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“It’ll happen some other day,” Brutus said. “You can’t cheat death, Harriet. It’ll find a way to make that prediction come true. So it’s better not to know, so you don’t worry.”

“I still say we pay a visit to this Madame Solange,” said Harriet stubbornly.

“So I’ve made the bed in the guest room for you guys,” said Charlene. “I hope that suits you. I’m sorry, but I have no idea how to take care of four cats,” she added, and then abruptly disappeared again.

“She seems a little frazzled,” said Harriet.

“Completely out of it,” said Brutus, shaking his head.

“That’s only to be expected after what she went through,” I said. “I think she should probably go and see a shrink.”

“What does a shrink do, Max?” asked Dooley.

“They shrink people’s heads,” said Brutus with a grin. “So their heads don’t bother them so much anymore.”

Dooley stared at him.“Shrink their heads! But how?”

“Well, shrinks have special machines that turn people’s heads the size of a peanut.”

“Oh, no!”

“Don’t listen to him, Dooley,” I said. “A shrink is a person who digs deep into a person’s psyche and tries to help them come to terms with certain traumatic experiences, like their boyfriends being snatched right from under their noses.”

“Oh,” said Dooley, nodding, and gave Brutus a slightly offended look, which the latter totally ignored.

“That was great, you guys,” said Harriet. “But now I’m afraid Brutus and I have to get going. We need to tell Chase what we discovered, so he can find Uncle Alec.”

And so she and Brutus walked over to the front door, only to discover that it missed one very important addition: a pet flap.

So they moved over to the back door, which was a sliding glass door, just like the one Odelia has, but of course there was no pet flap there either. And when they both started whining, and then started scratching the glass to be let out, Charlene merely said,“Oh, how cute!” and went about her business without bothering to open the door.

She probably thought this was normal behavior for cats.

And so we were all locked in there with a slightly loopy Mayor—possibly for eternity!

Chapter 17

“So what do you hear?” asked Scarlett.

Vesta, who was frowning and listening intently, said,“Shush!” then listened some more. “I hear exactly nothing! Nothing!” she said finally, and took off her earphones. “Are you sure this stuff works?”

“The guy at the store said it works just fine. You plant the bugs, then you download the app, and you listen! How hard can it be?”

“Huh,” said Vesta, and picked up the brochure Scarlett had gotten when she bought the surveillance equipment. She leafed through it. “So… you put the batteries in, right?”

“Oh, sure. The guy at the store put in all the batteries.”

“So did you turn them on?” When Scarlett didn’t respond, Vesta glanced over to her friend. “You did turn on the bugs, right?”

“Um…” said Scarlett, studying a long fingernail.

“Oh, Scarlett!”

“I forgot, okay!”

“I turned on mine, and we know they work, because we got a clear signal from them before, which means we can only hear Charlene when she’s downstairs in the living room.” She gave her friend a hard look. “So no feed from the bedroom, the bathroom, or Charlene’s home office—that’s justgreat!”

“Look, I’m not a professional bug person, okay? If you wanted a professional bug person you should have asked your granddaughter to tag along.”

“Odelia probably doesn’t know the first thing about bugs either,” Vesta grunted.

“Who does?!”

“Okay, so this is not a problem. We simply go back in there tomorrow and turn on all of the bugsyou planted.” She hadn’t mentioned this to Scarlett, but unfortunately she herself had completely forgotten to turn on the bugs she planted on the cats, too! Aargh!

“And what are you going to tell Charlene? We forgot to turn on our listening devices so just give us a minute and we’ll go and do that now?”

“No, you just lure her into the backyard with some excuse while I check on the bugs. And at least now we know we need to double-check the bugs we plant at Town Hall.”

“Fine. So when do you want to do this?”

“We better do it now. I’m getting tired of sitting in this damn car.”

They’d returned from Town Hall to sit in front of Charlene’s house for a while, hoping to get the goods on the Mayor, but the bug fiasco had thrown a spanner in the works. First they’d heard the woman loud and clear, but probably she’d retired to bed, and since Scarlett hadn’t turned on the bugs upstairs—end of broadcast! The two elderly wannabe spies had already ordered pizza, delivered to the car by a pizza delivery kid who gave them funny looks, and they’d also ordered a big meal from a Chinese food delivery guy, who’d given them even funnier looks. Their sanitary needs had been taken care of by using a local park, where they’d ducked behind some bushes to do their business.

All in all this whole spy business was a lot less glamorous than it was on TV!