by Nic Saint
Purrfect Trap
The Mysteries of Max 15
Nic Saint
Puss in Print Publications
Contents
Purrfect Trap
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
About Nic
Also by Nic Saint
Purrfect Trap
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Life had been going swimmingly, as life usually does in Hampton Cove, when suddenly disaster struck. Odelia had scheduled a surprise visit to Vena Aleman. Vena is our local vet, and a master at inflicting pain and suffering. And as it happens she was about to have a field day, for I’d been troubled by a toothache, and this fact had not escaped Vena.
So when those awful abductions happened I should have seen them coming, but I was still under the influence of my pain meds. Is it any wonder, then, that Dooley and I were captured by those awful catnappers? I blame Vena, to be honest, though of course that fiendish woman would deny all responsibility, and blame everything on the bad guys.
Add to that Grandma Muffin stomping at the bit to pick a fight with Tex, Odelia chasing the story of a lifetime when the local sausage store ran out of sausages, and you can see why I felt compelled to share these harrowing events with you, dear reader. Will there be a happy end, you ask? Well, that would be telling, wouldn’t it, and I’m not a spoilsport.
Prologue
Heavy rain lashed the windows of the homes that lined the road. A storm had blown in overnight and the wind had picked up speed. Lightning slashed the sky and the night was black as ink. Elon Pope, as he pushed down on the pedals of his bicycle, cursed his decision to take his bike and not the Lambo. He could have been home by now, warm and dry, heating himself by the family fireplace. But no, he had to play the hero again.
When his sister Marcie had accused him of being a climate denier and a grade-A polluter, he’d pointed out to her that he wasn’t merely the proud owner of a Maserati and a Lamborghini but also of a good old-fashioned bike, so when she’d challenged him to hit the pubs on his bike and leave his supercars at home, he’d foolishly taken her on.
And now here he was, riding along this deserted stretch of road in the middle of the night, while Hampton Covians were all safely tucked into their beds, pedaling away like a madman. His nice Moreschi shoes were ruined, his black Armani jeans spattered and caked with mud and muck, and his favorite Ralph Lauren polo shirt completely soaked.
His hair was plastered to his skull and he had trouble seeing which way he was going from the rain lashing his face and running into his eyes. Oh, damn you, Marcie.
Soon he’d left Hampton Cove behind, and was traveling along one of the smaller roads out of town. No posh residences here, though—only a bunch of old houses and rundown farms. One of those old houses was his family home, and the knowledge that he was close made him push down on those pedals with renewed fervor. One more mile.
And he’d just reached a fork in the road, and taken a left turn, when suddenly lightning flashed once again, only this time hitting much closer. It actually struck a willow tree close by and the sparks made Elon utter an inadvertent yelp of fear.
Yikes. This horrible storm was not only inconvenient but also seriously dangerous! Hadn’t he once read about a man being struck by lightning in just such a storm? And what had the advice been? To hide under a tree? Or not to hide under a tree? He couldn’t remember. One thing he shouldn’t do was stand still in the middle of the street. Or ride an iron bicycle on the open road… He looked around for a moment, wondering whether to go on or to take cover for a moment. Maybe let the worst of the storm blow over.
He wiped the rain from his eyes and glanced over to the old Buschmann house, just beyond the bend. Rumor had it that the place was haunted by the ghost of old Royce Buschmann. Nonsense, of course. Old man Buschmann had simply died and the house had fallen into disrepair, its owner having had no children or siblings to inherit the place.
Lightning struck once more, eerily illuminating the old structure. He shivered, and not just from being soaked through and through. It was almost as if the house had a soul. As if an evil entity possessed it. Even as a child he’d never been able to pass the house without a shiver, and to this day he preferred to take the other road into town, and avoid this part of the neighborhood.
He didn’t look away, though. For some reason he couldn’t, his gaze inexorably drawn to that hideous facade, those dormer windows like eyes, that gaping mouth for a door.
He suddenly realized that he’d stopped, and instead of bicycling away from the house as fast as his chilled legs could carry him, he was actually getting off his bike and approaching the house, as if some dark and mysterious force compelled him.
Thunder made the earth quake, and he snapped out of his strange reverie.
He’d simply had one too many to drink, and wasn’t thinking straight right now.
And that’s when he saw it: a pale face was staring right back at him from inside the house! A horrible face with eyes black as coal. It was old man Buschmann himself!
But before he could drag his eyes away from the hideous sight, something exploded across his skull. A sudden pain bloomed at the back of his head. And he knew no more.
Chapter 1
“Well, you can’t have it.”
“Yes, I can!”
“Over my dead body!”
“That can be arranged!”
I sat watching the spectacle like a spectator at the US Open.
“Who are you rooting for, Max?” asked Dooley, who was sitting next to me and enjoying the same show.
“I’m not sure,” I confessed. “Normally I’d root for Tex, as he often seems to be the voice of reason in this crazy family, but I feel that Gran has a point, too.”
“I agree,” said Dooley, which wasn’t a big surprise. After all, Grandma Muffin is his human, and if only out of a sense of self-preservation cats often take the side of the humans that feed them. Hypocritical, I know, but there you go.
“I need one of those new-fangled smartphones and if you won’t buy me one I’m moving out!”
“Fine!” said Tex. “Move out if you want. See if I care!”
The two opponents stood at daggers drawn, both with their arms crossed in front of their chests, and their noses practically touching.
“I need that phone!” Gran tried again, clearly not as keen on moving out as her threat had promised.
“No, you don’t. You have a perfectly functioning smartphone and that’ll have to do!”
We were in Marge and Tex’s kitchen, where all good fights between Tex and his mother-in-law usually take place.
“My phone is old—I need a new one.”
“It’s not old—it’s practically brand-new!”
“It’s five years old! It’s an antique!”
“My phone is five years old, and you don’t hear me complaining.”
“Sticks and stones, ma. Sticks and stones.”
“You probably got my phone at a frickin’ yard sale!”
In actual fact Tex had bought Gran’s phone on eBay, but he wasn’t going to let an insignificant little detail like that derail a perfectly good fight.
“It’s as good as new, and it’ll have to do.”
“It’s an iPhone five! They’re already up to ten or eleven!”
“So? If every time Apple comes out with a new iPhone I have to buy you one, I’d be broke!”
He had a point, and Dooley murmured his agreement, as did I. At the rate these smartphone manufacturers kept putting out new models you could spend a fortune, especially as they kept getting more and more expensive. The latest ones cost well over a thousand bucks. A thousand dollars for a silly little gadget! Nuts. It just goes to show that there’s no limit to the avarice of your latter-day capitalist when he hits on a guileless public willing to part with its hard-earned cash. Or, in this case, Tex’s hard-earned cash.
“Ma, you don’t need a new phone,” said Marge, also entering the argument, albeit reluctantly, as nothing good ever came from getting into a fight with her mother.
Grandma Muffin may look like a sweet old granny, with her little white curls and her angelic pink face, but underneath all that loveliness lurks a tough old baby.
“It folds!” Gran now yelled.
Both Tex and Marge stared at her. “It does what now?” asked Tex.
“The new phones! They fold right down the middle. And I want one.”
Tex rolled his eyes, and so did Marge. A collective eye roll. Not good.
“You don’t need a foldable smartphone, ma,” said Marge.
“Yeah, those things are fragile,” said Tex. “Plus they cost a fortune.”
“I need the bigger screen, so I can watch my shows on my phone.”
Gran is an avid consumer of soap operas. I think she watches all of them, if she has the chance. And the ones she can’t watch, on account of the fact that she works at Tex’s doctor’s office as a receptionist, she records on her DVR and watches later in the day.
“You can watch your shows on the TV like a normal person,” said Tex.
“I want to watch them live at the office. It’s different when you watch them live.”
“Someone should tell Gran that none of those shows are live,” I said.
Instead, Marge wagged her finger at her mother. “You shouldn’t watch shows when you’re working, ma.”
“Well, I want to, and I will,” Gran said stubbornly. “There’s never much to do at the office in the afternoon. Besides, Tex’s patients bore me, with all their yapping about their irritable bowel syndrome and their hemorrhoids. Who cares about some old idiot’s bowels! I don’t need that crap in my life. I want my shows and I want to watch them live.”
“She’s right,” said Dooley. “She always misses her favorite shows these days.”
“All working people miss their favorite shows,” I pointed out. “That’s what DVRs are for. Besides, she can watch them online. Most networks put shows online these days.”
Frankly the whole argument was starting to get a little tedious, not to mention repetitive, so I decided to leave them to it, and move into the living room, where a couch was waiting that had my name on it. Well, not literally, of course. But it is very comfy.
Dooley felt the same way, for he followed me out, the voices of three adults yelling at each other over a foldable smartphone following us into the living room. We hopped up onto the couch, turned around a couple of times to find ourselves the perfect spot, and finally lay down, neatly folding our tails around our faces, and promptly dozed off.
You’re probably wondering why I wasn’t over at Odelia’s, enjoying my perfectly good nap on my own perfectly good couch. Well, I will tell you why. Odelia and Chase are redecorating, and the house is a total mess right now. Not only that, but there’s a weirdly annoying smell of wallpaper glue and paint that pervades the entire house, and it fills me with such a sense of nausea I have trouble finding sleep. So for the time being Dooley and I have both decided to seek refuge at Tex and Marge’s. Fights are never pleasant, unless you love their entertainment value, like we do, but the stench of paint fumes is actually a lot worse, and even deleterious for one’s general health and well-being.
And I’d just dozed off and had started dreaming about the birds and bees—real birds and bees, mind you—when a loud booming voice practically had me tumbling down from my high perch. I was up and poised in a fight-or-flight position, ready for any contingency, when I saw that the booming voice didn’t actually belong to a human presence in the room, but to some loudmouth on the television, which Gran had just switched on and was watching intently, the volume cranked up to maximum capacity.
“Gran! Turn that down!” Tex bellowed from the kitchen.
But Gran decided to play deaf, and sat watching the TV with a mulish expression on her face. Obviously foldable smartphone negotiations hadn’t reached a breakthrough.
“Max?” said Dooley.
“Uh-huh?” I said, my heart rate slowly climbing down from its Himalayan heights.
“Isn’t that the guy?”
“What guy?” I said, wishing not for the first time that cats were able to put their fingers in their ears, the way humans can.
“The guy on the TV.”
I redirected my attention to the television for the first time. Apart from the noise, I hadn’t really paid any attention to the particular spectacle that was unfolding there.
The evening news was on, and newscaster Lauren Klepfisch, a lady we’d met in a recent adventure, was announcing that a person had gone missing, and asking the public to keep an eye out for him. I have to admit I didn’t recognize the youth in question. He was liberally pimpled and had a big zit on the tip of his nose. Not the picture of beauty.
“I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure…” I began.
“The lottery guy,” said Dooley. “The kid who won the lottery.”
I stared at the picture of the youth some more. According to the report his name was Elon Pope, and apart from the pimples he was also red-bearded and a little portly. In fact he looked like a younger, chunkier Ed Sheeran. He was grimacing awkwardly into the camera, a hunted expression in his eyes. It was one of those pictures paparazzi like to snap of unsuspecting celebrities. Paparazzi just love to make celebrities look like fools, and they must have had a field day with Elon Pope. His entire expression screamed deer in the headlights, and I wondered if they’d caught him exiting some local den of inequity or other house of disrepute. And then I recognized him. “Hey, isn’t that…”
“One of the youngest kids ever to win the lottery,” said Gran, who was following the story with rapt attention, her anger at being denied Tim Cook’s latest toy a distant memory.
“That’s right,” I said. “How much did he win again?”
“Three hundred million and change,” said Gran with a wistful look on her face. “You can buy a lot of foldable smartphones with three hundred million and change,” she added, indicating Tim Cook’s toy shop was still very much at the forefront of her mind.
According to the report Elon had vanished without a trace. He’d last been seen exiting the Café Baron, the hipster bar on Downey Street, but never made it home.
“Maybe he decided to disappear,” Dooley suggested.
“Could be,” Gran agreed.
Dooley might be on to something. The kid hadn’t expected to win the big pot and had been struggling in the aftermath of his big win. At twenty-one, he’d immediately walked out of his job at the 7-Eleven where he’d made a career as a shelf stacker, and never looked back. But then stories had started to surface about the fancy house he bought, and the fleet of fancy cars he acquired, and the models he’d been dating, and the wild and crazy parties he’d been throwing, where a bunch of strangers he’d never met before but who’d s
uddenly become his best friends forever had enjoyed his lavish hospitality.
“He probably decided enough was enough,” said Gran. “Or else he ran out of money already, and decided to move to Mexico and start a new life as a shelf stacker over there.”
She then resolutely switched the channel to Jeopardy, and for the next half hour intently followed the exciting exploits of Alex Trebek as he guided us through another series of tough questions to guess. To Gran’s credit, she guessed every last one of them.
But Dooley and I had had enough. Gran’s habit of turning the volume up to the max was impeding with our natural predilection for peace and quiet, so we decided to leg it.
We hopped down from the couch and moved upstairs to Gran’s room, which was devoid of both noise and humans, curled up at the foot of her bed and were soon fast asleep once more.
Ah, blisssss…
It wasn’t long, though, before the world decided to intrude upon our slumber. This time not in the form of Lauren Klepfisch or Alex Trebek, but our fellow cats Harriet and Brutus.
“What are you guys doing in here?” asked Harriet, who looked annoyed by our presence, even though technically she was the one who was intruding.
“We’re trying to get some quality Z’s,” I said pointedly. “What are you doing here?”
“Haven’t you heard?” said Brutus. “Odelia has decided to take us all to Vena’s again, so we figured we’d hide in the last place she would look.”