Naughty or Mice

by Livia J. Washburn

  Maybe what she ought to do was just wait and see who brought the mice back after the break, and deal with it then. She knew if she did that, though, she would worry about the two little guys the entire time. She really wanted to be sure they were all right.

  That left her with the option of calling around to the various parents and asking them if they had the mice. At least she could narrow it down by eliminating the bus-riders.

  What a way to start Christmas vacation, she thought as she started packing up the rest of her stuff.

  o0o

  When Dan had decided to move after Erica’s death, he had spotted a listing for an old house that interested him immediately. Built about a hundred years earlier, it was really too big for just him and Roxie, but he was fascinated by old houses. That fascination was what had led him into construction and then architecture. According to the listing, the house was a “fixer-upper”, which could mean anything from a shack on the verge of falling down to a fine old structure with a solid frame that just needed a little work. The only way to find out was to take a look.

  That one look was enough to tell Dan that he wanted to spend the rest of his life here.

  The house was two stories with a couple of finished attic rooms that formed cupolas. The wood floor was still in good shape and would be spectacular with some repair work and polishing. The wiring and the plumbing had been updated in the Sixties but needed it again. Dan could handle those things himself, although he would have to call in licensed tradesmen to do enough to make sure everything would pass inspection. He looked over the whole place carefully and didn’t see any signs of mold. Time had taken its toll on the house, but generally it was in good shape.

  “My great-grandfather built it mostly by himself,” the man who was selling the house had told Dan. “He and my great-grandmother moved in here right after they were married. They raised their family here, then the oldest son, my grandfather, took it and he and his family lived here, and then my dad. I grew up in this house.”

  “And you don’t plan to keep it?” Dan hadn’t been able to stop himself from asking the question. If he had inherited this house, he sure wouldn’t have wanted to part with it.

  The man spread his hands and said, “I moved away twenty years ago. I’m not going to uproot my family and force them to come back here just so I can live in the house where I grew up. Besides, it’s falling apart. I really don’t feel right about even selling it, that’s why my brothers and sisters and I have it priced to move.” He had laughed. “I’m not doing a very good job of giving you the hard-sell, am I? I just want to make sure you know what you’d be taking on if you bought it.”

  “I know,” Dan had said. The fact that the guy thought the house was falling apart told him a lot. If anybody was being taken advantage of here, it was the heirs getting rid of the house. “I’ll pay your asking price. No haggling.”

  “You have a deal, my friend.”

  “What was your great-grandfather’s name, if you don’t mind me asking.”

  That question seemed to surprise the man, but he had said, “His name was Lewis Collins. Why? Have you heard of him?”

  “Not until now,” Dan had answered honestly. “I was just curious.”

  He didn’t try to explain the real reason he had asked. As he stood there looking around the house, resting a hand on the staircase banister, feeling the place around him, he seemed to sense another presence. Dan was much too level-headed to believe in ghosts, but he did believe that when somebody created something, especially with their bare hands and sweat, something of their essence remained with it. It was almost like Lewis Collins was still here in a way.

  “My great-grandmother’s name was Beth.”

  “Lewis and Beth,” Dan had said as he looked around. “I’ll bet they had a good life here.”

  o0o

  In the year and a half since then, Dan had done a lot of work on the house. He had taken up carpet and linoleum, laying bare the wood floor that had come to life under his touch. He had painted, paneled, sheetrocked, scrubbed, polished, replaced, and repaired. Roxie had been right beside him, doing whatever she could to help. She could handle a hammer and a paint brush better than some grown-ups Dan knew. A shared project like this was just what they needed to keep them busy, so they didn’t think too much about the loss they also shared.

  Even so, Dan sometimes heard her crying, although those occasions were less frequent now. And sometimes he still felt like his guts were being ripped out. Again, it didn’t happen as often as it had in the past.

  For some reason, that bothered him almost as much as the grief. How could losing Erica not hurt as bad as it once had? It was supposed to hurt. The pain wasn’t meant to go away. If it did, that meant…

  He didn’t want to think about what it meant.

  Sometimes he thought about the upper hall instead. Something was off about it. His architect’s eye—or maybe his construction guy’s eye—had noticed that almost right away, but he had never been able to figure out exactly what it was. To be honest, he hadn’t devoted a lot of time to the question. Raising Roxie and taking care of work kept him busy. But there were moments when the little mystery was a welcome distraction.

  He wasn’t thinking about it at all today. He was thinking about mice and Melissa Logan, and about Christmas. This would be the third Christmas since Erica’s death. Since she had passed away not long before the holiday, the first one had been miserable for both Dan and Roxie. They had tried to carry on but had wound up ignoring the occasion for the most part. Then the second Christmas had come not long after the first anniversary of Erica’s death, so that one had been very subdued as well.

  Dan was determined he wasn’t going to let his daughter keep on moping through every holiday season from now on, though. This year they would do it right. They would have a tree in the living room, as soon as he got around to getting one, and they had been putting up lights and decorations outside. As he pulled up the driveway next to the house, he said, “You ought to get a couple of little Santa hats and put them on those mice. That would be really cute, don’t you think?”

  “Brewster and Chuck wouldn’t leave them on,” Roxie said, shaking her head.

  “They might for a minute or two. Long enough for you to take their picture. It would make a good Christmas card. We could make ‘em on the computer.”

  “It kind of would, wouldn’t it?”

  “We can give it a try,” Dan said.

  The past two years, they hadn’t sent out cards. That had always been one of Erica’s favorite Christmas activities. The three of them had always sat down together to sign the cards personally, just as soon as Roxie was old enough to print her name. It was time to start doing that again.

  Holding on to the pain in his heart and soul might be the right thing for him to do, but Roxie had to get past it. She still had her whole life in front of her.

  The one-car garage wasn’t attached to the house. Dan parked and got out. He took the bags of food and bedding and Roxie’s backpack while she carried the cage into the house. She didn’t seem to want to let go of it. She smiled at the mice and asked, “Do you two want to be Santa’s elves? You’re going to look so adorable!”

  Dan had to grin at the joy he heard in his daughter’s voice.

  He had already wrapped up his work for the day, so he didn’t have to go back to the office. Most of the time he was able to work from home anyway, so during school breaks like this he took Roxie with him when he had to go in. She didn’t mind sitting in his office reading or playing games for a couple of hours. He had managed to almost entirely avoid leaving her with babysitters, and he wanted to keep it that way.

  “Take Brewster and Chuck into the utility room,” he told her. “Then come back and get their stuff. I’ll leave it here on the hall table with your backpack.”

  “Okay, Dad.” She went toward the utility room in the back of the house, still talking animatedly to the mice.

  Dan was a little surpris
ed he had come up with the idea of dressing up the mice for a Christmas picture. That was the sort of thing that Erica would have done. She’d loved Christmas and once Roxie came along, the holiday was even better. Christmas and kids just went together.

  He went into his home office to check his email, and as he did, he opened one of the websites playing Christmas music and started humming along with it. He had to answer several emails, and between that and the music, an hour went by without him really noticing.

  Roxie came into the office and asked, “Can we go to the mall?”

  “What for?”

  “To look for Santa hats or elf hats for Brewster and Chuck. You were the one who suggested it,” she added as if he were trying to get out of taking her.

  “Sure, we can do that,” Dan told her. He closed the computer and stood up. “Come on. We’ll pick up some pizza for supper while we’re out.”

  Dan tried to see to it that they ate healthy most of the time, for Roxie’s sake…but there was no point in being fanatical about these things.

  Most of the stores in the mall had had their Christmas merchandise out since before Halloween, so things had already been pretty well picked over. Also, Dan didn’t really have any idea where to start looking for mouse-sized Christmas headgear. They wound up going to one of the stores next to the mall that sold pet food and accessories, and that was where they found a couple of Santa hats that Roxie thought would fit Brewster and Chuck. By the time they picked up the pizza and got home, night was settling down. That was all right with Dan, because it meant some people had already turned on their Christmas lights, and he always enjoyed looking at the brilliant, festive displays. So did Roxie, who ooh-ed and ahh-ed at decorations she had already seen a dozen times.

  When they walked into the big old house, Dan carried the pizza to the kitchen while Roxie went to show the mice the hats she had bought them. Dan had just set the pizza box on the counter, or else he would have dropped it when Roxie screamed.

  “Dad!” she cried. “They’re gone!”

  Dan ran into the utility room and found her staring in horror at the empty cage. The door was open a few inches, plenty wide enough for a couple of small mice to have climbed out.

  “What in the world—wasn’t the door fastened?”

  “I…I thought it was! I had it open earlier because I…I wanted to play with them, but then I put them back in the cage and I thought I fastened it…”

  She dissolved into sobs.

  Dan knelt beside her, put his arms around her, and cradled her against him. “It’s all right,” he told her. “They’ve got to be around here somewhere. We’ll find them.”

  “But the utility room door was open! They…they could be anywhere in the house! They could have gotten out!”

  “No, all the doors and windows were closed. They have to still be in here—”

  “They could have run out the door when we came in, and we never noticed them! A cat’s going to get them, or a dog!”

  Well, probably, if they had been unlucky enough to escape, Dan thought, but he wasn’t going to say that to Roxie. Instead he said, “Let’s just start looking, okay? The sooner we start looking, the sooner we find them, right?”

  “But…but…you don’t understand,” Roxie said miserably. “I’m not even supposed to have them!”

  Dan put his hands on his daughter’s shoulders and moved her back a little. For a long moment, he looked at her in silence, then he said, “What do you mean you’re not supposed to have them?”

  Sniffling, she said, “I…I couldn’t stand not seeing them for two whole weeks. So I thought if I told you that I…I was supposed to bring them home with me…”

  “You mean you thought that if you lied to me, I’d be stupid enough to believe it.”

  “No! Honest, Dad, I—”

  “Little bit late to be claiming honesty,” Dan pointed out. That was true, but he immediately regretted saying it anyway since Roxie started to sob.

  He went on, “All right, all right, honey, take it easy. We’ll worry about why you did it and why you thought you could get away with it later. Right now, you start looking for those mice, and I’ll call Miss Logan and tell her what happened.”

  “Do…do you have to?”

  “Well, yeah. She’s bound to be worried about the little guys. She doesn’t know you took them. All she knows is that they disappeared from her classroom.”

  Roxie wiped her nose with the back of her hand and said, “I never thought about that.”

  “Everything you do affects other people. You want to make sure you help as many as you can and don’t hurt any more than you have to.”

  She nodded and wiped away more tears. Dan rose to his feet and was reaching for his phone when it buzzed in his pocket.

  “Timing,” he muttered when he took it out and saw that the caller was Melissa. He thumbed the answer icon and said, “I was just about to call you.”

  “Was it about the mice?” she asked.

  “Great minds think alike.”

  “Please tell me you have them.”

  Dan looked at Roxie, who was scurrying around a little like a mouse herself, moving everything she could in the utility room to look behind it. He thought about telling Melissa that Brewster and Chuck were with him and Roxie and that everything was fine, but that would mean lying to her.

  He had already lied to her—and to himself—when he asked her out and made her think he was ready to move on after Erica’s death. He didn’t want to lie to her again.

  “They were here—”

  “Oh, thank goodness! Did Roxie tell you she was supposed to bring them home for the holidays?”

  “How did you know that?” Dan asked.

  “I didn’t really know it, but when they disappeared, that seemed like something that could have happened. And I’m not surprised that Roxie was the one behind it. I know how fond she is of those little guys—Wait a minute. Did you say they were there? Where are they now?”

  Dan grimaced even though Melissa couldn’t see that through the phone. “Well, they’re still here in the house somewhere—they have to be—but they’re not exactly in their cage anymore…”

  “You let them out?”

  Dan bristled slightly at the accusing tone in her voice. “They got out. It wasn’t intentional. Roxie and I are looking for them right now. I’m sure we’ll find them any minute…”

  Roxie turned to him with a look of despair on her face. They’re not here! she mouthed.

  He turned the phone away for his mouth and whispered, “Well, go look somewhere else.”

  Of course, that didn’t keep Melissa from hearing what he said. “I’m going to come over there and help you search,” she told him.

  He started to say that wasn’t necessary, but then he thought about how she probably had a sentimental attachment to the mice, too. He said, “Sure, that would be fine. Thank you. And I’m really sorry about this.”

  “You didn’t know any better. Roxie fooled you.”

  “Yeah, well, I should have checked with you before we left with the little…with the mice. But don’t worry, they can’t have gotten far. We’ll probably find them before you even get here.”

  “I hope so. I’ll see you in a little while.”

  Dan slipped the phone back in his pocket. Roxie had hurried out of the utility room. He went after her and called, “Roxie? Where’d you go?”

  “I’m up here!” she called from the upstairs hall. “I thought I heard something!”

  He started to tell her that the mice couldn’t have gone upstairs, but then he thought, why not? Mice could climb. Those stairs would have been a pretty formidable ascent for them, but if they had gotten out of their cage soon after Roxie left them in the utility room, they would have had plenty of time to reach the second floor.

  Then Roxie let out a little shriek and cried, “There’s a mouse hole!”

  They hadn’t had time to chew a hole in the wall, Dan thought. Had they? Surely not. But
honestly, he didn’t know how long it would take a mouse to chew through the wood, and there were two of them, so they could take turns or maybe even work at the job at the same time, if they were smart enough. Who knew with mice?

  It was worth taking a look, he decided. He started up the stairs and called to Roxie, “All right, I’m coming.”

  He hoped it was just an old hole he had overlooked. If Brewster and Chuck were in the walls, that wouldn’t be good. He might not ever be able to find them.

  Roxie was on her knees at the far end of the hall, bent over trying to look through a tiny hole in the baseboard. She had moved aside the table that usually sat there with a vase of artificial flowers on it. She glanced up at Dan and said excitedly, “I think they’re in there!”

  “Let me take a look,” he told her. She moved aside, and he hunkered in front of the hole.

  It certainly appeared to be a mouse hole. Dan was no expert at such matters, but it seemed to him the hole wasn’t new enough for Brewster and Chuck to have gnawed it out.

  “What did Miss Logan say?” Roxie asked, sounding worried again. “Why was she calling you? Was it about the mice?”

  “That’s right, she was looking for them. She’d figured out that one of you kids must have taken the mice, and I got the impression she was calling the parents of everybody she thought might have done it.”

  “Oh.” Roxie looked down at the floor. “I’m in a lot of trouble, aren’t I?”

  “You’re in some trouble. Just how much, Melissa and I will have to figure out later. Right now, let’s just concentrate on finding Brewster and Chuck.”

  Roxie pointed at the wall and said, “They’re in there, I just know they are.”

  “How’d you find this hole?” he asked her. The table had been here since shortly after they had moved into the house. Dan thought putting it there with some flowers on it would brighten up the hall, which came to an odd dead end here. In fact, this was the area that hadn’t really seemed right to him ever since they moved in.