The Mysteries of Max: Books 31-33

by Nic Saint

  “No, but it does, Max! It happens all the time on General Hospital. Even to people who aren’t even married. One of the doctors had an affair with a nurse and one morning she came into his office and announced that she was pregnant. And he was married to another person! So either that stork made a big mistake, or storks simply don’t care whether a person is ready or not. They just deliver those babies anyway.”

  “Sure, Dooley,” I said as we watched the cops work like beavers—or glorified movers. When all this was over, and Joshua was let out of jail again, he’d have a hard time recognizing his place, with all the stuff that had been removed from it.

  “I have a theory,” said Dooley now, visibly pleased with himself.

  “What is your theory?” I asked, curious in spite of myself.

  “Well, I think that the International Association of Storks is tasked with the important task that there should always be a certain number of babies in the world, so they simply go around distributing them. Now if a person is ready to have a baby, so much the better. But even if they’re not, those babies have to be placed somewhere, right? So they are going to be placed, whether the people getting them are ready or not.”

  “Right,” I said dubiously as I watched Sarah Flunk, one of Odelia’s uncle’s officers, carry a very large portrait out of the house, along with another cop. The portrait portrayed Melanie Myers in the nude, and was a vivid depiction of her likeness.

  “Hey, that’s that painting of Melanie Myers without any clothes on,” said Dooley, momentarily distracted from his stork theory. “You still haven’t explained to me why she’s not wearing any clothes, Max.”

  “She probably forgot to get dressed,” I said. “It happens. Let’s go inside and have a closer look.”

  “But who’s going to watch for the stork?”

  “Storks don’t work at night, Dooley,” I said. “They’re like most people: they work nine to five and then they take a load off. Let’s go.”

  Much relieved, Dooley traipsed after me as we entered the house.

  We quickly made our way upstairs, where all the activity seemed to be focused, and found ourselves in a small room adjacent to Joshua’s bedroom.

  “Oh, my God,” said Dooley. “Will you look at that.”

  I was looking at that, and it became clear to me that Joshua Curtis had some serious issues: everywhere we looked the smiling face of Melanie Myers greeted us. From pictures hanging on the walls, to painted portraits, to sculpted busts and even a life-sized statue literally placed on a pedestal, LED lights illuminating it from below. There was even one of those small bubbling water features, with Melanie clearly recognizable in the cherub pouring water from her pitcher and looking entirely too happy as she did.

  “I think Joshua really likes Melanie,” Dooley said. “Like, really really likes her.”

  “Yeah, a little too much, I would say.”

  Just then, Chase came walking in, followed by Uncle Alec. They looked around and shook their collective heads, then Chase said, “This is just evidence overload, Chief.”

  “Talk about an open-and-shut case,” his superior officer agreed. “Holy hell, what are those two doing here?”

  Since he was staring straight at us, I immediately assumed he was referring to Dooley and myself, so I gave him my best smile and said, “Top of the morning to you, Chief.”

  But of course he couldn’t understand a word I said. Also, it was mid-afternoon at that point, so my greeting was probably out of place. At any rate, he was glowering at us now, clearly not all that happy with our presence at the scene.

  “I can’t go anywhere without these two spying on me!” he cried, shaking an irate fist. “Pretty soon they’ll be in my bedroom, watching me sleep! I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and there will be two pairs of cats eyes looking at me from the foot of the bed!”

  “We would never do that,” I assured the big guy.

  “No, we like to sleep at the foot of our own human’s bed,” Dooley added.

  “And watch her sleep.”

  “It’s too much!” Uncle Alec cried.

  “They’re just cats, Chief,” Chase said.

  “I know they’re just cats, but they’re freaking me out.”

  “They’re just doing what Odelia told them to,” Chase added as he gestured to the door with a slight shake of the head.

  I got his drift immediately, and both Dooley and myself sidled away to the door, keeping our eyes peeled just in case Uncle Alec went full-berserk and launched himself at us. He had that look, you know. That look people get who are about to go cuckoo.

  “Look, they’re going already,” said Chase.

  “Probably to go and tell Odelia all about what we discovered here.”

  “Oh, I’m sure she knows all about it from Vesta and Scarlett.”

  “More spies! I’m surrounded by spies!” Uncle Alec screamed, sounding like a Roman emperor now, surrounded by wannabe Senate assassins.

  “You shouldn’t see them as spies so much as helpful contributors,” Chase tried. “We all want the same thing, Chief.”

  “And what’s that? To drive me nuts?”

  “To solve this case.”

  “Well, your wife sure has a strange way to go about it, and so does my mom and her friend.” He dragged a hand through his modest mane. “I swear to God, Chase, if this keeps up I’m going to slam an injunction on them.”

  “On who?”

  “All of them! My mom, Scarlett, Odelia, and especially those darn cats!”

  When we arrived back at the car, to report back to Odelia, we didn’t come bearing gifts, but more like stink bombs.

  “Looks like Joshua is guilty after all, huh?” she said finally, when we’d painted a colorful word picture of Joshua Curtis’s inner sanctum—his shrine to Melanie Myers.

  “Yeah, looks like,” I agreed.

  “Have you seen the stork?” asked Dooley, glancing up nervously.

  “I told you already, Dooley,” I said. “Storks don’t work at night. They sleep.”

  “Oh, right,” said Dooley, relaxing.

  “Well, I guess that does it,” said Odelia. “Game over. Joshua Curtis was in love with Melanie to such an extent that he decided to kill the man she was having an affair with. Though I still don’t get why he hired me.”

  “So he could stay out of the picture?” I suggested. “He wanted you to snap a couple of pictures of the man she was seeing, and ask you to go and talk to Melanie. That way Melanie would break off the affair, and Joshua wouldn’t have to get involved.”

  “But then why did he decide to kill the guy? And just after I told him the affair was over. That Franklin had ended things.” She shook her head. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

  Chapter 24

  After the long day we’d had, filled with emotion and not a small degree of strife, I was glad that it was time for cat choir again, my favorite entertainment of an evening.

  Odelia had dropped us off near the park, and when we arrived at the playground that serves as the backdrop for our nightly rehearsal sessions with the other cats of Hampton Cove, we saw that the showdown had already begun: Shanille was positioned on one side of the playground, near the jungle gym, where a handful of cats were listening to her speech about the importance of respect for one’s elders, while Harriet was located on top of the slide, a bunch of cats listening to her speech about the importance of respecting one’s peers, especially when they are right and you are wrong.

  “They’re not going to fight again, are they?” asked Dooley, as we took position somewhere in the middle between the two separate camps.

  “I think they might just fight with words today?” I said, though I wasn’t entirely sanguine, I must admit. Harriet and Shanille both have a volatile streak, and just might go paw to paw again. Which would turn cat choir into fight club, which wasn’t the idea.

  Brutus came over to talk to us, and I could see from his puckered brow and the worried expression on his face that he w
asn’t liking this any more than we did.

  “I tried to stop her,” he announced sullenly, “but she wouldn’t hear of it. I told her, okay, so maybe Shanille was out of line, but then you should try to be the grownup here. After all, there’s nothing to gain by pushing this thing.”

  “Unfortunately Harriet is not the kind of cat who will back down,” I said. “And neither is Shanille.”

  “Is she going to put it to a vote?” asked Dooley, turning his head like a spectator at a tennis match, looking from Harriet to Shanille as they both seemed to go from strength to strength—oratorically speaking.

  “Yeah, she wants to settle this thing once and for all,” Brutus confirmed.

  “So… what are we supposed to vote about?” I asked.

  “She’s going to try to push Shanille out of cat choir,” said Brutus in a grave tone.

  “No way!”

  “Yes, way. She wants to take control, so that something like this will never happen again.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “But I don’t want to vote for one or the other, Max,” said Dooley. “I like Harriet, but I like Shanille, too.”

  “Plus, I don’t think Harriet would make a good choir director,” I surmised. “Frankly I think if she goes through with this, cat choir just might split in two: Shanille will take her followers to a different part of the park, and then there will be two cat choirs.”

  “I’m afraid that just might be the case,” said Brutus somberly.

  “But I don’t want two cat choirs,” said Dooley. “I like the fact that we all come together here night after night, and that we all get along!”

  “Yeah, well, tell that to Shanille and Harriet,” said Brutus. “Clearly they don’t get along.”

  “But…”

  Just then, Harriet raised her voice. “Cats of cat choir, the time has come to take a stand: do you really want to keep on living under the dictatorship of Shanille? Or do you want your freedom, under my leadership? It’s your choice, and so choose wisely!”

  “Dear friends!” Shanille yelled, summoning for silence, “don’t listen to my opponent. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She’s disrespectful, she’s mean, and she’s a bully. And I for one feel that we should say no to bullies and therefore start a procedure to expel Harriet from our community once and for all.”

  “But then who’s going to sing the soprano parts?” a voice from the crowd yelled.

  “Yeah, I like those sopranos!” another insisted.

  “Thank you so, so much,” Harriet said, simpering a little. “Look, if you want to hear my sopranos you can hear them every night from now on, and not just when Shanille allows them. In fact you can listen to my sweet voice all the time, if you vote for me.”

  “If you want tyranny to get a kick in the teeth, you’ll vote for me,” Shanille snapped.

  “Free Cat Snax for all!” Harriet countered.

  “Don’t listen to her!” said Shanille. “She’ll promise you Cat Snax today and eat them all herself tomorrow. Because that’s the kind of cat Harriet is: selfish!”

  “Oh, shut up, Shanille.”

  “No, you shut up!”

  “Oh, dear,” I murmured.

  “If this keeps up,” said Dooley, “the stork will be scared off by all the yelling.”

  Soon it was time to vote, and oddly enough the electorate was split right down the middle: Harriet got half of the vote, and so did Shanille.

  “I demand a recount!” Harriet cried. “This can’t be right!”

  “Yeah, let’s have a recount!” Shanille agreed. “This can’t possibly be right!”

  After a few tense moments, it turned out that the vote was exactly the same as the first time, so it was finally decided that a committee would be created that would try and figure a way out of this stalemate. So more voting took place, and suddenly I found myself the leader of this commission.

  Yikes!

  My fellow committee members were Dooley, Brutus, Kingman and Buster, and before long we were engaged in a tense meeting trying to resolve this remarkable situation.

  “I think we should probably have a dual leadership of cat choir from now on,” Kingman suggested.

  “You mean put both Harriet and Shanille in charge?” I asked.

  “Exactly! It would solve all of our problems. They could be co-directors. Everybody happy!”

  “I don’t think so,” said Brutus, once more providing the gloomy note. “Harriet is not the kind of cat who’s great at cooperation. Put her and Shanille in charge and they’ll end up fighting tooth and claw.”

  “I think he’s right,” said Buster. “They simply are incapable of sharing the power.”

  “So what do we do then?” asked Kingman. “Any other suggestions?”

  “We could alternate,” said Brutus. “One night will be Shanille night, and the next will be Harriet’s turn. That way they both get what they want.”

  “Not entirely,” I said. “On the nights Harriet is in charge Shanille will do everything in her power to sabotage the rehearsals, and vice versa. We’ll end up with a protracted war.”

  “So then what?”

  Frankly we were all stumped and out of ideas. So we decided to sleep on it and reconvene the next day. It sure was a tough proposition.

  And as we walked home that night, Dooley said, “I’m worried, Max.”

  “Me, too,” I admitted.

  “I mean, what will the stork think? He’s probably going to be scared off by all the bickering and fighting. And then what?”

  I decided to settle this thing once and for all. “Look, Dooley, Odelia has clearly said that she and Chase don’t want to start a family right now. They have plenty of time and so let’s give them that time, all right? The stork will just have to wait,” I added, anticipating his next remark.

  He thought about this for a moment, then finally nodded. “All right, Max. We have to respect Odelia’s wishes. The stork will just have to wait.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I mean, after all it’s up to Odelia and Chase. They’re the ones who get to decide.”

  “Absolutely!” I said, much relieved he was taking this stance.

  “On the other hand,” he said, “we have to think of that poor stork, too.”

  “What?”

  “Well, we do. Storks are hard-working birds. They have to fly around carrying babies all the time. And you know babies are heavy, Max. They come in at seven or eight pounds. Can you imagine that poor stork, flying all the way out here, carrying a seven-pound baby in its beak, having to turn back? I don’t think we can do that to the poor bird.”

  “But…”

  “No, I think Odelia will just have to change her mind, and I’m going to have a long talk with her the first chance I get.”

  “But, Dooley!”

  “Storks have rights, too, Max!”

  Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.

  Chapter 25

  Odelia was having breakfast when her mom and dad suddenly stormed into the house, looking perturbed. Marge, who was Odelia’s lookalike, only twenty years her senior, and Tex, her white-haired amiable doctor husband, immediately got down to brass tacks.

  “Is it true that your grandmother was arrested last night?” asked Mom.

  “Um, yeah, I guess she was,” said Odelia, who’d been enjoying a cup of strong black coffee and a Nutella sandwich. “But they let her walk as soon as she confessed.”

  “Confessed!” Mom cried, raising her eyes heavenward and placing a hand to her chest in a gesture of extreme agitation.

  “But what was she arrested for in the first place is what I’d like to know,” said Odelia’s dad as he took the Nutella pot, a spoon, and dipped it into the pot with the air of a man digging for treasure.

  “It’s a long story,” said Odelia. “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes! Of course we want to know why a woman who’s living under our roof got arrested!” said Mom.

  “Well…”


  “Howdy folks,” said Chase, as he came ambling down the stairs, looking chipper and bright.

  “Is it true that you arrested my mother last night?” Mom demanded, not looking exactly like a loving mother-in-law should regard her newly acquired son-in-law.

  “Why, yeah, I guess I did,” said Chase a little sheepishly.

  “And did you grill her hard?” asked Dad with some relish.

  “Tex!” Mom cried.

  “I’m sorry. I meant: did she confess to whatever it was she was up to?”

  “Oh, yeah, she confessed all right,” said Chase with a slight grin as he, in turn, filled a cup with delicious black brew and took a seat at the kitchen counter.

  “What did she do?!” Mom practically yelled.

  “Well, she was caught trying to plant four stolen jerrycans in the tool shed belonging to an old couple,” Chase explained.

  “She did what?! Oh, my God!” Again the eyes went heavenward and the hand desperately clutched at the chest, as if trying to draw comfort from the gesture.

  “It’s fine, Mom,” said Odelia. “The Dibbles aren’t pressing charges, are they, Chase?”

  “No, I don’t think they will. The Chief managed to talk them out of it. They were pretty eager to, though. Apparently people aren’t happy when two burglars sneak into their backyard at night and try to plant stolen evidence in a murder case. Go figure.”

  “This evidence was stolen?” asked Dad, delightedly licking from his spoon and helping himself to a cup of coffee. He seemed to enjoy the episode tremendously.

  “Yeah, they stole the jerrycans from the house of Joshua Curtis, suspect in a murder case. They figured they were doing Odelia a favor, while in fact they weren’t doing anyone any favors at all, least of all themselves. But we got it all squared away and the evidence is safely secured, and will be processed for fingerprints and the like.”

  “But why? Why is she doing this?!” Mom cried.

  “Because I wanted to save Odelia’s client, of course,” a voice spoke from the sliding glass door, which had opened and closed to allow the final member of the Poole family to join this impromptu breakfast meeting.