by Doris Hay
Oh, that voice! That magnificent voice! So dark and deep it makes me feel funny inside.
Oopsie hasn’t stopped barking, and this time when Ed looks up, he spots me on the fence. Our eyes lock and I can’t breathe. I’m hoping he’ll come over and scoop me up in his big hands. I bet he could hold me in just one palm. I imagine him tucking me into his shirt pocket and carrying me around like that.
Instead, he says, “Quiet, Oopsie,” and turns his attention back to his phone.
When Oopsie still doesn’t quit, I take a turn. “Quiet, Oopsie.”
The dog stops yapping and stares up at me expectantly.
I might as well take this opportunity to glean some information from him. So I ask him to tell me about Amber. “What’s she like?”
“Amber’s nice. Amber gives me treats. She takes me to the dog park and throws the Frisbee for me even though I almost never catch it.”
I can’t think of a subtle way to ask this question, so I just come out with it: “She doesn’t take drugs anymore?”
Oopsie cocks his head like he doesn’t understand.
“Never mind,” I say. “What about Tommy’s sister, Penelope? Do you know her?”
Perking up, Oopsie says, “I know Penelope. I’ve known Penelope a long time. I used to see her every day. But not anymore. Now she lives far from here. I only see her at holidays.”
The only holiday I can think of is Easter. I ask, “Did she come home for Easter?”
Oopsie reflects, and then says, “No, not for Easter. Not this year.”
“Why not?”
It’s obvious that Oopsie is thinking very hard, because he’s sitting still and being quiet for once. “Oh! I remember now! It was a big deal, a big deal! Gemma and Ed sent her money for a plane ticket, but she didn’t buy one. She spent the money on something else.”
“On what?” I ask.
“How am I supposed to know?” Oopsie says. He’s more interested in chasing his tail, but it doesn’t take long before he gets bored with that too. “I’m going inside now.”
He runs headlong into the glass door and just about flips as he flies backward. Ed looks down as Oopsie shakes himself off and pants with his little pink tongue sticking out of his mouth.
Shaking his head, Ed says, “Dumb dog.” He opens the door.
Normally, a human talking that way to an animal would bother me, but it’s true that Oopsie isn’t the brightest bulb in the box. Plus, Ed is just so handsome. He should be allowed to say whatever he wants.
Oopsie goes inside, but Ed doesn’t. He slides the door closed and takes a few steps out of the way. Maybe I should head over there. I’d love for him to give me a scratch on the head. But last time I jumped into their yard I ended up in the bath, so maybe I’ll just stay put.
I can admire him from a distance.
Once he’s no longer visible from the house, he presses a button on his phone and then holds it up to his ear. I can tell that someone has answered, and it’s someone he likes, because he smiles widely and says, “How’s my sweetheart?”
How’s my sweetheart?
I might not be sophisticated or experienced like Butterball and Zorro, but I’ve watched enough TV to know affair talk when I hear it.
“Just text?” he says without losing the smile. “Any old slob can send a text. I wanted to hear my girl’s beautiful voice.”
Wow, he’s really laying it on thick. And I know I should feel bad for Gemma, if Ed is cheating on her with another woman, but a man as handsome as that? Of course he’s going to cheat! Every woman in town must be throwing herself at him. I certainly would, and we’re not even the same species.
“How’s your day been?” he asks. “Whatcha been up to?”
You should see his face as he listens to his mistress talk. He looks ten years younger than he did before he placed that call.
“Well, listen,” he says. “Next time you’re in the neighbourhood, you shoot me a text and I’ll see if I can slip out without you-know-who noticing.”
I can hardly believe it. Ed is conducting his affair right before my eyes. Or at least before my ears.
His mistress must have said something funny because now he’s laughing. “Okay, okay, we’ll get down to business. You are all about the cash, these days.”
Is Ed’s mistress using him for his money? If she is, he doesn’t seem to mind.
“Honey, listen, I know exactly what he’s going to say, but you tell him I don't care about the Over/Under on the Jacksonville game. Put five large on Kansas City. They're gonna cover the spread. I feel it in my bones.”
Wait a minute… that sounds like sports talk. Is Ed gambling again? Doris said he’d kicked the habit, that Gemma had helped him. Now he’s off the wagon, placing bets, and he’s got another woman in his life?
If Gemma finds out about this, she will destroy his handsome face.
Oh, this is bad. This is very, very bad.
Chapter 7
I tear into the house so fast I end up tumbling down the stairs like a gymnast.
Doris and Butterball are both asleep in front of the TV, but Zorro rushes over and asks, “You okay, squirt?”
Righting myself, I cry out, “No, I’m not okay! Ed is still gambling and I think he’s having an affair on the phone and probably in person too but I only heard him on the phone and it sounded like his girlfriend was placing bets for him—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Zorro says with a smirk. “Slow down, kiddo. Start from the beginning.”
I glance at Doris and Butterball. I don’t want to wake them—especially not Butterball, since he thinks this investigation is a whole load of hooey.
Zorro obviously reads my expression, because he nods up the stairs and leads the way to the kitchen. Once we’re up there, I tell him what I heard Ed saying on the phone.
“Sounds like sports betting alright. And five thousand dollars? Wow. If his wife finds out, she will not be happy.”
“I don’t think she’d be very happy about his affair, either.”
“Affair? Yeah. True.” Zorro glances sheepishly around the kitchen, and then heads to the water dish for a drink. “Except we don’t know for sure that he’s having an affair. Maybe he was just talking to… his bookie.”
I think it makes him uncomfortable to discuss adult matters with someone as young as I am.
But that doesn’t stop me.
“I think for sure the girl on the phone was his mistress, because he was calling her honey and sweetheart—”
“That doesn’t prove anything definitive.”
“—and he said the next time she was in the neighbourhood she should text him and he’d try to sneak out without Gemma knowing.”
“Oh,” Zorro says. “That does sound pretty incriminating.”
“And it definitely wasn’t his bookie, because Ed was asking the girl on the phone to place the bet for him. So that would mean someone else was the bookie, right? And she was just…”
“The go-between, yeah.” Zorro glances at his empty food bowl, and then he hops up on a kitchen chair, then hops again onto the table.
I follow him, tumbling on my first attempt. The second time around, I dig my nails into the seat of the chair and pull myself up. It’s not as far from the chair to the table. I manage that one on the first go.
Once I’m firmly planted on the tabletop, I find Zorro gazing out the side window, over the fence, toward Ed and Gemma’s dimly-lit house.
“What?” I ask him.
“I’m just thinking.”
“Just thinking what?”
He snaps out of his stare and glances down at me. “How’d you get all the way up here?”
“I jumped, just like you.”
He’s definitely impressed, even if he doesn’t say so. “It makes sense for Ed to use a middleman to place his bets, if he’s worried about his wife finding out. But it would have to be someone he trusts.”
“Like his mistress.”
“Exactly.”
&nb
sp; Zorro still seems a little embarrassed, talking about this stuff with lil’ ol’ me.
“The money piece must be tricky,” Zorro goes on. “Ed and Gemma own a business together. They probably have joint accounts for all their home stuff too. If Ed’s just getting back into gambling, where’s he gonna get this money from?”
“Well, it seems like they’re pretty rich.”
“Still,” Zorro says. “They weren’t always. If money goes missing, Gemma’s gonna know about it. So if Ed digs himself into a hole and he needs to get his hands on some quick cash without his wife finding out, where’s he gonna get it?”
It dawns on me what Zorro’s suggesting. “You think Ed stole from himself?”
Zorro gives an exaggerated shrug. “You said yourself Gemma immediately blamed Tommy for the theft.”
“But only in her mind,” I add. “Ed would have known his wife wouldn’t confront their son about it: daddies are devoted to their daughters, mothers to their sons.”
“Right, exactly. Gemma eats the loss without even going to the police.”
“The perfect crime!”
“Ed gets the money to pay off his gambling debts, Tommy takes the blame without even knowing it.”
“Zorro!” I cry. “We’ve done it! We’ve solved the mystery!”
He doesn’t seem as excited about all this as I am, but maybe that makes sense. It’s my case, after all.
But it’s more than that. Zorro says, “Solving the mystery is one thing, squirt. What we need now is solid proof.”
“Proof?” I ask. “Well, how are we supposed to get proof?”
Gazing at the house next door, he says, “We go to where the evidence is.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, feeling nervous all over.
Zorro nods toward Ed and Gemma’s place. “We’re gonna have to get behind enemy lines.”
Chapter 8
“Don’t cat burglars usually break into houses at night?”
Zorro gives me a flat look. “We’re not cat burglars.”
“We’re cats.”
“Yes,” he concedes. “But we’re not stealing anything. Think of us as Private Eyes operating in a grey area of the law.”
The morning is gloriously sunny, but Doris isn’t out in the garden like she was yesterday. She’s got edits to go through on one of her mystery novels. She’ll be in her office for a good long time.
“Anyway,” Zorro continues. “Last night would have been exactly the wrong time to break in. No sense entering a bedroom when the people are in bed. You’re just asking to be caught.”
I think I could probably sneak around someone’s bedroom without them noticing. If they’re asleep, that is. I’d just have to be extra careful not to knock anything over or jump on the bed.
But Zorro was right, when he suggested we delay our investigation until today. From the top of the fence, we can see Gemma bustling around in the kitchen. Ed has taken Oopsie for a walk. We saw them go only a couple minutes ago.
Oh, that Ed! Oh, he’s so handsome. Even Zorro agrees he could be a movie star if he wanted to be.
It’s such a shame he’s a thief, even if it’s his own money that he stole.
“Come on,” Zorro says, leading me to the end of our fence, and then across the one that separates Gemma and Ed’s yard from the one behind them.
“I’m not even sure what we’re looking for,” I admit as I follow along. “If we were police officers we could dust for fingerprints. If we were CSIs we could do some kind of DNA thing. But we’re just cats.”
“So we use our powers of observation,” Zorro replies. “Mostly, we hope Ed left his phone lying around.”
“Maybe we should have broken in while they were sleeping. People don’t sleep with their phones, do they?”
“You’re asking me?” Zorro chuckles.
“You know all about mother/daughter family dynamics,” I reason. “Sometimes your knowledge surprises me.”
He stops walking and I nearly bump into his bottom. That’s when I realize how close we are to the house.
Indicating upward, Zorro says, “You see that? That’s the bedroom we’re aiming for.”
I look to where he’s drawing my attention, and I’m surprised to see a little balcony sticking out from the house. It’s just big enough for a small chair and a tiny table. There’s a big window behind. Actually, not just a window but a door… a sliding glass door like they’ve got in the kitchen downstairs, like the one Oopsie ran into last night.
It’s a good thing that dog is out or he’d blow our cover in no time flat. We’d better take care of business before he comes back.
“Do you think you can jump from here to there?” Zorro asks.
Without waiting for me to answer, he takes the leap. He makes it look so easy, hopping from the top of the high wooden fence onto the pad of the balcony, sticking a perfect landing between two railings.
He turns around and looks at me expectantly, but I don’t think I can do it. I’m too little. I couldn’t even jump up on a chair last night, not on the first try. And if I fall from here…
“It’s okay,” he says. “You know what? I can’t believe I didn’t even think of this, but one of us needs to keep lookout. Can you do that from there? Call out if you see anyone coming?”
“Sure, I can do that,” I say.
I know he’s just helping me save face, but I appreciate it. I really do. If it was Butterball, he would be totally condescending. Not that Butterball could make that leap any more than I could.
“Okay,” Zorro says. “Cover me, I’m going in!”
As he sneaks toward the glass door, I realize that if a cat could make the jump from this fence to that balcony, a human could too. There’s a chance that it wasn’t one of the family who broke into that safe. Maybe it was a cat burglar—of the human variety.
I’m not sure how Zorro plans to open that door, and I realize as I watch him that he doesn’t know either. There’s a door pull, like a handle I suppose, but it’s high up for a cat.
“If you jump up on the railing,” I suggest, “you can push on that handle. You’ll have to push it really hard, but if you do, that should open the door.”
Zorro looks up and sees what I mean. “Let’s just hope the door is unlocked.”
As he hops up onto the railing, I notice something that seems totally bizarre. “Is that a lock? I mean a latch? On the outside of the door?”
Once he’s up there, he sees what I mean: a little latch that flips up and down, right beside the handle.
“Shouldn’t that be on the inside?” I ask.
“Maybe there’s one on the inside too.”
“It looks like the door was hung inside out. You’d only put the lock on the outside if planned to lock yourself outside, but that makes no sense.”
Zorro nodded in agreement. “Hey, and isn’t Ed supposed to be some kind of superstar contractor? It was him, his company, that built this house. He got rich making mistakes like this?”
My stomach knots because I don’t want to think ill of someone so handsome. Stealing is one thing, but hanging a door inside-out when that’s your full-time job?
“If the lock is on the outside, that makes this bedroom extra-easy to break into. It’s like they’re asking to be burgled.”
“For the insurance money, you think?” But Zorro doesn’t wait for me to answer before saying, “No, it couldn’t be that. You’d need a police report to cash in an insurance police. And you said yourself Gemma refuses to involve the police.”
“If a cat can break in, anyone can.”
Zorro takes a deep breath before reaching his front paws out to push on the handle. He pushes so hard he tumbles to the pad of the balcony. “I meant to do that.”
Laughing, I say, “Sure you did!”
“I did!” he assures me. “I just wanted to test to see if the door was locked. And it is.”
He leaps back up on the railing and easily flips the lock from up to down. “That was too easy
.”
I nod in agreement, then say, “Be careful, okay?”
He barely pauses before reaching again for the handle. His front paws land easily against it, and he begins to push. I know Zorro well enough by now to recognize when he’s really exerting himself, and I can see that he is.
It works! The door begins to open, just a crack, and then a little bit wider, an inch or so—
Weee-ooo-weee-ooo-weee-ooo! Security breach! Weee-ooo-weee-ooo-weee-ooo!
An ear-splitting noise screams from the house. It’s enough to knock Zorro off-kilter. He tumbles to the balcony pad, and then leaps between the railings, nearly overshooting the fence.
“What is that?” I ask.
“It’s the alarm system,” he cries as he races along. “We’ve activated the alarm!”
“We?” I ask.
Weee-ooo-weee-ooo-weee-ooo! Security breach! Weee-ooo-weee-ooo-weee-ooo!
The alarm’s still going as we round the corner onto the fence we share with the yard next door. Zorro jumps down to the ground and I follow him toward the cat door. We’re almost home free when the kitchen door opens and Doris rushes out.
My heart stops. I’m sure we’ve been caught in the act, but Doris doesn’t even notice us. She calls out, “Gemma! What’s happening?”
I’m about to race inside, but I stop and turn around. Zorro does the same. We make our way back to the fence. I’m too worn out to jump. I have to climb, but it’s worth it to spot Gemma alone in her backyard, making her way toward Doris by the back fence.
“Oh, Dori!” Gemma cries. “I don’t know! I don’t know!”
She’s got her phone out.
“Are you calling the police?” Doris asks.
Gemma doesn’t answer the question, but clearly she isn’t because she says, “Ed? Ed, the alarm’s gone off. Can you come straight home?”
He must have said no, because her lips purse. She presses them together so hard they turn white.
“Well, why not? Where are you?” A quick pause, and then, “What are you doing all the way out there? I thought you were taking Oopsie to the dog park.”
She listens for another moment, and then says, “Look, I don’t care about this right now. My alarm system is disrupting the neighbourhood and I don’t want to go back in the house until you’re home.”