Ten Kids, No Pets

  Hardy let out a whoop, turned off the alarm clock, and, leaving his sleeping brothers behind, ran downstairs and into the kitchen. He found his parents, Candy, and the younger children already there.

  “Snow day! Snow day!” cried Hardy.

  The morning was spent doing just what Hardy liked best on an unexpected vacation from school. With the snow whirling and blowing and drifting outside, he and his brothers and sisters crowded onto the couches in the family room with blankets and watched reruns of “I Love Lucy” and “Leave It to Beaver” and “Gilligan’s Island.” Later in the morning they watched game shows — “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune” and “Concentration.”

  Mr. Rosso, who hadn’t even been able to get the back door open after breakfast, happily spent the morning in his workshop, while Mrs. Rosso organized two closets and put the contents of a photo album into chronological order.

  Late in the afternoon Hardy, Woody, and the twins bundled up in outdoor clothes. After Dinnie squeezed through the tiny opening they were able to create by heaving against the back door, they shoveled off the stoop and decided on a walk to the barn, just to see what it was like during a storm. But the wind blew the snow against their faces in stinging gusts, and they couldn’t see for more than a few inches. Disappointed, they returned to the house.

  Not much later the announcement came over the radio that school would be closed the next day as well. “A four-day weekend!” Hardy was beside himself with pleasure.

  That night the electricity went off. “I’m glad of the candles we bought,” said Mrs. Rosso, “but I’m afraid we’re going to freeze to death.”

  Bainbridge and Abbie built a fire in the living room fireplace, and the Rossos gathered around it with blankets. They toasted popcorn in the candlelit room. When the popcorn was gone, a hush fell over them. Hardy listened to the wind whistling and the fire crackling and Ira breathing next to him. Then he heard something else.

  “What was that?” asked Faustine.

  “I don’t know. But I heard it, too,” Hardy told her.

  “You guys are —” Bainbridge started to say, when a crash sounded outside that no one could miss.

  “I better go check,” said Mr. Rosso, getting to his feet.

  “I’ll go with you,” said Mrs. Rosso.

  None of the kids wanted to be left behind. They followed their parents in a nervous bunch.

  Mr. Rosso took the biggest flashlight he could find and shined it out the back door.

  “Garbage can’s knocked over!” exclaimed Hardy.

  The garbage cans had been moved against the side of the house the afternoon before. Now one was tipped partway over, the lid off, garbage spilling into the snow.

  “Maybe an escaped prisoner is on the loose!” cried Hannah. “Maybe he’s trying to get into our house.”

  “Mommy, really?” whimpered Jan.

  “Of course not, honey. Hannah, don’t say things like that, please.”

  The rest of the evening was quiet, and by bedtime the power had been restored, but Hardy couldn’t stop thinking about the garbage can. Who or what had turned it over? Hardy had a real mystery to solve — just like Frank and Joe Hardy.

  The next morning he got to work right after breakfast. He put on his outdoor clothes, replacing his wool hat with his Sherlock Holmes hat. Then he slipped a magnifying glass into his pocket and squeezed out the back door. His mother handed him a shovel. “See if you can dig us out while you look for clues,” she said.

  “Aw, Mom, it’s still snowing,” Hardy replied, but he began work on a path from the back door to the drive.

  The snow was still falling but not as heavily, and the wind had died down. Hardy figured that at least a foot and a half of snow was on the ground. He saw a few drifts that were as tall as he was.

  As he shoveled, he looked for clues, but of course any clues from the night before — footprints or lost buttons or bits of clothing — were long covered by snow. When Hardy finished the path, he examined the trash cans and the side of the house with his magnifying glass, but he didn’t see anything except big-looking garbage.

  That night the Rossos, who were beginning to have what Mrs. Rosso called “cabin fever,” played board games by the fireplace. Jan and Ira were playing checkers, and Jan was just shouting, “King me! King me!” when Hardy heard a noise again.

  “Shh,” he said, sitting up straight. “I heard something.”

  The room grew silent.

  Clink. Clank. Clink.

  This time the sounds came from the front of the house.

  Everyone ran to the front door, and Mr. Rosso thrust it open while Mrs. Rosso turned on the porch lights. The yard was empty.

  “The chain on the bird feeder is swaying,” Hannah pointed out.

  “It must be getting windy again,” said Hardy.

  “I wonder why we didn’t hear the chain before,” mused Abbie.

  No one knew.

  * * *

  When Hardy woke up on Saturday morning, he discovered that the snow had stopped falling. Now I can do some real detective work, he thought. He put on his plaid hat and found his magnifying glass. Then he tiptoed out of the house. He didn’t want to get stuck with any more shoveling. He bet Frank and Joe Hardy’s father never made them shovel snow while they were working on a case.

  Hardy looked at the garbage cans again. He dug through the snow around them. He found some crumbs and toast crusts and orange peels, but no buttons or matchbooks or shreds of clothing.

  He walked across the yard. Not a human footprint anywhere, just some slender tracks. The tracks circled the house. Hardy followed them. When he reached the back again, he nearly whooped with joy — until he realized the human footprints he had just found were his own.

  “Darn,” said Hardy.

  He investigated the bird feeder. Seed was everywhere.

  “Messy birds,” he said. “Unless …” An idea began to form in Hardy’s mind. He took another look at the garbage cans. Then he followed his footprints to the bird feeder, keeping an eye on the smaller tracks beside him.

  “Mm-hm, mm-hm,” he muttered.

  The skinny tracks circled the post that supported the feeder. Then they angled off across the farmyard and into the woods.

  “Oh, no,” Hardy said softly. Then, “Oh, no!” He ran through the deep snow as fast as he was able, which wasn’t very fast, and burst through the back door of the house and into the kitchen.

  “Mom!” he shouted. “Dad! Everybody!”

  Most of the Rossos were in the kitchen, pouring glasses of orange juice and filling cereal bowls.

  “Hardy!” said Mrs. Rosso sharply. “What’s the matter? And why are you wearing your boots in the kitchen? You’re dripping everywhere. Go back in the mudroom and take them off, please.”

  “But I solved the mystery,” Hardy cried, “and we’re all in trouble. Dad, call the police!”

  “Boots,” said Mrs. Rosso, pointing to Hardy’s feet.

  “Mom, we’re in trouble!”

  “Boots.”

  “Why are we in trouble?” asked Faustine nervously. She glanced at Dinnie and murmured, “Messosmash.”

  Dinnie looked back at her twin with frightened eyes.

  “Hannah was right,” said Hardy, standing his ground. “There is an escaped convict. And he’s been hanging around our house. Now he’s off in the woods somewhere.”

  “How do you know there’s an escaped convict?” asked Mr. Rosso. “Have you been listening to the radio?”

  “No,” replied Hardy, “but all the clues are right in our yard. The only garbage outside the cans is food. The guy is hungry. He didn’t find much in the cans, though, so he walked around the house looking for other stuff. On the way, he crashed into the bird feeder and ate some seed. That’s what we heard last night. Then he must have gotten nervous, so he ran into the woods.”

  “Are you saying there are footprints in our yard?” asked Mrs. Rosso, who now seemed truly concerned, and apparently had fo
rgotten about Hardy’s wet boots.

  “Well, there are prints,” Hardy replied, “but not footprints. They’re stilt prints. See, the convict is very clever, and he knows the police could trace him by his footprints, so he’s walking on a pair of stilts. They left skinny holes all around the yard.”

  Bainbridge let out a guffaw, and Woody spit out a mouthful of milk, spraying it across the table at Faustine.

  “Ew, ew!” Faustine cried, grabbing for a napkin.

  “This convict was walking on stilts through the snow?” Bainbridge snorted with laughter.

  “Boots,” Mrs. Rosso ordered Hardy.

  “Aren’t you going to call the police, Dad?” Hardy wanted to know.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But that guy’s probably right out there in the woods.”

  “Yeah, polishing his stilts,” said Woody with a grin.

  “Boy,” said Hardy. “I do all this work, and everyone laughs at me.” He stomped into the mudroom.

  Hardy stayed mad at the Rossos all day. Just to prove how stupid they were, he wore his plaid hat all day, too. It would remind them that he was a detective.

  It was late in the afternoon, as dusk was falling, that Hardy found the real solution to the mystery. Clink, clank, clink went the chain on the feeder again. Hardy rushed to the window by the front door. Then he rushed around the house, rounding up his family. “Hey, you guys! Hey, everybody!” he exclaimed softly. “Come look out the window.”

  The Rossos crowded around the front windows. Standing at the feeder, his neck arched gracefully to reach the food inside, was a fawn.

  “A deer baby!” said Jan. “Right?”

  “Well, an old deer baby,” Mr. Rosso replied. “He’s already losing his spots. And you can see where his antlers are going to grow.”

  “He must be an orphan,” said Faustine, “and he’s having trouble finding food because of all the snow on the ground. Oh, Mom, can we adopt him?”

  “No, we cannot,” replied Mrs. Rosso. “No pets. Besides, honey, he’s wild. He doesn’t want to be adopted.”

  “Flag was adopted in The Yearling.”

  “But in the end, that didn’t work out,” said Mrs. Rosso. “Remember?”

  Faustine nodded. But she and Hardy and the other kids wanted to adopt the fawn anyway. On Sunday, Mrs. Rosso agreed that they could put food out for it. Hardy, the twins, Jan, Ira, and Hannah tried to lure the fawn out of the woods, but he would only approach the food if no one was around.

  “He can smell us, you know,” Hardy told his brothers and sisters.

  School opened again on Monday. The fawn ate in the morning while the Rosso kids were gone. He did the same thing on Tuesday and Wednesday. By Wednesday afternoon the snow was melting as the sun shone and the temperature rose. On Thursday the fawn did not return. The food that Hardy left for him remained untouched. The fawn didn’t come back on Friday or Saturday either. He was gone.

  “That’s as it should be,” said Mrs. Rosso.

  “I guess,” replied Hardy, but he was disappointed anyway. It would have been nice to have had a fawn for a pet.

  Hannah Rosso sat in the secret room that Candy had found. She’d been going there a lot lately, more than any of the other kids. It was a pretty private place. Her parents still didn’t know about it, and if she hung a washcloth on the inside knob of the closet door, the other kids took that as a sign not to enter the room.

  Hannah was moping. She was moping for a lot of reasons. She was moping because her big mouth had gotten her into trouble in school again. She had merely whispered to someone that Nicole Barruch smelled, and her teacher had asked her to stay after school and then had told her that she would have extra homework that night. She was to write one hundred times, “I will not be unkind to others.” How had her teacher even heard what she’d said?

  Furthermore, no one seemed to appreciate Hannah’s practical jokes. At home her brothers and sisters just rolled their eyes. In school the other third-graders said things like “Hannah’s being silly again” or “Hannah’s acting like a baby again.” They didn’t think anything was funny, not even when Hannah left a dead spider on Nicole’s desk and Nicole screamed.

  The worst thing about Hannah’s life, though, was her place in her family. She didn’t fit in with anybody. She was too young for Abbie and Bainbridge and Candy. And everybody else had what Hannah thought of as a “special”— a brother or sister who was that person’s favorite. Woody’s special was Hardy and vice versa. The twins had each other (their specials were the best of all). And Jan and Ira were specials.

  But Hannah had nobody. She was always too young or too old or not a boy. She hung around with Jan and Ira because she shared a room with them, but mostly she thought that they were too young for her. Well, Jan was, anyway. Ira was too neat.

  So Hannah had been spending a lot of time in the secret room, reading Celia’s diary. She wasn’t a very good reader, and Celia’s handwriting was messy and the ink had faded, but Hannah had read a number of parts. She’d covered the holidays first — Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, and Celia’s birthday. (Hannah loved birthdays.) Then she’d read about summertime, and about starting school in the fall. She could easily identify with Celia, who wrote that she was often lonely. Hannah knew what it was like to be lonely with lots of people around. It was even worse than being lonely and alone.

  After Hannah read about starting school, she realized that she’d forgotten to read about Valentine’s Day. Did people even celebrate Valentine’s Day way back when Celia was a girl? she wondered.

  She turned to the beginning of February.

  Yes. Celia was talking about Valentine cards. Hannah skipped ahead to find out where Celia bought hers. Hannah was going to buy hers at Hinkson’s, which was in town, next door to Zinder’s Dime Store. Hinkson’s was a stationery store, and Hannah had thought they had very nice birthday cards. She’d bought a gorgeous one for her grandmother when Nanny had turned seventy. It had been the biggest card she could find. On the front was a lightly scented heart that said: Grandma. Inside were the words I Love You With All My Heart. Candy had said the card was inappropriate because they didn’t call their grandmother Grandma, but Hannah knew that it was the thought that counted. And the thought here was that Hannah cared enough about Nanny to buy her the biggest birthday card in Hinkson’s.

  Hannah hadn’t had a chance to look at Hinkson’s valentines yet, and she was a little worried. What if Hinkson’s didn’t carry the boxes of Peanuts valentines she’d always bought in New York? They were the best cards of all. They were funny, and they didn’t cost too much, and you didn’t have to punch them out or do anything to them except sign your name. And best of all, two boxes was enough for all of Hannah’s classmates and her family.

  Maybe Celia had bought Peanuts valentines, too. Hannah read carefully, but she couldn’t find anything about going to town in early February. She turned back to January twenty-fifth and began reading from there. Finally, there it was — a trip into town to someplace called the Jersey General Store. But Celia didn’t buy boxes of cards. She bought yards of ribbon and lace, some colored pencils, and some paper. Celia was going to make her valentines. Hannah was impressed until she realized that Celia probably didn’t have to make twenty-six of them. That was how many Hannah would need — twelve for the kids in her class, one for her teacher, nine for her brothers and sisters, one each for her parents, and one each for Nanny and Grandy, who would be visiting the Rossos on Valentine’s Day.

  Still … maybe Hannah could make her own valentines, too. She could start right away and work in the secret room. It would be fun. There must be plenty of stuff to make cards with right in her house. After all, the Rossos had made their Christmas cards several months earlier.

  Hannah began to feel excited. She ran downstairs and rooted around in the cabinets where Mrs. Rosso had stored the materials for card making and ornament making and decoration making. She found Magic Markers, paper, glue, scissors, glitt
er, scraps of lace and fabric, beads and buttons and doilies and sequins. Amazing!

  With an armload of supplies teetering in front of her, Hannah returned to the secret room. She set to work immediately and decided to make the cards for her classmates first.

  Hannah started by folding a piece of paper in half and making a beautiful rose on one side with red sequins and glitter. Then, with a grin, she wrote on the inside, “Roses are red, glue is sticky, Valentine’s Day would be great if you weren’t so icky.” She disguised her handwriting by printing extra neatly, and she didn’t sign her name. At the last minute she decided it would be more fun not to make cards for particular people but just to make them, hand them out, and see who got what. So she didn’t bother to decide who the card was for either.

  Over the next week Hannah spent all of her free time in the secret room making her valentines. She finished the cards for school and started on the ones for home. A brilliant idea came to her just as she was making the first card for her family. Maybe she could use the cards to hint to her parents how much she and her brothers and sisters wanted a dog. Hannah wouldn’t sign these valentines either, so no one would know they were from her.

  With a smile on her lips, Hannah began the first card. In a magazine she found a picture of a cocker spaniel, cut it out, and glued it to the front of the card. She made a border of colored stars and red hearts. Inside, in her best handwriting, Hannah printed, “Come snow or rain or wind or fog, we’d all be happier if we had a dog.” Brilliant! Simply brilliant!

  Hannah worked so hard that all of her cards were finished five days before Valentine’s Day. The only things she needed to buy were envelopes for them. At Hinksons’ she bought thirteen white ones and thirteen pink ones. Later she put the school cards in the white envelopes and the family cards in the pink ones. Most of them didn’t fit very well, and she had to fold some of the edges in odd ways, but she didn’t think that mattered much.

  On Valentine’s Day, Hannah woke up early. Her stomach was jittery with excitement. She loved receiving valentines, but this year she was also excited about giving out the special ones she had made. She couldn’t wait to see what everyone thought about them. Best of all, they weren’t signed. If no one liked them, they wouldn’t know that it was Hannah who had made them.