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“I know they’re just cats, but they’re freaking me out.”

“They’re just doing what Odelia told them to,” Chase added as he gestured to the door with a slight shake of the head.

I got his drift immediately, and both Dooley and myself sidled away to the door, keeping our eyes peeled just in case Uncle Alec went full-berserk and launched himself at us. He had that look, you know. That look people get who are about to go cuckoo.

“Look, they’re going already,” said Chase.

“Probably to go and tell Odelia all about what we discovered here.”

“Oh, I’m sure she knows all about it from Vesta and Scarlett.”

“More spies! I’m surrounded by spies!” Uncle Alec screamed, sounding like a Roman emperor now, surrounded by wannabe Senate assassins.

“You shouldn’t see them as spies so much as helpful contributors,” Chase tried. “We all want the same thing, Chief.”

“And what’s that? To drive me nuts?”

“To solve this case.”

“Well, your wife sure has a strange way to go about it, and so does my mom and her friend.” He dragged a hand through his modest mane. “I swear to God, Chase, if this keeps up I’m going to slam an injunction on them.”

“On who?”

“All of them! My mom, Scarlett, Odelia, and especially those darn cats!”

When we arrived back at the car, to report back to Odelia, we didn’t come bearing gifts, but more like stink bombs.

“Looks like Joshua is guilty after all, huh?” she said finally, when we’d painted a colorful word picture of Joshua Curtis’s inner sanctum—his shrine to Melanie Myers.

“Yeah, looks like,” I agreed.

“Have you seen the stork?” asked Dooley, glancing up nervously.

“I told you already, Dooley,” I said. “Storks don’t work at night. They sleep.”

“Oh, right,” said Dooley, relaxing.

“Well, I guess that does it,” said Odelia. “Game over. Joshua Curtis was in love with Melanie to such an extent that he decided to kill the man she was having an affair with. Though I still don’t get why he hired me.”

“So he could stay out of the picture?” I suggested. “He wanted you to snap a couple of pictures of the man she was seeing, and ask you to go and talk to Melanie. That way Melanie would break off the affair, and Joshua wouldn’t have to get involved.”

“But then why did he decide to kill the guy? And just after I told him the affair was over. That Franklin had ended things.” She shook her head. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

Chapter 24

After the long day we’d had, filled with emotion and not a small degree of strife, I was glad that it was time for cat choir again, my favorite entertainment of an evening.

Odelia had dropped us off near the park, and when we arrived at the playground that serves as the backdrop for our nightly rehearsal sessions with the other cats of Hampton Cove, we saw that the showdown had already begun: Shanille was positioned on one side of the playground, near the jungle gym, where a handful of cats were listening to her speech about the importance of respect for one’s elders, while Harriet was located on top of the slide, a bunch of cats listening to her speech about the importance of respecting one’s peers, especially when they are right and you are wrong.

“They’re not going to fight again, are they?” asked Dooley, as we took position somewhere in the middle between the two separate camps.

“I think they might just fight with words today?” I said, though I wasn’t entirely sanguine, I must admit. Harriet and Shanille both have a volatile streak, and just might go paw to paw again. Which would turn cat choir into fight club, which wasn’t the idea.

Brutus came over to talk to us, and I could see from his puckered brow and the worried expression on his face that he wasn’t liking this any more than we did.

“I tried to stop her,” he announced sullenly, “but she wouldn’t hear of it. I told her, okay, so maybe Shanille was out of line, but then you should try to be the grownup here. After all, there’s nothing to gain by pushing this thing.”

“Unfortunately Harriet is not the kind of cat who will back down,” I said. “And neither is Shanille.”

“Is she going to put it to a vote?” asked Dooley, turning his head like a spectator at a tennis match, looking from Harriet to Shanille as they both seemed to go from strength to strength—oratorically speaking.

“Yeah, she wants to settle this thing once and for all,” Brutus confirmed.

“So… what are we supposed to vote about?” I asked.

“She’s going to try to push Shanille out of cat choir,” said Brutus in a grave tone.

“No way!”

“Yes, way. She wants to take control, so that something like this will never happen again.”

“Oh, dear.”

“But I don’t want to vote for one or the other, Max,” said Dooley. “I like Harriet, but I like Shanille, too.”

“Plus, I don’t think Harriet would make a good choir director,” I surmised. “Frankly I think if she goes through with this, cat choir just might split in two: Shanille will take her followers to a different part of the park, and then there will be two cat choirs.”

“I’m afraid that just might be the case,” said Brutus somberly.