“No, I have just always wanted to say that,” said the head councilbunny.
“You stop that right now,” said Mr. Bunny, shaking his fist. “You’re scaring Mrs. Bunny.”
The council yawned and ignored him.
“But the truly actionable thing you have done is that you have been seen in the company of a HUMAN! A girl human! And you have not even tried to disguise this fact. Not only that, you brought said human to a bunny eating establishment, which goes absolutely against the charter of bunny laws, section six, subcode twelve twenty-three.”
“Who says?” said Mr. Bunny.
“A certain bunny waiter.”
“I told you to leave a bigger tip,” whispered Mrs. Bunny.
“This, in combination with your marmot consorting, has put both of you in a most tenable postion,” said the head councilbunny. “Most tenable.”
“Perhaps you do not know the meaning of tenable?” suggested Mr. Bunny.
“Shhh,” said Mrs. Bunny, pinching Mr. Bunny. “Don’t make him mad.”
“I’ll tell you what we have to say,” said Mr. Bunny, stepping out of the dock and pacing like a lawyer in the courtroom. “I’ll tell you what we have to say. We say, HA!”
“Ha?” asked the head councilbunny.
“You heard me. Ha! Consorting with marmots, I will give you. Or rather, a marmot. But let me point out, we all consort with marmots when we need to decode messages! Therefore, we are well within our rights and there will be no pit of snakes for us! Ha!”
“True, true,” murmured all the councilbunnies.
“Also, we don’t have a pit of snakes,” whispered one of them.
“True, indeed,” Mr. Bunny went on, picking up the pace of his pacing. “No, you can have no objections to that. We don’t like marmots, but we use them. Am I correct?”
“Nevertheless,” said the head councilbunny, “we may use marmots, but we don’t take them to The Olde Spaghetti Factory. And as for humans, we never, ever befriend them. The waiter reported that the little girl was your friend.”
“The waiter was wrong. That little girl is not our friend,” said Mr. Bunny.
“Oh, really?” said the head councilbunny acidly. “She just happened to follow you into The Olde Spaghetti Factory, sit next to you and let you pay for her spaghetti?”
“She is not our friend because she is …” And here Mr. Bunny paused for dramatic effect. He paused so long that several councilbunnies went out for coffee. One had time to order a short decaf double shot no whip mocha iced frappuccino to go. Mr. Bunny paused so long that when the councilbunny’s coffee came, he had time to change his mind to a venti semi-skim soy no sugar caramel macchiato with no whip but double caramel and a reduced-fat skinny poppy seed and lemon muffin, hot, no butter. When the councilbunnies got back, Mr. Bunny was almost done pausing. They sipped their coffee and turned their attention back to him.
“OUR PET!” Mr. Bunny finished.
“Your pet? The little girl is a pet?” said the head councilbunny. “A likely story.”
“I think if you will read your bunny charter of rights you will find, section sixty-two, subsection nine thirty-four, that, and I quote, ‘Bunnies have the inalienable right to have for their pet any animal they choose so long as they build it suitable housing.’ ”
“AHA!” said the head councilbunny.
“And as you can see, I am wearing my overalls because I was working on the said pet hutch right up until council time! HA! HAHAHAHA, HAHA!” said Mr. Bunny triumphantly.
“Curses! The dreaded loophole!” the councilbunnies muttered to each other.
“And if any of you should care to follow us home, you will find this fantastic pet hutch!” said Mr. Bunny, wildly waving around his arms in an excited and exaggerated fashion.
“I don’t think,” said the headcouncilbunny, “that any of us care to, as you so unlawyerlikely put it, ‘follow you home.’ We will send an official building inspector to check on this story. I suggest there had better be a pet house for this human when the inspector arrives. That’s all I have to say. NEXT!”
“I haven’t made my closing arguments!” protested Mr. Bunny, still waving his arms around. He found it very aerating.
“NEXT!” said the head councilbunny again, and in were led a terrified pair of suit-wearing bunnies.
“Stand firm,” said Mr. Bunny, gripping the upper arm of one of the accused bunnies. “Don’t let them cheat you out of a closing argument! And when you pause for dramatic effect, that’s a good time to put in your coffee order.”
“And there is no pit of snakes!” whispered Mrs. Bunny.
Then, having done all they could, they hopped back to the car.
Mr. and Mrs. Bunny drove the first few miles home in exhausted silence. Finally, Mrs. Bunny said, “Brilliant, Mr. Bunny. I never thought of keeping Madeline on as our pet.”
“I can’t wait to tell her. We can keep her always,” said Mr. Bunny.
Mrs. Bunny frowned. “But what about her parents?”
“The ones who won’t come to her parent-teacher conferences? To heck with them,” said Mr. Bunny fiercely. “I’ll tell you another thing, I’m not going back to The Olde Spaghetti Factory. Now that I know they have tattling waiters.”
“You ought to tip more,” said Mrs. Bunny.
“The problem isn’t with the tipping,” said Mr. Bunny. “It’s the employers’ job to pay their waiters a decent wage. If they did this, then the waiters would not have to rely on tips. I do not like to feel obligated to pay the wages of a restaurant’s employees.…”
And on and on and on Mr. Bunny went with this well-worn argument. Mrs. Bunny had heard it a million times before and could not imagine what had possessed her to bring it up again. Mr. Bunny was still talking about it as they drove home. And as he parked and got out and as Mrs. Bunny collected the mail and put it in the house. She tried stuffing his mouth full of circulars, but she could still hear him talking. Then she tried socks. But he was still making sounds. She was considering duct tape, but she wasn’t fast enough.
“Let’s give Madeline the good news,” she said, giving up and going into Madeline’s hutch while Mr. Bunny spit socks out over the back lawn. His projectile range was excellent.
“Madeline!” they called out cheerily.
But Madeline was gone.
“Where could she be?” asked Mrs. Bunny.
“Maybe she got hungry and went to pick some lettuces,” said Mr. Bunny, so they hopped around the garden, but Madeline was nowhere to be found. Hmm, he thought, the lettuces were looking a little dry. Should he tell Mrs. Bunny a sad story?
“Oh, Mr. Bunny, we should have taken her with us. I felt so from the start,” said Mrs. Bunny, punching him on the arm.
“Ouch! Get ahold of yourself, Mrs. Bunny. If you felt so, you never said so.”
“Oh, Mr. Bunny,” wailed Mrs. Bunny. “You don’t suppose she was foolish enough to go to the cliff edge alone? We told her to wait for us.”
“I’m afraid that is what she did do,” said Mr. Bunny grimly. “Hurry!”
They leapt into the car and drove to the cliff edge. There they leapt out to look for clues. They found signs of markings that had been carefully smudged out.
“What was it, do you think?” asked Mrs. Bunny as Mr. Bunny sifted through the sawdust debris. “A message?”
“No,” said Mr. Bunny. “A line, and see, the remnant of another. Mrs. Bunny, I think it’s a trail! Let’s follow the debris.”
Mr. and Mrs. Bunny hopped along these remnants until they came to the oak tree. There seemed to have been one last smudge. Mrs. Bunny hopped excitedly in that direction until Mr. Bunny’s hand grabbed her and pulled her back. “Stop!” he cried, and pointed down one hop ahead of where Mrs. Bunny stood.
Mrs. Bunny turned pale. “The snake pit! There was one after all,” she whispered in awe, and promptly fainted.
“For heaven’s sake,” said Mr. Bunny, yanking Mrs. Bunny to her feet. “Wake up!”
“Oh, Mr. Bunny,” squealed Mrs. Bunny, having been roused by Mr. Bunny, who in his excitement might have bitten her just a little. “They’ve got Madeline! Let’s jump in after her! We can stomp those snakes with our floppy feet!”
Mr. Bunny put a restraining paw on Mrs. Bunny. “Wait, let’s not go off half-cocked, Mrs. Bunny, with more enthusiasm than brains. Let us certainly not start jumping into holes. We are not detectives for nothing. Let’s us sit here for a minute and think.”
The Bunnys sat. If there was ever a time for the brains under those fuzzy ears and fetching fedoras, it was now.
Mr. Bunny suddenly stood up.
“Mrs. Bunny,” he said, “I have an idea.”
Madeline was awoken by someone opening the bag she lay curled tightly inside.
“It’s morning. We are going to take you out of this bag and blindfold you and lead you to the bathroom,” said a whiny voice. “But if you resist or give us trouble, it’s back in the bag for you. Got it?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Madeline. She didn’t know why the tone of the speaker exasperated her so much. She felt she herself could be a scarier villain than this apparent guard fox, but nevertheless she thought it best to cooperate.
When she returned from the bathroom and the blindfold was removed, she found herself in pitch-darkness. Metal banged on metal, and she heard loud stomping feet. There was a pungent smell of garlic. From somewhere in the room she heard the sound of many mouths chewing.
Occasionally a voice would call out. Sometimes the voice was high. Sometimes it was low. Sometimes it had a Spanish accent. Sometimes a French accent. Always it said the same thing: “Now you are mine!” It was maddening and monotonous and Madeline wished she knew what it meant.
Then, just as Madeline thought she was going to go crazy if she heard “Now you are mine!” one more time, the voices switched to “Beware, the boss is coming!”
Now, this did worry Madeline. Maybe this whiny-voiced fox wasn’t much threat, but the boss might be a different story. It was time to make a move. She crept slowly away from the voices until she found a wall. Then, feeling her way along the wall, she tiptoed sideways, hoping to find a door. Inch by inch she moved, worrying that the foxes would notice what she was doing, but they seemed busy nattering in different accents. At last her hands came upon a doorknob. She sighed in relief. She turned it, but to no avail. She was locked in. She almost wept in frustration, when suddenly she remembered the tae kwon do that KatyD had taught her. She rehearsed the sideways kick in her mind. The boss fox, when he entered, would have a surprise waiting for him!
There Madeline stood, poised and ready as the moments ticked on. Finally, just as she was about to sit down again, the door swung open. She leapt sideways, kicked where she thought the boss’s collarbone should be and met air. She fell over and the door swung the rest of the way open. Any second she expected sharp teeth, but what the light revealed was the last thing she expected.
A CLUE!
There stood Mr. Bunny, holding The Marmot by the scruff of his neck in one paw and another marmot in the other paw. Both marmots were munching garlic bread and looking completely unfazed, even when Mr. Bunny heaved them across the room onto a pile of other marmots and flicked the lights on.
“MR. AND MRS. BUNNY!” cried Madeline when she could find her voice.
“Yes, for so we are called!” proclaimed Mr. Bunny, and then the three of them fell upon each other in furry joy.
When everyone had calmed down, Madeline stared at the pile of garlic-bread-munching marmots in the corner in a state of disbelief. “I’ve been in here with marmots all this time? But what about the accents? The scary voices?”
“Digital voice-changing box. Very deluxe item as seen on TV,” said The Marmot.
“Oh, I’ve seen commercials for that! Does it really work?” asked Mrs. Bunny, forgetting herself and hopping over to their corner to examine it.
“Sure it does, sure it does, it’s seen on TV! You just speak into the microphone here and it changes your voice,” said The Marmot through a mouthful of garlic bread.
“How clever!” said Mrs. Bunny. “How much was it?”
“Twelve ninety-nine. And if you order now you get the Instaburp absolutely free! Of course, it comes to a hundred dollars by the time you add the shipping and handling.”
“Yes, that’s how they always get you, the shipping and handling,” said Mrs. Bunny, nodding sagely and then remembering herself. “Still, it serves you right, you naughty naughty marmot! I wish they’d charged you DOUBLE!”
“Well, that’s a bit harsh,” said The Marmot, grabbing a piece of bread from another marmot, which started a free-for-all among them as they scrabbled for the last bits. There were crumbs everywhere.
“So you’re the enemy?” asked Madeline. She was still baffled. “But I thought foxes took Flo and Mildred!”
For a second the room froze and fur quivered. Marmots were no fonder of foxes than bunnies were. Then they shrugged it off. It was always out of sight, out of mind with marmots.
“Yes, I’m the enemy, like the note said,” said The Marmot. “And why wouldn’t I be your enemy? First Mr. Bunny gives me a vicious pinch, then you hypnotize me and probably make me do things like sing like Elvis. I’ll never know. I was hypnotized!”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” said Madeline.
“And then my neighbors tell me that you were following me from new hole to new hole, spying on me. Well, I guess I showed you! I guess I turned the tables on you! HA! You won’t be calling me stupid marmot anymore.”
“I think I can assure you, I will always call you stupid marmot,” said Mr. Bunny.
“But how did you find me?” asked Madeline to Mr. and Mrs. Bunny.
“AND,” The Marmot interrupted, “I got hundreds of friends to help me capture you and carry you here. That’s a marmot community for you. Won’t find that kind of community spirit with rabbits.”
“Hundreds?” said Mr. Bunny skeptically.
“Well, sixteen,” said The Marmot, starting in on another piece of garlic bread.
“Oh, shut up, you ridiculous Marmot,” said Mr. Bunny, who had had enough. “Mrs. Bunny and I got to the pit, and when we saw all the branches about, we realized that they had covered it and used it to trap you, Madeline. We were looking for foxes, of course, but what we found was an unusually high concentration of marmot fur. Marmots are always shedding.”
“Aren’t,” said The Marmot.
“We knew that if The Marmot was hiding you, it would have to be somewhere you could fit, which would rule out their holes.”
“We thought you might still be down in the deep snake-pitty hole,” said Mrs. Bunny. “I was all set to leap down and stomp those snakes with my floppy feet when Mr. Bunny had an idea!”
“Yes,” said Mr. Bunny. “I looked in the hole. It was quite deep but not so deep you could not see to the bottom. There was no Madeline to be seen. And no snakes either.” He paused a second and gave Mrs. Bunny a look.
“There very well might have been,” said Mrs. Bunny primly.
Mr. Bunny gave her another look as if to suggest that it was a great trial to be on constant idiot patrol and then went on. “Then I thought, where would The Marmot go? What is The Marmot’s favorite place on earth?”
“The Olde Spaghetti Factory,” said Madeline.
“Precisely. We circled the building. They happened to be delivering cans of sauce as we arrived. They were sending cartons down this big chute, and we figured that was how The Marmot got you in, so we slid down the chute and hopped about until we found the room where they store the garlic bread. There sat The Marmot and a couple of pals chewing their way through a carton of it. It was the work of a moment to persuade them to show us where they had hidden you.”
“Poor dear,” said Mrs. Bunny. “You must have been so frightened. Don’t you ever go off on your own like that again.”
“Well, anyhow, you’re safe now,” said Mr. Bunny, lead
ing Madeline toward the door. “They’ve all eaten so much garlic bread they couldn’t defend their fortress of carbohydrates even if they wanted to.”
“But where are Flo and Mildred?”
“Who’s that? Who’s that?” asked The Marmot.
Madeline’s heart sank. If the note to meet the enemy by the cliff edge had nothing to do with Flo and Mildred, she was no closer to finding them than she’d ever been, and yet more time had been wasted.
“I suggest we all go home. And YOU!” said Mr. Bunny, turning to The Marmot and shaking his fist. “What do you have to say about that?”
“I was only kidding anyway,” said The Marmot, who had finished his garlic bread and was now embroiled in a fight over which button to push next on the voice-disguising box and didn’t even notice when the Bunnys and Madeline left.
When they got back to the hutch, it was dark. Madeline had had very little sleep the night before, and despite the fact that she wanted to set right out again to find Flo and Mildred, Mrs. Bunny made her go to bed.
“Listen, dear,” said Mrs. Bunny gently, tucking her in, “tomorrow is another day. Get some sleep. As long as the foxes don’t know where your uncle lives, your parents should still be safe.”
Madeline wanted to stay awake, but her eyes kept drooping. She was fast asleep before Mrs. Bunny could turn off the light.
Mrs. Bunny tiptoed out. Mr. Bunny was waiting for her.
“It does not look good for Flo and Mildred,” he whispered.
“At least as long as Madeline is with us, she will be safe,” Mrs. Bunny whispered back.
“Tomorrow is her graduation,” said Mr. Bunny.
“I very much fear she will want to skip it in order to look for her parents,” said Mrs. Bunny.
“Dear, dear,” said Mr. Bunny. “Let’s go inside and give our brains a rest. There must be a clue we have somehow missed. In books there always is. I feel sure that if we turn our attention to soothing pursuits, this clue will suddenly leap out at us!”
“We still have the word rubber,” Mrs. Bunny reminded him.
Mr. and Mrs. Bunny—Detectives Extraordinaire! Page 11