Baby-Sitting Is a Dangerous Job (6 page)

“Okay,” I agreed. “Mom, what do you think I should do about the Foster kids? It's hard to find something fascinating to do that will interest all three of them at once.”

“I don't know what to tell you, Darcy. Except that if you show them you like them, they'll probably behave for you.”

“Jeremy may be hard to like,” I said slowly.

“That means he needs liking, or loving, most of all, I suspect. Children will sometimes push a parent with unacceptable behavior, until the parent sets a limit to it. Tim was terrible that way, but when we told him he simply could not do certain things, and then stopped
him from doing them, he seemed relieved that it had all been settled, and he stopped fighting us on that issue. Until the next issue came along, of course.”

My mom didn't have a degree in psychology, but she seemed pretty smart to me. “I don't understand why Mrs./Dr. Foster doesn't know what's happening with her own kids, though,” I said. “She's a psychiatrist, for pete's sake.”

Mom fastened foil over the tops of the casserole dishes and sealed them shut. “Here, put these in the freezer for me, will you? The thing is, Darcy, it's a lot easier to look at other people's children and see what's wrong with them than to interpret what's happening right under your nose. We're too close to our own families and it's easier to pretend nothing's wrong than to have to try to deal with the problems. Maybe I'm mistaken about the Foster kids, but it can't hurt to be firm but loving with them. I never saw a child who didn't respond to love.”

So I went to work the next day determined to love Jeremy if it killed me, and that lasted for about twenty minutes after Mrs. Murphy had gone off to her dental appointment.

We started off all right. They'd had lunch, this time, so we didn't have to risk cooking anything. Shana wanted a story—the same one,
Gregory Gray and the Brave Beast
—so I read that while the other kids were looking for books.

“She always wants that one,” Melissa told me. “It's her favorite.”

By the time I finished the first story, Melissa was there with her book, but Jeremy had disappeared.

“Just a minute,” I told the girls, “I have to find Jeremy.”

And right then this horrible noise began, so that my hair stood on end and chills ran all through me. It was loud and terrifying and made me want to scream at it to stop.

It didn't stop, though. It would break off for a few seconds, and then start again. “What is it?” I asked wildly, looking around for the source of the sound.

Shana sat on the couch, her book closed on her lap, blue eyes very wide and startled. Melissa held her hands over her ears and scrunched up her face.

“It's the burglar alarm, I think,” Melissa said.

Burglars? In the middle of the afternoon?

The racket was awesome; I felt as if I were being assaulted, and I didn't know what to do. Call the police? I looked around for the telephone.

Jeremy suddenly appeared in the doorway of the playroom, looking about the way I felt—frightened.

“What did you do, Jeremy?” Melissa asked, and he shook his head.

“I didn't do anything,” he protested earnestly, “honest I didn't.”

It was hard to recover my wits with that alarm going off. I didn't know much about burglar alarms, but there must be a way to turn it off. I asked Jeremy.

“I don't know. Is there really a burglar?”

“I don't know,” I echoed. “I think we'd better call the police. Where's the telephone?”

It was hard to think, to dial, even with the number written on a sticker on the phone book so I didn't have to look it up. If I were the burglar, I thought, if there
was
a burglar, I'd run for my life, with that sound going on
and on. It must be almost loud enough to be heard over at our house.

In a moment, between the blasts of the alarm, I heard two separate sounds. Someone pounding on the front door and a siren.

“Marysville Police Department,” a voice said in my ear.

“Uh, I'm the baby-sitter at the Foster home on Oakwood Drive,” I said nervously. “Ah—” I had to wait for the next blast of sound to end before I could continue. “The burglar alarm is going off, and I don't know why, or how to stop it—”

“We have an officer on the way,” the dispatcher's voice said calmly. I suppose it was easier to stay calm when you weren't where the crime was actually taking place.

Jeremy ran to the front of the house to peer through the windows, which were covered with the iron grillwork. I had thought that was decorative, but now I wondered if the windows were barred to keep burglars out. They were all that way except the ones that opened inside the fenced yard.

Could someone really have attempted to burglarize the house? Or had Jeremy, in spite
of his denial, been responsible for setting off the alarm?

“The cops are here!” Jeremy said excitedly as I entered the front hallway.

He struggled with the lock and opened the door as a police car pulled in at the curb, closely followed by a second patrol unit. Jeremy ran out to meet them, shouting, “It's a burglar! It's a burglar!”

I had a fleeting memory of my mother saying kids sometimes did things to get attention; and then two of the officers were entering the house. One of them, I was both glad and embarrassed to see, was Tim's friend Clancy.

Clancy was about my father's age and had a magnificent handlebar mustache like someone out of an old movie. He looked at me and then at Jeremy, who was jiggling up and down, hopping from one foot to the other.

“Hello, Darcy. What happened here?”

“I don't know. Just all of a sudden that horrible alarm went off. I didn't see anything,” I said.

“You see anything, son? Any person looking in a window, anything like that?”

Jeremy stopped jumping; his brown eyes were shining, though. “No. I didn't see anything. But it's a burglar, isn't it? The alarm went off!”

“I'll check around the back,” one of the younger officers said, and disappeared. Another one started through the house, and a minute later the alarm stopped. The quiet was almost as unnatural, at first, as the noise had been.

“Where were you when it went off, Jeremy?” I asked. I could usually tell by looking at my younger brothers if they were telling the truth or not, but I didn't know Jeremy very well yet.

“In my room, looking for my
Star Wars
book. All of a sudden it went off. It made my hair prick,” he said, and touched the back of his neck.

That made me kind of inclined to believe him, because that was how it affected me, too.

“Do you think the burglar got any of Mama's jewelry?” Melissa asked, leaning into my side.

Clancy squatted down so he was more on a level with her. “Where does your mama keep her jewelry? Do you know?”

“In a box in the bedroom. It's in the wall,” Melissa said.

“It's not a box, it's a safe,” Jeremy corrected her. “There's one in Daddy's study, too, but it just has papers in it, or maybe money. I can show you,” he offered.

I went with them to look at both wall safes. Clancy made a grunting sound, and I finally realized where Tim got his habit of making that sound instead of using words.

“Nobody's been at either of them,” Clancy said. “You hear anything, Darcy, before the alarm went off?”

“No. I didn't notice anything.”

“All the kids with you when it began?”

“No. Jeremy was in his room, looking for a book.”

“You try to open a window or anything like that, son?”

Jeremy shook his head. “No. Daddy says we're not supposed to open the windows, or it will set off the alarm. Besides, the air conditioner doesn't work right if the windows are open.”

I was beginning to feel wobbly in the middle. What if Jeremy hadn't done anything
to set off the alarm? What if there had been a burglar? What if there hadn't been an alarm, and someone had gotten into the house?

About that time, as we walked back toward the entry hall, a young officer came back. “Looks like somebody tried to jimmy the lock on the side door into the garage,” he said.

The feeling in my stomach got worse.

“It's a blind area, big high hedge shields that side of the house from the neighbors. They didn't see anything, though they looked out when the alarm went off. Doug's checking out the alley, to see if anybody went out that way.”

Clancy grunted again. “All right. Make sure all the doors and windows are secure now. We better contact Mr. Foster, let him know it looks like an attempted break-in.”

“Will you catch him? And put him in jail?” Jeremy wanted to know. He did a little skip of excitement.

“Maybe,” Clancy said. “You here alone with the kids, Darcy?”

“Yes, until the housekeeper comes home around four. She's having root canal work done.”

Clancy was frowning. “We'll make sure everything's secure before we leave. You want to stay here, or should we take you all over to your own house?”

A part of me wanted to go home. What if a real burglar came back? He might not be scared by the alarm the next time, or he might feel he could steal whatever he was after before the police got there.

I didn't know how the Fosters would feel about my taking their kids somewhere else, though. And the kids weren't scared. Jeremy thought it was entertaining, and Melissa and Shana took their cue from him.

“I guess we'd better stay here, unless Mr. Foster thinks we should leave,” I said slowly.

Clancy called the bank from the white telephone in the living room. Mr. Foster seemed satisfied that the police had routed the intruder, and Clancy assured him that they'd have a patrol car keeping an eye on the place for the rest of the day.

Clancy hung up the phone as the last of the officers returned to the house.

“Neighbors at the end of the block say a car
came out of the alley right after the alarm went off, but they didn't get a good look at it. All they're sure of is that it was dark, and probably five or six years old. Lady said she can't tell one model from another, but she thinks it was black.”

Black. I remembered the car I'd thought followed Tim and me away from this house, and (maybe) the same one that had parked so the occupants could watch Irene and me when we went to the store. Could it have been the same one?

I opened my mouth to tell Clancy about the mysterious car, but he was already turning away, and Shana said firmly, “I have to go potty.”

By the time Shana was taken care of, the police had gone. I stood looking at the phone, wondering if I should call Clancy and tell him about the car.

I'd feel stupid if it turned out to be just somebody who liked to look at girls. I knew Tim and his friends often drove around and watched girls.

But what if it wasn't only girl watchers?

I decided to call Tim. He'd know what to do.

I dialed our number, and Jimmy answered it. He didn't know where Tim was, he'd driven off ten minutes earlier. I swallowed and read off the Fosters' number for him to write down. “Tell Tim to call me when he comes back,” I said, and Jimmy promised he would.

I felt a little better, which was a mistake. I didn't know Tim wasn't going to call back until it was too late.

Jeremy was so excited over the burglar alarm and the police coming that there was no way of calming him down. At least not any way that I could think of.

He whooped and hollered and raced around being a burglar, poking at his little sisters, instructing Melissa to be the intruder while he was the officer who pursued her. She got into the spirit of the thing, being about half really afraid, screaming as she ran to get away from him.

Shana didn't understand what was going on, but she ran and shrieked, too. After Melissa knocked over a lamp, I told them they'd better go out in the backyard. Luckily the lamp landed on the couch and it didn't break, but it looked expensive, and I didn't want to lose all
my wages for the entire baby-sitting job over one lamp.

Jeremy was just as wild outside, but there was less to damage. I let him run and yell, as long as he didn't get too rough with his sisters.

After half an hour or so, though, I was getting tired of burglar alarm imitations and screaming, and Melissa fell and hurt her knee.

“Okay, that's enough,” I said. “Come on, Melissa, we'd better wash that off and put disinfectant on it, and maybe a Band-aid.”

Most little kids like Band-aids, and sure enough, she decided not to cry as I led her inside.

I found the medicine cabinet and was proud of the good job I did, getting the dirt off the scraped place, putting a Snoopy patch over it.

“Now maybe you can talk Jeremy into playing something quieter,” I suggested.

There was an odd sound, then, and it took me a moment to identify it. The garage door opening? I'd heard it when Mrs. Murphy left; she had one of those devices you carry to open and close the garage doors without getting out of your car.

Was she back already? I was torn between relief that someone else could take on the job of calming Jeremy down and regret that my pay would be smaller if I went home early. The housekeeper was only scheduled for three more appointments after today, so I wasn't going to earn a whole lot anyway, I decided.

Just at that moment I heard a bellow of rage—or what sounded like rage—from somewhere else in the house. I sighed. Jeremy would have to be distracted by something else, I thought, and wondered what would work best. He had every game I'd ever heard of in his room, but he never seemed much interested in playing any of them except video games. I didn't dare play them with him because I had to watch the girls, too. Maybe I could think up something that just used his imagination, like the games my little brothers played all the time.

Melissa trotted off ahead of me with an exaggerated limp to make sure everyone knew she'd been injured. I lingered to wipe up the dirty fingermarks she'd made on the edge of the sink, then dropped the washcloth into the hamper.