Finding Midnight (10 page)

“I guess so,” Summer replied, unsure.

“Good,” he said, patting her shoulder. With
that he headed to the front office to close down for the day.

Chapter 9

After her talk with Dr. Stuart, she went
home with a few live traps that the doctor kept around for
customers who had stray animals around their homes. They could trap
the animal then bring it to a shelter or, if hurt, they could bring
it in to be checked out by Dr. Stuart. Feeling it was highly
unlikely she’d catch Ms. Midnight’s rat outside, she did want to
show her she was indeed trying to look for her lost pet.

She set a couple of the traps around the
perimeter of the mansion and one on the porch. Later she would
knock at the door and see if she could put a couple in the house,
but for now she didn’t want to disturb Ms. Midnight.

Within an hour, she had caught a whopper of
a brown rat almost the size of a small cat. Not wanting to waste
time, but pretty sure the occupant of the trap was not Ms.
Midnight’s pet, she grabbed another trap and headed for the front
door of the mansion.

She knocked timidly at the door, holding the
full trap in one hand, and then reached down for the empty one when
she heard Ms. Midnight making her way to the door.

When the door jerked open, she exclaimed,
“Ms. Midnight, I caught—”

Ms. Midnight shrieked in horror. “Dear Lord,
girl, what is THAT?”

“It’s a rat, Ms. Midnight. I caught it round
back near your cellar door. Is this your pet?”

“Get that, that, THING, out of my sight. Why
would you show me such a thing? Are you trying to give me a heart
attack? And what is that for?” Ms. Midnight pointed at the empty
cage. “You don’t plan on torturing me again with such a disgusting
prize do you?”

“No! You said you were missing your pet rat,
Ms. Midnight. I’ve set up some traps around the perimeter of the
house and this one is for the inside. It’s much more likely your
pet is still inside the mansion.”

“I most certainly do not have a pet rat. The
thought of such of thing!” She shuddered as she said it. “You are
not coming in here with that dirty rat cage and you can take
that…that…that THING away as well. How disgusting! A pet rat, how
absurd! How could someone think I, of all people, would own a rat?”
Ms. Midnight was still ranting as she slammed the door—before
Summer could get a word in edgewise.

“Well, that didn’t go well,” Summer said,
looking at the rat that was pacing the cage, looking for an
opening.

She schlepped down the porch stairs and
headed for the woods behind the cottage. Summer was sure this would
be a good place to release the big brown rat and also it would give
her a chance to go to the cottage and see if Sully had awakened
from his nap yet.

She let the thankful rat go near a fallen
rotted log a few yards into the woods and then she deposited the
two empty cages in the back of the dog mobile.

What could Ms. Midnight have meant by a rat,
then, if it was not a pet? Was she speaking of gangsters and
referring to some bad man? If so, why would she care if a bad man
was missing? She figured she would let Ms. Midnight cool off a
while and go and talk to her again as Dr. Stuart suggested.

*****

She finished collecting the other traps
around the house and set them in the SUV, and then checked on
Sully. Hopefully he hadn’t awakened while she was talking to Ms.
Midnight and decided to dismantle more of the couch. When she
quietly peeped in the door, she woke him. He blinked his mismatched
eyes, clearing them of sleep, and started wagging his tail
vigorously. He tried to get up quickly but the fur on the bottom of
his feet made it almost impossible for him to get any traction on
the hardwood floor. He looked as if running in place for a moment.
Finally he made his way to her side, sliding a bit when his
momentum caught up with his halt.

“Would you like to help me in the garden,
Sully?” He leaned against her leg amorously, leading her to believe
the answer was yes.

He trotted behind her as she led him with a
shovel in tow to the Celtic knot of intertwined crushed stone
paths. While he sat watching, she opened one of the burlap sacks of
chicken manure she had procured from a local farm, one of Dr.
Stuart’s patrons. The garden was in serious need of a good
rototilling now that she knew which plants were meant to be in the
garden and which were not. The chicken manure would be a great way
to get the soil conditioned to host the plants and seedlings it
would soon be nurturing.

She spread a layer of the manure out with a
bow rake of metal teeth. Sully watched impatiently, standing and
sitting then swatting at the rake as it passed near him. But
mostly, his interest was piqued by the smell of the manure.

When a good layer of manure had been spread,
she grabbed a rusty old round pointed shovel she found in the barn,
and started to dig. She jumped on the shoulder of the shovel to put
her body weight into breaking the hard dirt that had formed from
years of neglect and lack of moisture. Sully found this amusing and
lay on the crushed gravel path watching her curiously.

She used the handle as a lever and the
ground broke free in large chunks and clumps, which she turned over
on top of the manure and broke up with the blade of the shovel into
smaller chunks. She had turned over three good-sized chunks when
she looked at Sully and said, “Well, little one, are you going to
help me?”

His ears perked up and he quickly got to his
feet at her invitation. He sniffed around as if looking for the
perfect place to begin. When he was satisfied, he turned facing
away from Summer and started to dig in—slow at first, then faster
and more vehemently.

Once she saw he figured out what to do, she
turned around to a spot near her last hole when she was pelted by a
dirt clod on the back of her thigh. A second later, several more
hit the small of her back. She turned to see what it was that was
hitting her only to be showered by a rain of fine dirt and manure.
Afraid to open her mouth for fear of taking in a mouthful of the
flying debris, she stood there stunned by the power and speed with
which Sully was digging.

His claws ripped through the ground
effortlessly, shredding it into small clods and fine dirt, which
were strewn from his paws through his back legs at Summer. In a
matter of seconds he was four feet down and Summer was standing
waist deep in a pile of dirt.

Summer sneezed, causing a cloud of dust and
dirt to sprinkle from her hair and face to the pile below. The
sneeze caught Sully’s attention and he turned to look at Summer,
wagging his whip of a tail. She wiped dirt from her eyes and lips,
spitting to get the remnants of dirt that had made its way past her
lips into her mouth from the force of Sully’s pitching.

“Well, now. I certainly hadn’t expected
that!” she said as she pulled her legs from the pile of dirt that
encased them and pat her clothes free of loose dirt. The pup looked
at her as if worried he’d done something wrong, when Summer knelt
down to give him a reassuring rub behind the ears.

“You like to dig, don’t you?” she said,
scratching behind the one ear that flopped over lazily to one side.
He moaned in content and involuntarily scratched the back of his
front leg with his back leg. “Was that fun?” she said, shaking her
head and depositing a sprinkling of dirt and small dirt clods on
Sully’s muzzle. He shook his head in imitation of her and she
giggled.

“You did good, boy, but maybe we don’t need
to go so deep?” she said, chuckling. She pulled the shovel from the
earth and started to shovel the pile of dirt into the hole Sully
had made. Without missing a beat, Sully started digging in the
pile, depositing the dirt in the hole.

“Good boy, Sully…easy does it, slow down.”
He did as instructed and eased the dirt into the hole. When the
hole was filled, she walked on it, stomping down the soil and
tamping it back into shape. Sully imitated her and stepped in
place, lifting his legs higher than needed to emulate her actions.
She smiled at him and when they were done she ruffled his ears,
exciting him and causing him to lunge at her playfully.

“I promise we’ll play, but first let’s get
this dirt overturned, okay?” It was apparent that Sully was much
quicker and more adept to the challenge than she was at digging, so
she opted to follow behind him with the bow rake gathering any
rocks she found, piling them in an old lopsided but useable
wheelbarrow. In no time at all, they had the entire bed ground up
and the fertilizer mixed in well.

When all the tools were put away and Sully’d
had half a bucket of cool, clean water, she pulled out an old
tennis ball she found on a shelf in the barn. She tossed it a few
yards away. Sully watched the ball intently since she had pulled it
from her pocket. He watched it sail through the air, bounce a
couple of times and roll a couple of feet before it came to rest
next to the trunk of a large scruffy-looking bush. He turned and
looked at Summer with his black tongue hanging over the side of his
lower canines.

“Fetch…go get it!” she instructed and he
took off like a flash, his tail wagging so hard it seemed to throw
his rear end out of balance in his strides. He grabbed the ball in
his mouth and mauled it while he looked at Summer.

“Bring it back, Sully. Bring it to me,” she
said, clapping her hands and exciting him more. He seemed to hop in
the air with delight and with his tail in the air and his elbows
and forelegs on the ground, he seemed to be challenging her to come
and get it from him.

She took a step towards him and he ran
leaping through the air and lunging towards her, just out of reach.
“So the game is keep away, is it?” she said, bending over with her
hands on her knees rocking from one foot to the other. Sully lunged
at her then spun in a circle, keeping just out of Summer’s reach.
She lunged at him and he shot to his right, running a wide circle
around her and stopping in front of her again.

*****

The game was afoot—a strange dance of lunges
and retreats, chasing and escapes—the game of keep away had Sully’s
tail straight up and spinning in a clockwise twirl as Summer
giggled and chased him until she ran out of breath. But it was the
drumming on the upstairs window of the mansion that stopped the two
players dead in their tracks. Ms. Midnight donned a face most
unfamiliar to Summer. The old lady seemed to light up with
astonishment, as if it would break down the ancient window pane.
Just as suddenly as she had appeared, she turned in a tornado of
swirling curtains and skirt, disappearing from view into the recess
of the room.

Sully and Summer looked at one another for a
brief puzzled moment, and then Sully made a fake lunge to Summer’s
right, and then took off to the left, watching her all the while
and nearly running into an oncoming, breathless Ms. Midnight. She
looked practically giddy as she reached down to rub Sully’s
ears.

“Oh, I’m so relieved, you found Ms. Ash,”
she said to Summer.

“Um. Ms. Ash?” Summer asked, confused.

“Well, you must have found her if you’ve
come to know her pup,” Ms. Midnight said matter-of-factly.

Summer wasn’t quite sure how to proceed with
this strange conversation. She was also stunned at seeing this new
side of Ms. Midnight—a pleasant, almost cheerful spirit seemed to
have stepped into Ms. Midnight’s body and taken possession of the
bitter, antagonistic woman. All Summer could do was shake her head
at the woman.

“You didn’t find Ms. Ash?” Ms. Midnight
said, her demeanor suddenly changing to sorrowful. “But…” she said
and trailed off.

Summer reached for Ms. Midnight’s hand. With
the sudden change in her emotion, the energy of her elation flooded
out of the elderly woman as did her strength and Summer was sure
that she was about to fall. Sully must have sensed the same thing
as he leaned up against Ms. Midnight, steadying her as Summer
cupped her other hand under her elbow. They walked her over to a
nearby weathered but solid bench.

“Who is Ms. Ash?” Summer said breaking the
silence of Ms. Midnight’s disambiguation.

Ms. Midnight lovingly pet the huge head of
the hellhound pup that lay upon her knees looking up at her with
concern. “Ms. Ash is the mother of this pup,” she said sadly.

“Oh…” Summer said, now realizing why Ms.
Midnight had become so sad.

“And if he is here with you, then
she…she—”

“Yes. Ms. Midnight, she’s gone. There was
nothing I could do for her,” Summer said regretfully.

“Then you saw her? What happened to
her?”

“There was some kind of fight between the
hell—I mean Ms. Ash—and a demon named Hunter. When I found them Ms.
Ash was already gone, but the demon was in bad shape and I stitched
him up.”

“You mean you saved the scourge that killed
my beloved Ms. Ash?” Ms. Midnight growled.

“Um, well, yes. I didn’t know what had
happened or that you and Ms. Ash were, well, friends. He said—the
demon, that is—that she attacked him and he was just protecting
himself.”

“And you believed a demon? What’s wrong with
you? Are you some kind of imbecile?”

“Well, no. I just, well, when we found
Sully, he—the demon—said she must have attacked him because he
unknowingly got too close to her pup.”

“Of course she would defend her pup against
a nasty thing like a demon. They are unable to tell the truth.
Don’t you know anything? And who is this Sully?”

“Do I know anything about demons? No, not a
thing. Sully is what I named him,” Summer said, patting the pup’s
head. “Well, Sulphur, really—Sully for short.”

“Well, for future reference, demons can’t be
trusted—ever,” she said, looking lovingly at the hound. “Sulphur—I
like it. Ms. Ash would have liked it too.” A tear rolled down Ms.
Midnight’s cheek and landed on her chest. “Ms. Ash would have been
a good mother to you, Sulphur. She loved you very much.”