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For the rest of the day, I was confined to the house. House arrest, Odelia called it. Bummer. Luckily, Dooley had opted to stay behind and share my punishment. Harriet and Brutus, not surprisingly, had not. They were out and about somewhere, continuing their investigation. Harriet, after having supplied Odelia with the identity of the vajayjay woman, had become cocky, and now truly believed she was the second coming of Sherlock Holmes or something, and no longer needed my or Dooley’s assistance in solving this particularly heinous crime.

Good for her. If she didn’t need me, I certainly didn’t need her. But if she thought she could catch Donna’s killer, she was dead wrong. What she hadn’t grasped was that Maureen Cranberry was innocent, which meant she’d led Odelia and Chase on a wild goose chase.

At least I’d had some prime meatloaf. Whatever Maureen Cranberry’s faults, she prepared one mean meatloaf. The meat had been tender, succulent and tasty. Just the way I like it.

I opened one eye when Dooley’s insufferable snuffling told me he was somewhere nearby. He looked up at me expectantly. The moment Odelia had delivered the verdict, I’d plunked myself down in my usual spot on the couch and hadn’t moved from it. I swear, this diet was slowly killing me, not only robbing me of my physical strength but also of my will to live.

“What do you want, Dooley?” I grumbled, closing my one eye again.

“Aren’t we going to continue our investigation?” he asked excitedly.

“What investigation? If you hadn’t noticed, we’re grounded. We’re not going anywhere anytime soon.”

“But we have the computer! We can find clues, just like Harriet found that clue about the woman with her burnt business.”

I groaned.“If you hadn’t noticed, Dooley, that was a rubbish clue. Nothing came of it.”

“That’s because it was Harriet finding that clue,” he said cleverly. “But we’re not Harriet, Max. We’re the real sleuths in this household. If we put our minds to it, I’m sure we’ll find out more than Harriet ever could.”

I opened my eyes. Had Dooley just delivered an intelligent statement? I believed he had. And it was so unlike Dooley to make sense that I actually sat up and took notice.“What did you just say?”

“That we’re better sleuths than Harriet and Brutus?”

I nodded.“You have a point, Dooley. Weare better sleuths. In fact we’re ace sleuths.”

Reluctantly, I abandoned my spot and jumped down from the couch. Dooley had already taken up position in front of the computer and I joined him. We both stared at the screen, which was black.

“So… how does this work, exactly?” I asked. I have to confess I’m not much of a computer cat. I love lying down on the keyboard when Odelia is working, and making sure she can’t see the screen, but that’s as far as my knowledge of computers goes, to be perfectly honest.

“Just do something, Max,” Dooley suggested. “If Harriet can do it, so can we.”

He was right, and his statement totally galvanized me. So did the fact that my tummy was full of that delicious meatloaf. Odelia might not like it when I eat my fill, but I certainly did. I took a stab at the keyboard and to my surprise the screen flickered to life.

“Hey! How did you do that?” asked Dooley.

“No idea. I just did this…” I stabbed at the keyboard again and some letters appeared on the screen.

“Oh, my God, Max. You can type!”

“Yes, I can!” I said enthusiastically, and stabbed at the keyboard some more. More letters appeared, forming one long word that didn’t make any sense. But it was something. We were going places! I decided to use the backspace key to remove all those funny symbols and start over. So I carefully typed in donna.vip and we landed on Donna’s website. There were a lot of funny things for sale there, so for the next half hour or so, Dooley and I had fun clicking through to the pages of all these items and reading the descriptions. There were those jade eggs Gran had ordered, and for the first time we understood they weren’t actual eggs but served an entirely different purpose. Something to do with pelvic muscles, whatever that was. And then there was Maureen Cranberry’s V-steamer, which appeared to be beneficial for personal hygiene and improved fertility.

“What’s fertility, Max?” asked Dooley.

“I think it’s a kind of plant.”

“Oh, right. Like a fern.”

“They must have misspelled ferntility.”

“Humans.”

“Yeah.”

There was a lot more stuff, and it was all weird and wonderful, sort of like the Discovery Channel. There was a prisoner’s ball and chain, a toothpaste squeezer, nipple clamps, very expensive paper wipes, a pouch with magically charged stones, gold dumbbells for weightlifting, a facial massager, a heated couch, and… the same kind of rocket that Odelia keeps in her bedside drawer but this one was made of gold. Itwas called a dildo and its purpose wasn’t immediately clear to me.

“What does it do, Max?” Dooley asked, staring at the shiny gold object.

“I’m not sure. It says here it’s a massager, but I’m not sure what it’s supposed to massage.”