The Pet-Sitting Peril (3 page)

Her apartment was bigger than Mrs. Sylvan's or Mr. Haggard's, and in some ways it was nicer than either of the others. It was neat, though not so much so that a person felt uncomfortable in it. There were books in the bookcases, papers neatly folded on the coffee table, and a plate of cookies set out for him.

“Help yourself,” she said. “They're oatmeal-spice, with raisins.”

Nick bit into one appreciatively, sinking onto the couch next to Fred. Fred was a cat, too; but he didn't resemble Eloise in the slightest. He was gray-and-white striped, and big; where Eloise was half fur, Fred was mostly cat. He rubbed against Nick's leg and purred when Nick stroked him.

“I've been thinking,” Mrs. Monihan said now, regarding him through her glasses. “I'm
going to be gone a whole month. That's an awful long time to leave Maynard and Fred here alone all the time. I mean, even with you coming in a couple of times a day to see to their food and water, and taking Maynard outside a bit, they'll get terribly lonesome. So I wondered, if maybe you couldn't stay here?”

Nick strangled on a cookie crumb. When he'd stopped coughing, he said, “What?”

She leaned toward him, then reached up to adjust her hearing aid. “I'm sorry, I forgot to turn it back up again. When those young men had that music on so loud, I turned it off. What was it you said, dear?”

“I said, what did you want me to do?”

“Stay here. Sleep here, in the apartment. Not every night, but once in a while. Maybe two or three nights a week. It would mean so much to Fred and Maynard to have company. There's plenty of food for late-night snacks. You could just come up after you walk Rudy.”

“I don't know,” Nick said slowly. “I'm not sure my folks would let me.”

She looked so disappointed he almost relented and agreed to do it, though he didn't
really want to. And probably his mother wouldn't allow it anyway.

“Would you ask, dear? I'd pay you extra, of course. Couldn't expect you to do it for nothing. Say, double the amount we agreed on for the other things you'll be doing if you'll stay two or three nights a week.”

Double. Nick considered that, chewing his second cookie. Gosh, that would make quite a difference in how much he could contribute to the Disneyland fund. And if he kept really busy over here, he wouldn't have to help Dad paint the house.

Nick liked his father very much, and he knew he was an excellent teacher; all the other kids liked him, too. Only he wasn't very mechanical, nor good with his hands; the only other time he'd painted anything, that Nick could remember, was two years ago at his grandparents' farm, when Mr. Reed had painted the chicken house. Grandma had muttered under her breath that if she'd known he was going to make such a production out of it, she'd have been tempted to get rid of the chickens instead.

“I don't know. I'll have to ask,” Nick told Mrs. Monihan now.

“Oh, I do hope they'll give you permission. It isn't,” she said earnestly, “as if you'd be alone in the house, or anything like that. Those young men are just across the hall—you can tell when they're home because you can hear the music—and there is Mrs. Sylvan downstairs, and Mr. Haggard, and Mr. Griesner is at the back of the house. You can tell your parents that.”

  •  •  •  

He didn't get around to discussing the matter at home right away, though, because when he arrived there a short time later the place was a scene of chaos.

The front door stood wide open, and Winnie was looking out, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, from which the filling oozed down her arm. Beyond her, the telephone was ringing, and the two little boys that Molly took care of were jumping up and down on the couch, squealing. His mother was shouting something down from upstairs. What was she doing home?

Winnie stepped aside so that Nick could enter, pausing to lick a glob of jelly off her wrist. Through the dining room windows Nick saw that yellow paint had been spilled on the tarp covering the bushes next to the house, and there was nobody on the ladder. When he moved a little, he saw the paint can lying on its side with a yellow puddle around it on the cement.

“What's going on?” Nick demanded, and moved out of the way when his sister Molly raced in to take the children off the couch and his mother ran into the kitchen to answer the phone. He heard her say, “We don't know yet how bad it is. We're heading for the hospital now.”

“Hey, Winnie! Is it Dad? Did he fall off the ladder or something?”

Winnie shook her head. “No, Daddy's not hurt. Well, he did come down the ladder so fast he spilled the paint, and he hit the corner of the house and skinned his elbow, but he's all right.”

Dad said when Winnie grew up she was going to be a real beauty. Right now she looked
the same as all the rest of the Reeds: straight dark hair, big brown eyes, and a sprinkling of freckles across her nose. Nick had wondered how his father knew what she was going to look like when she grew up until he saw a picture of his mother when she was eight years old. Ah, Winnie was going to look the way his mother did now, that's what Dad had meant. And since Winnie was a girl, it wouldn't matter so much if she didn't get very tall.

“What's going on then?” Nick asked her now, and had to wait until she'd swallowed a bite of the sandwich.

“It's Grandma Tate,” she explained. “She fell down the stairs at home, and they think she's got a broken hip.”

“Oh, wow. Broken hips are terrible for old people. What're you doing here with the monsters?” he demanded of Molly as she herded the two little boys out of the living room toward him.

“I came when I heard about Grandma, and I had to bring them with me. Nick, see what you can do about that spilled paint, will you? I'm going on back over to the Franklins'; that
house is used to these kids' wild ways, and this one isn't. You and Dad ready to go, Mom?”

“Yes. I don't know how long we'll be at the hospital; until they get the X-rays and tell us what's going to happen, I suppose. Nick, dear, Charles is working, and Molly won't be home until after six, so see to something to eat for lunch, all right? Oh, and call Mr. Sundling and tell him I won't be back to work today.”

Mrs. Reed worked in an office downtown, and the rest of the family were used to doing for themselves when she wasn't around. After she and Mr. Reed left, and Molly had taken the Franklin kids home, Nick put out bread and cold meat and peanut butter, and he and Winnie, and Barney, when he came home, helped themselves.

Barney had a couple of lawn cutting jobs that afternoon, so after lunch Nick did the best he could with the mess in the patio. It took him quite a while to get things cleaned up, and then, for lack of anything better to do, he did a little painting himself. He didn't mind doing something like that when the whole family wasn't around to tell him he was doing it
wrong. He could have gone to see Sam, of course, but he didn't want to leave Winnie alone, and besides, he wanted to wait and hear about Grandma.

Mrs. Reed didn't call back until late in the afternoon. Grandma was still being operated on, she said, so she and Mr. Reed would be having dinner at the hospital. Nick opened a can of soup for Barney and Winnie and himself and made toasted cheese sandwiches to go with it. There was chocolate pudding in the refrigerator, and after they'd each had a dish, they decided that since there wouldn't be enough left to go around tomorrow when the whole family would be home, they might as well have another bowl.

Nick felt comfortably stuffed as he headed back toward Hillsdale Street. He hoped Rudy would be content to walk instead of run, at least until Nick's supper had settled.

There was a U-Haul truck in front of the house next door, and Nick slowed to watch with interest. Somebody was moving in, he saw at once, a family with a girl about his own age and a boy about ten. The whole
family was carrying boxes except the boy, who was hauling coiled garden hoses around the side of the house. It was almost a twin to 1230 except that it had been more recently painted and didn't have as much fancy colored glass in the windows.

The girl turned from the truck with a box labeled
Books
just as Nick came abreast. She was small and slim, with dark hair that blew loose around her shoulders. She was wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt and blue shorts, with blue-and-white running shoes like his own, except hers weren't falling apart.

She hesitated for only a few seconds, then gave him a faint smile and went on toward the house.

Cute, Nick thought. Why hadn't he had nerve enough to speak to her? Say hi, anyway, and maybe find out her name. Barney would have found out her name.

He kicked a pop can off the sidewalk, then picked it up to throw in the trash. Shoot, he wasn't ever going to be much like Barney. Actually, he didn't want to be, even if Barney could talk to girls.

As Nick turned onto the walk to the Hillsdale Apartments, the boy next door called out, “Melody, where am I supposed to put this junk?”

“Leave the hose at the side of the house,” the girl said, “right by the outside faucet. Put the toolbox around in the garage, I guess. Oh, and Dickie, Dad said to get those empty boxes out of the way. Stack them in the alley for now.”

Melody, Nick thought, going up the steps. What a pretty name. He said it again to himself as he unlocked the front door. Melody.

Rudy heard him coming and whined behind the door of apartment one, but that wasn't where he was going, yet. First he had to give Eloise her medicine. He found the key to Mrs. Sylvan's door and let himself in.

Eloise was lying on the sofa. She lifted her head to gaze at him with enigmatic eyes. Nick liked that word. It seemed to him that everybody had enigmatic eyes; you couldn't tell what they were thinking, most of the time. Maybe it was just as well, if they were all thinking what a shrimp he was.

“Hi, Eloise,” he said. She didn't blink or move. “Time for your medicine,” he told her, and got the bottle and the dropper.

Eloise stayed where she was until he approached within a foot or so of her, and then she suddenly shot past him with a decidedly unfriendly sound.

“Hey, come on. You're supposed to take this stuff so you'll get over whatever's wrong with you. Come on, Eloise. It's important.” He didn't feel self-conscious about talking to animals. His grandma Reed, who lived on a farm, talked to animals all the time. If she could do it, so could he.

Only Eloise wasn't particularly receptive to his small talk. He stalked her through the unnaturally neat apartment, speaking gently all the time, until he cornered her in the bathroom. Maybe this wasn't going to be as easy as he'd thought.

All he had to do was hold her still, get the dropper full of the medicine, and squirt it into her mouth. Only he had a devil of a time catching her, and she scratched him. Luckily he'd had sense enough to close the door, and the
bathroom was too small for her to get far away from him. This time he got a towel and wrapped her in it; she didn't like it, but she was a lot smaller than Rudy and he managed to subdue her inside the wrappings. Then he had to pry her mouth open with his fingers while holding her tight against him with that same arm, and used the other hand to administer the medicine with the eyedropper.

“There, that wasn't so bad, was it?” He loosened his grip on the towel and the indignant cat shot away from him, snarling her fury. Nick wondered uneasily how much harder it would be to administer the stuff the next time. Maybe he'd see if Sam would come over and help him.

“I sure hope you get well soon,” Nick told the cat as he opened the bathroom door and saw her streak past him to hide under a chair in the living room. “If I'd known how hard this was going to be, I'd have asked for twice as much money to do it.”

Eloise glowered at him. He decided to ignore her. He washed off the scratch and put an antiseptic on it from the medicine chest. It
wasn't bleeding enough so that he felt the need of a Band-Aid over it.

“See you next time, I guess,” he said to the cat as he headed for the door. And that was where he made his mistake.

He turned his back on Eloise and opened the door into the hallway, and the next thing he knew a big white puff of fur ran between his legs, nearly knocking him down, and Eloise disappeared.

He was so busy trying to keep from braining himself by falling against the doorjamb that he didn't even see which way she went.

Breathing through his mouth, Nick stood in the dim hallway, listening. He didn't hear a thing. He'd told Mrs. Sylvan that he liked cats, but he was beginning to think that in Eloise's case he might make an exception.

Which way had she gone? Not outside, she had to be trapped in the house because the front door was closed, but it was a big house.

Nick walked toward the rear of the place until he came to the manager's apartment. Behind the door he could hear the television—a ball game. There was no way Nick could see
that the cat could have gotten in there, nor found a way directly outside, so he retraced his steps.

In Mr. Haggard's apartment, Rudy whined again, recognizing him. “Be back in a while, boy,” Nick called, and looked up the stairs. Eloise could be up there, or she could have hidden in one of the dark corners down here. The light was on again, but the illumination didn't extend to the area beneath the stairs. What was that, a closet under there?

The door was closed, a door painted the same dull brown as the paneling that ran around the bottom four feet of the walls below the faded wallpaper, so it didn't seem likely the cat could have gotten into the closet. Still, the door didn't fit well at the bottom. Nick tried the door to see, and it came open easily.

No sign of Eloise, though the crowded little cubbyhole was full of plenty of other stuff. Old paint cans, boxes labeled
CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS
and
INCOME TAX RECORDS, 1969 TO 1975.
There was a faint smell that made Nick frown and reach for the small red can in one corner.