Ruff vs. Fluff

by Spencer Quinn

  And now we had moonlight again. It turned the footprints black in a world of silver. Those black prints led off the old lumber road, down through a grove of trees and toward a dark, rocky outcrop, jutting from a steep slope. As we got closer I saw something strange: The prints went right into the rocky outcrop and disappeared. Then I saw the tall, narrow opening in the rocks.

  “The cave,” Harmony said in a very low voice. “Where Mr. Pelter and his dad found the bodies.”

  We stood outside this cave. Harmony and Bro exchanged another of those looks of theirs, where something silent gets said. I came very close to understanding what it was. But there wasn’t quite enough time. We stepped through the narrow opening and into the cave.

  At first it was so dark I couldn’t see a thing. Then my eyes pitched in—they’re pretty good at night, maybe better than yours—and I made out a widening space that led to a downward-sloping tunnel. A bluish-white light flickered at the tunnel opening, faded away, came back. It reminded me of the phone lights old folks at the inn used to help them read Bertha’s breakfast menus, back when we had guests. We walked toward that flickering light.

  Then, from out of the tunnel, came Mom’s voice. “You’ve got this completely wrong.” After that there was a … I didn’t know what to call it. A slapping noise? Something like that. None of us liked that sound, not one little bit. I could tell by how fast we moved into the tunnel, Harmony first and me last, even though I always like to be first. Plus it’s my job! This was no time to be doing it badly. I squeezed in front the first chance I got, which was when the tunnel opened up into a sort of dim room with damp, rocky walls, a high rocky ceiling, and a dirt floor.

  The only non-dim part was a cone of light that came from a cell phone, propped up on a jumble of rocks. In that bright bluish cone was a terrible sight. Mom was sitting on the cave floor. Florio stood over her. He had a gun in one hand. Her nose was bleeding.

  “I’m running out of patience,” Florio said.

  Mom looked up at him. Her face looked strange and blue. “I can’t help you,” she said. Poor Mom. She must have been so scared. But did her voice tremble? Not a bit!

  “See, I think that’s a lie,” Florio said. “When I met with LeMaire down in the meadow—”

  “Where you killed him,” Mom said.

  Florio raised the gun, rested the barrel gently on Mom’s head. “I hate interruptions. Understood?”

  There was a long pause. Finally Mom said, “Yes.”

  Florio withdrew the gun. “When I met with LeMaire I was sure he had the map. No point in coming up here without it. You need both—the map and this.” He took something from his pocket, held it in the light for Mom to see. The postcard. He shook his head and laughed. Human laughter almost always sounds good to me. This was one of those times it didn’t. “The Depression’s the reason for all this mumbo jumbo. Those two old guys didn’t trust anyone. The map was supposed to show the different hiding spots in the cave. The postcard indicated the one for the last shipment. LeMaire wanted to meet me because he thought I had the map.” He smiled. “Which I did not, but I kind of let him think the opposite. And then I came up here early, just in case he was pulling a fast one. And wouldn’t you know? He showed up early, too. Didn’t that mean he’d somehow found the map on his own? That was the subject of our little discussion in the meadow. He denied he had the map, but I wasn’t convinced. A smart guy maybe, but not cut out for this kind of thing. He didn’t want to be searched, forcing me to … subdue him.” He held up the gun. “With this, actually. The butt end. I never intended … something permanent. And after all that, it turned out the map wasn’t on him. Know what I think?”

  “I hope,” said Mom, “that you think it’s not too late to stop all this.”

  “You can’t be that stupid,” Florio said. “My take is that LeMaire heard me coming and hid the map somewhere. I couldn’t find it, but guess what I’m betting.”

  Mom didn’t answer.

  “I’m waiting,” Florio said.

  “I don’t know what you’re betting,” Mom said.

  “I’m betting your daughter found it.”

  And now, for the first time, Mom’s voice lost its steadiness. “You’re wrong.”

  “Nice try,” Florio said. “See what you think of this plan. First, I’m going to search you. Then, if the map’s not on you, you’ll … wait up here, so to speak, while I go down for a quick confab with your daughter.”

  “No,” Mom said.

  “No?” said Florio. “You’re not being given a choice.”

  “But none of that will do you any good.” Mom’s voice was trembling badly, no doubt about it. I’d never been more upset in my life. “There is no map. Not anymore.”

  Florio raised his voice, all the way up to a shout. “Not anymore? What is that supposed to mean?”

  Somewhere up above a rock shook loose and fell to the cave floor with a thump. It landed near Florio’s feet but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN?”

  Another rock fell. Florio got way too close to Mom, sort of surrounding her.

  “ANSWER ME!”

  Mom tried to shrink away from him but there was nowhere to go. She looked up and said, “There is no map. Arthur ate it.”

  “Arthur? What are you talking about?”

  “Our dog.”

  Florio smacked Mom across the face with the back of his hand. That was my last clear memory of things for a while. I saw red! Even though there was no red to see. I saw red anyway and charged at Florio. Were Bro and Harmony with me? I believe so, but I was in the lead. No one could have kept up with old Arthur at time like that.

  Florio heard me coming and spun around my way. With shock on his face! And fear! Both very nice to see. He raised the gun. I launched myself at him.

  BANG!

  Something hot whizzed through the fur on my shoulder. An instant after that, I got him by the gun arm, sinking my teeth in deep. He cried out. I sank my teeth in deeper. And he cried out again. We wrestled around on the floor and then, oh, no! He kicked me in the stomach, real hard. I rolled away, just out of the cone of light.

  BANG!

  This bang was followed by the zing zing zing of the bullet bouncing off the rock walls of the cave. Then came something hard to describe. The cave didn’t like that bullet zing zing zinging off its walls. It let out a kind of low roar and then a big part of the ceiling tumbled down, missing me, the kids, and Mom, but burying Florio under a huge, stony, silent pile.

  Oh, no! But not missing Mom after all. That was just me, wishing for happiness. The truth was that Mom was buried, too, all except for her head. Her eyes were open so wide. How frightened they looked! This was the worst thing I’d ever seen. A great howling rose up from deep inside me.

  Harmony and Bro rushed over to Mom. Without a word, they fell down on their knees and started grabbing rocks, some of them really big, and flinging them away like they were nothing. And how they worked, their hands just blurs—like they were one mighty being, digging, digging, digging. In what seemed like forever, but maybe was no time at all, they had Mom free and on her feet.

  “Mom, Mom, are you okay?” Harmony said.

  Mom slowly patted herself, tried a few little leg movements. “I seem to be,” she said. “Oh, kids!”

  The next moment we were all together, hugging and crying, except for me. I wasn’t part of the hugging and crying, but I made up for that by being the most all-together of anybody.

  Mom moved toward the phone—quite steady on her feet—and shone the light around. Dust rose from the rock pile and another stone or two came loose from the ceiling. But in the pile itself nothing moved or made the slightest sound.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Mom said.

  We turned to go.

  “Wait,” Harmony said. “What’s that?”

  She pointed at the wall. A flat stone, not much bigger than a book, had fallen away, exposing a hole.

  “That’s a letter pain
ted on the rock in there,” Bro said.

  “C,” said Harmony.

  We went closer, peered into the hole. Down at the bottom was a golden glow.

  “The gold bars,” Bro and Harmony said, speaking as one. Bro reached in and pulled out a gold bar, about the size and shape of the French bread loaves Bertha sometimes bakes, possibly called baguettes. We were all admiring it when a voice came from the opening to the tunnel.

  “Well, well.”

  Mom shone the light in that direction. And there stood Mr. Mahovlich. He had a light, too. He shone it on us, the rock pile, the gold bar.

  “What are you doing here?” Mom said.

  “Same as you, I suppose.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Mr. Mahovlich spotted Florio’s gun, lying on the floor, quite close to him. He picked it up and said, “Maybe you won’t have to.” He held the gun loosely, not pointed at us, and not exactly not at us, either. “We had family tales about the gold, but I doubted them. So congratulations. I owe you.” The gun came up, slowly and still not definitely in our direction. I was a little confused. I’m sure my confusion would have cleared up in no time, but before it could, a small, dark shadow came streaking through the air. This shadow seemed to land on Mr. Mahovlich’s side or arm. He cried out in pain, whirled away, trying to shake off the shadow.

  “ARRRGH!” Mr. Mahovlich cried out again. He lost the gun, which came spinning our way. Mom scooped it up. The shadow separated from Mr. Mahovlich and glided over to us. This shadow turned out to be Queenie. She sat down and yawned.

  THIS HAD BEEN AN ENJOYABLE outing, even exciting at times, yet I was ready to be back home. I’m no expert on human behavior—I have other things to ponder—but I expected that they were thinking the same thing. So why didn’t Mom now shoot Mr. Mahovlich and be done with it? Instead we had a complicated conversation going on, lit by cell phone light, with Mr. Mahovlich talking real fast.

  “I hope you don’t misinterpret my actions, Yvette,” he was saying. “I dropped by the inn to check out room availability for some friends of mine, and ended up talking to your guest—Melanie, I believe? From what she said, I pieced together the possibility that you and the kids—” He raised his free hand in a little wave to Harmony and Bro; his other hand was wrapped in a scarf he’d been wearing, a scarf that now dripped blood, the drops black in the cell phone light, a very displeasing sort of light to my eyes, by the way, although the sight of his blood made up for that.

  “—you and the kids,” he was saying, “might have gone up here. Not really safe at night, in my opinion, so I thought, as a friend and neighbor, that I’d come check. And I think my fears were borne out. Whose gun is that?”

  Mom held the gun firmly, pointed down. “We can get to that later,” she said. “Do you really expect me to buy your story?”

  “I sure hope so,” said Mr. Mahovlich. “It’s the whole truth and nothing but.” He gazed at Mom in an innocent way that reminded me of Arthur, who was currently standing between Harmony and Bro, his tail wagging maniacally.

  Mom gazed back. “And you brought Queenie with you?”

  He turned to me. I could feel him thinking hard. “Well, yes. She seemed to want to come.”

  What was this? He hadn’t known I was with him to the very end, that sweet moment of biting and blood.

  “Queenie did?” said Harmony.

  “At least so I thought,” Mr. Mahovlich said. “I even imagined she liked me.” He held up his scarf-wrapped hand and laughed the kind of laugh I believe is called rueful. “Evidently not.”

  A few moments passed. I got ready for Mom to shoot Mr. Mahovlich but that wasn’t what happened. Instead she gave him a long look, not friendly, and said, “Let’s go home.”

  We left the cave—an odd sort of place and in the end disappointing. Wouldn’t you expect to find mice in that kind of setup? And yet there was not a single trace of mouse. Arthur took the lead until he got tired, which was almost immediately. Bro carried him the rest of the way. Harmony carried me the whole time, although I wasn’t the least bit tired. I gazed at the moon and felt wild, through and through.

  Oh. The gold bars. Mr. Mahovlich carried those over his shoulder, wrapped in a sort of bundle he made with his sweater.

  “Can’t deny I haven’t had thoughts about the gold,” he said when we were back in the front hall of the inn. “The charities I’d leave it to, supposing the gold came into my hands. That kind of thing.”

  “There by the grandfather clock will be fine,” Mom said. “You can keep the sweater.”

  “What are we going to do with the gold, Mom?” Harmony said the next day.

  “Let’s buy a place in Hawaii and take up surfing,” Bro said.

  “Whoa and double whoa!” said Harmony. “Can we?”

  Mom laughed. “First we have to make sure it belongs to us. It looks like at least some does—the state may get a portion. As for what we’ll do with it, Matty’s coming over later. I thought we’d discuss it with him.”

  “Huh?” said Bro.

  “We were thinking, Matty and I,” Mom said, “about a small archaeology museum dedicated to Colonial history in these parts.”

  “You mean we’re giving it away?” Harmony said.

  “Not all of it,” said Mom.

  “Will there be enough left for the place in Hawaii?” Bro said.

  “It doesn’t have to be on the beach,” said Harmony.

  And there was more about Hawaii, beaches, and surfing, but I lost interest. Did a call come in about the arrest of the woman possibly named Mary Jones, possibly of Brooklyn? I paid no attention.

  A little later, I ran into Arthur on the stairs. We both paused and gazed at each other. It was an interesting moment.

  By the day after that, the inn was packed with guests, most of them media people. Media people turned out to be just what we needed. They paid top dollar for everything, Bertha said, and ate and drank huge amounts. In fact, a party started up, and then we got snowed in so it went on for days. Arthur played dead 24-7 and scarfed up so many treats he could barely move. The whole house shook with fun and noise and laughter. Not my kind of thing at all. I spent most of my time down in the basement, doing what I do, and simply being, well, me.

  Many thanks to Mallory Kass, my very talented editor at Scholastic, and also to Rachel Griffiths for encouraging this project in its early days.

  Keep reading for a sneek peek at the next Queenie and Arthur novel, Paws vs. Claws!

  “Bad news, pussycat,” said Bertha. “No cream today.”

  No cream today? Had I heard right? Well, that’s not a real question. Of course I’d heard right. My hearing is as good as it gets. Everything about me is as good as it gets. My looks, for example, are off the charts. I’m a thing of beauty from my gold-flecked button nose to the tip of my snowy tail. And my eyes! I’ll make this simple: When you gaze into them, you never want to stop. That’s happened to me so often—in fact, every time I come upon a mirror.

  There are no mirrors in our kitchen, here at the Blackberry Hill Inn. I prefer rooms with mirrors but I make an exception for the kitchen. Every morning when I wake up I take an elegant little stretch—very different from the clumsy stretches of a certain other party who inhabits this place and whom you’ll probably meet later, nothing I can do about it—and I glide down off the top of the grandfather clock in the front hall and make my way here, where Bertha, the cook, is standing by to serve me fresh cream in a pretty china saucer, white with a gold border. This saucer is known to everyone as Queenie’s saucer. I’m Queenie, in case you haven’t guessed. I hope I’m not going too fast, although if I am, don’t expect me to do anything about it.

  I stood motionless in the doorway, waiting for . . . what, exactly? For some explanation? For Bertha to come to her senses? No! I was waiting for my cream, period. This was basic: I, Queenie, start my day with fresh cream served in a special saucer named after me, Queenie. End of story.

  Bertha looked at me. I l
ooked at Bertha. Bertha’s a big, strong woman with a roundish face, not unpleasant. She’s quite presentable for a human, and we’ve always gotten along well, right up until now.

  “What’s with you?” she said.

  Seriously? I didn’t move a muscle. Perhaps a whisker or two quivered in the slight breeze drifting in from the hall. My whiskers are lovely, kind of a finishing touch to the whole stunning package, and quite intelligent in their own way. I wouldn’t have minded watching them quiver for a bit, but . . . no mirror. My mood—so cheery on awakening, the memory of a brief nighttime trip down to the basement and a chance encounter with a mouse fresh in my mind—was darkening fast.

  “Don’t blame me,” Bertha said. “It’s not my fault.”

  So? What did that have to do with anything? Did I care about the whos or whys or—

  At that moment Mom walked in, entering through the door that led to our family quarters upstairs.

  “Morning, Bertha,” Mom said. She glanced around. “Were you talking to someone?”

  Bertha pointed at me with her chin. Some humans have a cool move or two—I don’t mind admitting that—and the chin point is a personal favorite.

  Mom laughed. “I do that all the time.”

  If that was a joke, I didn’t get it. So Mom talks to me all the time? What’s funny about that? We’re very close. She tells me all sorts of things she tells nobody else. That’s how I know, for example, that the Blackberry Hill Inn, which belongs to us—us being me, Mom, and the twins, Harmony and Bro, now on some sort of school vacation—and I suppose that one other party mentioned earlier, although he’s the classic free-riding type, contributing nothing while eating us out of house and . . . but where was I? Right, the inn. The inn’s not doing so well, Mom told me the other night, when it was just the two of us sitting by the fire in the small parlor. A bunch of money coming our way is still tied up in court, with more knots added by the day, Mom says. “We need guests, Queenie, and lots of ’em. But you know the problem.”