Ghost Dog Secrets

Table of Contents

 

 

A MYSTERIOUS GHOST

That night, I woke suddenly. I lay still, listening, wondering what had awakened me. The numbers on the digital clock beside my bed said 12:16.

Just past midnight.

It felt cold in my room. Even under the blankets, I was chilly. I wondered if Mom had opened a window and forgotten to close it. When she changes the sheets on my bed, she usually opens a window, even in winter, to “air out the room.”

Intending to walk across the room to check the window, I groggily swung my feet over the side of the bed. It was like sticking my legs into a tank of ice water.

Instantly wide awake, I looked beside my bed. The dog ghost stared back at me. The cold air that swirled around my feet came from her.

The dog ghost did not appear menacing. She didn't bare her teeth or act as if she wanted to bite me. Instead, she trotted to my bedroom door, which was closed. She turned back, as if to say,
Let's go
.

OTHER BOOKS BY PEG KEHRET

 

PUFFIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First published in the United States of America by Dutton Children's Books,
a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2010
Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2011

 

Copyright © Peg Kehret, 2010

All rights reserved

 

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE DUTTON CHILDREN'S BOOKS EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Kehret, Peg.

p. cm.

Summary: Sixth-grader Rusty, determined to help an injured dog that is chained outdoors in frigid weather,

calls animal control then takes matters into his own hands, aided by his best friend and a ghost collie that leads

Rusty to an even deeper secret. Includes instructions for knitting cat blankets.

ISBN : 978-1-101-56461-5

[1. Dogs—Fiction. 2. Animal welfare—Fiction. 3. Animal rescue—Fiction. 4. Ghosts—Fiction.

5. Stealing—Fiction.]

I. Title.

PZ7.K2518Ggm 2010

[Fic]—dc22 2009053256

 

 

 

 

 

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume
any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

 

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product
of the author's imagination or are used fictiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

CHAPTER ONE

I
first saw the dog chained to a tree on a frigid October morning. Icy rain pelted him, and his tail drooped between his hind legs as he watched the cars pass his yard. He had no shelter.

“Mom!” I said. “Look at that poor dog! He doesn't even have a doghouse.”

She glanced at the dog. “Not everyone takes care of their animals, Rusty,” she said, and quickly returned her attention to the slick road. Since she was already annoyed with me for missing the school bus, I didn't say anything more, but the image of the dog stayed with me. While my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Webster, tried to interest the class in the industrial revolution, I looked at the sleet blowing sideways against the window and thought how cold that dog must be.

My attention returned to the classroom when I heard the word
quiz.
Mrs. Webster's favorite trick was to spring an unannounced quiz on the class. When we complained, she always said, “If I told you that you were going to be tested, most of you would study the night before, but the point of education is that you should study whether you think you'll be tested or not. You need to do your homework every night and keep up with the reading assignments. A surprise quiz lets me know who is doing that, and it's a good wake-up call for those who are not.”

For me, a quiz usually equaled an alarm clock, especially if the test was in math.

That day, though, I was lucky. The quiz said, “Write two paragraphs about the book you're reading for free reading.” Each student was supposed to read for thirty minutes every evening. Since we could read anything we wanted (as long as it was age appropriate—Gerald Langston had once claimed he spent the entire thirty minutes reading
Goodnight Moon
) it was my favorite homework and the only assignment I did consistently. I quickly jotted down two paragraphs about my current book.

I finished, looked up, and caught Gerald peering at my paper. When he saw me look at him, Gerald turned around and began to write on his own paper. I dropped my pencil on the floor as an excuse to bend closer to see Gerald's paper. Just as I thought, he had written about the same book that I was reading. Ha! Fat chance that Gerald had read anything. Gerald ignored me as he scribbled away.

It's easy to write a report on a book you have not read. All you have to do is talk about the fast-paced plot or the intriguing characters or the author's use of similes. As long as you've put the title in the first sentence, the rest of it sounds true, and I was pretty sure Gerald would get away with his deception.

All the kids knew that Gerald cheated, but he never got caught and nobody wanted to be the one who squealed on him. In Heath School, being a tattletale was more of a disgrace than being a cheater. I retrieved my pencil, then turned my paper over so that Gerald couldn't copy anything more.

While I waited for Mrs. Webster to tell us to pass our papers forward, I made a mental list of the reasons why I don't like Gerald:

I was working on number five when Mrs. Webster said we could put our papers on her desk on our way to lunch. I followed Gerald and put my paper on top of his. I hoped Mrs. Webster wouldn't think that I had copied from him. I didn't worry too much about that, since I had written about the specific things I had liked in the book. Unless Gerald had actually read the book, which I doubted, his paper would be only generalizations.

During lunch I complained about Gerald to my best friend, Andrew. In first grade, Andrew and I had formed a “club” called the Knights of the Royal Underpants. One of the club activities was to make up alliterative three-word phrases that we called
threesomes.
We didn't hold club meetings anymore, but we still created threesomes and sometimes called each other by our club names. I was Mighty Muscles Man. Andrew was Exalted Exciting Expert.

“Gerald's hopeless,” Andrew said. “Ignore him.”

The afternoon dragged and I found myself thinking about the dog again.

When we had to write a poem for our language arts unit, I wrote:

Fur is singular and blurs is plural, so they don't really rhyme, but time was up before I could fix that. Although Mrs. Webster says a first draft is not a finished poem, we are never given enough time to revise anything.

We ended the class day with a discussion about litter. One of Mrs. Webster's goals in life is to turn all of her students into involved citizens who help solve the problems of the world. At the beginning of the year, we had a guest speaker from Habitat for Humanity who talked about building houses for people who can't afford them, and last week we had a speaker from the Department of Ecology who told us what kind of evidence to look for if we think someone has a methamphetamine lab on their property. He said even if we don't think there's a meth lab in our neighborhood, we should all be knowledgeable about how to tell. Our next guest speaker was going to talk about recycling.

Kids sometimes mention a community problem in class, hoping Mrs. Webster will get distracted and talk about it instead of having us do our work.

That day, Hayley said, “The playground area at Kennedy Park is a mess. Somebody ought to do something about it.”

“You are somebody,” Mrs. Webster said. “Each of us is somebody.”

We all looked at her.

“When we say, ‘Somebody ought to do something,' ” she continued, “we're wishing someone else would solve a problem, but perhaps we are the ones who should take action.”

“My parents would never let me go to the park and pick up the trash,” Hayley said. “Some of it is really nasty stuff, like pee in bottles.”