The Missing Dog Is Spotted

by Jessica Scott Kerrin

  “But Mr. Fester won’t be able to keep Buster at the seniors’ residence,” Loyola said.

  “No, but at least he’ll know that Buster is safe. And we’ll work hard to find his dog a good home. I can promise him that,” she said.

  Trevor could tell that she had said the standard line about finding a good home many times, just like he said his standard line about time to fly. They were both trying to reassure others.

  Only sometimes their lines didn’t work.

  “See you next week,” he barely replied.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” Mr. Easton announced that Friday at the beginning of their language arts class. “How about we take our books outside to the soccer field to read?”

  The students whooped, Trevor included. Everyone headed outdoors.

  The class scattered across the field, each student choosing a spot on the soft new grass. They cracked open their books and read by the sunlight, which burned warm on their backs. Other than birds singing and the occasional squeaking clothesline, there were no interruptions for the next half hour. Then Mr. Easton gathered the class near the goalpost to read another chapter of The Science Fair Incident. It was the part where a backyard rocket launch goes terribly wrong.

  Trevor leaned back on his elbows, his legs outstretched and his eyes half-closed, listening to the story. Mr. Easton was an excellent reader. He would change his voice when he spoke the dialogue from different characters, and he knew exactly when to pause, making the story extra suspenseful.

  Mr. Easton read until almost the end of class, and when he closed his book, he said, “Looks like we have an extra student today.”

  Trevor opened his eyes and sat up to see what Mr. Easton was talking about.

  All eyes in the class were turned to the fence beside the soccer field. Trevor followed their gaze.

  Buster was sitting on the other side of the fence listening to the story, his head tilted, the stuffed ladybug at his feet. When he noticed that the reading had ended and that all the students were now staring at him, he grabbed his toy and bolted down the alley.

  Trevor gulped. He looked over at Loyola. She sadly shook her head.

  The same thing happened the following Tuesday morning when Mr. Easton offered to hold his class outside again. It was another blue-sky day with not a single cloud. The softest breeze occasionally fluttered the bright white pages of their books as the students read.

  This time Trevor kept a lookout for Buster, and across the soccer field, in another spot, Loyola was doing the same thing. Neither of them got much reading done. But when Mr. Easton gathered the students by the goalpost to read out loud the latest installment of The Science Fair Incident, Trevor fell into a pleasant trance, eyes half-closed, taking in all the details of the story as he floated against the blue sky. It was only when Mr. Easton closed his book at the end of class that Trevor came back to earth and spotted Buster.

  Once again, Buster sat by the fence with his toy listening to every word as if he enjoyed Mr. Easton’s company just as much as the students.

  When the reading ended, Buster disappeared on cue, but not before Mr. Easton noticed him in the audience.

  Trevor lingered on the field to see if Buster would reappear as the rest of the class went back inside the school. He waited until he and Mr. Easton were the last ones to leave.

  “Your family must be getting ready for the move,” Mr. Easton said to Trevor as they headed in.

  It was just like Mr. Easton to care about what was going on with each of his students.

  “Yes. Pretty much everything is in boxes,” Trevor said. “My parents are very efficient.”

  “I could use some packing tips,” Mr. Easton said. “I’ll be moving, too.”

  “What? Where?” Trevor asked.

  “My hometown. Ferndale.”

  “But you just got here,” Trevor said, who remembered that Mr. Easton had arrived at Queensview at the start of the school year, the same as he had.

  “I know. And I’ll miss this school very much, especially the students. But Ferndale’s my hometown. And there’s someone back there whom I hope to marry.”

  “Oh,” said Trevor, at a loss for words.

  He was surprised at how sad he felt, more sad than he really should be. After all, he was leaving Queensview Elementary, too. What difference would it make if Mr. Easton remained there or not?

  Then Trevor realized something. He had always liked to comfort himself with the thought that whenever he moved, he could always go back to the school and that it would be exactly the same, including the people he had left behind.

  With Mr. Easton moving, that comforting thought was gone. Queensview Elementary would never be the same, not without Mr. Easton. It made Trevor’s move feel much more permanent.

  “I wonder who that dog belongs to,” Mr. Easton said as they neared the back door of the school.

  “The dog with spots by the fence?” Trevor asked guiltily.

  “Yes. I’ve seen it hanging around school lately.”

  “You have?” Trevor asked, slowing his pace.

  Mr. Easton nodded. “When we read outside, and other times, too. I sometimes see it when I stand at the classroom window.” He held open the door for Trevor and added, “I don’t think it’s a stray.”

  “Why not?”

  “It wears a collar. It also carts around a toy. I think it’s lost.”

  “Lost?” Trevor repeated, his heart thumping in his chest, making it difficult to hear.

  “Maybe you should mention it at the animal shelter the next time you report for duty,” Mr. Easton suggested as they headed up the stairs to the second floor. “See if that dog’s owner has reported it missing.”

  “Good idea,” Trevor managed to say, his guilt stopping him from spilling Buster’s miserable story to Mr. Easton.

  Just before they got to the door of the classroom, Mr. Easton turned to Trevor.

  “Please don’t mention my move,” he said. “I’ll make that announcement to the class at the end of the day.”

  “They’re going to be sad,” Trevor said.

  “I know. But I’ve got a wonderful last assignment for them, and you can help.”

  “How?”

  “Have you thought about your time capsule? About what you’d like to put in it?” Mr. Easton asked.

  “No, not really,” Trevor admitted.

  Trevor surprised himself. When he was first chosen, he had been so excited by the idea of leaving something of himself behind at Queensview besides appearing in a few photographs for the yearbook. But with all his worries over Mr. Fester and Buster, he had mostly forgotten about the time capsule.

  “Well, I have an idea. Can you lend me some space in your locker?”

  “Sure,” Trevor said. He smiled at the honor. “What for?”

  “I’ll give you the details at the end of the day.”

  Trevor nodded happily. The sting of Mr. Easton’s move had been lessened. He took his seat in the front row. But before Mr. Easton sat at his desk, he paused at the classroom window and scanned the fence line.

  “Do you always eat the same thing for lunch?” Bertram asked Trevor as they sat at a table and unwrapped their sandwiches.

  Everyone except Miller. As usual, he started in reverse order by first peeling back the lid of his chocolate pudding and digging in.

  Trevor studied his plain cheese sandwich and shrugged.

  “My life’s a constant change,” he said. “So I like to know I can depend on lunch.”

  “How’s the move going?” Craig asked through his stuffed nose. His allergies were getting worse, now that they were well into spring.

  “The same as all the other moves,” Trevor said. “Time to fly,” he added automatically. He took a bite of his sandwich and chewed.

  He was still thinking about what Mr.
Easton had in store for his locker, so the next bit of conversation caught him completely off guard.

  “I saw the strangest thing in the cemetery as I was walking by this morning,” Bertram said. He leaned in as if he were about to tell a ghost story around a campfire. The only things missing were a starry night and him holding a flashlight up to his face.

  And the campfire.

  The other boys stopped eating their lunches to listen.

  “Where? Twillingate?” Trevor asked, catching up to the conversation.

  “Of course it was Twillingate,” Bertram said. “This town has only one cemetery.”

  “Oh. That’s why it’s so big,” Trevor said.

  “Was it the ghost?” Miller jumped in. “The one from the double gravestone with the missing words?”

  “Epitaph,” Noah corrected.

  “Sure. Epitaph. Was the ghost wandering around?” Miller asked eagerly.

  “No. It wasn’t a ghost. It was Mr. Creelman,” Bertram said.

  “Mr. Creelman? So what? He’s a volunteer groundskeeper there,” Craig said. “Along with all those other old guys. The Twillingate Cemetery Brigade.”

  “I know that,” Bertram said. “But he was by himself, and he was behaving very strangely.”

  “How do you mean?” Miller said.

  “Well, he was crouching behind gravestones and darting between them. Kind of like he was spying on something. Something up ahead.”

  “Spying? What would he be spying on?” Craig asked.

  “A ghost!” Miller announced. “I’m telling you! There’s a ghost in that cemetery. Everyone says so.”

  “I didn’t see a ghost,” Bertram insisted. “But I think something else was there. Only it was small. Smaller than the gravestones, anyway, because I couldn’t see it from where I stood on the sidewalk.”

  Trevor forced himself to ask.

  “Was it a dog?”

  “A dog? Maybe. But why would he be sneaking up on a dog?”

  “There are no dogs allowed in the cemetery,” Craig said. “There’s a big sign posted at the gate.”

  “Well, maybe that dog couldn’t read,” Noah said, smiling at his own joke.

  “I’m telling you. It was the ghost,” Miller insisted. He turned to Bertram. “Then what happened?”

  “I came to school.”

  “That’s it?!” Miller asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘that’s it?’ Mr. Creelman was sneaking around the cemetery. That’s very strange, don’t you think?”

  Miller polished off his chocolate pudding looking very disappointed about no ghost.

  Trevor could hardly take another bite of his sandwich. Mr. Creelman had spotted Buster. He was certain of it. He was trying to catch the dog. But then later that morning, Trevor had seen Buster by the school fence. So Mr. Creelman had been unsuccessful.

  Would Buster ever be caught? Would he ever find another home? Or would Trevor be forced to move away without knowing the fate of the spotted dog? That thought was unbearable.

  Trevor had to act. He had to do something to help Mr. Creelman catch Buster.

  But what?

  Then he remembered Buster by the school fence, sitting and patiently listening until Mr. Easton finished reading out loud. Just like the first Buster, this dog seemed to like being read to. If Mr. Creelman knew that, maybe he could read in the cemetery and lure Buster to him.

  “Excuse me,” he said to the others, and he went back to his classroom early, most of his lunch uneaten.

  Trevor dug out a clean sheet of paper from his desk and wrote a note to Mr. Creelman in his best handwriting. His plan was to tuck the note into the gate of the cemetery after school on his way home. Mr. Creelman would be sure to find it the next time he entered the cemetery with the rest of the Brigade on one of his missions.

  Dear Mr. Creelman, Trevor wrote. Buster likes to be read to, just like Mr. Fester’s first dog. Maybe you could read out loud in the cemetery. It might be easier to catch Buster if you did.

  Trevor read over his note. There was still plenty of white space. He thought he should add one more line of encouragement.

  Maybe you could read your book of epitaphs, like you did at the Queensview Mystery Book Club, he added, hoping that flattery might work.

  There was still a bit more white space. And Trevor desperately needed to clinch the deal.

  He thought back to when Mr. Creelman had visited their school with his blue bin of cemetery stuff and had finished off the class by reading one epitaph after another. Trevor recalled that there was a nice section of epitaphs written especially for pets. There was one in particular about a Dalmatian who had served as a heroic fire-station mascot.

  Trevor wrote, Maybe Buster would like the one about the fire-station mascot, because it was about a spotted dog, too. Sincerely, Trevor Fowler.

  Trevor read his note again. Satisfied, he carefully folded it and put it in his knapsack to be delivered later that day.

  It was almost the end of the last class of the afternoon, the late-day sun shining through the window, when Mr. Easton made his announcement. He started off by telling the students how much he had enjoyed his year with them, and how they had taught him rather than the other way around. Then he dropped his news.

  “I’m going to be leaving Queensview Elementary and moving back to Ferndale.”

  There were soft gasps all across the room.

  “I’ve been offered a teaching job there, and, well, Ferndale is where I grew up. I miss my hometown very much.”

  Trevor didn’t nod in agreement because there wasn’t a single place that he had lived long enough to call his hometown. But everyone else in the classroom seemed to know exactly what Mr. Easton was talking about. Their surprise quickly turned to sympathy.

  “Will you finish out the school year with us?” Loyola asked from the back of the room.

  “Absolutely,” Mr. Easton said. “And before the school year ends, I have one more assignment for you.”

  Everyone held their pens at the ready, waiting to take notes.

  “I would like each of you to write a short story, a true story, something that really happened to you during your time at Queensview. But I want it to be a story about a situation where something went wrong, something that you never got a chance to fix and may never get the chance to make right.”

  “Like what?” Miller asked.

  “Well, maybe you broke something at home and let your little brother or sister take the blame. Maybe your pet died and you never got the chance to say goodbye. Maybe you borrowed something very precious from a friend and then lost it. That kind of thing.”

  Noah said, “So you’re talking about an autobiography.”

  “Isn’t that like a diary? My sister has one,” Miller said. He turned in his seat to face the rest of the class. “Only hers has a lock,” he added bitterly.

  “Your sister has the right idea,” Mr. Easton said. “And like that diary with the lock, I won’t be reading your stories. In fact, no one will be reading your stories. That’s where Trevor’s time capsule comes in.”

  All eyes turned to Trevor.

  “What I want you to do is write about something difficult. Then you’ll put your story into an envelope and seal it. Trevor has agreed to provide space in his time capsule where you’ll put all your stories. And there they’ll be stored, safe and secure, for the next fifty years.”

  “So we’ll be writing something that no one else will read?” Craig repeated in awe. “Not for fifty years?”

  “Exactly,” Mr. Easton said. “That’s the most important part, so you’ll need to keep this in mind as you’re writing. That way you can be truly honest. And if you can be truly honest now, it will make you a much better writer for other projects.” He paused. “There’s one more thing. By writing about a bad situation, you might find
that you’ll feel better about it, even though you still can’t fix the problem. So if there’s one particular thing that’s troubling you the most, you should probably write about that. After all, you’ll never get a chance like this again.”

  Mr. Easton had been pacing back and forth at the front of the room while he spoke, but then he made his way over to the window. He took a moment to scan the fence line before returning his attention to the class.

  The students grew silent, pondering the assignment.

  Trevor had no trouble whatsoever coming up with what he would write about.

  Ten

  —

  A Likely Story

  WHEN TREVOR stepped outside after the last class of the day, a warm almost-summer breeze brushed against his face. Others bumped past him as he opened his knapsack. His note to Mr. Creelman was still there.

  He knew that coaching Mr. Creelman on how to capture Buster was a good idea, but he couldn’t help feeling out of sorts.

  It was guilt.

  It had to be the guilt.

  Maybe he should go back inside, see if he could track down Loyola. She might go with him to keep him company.

  But, no. She wouldn’t go with him — not without the dogs. Despite all their time together during their community service work, despite all the talks and all the laughs, even despite the trouble they were in now, he knew that she wouldn’t want to be seen walking alone with him. That’s how much she hated the tall jokes. And if Trevor was truly honest with himself, he hated the short jokes just as much.

  What a shame. For once, Trevor had spent enough time with someone to almost form a true friendship. If only their heights hadn’t been such an obstacle.

  Trevor took a deep breath and headed down the steps of the school on his own. But as he walked along the sidewalk, he was filled with feelings of regret. Up ahead, on the right, he could see the beginning of the ominous iron fence that surrounded the ancient cemetery, its bleak gray markers sprouting up from the bright green spring grass. But a bit beyond, on his side of the street just before the florist’s shop, was a large colorful sidewalk sign with the word Sale written in cheerful handwriting. It was placed in front of the used bookstore called A Likely Story.