Nickie stared—but then relief swept through her. “Oh!” she said. “You thought of it, too!”
Amanda didn’t move. “Thought of what?” she said. Otis licked her neck, and she lifted her chin to get away from his tongue.
“To hide Otis,” said Nickie. “So they won’t find him. Even though nobody knows he’s here, it would be better—”
“They do know he’s here,” said Amanda. She still didn’t move.
“Oh, no! They do? Then we have to hurry! How do they know? Come on, let’s—”
“I told Mrs. Beeson,” said Amanda in a cool, flat voice.
“You what?” Nickie’s heart seemed to stop.
“I called her up and told her. Course I did. Did you think I’d want to mess up everything? Did you think I’d go against the Prophet?”
Nickie ran at Amanda and grabbed at Otis with both hands. Amanda pulled him away. “No!” she cried. “She said no dogs! I have to take him!”
“You can’t take him!” Nickie reached again for Otis, who was now thrashing wildly in Amanda’s grip, but Amanda darted to the side and turned her back, clutching Otis close to her chest, and when Nickie came at her again and grabbed her arm, she made a sudden ferocious twist, sending Nickie staggering across the floor, and turned back toward the stairway. Nickie got her balance and came after her.
When Amanda reached the top of the stairs, Nickie was close behind. She could have pushed her. It would have been easy. Amanda would have dropped Otis, who’d have scrambled away, and she would have fallen down the whole length of those hard, polished steps. She might have broken bones. She might have been killed. The urge to push her was so strong that Nickie just barely kept herself from doing it. Instead she grabbed for Amanda’s shirttail, Amanda jerked away, and Nickie fell back and sat down hard on the top step.
Before she could get up, Amanda was halfway down the stairs. Nickie followed, but Amanda was too far ahead. When Nickie reached the bottom step, Amanda was at the front door, throwing it open. When Nickie got to the front door, Amanda was racing down the path toward the sidewalk. And when Nickie made it to the sidewalk, Amanda was running as fast as she could toward the corner of Cloud and Trillium streets, where the blunt yellow nose of the school bus was just coming into view.
That was when the sobs came up in Nickie’s throat and the tears flew from her eyes, and she kept running and crying, but only for half a block, because she could see the man coming down from the bus and Amanda running up to him and holding out Otis, and the man taking Otis into the bus. At that point Nickie stood still and screamed. Someone came out of a house and scowled at her. She screamed again. The bus moved on, turning a corner. She ran after it, crying so hard she could scarcely breathe, but it turned another corner and disappeared.
Two desperate urges arose in her: one was to find Amanda and choke her to death, and the other was to find Crystal and make her drive after the school bus, so she could get Otis back.
Finding Otis was more important than choking Amanda. But where was Crystal? Nickie stood in the street looking wildly around, rooted to the spot, trying to think what to do. Maybe Crystal had left her a note. She ran back to Greenhaven and dashed from room to room, but no note was there. Maybe Crystal was at the restaurant. With trembling hands, she fumbled through the phone book and found the number, but when she asked if Crystal was there, the person who answered said no. Finally she ran outside again and stood in the street. Could she run downtown and try to find the school bus and somehow bash her way into it and rescue Otis? She didn’t know. She couldn’t think. Her breath came in hiccupy sobs, and her heart was running like an engine out of control. She wailed; she couldn’t help it—a long, wavery wail.
And at that moment, Crystal’s car came around the corner. It drove up the street and pulled in at the curb, and instantly Nickie was beside it, pounding on the window, which Crystal rolled down.
“They’ve taken Otis!” Nickie cried. “Amanda—she came—she betrayed me and stole Otis and he’s in the bus with all the dogs! You have to help! Please, please! If we follow the bus, we could get him—”
Crystal gaped at her. She had a paper cup of coffee in her hand. A white bakery bag was on the seat beside her. “What in the world are you talking about?” she said.
“They’re taking the dogs!” Nickie cried. “There’s no time to explain! Please, please, can you just drive me? And I’ll tell you about it while we go.”
Nickie’s frantic face must have persuaded Crystal. “All right,” she said. “Jump in.”
CHAPTER 27
__________________
The Chase
As fast as she could, in a few short sentences, Nickie told Crystal everything.
Crystal kept interrupting, turning to Nickie with wide eyes and a dropped jaw.
“You mean you’ve had a dog up there all this time?”
“There was a girl in the closet?”
“You’ve been battling the forces of evil?”
“She says dogs are doing what?”
But all Nickie wanted was to find out where the buses had gone. “Never mind, never mind,” she said. She was still having trouble talking because of breathing so hard and shaking. “I’ll tell you later. Go that way.” She pointed down Cloud Street. “That’s where Amanda gave—But then it turned the corner, I think onto Birch Street—and that was maybe five minutes ago, or ten, so I don’t know where the bus is now.”
Crystal headed down Cloud Street. “Where did this Prophet woman say they were going to take the dogs?”
“Into the woods, she said. Far away, into the woods where they belong, and then let them go so they can be wild the way they’re supposed to be.”
“Odd,” said Crystal, driving through the neighborhood as fast as possible without actually squealing the tires. “Dogs haven’t been wild for several hundred thousand years. Not most dogs, anyway. They need us.”
“And we need them!” Nickie wailed. “I need Otis!”
They curved up onto Spruce Street but saw nothing. No one was in the street. A few snowflakes sifted down from the sky and landed on the car’s windshield. Crystal put on the wipers. She headed down Grackle Street and turned onto Main Street.
Nickie shouted, “Look!” and pointed ahead. Far down at the other end of Main Street was a patch of bright yellow. “The bus!”
But a moment later it turned off Main Street and was gone.
“It went to the right,” said Nickie. “That’s High Peak Road; it goes up the mountain. So that means they’ve finished collecting the dogs, and they’re taking them away. Can we go faster?”
Crystal stepped on the gas. “If we do catch up to the buses,” she said, “what happens next?”
“We just follow them till they stop.” Nickie was leaning forward, both hands gripping the dashboard. “Then when they let the dogs out, we grab Otis.”
“What about everybody else’s dogs?”
“I don’t know. I wish we could save them, too.”
“What if the people on the bus refuse to let us have Otis?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” said Nickie. “Let’s just go really fast.”
They turned up High Peak Road. It was a narrow, winding road, with the ranks of trees standing close on either side. The snow was falling faster now, whirling toward them, making it hard to see. Crystal slowed down. There was no sign of the buses.
“I don’t know,” said Crystal. “This might not be a good idea.”
Nickie said nothing. She kept her eyes glued forward, staring through the spinning whiteness. How would Otis survive in a snowstorm? He was little. He didn’t know how to get his own food.
Crystal glanced over at her. “Why didn’t you tell me about this dog before?”
“I thought you’d take him to the pound. You said you would.”
“I did?” Crystal shook her head. “So you’ve been getting fond of him all this time, haven’t you?”
Nickie nodded. Tears came to her eyes a
gain, and she couldn’t speak.
“I don’t get it,” Crystal said. “This Prophet woman says the love you give a dog is subtracted from the love you give God. Have I got that right?”
Nickie nodded. The sky was growing darker as afternoon turned to evening. The shadows in the woods were so thick she could no longer see between the trees.
“So would that apply to cats, too, I wonder? Parakeets? Hamsters? Undeserving people? How do you decide what’s okay to love, according to the Prophet?”
“I don’t know,” said Nickie. She didn’t want to talk about this now. She just wanted Crystal to hurry up. The car was going slowly around the curves. Crystal had turned on the headlights, but they brightened the spiraling snow more than the road ahead. Nickie’s neck hurt from craning forward, trying to see.
“Love is love, seems to me,” said Crystal. “As long as what you love isn’t armed robbery, or bombing airplanes, or kidnapping little children.”
“Can we go faster?” Nickie asked.
“Not without sliding off the road.” Crystal shook her head. “We’re going to have to give this up, I think. It’s dangerous.” She slowed down even more to go around a bend in the road, and then suddenly she stamped on the brakes and the car slid sideways. Careening toward them out of the blinding whiteness was something big and yellow.
“The bus!” screamed Nickie. “It’s coming down!”
Crystal pulled over and stopped. Behind the first bus was another one, and another, each one furred with white on top. They passed by and trundled on downhill.
“But are the dogs still in there?” Nickie said. “Or did they let them out?”
Crystal pulled the car back out onto the road. “My guess is that those bus drivers didn’t want to drive in this weather any more than I do. I bet they just dumped the dogs and turned around.”
“Then let’s keep going!” Nickie cried, bouncing frantically in her seat. “We can find them!”
Crystal drove on, but she was frowning at the road and going slower than ever. After about ten minutes, they came to a place where the trees thinned out, and on the right was an open field, lightly dusted with snow. Nickie could see a dark mush of tire tracks here. “Stop!” she cried. “I think this is where the buses turned around. Can we get out and see?”
“We’re turning around, too,” said Crystal, but she stopped the car. Nickie flung the door open and jumped out. She ran toward the tire tracks and scanned the field. At the far edge, where the forest resumed, she saw something moving. A dog—no, two dogs, or three—leaping across the snow-dusted ground, heading for the trees.
“Otis!” Nickie shouted, though the dogs she saw were too big to be Otis. “Otis, Otis, come! Come back!”
But the dogs disappeared into the woods. If they heard her at all, they paid no attention. It was just an adventure to them, a thrilling freedom—at least at first. They didn’t understand yet that there were no food bowls in the woods, no warm fires, no people.
Crystal came up and stood beside her.
“I want to go after them,” Nickie said. “Will you wait for me? I’ll just run across there and call Otis again from where he can hear me—”
“We’ve got a snowstorm starting up,” Crystal said, “and it’s almost dark. I can’t let you go plunging around in the woods. I’m afraid we’re too late.”
“No!” cried Nickie. “It’s just over there,” she said, pointing across the wide field to where the trees made a dark line in the distance. “Otis!” she screamed again.
But nothing moved out in the field, and the snow whirled faster, filling the air, until the trees had vanished behind a blur of white.
“We have to go,” said Crystal. Her voice was sad and kind.
All the way back down the mountain, Nickie said hardly a word. She sat staring through the passenger-side window at the tree trunks ghostly in the snow, knowing it was too dark to see anything moving among them, but unable to make her eyes look anywhere else. She felt as if a hundred stones had collected inside her.
Crystal pulled up outside Greenhaven. “I’m sorry about this, sweetie,” she said. “I just had no idea any of this was going on. How could I not have known it?”
“You were busy,” said Nickie. “With other things.” She was so tired all of a sudden. She barely had the strength to open the car door.
But even after they got inside, Crystal kept asking questions, and Nickie kept having to explain things, and then they had to have something to eat, which Nickie wasn’t hungry for at all, and Crystal had to talk about how strange it was that no word had come from the president about whether there was going to be war. It seemed like forever before Nickie could get into bed and close her eyes. And of course by then she wasn’t sleepy anymore. She lay there thinking about Otis out in the snowstorm, cold and hungry and alone. She thought about the white bear, which might eat small dogs. She thought about Mrs. Beeson, who was trying to do good and was causing so much pain, and about Althea Tower, the Prophet, whose vision had started everything. And she thought about what she herself had done, and at that she buried her face in the pillow and tried not to think at all. “I want my mother,” she whispered, “and my father. I want to go home.”
CHAPTER 28
__________________
One More Trip to the Woods
In the morning, a white cloak of snow lay across the ground. Rooftops and tree branches wore caps of white, and from the bedroom window, Nickie saw that the mountainside had turned from gray to silver. The sun shone down on this white world and made it glitter.
It was beautiful. If she hadn’t been so sad, Nickie would have rushed outside to make snow angels and snow caves. But she didn’t have the heart for it this morning. Besides, Crystal had plenty of work for her.
Nickie begged Crystal to drive her up High Peak Road again so she could look for Otis. But Crystal said no. This was a busy day. They’d never find the dog—the woods were vast, and besides, everything was buried in snow. And anyhow, they’d be leaving soon, and what would Nickie do with a dog?
Nickie’s orders were to clean out the nursery—put the lamps and furniture back where they came from, pack up the toys and games and other things, throw out anything old and useless. All morning she worked on this. It was awful not having Otis there. When she picked up his food bowl and his water bowl, a lump of sorrow rose into her throat. She put the bowls in a big plastic bag so she wouldn’t have to look at them.
She was going to keep the picture of the Siamese twins. Crystal had told her she could have it, either to keep or to sell. She’d called an antique expert and asked about it, and he offered to pay $350 for it, sight unseen. But Nickie wanted to keep it, along with the cross-written letter. After all, these were among the few souvenirs she’d have from this whole trip. She put them carefully at the bottom of her suitcase.
She’d asked Crystal if she could keep her great-grandfather’s notebook, too. She felt as if he’d kept her company, a little, while she was here in his house. Now she picked up the notebook and riffled the pages, thinking again about the mystery they contained. The professor had encountered a pool of sadness in the west bedroom, and he had seen something there, too, or thought he had. She sat down on the window seat and flipped through until she found that entry:
1/4 Extraordinary experience last night: Went into the back bedroom to look for the scissors, thought I saw someone in there, over by the bed—dark-haired figure, transparent swirl of skirt. Dreadful feeling of sorrow hit me like a wave. Had to grab the doorknob, almost fell. Figure faded, vanished. Maybe something wrong with my eyes. Or heart.
Reading this again, she remembered something: the long-ago death of a child, and the mother’s grief. And the dates: January 4 for the death, January 4 for the echo her great-grandfather had felt. If that’s what he’d really felt, an echo.
Could it be? When the child died, the mother would have felt such a knife-like sorrow that it might have left a scar somehow beside the bed in the west bedroom, a
scar so deep it could last through a hundred years and more. And the old professor, near death himself, might have felt it, might even have caught the merest glimpse of the grief-stricken mother as she had stood there on that awful day.
Or, thought Nickie, closing the notebook and staring outside at the light on the snow, maybe the professor had read about this tragedy somewhere and forgotten that he knew it. Maybe he’d just imagined what he saw and what he felt. Or maybe he’d made it all up to go with the theories of “parallel worlds” that he was interested in, those “leaks” between the past and present, present and future.
Had he really caught a glimpse of the past? Did the Prophet catch glimpses of the future? There was no way to know.
She put the notebook in her suitcase with the photograph of the twins and the crosshatched letter, and she went back to work on the nursery. When she was finished, the room looked just the way it had when she’d first seen it: empty except for the rolled-up rug and the rocking chair and the iron bed, with a slanted rectangle of sunlight on the wooden floor. What would this room be when the new owners moved in? She hated to think of it filled with dumbbells and stationary bicycles. It wasn’t meant to be that kind of room; she just knew it. It wasn’t meant to be someone’s office, either, full of humming computers and gizmos with little flashing lights. It was meant for children.
After that, she went down to Grover’s house to say goodbye. A snowplow had cleared the streets, pushing the snow in lumpy banks to either side. Already, the snow was starting to melt; trickles of water ran down into the street.
Nickie heard bits of conversation as she passed people. Mostly it was about the silence from the White House. No declaration of war. No declaration of peace, either. Just nothing. The nothingness seemed to upset everyone. They argued about what it meant. Good news or bad news?
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