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“Oh, boy,” my friend said. “I just hope that dam won’t burst before we have a chance to get as far away as we can.”

I had raised our concern with Odelia, but she had merely smiled indulgently and given me a pat on the head. Clearly she wasn’t taking our concerns seriously, or else she would never have agreed so enthusiastically when Chase had floated the idea at the outset of summer. I frankly had hoped Marge would have more sense, seeing as she was married to a doctor, and we all know that doctors are trained to deal with life anddeath type of situations. But even Tex hadn’t shown a single sign of worry, and neither had Marge. On the contrary. Tex had actually yipped with joy at the notion of the Poole family acquiring their own private pool.

“The Poole pool is now officially open for the season!” he’d exclaimed the moment the pool had been erected and filled up with water. The silly nut.

CHAPTER 2

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I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but a paddling pool, even if slightly too big for mere paddling, is a magnet for all kinds of vermin. And I’m not talking about your rodent type of vermin either, but the winged kind. It didn’t take long for the Poole pool to fill up with flies, mosquitoes, beetles and other more exotic-looking bugs. On the third day of the paddling pool extravaganza Gran even swallowed what she later claimed was the biggest beetle she’d ever seen—or ingested. She surfaced spluttering and choking, and Marge was already urging her husband to step in and perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, a prospect I could tell Tex looked forward to with as much excitement as the filling out of his tax return, but lucky for the good doctor his irascible mother-in-law managed to crawl out of the pool under her own steam, loudly complaining about the giant bug that now residedin her stomach, where it had found its final resting place, the poor thing.

“I told you to clean out your pool, Tex Poole!” she loudly lamented, directing her ire at Tex as if he was the one to blame for this unfortunate mishap.

“I did!” said Tex. “I scooped out all the bugs this morning with the skimmer!”

“Well, you didn’t scoop good enough, cause I just swallowed the Titanic of bugs. That sucker must have been at least two inches!”

“If you’d swallowed a two-inch bug you wouldn’t be talking to us right now,” said Marge, coming to her husband’s defense. “You’d be gargling and choking and throwing up whatever it was that you swallowed.”

“I still might,” said Gran as she placed a hand on her tummy, as if to try and figure out what this monster bug was up to down there.

Meanwhile, the four of us had found respite underneath the rose bushes at the bottom of the backyard, though respite is probably too optimistic a word for the oppressive heat that still permeated the atmosphere. It felt as if Hampton Cove had turned into a crockpot, and we were slowly being brought to a boil.

“I think it’s global warming,” Harriet now posited.

“Global warming?” asked Dooley. “What’s global warming?”

“Like the word says, it’s warm and it’s… global,” said Harriet, darting a helpless look at her mate. Harriet isn’t big on nature shows, or any type of documentary. She prefers to give her attention to her cherished reality shows, which only rarely cover topics as fascinating or worryingas global warming.

“Global warming is a hot topic right now,” Brutus agreed, though he clearly had no clue what his beloved was referring to either. “Though not as big, obviously,” he hastened to add, “as global cooling, which is even worse.”

I’d never heard of global cooling, though it certainly sounded like a daunting prospect. “I think global warming refers to the idea that temperatures are rising on a global scale,” I ventured, though I was a novice on the subject myself.

All around us, birds were singing their songs in a sort of haphazard or desultory fashion. Clearly even they were being affected by the heat. Which is why it surprised me when suddenly one of these winged creatures suddenly materialized on a branch near me, and addressed me thusly:“Yo, you Max?”

“Yep, that’s me,” I said, staring at the intrepid bird. He was a bird of vivid plumage, with streaks of red and green in all the right places, and was staring at me in a brazen fashion.

I must say its behavior surprised me somewhat, since it’s not often that birds are so keen to approach what are commonly considered their natural enemy. Then again, the four of us were in such a state of lethargy and general torpidity that we wouldn’t have moved a paw or claw in anger at a bird even if we’d wanted to.

As it was, even the mere effort of striking up a conversation with this sudden newcomer was taking more energy than I was frankly prepared to expend.

“I have a message for you, Max,” said the bird, deftly straightening a crooked feather with its beak.

“A message?” I said, making an effort to look both surprised and intrigued. “What message? From who?”

“Whom,” Dooley corrected me immediately.