by Nic Saint
“Ooh! I love Katherine Hepburn.”
“What about Cary Grant?”
“He’s fine, I guess,” she said with a coquettish flutter of her lashes. In fact he was more than fine. Cary Grant had always been one of her favorite actors. More than today’s movie heroes, he had charm, style and charisma and that elusive je-ne-sais-quoi.
“Phew. I hoped you’d like my selection.”
“I love it.” She didn’t mention that she’d already seen the movie about a dozen times on TCM. On the big screen it would look even better, of course. Their local movie theater was holding a screwball comedy retrospective and she was happy Chase was a fan, too.
“So what do you think is Cary Grant’s best movie?” she asked now.
He pressed his napkin to his lips. Their menu had consisted of shrimp scampi and lobster stuffed flounder with a side of pasta and marinara sauce and brickle for dessert: toasted almonds, ice cream and whipped cream. A real feast. And the evening wasn’t over yet. Not by a long shot.
“I like the Hitchcocks best,” Chase said. “North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief, Charade…”
“Charade isn’t a Hitchcock,” she told him. “It’s Stanley Donen’s Hitchcock homage.”
Chase grinned. “Of course you would know that, Miss Movie Buff.”
“I like Arsenic and Old Lace. Oh, and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, of course.”
“Huh. I thought you’d have gone for the more romantic ones.”
“I guess I’m a funny girl at heart,” she quipped.
“Yes, you are,” he said, and gave her one of those looks that made her melt like the toffee-flavored ice cream on her tongue. “Not only funny but smart, beautiful, compassionate…”
Her cheeks flushed, and not just from the fireplace they were sitting close to. “Keep this up and I just might let you get frisky through the second act of Bringing Up Baby.”
“Oh, I’m counting on it.”
She dug her spoon into the caramel-colored ice cream. “Is it just me or is it hot in here?”
Chase cleared his throat. “I heard your grandmother moved back in with your parents?”
And there it was: the reason he’d asked her out on a date in the first place. Or at least that’s what she hoped. They’d been going out for months now, and it was time to put their budding relationship on a more permanent footing. Since Chase bunked with Odelia’s uncle, having not had much luck renting a place of his own in town, moving in with her was the logical thing to do. And oh boy was she ready. And she’d just opened her mouth to confirm that her grandmother had, indeed, moved back in with her folks when both of their phones started to sing in unison.
“Huh,” said Chase with a frown. “It’s your uncle.”
“My mom,” said Odelia with a smile, and tapped the green Accept icon. “Hey, Mom. What’s up?” When the garbled words of her mother flowed into her ear, though, her smile quickly vanished. “Wow, slow down. What are you talking about?”
“He’s dead!” Mom practically shouted into the phone. “Chris Ackerman is dead and now they think he may have been murdered and that I had something to do with it!”
As her mother explained what happened, Odelia fixed her gaze on Chase, whose jaw was clenching while he listened to what Uncle Alec, the town’s chief of police, had to say.
Looked like Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn would have to take a rain check.
Chapter 2
I won’t conceal I was having a tough time at it. To be honest I don’t think I’m cut out to be a teacher, and teaching a bunch of unruly cats was definitely not my idea of an evening well spent.
“We’ll watch it again until you discover when Aurora picked up the all-important and vital clue,” I said, and tapped the rewind button on the TV’s remote. When my audience groaned loudly, I added, “And no buts. If we’re going to do this, we need to do it right.”
“But, Max!” Brutus cried. “We’ve seen this movie three times already!”
“And we’ll see it three times more if that’s what it takes,” I said stubbornly.
“The Bachelor is on,” said Harriet. “I love The Bachelor. Can’t we watch that instead?”
I gave her a stern-faced look. “No, we can’t. The Bachelor won’t teach us the things we need to know as cat sleuths. Aurora Teagarden will.”
Unfortunately Odelia had only taped one Aurora Teagarden movie, even though I’d asked her to tape all of them if she had the chance. Instead, she’d taped a movie called I’ll Be Home for Christmas. Which featured a dog, and as everyone knows, no cat wants to be seen dead watching dogs on TV—or in real life, for that matter—so that was a definite no-no. Besides, there was no mystery, only a silly romance plot and a lot of tinsel.
I watched the screen intently, then paused the movie just when Aurora opened her mouth to say something, her face a mask of concentration. “See? This is the moment she realizes who the killer is. See the way her forehead crinkles? How her eyebrows draw up?”
“She looks constipated,” said Harriet, tapping her paw against Odelia’s leather couch.
“Do I look like that when I get an idea, Max?” asked Dooley.
“You would if you ever got an idea,” said Brutus with a grin.
“I get ideas,” said Dooley. “I get ideas all the time. Just now I got the idea that Odelia’s been gone a long time, and that I hope she’ll be home soon.”
“That’s great, Dooley,” I said. “But that’s not the kind of idea we’re talking about.”
“So tell us exactly what we are talking about, Max,” said Brutus as he suppressed a yawn. Even though he, unlike Harriet, wasn’t a big fan of The Bachelor, it was obvious he wasn’t remotely interested in my lecture on modern sleuthing techniques either.
“We’re talking about being perceptive,” I said. “About not missing even the teensiest, tiniest clue. For all we know a cigarette butt can lead us to the killer. Or, as in this case…” I pointed to the screen. “Pizza boxes tucked underneath the kitchen sink.”
“Are the pizza boxes a very important clue, Max?” asked Dooley eagerly.
“They are,” said Brutus before I could respond. “They’re a clue to this couple’s eating habits. It tells us that they like pizza.” He was grinning again, clearly enjoying himself.
“The pizza boxes tell us that these people took the missing students hostage,” I said, directing a censorious look at Brutus. “It tells Aurora—and the viewer—that the missing students are, in fact, somewhere in the house. So yes, Dooley, the pizza boxes are a very important clue. They’re that all-important, telling a-ha type of clue you want to find.”
“Pizza boxes,” Dooley repeated reverently, as if memorizing the words.
“They’re an important clue in this particular case,” I hastened to add. “In any other case they’re probably completely irrelevant.”
Dooley looked confused. “So… pizza boxes aren’t always a clue?”
“No, they’re not. It all depends on the circumstances. In this case the pizza boxes—”
“Oh, enough about the pizza boxes already!” Harriet cried, lifting her paws in a gesture of despair. “Can we watch The Bachelor now? I’ll bet Jock’s dinner with LaRue is still in full swing. We just might catch dessert if you turn off this Aurora nonsense right now.”
“I think I need to see it one more time,” said Dooley. “I think I missed something.”
Harriet looked as if she was ready to pounce on Dooley, but restrained herself with a supreme effort. “What don’t you get, Dooley?” she asked instead in clipped tones.
Dooley was shaking his head confusedly. “Well, it’s those pizza boxes. I don’t see how Aurora goes from seeing the empty pizza boxes to finding those missing students.”
“God give me strength,” Harriet muttered, very expressively rolling her eyes.
“Why don’t you let us do the thinking from now on, Dooley?” Brutus suggested.
“You think so?” said Dooley.
“Yes, unlike you I do think. In fact I think so much I don’t mind doing a little thinking for you, too, so that you can…” He gave Dooley a dubious look. “Do whatever it is you do.”
“I could… help you search for those pizza boxes,” said Dooley hopefully.
“You do that,” said Brutus, patting the other cat on the shoulder. “You do that.”
I now realize I may have committed the ultimate faux-pas. I’ve neglected to introduce you to my merry band of felines. Let me rectify that right now, by introducing myself first. My name is Max, and I’m Odelia Poole’s feisty feline sidekick. I’m strapping, I’m blorange, and I’m proud to be of assistance to my human, who’s probably one of the finest humans a cat could ever hope to be associated with. She also stems from a long line of females who can converse with felines, which makes her an honorary feline in my book.
The three cats lounging on the couch are (reading from left to right) Dooley, who’s a gray Ragamuffin and my sidekick (yes, he’s a sidekick’s sidekick), Brutus, a black musclehead who likes to think he’s the bee’s knees (or more appropriately the cat’s whiskers) and finally we have Harriet, who’s by way of being Brutus’s mate. She’s also a pretty, prissy Persian but don’t tell her I said that because she can be quite catty. And she has some very sharp claws.
“I think I saw a pizza box yesterday, Max,” Dooley said now, showing the kind of zeal and initiative a feline sleuth worth their salt should strive for. “If you want I can show you.”
“That’s all right, Dooley,” I said. “We can go into that when we start the practical part of this introductory training.”
“Practical part?” asked Harriet. “There’s a practical part?”
“Of course there is,” I said. “First we learn the basics, then we apply them to a real-world situation.”
“I still don’t get why you get to teach this course, Max,” said Brutus. “What makes you think you’re qualified?”
“I’ll have you know I’ve solved quite a number of high-profile cases,” I told him.
“You couldn’t have pulled those off without me and you know it. In fact before I arrived in town you hadn’t solved a single case. Not a one. Admit it, Max.”
I was puffing out my chest to give him a proper rebuke when all of a sudden there was a commotion at the door. It flew open and Odelia burst in.
“I need you guys to come with me,” she said, panting as if she’d just run a marathon. “There’s been a murder.” She fixed us with a meaningful look. “My mom is implicated.”
Chapter 3
“So what happened?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” said Odelia.
“So who did it?” asked Dooley.
“I have no idea.”
“So who’s the victim?” asked Harriet.
“I have no idea!”
After this rare outburst, we all sat silent for a moment. Not for very long, though. We are cats, after all, not church mice. You can’t keep a good cat down. Or quiet.
“So what do you want us to do?” I asked.
Odelia, who was visibly overwrought at the thought of her mother being involved in some dreadful murder business, heaved a deep sigh and rolled her shoulders in a bid to relax them. She’d been sitting hunched over the steering wheel, which I could have told her was the kind of posture that could lead to some serious neck trouble. “I want you to talk to any animal you can find within a mile radius of the library. If anyone out there saw something I want to know about it. If someone out there heard something I want to know about it. And if someone out there so much as smelled something, I want—”
“Let me guess,” I said. “You want to know about it.”
She didn’t smile. “This is my mother we’re talking about, Max.”
“I understand,” I said. “And we’ll do everything in our power to—”
“So did Marge kill someone?” asked Dooley.
It wasn’t the right question to ask, so when Odelia’s head snapped around, for a moment I thought she was going to bite Dooley’s head straight off. Instead, she merely snapped, “Of course she didn’t kill someone. My mother is the sweetest, kindest woman I know. She wouldn’t hurt a fly, let alone the bestselling thriller writer on the planet.”
“I saw her swat a fly once,” said Dooley conversationally. “It was a big fly. One of those blue ones. Made a big mess, too.”
When I gave him a prod in the ribs he blinked and turned to me, looking slightly offended. “Shut up,” I loud-whispered.
“What did I say?”
Raising my voice, I said, “If anyone saw, heard, smelled or tasted something, we’ll find them and let you know, Odelia.”
Odelia grunted something I understood to be approval, and continued staring straight ahead through the windshield, while her foot ground the accelerator into the floorboard and the car flew across the road at a rate of speed which was frankly disconcerting, not to mention frowned upon by traffic police everywhere.
“So who is the bestselling thriller on the planet?” asked Harriet.
When Odelia didn’t respond, Brutus decided to do the honors. “Agatha Christie, of course,” he said. “In fact she’s the best-selling author of all time. Sold billions of books.”
“Agatha Christie died years ago,” I said.
“So?”
“So she can’t have been murdered tonight if she’s been dead for years.”
This stumped him for a moment. He quickly rallied, though. “Maybe she didn’t die. Maybe she only pretended to die but she’s been alive all this time only to be murdered at Marge’s library tonight.”
“Agatha Christie was almost ninety years old when she died,” I said.
“So?”
“This was years ago! She would have been a hundred-whatever!”
“So? Humans get very old. Hundreds of years, probably. Maybe even thousands.”
For a long time I’d been laboring under the same misapprehension. I’d always figured Odelia was probably a couple of hundred years old. But she’d recently cured me of this mistaken belief in the longevity of the human species. Odelia, as it turned out, wasn’t even thirty years old yet. And most humans never made it past the age of a hundred. Weird, huh?
“Trust me, Brutus. Whoever was killed tonight, it wasn’t Agatha Christie.”
“Chris Ackerman,” said Odelia suddenly.
“Who?” asked Dooley.
“Chris Ackerman. The thriller writer?”
Neither me nor Brutus, Harriet or Dooley showed any signs of recognition. Then again, cats are not your great readers. We love television—mostly cat food commercials—but we lack the patience and the attention span to read page after page like humans do.
“So who was this Chris Ackerman?” I asked.
“Like I said. A thriller writer.”
“Any good?” asked Harriet.
“I liked him,” said Odelia. “He was the master of the cliffhanger.”
“Why would a writer make cliffhangers?” asked Dooley. “Isn’t that what IKEA does?”
“Not clothes hangers, Dooley,” I said. “Cliffhangers.”
“What’s a cliffhanger?”
“It’s like the rose ceremony,” said Harriet. “From The Bachelor? Our handsome bachelor is about to hand out his final rose of the night and suddenly they cut to commercial and you can’t wait to see what happens next.” She nodded seriously. “That’s a cliffhanger.”
Dooley stared at her, obviously not seeing the connection between cliffhangers, roses and The Bachelor. But when he opened his mouth to ask a follow-up question, Odelia said, “We’re almost there, you guys. So you know what to do, right?”
“We know,” I said. “We’re going to talk to any animal we can find.”
“Any animal?” asked Harriet in an undertone. “Not just cats?”
“Any animal,” I confirmed.
“I’m not talking to dogs,” Harriet said determinedly. “No, I mean it. I draw the line at dogs. Dogs are f
ilthy, especially street dogs. Just looking at them makes my skin crawl.”
“But what if that particular dog has some very important information to share?” I asked. “Odelia wants us to be her eyes and ears out there.” Not to mention her nose and taste buds, apparently. “So put your petty anti-dog sentiments aside for a moment and think about the greater good here, Harriet.”
“Yes, think about the greater good, Harriet,” Dooley echoed.
“I mean, what if this particular mutt got a good look at the killer’s face? Are you going to let him get away just because you don’t like dogs?”
“Are you, Harriet?” asked Dooley. “Are you doing to let him get away?”
Harriet bridled at this. “You know what? If you like dogs so much why don’t you talk to them? I’ll stick to cats.”
Dooley thought about this for a moment. “All right,” he said finally. “I’ll take the dogs—you take the cats.” Then he directed a curious look at Brutus. “What species of animal are you going to talk to, Brutus?”
“I’ll take the ladies,” said Brutus with a big grin before he could stop himself. But when Harriet directed a withering look in his direction, he quickly added, “Or you could talk to the ladies, Harriet. I can talk to the gentlemen.”
“We’re here,” said Odelia, and stomped on the brake with such fervor that the four of us were suddenly catapulted from our positions on the backseat and plastered against the back of the front seats. All of us except Dooley, who’d been sitting in the middle. He flew through the air, describing a perfect arc, and would have been reduced to a mere smear on the windshield if Odelia hadn’t had the presence of mind—and the superior reflexes—to grab him by the neck and save him from further harm.
“Phew,” said Dooley once he’d recovered from his adventure. “Thanks, Odelia.”
“I’m sorry about that,” said Odelia, giving Dooley a quick hug before placing him on the passenger seat. She turned to face us. “I know I’m a little on edge right now, but that’s because my mom is in trouble. So please do the best you can, and I apologize for being such a sourpuss.” She gave us a quick smile, then opened the door and allowed us to hop from the car and onto the pavement.