After dinner, Mom e-mailed Heidi Kellogg and told her the latest development. I started my homework and Mom began opening the day’s mail. I heard her gasp.
“What is it?” I asked.
Mom’s hand shook as she handed me an official-looking letter from a law firm.
“Mr. Myers hired an attorney,” Mom said. “He’s suing us for stealing his dog.”
“He can’t do this!” I cried.
“I’m afraid he can.”
“But he’ll lose the case, right? You’re Ra’s foster parent now. It’s legal for him to be here.”
“It’s legal now,” Mom said, “but it wasn’t legal when you took Ra. The dog was Mr. Myers’s dog, and you stole him from private property. Every time you went there to feed Ra you were trespassing.” She sounded tired, as if she’d like nothing more than to climb into her recliner and take a nap.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“I can’t afford to hire a lawyer,” Mom said.
“Maybe the Humane Society will help since they’re responsible for Ra now.”
“They’re a nonprofit organization whose donors give money to save animals. They can’t spend their funds on a private party’s lawsuit.”
“How can Mr. Myers afford an attorney?” I asked.
Mom shrugged. “Just because he lives in a rundown house and drives a beater car doesn’t mean he has no money.”
I went to the front door and called Ra. Then I called him from the back door. Where was he? All the horrible possibilities rushed through my brain like a flooded stream flowing downhill.
When I went back inside, I heard a muffled sound and looked in the kitchen. Mom’s head rested on her arms, which were folded on the table. I realized she was crying. She had cried a lot in the first months after Dad died but since then no matter how short of money we were or how bad our troubles got, I never saw my mom cry.
The worst part was, it was my fault. I had got us into a huge mess, and I had no idea how I could get us out of it. I felt like crying myself.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I woke up twice in the night. Both times I went downstairs, opened the door, and called Ra. He didn’t come.
I wanted to stay home from school the next day to look for him but Mom said I had to go. She called Mrs. Gardiner, who promised to walk past our house several times during the day and call Mom at work if she saw Ra. Of course with her poor eyesight, she wasn’t likely to spot him unless he stood right in front of her.
Heidi Kellogg called while I was eating my breakfast. “The Humane Society is posting a five-hundred-dollar reward for information leading to Ra’s safe return,” she said. “They’re using one of the photos that you sent me. Rewards have worked well in the past when they’ve sought information in animal abuse cases.”
Mom drove me to school. We cruised slowly past Mr. Myers’s house.
I don’t know what we would have done if Ra had been chained in his old yard but he wasn’t there. The dull blue spotted car was not in the driveway, either.
Andrew was waiting for me when I got to school. “Did you find him?” he asked.
“No.” I told him about the reward and about driving past Mean Man Myers’s house.
“If he isn’t back by the time we get out of school,” Andrew said, “I’ll help look. We can put up flyers. Wendy said to tell you she’ll help, too.”
Whatever rift that had begun between Andrew and me was gone. Once again we were pals, working together, both on the same side.
“Let’s tell Mrs. Webster and the rest of our class,” Andrew suggested. “I bet lots of kids would look for Ra.”
During the morning recess, Andrew and I stayed in the room. “Do you need something, boys?” Mrs. Webster asked.
“Can we talk to you?” I asked.
“Of course.” She sat at her desk and motioned for us to sit in the front row.
“Remember the dog I wrote about that wasn’t being taken care of ?” I asked.
“The dog in your poem. Yes, I remember.”
“Well, Andrew and I rescued him.”
“How? What did you do?”
“We unchained him and took him home.”
“Oh, my,” said Mrs. Webster.
“We kept him hidden in our secret fort,” Andrew said. “We fed him and walked him and gave him flea treatment and took really good care of him. We named him Ra.”
“After the Egyptian sun god?” Mrs. Webster looked surprised.
“That, too, but mostly because R and A are our initials.”
“Go on,” Mrs. Webster said.
“Then my little sister blabbed to my mom about the dog,” Andrew said, “and our parents were going to make us take him back, only when we got there, a different dog was chained up with no food or water, and Ra acted scared, so we didn’t leave him there, after all.”
“I should hope not,” Mrs. Webster said.
“My mom talked to the city’s animal control officer,” I said. “The officer went there and saw the new dog. She took video of him for thirty-six hours, to prove he didn’t get any food or water. She gave the Humane Society temporary custody of him and of Ra. My mom is Ra’s foster parent, so Ra’s staying with us. Then yesterday Mean Man Myers—”
“Who?” Mrs. Webster interrupted.
“The man who had chained Ra to the tree, Mr. Myers. He followed me while I was walking Ra and tried to take him away, but Ra bit him and ran off and now Ra’s missing.”
Mrs. Webster was quiet for a moment, as if it took a while to absorb all the facts we had given her. “Has Mr. Myers been charged with any crime?” she asked.
“Animal negligence. There’s a hearing this afternoon.”
By then the other kids were returning from recess. Mrs. Webster didn’t say anything about Ra to them.
At lunch, Andrew said, “We should skip school this afternoon and go to that hearing.”
“Are you nuts? Mom would never forgive me.”
“I’ve seen news clips of court hearings where people hold up signs. It shows the judge that the public wants the defendant to be held accountable.”
“How would we get there?”
“The bus. I looked up the schedule last night. If we leave now, we’d be there in plenty of time.” He reached into his backpack and brought out a rolled up tube of paper with a rubber band around it. He unfurled a three-foot-long banner that read KIDS AGAINST ANIMAL CRUELTY. “We can each hold one end,” he said. “We’ll be powerful pertinent protestors.”
I shook my head. “We’d be painfully punished and penalized.”
“We could make a difference,” Andrew said. “Our presence might be important.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m sorry, Andrew, but Mom’s doing everything she can to help us rescue Ra. I need to do it her way.”
Andrew rolled up his banner and put it away.
When we got back to our room, Mrs. Webster told me she’d talked to my mom and to Heidi Kellogg.
“Class,” she said, “we have an opportunity to help another mistreated animal.”
Everyone quit talking and paid attention.
“Rusty and Andrew rescued a dog named Ra.” Everyone stared at me and Andrew but they were good stares, full of admiration. Andrew grinned at me and I knew he wasn’t angry any longer. If we had left school to go to the hearing, we would have missed this.
“Ra got loose yesterday,” Mrs. Webster said, “and he is still missing. They need help to find him.”
The class immediately buzzed with plans to look for Ra. While they talked, a student helper from the school office came to my classroom with a stack of flyers that said LOST DOG. REWARD. They had Ra’s picture and a phone number on them. Mrs. Webster had asked someone at the Humane Society to e-mail the flyer attachment so the school could print them.
Several kids said they’d distribute Lost Dog flyers; some said they’d ride their bikes and look for him; others said they’d e-mail all their relatives.
While Mrs. W
ebster distributed the flyers, Andrew asked me, “Did you look for Ra at the fort? Maybe he went back there.”
I slapped my palm to my forehead. I couldn’t believe I had not thought to look around the fort. That had been his safe home, and he was used to being walked there. It made sense that he’d return. What if he’d been sitting at the door of the fort all night?
“I’m the most ignorant person ever born,” I told Andrew. “I am a bona fide brainless blob. It never occurred to me that Ra might be there.”
“We can look there right after school,” Andrew said.
I thought about calling Mrs. Gardiner and asking her to go look at the fort but she uses a cane, and the greenbelt terrain is uneven. What if she fell? I knew Mom wouldn’t like it if I called Mrs. Gardiner. Also, the fewer neighbors who knew about the fort, the better. If Ra had gone there, I hoped he would stay and wait for me to come to him.
My row was the last to receive flyers. When Gerald got his, he said, “That’s Buddy! That’s my uncle’s dog! Somebody stole him.” Gerald turned in his seat and looked suspiciously at me. “Where’d you get this dog?”
“What’s your uncle’s name?” I asked.
“Uncle Kip.”
“His last name.”
“Myers. Kip Myers.” Gerald looked back at Mrs. Webster. “His dog was swiped right out of his front yard. The cops didn’t do nothing about it, but Uncle Kip says he knows who took Buddy and he’s suing them to get Buddy back.”
Mrs. Webster looked worried. “Many German shepherds look alike,” she said. “Are you positive this is a picture of your uncle’s dog?”
“That’s him, all right,” Gerald said. “That picture was taken in Uncle Kip’s front yard. Now we know for sure who the thieves were! ” He gave me a triumphant look, and I knew he was remembering when I caught him stealing dog food out of the donation bin and had called him a thief.
“I agree with Gerald,” I said.
“You do?” Gerald said.
“It is the same dog,” I said. “We rescued him from the yard of a man who beat him and left him chained up with no food or water. The man’s last name is Myers.”
I heard murmurs of disbelief from some of my classmates.
“So you admit it! ” Gerald said. “You stole my uncle’s dog!”
“We rescued him.”
Mrs. Webster said, “Quiet, everyone! This situation is more complicated than I realized and won’t be an appropriate class project. Please pass the flyers forward.”
“I want to keep mine,” Hayley said. “I’m going to help find Ra.”
“Me too,” said Jordan.
“His name isn’t Ra,” said Gerald. “It’s Buddy.”
It was clear that the sympathies of the class were with Andrew and me, not with Gerald, but Mrs. Webster was adamant. “What you do on your own time outside of class is up to you,” she said, “but this will not be a school activity. Please get out your math workbooks.”
I got out my workbook and pretended to look at the problems while my mind mulled over the fact that Mean Man Myers was Gerald’s uncle. No wonder Gerald was a jerk if that’s the kind of family he had. I wondered what his parents were like. Maybe they were as horrible as his uncle, which would explain a lot about Gerald’s behavior.
I wondered why he had tried to steal dog food. Maybe he had a dog and his parents didn’t feed it enough. Maybe he had planned to give the food to Ra.
I tapped Gerald on the shoulder. He glared at me. “Do you have a dog?” I whispered.
“Why do you care?”
“Do you have a dog or not?”
“None of your business.” He turned back to his math book.
My temporary sympathy for Gerald evaporated. Probably he stole the dog food because he couldn’t resist a chance to steal something.
Gerald, I thought, is a rotten repulsive rat.
After school, I rushed to the fort as soon as I got off the bus. I walked through the trees calling Ra, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t waiting by my house, either. I circled the block once and then went inside to leave my backpack.
Andrew arrived on his bike.
“I need to check the phone messages before we start searching,” I said. “Mom put an ID tag on Ra with our phone number on it, so if anyone finds him they’ll call us.”
There were three messages. We drank lemonade while we listened.
The first message was from Mrs. Gardiner telling us she had not see Ra.
The second was from Heidi Kellogg. “Bad news,” she said. “The judge let Mr. Myers off with only a warning.”
“We should have gone to court,” Andrew said. “Our sign might have helped.”
The third message was from Mean Man Myers. “When I get my watchdog back,” he said, “I’m coming for revenge.”
Andrew and I looked at each other. I left all the messages for Mom to hear.
“We have to find Ra before he does,” I said.
I scribbled a note to Mom, in case she got home before we returned: Andrew and I are riding our bikes to look for Ra.
We went outside, hopped on our bikes, and began to search.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Andrew and I rode around for three hours. We took a staple gun with us and stapled flyers to telephone and electric poles. We saw a mail delivery person and asked him if he’d seen Ra. He hadn’t, but he took one of the flyers and said he’d be watchful. He told us he’d once found a stolen bicycle because the kid who owned it had given him a picture of the bike and asked him to look for it on his rounds.
As we worked, I thought how good it was to have a friend to help me, someone I could count on in good times or bad to always take my side. Andrew was there for the fun days of bowling and building a fort and playing with Ra, but he also showed up to distribute flyers and ride for miles, calling and searching. If he had felt unhappy over not seeing the collie’s ghost, and for being less involved with Ra than he’d been while Ra lived at the fort, he had put those feelings aside, and I was grateful.
Andrew had to be home by six, so I went home then, too. Mom and I made peanut butter sandwiches for dinner, then ate them in the car while we looked for Ra. I kept my window rolled down despite the cold. I called until my voice was hoarse, shining my flashlight into shrubbery and alleys.
How could he vanish without a trace? Several times we saw one of our Lost Dog flyers and didn’t know who had put it up. It helped to know that other people were also searching for Ra.
“He could be anywhere,” Mom said as she wearily parked the car back in our garage. “Some kind person might have thought he was a stray and taken him in and is feeding him.”
“How could anyone think he’s a stray? He has on a collar and a tag. He was dragging the leash behind him.”
“Maybe the collar came off. Maybe the leash got caught on a fence or bush and Ra jerked out of the collar. Who knows? All I know is, we can’t look any longer tonight.”
We trudged inside and checked for messages. There weren’t any.
Before we went to bed, Mom and I took flashlights and looked around the fort. Then we walked to the end of our block and back, calling. Finally we gave up and went upstairs for the night.
The collie’s ghost woke me. I knew she was there even before I saw her because I felt the icy air next to my bed. She paced back and forth between my bed and the door. For once, I was glad to see her. I had decided this was a good dog ghost who wanted to help Ra. Maybe she knew where he was. Maybe she had found him and would lead me to him. I wished she could tell me her secrets.
I dressed quickly, slid my feet into a pair of flip-flops, and followed her downstairs. I got one of the flashlights that Mom and I had used earlier. I thought about Mean Man Myers and Mom’s warning that I shouldn’t go walking around alone until this matter was settled. I knew Mom would want me to wake her up, but what would I tell her? That I was following the ghost of a dog?
That day when the ghost dog had tried to block us from getting in the car, M
om had not seen her. She wouldn’t be able to see her now, either, so how could I possibly explain why I intended to follow this apparition into the night?
I knew tonight I wouldn’t turn back; I would go where the collie’s ghost led me. Yet, I also knew that I needed to be careful. I opened Mom’s purse, removed her cell phone, and put it in my pocket. I saw a business card for Heidi Kellogg and took that, too. I paused a moment, trying to think what else I might need. My camera? I grabbed it and stuck it in my other pocket.
I wrote a note: I’ve gone with the collie. Andrew can explain. If something awful happened to me and I never came home, at least she’d know why I left.
No! I told myself. Don’t be negative. You’ll come home. You’ll probably return before Mom wakes up and realizes you’re gone, and, with any luck, you’ll have Ra with you.
I let myself out the front door and trotted down the sidewalk after the collie’s ghost. I hoped she had discovered Ra, shut by accident in the garage of someone who was gone for a few days, or maybe she’d found him wandering behind a strip mall, foraging in the Dumpsters for food. Perhaps he was hanging around the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant, begging for handouts. He might be hopelessly lost, running in circles the way people do when they’re lost in the woods.
Those possibilities vanished as I realized where the collie’s ghost was leading me—straight back to Mean Man Myers’s house. Had he found Ra, after all, and somehow managed to force him into the car?
We were still half a block away when I saw Ra lying in the dirt, chained to the tree, exactly where he had been the first time I ever saw him.
I ran to him. He saw me coming and struggled to get up. His tail wagged but I could tell he’d been injured. He staggered briefly, then lay down again. I dropped to my knees and threw my arms around him.
“Oh, Ra! ” I whispered. “I’m so glad to see you! I’m taking you home, right now.”
I didn’t have a leash with me, but I knew I didn’t need one. Ra would go with me whether he was leashed or not. Ra’s blue collar with the suns on it had been replaced by a choke collar, and when I reached for the chain to unhook it, I discovered that there was a small padlock attached. Ra’s collar was locked around his neck and locked to the chain!