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Harriet and Brutus had gone off to circle the block and talk to any animal they met—except for dogs—Harriet was sticking to her decision not to let any mutt so much as breathe on her flawless white fur—and Dooley and I watched them stalk off. Yes, detective work is a lot like being a Mormon missionary: it’s all about you and your buddy, knocking on doors and spreading theword.

“Max?” said Dooley, even before we’d put one paw in front of the other.

“Uh-huh?” I said, searching around for our first potential eyewitness.

“Can I talk to you?”

“You are talking to me, Dooley.”

“I watched the Discovery Channel last night.”

Progress. It would appear that the Hallmark Channel was losing its dominant position in the Poole household.

“And? What did you learn?” I asked.

He suddenly shivered.“Nothing good,” he intimated.

This didn’t surprise me. Oftentimes people—or as in the case of Dooley pets—respond to being weaned off the Hallmark Channel by experiencing dizzy spells and bouts of insomnia. “It’ll pass,” I assured him as I looked up at the streetlamp we were standing under, and wondered how long it would be before the first dog trotted over to use it as a urinal.

“There was this documentary on about the end of the world as we know it,” Dooley continued. His eyes had widened to their full dilation. “Max—it won’t be long now before the entire country is either swallowed up by a gigantic tsunami of ocean waves, or the earth simply opens up underneathus, or Yellowstone finally erupts and kills us all!”

Oh, boy. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to advise Dooley to stop watching the Hallmark Channel after all. “Look, Dooley—I’m sure you misunderstood. Nothing is going to drown us or crush us or—”

“Cover us in boiling lava!”

“—or that. Are you sure you were watching the Discovery Channel and not some fringe crackpot conspiracy show?”

“I don’t think so. Gran was watching so I decided to join her. And let me tell you—I was terrified!”

“What did Gran say?”

“She fell asleep five minutes in.”

Good self-preservation strategy.“I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. It’s called alarmism and it’s never done anyone any good. Just forget you ever saw that show.”

“It wasn’t a show—it was real! They showed diagrams.”

“Never trust a diagram.”

“They had real scientists! They had PhDs!”

“Sure, sure,” I said, wondering how to steer the conversation away from natural disasters and the end of the world and back to our all-important murder investigation.

“It was very scary. I think we should talk to Odelia. We need to move countries.”

“And go where?”

He looked at me earnestly.“New Zealand. Mark Zuckerberg bought a house there.”

“Oh, well, if Mark Zuckerberg bought a house, we should probably all go there.”

He heaved a sigh of relief.“I knew you’d agree. Now we need to convince Odelia.”

Just like a child, Dooley is impervious to irony. Luckily, also like a child, Dooley’s attention span is extremely limited. So I simply decided to change the subject.

“I say we enter the library first,” I announced.

“To talk to Odelia about the volcano?”

“To check the crime scene.”

“Crime scene?”

“The dead body. Haven’t you noticed that almost every Hallmark Movies& Mysteries Channel detective stumbles over a dead body in the opening scene and takes it from there?”

Dooley was staring at me.“I don’t like dead bodies, Max.”

“I don’t like dead bodies either, Dooley. But like it or not, we’re detectives now, and detectives look at dead bodies.” I spread my paws. “It’s the only way to solve the mystery.”

He looked pensive for a moment, and I could almost see the wheels and gears in his head turning and grinding away. Finally, he said,“Fine. Let’s look at the dead body.”

“I mean, how can we solve a crime if we don’t know what the crime is all about?”

So we crossed the road and tripped up to the library. A large cop was blocking the door, so we decided to go around back, where hopefully there would be another way in.

To be perfectly honest I wasn’t looking forward to visiting this so-called crime scene either, but if watching my fair share of Hallmark Movies& Mysteries had taught me one thing, it was that most detectives weren’t born sleuths but had sleuthing thrust upon them.

All I ever wanted was to be a regular, happy-go-lucky cat, but through some strange twist of fate I’d had my human Odelia thrust upon me, and she had thrust detecting upon me and now here I was thrusting the same thing upon Dooley. Trying to figure out why one human murdered another human. I guess sometimes life is just weird that way.

Chapter 6

“So what happened?”

Odelia’s mom shook her head. “One minute he was fine, and the next he was… dead.” She looked up, and Odelia didn’t like the look of anguish on her mother’s face. “Do you think he could have done this to himself? That I was talking to a man in great psychological pain, suffering through great stress, and that I didn’t pick up the signs?”

“The coroner seems to think it was murder,” said Odelia carefully.