The Pet-Sitting Peril

by Willo Davis Roberts

  It seemed the best he could do. Nick turned from the phone to see that Maynard had already curled up on the rug before the couch where Fred slept draped over one arm.

  Nick turned on the TV and sat down to watch it. There wasn’t much of anything on that he hadn’t already seen except a horror show about a monster that lived in a pond and came out at night to drag its victims down into the swamp.

  It might have been all right to watch if Sam had been with him; tonight, Nick decided, he didn’t need anything like this. He got up and turned off the set.

  He stood for a moment, looking out at the lighted windows in the house next door. He was glad that Melody’s family had moved in, or he’d have been looking at dark, blank windows, making him feel even more alone than he already felt.

  Suddenly, across the hall, loud music boomed. Well, that meant Clyde and Roy were home, so he wasn’t alone, after all. It made him feel somewhat better.

  Directly across from him, Melody appeared in one of the lighted windows. She reached up to draw the shade, saw him, and waved.

  Nick waved back, wondering if she thought he was a peeping tom or something. It was embarrassing, to be caught looking into her window at night. And then Melody raised the window and leaned out, so Nick did the same. They weren’t really very far apart, no more than four or five yards.

  “Hi! Are you still taking care of that cat?”

  “Two cats and two dogs,” Nick confirmed. She didn’t sound annoyed at finding him there. In fact, she was smiling as if she were pleased.

  “Dad says we can get a dog, now that we’re settled in one place. Dickie and I have been trying to decide what kind we want. A big one, like that Airedale, or a little one. Which is the best?”

  “Depends on what you want. If you’re going to walk him yourself, maybe you’d be happier with one Maynard’s size. He can’t drag you off into the blackberry bushes or jerk you off a curb when you aren’t expecting it.”

  “Maynard, is that the little one’s name?” Melody had a nice laugh. She leaned on her elbows on the window frame. “Funny name for a dog, isn’t it? Well, we don’t have a yard for a dog, so I guess we’d have to walk him all right. Do you know of any place to get a small dog?”

  “There’s a pet shop in the mall, but I think they have only pedigreed dogs and they’re pretty expensive.” Nick had an inspiration. “I know some people whose dog just had puppies. Dad said we couldn’t have one, but maybe they’d give one to you. They aren’t pedigreed, though. The mother is a little bigger than Maynard, sort of a cross between a poodle and cocker spaniel. The pups are real cute.”

  “Cockapoos,” Melody said. “Will you ask if we can go look at them?”

  “Sure,” Nick agreed. “Maybe we could go over there tomorrow. It’s only about a mile and a half, if you don’t mind walking that far.”

  Melody grinned. “Thanks.” She turned her head to call behind her, “All right, I’m coming,” and then waved out the window. “Good night, Nick.”

  She didn’t close the window behind her, nor did she turn off the light. There were few insects in this part of California, and most people didn’t bother with screens. Nick could see into her room after Melody had left it, and though he knew she’d gone somewhere else, it was nice to see a lighted window so close by. If he hollered, anybody over there would surely hear him.

  Now why had he thought a dumb thing like that? He wasn’t going to holler, was he?

  He ate the last of the cookies Mrs. Monihan had left, offering the final bite to Maynard, who was usually capering around his feet waiting for his share.

  Tonight Maynard opened one eye and looked at the half cookie on the rug. He licked at it listlessly but did not eat it.

  “Hey, you sick or something? Really sick?” Nick looked uneasily at the little dog. Maynard had thrown up, after all, though dogs sometimes did that without having anything seriously wrong.

  “You sure you don’t want any?” He held the tidbit close to Maynard’s nose, which twitched. Maynard’s tail thumped once, but he still didn’t eat the cookie.

  It was one more thing he’d mention to his father, when the time came. Maybe Dad would come over and look at Maynard. Nick touched the black button nose. It wasn’t hot. He didn’t know if that proved anything or not. Maynard had gone back to sleep.

  Nick sighed. He supposed it was late enough so that he should go downstairs and give Eloise her last dose of medicine. He hoped it was the last one he ever had to give her, that the vet would pronounce her cured.

  The music followed him down the dark stairs as he probed his way with the little flashlight. Booming, crashing, throbbing music, the kind his mother said gave her a headache. Clyde and Roy had seemed nice enough, but they certainly weren’t very considerate of their neighbors.

  Again Rudy didn’t whine or claw at the door when Nick went past. He must finally understand that he didn’t get to go out, Nick decided, every time he was nearby.

  It didn’t dawn on him until he had the key in Mrs. Sylvan’s door that he was expected to capture Eloise in the dark. True, the bathroom light could be turned on, but Eloise had long since learned that heading for that small room gave Nick the advantage in their battle of wits and strength. Eloise might be a real pain in the neck, but she wasn’t stupid.

  Resentment against Mrs. Sylvan rose inside him. It wasn’t fair that she expected him to do what she wasn’t willing to do herself.

  He should have told her, he thought. He unlocked the door, listened to make sure Eloise wasn’t just on the other side, and slowly eased the door open, with the light trained on the widening crack.

  Nick was halfway into the apartment when the big puff of white fur bolted past him. There was no way he could move fast enough to block her escape.

  He muttered a word that his mother had once washed out his mouth with soap for saying, when he was little, and swung the flashlight to follow Eloise’s passage. Up the stairs, he saw that much. He said another bad word.

  He was about to close the door to the apartment when he saw the cat box. Mrs. Sylvan thought it was too early to put Eloise into it and leave her for the night, but he’d be darned if he was going to chase her all over and get scratched to shreds. If he could corner her, Eloise was going into the cat box.

  Nick grabbed it up and ran up the stairs, arriving on the second floor in time to see Eloise make a dash from a perch on the upper railing into the open doorway of the front apartment.

  Roy had just opened that door, and he reeled backward with a yelp as Eloise catapulted past his left ear. Beyond him, in the lighted room, there was another yelp, followed by an oath considerably worse than the ones Nick had used.

  “What was that?” Roy demanded.

  “Quick, shut the door so she can’t get out,” Nick pleaded. “I’ve got to catch her in this box.”

  Clyde was still swearing, and when Nick entered the door he saw why.

  Clyde was kneeling to paint on a huge canvas laid flat on the floor. Eloise had landed in an area freshly painted scarlet—Nick couldn’t quite make out what it was supposed to be—and now there were bloody-looking footprints across not only the canvas Clyde was working on but the top one of a stack of three more alongside it.

  Eloise, still fleeing her pursuer, skidded to a stop in a corner and turned to arch her back and spit.

  For a moment Nick was too distracted by the damage done to Clyde’s painting to notice. “Oh, no! Oh, gosh, look what that stupid cat’s done!”

  “Do you know what I had to pay for this canvas?” Clyde demanded, sitting back on his bare heels. “Not to mention the paint. And the fact that a guy said he’d buy it if I could get another sunset like the one I sold his neighbor.”

  Nick couldn’t think what to say to that. Was he responsible? Or was Mrs. Sylvan? If he had to pay for the canvas and paint, let alone the lost value to the painter, he’d never contribute another cent to the Disneyland fund for the rest of the summer.

  “Hey,” Roy said, star
ing down at the result of Eloise’s flight, “you know, that’s kind of interesting. You got another canvas, man, you can do another sunset. But stand up and look at that. Cat footprints in bright red. You suppose you could get her to walk in the blue paint and add some contrasting prints?”

  Clyde stood up and surveyed the canvas. “Maybe you’re right. It is . . . different, isn’t it?”

  Nick watched the two of them in amazement. Were they serious?

  “With those to use to copy, I could do the blue ones myself,” Clyde said, almost under his breath. “Or black. I think it would be more dramatic with black.”

  He dropped back to his knees and began twisting the cap off a tube of acrylic paint.

  Nick gave up. As long as they didn’t expect him to pay for damages, he didn’t care how crazy the picture turned out. He began to edge toward Eloise, who was more or less trapped in a corner of the kitchenette.

  Nick wondered if he could rush her and capture her without getting scratched. There ought to be extra pay on a job that required bleeding.

  “Hey, kid, you’re going about that wrong,” Roy informed him.

  Nick noticed for the first time then that Roy hardly looked like a hippie at all tonight, except for his long hair in the ponytail, which was tied with a red bandana handkerchief. He wore new jeans and a colorful western shirt with a suede vest. And he was no longer barefooted; on his feet were a pair of the most elaborately tooled cowboy boots imaginable, with little heels and sharply pointed toes that almost made Nick wince to look at them.

  “What you do, see, is entice the cat into the box, not try to pop it over her. She’ll tear you to shreds if you do that. See how she’s looking at you?”

  “I tried enticing her when I first met her,” Nick said tiredly. “She’s suspicious of everything I do.”

  “Here,” Roy offered, reaching for the cardboard cat container. “Let me try. I’ll put something in there to tempt her, and we’ll just let her take her time getting it. Let her wander around, if she wants to. Maybe she’ll make some more of those neat footprints. Put out some more paint, Clyde, in case she walks back in your direction.”

  Nick had no objection to trying Roy’s method, though he wasn’t too hopeful that it would work. At the moment, pressed against the wall with her back arched and ready to strike at anything that came within her reach, Eloise didn’t seem likely to be caught in any trap. She was a tough customer.

  Even half a fish stick rescued from the garbage didn’t immediately lure Eloise into the box laid on its side before her, though they saw her nose quiver as the scent of it reached her.

  “Leave her alone for a while. Pretend you aren’t paying any attention,” Clyde suggested.

  “Only stay ready to leap when she gets her head inside the box,” Roy added. “Hey, man, you’re making better footprints than the cat did. That’s going to make a fantastic painting.”

  Nick turned then to watch Clyde as he painstakingly reproduced the red footprints, only in black, making approving sounds to himself. At least he wasn’t going to demand to be paid for a ruined canvas, Nick thought.

  Clyde nodded absently, bent over his work. “Maybe I’ll enter this one in the Art Fair. What do you think?”

  “Sure, why not? Last year one of the prizes went to a ceramic tongue, twice normal size; this has more class than that. Who knows, you might win a prize. Five hundred dollars, if you take first place.”

  Clyde, Nick now observed, had also added new garments to his wardrobe. Jeans, already with a smudge of red paint on one knee, and one of those flowered shirts like you saw in the commercials for Hawaiian holidays.

  “Well, we only got about two hundred bucks left, after we bought the car and everything,” Clyde said, rocking back on his heels to examine his handiwork. “Hey, look, I think she’s going for it.”

  Sure enough, when the attention turned away from her, Eloise had deflated to her normal size and was slowly sneaking up on the fish stick as if it were a mouse. When she put her head cautiously inside the open end of the box, Roy moved, fast.

  “There you are! One cat in a box,” he said, laughing, and handed it over to Nick.

  Eloise didn’t take kindly to the container; for a minute or so she thrashed around inside and complained noisily, but the lid was latched down. Nick decided he didn’t care what Mrs. Sylvan thought, he wasn’t going to let Eloise out of the box before morning. There would be no medicine tonight. And if Eloise still needed medication after she saw the vet tomorrow, he was going to tell Mrs. Sylvan that he was resigning from the job.

  “Thanks,” he told Roy, meaning it. “I’ll get her out of here, now.”

  “If Clyde wins a prize with this canvas, bring her back to make some more pictures,” Roy suggested. He reached for the control on the stereo, and the abrupt cessation of the throbbing music left Nick feeling strangely unbalanced, as if it had actually been holding him up. “Come on, Clyde, if you’re going to come and hear me play, let’s go. I gotta be there in half an hour, man.”

  “Okay, okay, just let me finish this.” Clyde applied the final touch to another footprint and stood up. “See you later, kid.”

  They clattered down the stairs ahead of him, making the sort of racket his mother complained about when Nick and Barney did it. And then they were out the front door, and he heard their van starting up. Nick stood on the landing with the cat box in his arms, his flashlight beam very tiny in the vast darkness of the entryway.

  He heard no sounds at all except his own breathing. And that seemed odd to him, because ordinarily Rudy would have given some sign that he knew Nick was there.

  Slowly, hugging the cat box against his chest with one hand while he focused the light with the other, Nick went the rest of the way down the stairs. “Rudy?” he said, close to the door of Mr. Haggard’s apartment.

  There was no sound behind the door.

  Nick put down the cat box, making Eloise mew another protest as her position shifted, but he wasn’t thinking about Eloise. He unlocked the door and shone the light into the apartment.

  Rudy lay on the rug before the couch, not moving. Nick suddenly felt as if his blood had thickened so that it couldn’t move through his veins, except where it pounded in his ears.

  “Rudy?” he said again, louder this time.

  The big Airedale didn’t move.

  Chapter Eleven

  Nick ran quickly across the room and dropped to his knees beside the dog. “Rudy? Are you okay?”

  The dog opened one eye, to Nick’s vast relief, but he didn’t lift his head. Only when Nick stroked his warm flank did Rudy’s tail flicker, just barely.

  “There’s something the matter with you,” Nick said.

  He’d spent plenty of time in this apartment lately, but it was different with no lights on. It no longer seemed a pleasant place.

  He continued to kneel, stroking the dog, speaking to him. Rudy was breathing all right; and when Nick put his ear to the dog’s side, he could hear his heart beating. Yet this was completely out of character, for Rudy to lie still this way, to respond so faintly when spoken to. Not even to bark at Eloise!

  Nick rose and got down the choke chain, slipping it over Rudy’s head. Always before, Rudy had gotten excited at the mere jangle of the chain, knowing he was going out. This time, he simply closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

  Nick felt a moment of panic. Something had to be seriously wrong. “Come on, boy, get up!” he urged, tugging the chain. “Come on, Rudy, let’s go for a walk!”

  It took several minutes to get the dog on his feet. “Come on. I can’t leave you down here, and Maynard’s sick upstairs, so I can’t leave him all alone, either . . .”

  His voice sounded too loud in the empty room. Both dogs sick at the same time? Wasn’t that a most peculiar coincidence?

  Rudy took a few wobbly steps with him toward the hallway as Nick’s mind raced. Could someone else have fed both dogs? Something that made them both sick?

  Who? Did
someone else have keys to both apartments? And why would anybody want to make the dogs sick?

  The house was so still. Unless Mr. Griesner was home, Nick thought, he was alone here with the animals. The realization made him break out in goose bumps. He’d been home alone in the dark lots of times, and he’d never given it any thought. He certainly hadn’t been scared.

  He was scared now.

  Nick dropped the leather handle on the chain and patted Rudy’s head. “Stay, boy,” he said, and went back along the hallway to Mr. Griesner’s door.

  There was no crack of light under it. Nick knocked, anyway, just in case. There was no reply, and after a moment he turned and went back to the front entryway.

  Should he take Rudy out and try to walk him as far as his own home? Realistically, he didn’t think Rudy could walk that far, the way he was, and even if Nick got the dog there, he’d still be on his own. His parents wouldn’t be home for hours, maybe.

  Ordinarily, if his parents weren’t available in an emergency, he’d have called his grandmother, only she was in the hospital. And even if he could get Rudy anywhere, it would mean leaving the other animals here.

  That didn’t seem like a very good idea, to leave them alone in the house.

  In the end, he took Rudy and Eloise upstairs, one at a time, after he’d shut Fred into Mrs. Monihan’s bathroom. With Eloise in her cat box, he decided it ought to work all right to have them all together. After all, Maynard and Rudy got along all right, even when they weren’t sick.

  Rudy walked up the stairs as if he’d had too much to drink; and when Nick let go of the leash, he sank down at once, just inside Mrs. Monihan’s apartment.

  Maynard opened an eye and thumped his tail halfheartedly without getting up.

  Something was terribly wrong with the dogs. More to try something, anything, than from a conviction that Rudy was thirsty, Nick offered him water. To his surprise, Rudy lapped at it eagerly, and then Maynard did the same, but it didn’t make any difference. Each immediately went back to sleep.