Cry Woof

by Sarah Hines-Stephens

  That explained a lot. Bloom must have nabbed The Kid when she came out of Heinz’s house. While I was under the bush. Bloom probably took her to Pet Rescue. Yeah. That made sense. Cassie would find her there. She probably stashed The Kid in her pack. But how’d Cassie know where to find me?

  “Woof!” I barked. I couldn’t help it. I was so relieved. But Cassie shushed me.

  “Quiet, Dodge,” she whispered. Her head was cocked toward Heinz’s house. Then I heard another bark. Muffet’s!

  Cassie heard it, too.

  Woof. I was so busy wagging over one friend being out of trouble I forgot I’d gotten another friend in trouble.

  Cassie gazed at me. Serious. “That’s Muffet in there, isn’t it?”

  I stared back a “yes.”

  “So what’s the plan?” She scanned the messy yard and noticed the window. I led her to the door and paused. The plan was that Muffet would rescue The Kid. Only the plan had changed. Now we needed to rescue Muffet.

  Get her out, I whined.

  Cassie tried the door. Locked. The window wouldn’t work for either of us. Too small. But The Kid could fit. And she did. She slipped inside while I started sniffing. The scent of snails and metal wafted up from a pot of dead flowers. I pawed at the base. Cassie tipped the pot on its side and … bingo! We’d found the spare key. We were in!

  I slid the key into the lock and turned the handle. Is it breaking and entering if you don’t actually take anything? I wondered. I was pretty sure it was. I was also pretty sure that was why my heart felt like it was trying to leap out of my chest. Taking a breath, I stepped through Bill Heinz’s back door with Dodge beside me.

  The smell inside was overwhelming. The whole place reeked of fish. Like more fish than anyone should ever eat or … I grasped the bottle in my pocket, the one I’d taken out of Duke’s trash. We were talking about more than anyone should ever eat!

  Knowing we were on the right trail helped calm my nerves a little. Dodge seemed to know we were close to breaking the case wide open, too. That must have been why he’d come here. Though I still wasn’t clear on why he’d brought Muffet.

  We followed Bananas to a small door in the kitchen. The door opened onto stairs leading to the basement. And if I thought the fish smell couldn’t get any stronger? Well, I was wrong. I had to breathe through my mouth to keep from gagging, and even then I felt like I could taste it in the back of my throat. The smell was that thick.

  Bananas zipped down the stairs like she’d done it a million times before, disappearing into the dark. She had the cat-eye advantage. Her paws were silent on the steps, but from the base of the stairs, in the blackness, I heard a familiar yip. Dodge plunged ahead of me, and I flipped on the lights and followed.

  The basement room was dank and windowless. Lights hung from a low ceiling and the stainless steel tables that lined the walls were covered in equipment I didn’t recognize. The shelves above were crowded with strange ingredients, bottles, and labels — it was a Pepper-Upper factory.

  I felt dizzy. From the smell, yes. And also from the fact that I was surrounded by evidence — evidence that made everything click together.

  “Woof!” Dodge called my attention to Bananas and a very dirty Muffet. They huddled together over a dark spot on the floor. Muffet had her nose pressed close while Bananas licked the oily stain.

  “What is that?” I bent down to touch it and rubbed my fingers together. It was greasy. I gave a sniff and nearly barfed. “Ugh!” I spluttered. I’d found the source of the fish stink: fish oil! And I was betting this wasn’t just any fish oil, but the source of the mega omega-3s. This was shark liver oil!

  “Don’t eat that,” I told Bananas, waving her away from the spill. “You either,” I told Muffet.

  I examined the room, stunned. I’d set out to find my dog and wound up finding Bill Heinz’s poison factory. Bill might have seemed like the friendly fish-fry guy, but he was as greedy as they got. The memory of his angry expression in the hospital, when he’d just learned that Duke wasn’t going to sell the supplements that had almost killed him, made me make a few angry faces of my own. Bill was a crook! A scammer! A criminal! He’d been taking advantage of the nice people at Home Away to sell his untested, unsafe pills.

  I pulled the bottle out of my pocket and peered at the label. In addition to omega-3s, the pills were loaded with vitamin A. And if Bananas knew just where to find a fishy treat, the rest of Madame’s cats probably did, too. Licking up the overconcentrated fish oil spills and chowing down a bottle of Pepper-Uppers was almost certainly what had killed poor Salt and Pepper.

  “Dodge, Heinz was the one poisoning cats, and the reason Duke is in the hospital,” I announced. Dodge’s ears went up. We’d found our perp, or at least his lab. “It’s all here,” I breathed. Except for the answer to the mystery we’d started out to solve: How did Madame LeFarge die?

  I was about to start snapping pictures of the evidence with my phone when Muffet, Bananas, and Dodge all froze. I froze, too, straining to hear what they’d heard first. When I finally did, I sucked in my breath.

  It was the rattle of keys in the front door.

  There wasn’t enough room behind the warm tank for all of us. But we smushed together anyway.

  Bananas sat on one side of me. Silent. Muffet sat on the other. Shivering. The Maltese wasn’t nervous — she was excited. This was her second shakedown and the little pup was eating it up. Cassie hit the light and crouched with us.

  We stayed as quiet as we could, which wasn’t easy. Being in Heinz’s house made my teeth itchy. The place reeked. Not in a bad way, but the smell was really strong. A growl tickled my throat.

  Still. I kept still. I stayed. Hidden. Stealthy. Then the light blinked on and I felt exposed — like a poodle after a haircut. But Heinz couldn’t see us. Not yet.

  The fishy guy stomped down the stairs, talking to nobody. The metal smell of anger mixed with his pepper scent and the inescapable fish stink. It stung my nose.

  “At least I’ve got their investment,” he said, talking to himself. “They were the first ones dumb enough to sign the contract, but they won’t be the last. I just need to find some other suckers to sell the stuff for me.” He moved things around roughly, banging them together. I didn’t know what he was talking about but I felt a change in Cassie’s touch. She kept one hand on me and lifted Muffet up under her other arm. I think she knew how much my teeth itched. How much my teeth wanted to grab on to Heinz’s pant leg and clamp down. Or maybe her teeth itched, too. Yeah. I wasn’t the only one who wanted to take a bite out of Heinz.

  “It’s not my fault Duke MacLean had a weak heart,” Heinz babbled. My ears twitched. He’d said Duke. Duke! That’s what Cassie was talking about. Suddenly it all came together in my head: The fishy smell. The pills. The sick cats. Sick Duke. My teeth itched worse than ever.

  There were a few of the nasty capsules on the floor behind the tank. With us. Bananas picked one up and I couldn’t keep my growl in anymore. “Grrr!” Drop it, I growled. That stuff was dangerous. The Kid dropped the pill. She jumped onto my back and I stepped out from behind the tank.

  Heinz stopped and turned. He took a step backward. He wasn’t expecting us. I growled again. Low. Fierce. To let him know we meant business.

  His face grew pale. His smell changed. Mixed with the cider vinegar scent of fear.

  “We know you’re guilty,” Cassie said, stepping out behind me. She was talking about how he hurt Duke. About the bad pills.

  “Meowf!” The Kid had something to say, too. Heinz was not going to get away with this.

  The expression on Heinz’s face said a lot. I’d seen that look before, on a chow who’d been caught eating a pair of leather boots. Shame. Guilt. He’d done Duke and the old-timers and the cats wrong. Big wrong.

  Heinz raised his hands in the air. “I didn’t mean to kill anyone!” he cried.

  I blinked in surprise, wondering if I’d heard right. I didn’t mean to kill anyone. Kill anyone? K
ill anyone? My jaw dropped. Bill didn’t know about Salt and Pepper, and he definitely knew that Duke had survived the poisoning — he had to be talking about Madame LeFarge!

  I steadied myself on a stainless steel table. I’d figured out that he was guilty of swindling the Home Awayers, and making the cats sick. But he’d just confessed to killing his neighbor — a much bigger crime.

  My mind spinning, I blurted out the first question that came to me. “Were you already in the house when she called the police?”

  Bill’s face went even whiter — he didn’t know I knew so much. “I was just trying to scare her a little — to tell her to mind her own business and keep her cats out of my basement!” he said in a rush. “She was a meddling busybody. If she’d have stopped poking around in my affairs, I —”

  “Then you wouldn’t have killed her?” I finished angrily.

  “Look, all I wanted was to talk to her, maybe scare her a little. I needed her to see how it was to have uninvited guests for a change. Those cats of hers had been coming into my basement for weeks! And she was constantly spying on me. I didn’t expect her to lose it like that. She was frantic, flailing her arms and screaming her head off.”

  Dodge took a step closer, growling. Bill backed against a wall of shelves.

  “She was so riled up she tripped and hit her head on the kitchen counter. I didn’t even push her! I didn’t know she’d hit so hard, either. I thought she’d wake up and be a little freaked out. Maybe keep better control over her cats.”

  “You left her there unconscious?”

  Bill swallowed. “I didn’t think she’d die.”

  “You probably didn’t think Duke would collapse from taking your poison pills, either. It sounds like you don’t think about a lot of stuff.”

  “I never told that old man that he should take so many of my pills. Shark oil is potent stuff. It shouldn’t be messed with.”

  “Neither should people’s lives. You were taking advantage of the folks at Home Away and you knew it!”

  Bill’s eyes narrowed, and he raised his stubbly chin. “I just wanted to make a little money. Not my fault the old guy had to complicate things.”

  “Complicate things?” I balked. “By almost dying from taking your unregulated vitamins?”

  Bill’s face hardened into a steely mask, and I knew I’d pushed too far. His eyes darted around the room as he sized us up: A seventh grader, a pocket dog, and a German shepherd with a cat on his back — we looked more like a circus troop than the long arm of the law.

  He stepped forward menacingly, and I suddenly wished I’d kept my big mouth shut. The tide was turning fast.

  My hackles rose and a growl rumbled in my throat. Heinz was more angry now. I could tell by the strong metallic smell coming off him, and the way he moved. He felt cornered. Nobody liked feeling cornered. No dog did, either. But Heinz was a bad man. Guilty.

  “Rowf!” I lunged, knocking him off balance.

  Muffet barked like a mad dog.

  The Kid leaped to the ground and swiped at his ankle. “Reeeoooww!” Claws out.

  That was all it took to bring the bad guy down. Down on his own fishy floor. I stood over his soft stomach. Bananas stood on his chest, and Muffet stood guard next to his head. We had him pinned. We held him there while Cassie pulled out her phone.

  Then I heard them: voices. Right outside. And a familiar bark. Hero!

  “In here!” Cassie called. Muffet yipped. The Kid and I held our ground — we had our man.

  A minute later Officer Riley and Hero burst through the door and rushed down the stairs, followed by Summer. Summer? Yes, Summer. And she looked like she was back to her old self. Her eyes were narrow and angry.

  “I told you somebody stole my dog!” she screeched, pointing at Cassie.

  Aw, woof. This again?

  “Are you holding Muffie hostage over that dumb book?” she huffed at Cassie. Her nose twitched and she eyed the floor with a shudder. “Eewwwww! What is this place? Some sort of torture chamber?”

  Cassie stared at Summer like she had a second head, but didn’t say a word. Officer Riley ignored her, too. Not even Hero paid any attention to Summer’s whining. One look at me and The Kid, and Hero moved to flank us. Made extra sure Heinz stayed where he belonged. The whelp was learning.

  “Officer Riley, I think you might want to take Mr. Heinz in for questioning,” Cassie said. “He just confessed to killing Madame LeFarge.”

  Summer’s mad eyes turned into surprised eyes.

  “And thanks to Muffet’s infiltration, I believe we can also prove that Mr. Heinz was running a fraudulent and dangerous business, swindling and poisoning two- and four-legged creatures with his illegal Pepper-Uppers.” Cassie gave Muffet a pat on the head, still pretending Summer wasn’t there. Riley busted out his handcuffs.

  “My Muffie cracked the case?” Summer exclaimed. “My Muffie cracked the case!” Yeah. Summer was a little slow on the uptake. Not to mention off. Way off. Muffet helped for sure. But she was part of a case-cracking team.

  “This is so exciting. Do you think we’ll be in the paper?” Summer babbled.

  Cassie looked at me and closed one eye really fast. It was that thing people do when they have a little secret, a little joke.

  “It’s no big deal,” she said slyly. “Just a silly little hobby.”

  Ha, woof! This time, I totally got it.

  I pulled open the door to Pet Rescue, smiling at the sight of Bananas on Dodge’s back. He’d practically galloped all the way from our house to make the ride special — it would be her last one for a good long while.

  “Hey, team,” Gwen greeted from behind the counter. Her smile was bright and her lap empty.

  “Hi, Gwen! Where’s Parsley?” I asked, hoping her lap cat was all right. We’d solved the case but some of Madame’s cats had barely recovered.

  “Right here,” replied a voice. It was Erica Bloom, pushing through the door from the cat wing with Parsley, Cinnamon, and Trouble in her arms.

  Gwen lifted a giant travel crate onto the counter. Erica carried the cats over, and together they jostled them inside.

  “Reow!” Trouble complained.

  “You’re okay. We’ll be home in a few minutes,” Erica crooned to him. “And we’ll have a yummy seafood dinner.”

  “Without shark liver oil, I hope,” Gwen said, looking alarmed. “We just got all the cats healthy, and we want them to stay that way.”

  I nodded my agreement. “Too much vitamin A can cause a number of dangerous health issues in animals and humans.”

  Erica’s dark eyes were solemn. “No shark, its liver, or its oil will cross their lips,” she vowed, looking each of us in the eye. “And, oh! I wanted to ask you about garden fertilizer….”

  I looked at my feet while Erica questioned Gwen about the safety of garden fertilizer. I felt bad for ever suspecting that Erica had poisoned the cats. She’d actually been throwing out the fertilizer because she was afraid it might harm them. It was weird how much she complained about Madame LeFarge’s cats, when deep down she actually cared about them — a lot.

  “I just need you to initial and sign here,” Gwen said, pointing to the adoption papers. “Then the cats are officially yours.”

  Erica signed with a flourish. “My little darlings!” she crowed, sounding a little like Madame herself. Gwen handed over her copy of the papers and Erica folded them and put them into her purse. “I’ll see what I can do about Henry,” she said. “I really think he could use a little company.”

  I blinked in surprise. “Henry? As in Henry Kales?”

  Erica nodded. “Of course,” she replied as she picked up her giant crate. “The poor man is terribly lonely. He could use a cat. And a little help with his social skills.”

  I shook my head as I watched Erica go. Who would’ve guessed? First she adopted three of the cats she’d complained about, and now she was going to convince Henry to adopt one as well? It didn’t seem likely, but … I tapped my finger on my
chin. You never knew. Dodge wasn’t a cat lover (or even liker) until he met Bananas. Erica wasn’t a cat lady until she had to live without them. So Henry … there might be hope for him, too.

  I was still musing when I spotted a vaguely familiar blonde head walking toward the glass doors. Oh, no. Summer? Here? Now? I’d had enough of that girl to last for years. But it wasn’t Summer — this blonde was older and taller.

  The woman pulled open the door and walked gracefully up to the counter. “I’m interested in adopting a cat,” she told Gwen. “My niece said you have several available right now.”

  I nodded, getting it. This was Summer’s aunt. Which meant that Summer had kept her word. Which meant that …

  I shook my head as Gwen dropped a couple of pizza crusts onto the floor for Dodge. I didn’t want to think about what that meant. I quickly signed my own paperwork — for Bananas — and the three of us were on our way.

  * * *

  At Home Away, Paul and Esther were waiting with Duke in the front room.

  “Hello, hello!” Duke said, getting up from his easy chair to give us hugs.

  “Sit down!” Esther scolded. “The nurses said you’re not one hundred percent yet.”

  Duke waved a hand. He still looked a little thin and pale, but his eyes were full of sparkle and he seemed much stronger than the last time I’d seen him.

  “Dodge and I brought you a present,” I told him, setting Bananas on his lap.

  “A present?” Duke repeated, blinking. “For me?”

  I nodded and winked at Paul and Esther. “Yes. Thanks to my friend Gwen’s adoption magic, you’ve got a permanent visitor.”

  “Permanent?” Duke repeated. He lifted Bananas up and held her face close to his. “And what do you have to say about this, little one?”

  “Meowf!” Bananas replied, starting to purr.

  A giant smile spread across Duke’s face, and he blinked even faster. “Well, it’s settled, then.”