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Authors: Willo Davis Roberts

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BOOK: The Pet-Sitting Peril
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It seemed to Nick that a long time had elapsed and he continued to breathe heavily, though it couldn't have been more than ten minutes since they'd seen that first spark in the darkness. Mr. Haggard, leaning on his metal walker, had managed to get down the steps onto the sidewalk, where some of the neighbors stood with him, talking.

Sam was nowhere in sight. He must have gone back to where he could see the fire, Nick thought, and took Maynard on around the house. He hoped Fred was looking out for himself, as Mrs. Monihan had said he could.

There were two fire trucks and about a dozen firemen. Their hoses were a lot bigger
than the little garden hoses Nick and the neighbors had used; within minutes, the flames were extinguished, though the firemen continued to play water over the blackened debris, just to make sure.

Mr. Jamison was coiling up his own hose, and he looked at Nick in the light from the fire trucks. “Good thing you moved fast, young fellow,” he said. “If that roof had gone up before the firemen got here, they might have lost the house. Not to mention the place
we
just bought.” He glanced at the house next door, only a few feet separating the adjoining walls. “I only hope Dickie wasn't in any way responsible for this mess.”

“Me? Hey, Dad, I haven't been out of the house since before supper!” Dickie wiped at his nose, leaving a smudge from the soot that had settled there. “And I'm smart enough not to monkey around with matches, anyway.”

One of the firemen came toward them, his face rather grim. “Looks like what burned is mostly junk, except for this back wall. They'll have to replace that. Lucky it wasn't a lot worse. Anybody know why there was so much
trash back here? Surely the alley isn't always that full of burnable stuff, is it? There's no burning allowed in these alleys, you know. There isn't room to get a barrel far enough from the backs of the houses.”

“I don't think anybody was deliberately burning anything,” Mr. Jamison said. “At least, nobody in my family was. We did haul a lot of packing boxes out here earlier this week. There were too many for the regular garbage collection, but someone was coming for them tomorrow. I had them all stacked behind our own place, until they could be hauled away.”

“Some of them were over here,” Nick said slowly. It made him nervous, the way the fireman was looking at everybody, and he didn't want to cast suspicion on anybody. But it seemed important to tell everything he knew, in case the fire department could figure out what had actually happened, so it wouldn't happen again. “When the fire went up, I saw the boxes. Stacked up all across the back wall.”

The fireman's eyes locked on Nick's. His skin had a reddish tint because of the lights
that still flashed on the trucks behind him. “You the one turned in the alarm, son?”

“No, that was my friend Sam.” Nick gestured toward him. “We both saw it at the same time, and I knew where the people next door had left their hose, so I ran for that. Sam turned in the alarm and warned the people in the house.”

Mr. Griesner's fuzzy head materialized out of the shadows. “Didn't warn me. I didn't know a thing until I heard the fire trucks. Boy, I don't know what Mr. Hale is going to say about this. He hates to spend money to fix the place up, but he's sure going to have to rebuild that wall.”

“You live in the back apartment, sir?”

“Yeah, that's right. I'm the manager,” Mr. Griesner said. “My place would have been next to go, after the garage.”

“These boys did a good job,” Mr. Jamison put in. “Moved fast, did the right things.”

“How did the fire start?” the fireman wanted to know. “Anybody see what happened?”

For a moment there was only silence and the small sounds of the drowned fire. The
smell was sharp, acrid, and it hurt Nick's nose and throat. He swallowed.

“Sam and I were coming across the end of the alley, there, walking Rudy. He's Mr. Haggard's dog, from apartment one, in the front. We noticed the streetlight was out on the corner, and the one at the end of the next block, too, so the alley was darker than usual. Rudy barked and jerked me sideways and took off down the alley as if he were after something, and we saw the sparks. It was only a minute—seconds, really—before the fire was all over the place.”

The fireman—Nick finally recognized him as Mr. Conrad, who sometimes took up the collection in church—was looking at him and Sam in a way that made Nick shift uneasily from one foot to the other. Not as if Nick were being helpful, but as if he were under suspicion!

“You didn't see what caused the sparks?” Mr. Conrad asked.

This time it was Sam who answered. “Just a little flame, at first, and then a whole lot of fire. We couldn't see what started it.”

“And you say the dog barked at something,
or someone, in the alley? Did he usually do that? Bark at people, say, if there was someone around?”

“He never barked at anybody before that I know of,” Nick said. “Not while I was walking him. Even when we passed other dogs that barked at him, Rudy didn't. He'd chase cats, though,” he felt compelled to say. “He could have been after a cat when he pulled away from me. We didn't hear anything.”

“No feet on the gravel, nothing like that?”

“No, sir. Not that I noticed.”

And then Mr. Conrad said something that made Nick both alarmed and angry, all at once. “You boys didn't start it, did you? Trying out a smoke back here, something like that? Playing with matches?”

Nick was so stunned that for a minute he couldn't reply at all. It was Sam who yelped a protest. “Hey! No, we never did anything like that!”

“Better to admit it now, if you did,” Mr. Conrad told them, and he didn't sound friendly the way he did when he greeted Nick's father at church on Sunday mornings. “Because our
investigators will be out here to find out what happened. We can't have people setting fires, and we try to find out how every fire got started so we can prevent future ones. I know boys sometimes snitch a few cigarettes and try smoking, and once in a while they drop a match or a cigarette and start a fire when they don't mean to.”

“Well,
we
didn't,” Sam said, sounding indignant. “My folks would about kill me if I ever did that, and besides, I think it's stupid to smoke. Or play with matches, either. We're not little kids, to do something dumb like that.”

Mr. Conrad asked more questions, and he wrote down their names and addresses, which struck them both as ominous. Not that he could prove anything against them, because of course they hadn't done anything wrong, but it was most uncomfortable to be under suspicion.

Finally the firemen turned off the flashing red lights and the neighbors drifted back to their own homes. The Jamisons were among the last to leave.

“I still don't understand how our boxes got over against the back of the house next door,”
Mr. Jamison said, sounding troubled. “I hope it wasn't because someone moved them just to start a fire in them.”

“Why would anyone do that?” Mrs. Jamison asked. She was a pretty woman, looking much like Melody, though now that the trucks had gone it was too dark to see her.

“I don't know. Well, I hope that's the end of the excitement. And I still think you did a fine job,” Mr. Jamison told Nick. “A good thing you noticed where Dickie left the hose. Come on, let's go inside; it's too cold out here to stand around in our shirtsleeves.”

And so at last only Nick and Sam were left, holding Maynard.

“Criminy,” Sam said. “Imagine, blaming us! If we hadn't seen the fire and turned in the alarm, the whole house could have burned down.”

“Yeah,” Nick agreed. “Listen, Sam, I have to find Rudy. Let's walk through the alley and see if he's down there somewhere.”

“What if there's somebody there?” Sam asked. “I mean, we know
we
didn't start any fire, but somebody did. Either accidentally or
on purpose. Nobody ran out of the alley on this end, but somebody could have gone the other way.”

“We didn't hear anybody,” Nick reminded him. “Nobody could run on the gravel without making some noise.”

“Rudy didn't make much noise. I'll bet somebody who was barefooted wouldn't have, either.”

“Why would anybody be barefooted, when it's cool enough to wear a jacket?” Nick asked, and then, more slowly, said, “You mean someone deliberately started the fire and was barefoot so he could move quietly? But why would anybody do that, Sam?”

“Why did somebody move the packing boxes from behind the house next door over to this one? They weren't over here when you went through the alley this morning, were they?”

“No. Well, a couple of small ones, but that's all.” Nick frowned in the darkness. “Sam, you think somebody really did it on purpose? Not just accidentally?”

It was hard to believe that anybody would do such a thing. Yet Nick knew such things
did
happen. More and more often, when the TV news reported a major fire, the word
arson
came up. And arson meant a fire that was deliberately set.

They began to walk down the alley, and Nick whistled and called “Hey, Rudy! Here, boy! Here, Rudy!”

Maynard trotted along on his little leash; like the bigger dog, he enjoyed poking his nose into the refuse set out for tomorrow's trash collection, but when he tried to go too far in the wrong direction, it was easy to pull him back. Suddenly Maynard whined and tugged Nick to one side, and there was a joyful barking reply.

“It's Rudy! Here, Sam, take Maynard. Where are you, boy? Behind the fence?”

Now Rudy whined and leaped happily against the picket fence; his warm rough tongue licked at Nick's fingers when they were pressed between the boards. Nick groped along, feeling for a gate and not finding one.

“You stupid dog, how'd you get in there?” Perplexed, Nick glanced toward the lighted house set in the middle of the yard. “There are people up, but to get to their door we'd have to
go all the way around the block. And they might not like finding out they've got a horse-sized dog in their yard.”

“There must be a gate somewhere,” Sam said, and joined in the effort to find it. “If he could jump over it to get in, you'd think he could jump over it to get out.”

Rudy, however, though he tried to reach them, didn't jump nearly high enough to get over the fence. And if there was a hole where he could have crawled under, Nick couldn't find it.

Finally Sam gave a cry of triumph. “Here's a gate! Only it's locked on the inside. My foot's too big to fit between the boards, and I can't reach the latch. See if you can step in there, Nick, and reach up and unlock it.”

Nick's running shoe would fit between the slats in the fence if he forced it. He hoped he wasn't stuck there. He reached up and found the latch, a difficult one to manipulate without seeing it, and then heard the welcome
click
as it gave way.

Rudy bounded out to meet them, knocking Maynard over so that the little mop dog yipped
once, then threw himself with delight against his rescuers.

“Down!” Nick commanded sharply. “Sit!”

Rudy sat . . . right on Maynard. This time Maynard
ki-yied
, and Sam untangled the dogs while Nick got the gate relocked and pried his foot out of the fence. Just as he jerked free, a door opened in the house inside the yard and a man's voice called out, “What's going on out there? Is somebody running through my yard again? Doggone it, I'm going to call the cops if people don't stay out of here! Why you think we lock the gate, if we wanted people in our yard?”

Nick wasn't sure why he felt guilty, but he did. Was that what had happened? Had Rudy chased someone from the scene of the fire and jumped over the fence after him, only to be trapped because he couldn't unlock the gate and didn't find his way out the front?

Rudy's chain dragged across his foot, and he grabbed for the leather loop at the end of it. “Come on, let's get out of here,” Nick muttered, and they all turned and ran.

The smell of wet burned wood was a strong
reminder of the near catastrophe as they walked back down the alley and to the street. Nick was getting cold, and he zipped his sweatshirt and pulled up the hood, as well. Someday, he thought, he was going to try living in a climate where it stayed warm in the evenings in the summertime, the kind of places Sam talked about. He had lived in Indiana and in Nevada and Texas, before his family moved to Northern California.

His guilt increased when he saw that old Mr. Haggard was still waiting on the front porch. The outside light had once more been replaced, and Mr. Griesner was even now on a ladder, screwing a new bulb into the fixture in the entry hall.

“We found him. Somehow he got inside a yard and couldn't get back out until we unlatched the gate,” Nick said. Up close, he saw that the old man's face was deeply creased with fatigue or pain. “I'll come back after I've put Maynard in his apartment and make you some cocoa, shall I?”

“That would be very kind of you,” Mr. Haggard said. He smiled, reaching out a hand
to Rudy's big head. “I knew you wouldn't let anything happen to him, boy.”

It made Nick uncomfortable, because he really had no control over what happened to Rudy. And he still wondered how the big Airedale had gotten behind a locked gate. All the pets in his care were still safe, though. He was sure glad about that.

Fred had returned and followed them into the house. He and Maynard headed for their brightly colored bowls to eat and drink, and Nick locked the door behind them. At Mrs. Sylvan's door he could see a crack of light, so she had come home, too. He was glad the fire hadn't spread so he'd have had to get Eloise out of there; he didn't know how he could have kept her from running away.

It was only after he'd fixed Mr. Haggard's cocoa, and the boys had each shared a cup with him, that they emerged from apartment one, ready to go home. His folks would be wondering why he was so late, and Sam's would, too.

BOOK: The Pet-Sitting Peril
8.78Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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