why it was abandoned—poor drainage. Some rabbits just don't know how to build.”

Professor Capybara looked at Emmy. “How long was she left in the tunnel?”

Emmy swallowed hard. She looked pitifully at Meg.

“Since noon yesterday,” said Meg, her voice barely audible.

There was a hushed gasp from the rodents nearby.

“About fifteen hours,” the professor said slowly. “In a damp burrow. Alone and wounded.” He gazed down at the unconscious Sissy and covered her gently with his handkerchief. “I don't care if it
is
the middle of the night. I'm going to call the vet.”

 

Emmy stood next to Meg outside the Antique Rat and watched the truck pull away from the curb. Brian, his expression serious, was driving. The professor sat hunched over the small gray lump in his hands, looking tense. No one waved good-bye.

The Rat stared after the receding taillights. “I can't just wait here and do nothing.”

Joe threw a furry arm over his shoulder. “We'll wait with you, Ratty.”

Buck patted Raston on the back. “Mother will make you some hot cocoa, if you want to come back to the loft.”

The Rat shook his head violently. “I don't want to sit around. Isn't there something we can
do
?”

“I know what you mean,” said Joe suddenly. “You want to hit somebody, or do something dangerous, or work so hard you can't think anymore.”

Emmy looked across the green. The light in the attic of the shoe shop was still on. “I know something we could do,” she said slowly. “Rescue those tiny girls.”

“Oh,
now
she wants to rescue somebody,” said the Rat bitterly.

“What tiny girls?” Joe narrowed his rodent eyes. “And who asked you, anyway?”

Emmy stared at him, stung.

“Listen,” Meg said firmly. “Emmy went to the attic at the Home for Troubled Girls, and she saw tiny footprints in the dust. And later, when she was in the attic at Mr. Peebles's house, she saw a girl a few inches tall standing on the windowsill.”

Joe frowned. “So?”

“Those are the girls on the
cane
,” said Meg. “They wrote the note that was tied on the stick, and they're waiting for someone to help them escape.”

Joe looked suddenly interested.

“How do you know so much about it?” the Rat asked suspiciously.

“Because I told her,” said Emmy. “But there's more. Miss Barmy is up to something, and maybe—”

“Hey!” Raston looked up. “There's an insulated wire that goes from Peebles's attic to theirs—we're all rodents, we can run across it—”