Hotel For Dogs Read Online Free PDF Page B

more closely. Jerry had done a thorough job, all right.All that remained of the windows were some jagged slivers of glass that were still stuck in the frames.
    Working with care so as not to cut himself on the sharp edges, Bruce began to remove those. They could be dangerous, he told himself. Some little kid might come around here and decide to crawl in to explore.
    The windows were set low and would be easy to straddle. Looking in, Bruce could see an empty room with a door standing open to a hallway. Beyond that was another room with the door closed.
    Dust lay thick over everything. How long had Aunt Alice said the house had stood empty? Six months, without anyone even coming to look at it?
    It was too bad for a place to stay vacant like this, Bruce thought. There must be people in the world without a home who would be glad to look after the place just for a chance to sleep there.
    It was then that the idea hit him. It came suddenly, like a great floodlight going on in his brain. It was the answer to everything.
    For a moment he stood contemplating. Would it work? There would be plenty of problems. Still,even with problems, it seemed better than anything else they could come up with.
    Tossing the last of the glass fragments into the bushes, he turned and began to run through the row of maples, across the vacant lot, toward Aunt Alice’s neat white house down the street.

CHAPTER FIVE
    It was on a Friday afternoon that the dogs moved in.
    “And that’s what I’m naming her,” Andi said. “I’m going to name her Friday, because that’s the day she’s getting her very own home. Oh, Bruce, this was the most wonderful idea! Friday and her puppies will think they’re staying in a hotel!”
    “Well, they’d better not get too used to it,” Bruce said. “As soon as the pups are old enough, we’re going to find homes for all of them and for Friday, too.”
    He spoke decisively to cover the fact that he was beginning to feel a little nervous. The idea had seemed so reasonable when it first occurred to him: a vacant house with no one to tend it, four little dogs that needed a place to stay, so why not put them together for a few weeks?
    The thing that was not reasonable was the way Andi was acting. In the day she had spent at home having her stomachache, she had formed a deep attachment to the group in the sewing closet. And now she was giving them names as if she expected to be their mistress for the rest of her life.
    “This is just a short-term emergency thing,” Bruce kept saying, as he followed her about from one empty room to another. “This is somebody else’s property, even if they’re not living here. We really shouldn’t be using it at all.”
    “I know, I know.” Andi’s eyes were shining with excitement. “I think Friday would like the pink bedroom at the front of the hotel, don’t you? It’s such a ladylike room, and that big window lets in so much light. We can fix her a bed in the corner, and when the puppies start walking, they can go exploring down the hall to the living room.”
    “By the time they can do that, they’ll be ready to leave,” Bruce said. “We should start right now trying to line up homes for them. Does your school have a bulletin board? You could pin up a sort of announcement —”
    But Andi was gone again, hurrying through to the kitchen to see if the faucets were working. Itwould be so much easier to fill Friday’s drinking bowl from there than to have to keep carrying water over from Aunt Alice’s.
    Andi was up at dawn the next morning and out of the house before anyone else was awake. Mrs. Walker discovered her room empty when she went to call her to breakfast.
    “I can’t understand it,” she said in bewilderment as she joined the rest of the family at the breakfast table. “Andi never gets up early if she can help it. Where in the world could she have gone?”
    “Perhaps she’s over at somebody’s house,” Mr. Walker suggested. “From the way she talks,