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“Just tell her I sent you. I’m sure it’s just a storm in a teacup. You know what Ida is like. A lot of fuss about nothing. Thanks, honey. I owe you one.” And before Odelia could say more, he’d already hung up. And when she rang him back a couple of seconds later, her call went straight tovoicemail. “Listen, Uncle Alec, there’s something you should know,” she spoke into the machine. “You and Charlene are going to be in tomorrow’s—” And she would have said more, but the beep of her uncle’s answering service cut her off. So instead she typed out a message and hit send,biting her lip and wondering what could be so important her uncle didn’t have time to look into a simple burglary.

Chapter 11

We’d only just emerged from the relative safety of the bedroom and trepidatiously set paw into the living room—practicing extreme caution lest that terrible vacuum cleaner was waiting for us around the corner to jump us and tear us into little dust-sized pieces—when both the front door slammed open and so did the kitchen door. Odelia came homing in on us from the front, while Gran performed the same maneuver from the back. We were cornered, and awaited further developments with bated breath.

Odelia was the first to speak.“Are you guys up for a new adventure? I’m heading out to talk to Ida Baumgartner, who’s been the victim of a burglary.”

“They can’t come with you, Odelia,” said Gran. “I need them to come with me. I’ve set up an interview with Mort and Megan Hodge, whose house has just been burgled.”

For a moment, both amateur detectives faced off, the four of us stuck in the middle, our fate being sealed without our say-so. Now I know how the lesser countries in the UN must feel, when the Permanent Members decide the fate of the world over their heads.

“Fine,” finally said Odelia. “Why don’t I take Max and Dooley, and you take Harriet and Brutus? That way we both get what we want.”

“Fine,” said Gran, in the same measured tones as her granddaughter. “Harriet. Brutus. You’re with me. On the double!”

Harriet and Brutus trotted off in the direction of the kitchen door, and soon it slammed shut and the threesome was gone.

“Thanks for picking us,” I told my human. “It’s not that I don’t like Gran, but she looked a little… worked up.”

“She’s got a lot on her plate right now,” said Odelia, crouching down to give me a scratch behind the ears. “What with this neighborhood watch thing she started. People are relying on her, and it’s making her a little antsy.”

“Berserk is the word I’d go for,” I intimated, earning myself a smile from my human, and a cuddle. Dooley emitted a plaintive meow, and Odelia laughed and included him in the cuddle.

Group cuddle over, we set out for Odelia’s car, an aged pickup that nevertheless refuses to break down, and soon we were hurtling away from the curb, leaving the house on Harrington Street behind. And as we rounded the corner, and our home disappeared from view, I wondered briefly if it was safe to head out like this. “Don’t you think you should install an alarm?” I asked. “I mean, with this plague of burglaries maybe you should take some extra precautions, and so should Marge and Tex.”

“There’s nothing worth stealing, Max,” said Odelia, hunched over the wheel and steering the car through mild mid-morning traffic. “Apart from the television, which is old, and the stereo, which is even older, I don’t see why burglars would even bother.”

“They might take Chase’s fitness equipment,” Dooley said.

Odelia laughed.“I’d like to see them try. They’ll be in the hospital with a hernia before they manage to get it down the stairs. That stuff weighs a ton—literally.”

“Why does Chase spend so much time pulling all of those weights, Odelia?” asked Dooley, deciding now was the time to voice a question he’d been asking himself for ages. “And why does he make all those weird noises when he does?”

Odelia grinned.“I’ll be sure to ask him, Dooley. I’m not really sure myself.”

“It just seems as if he likes to torture himself,” Dooley continued, not afraid to offer the theory he himself had conjured up. “There was a documentary on the Discovery Channel the other night, about people who call themselves mosaicists.”

“Masochists,” I corrected him.

“These people like to suffer,” Dooley said. “In fact the more pain they suffer the more they like it. Do you think Chase is a masochist?”

This time Odelia laughed so hard the car swerved across the white line in the center of the road, earning herself loud honks from a panel van heading in our direction in the other lane.“Chase a masochist,” she said, wiping a tear from her eye. “You know what, Dooley? I think you might be onto something there.”

“See, Max?” said Dooley. “And you told me my theory couldn’t possibly be right.”