The Pet-Sitting Peril (12 page)

It was Charles who was perceptive enough to guess the truth. “This kid a girl, Barney?”

To Nick's
mingled delight and envy, Barney blushed. He didn't remember ever seeing his brother blush before.

“Well, so she's a girl, what difference does that make? I said I'd meet her, and since I can't tell her . . . I have to meet her, don't I?”

“Maybe you could meet her and tell her you have to paint the house,” Winnie suggested, holding out her glass for more juice. “Maybe she'd like to come and help you paint.”

Barney rolled his eyes. “Oh, sure! Some date that would be! Listen, Dad, I don't have a job tomorrow afternoon, and I'll help you from noon on, okay? Only I really want to play tennis today.”

Nick wondered if he'd ever get to play tennis with a girl. Or do anything interesting with a girl, since so many of them were taller than he was, and they all seemed to prefer the taller boys. He didn't really see why it mattered so much, which person was taller, but it seemed to be important to most people.

Barney pushed back his chair, looked at the clock, and speared one more sausage. “Oh, I invited Chuck to stay over again tonight, Nick.”

Nick stopped chewing. “Hey, I didn't give up my half of the room permanently, you know.”

“Well, he's not coming tonight anyway. Has to go someplace with his folks. But he is coming tomorrow. We want to finish our Monopoly game, okay?” Barney paused then, surveying Nick with slightly narrowed eyes. “How was it, sleeping in that old mausoleum? Kind of spooky?”

Mausoleum, if Nick remembered correctly, meant a place where they buried the dead, or was it stored them in crypts? He thought he detected a certain malicious amusement in Barney's gaze, and he made his reply casual, though he didn't feel that way about it. “It's just an old house, is all.”

“No spooks? No ghosts?” Barney grinned. “Of course you had Sam there with you, didn't you? It would take a brave ghost to take old Sam on, I guess. Big as he is. So you weren't scared, huh?”

After that, how could Nick admit that he had been, for a time, scared spitless? And it looked as if he had to spend tomorrow night at 1230 Hillsdale, whether he wanted to or not.

He thought about it through the day as he went to church, helped paint the house for a while, and walked Maynard and Rudy both in midafternoon and evening, not to mention spending forty-five frustrating minutes medicating Eloise.

It was stupid, Nick thought bitterly. Why hadn't he admitted that he had been scared last night? If there was really something dangerous in the house wouldn't it be smarter to admit it, and stay away from it, than to pretend there was nothing the matter and maybe get hurt? Especially if it only meant that he was saving face in front of Barney. What did he care what Barney thought?

The trouble was, though, that he
did
care what Barney thought. Or at least he cared about what Barney said. Barney had a way of not letting him forget it if he ever made a mistake. It never seemed to occur to him that Nick had feelings, too, and that it hurt to be taunted long after the episode should have been forgotten. Well, he had until tomorrow night to work something out.

Mr. Haggard's pension check came the next
morning, and Nick took it inside. After the skirmish between Fred and Rudy on Saturday, he had decided to find a safer place to put the mail, in the drawer of a bureau. That afternoon, after a morning of painting and a check on all the animals, he decided to go over to the hospital and tell Mr. Haggard that the check was safe, and that Rudy was all right, too. He didn't let himself think it was a way of keeping busy, of not thinking about the night to come. He hadn't heard a word from Sam. And somehow he couldn't bring himself to call. Yet, with or without Sam, he, Nick, was committed to spending the night at 1230 Hillsdale.

Mr. Haggard looked even older than before, propped against pillows with his hair standing in white wisps. He grinned when he saw Nick, though, and lifted a hand in greeting.

“Well, fancy that, I've got a visitor! How are you, Nick?”

Nick relayed all his messages, glad he had come since the old man seemed so pleased to see him. Before he lost his courage, he blurted out the details of the mishap with the lamp and the pillow, though he left out the reason
for Rudy's wild reaction. Maybe Mr. Haggard wouldn't like it that he'd brought someone else's animals into his apartment.

“My friend says his dad can fix the lamp. And I sewed up the rip in the pillow,” Nick said.

Mr. Haggard didn't seem too upset. What mattered to him was that Rudy was okay. They talked on a bit and then just before he was ready to leave, Nick remembered the gas can.

Mr. Haggard looked bewildered. “Gas can? Well, I do remember you told me about it, and I meant to mention it to Mr. Griesner so he could move it, but my leg was hurting so bad—and those pain pills don't exactly make a fellow any smarter—I don't think I did it. And
I
sure didn't move it out of the closet into the cupboard under my sink. No, sir, I don't store any gasoline in the house. I knew a fellow, once, had some in his garage, and it exploded. He had third degree burns.”

Nick listened to the details, wondering if Mr. Haggard could possibly have moved the can and forgotten it. The old man's mind seemed perfectly clear now.

If Mr. Haggard hadn't put the can under his sink, who had?

Walking down the broad tiled corridor toward his grandmother's room, Nick remembered uneasily that Mr. Haggard's apartment had been unlocked that one time he'd returned from a walk, even though he thought he'd locked it when he left. Someone else
could
have moved the gas can inside then, though he didn't see why they would have.

Talking to his grandmother took his mind off the situation at 1230 Hillsdale for a while. She, too, seemed smaller and older than he remembered. It was almost as if the hospital beds had the power to shrink people.

She was cheerful, though, and glad to see him. “I saw the X-ray of the pin they put in my hip,” she told him, and gestured with her hands about a foot and a half apart. “It's this long, and bent on the top where it goes through the hip joint, and it has what look like bolts through it, crossways, to hold it in place.”

Nick swallowed. “Does it hurt a lot?”

“Well, it does when they make me move around. Would you believe the physical
therapy department is making me
walk
already? I wasn't sure I'd ever walk again after an injury like that, but they get somebody on each side of me to get me up, and then I have a walker to hang onto, so I won't fall down. And it hurts, all right, though they said the more I walk, the less I'll feel it. Tomorrow I'm going to try crutches, and learn to go up and down steps. Imagine, so soon!”

“I think that's great, that you aren't going to be crippled or anything,” Nick said.

His grandma reached out and squeezed his hand. “I think it's great, too, even if it does hurt right now. Thank you for coming to see me, Nick.”

It almost made
him
hurt, to think about having a huge steel pin bolted through bone, even somebody else's bone.

Visiting his grandmother and Mr. Haggard in the hospital gave him something to think about as he walked on home. Getting old wouldn't be so bad if you didn't get sick or hurt, he thought. He wondered if Grandma would be able to play ball with them any more, or work in her garden the way she liked to do.
He sure hoped so. If she couldn't, it would be the same as if
he
were no longer able to run.

The aroma of chicken met him at the front door. Everybody else was at the table, and they looked up when Nick walked in.

“You're late,” Winnie piped. “We're having fried chicken, Nick. I got a leg.”

“Nick gets the tail,” Barney offered. “He's the last one here, he gets the back end of the chicken.”

Nick ignored him as he slid into his place and spoke to his parents. “I went over to the hospital to see Grandma and Mr. Haggard.” In a sudden rush of words that showed the subject was still there, pushed to the back of his mind, he said, “Dad, could I talk to you for a few minutes tonight? After supper?”

“My bowling night, Nick, remember? Though I'm so stiff from standing on that ladder all day I'll be lucky to keep the ball out of the gutter. Here, how about a thigh? Or would you rather have half a breast?”

Nick chose the chicken thigh, accepted a mound of mashed potatoes, poured gravy over it, and allowed his mother to serve him the
peas. He watched the butter melt on a hot biscuit and felt tension building up inside him. He hadn't consciously made the decision before, but he knew he'd been working up to it all day, to talk to his father about the things that had been happening at 1230 Hillsdale Street. He didn't know if he was imagining things or not, but if it was really dangerous to stay there, it was stupid to do it. His father wouldn't be like Barney, making fun of him for being afraid. Nick knew he could talk to his father.

Only he'd forgotten it was bowling night. And by the time his father came home, he'd already have to be going to bed over at the Hillsdale Apartments.

As usual, almost everybody had to go somewhere. Molly was to clean up the kitchen before she went out to a movie with a girl friend. Mrs. Reed was, of course, going back to the hospital. Charles was already at work. Barney was baby-sitting Winnie and having his friend Chuck over and they were going to finish their Monopoly game and work on Barney's bike.

Nick knew without asking that his mother
didn't have time to listen to him, either. If she'd had time, she would have helped with the kitchen cleanup, and he knew if she was late for visiting hours she sometimes had to park blocks from the hospital. She'd worked all day, and she was too tired to walk very far.

So there he was, with it time to head for Hillsdale Street and no chance to talk to anybody about any of what he was thinking. He called Sam's house, hoping Sam was going to be able to stay with him again tonight. By tomorrow, Nick promised himself, he'd get his father alone and have a serious conversation with him.

Only Sam wasn't home.

“I'm sorry, Nick. My husband decided to take a couple of days' vacation, and he and Sam went off to Willow Creek yesterday, on the spur of the moment,” Mrs. Jankowski told him. “They intended to be back tonight, but they just called to say they're going to stay on and won't be in until tomorrow afternoon.”

Tomorrow afternoon. Nick felt as if he'd been hit in the stomach as he replaced the phone. What about tonight?

He supposed he could get out a sleeping bag and put it on the floor in Winnie's room. Winnie wouldn't care. But then there would be Barney and his big mouth. It had happened so often that Nick could almost see the scene unrolling like a movie in his mind. Barney's nasty smile, his taunting voice. “What's the matter, Nicky? Scared of the dark? Scared of the ghosts in that old place, eh?”

All of that in front of Chuck Wilson, and by tomorrow everybody in the whole darned town would know about it. Nick could picture that, too. The other guys teasing him the rest of the summer, maybe longer than that, about being chicken.

Better chicken than burned up in a fire some maniac arsonist set.

The thought flashed through his mind, very quickly, and was gone. He didn't
know
that there was an arsonist loose; the fire in the alley could very well have been only kids playing with matches or cigarettes. And besides, how could he ever face Mr. Haggard, or Mrs. Monihan, or even Mrs. Sylvan, if he didn't take care of their pets as he'd promised?

He didn't run this time. He walked briskly because the air was turning chilly, as it almost always did in the evening, and thought out how he would explain it all to his father tomorrow.

As he came alongside the Hillsdale Apartments, he saw Mr. Griesner standing in the yard, and that investigator from the fire department was with him. Nick's footsteps slowed.

The red gas can lay on its side, almost concealed in the shrubbery against the side of the house. Its contents had spilled out; he could smell the gas slightly even from out here on the sidewalk.

Both men stopped talking and turned to look at him. Mr. Howard cleared his throat.
“Hello, Nick. Is this the can you thought you saw in the closet in the front hall?”

Even then, with his stomach suddenly cramping in apprehension, Nick resented the choice of words.
Thought he saw?
The can was in plain sight, so they must admit now that there had been a can, at least.

“Yes. It looks like the same one.” Nick's voice wavered, and he quickly brought it under control. His fingerprints were on the can, his and Sam's, and for all he knew they might be the
only
fingerprints on the thing. He cleared his throat. “We found it—Sam and I, Saturday night in Mr. Haggard's apartment. Under his sink, when we went to get out the dog food. I didn't think that was a good place to keep it, so I . . . I brought it outside, and put it down there on the sidewalk, by the bushes. I meant to tell someone about it, but I forgot.”

“You
brought it out here?” Mr. Howard was looking at him with narrowed eyes, or so it seemed to Nick. “Did you pour gas over the shrubs, here, or on those back steps into Mr. Griesner's apartment?”

Nick's apprehension curdled into outright
fear. “No, sir. All I did was put it down on the sidewalk, where I figured it couldn't hurt anything until someone could dispose of it. It wasn't spilled anywhere; the cap was on it, tight.”

Mr. Griesner spoke crossly, only for once it seemed that the annoyance was directed at someone other than Nick. “I told you, I heard a ruckus about three o'clock Sunday morning. I got up and looked out my back door—that side door, I mean—and didn't see anybody, so I just made sure everything was locked the way it's supposed to be, and I went back to bed. I figured it was some punk taking a shortcut who ran into something. I didn't know it was the gas can sitting there. We have trouble every once in a while with guys cutting across here. Sometimes I hear one of them trying the doors, just to see if I've been stupid enough to leave it open. Kids, looking for something to rip off. Might have found it yesterday, but I was gone to my daughter's most of the day.”