Over an hour went by, during which Nickie could not stop thinking about Otis two floors above, needing his breakfast, needing to go outside, ready any second to start whining or barking. But Crystal, for once, wasn’t in a hurry.
At ten o’clock, she turned on the radio. “There ought to be some news,” she said. She stopped dashing around and sat down to listen. Nickie listened, too. “We are expecting an announcement from the White House at any moment,” said the newscaster. “The president’s deadline ran out yesterday, but so far there has been no word on the status of the situation.”
They kept listening, but no announcement came. There was a report about an earthquake somewhere, and a riot somewhere else, and then something about two movie stars getting married, and finally the announcer came back on and said that there was still no news about the tense international situation and that people should stay tuned.
“It’s odd,” said Crystal, flicking off the radio. “But at least it’s not war. Not yet.”
She went back to work. For another half hour, she wandered around adding final touches here and there. Finally she flopped down on the red plush sofa in the front parlor and surveyed what she had done. “Not bad,” she said. She checked her watch. “Ten forty-two. We open at eleven. Len should be here any minute.”
“Do you need me anymore?” Nickie asked.
“No, no,” said Crystal, waving a hand. “You go off and play.”
“Okay,” Nickie said. “I just have to get some stuff from upstairs first.”
Crystal nodded. She reached for a spray bottle and squirted a fine mist at a potted fern.
Nickie dashed up the stairs. Poor Otis, poor Otis; if he’d made a puddle on the floor, she wouldn’t say a single scolding word. She burst through the door at the top of the stairs, closed it behind her, flung open the nursery door, and there was Otis scrambling backward, yelping and squealing with a desperate tone in his voice. He’d been standing right there, she could picture it, nose to the place where the door would open, waiting for her. She scanned the room. Only one small puddle, which she quickly mopped up.
“Okay, Otis,” she said, “just a couple more minutes. I’ll be really quick.” Otis jumped up and down beside her leg. “I know you’re hungry, but we have to get out of here first. You have to be incredibly quiet.”
She hooked Otis’s leash to his collar and wound it once around his muzzle so he couldn’t bark. Then she picked him up and carried him down the hall and down the stairs. She paused at the second floor, listening for Crystal. Heard nothing. Went down the next flight to the door that led to the hall behind the kitchen. Listened again. This time she heard voices.
“Looks great!” said Len’s voice. “You do, too.”
“Well, thanks! You’re such a sweetie.”
That was Crystal. They were by the front door, Nickie thought. Good. She darted into the kitchen, grabbed an apple and a muffin from a bowl on the table, opened the door to the back garden, and shouted, “Bye, I’m leaving! Good luck!” Before anyone even answered, she shut the door behind her and took off.
It was not a beautiful day for a walk. Gray clouds hung low and dark in the sky, and the air was cold enough to bite. Nickie had on her warmest jacket and a thick knitted scarf around her neck and a knitted hat that came down over her ears, and she was still chilly. She’d warm up as she walked, probably, but it would be nice if the wind would die down. She snuggled Otis’s head up under her chin.
At the end of the block, she went around the corner, turned onto Fern Street, and started up the path that led in among the trees. A few yards along, she stopped and set Otis down on the ground. Instantly, he pulled the leash tight, making a beeline for the base of a tree, where he lifted his back leg and sent a stream of pee against the bark. “Good boy,” said Nickie. Suddenly she felt happy and free. The cold didn’t matter. The woods stretched before her, mysterious, unexplored. No danger of running into the dog-napping Prophet out here, or any of her spies. And if there was a terrorist wandering around in the woods—well, if she saw him, she’d just hide, that’s all.
So they hiked, Nickie striding along on legs that felt strong and glad to be exercised, and Otis zigzagging across the path from one fascinating smell to the next. The ground crackled underfoot—icy dead leaves, brittle twigs, dirt hardened by cold. In all directions stood the endless ranks of gray-brown tree trunks, their bare branches making a dense weave that reminded her of the crosshatched writing on the old letter. Wind rattled the branches against each other, and here and there a few last rags of leaf fell down.
It was a little after eleven o’clock. In a while, she’d find a place to sit, and she’d eat the muffin and the apple she had with her. But now all she wanted to do was walk, and walk fast.
The trail wound back and forth, always sloping upward, but never very steep. Most of the time, all Nickie could see was the deep forest on both sides, but after a while she came to a clearing where the trees thinned out on the downhill side, and she could look down the mountain and see the roofs of the town below. It looked small and peaceful from here. No people were visible. She tried to make out which house was Greenhaven, but she couldn’t tell. It made her a little sad, this view of Yonwood, the place where she had been sure she wanted to live. In her imagination, it had been so perfect—peaceful and beautiful, safe from the troubles of the cities. If someone had told her then that Yonwood was working to battle the forces of evil by building a shield of goodness, she would have been happy to hear it. Those things were exactly what she wanted. How strange that it could all turn out so differently.
She walked on. It wasn’t a steady walk, because Otis had to stop every few yards and thrust his nose beneath a bush or into the leaf litter that covered the ground. Some spots were so interesting that he had to snuffle in them for quite a while. During these times, Nickie stood still and gazed around her. Birds flitted among the branches, twittering in a muted way. Overhead, clouds moved slowly across the sky, so the forest was sometimes in shadow, sometimes in sunlight. When the sun shone down, crystals of frost and patches of ice glistened like glass.
When she’d walked for an hour or so, she started thinking it was time to rest, and time to eat. She looked for somewhere to sit down. A few yards farther on she came to a fallen tree that lay alongside the trail, covered in a tangle of brown stickery vines and furred with green moss along the top. She tore the vines away to make a clear space, and she tied her end of Otis’s leash to the stump of a branch sticking up from the log. Then she sat down, took the muffin and the apple out of her paper bag, and ate them both, except for the last chunk of muffin, which she gave to Otis. She crushed the paper bag into a ball and stuck it in her pocket.
That was when she heard the footsteps. There was no mistaking them—firm and steady, a tramp, tramp, tramp that came from above her on the trail, not far distant. Nickie’s heart started racing. Could she duck behind a tree? Crouch down behind this fallen log? But Otis had heard the footsteps, too, and after a moment of cocking his head and pricking up his ears, he let out a string of loud barks. So there was no use hiding. Whoever was coming would have heard them already. He would come around the bend in a moment and see them, and Nickie would just have to hope that if it was a terrorist or some other sort of wild person, he would have more important things on his mind than a girl eating lunch.
So she sat frozen on the log and waited, and in a few seconds the person came around the bend, and it wasn’t a terrorist; it was Grover.
“Hey!” he cried when he saw her. He stopped and stared. Then he made a face of extreme horror, pulling down the corners of his mouth and making his eyes bulge out. “Aaaaaiiieee!” he yelled. “It’s a terrifying terrorist! And a savage monster! Save me, save me!”
“Stop that,” said Nickie. Relief swept through her, and she grinned.
Otis bounded over to Grover and stood up against his legs, and Grover stooped to pet him—with his left hand, because his right hand was bundled up in a clump of clo
thes. When he came closer, Nickie could hear the hum of the bracelet: MMMM-mmmm-MMMMM-mmmmm.
“Can I see it?” she said.
“Five dollars per view,” said Grover.
“Come on.”
So he unwrapped his wrist, and the noise came out loud and shrill in the cold air. Nickie peered at the thing. “It’s awful,” she said. “You can’t break it with a rock or anything?”
“Not without breaking my arm, too. I tried.” He wrapped it up again. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s the open house today,” Nickie said. “I have to keep Otis away. Not just because of the open house, but the Prophet, too.”
Grover sat down on the log. “Why?”
Nickie told him what Mrs. Beeson had said. “It’s tomorrow. She’s going to take all the dogs away.”
Grover responded to this by rearing backward and nearly falling off the log, as if knocked off balance by astonishment. “I am stunned,” he said.
“Me too,” said Nickie. “You don’t think she could be right, do you? That dogs take up too much love? Which should go to God?”
“I don’t think so,” said Grover, sitting up straight again. Otis sniffed at his wrist, which hummed faintly. “I really don’t think so.”
“But Otis is all right because nobody knows about him. Hardly anybody. You do, but you wouldn’t tell, would you?”
“Nope,” said Grover. He rumpled Otis’s ears. “Guess what?” he said.
“What?”
“I saw the terrorist.”
“Not really,” said Nickie. “Did you?”
“I did.” He told her about the bear. “It was an albino,” he said. “I’m pretty sure it was, because I’ve never heard of a white bear. Except polar bears, and there aren’t any in North Carolina.” He looked thoughtful, and a little sad. “I told it to go away,” he said, “for its own good. People here don’t like things that are different.”
“Was it beautiful?” Nickie said.
“Not really. It was sort of dirty-looking. It had smudges on it. And it was limping.”
“Were you afraid?” Nickie asked.
But Grover didn’t answer. He was staring into space with his eyebrows raised. “I just thought of something,” he said.
“What?”
“The broken window. I bet it was the bear. Put its foot through the glass.”
“You mean at the restaurant?”
“Right. Snatched up that chicken and snagged the napkin with a claw, I bet. And that blood. She said it was an R, but I always thought it was just a blot. It was bear blood. Bet you anything.”
He explained, and Nickie listened. “Bear blood,” she said wonderingly. “No one guessed.”
They sat without talking for a few moments. The bracelet hummed beneath its wrappings.
“You have to get that thing off you,” said Nickie. “What are you going to do?”
Grover stood up. The wind was blowing harder now, and dark clouds were coming in from the east. “It doesn’t matter about my snakes, I guess. I can let them go. I studied them a lot already. And in the summer, when I leave, I was going to let them go anyway.”
Nickie looked up in surprise. “You mean you made enough money?”
“I will,” said Grover. “I made ninety-seven words out of ‘Sparklewash for Dishes.’ That ought to be enough to win.”
They walked back down the trail together. Grover talked about albino animals most of the way—how rare they were, how he’d never heard of an albino bear before, how some people had considered them sacred in other times and places. Nickie listened with half her attention. A sadness had come over her. She was sad that Grover probably wasn’t going to win his contest and go on his expedition, and she was sad that Greenhaven might have a new owner by now, some stranger who wouldn’t love it as she did. She felt tired, and sad, and cold.
Overhead, the clouds had gathered and darkened, filling in the whole sky.
“Looks like it’s going to snow,” said Grover.
CHAPTER 26
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Catastrophe
“How was the open house?” Nickie asked.
“Lovely,” said Crystal.
“And did anyone want to buy the house?”
“Well, we have an offer,” said Crystal. She didn’t sound as happy as Nickie thought she would.
“From who?”
“A couple named Hardesty. Retired, children grown. Looking to start a senior health center. Vitamins, herbal remedies, exercise equipment. A library with books about how to cope with hair loss and stiff joints and swollen ankles and that sort of thing.” Crystal looked dispirited. “I don’t love the idea,” she said. “But they offered a good price, and they’re ready to sign as soon as they sell their house in the city. I called your mother about it. She thinks we should accept.”
So it was over. Goal #1 lost—no hope at all. Once again, that night Nickie crept upstairs after Crystal had gone to sleep and spent the night in the nursery with Otis. He curled up close under her chin. His fur smelled of the woods.
In the morning, Nickie got up while the sky was still dark. She took Otis out, stood with him in the cold while he did what he needed to do, and took him back upstairs. Then she climbed into the bed in her regular room to wait for the light.
As soon as a gray streak showed in the gap between the curtains, Nickie got up and got dressed. She moved quietly. In the chilly kitchen, she made herself some toast and drank a glass of milk. Then she went out to see what was going to happen when Mrs. Beeson’s helpers came to get the dogs.
She didn’t know when or where the dog pickups would start—but as it turned out, it was easy to find them. As soon as she got down the hill, she saw a school bus moving slowly down Main Street. There were no children in it. At Trillium Street, it turned right. A blue van behind it made the same turn; on the van’s side, in white letters, was printed “Church of the Fiery Vision.” In the front seat, next to the driver, Nickie saw Mrs. Beeson. Other people were in the van, too. It was full.
Nickie followed the bus, walking fast.
The bus and the van pulled up at a small brown house. Out of the van climbed Mrs. Beeson and several men, including all four of Yonwood’s police officers. One of the policemen knocked on the front door of the house.
A man came to the door, leading a medium-sized brown-and-white spaniel. He patted the dog twice and then went quickly back inside and shut the door. The policeman led the dog to the bus and lifted it inside. Everyone got back in the van, and it moved on.
This is how it went—Nickie followed and watched it all. Other people trailed after the bus, too; she saw Martin among them, nodding sternly as he watched the dogs being collected. How could she ever have thought she liked him?
All around her, people commented on what was happening. Most of them had decided, it seemed, that Mrs. Beeson was doing the right thing. “It’s hard, of course,” said a stout middle-aged woman in a green knit hat. “But doing the right thing just is hard sometimes, isn’t it? I don’t have a dog myself, but if I did, I’d give it up in a heartbeat.”
A bald man in round glasses nodded. “I know a lot of people who had trouble with this,” he said, “but once they made the decision, they were proud of themselves. They felt strong, you know what I mean?”
Nickie thought of how giving up hot chocolate had made her feel: strong, yes, and proud of herself for doing a hard thing. But how could you feel that way about your dog, who was going to be thrown out into the cold? It wasn’t just you giving something up; you were making the dogs give up their home, and maybe their lives.
The woman in the green hat nodded. “We have to trust in our Prophet and put aside our own selfish feelings,” she said. “For the good of all.”
But it was hard for Nickie to see the good in what was going on. At each dog-owning household, the bus stopped, the police went to the door, knocked, and then waited while the people inside put the leash on their dog and brought him or her out.
Some people put on a brave or saintly face like the first man: they simply patted the dog once or twice on the head and then went back inside and closed the door and did not watch the men lead the dog away. At other houses, there were scenes, especially if children lived there. Loud crying came from inside, and some children even broke away from their parents and ran out and grabbed their dog’s collar, screaming, “No, no, you can’t take him!” and the policeman had the sad duty of uncurling the fingers from the collar, and the parents had to wrestle the child back inside. A very few families refused to open their doors at all. Mrs. Beeson wrote down their addresses.
After about an hour, when a second and third bus had been added to the first to hold all the dogs, and a chorus of barking, whining, and howling came from the bus windows, Nickie began to tremble, as if she had a hard-beating heart in every part of her body. Her teeth chattered, but not just from the cold. Suddenly she couldn’t stand it anymore. She ran, heading back home to get Otis and hide him where no one could find him, just in case, just in case, somehow the dog bus came to Greenhaven.
As she ran, she kept saying to herself, It’s all right, it’s all right, no one knows he’s there, I have plenty of time, he’s safe, no one knows about him, only Amanda and Grover, so he’s all right. But still, the sound of barking and shouting followed her as she ran.
Crystal would probably be there. But Nickie didn’t care anymore if Crystal found out about Otis. She’d have to find out soon anyway. It was time for her to know. And Crystal would help her hide him—wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t let him be taken away.
But when she got to Greenhaven, Crystal’s car wasn’t there. Where could she have gone? Out to breakfast? It didn’t matter. Nickie raced up the path and bounded up the stone steps. She opened the front door and dashed inside and started up the stairs. And stopped short just before reaching the second floor, because there was Amanda, standing at the top of the stairs with Otis in her arms.