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“Is there anyone else in the water?” asked Streaker. “A man? A girl? A boy? I can get them for you! I can do it—I swear! I can do it!”

“You saved me?” Mrs. Flake asked, glancing around at the nativity scene.

“Yup, we sure did,” said a goat, who’d only now joined the gang.

Two rabbits came hopping up.“What’s going on? Did we miss the party?”

“If you like I’ll jump in and save you all over again!” Streaker cried excitedly.

“It’s all right, Streaker,” said Francis. “You did good.”

“I know I did—and I can do it again in a flash!”

Mrs. Flake now stared at the four of us, seated in a neat row: Dooley, yours truly, Harriet and Brutus.

“You saved me?” she asked again. “After everything I did to you?”

“Oh, well,” I said. “We don’t like to hold a grudge.”

“Yeah, we’re all human, after all,” said Dooley.

“Forgive and forget and all that,” added Brutus.

And then, to my surprise, Leo’s mother actually burst into tears!

“She’s probably just realized she lost her wheelchair,” said Dooley.

“A wheelchair?” asked Streaker. “Where is it? Where! Tell me!”

“Still in the pond,” I said. “Must have sunk to the bottom by now.”

“Hop in, Streak. Fetch,” said Francis with an indulgent smile.

“I’m on it!” Streaker cried, and jumped into the pond. Moments later she came out with the wheelchair clasped between her teeth. “Here you go, ma’am!” she said as she deposited the contraption next to the old lady.

The wheelchair was covered in muck and looked a little worse for wear.

“Some love from the high-pressure hose and it’s as good as new,” said Francis, who’d noticed the same.

“Oh, I’m such a horrible person,” said Mrs. Flake, shaking her head mournfully. “I killed my own son!”

“You did?” I said, surprised at this impromptu confession.

“He was doing such a lousy job with the company and I had a feeling he was dragging us all down and if I didn’t get rid of him I’d go down with the ship. I own thirty percent of the company, and my shares were going to be worthless if Leo kept this up—or at least that’s what my advisors told me.”

“Killing your own son, huh? That wasn’t very nice of you,” grunted Francis.

“Can she understand what we’re saying?” asked Harriet.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “But I guess she feels like confessing.”

“She almost died,” said Francis. “It’s a pivotal moment for her.”

“I didn’t kill him myself, of course,” Leonora said now. “I told my nurse to do it for me. I could never have held the knife that took my son’s life. Besides, I was persona non grata at the chateau. But Helga wasn’t. She simply swapped shifts with one of Leo’s nurses and gave Gabe a sedative. She then planted the knife in his hands and made sure he was at the scene just as the maid walked in. The whole thing was arranged like clockwork. Helga is German, you see,” she said, as if this explained everything. “She’s been with me for so long she’s like a daughter to me. She’d do everything for me. So when I told her I needed to get rid of my boy, she immediately understood and arranged the whole thing with impeccable precision and efficiency.”

“So she was the one who plunged the knife into your son’s chest?” I asked.

“It was a little hard to juggle all the different elements, of course,” Mrs. Flake went on. “But I knew for a fact that my son is a stickler for punctuality, and liked his maid to wake him up every morning at seven o’clock on the dot. So all Helga had to do was make sure that Gabe was standing there, knife in hand, at seven o’clock sharp, and the deal was done. It wasn’t hard. The hard part, she later told me, was to drive that knife into his heart. She hit bone, you see, and since she only had a very short window of time, she got a little nervous at some point. Especially since my son woke up at that moment and started to scream. She managed in the end, though. It all worked out fine.”

“Define fine,” mumbled Brutus.

“We should probably call the police,” said Dooley.

“Take out your phone, Dooley,” said Harriet. “I forgot mine at the house.”

Dooley actually reached around, before realizing Harriet was playing a little joke on him.“Oh, ha ha,” he said. “You don’t have a phone, do you?”

“No, I don’t. And neither do you.”

“Oh, no,” said Leonora, burying her face in her hands. “What have I done?”

All the animals were quiet as they listened to the woman unburdening her soul. It wasn’t a pleasant tale to hear, and I’m sorry to say I didn’t feel a lot of compassion for Mrs. Flake. The only thing I was sorry about was that we didn’t have anyone to witness her confession, for as you may or may not know, the word of a cat, or a cow, a pig, a horse, a donkey or even a sheep, goat or rabbit, for that matter, doesn’t carry a lot of weight in a court of law.

And for a moment I feared that this whole exercise was in vain, when suddenly two people popped up from a nearby bush, one of them holding a camera, the other a microphone, and abruptly descended on the scene.