Two

—

Pet Patrol

“YOU GOT the cemetery, too,” Trevor stated, slowly turning around to face Loyola.

Loyola nodded, still staring over the top of his head at the sheet of paper in horror.

“Was that your first choice?” he asked.

Loyola shook her head.

“Second choice?”

Loyola shook her head.

“Then I’m guessing it wasn’t your third, either.”

Loyola’s forlorn look said it all.

Trevor could see that it wasn’t the cemetery that horrified her. It was the grim realization that she and Trevor would be paired together for this assignment.

She took a giant step back.

Trevor wasn’t offended. He didn’t like the idea, either.

“How does this work again?” he asked from the safer distance she had created.

He was a little vague on the details. After all, he had been attending Queensview Elementary for less than a year, and every school he had ever been to came with a different set of rules. The whole community service requirement was new to him.

“We have to volunteer for a charity for three months. Every Wednesday afternoon. From now until school ends in June.”

Loyola rattled off the details in a mechanical, deadpan voice, as if she were in shock.

She took another giant step back, attempting to shrink into the row of lockers across from where Trevor stood.

“Together?” Trevor said. “You and me?”

“I don’t think there’s any other choice,” Loyola said glumly, her back pressed against the lockers, nowhere else to go. “The rest of the list is completely full.” Her voice softened to the point of almost disappearing.

But there she stood, larger than life. She turned to open her locker.

“Let’s talk to Mr. Easton,” Trevor said, taking charge, because she certainly didn’t look as if she was up for the challenge. Then he gasped. “Whoa!”

She had swung the locker door open, and for the first time Trevor got to see the contents. Her clothes hung on hangers, her spare shoes were stacked in boxes on the floor with pictures of them taped to the fronts so that she could tell which pair was inside, and her books and notepads were neatly arranged on the top shelf according to height and color.

It was the most organized space he’d ever seen!

Loyola ignored his awe. She deposited her mystery novel on the top shelf, then shut the locker door.

Some of the other grade-six students had started drifting back into class from the photo shoot. Trevor and Loyola stayed put, craning their necks to look for Mr. Easton. They both spotted him at the same time as he made his way down the hallway toward their class, surrounded by more students who were joking with him.

“Mr. Easton,” Trevor called out as soon as their teacher was within earshot. “Can we talk to you for a second?”

Mr. Easton slowed his pace.

“What’s up?” he asked as the other students slid past him and took their seats inside the classroom.

“It’s about community service duty,” Trevor said. “I know that not everybody could get their first choice …”

“But there must be room for us in another group,” Loyola chimed in from her safety zone across the hall.

“I’m afraid there isn’t,” Mr. Easton said. “Besides, the Twillingate Cemetery Brigade really needs the school’s help.”

Trevor glanced at Loyola, who had begun to slouch in defeat.

Mr. Easton paused.

“Is it because of the cemetery? Surely you don’t believe in ghosts,” he said, misreading their stricken faces.

Trevor hadn’t thought of that. Maybe he and Loyola could be reassigned if they claimed an irrational fear.

“Yes, that’s it,” Trevor declared, hoping Loyola would follow his lead and play along. “Grave markers give me the creeps.”

Mr. Easton looked as if he didn’t believe the ruse for a second.

“And all those gravestone poems about dead people?” Trevor grimaced.

“Epitaphs,” Mr. Easton corrected.

“Epitaphs,” Trevor repeated. “Pretty bleak, am I right?”

“Not as bleak as you might think. I read the description of the work that the Twillingate Cemetery Brigade undertakes. They’ll be covering topics like how to read eroded inscriptions, how to clean a gravestone, how to map locations of the plots and how to take rubbings of epitaphs. There’s even a lesson on how to design your own gravestone.”

“Design my own gravestone?” Trevor repeated incredulously.

Mr. Easton’s unwaveringly cheerful tone made it sound as though he was describing a fun-time theme park. It dawned on Trevor that he was not going to make any headway pretending to be afraid of cemeteries.

“I should think it would be fascinating,” Mr. Easton continued. “Mr. Creelman has designed his own gravestone. He told me it features thistles from his parents’ home country of Scotland, along with an epitaph inspired by the planetarium where he used to work.”

Trevor looked over at Loyola, but she was still no help, having glumly planted herself on the opposite side of the hallway, secret pact in full force.

Was Mr. Easton aware of their secret pact? Had he ever noticed that they wouldn’t be caught dead standing next to each other?

“Don’t look so morose,” Mr. Easton said kindly. “Twillingate Cemetery isn’t a death sentence.”

He started to chuckle at his pun. Trevor and Loyola did not join in.

Mr. Easton stopped chuckling. He sighed.

“Okay. Tell you what. I’ll see what I can do. But no promises.”

“Great!” Trevor said with relief, thinking that he could slide into one group on the list, Loyola could be sent off with another group, and their secret pact would be safe.

Problem solved.

“No promises, Trevor,” Mr. Easton repeated, trying to sound stern, but Trevor knew better. “I haven’t any idea what I’m going to say to the Twillingate Cemetery Brigade. They’re going to be very disappointed.”

Before Mr. Easton could change his mind, Trevor made a hasty retreat into the classroom and sat at his desk in the front row. Loyola did likewise, only her destination was a desk at the very back of the room where she surveyed everyone’s comings and goings. She reminded him of a control tower looking down at all the puny airplanes on the tarmac. Between them, hanging from the ceiling above their heads, floated another of Mr. Easton’s playful assignments, this time about setting words free. He had had his students fold the pages from a manuscript he had been working on into bats or birds or dragonflies, turning them into mobiles of fluttering words marked up with red ink.

There wasn’t much class time left before the lunch bell rang. Trevor ate with some of the other boys in grade six. He had made friends quickly, but, as usual, he had only learned one or two key facts about each of them, knowing he’d be gone in a year.

“So what did you get for community service?” Miller asked while scarfing down his roast beef sandwich. Miller had broken his arm twice last summer.

“Cemetery duty,” Trevor said, but hastened to add, “Mr. Easton is going to change it.”

“Cemetery duty?” Miller repeated between bites. “With that old man who came to the Queensview Mystery Book Club?”

“Mr. Creelman? Yes,” Trevor said. “But like I said, Mr. Easton’s going to change it.”

“Do you remember his eyebrows?” Craig said. Craig was constantly stuffed up with allergies and talked through his plugged nose.

Trevor remembered. Mr. Creelman’s eyebrows were like puffy white cotton balls.

“Who wouldn’t,” Trevor said, digging into his cheese sandwich. He ate one every day without fail, one of the few constants in his life.

Miller wiped his hands on his pants, then, frowning, plucked a bag of fresh baby carrots from his lunch bag with two fingers, as if he was handling something that had gone moldy.

“And those poems,” Bertram added. Bertram was the writer in the group, having recently recited a hilarious poem about his grandmother’s yard sale that had had the class in stitches. “Mr. Creelman covered everything you’d ever want to know about death, and then some.”

“I told you, Mr. Easton is going to find me something else to do for community service,” Trevor insisted.

“Who else got assigned cemetery duty?” Miller asked, munching through the carrots faster than a garden of rabbits.

Trevor set down his sandwich. He was losing his appetite. Perhaps he needed to hang out with a different crowd at lunch. This bunch was merciless!

They all stopped chewing and stared at him for an answer.

“Loyola,” Trevor finally muttered.

He braced himself.

The boys — every single one of them — whooped.

“That’s classic!” Noah said. He liked to use big words. “You and Loyola? Stomping around that lumpy old necropolis together!”

Trevor was pretty sure that necropolis was a fancy word for graveyard.

“It’s not going to happen,” he insisted with a dismissive wave of his hand.

“What a spectacle,” Noah went on with his lethal word choice. “And I’m not talking about the ghosts and other apparitions.”

“The dynamic duo,” Craig added, following Noah’s lead. “Able to reach high shelves and fit into small spaces. That’s quite the combination.”

“Very funny,” Trevor said.

He could see that it might actually be funny if it hadn’t been about him. This kind of remark was exactly why he and Loyola had a secret pact not to stand next to each other.

“What’s an apparition?” Miller asked Noah, having polished off his carrots.

“An apparition?” Noah repeated. “It means ghost-like.”

Trevor seized the opportunity to steer the conversation away from Loyola.

“So you believe in ghosts?” he asked Noah.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Have you seen any?” Trevor asked.

“No,” Noah said. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that cemetery.”

Miller jumped in. He had scooped out the contents of his first pudding cup and had already started to peel back the lid of the second one, which he had happily discovered deep in his lunch bag.

“Noah’s right. There are definitely ghosts at Twillingate.”

All the boys turned to Miller. He continued his spooky account between spoonfuls.

“People say there’s one ghost in particular. It’s a man who’s searching for his wife. He wanders from gravestone to gravestone in the middle of the night, looking for her name.”

“She’s not buried beside him?” Bertram asked.

“No. That’s the thing. When he died and was buried, his family placed a double marker on his grave. On his side of the marker is his name and dates and all that, but the other side is completely blank.”

“Maybe his wife hasn’t died yet,” Bertram reasoned, but his eyes were wide open. He was clearly creeped out.

“Do the math. He’s been dead for over two hundred years,” Miller explained, his words hanging over them like ominous black clouds.

The boys grew silent, pondering the mystery, except for Trevor. He rolled his eyes.

“You think I’m making this up?” Miller demanded.

“I’m sure it’s true. Every word,” Trevor said, playing along.

“Well, get this,” Miller said, pulling out a muffin from his bottomless lunch bag. “On the dead man’s side of the grave marker, it reads that he was an affectionate husband. Only the word affectionate was scratched off and it had to be carved back in again even deeper than the other words surrounding it. They say that his wife’s ghost erased her side of the grave marker and then scratched out affectionate when she was buried next to him. Apparently, he wasn’t such an affectionate husband after all.”

“Wow,” Trevor said in a deadpan tone, continuing to goad Miller so as to keep everyone off the topic of Loyola. “That’s quite a story.”

“You still don’t believe me?” Miller asked, and then he tackled his muffin in five quick bites.

Trevor decided not to press his luck. Unlike the others, he knew a thing or two about when to stop teasing. Instead, he gave a noncommittal shrug.

Having polished off the muffin, Miller reached over and plunged his hand into Bertram’s open bag of chips.

“Hey!” Bertram complained.

“Go by and have a look,” Miller taunted Trevor. “No, wait! You have cemetery duty, so you’ll be able to check it out any time you want.”

“There are no ghosts,” Trevor insisted. “There are no vampires or werewolves, either. Besides, I told you. Mr. Easton’s going to find me something else to do.”

“Yeah, probably,” Miller agreed.

Mr. Easton had certainly come to his rescue plenty of times throughout the year.

Miller began to root around his lunch bag for something else to eat, but came up empty at last.

“What about zombies?” Craig asked. “Do you have an opinion on those?”

“The undead who walk around confused and constantly hungry?” Trevor said. He nodded in Miller’s direction. “Sure there are zombies. We have living proof.”

The boys laughed as the school bell rang, announcing that lunch was over.

Trevor was relieved that their conversation had ended, but continued to worry about whether or not Mr. Easton could get him out of cemetery duty with Loyola.

Of course he could, Trevor reasoned to himself. Mr. Easton was probably the kindest teacher that he had ever met, and he had been to four schools so he had plenty of comparisons.

Up until grade six, Trevor had been too busy quickly learning the rules of each new school and making a few friends to care much about his teachers. Meeting Mr. Easton changed all that. He had gotten to know each of his students so that he could recommend a book they would be sure to like. It was his idea that Trevor might want to borrow The Case of the Waylaid Water Gun from the school library.

On his way back to class, Trevor ran into Mr. Easton, who was stooping in front of the water fountain in the hallway.

“Did you find something else for me to do for community service?” he asked, boldly pushing his luck.

“I did get a chance to call the Twillingate Cemetery Brigade over lunch, and I spoke to Mr. Creelman,” Mr. Easton said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“You did?” Trevor said.

“He was very disappointed.”

“Oh,” Trevor said, feeling his chest collapse. What else could he say?

“He told me that the Twillingate Cemetery Brigade has been working with student volunteers for years.”

Trevor’s sinking feeling told him that he would not like where this conversation was headed.

“But I hear that cemetery really does have ghosts,” Trevor blurted out. Even he didn’t know where he was going with that malarkey. A bid for sympathy, maybe?

“Ghosts?” Mr. Easton repeated. “Seriously?”

Trevor nodded, hoping his absolute disbelief in the undead did not betray him. And then he remembered that Mr. Easton was also new to the school, having arrived for grade six just like Trevor. Perhaps he was unaware of the town’s ghost story, too.

“They say there’s this one who is missing his wife. He goes around looking for her name on the other grave markers.”

“Is that so? And who told you this?”

“I don’t know,” Trevor said, studying the floor. “I just heard it.”

Trevor knew that if he had said, “Miller,” it would be game over. He and Mr. Easton, and everyone else for that matter, understood that Miller made up stuff all the time.

Embellishing, as Mr. Easton liked to call it.

Mr. Easton studied Trevor. Then he sighed.

“You can relax,” Mr. Easton said, running his hand through his thick, wavy hair. “Mr. Creelman only wants volunteers who are committed to the work. He wants volunteers who love and appreciate the cemetery as much as the Twillingate Cemetery Brigade. The grounds are very important to them and to the families of those who are buried there.”

“Mr. Creelman told you all that?” Trevor asked.

Was Mr. Creelman trying to make him feel guilty?

It was working. Trevor scuffed at the floor.

“He did,” Mr. Easton said. “But he’s letting you off the hook.”

“What will I do now?” Trevor asked, not feeling nearly as much relief as he had hoped.

“Interestingly enough, Mr. Creelman had a suggestion that I followed up on.”

“What?” Trevor asked warily.

“Mr. Creelman told me that the local animal shelter has started a new program called the Pet Patrol and they are looking for volunteers.”

“The animal shelter? Isn’t that where they take care of lost cats and dogs?”

“They do. And they’ve started a program for senior citizens who own dogs that need exercise and an opportunity to socialize with other dogs. Volunteers pick up the pets from their homes and take them for a walk. That way the dogs stay healthy and happy.”

“So I would be a dog walker?” Trevor asked. He was quickly warming to the idea. In fact, he couldn’t believe his luck. He loved dogs, but he didn’t own one because his family moved so much.

“How does that sound?” Mr. Easton asked.

“You’re the best!” Trevor exclaimed.

“Well, you really ought to thank Mr. Creelman.”

“I will,” Trevor said generously, knowing full well that he would likely never run into Mr. Creelman again with his family move so near at hand.

The next Wednesday afternoon, Trevor reported to the animal shelter. It was located five blocks from Queensview Elementary in the direction of the town’s public park. As he pushed through the front door, a bell tinkled, announcing his arrival. Inside, it smelled of soap and warm dogs and lasagna.

“Hello,” he said to the woman wearing a white lab coat sitting behind the front desk. She was eating lunch from a take-out box that had Sacred Grounds Cafe printed on its lid. “I’m Trevor. I’m here from Queensview Elementary to volunteer.”

“Oh, yes. The Senior Citizens’ Pet Patrol. But I was told there’d be two of you.”

“Two of us?” Trevor repeated. “Mr. Easton didn’t tell me about another volunteer.”

“Yes,” the woman in the lab coat said. “It’s the school’s policy. Students must work in pairs for safety reasons.”

The bell tinkled behind him. He turned.

And he looked up, way up, in disbelief.

It was the school giant, dressed to be invisible in a faded gray sweater and dark brown pants.

“What are you doing here?” Loyola demanded, forgetting to use her I’m-smaller-than-I-look voice.

“I got out of cemetery duty,” Trevor announced loudly, so as to take up as much space as possible. “And you? Did you lose a dog? Or a cat?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Loyola said hotly, but keeping her distance. “I got out of cemetery duty, too.”

“Well, we can’t both be here,” Trevor reasoned. “Go back to the school and find something else for community service.”

“You go back,” Loyola argued. “I like dogs.”

Loyola held her ground, arms crossed, but at a safe distance from Trevor. Trevor stood firm, too.

“There are plenty of dogs to go around,” the woman in the lab coat cut in jovially, ignoring their standoff.

Obviously, she did not know about their secret pact.

“Here you are,” she said, handing Trevor a plastic vest with a chest-sized reflective X on the front and back. It was the kind of vest that crossing guards or construction workers wore so that motorists could see them in blizzards or fog.

She handed a vest to Loyola, too.

“One size fits all,” the woman in the lab coat added cheerfully.

Was she trying to be funny? Trevor wondered as he reluctantly put on his vest.

“Here are your walkie-talkies. They have a long range in case you need me.”

She showed them how to work the buttons.

“And here’s the list of addresses of the senior citizens to whom you’ve been assigned.”

She retrieved the list from her desk and handed it to Loyola.

Trevor frowned. He knew Loyola got the list because she looked older than him. She looked older and more responsible just because of her height. It wasn’t fair.

“We’re the same age,” he wanted to state for the record, but he didn’t. He thought that it would make him sound small.

Loyola studied the list.

“Are all the addresses near here?” she asked, returning to her soft voice, her I’m-smaller-than-I-look voice.

The woman in the lab coat nodded as she pulled out a map from the drawer of her desk and laid it out for them. She pointed to their location.

“Here’s where we are,” she said. “And here’s the park where you might want to take the dogs. The seniors live on these blocks between the two.”

“They’re very close by,” Trevor observed out loud to show that he was perfectly capable of reading maps, despite being short.

“That’s right,” the woman said. “You’ll have six dogs between you so be sure to keep them on their leashes. And remember to wear your vests and use crosswalks at all times.”

“Will do,” Trevor said, using his large I’m-responsible voice. He was still smarting over Loyola getting the list of addresses. He turned to leave.

“Oh! One more thing,” the woman in the lab coat said.

She pushed through a swinging door behind her desk, and Trevor heard different barks start up, with every dog sounding desperate for companionship.

“You keep the dogs back there?” he asked when she returned seconds later, and all the barking stopped.

“Dogs, cats and one bunny at the moment,” she said. “They’re waiting for good homes.”

“Someone called our school looking for a lost dog,” Trevor said.

“Lost, abandoned, runaways. We take care of them all,” she said.

She handed Trevor and Loyola a clump of plastic bags each.

“What are these for?” Trevor asked.

“Doo-doo,” the woman said with a smile. “It’s the town’s by-law. Don’t worry. The bags are biodegradable.”

That was not what Trevor was worried about. He had never had to pick up dog poop before. Could he even do it?

“You better get going,” the woman said, eyeing the clock on the wall. “The seniors are expecting you. When you have finished your walk and returned the dogs, please report back here before you go home for the day. Have fun!”

“Tell you what,” Loyola said as soon as she was outside, a sour look on her face. “There’s no need for both of us to go to each house on this list. That’s not very efficient and the dogs won’t get as long a walk. So why don’t I take the addresses that are on one side of the street, and you take the addresses on the other?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Trevor said, just as happy not to be seen with her as she obviously was not to be seen with him.

She pulled out a notepad from her knapsack and began to copy out half the list of addresses for Trevor in her teeny-tiny handwriting.

“What about the park?” he added.

Regardless of their secret pact, the park was big and he did not want to get lost on his own with three strange dogs.

Loyola hesitated with her pen, weighing her options, which were as limited as his.

“Why don’t we meet at the park gate by the water fountain once we’ve picked up all the dogs, then figure out what to do.”

She handed Trevor his list of addresses.

“Okay, time to fly,” Trevor said, using a favorite family expression.

With that, Loyola crossed the street taking giant strides and started up the opposite sidewalk to the first address on her list.

Trevor was left in the dust.

Get used to it, he thought glumly.