Ник Сайнт: Purrfect Peril

“Oh, you poor darlings,” she said, getting up. “Let’s go, shall we? I made an appointment with Vena. She’s waiting.”

Max and Dooley’s eyes turned to Kingman, who gave them an ‘I told you so’ look and then shook his head sadly, returning indoors. She now saw he was wearing a flea collar. So he had caught the affliction, too. If what Vena said was true, every local cat had. She wondered what had started the infestation. Who, in other words, was Hampton Cove’s patient zero? Probably some street cat like Clarice, who liked to roam the streets and snack from garbage dumps all across town.

“Do we have to go to Vena, Odelia?” asked Max.

“Yes, you do. You don’t want to suffer these fleas forever, do you?”

“Maybe they’ll, you know, get tired of me and jump ship?”

“No, they won’t. They’ll lay eggs and more fleas will come and you’ll never get rid of them.”

He slumped and she decided to cut all this back-and-forth short and picked both him and Dooley up. People were already stopping and staring at the crazy lady talking to her cats. She knew the Poole women had a reputation in town for being cat ladies, and she didn’t want to make it worse by becoming a public display of crazy. Although her grandmother probably cornered the market in that particular area.

She carried both cats to her beat-up old pickup, which she’d parked in front of her dad’s office, and deposited them inside.

They looked remarkably glum, which was only natural, of course. Poor darlings.

She got behind the wheel, managed to make the car’s engine cough and purr, and navigated the old thing into traffic. “Are Brutus and Harriet at the house?” she asked.

Max and Dooley both nodded automatically, still looking sandbagged.

“Don’t worry, you guys,” she said in an attempt to cheer them up. “Vena will get rid of these pests in no time. You’ll see. She told me she’s seen half of Hampton Cove’s cat population already and she’s expecting the other half this afternoon. It would seem everyone and his tabby has caught this affliction today.”

“What were you doing at the hotel?” asked Max, showing the first signs of animation since she’d picked him up at Vickery’s store.

“I was going to tell you about that. Do you remember those beer commercials? The Most Fascinating Man in the World ones?”

“The old bearded man with his funny stories and the two pretty ladies?”

“That’s the one. His name is Burt Goldsmith, and I was going to interview him this morning. Only turns out he got blown up.”

Max did a double take. “Blown up?”

“Yeah, his hotel room exploded and he along with it.”

“Maybe he was filming one of his commercials and something went wrong?”

“I don’t think so. Either he killed himself—by accident or on purpose—or…” Her expression turned grim and she clutched the steering wheel a little firmer. “He was killed.”

“Do you want us to snoop around?” asked Max.

“If you could, that would be wonderful,” she said.

Her cats were her secret weapon as a reporter. They gave her the kinds of scoops other journos could only dream of. And since they were plugged into the local feline network, they collected stories that were pure gold once they made it into print.

“Odelia?” asked Dooley, speaking up for the first time since he got into the car.

“Uh-huh?” she said as she turned down the street where she lived.

“Are we going to die?”

She glanced in the rearview mirror. “Oh, Dooley. Of course you’re not going to die. It’s fleas—not cancer. By this time tomorrow you’ll have forgotten about the whole thing.”

“But—remember the movie the other night? Where Rose from Titanic died?”

Max heaved an annoyed grunt. “Not Rose from Titanic again, Dooley!”

“Rose from Titanic died,” Dooley insisted stubbornly, “and so did Gwyneth and a whole bunch of other nice people, except for Matt Damon for some reason. And until they discovered patient zero and the bat and pig poop they had no way of stopping the disease.”

“This isn’t the same thing,” she assured him while suppressing a smile. Dooley had a flair for the dramatic, and for some reason always thought he was going to die. “It’s fleas, not some terrible virus. And you know that wasn’t Rose from Titanic , right? Kate Winslet is an actress. She simply played a part. She’s alive and well and probably still living in that nice English cottage from The Holiday .” Though that was probably only true in the movie as well.

“Oh,” said Dooley as he thought about this for a moment. It was obvious she’d given him food for thought.

“Odelia?” asked Max.

“Uh-huh,” she said, parking the car in front of the house.

“Is Chase going to be living with us from now on?”

She’d extracted the key from the ignition and now sat poised, not expecting this particular question. At all. “Um…”

“I mean, he’s been sleeping in your bed for the past four nights. And he’s got his toothbrush and his toothpaste up in the cup in the bathroom and his underwear on that shelf you cleared for him in the bedroom closet, so…”

She blinked and turned to face her cats. They both looked at her expectantly.

“Um…”

“He seems nice,” Dooley commented, that sandbagged look slightly waning.

“Yeah, he seems very nice,” Max added. “And he killed a flea.”

“Two fleas,” said Dooley. “He’s a hero. A flea-killing hero.”

“Truth is, guys, I don’t know. I like Chase. I like Chase a lot.”

“And he likes you,” Max offered.

“It would appear so,” she said with a laugh. “It’s just that… we’re taking things one step at a time. I wish I could tell you what the future will bring, but I can’t. You see, human relationships are like puzzles. Sometimes you know all the pieces will fit from the moment you dump those pieces out on the table. Other times? You just don’t know. Maybe things look good for a while, and then suddenly you discover the puzzle company decided to short you a piece and without it you can’t complete the puzzle. Other times you get bored laying that puzzle halfway through or things are just too hard and complicated and you give up.”

Max and Dooley were frowning seriously. The puzzle analogy probably wasn’t the best one she could have come up with, but there was some truth to it. She liked Chase, and she liked the way he made her feel. But it was early days, and she had no idea if he was a keeper or not. And neither, probably, did he. At any rate, things were going great, and she had no intention of taking them further by making big promises or launching big ambitious plans. Plans had a way of backfiring on her. Big time. So she wasn’t going to jinx anything at this point when everything was humming along fine.

She gave them both a poke in the tummy. “You guys sit tight and I’ll pick up Harriet and Brutus, okay?”

As she slammed the door, Max and Dooley were still brooding. She smiled to herself. Sometimes, she thought, her cats were almost more human than most humans she knew.

And a heck of a lot smarter, too.

Chapter 9

Chase and Chief Alec took a seat on one of those plush overstuffed chairs in the hotel lobby. With the fire marshals going over Burt Goldsmith’s room with a fine-tooth comb, trying to figure out what exactly happened there, the techies wrapping up Burt’s body and transferring it to their van, and Alec’s people talking to staff and guests, they took a respite.

“Do you really think your mom had Burt Goldsmith’s son?” asked Chase.

Chief Alec patted at the few remaining strands of hair on his wide dome and groaned. “I don’t know what to think, buddy. You would imagine a woman would know if she popped out a second son at some point in the past.”