Ник Сайнт - Purrfectly Hidden. Purrfect Kill. Purrfect Boy Toy

Then, even as I’d already started poking my head from under the desk, the door had opened again and Hector had come sneaking in, had taken one look at the empty liquor cabinet and had uttered a loud lament, then had moved off again. The same thing happened five minutes later when the cook entered. She hadn’t cursed as loudly as Hector, but clearly hadn’t been happy with the new state of affairs either. And when finally a third man had come sneaking in, this one a bespectacled specimen with a big red nose, and had cursed, I was pretty sure we’d just met the elusive George.

When he left, I had a feeling the endless passage of humans might finally have abated. I was right, for the next ten minutes nothing more happened to disturb the peace and quiet of the study, and so we finally emerged from our hiding place.

Hopping onto Opal’s chair, and then onto the desk, I looked around, like a general surveying the battlefield. There were plenty of bookcases in the study, as seems to be typical for studies the world over, but nothing that screamed records or personal files.

“She probably keeps her files in these drawers,” said Brutus, who’d also crawled up.

Unfortunately, cats are slightly handicapped in the sense that we don’t open drawers with the same ease humans do. Still, Harriet gave it a shot, squeezing a nail into the crack and pulling. And she actually managed!

“Hurray!” I said, like a general spurring on his troops.

The drawer contained a large assortment of medication. Cough drops, pill bottles, a box promising a good night’s sleep to be had by all, but no documents or secret files.

The other drawers revealed nothing about a cloning factory either.

Finally I turned my attention to the computer located on top of the desk.

I pushed the button to boot it up, and before long we were glancing at a large picture of Prunella staring back at us from the computer screen.

The computer was locked, though, and in urgent need of a password to reveal all of its secrets.

I tapped the letters forming the word Prunella, and snap! We were in!

“Great job, Max,” Brutus grunted, in a rare compliment.

“I watch a lot of movies,” I told him.

“And it pays off dividends now,” he said with a smile.

Dooley and Harriet had also mounted the desk and now four cats stood side by side, staring at Prunella’s face.

“Now what?” asked Harriet.

“Now we look for any files associated with cloning,” I said, and called up the search window, then spelled out the word KLONE.

Nothing.

“I think clone is spelled with a C, though,” said Dooley, who watches a lot of the Discovery Channel.

“No, it’s not. It’s spelled KLOAN,” said Harriet.

“No, it’s KLOWN,” Brutus opined.

“I think it might be CLOWN,” said Dooley.

“Let’s try CLONE,” I said, and promptly a file popped up. It was a PDF file and so I tapped the mouse button twice to open it. And there it was. Prunella’s file. There was plenty of information about the original Prunella, and how the cloning people had managed to clone her fifteen times with no acceptable result before they’d achieved the impossible: a perfect clone—at least according to the braggadocio in the file.

“Perfect clone, my ass,” said Brutus.

“What’s the address?” asked Harriet, and I scrolled back to the beginning of the file.

“Thank God, it’s in LA.”

“Far from here?” asked Brutus.

“Call up Google Maps,” Harriet demanded.

“How do I do that?” I asked.

“Oh, you silly cat. Here. Give me that mouse.”

“Harriet knows her way around a mouse,” said Brutus proudly.

“Yeah, I like mice,” said Harriet. “They’re easy to handle if you know what you’re doing.”

“I don’t like mice,” said Dooley. “Mice scare me.”

I wasn’t sure whether he meant real mice or computer mice, but we were too busy to delve deeper into the matter.

Harriet expertly showed us how to handle the computer and tame the program called Google Maps.

“There,” she said, pointing at the screen. “There it is.”

We all stared at the map she’d drawn up, mesmerized.

“Is that where they keep our original selves?” asked Dooley.

“Yes, it is,” I said. “At least, if we were cloned.”

“Cryogenically frozen,” Brutus said.

“Cryo what?” asked Dooley.

“Cryogenically frozen. Basically means they pop you into a freezer.”

“Like popsicles?”

“Yeah, exactly like popsicles.”

We all let that sink in for a moment. It’s a strange feeling to know that your original self is stuck in a freezer somewhere in the middle of LA, frozen solid like a popsicle.

“I don’t think I like being a popsicle, Max,” Dooley confessed.

“I don’t like it either,” I said.

“Me, neither,” Brutus grunted.

“Oh, well. It could be worse,” said Harriet.

“How could it be worse?”

“Odelia could have let us die and buried us in the backyard. At least this shows she cares.”

“How so?”

“Well, this cloning business costs a lot of money. This shows that Odelia spent all of that money to have us cloned, which means she must love us a great deal.”

“We already knew that, though, didn’t we?” I said.

“Yes, but this…” said Harriet, scrolling down the document to the last page and tapping a number, “… definitively proves it.”

We all gulped when we saw the price Opal had paid to have her beloved cat cloned.

“Odelia must love us very, very, very, very much,” said Dooley.

“Yes,” I said. “To the tune of fifty thousand smackeroos.”

Chapter 21

“Hank! Hank, where are you!”

“What is your mother doing?” asked Tex.

“I think she’s calling for Hank,” said Marge.

They’d had a wonderful day being chauffeured around LA by Opal’s driver. They’d seen the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Rodeo Drive, The Getty… And of course Santa Monica Pier, the Venice Boardwalk and the Venice Canals. Though she hadn’t seen Matthew Perry, as she’d hoped. Marge was a big Matthew Perry fan, and had followed the actor since his Friends days. In fact they hadn’t seen any famous actors or actresses at all, even though they’d taken the Celebrity Home Tour, leaving the limo at the starting point.

“Now that you mention it, I haven’t seen Hank for a while,” said Tex.

“Me neither. He wasn’t at dinner, and I don’t remember seeing him when we got back.”

“I’ll bet he went into town and won’t be back until he’s seen all the sights.”

“Hank!” Vesta was still yelling, as if calling her dog. “Hank, come back here!”

“Did Odelia tell you about what happened today?” asked Marge.

“Yeah, she did. Absolutely horrifying. I mean, who would want to try and kill a nice lady like Opal? Just look at all the good she does with her show, and all the charities she supports.”

“She is a nice lady,” Marge agreed. She had been watching Opal’s show for so long it had become part of her life. “Probably someone who’s jealous of her success.”

“Or someone who’s not all there,” Tex said as he took a seat on the edge of the bed and bounced up and down on the thick box spring mattress. “I love this mattress, don’t you? Almost as if we’re staying at some posh five-star hotel.”

“This is better than a five-star hotel,” said Marge. “More like a six-star hotel.”

“The Opal,” said Tex, spreading his hands as if indicating a marquee. “An experience that will last you a lifetime.”

“She could rent out this guesthouse and make a small fortune,” Marge agreed as she placed her smartphone on the nightstand. She’d quickly checked TMZ, one of her favorite sites. She liked a bit of light reading before going to bed.