Bailey's Story (13 page)

I poked the meat with my nose and then lay down next to it, staring at it. Why did it smell so strongly of Todd?

 

17

When Mom came outside the next morning and saw me, I hung my head and flattened my ears. I felt guilty for some reason. But I wasn't sure why.

“Good morning, Bailey,” she said. Then she saw the meat. “What's this?”

She bent over to look at the meat more closely. I tried a timid wag. The tip of my tail just brushed against the patio bricks. That meat had been worrying me all night. Should I have eaten it? Was it the right thing to leave it alone? What should I do to be a good dog?

When I rolled over and Mom rubbed my belly, I felt better. Bad dogs didn't get tummy rubs. “Where did this come from, Bailey?” Mom stopped scratching and picked the piece of meat up gingerly between two fingers. “Ugh,” she said.

I sat up and cocked my head. Was Mom going to feed me the meat? If she did that, it must be okay after all. My tail wagged more strongly.

“Yuck, Bailey. You don't want that, whatever it is,” Mom said. She dropped the meat into the garbage.

Hannah sat in my front seat for the car ride to the giant silver school bus, and I was alone in the car for a long time while Ethan and Hannah stood and hugged. When the bus drove away and the boy came back to the car, I could sense his loneliness and wondered if he needed to go home and play Doghouse. I hopped into the front seat and lay down with my head in his lap instead of sticking my nose out the window.

The girl came to visit again the day after the family sat around the indoor tree and tore up papers for Merry Christmas. Normally, I liked this time of year because I'd have Mom and Dad and Ethan together, in one room, with good smells coming from the kitchen and some paper for me to rip with my teeth. (The family didn't usually like it when I ripped up paper, but on Merry Christmas the rules were different.)

This year Christmas was not as much fun as usual, because Ethan gave Mom a new black-and-white kitten, named Felix. That little scrap of fur had no manners at all! He would stalk my tail from behind or leap out at me from behind the couch, batting at me with his tiny paws. When I tried to play with him, he wrapped his legs around my nose and nibbled me with his sharp teeth. He was worse than Duchess when she'd been a puppy! Finally, I shrank into a corner and put my nose down on my front paws with a long sigh to remind Ethan of how much I was suffering.

Even Hannah, when she arrived, paid far too much attention to Felix. I'd known her longer and, of course, I was her favorite pet. But she kept dangling bits of Christmas ribbon in front of the kitten's nose and laughing. I'd have to come up and nudge her hard with my nose to make her give me one of those good ear rubs.

At least I got to go outside with Hannah and Ethan. Felix tried once. He put one paw into the fluffy white snow that surrounded the house and then turned around and dashed straight inside as if he'd been burned. So when the boy and the girl built a big pile of snow in the front yard and put a hat on it, I was right there beside them. The boy liked to tackle me and drag me around in the white stuff, and I liked to let him, just for the joy of having his arms around me. It was how we'd played every day when we were both younger.

Her second day with us, Hannah and Ethan and I went sledding. Felix, of course, had to stay behind.

The sun was out, and the air was so cold and clean I could taste it all the way down my throat. Most of the children from the neighborhood were there at the sledding hill, and Hannah and Ethan spent as much time pulling the younger ones up to the top as riding down themselves. I was at the bottom when Todd drove up.

He looked at me when he got out of the car, but he didn't hold out his hand or say anything to me. I kept my distance.

“Linda! Come on, time to come home!” he shouted.

Linda was on the slope with three of her little friends, sliding down on a round piece of plastic, spinning and giggling. Ethan and Hannah flashed past them, both lying on one sled.

“No! I don't want to!” Linda yelled.

“Now! Mom says!”

Ethan and Hannah flopped off their sled at the bottom of the hill, tumbling in the snow. I raced over and sniffed them, in case they smelled different now that they'd had a ride without me. Todd stood and watched them.

Something in Todd rose up to the surface, something worse than anger, something I'd never felt from anyone before. It was dark, scalding hot, and frightening. My head came up, and I felt a growl swelling in my throat.

Ethan and the girl stood up, wiping snow off of each other. Happiness was spilling off them. I looked back and forth from them to the other boy standing so still, his face a blank, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched.

“Hey, Todd,” Ethan said, beaming.

“Hi.”

“This is Hannah. Hannah, this is Todd. He lives down the street.”

Hannah reached her hand out, smiling. “Nice to meet you.”

Todd stiffened a little. “Actually, we already met.”

Hannah pushed her purple knitted cap back a little from her eyes. “We did?”

“At the football game,” Todd said. Then he laughed, a short bark. It sounded to me like a warning.

Hannah blinked. “Oh. Oh, right,” she said.

“What?” Ethan asked.

“I have to pick up my sister,” Todd told them. “Linda!” he yelled, cupping his hands to his mouth. “Come home
now
!”

Linda's sled had spun to a stop. She tugged herself out of a pile of friends and trudged through the snow toward Todd, her face downcast.

“He's … he's the one I talked to,” Hannah told Ethan. Some worry flickered through her, and I felt it. I also felt the quick flare of anger from Ethan.

“Wait, what? You? Todd, you were the one who told Hannah I'm going out with Michele? I don't even
know
Michele.”

“I got to go,” Todd mumbled. “Get in the car, Linda.”

“No, wait,” Ethan said. He reached his hand out. Todd jerked away from it.

“Ethan,” Hannah murmured. She put a mittened hand on his arm.

“Why would you do that, Todd? Why would you lie? What's wrong with you, man?”

The emotions boiling inside Todd seemed hot enough to melt the snow he stood on, but his face didn't change. He stood there, not saying a word. I wanted to grip the hem of Ethan's jacket in my teeth and tug him away, but I knew that good dogs shouldn't do that.

“This is why you don't have any friends, Todd.” Hannah drew in a quick little breath when she heard Ethan's words. “Why can't you just be normal? You're always doing stupid things like this. It's sick.”

Todd still said nothing. He simply walked away and got in his car. Linda was already in the backseat. He slammed the door.

Todd's face, looking out the window at Ethan and Hannah, was absolutely blank. Even the motor of the car sounded angry as he drove away.

“That was mean,” Hannah said.

“Oh, you don't know him.”

“I don't care. You shouldn't have said that he doesn't have any friends.”

“Well, he doesn't. He's always doing this kind of stuff. He's always been
twisted,
you know? Ever since we were kids. The kind of stuff he thinks is fun…” Ethan shook his head. “Anyway, I don't care about Todd. Come on, we've got to get home.”

A few days after Hannah left, the snow came down and the wind blew so hard that we stayed inside all day, sitting in front of the heaters. That night, I slept
under
the covers on Ethan's bed. The next morning the snow finally stopped, and Ethan and I went out and dug for hours in the driveway, him with a shovel and me with my paws.

The moon came out right after dinner, so bright that I could see nearly as well as in the daytime. When I went out in the backyard, the air was thick and sweet with the smell of smoke from many different fireplaces.

Ethan shut the door and went inside. Faintly I heard him call to Mom, “I'm worn-out from all that shoveling. I'm going to bed. Let Bailey in, okay?”

I didn't hear Mom answer him, because I had discovered something interesting about the fence.

The snow had drifted up against it, blown by the wind to make a smooth hill. It was easy to climb to the top of the hill, and from there it was only a short hop to the ground on the other side.

Time for a nighttime adventure!

 

18

I went to Chelsea's house first, to see if Duchess was out, but there was no sign of her except a yellow patch on the snow near her front door. I lifted my own leg over the same place so that she'd know I was thinking of her.

Normally when I got outside the gate, I went for a stroll along the creek—except, of course, if I saw Todd there. But because of all the snow, tonight I had to stick to the plowed road. Some people had already dragged their indoor trees outside, although at our house the tree still stood in the front window, glistening with lights and hung with shiny ornaments for Felix to attack. When I came across one of those discarded trees, I marked it with my scent. I could always smell just one more tree a little farther down the road, and so I stayed out later than I'd ever done before.

If I hadn't gone so far, if I'd turned back just a little sooner, I might have been in time to stop what happened next.

Finally, a car turning into the street from a driveway up ahead blazed its headlights into my eyes. When it drove slowly by, the smell of it reminded me of the smell of Mom's car, those times she and Ethan would come looking for me. I felt guilty for being so far from my boy, so I lowered my head and trotted for home.

When I turned up the driveway where Ethan and I had dug that morning, I stopped. My eyes and my nose together noticed several things at once, all of them wrong.

The front door was open, and wafting out was the warm scent of home. But another scent was laid on top of that—something chemical, sharp, both unpleasant and familiar. I'd smelled it in the garage before, and on the car rides I took with the boy. Gasoline.

That smell was so strong that it covered the scent of the person backing out of the open front door. All I had to rely on was my eyes, and in the moonlight, I thought I was looking at my boy. I trotted closer, just as the figure turned, tossing more gasoline from a jug in his hand onto the bushes near the front door.

I stopped. Now I was close enough to catch the scent. Todd.

He hadn't seen me yet. The fur along my spine and neck rose as he took three steps back and pulled some paper from his pocket. From another pocket came a book of matches. There was a tiny scraping sound, and a flare of light popped up in Todd's hand, brightness flickering against his stony face.

He tossed the burning paper onto the bushes, and a blue flame swept up, making a soft whoosh in the quiet nighttime air.

Todd didn't turn. He stood watching the fire. And I never barked, I never growled. I just raced up that sidewalk in silent fury.

I knew good dogs didn't jump on people. Good dogs didn't knock them down. Good dogs didn't bite.

But all of that didn't matter. Somehow, I knew that what Todd was doing was wrong. He was trying to hurt the boy and my family. I could tell it from the crackling heat of the fire, from its charred smell of danger, from the dark delight rising inside Todd as he stood watching the burning house.

Even more than staying close to the boy, playing with the boy, comforting the boy, my job was to keep the boy safe. I had done that in the woods. I would do it here.

I leaped for Todd as if I had a pack at my heels, crashing into him with all of my weight, knocking him to the snow.

Todd yelled and thrashed underneath me, twisting and rolling. He kicked at my face. I snatched his foot in my mouth and held it, biting hard, holding on while Todd screamed. His pants ripped, and his shoe came off in my mouth. I dropped the shoe, lunging forward to get a second grip on his foot with my teeth.

Yelling again, Todd hit at me with his fists, but I kept my jaws locked around his ankle, shaking my head as if he were prey. I'd never bitten anyone, not like this, but I didn't let go.

Then a shrill, piercing noise stabbed through the air. I jerked my head around to locate this new threat. Inside the house, I could see that the indoor tree was burning like a candle. Thick smoke poured out of the open front door.

Todd yanked his foot free, and I backed away, shaking my head. The noise hurt my ears and I wanted to run from it—but what about my boy?

Staggering to his feet, Todd limped away as fast as he could. I let him go, suddenly more worried than angry. I added my own alarm to the noise, barking and running from the front door to the driveway and back again. I pivoted and raced toward the back of the house, but the pile of snow that had helped me leap over the fence was on the wrong side. I couldn't get over, so all I could do was bark louder than ever.