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“You’re absolutely right, Brutus,” said Harriet, perking up. “Odelia won’t go to these extremes. She would never force us to eat this junk, and then throw it down the drain if we decide it is simply not fit for feline consumption.”

She was right. Odelia would never put us through the wringer like that. So we walked out of Marge’s kitchen, through the hole in the hedge that divides both backyards, and into the house through the pet flap and straight into the kitchen.

It hit us like a cold shower. The four bowls that greeted us were filled to the brim with… the same grayish-greenish sludge we’d already encountered over at Marge’s.

“Yuck,” said Harriet, wrinkling up her nose. “That’s it. My hunger strike is on. When they see my wasted, weakened body, they’ll be sorry. I mean, they could have given us some gourmet soft food, but instead they chose to feed us this tasteless, odorless guck.”

We all looked up when sounds of a cat eating with relish reached our antenna-like ears. It was Dooley, who’d hunkered down while Harriet was officially announcing her hunger strike, and was eating his fill from the bowl that carried his name.

“What?” he said when he caught our looks of horror and shock. “I’m hungry.”

“But Dooley!” cried Harriet. “We have to stick together. We have to show them that we mean it.”

He gave her a sheepish look.“It might not taste like much, or smell like much, or look like much, but it’s full of the necessary proteins and vitamins and essential minerals that a growing body needs, so I’m eating it.”

A snicker sounded from Brutus, and immediately Harriet turned to him with outrage written all over her features. The snicker was squelched, and Brutus rearranged his features into the appropriate expression of solicitude and quiet resolve to go without food for as long as he could manage, or as long as Harriet told him to.

I, for one, was with Dooley on this. And I had an excuse: I was an outpatient, still recovering from a surgical procedure, so I needed all the proteins, vitamins and essential minerals I could get. But I was also conscious of one salient fact: this was all my fault. If only I’d taken better care of my snappers, this would never have happened. And as the cat carrying sole responsibility, I couldn’t very well go against Harriet’s orders, so I abstained from tucking in, too, hard as it was when I saw Dooley eat with such relish.

“You, Dooley, are a traitor,” said Harriet. “You are a strikebreaker and a rat.”

“I’m just eating,” Dooley pointed out. “How can I be a traitor for eating?”

“Aaargh!” Harriet screamed in response, and stalked off and out of the house.

Brutus gave me an apologetic look.“It’s because she hasn’t eaten. She always gets cranky when she hasn’t taken nourishment.”

“You mean she’ll only get crankier the longer this hunger strike lasts?” asked Dooley.

“Afraid so,” said Brutus, not looking too happy at the prospect of a berserk Harriet.

Then, after exchanging a quick look of understanding, both Brutus and I moved over to our respective bowls, and dug in. Harriet might be willing to forego a square meal or two but I wasn’t, even if that made me a traitor, a strikebreaker and a rat.

“You know what we should do?” said Brutus in between two mouthfuls.

“No, what?” I said.

“We should go and visit one of those celebrity cats we met over the course of our investigations. I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to fix us up with some prime grub.”

“Yeah, what happened to Pussy?” I asked Dooley.

He gave me a mournful look.“Pussy moved to Paris with Gabriel.”

Pussy was the cat of famous fashion designer Leonidas Flake. After he died, Pussy was adopted by Leo’s boyfriend Gabriel, who loved her as much or even more than Leo.

“Paris?” I asked as I moved the weirdly textured food around my mouth.

“She told me to visit her any time I want, but how can I?”

He was right. Cats, as a rule, don’t simply hop on planes and fly off to Paris.

“I’m sorry, Dooley,” I said. “I know how much you liked her.”

“Yeah, she was a lot of fun to play with,” he said. He didn’t seem particularly lovesick.

“Fun to play with?” said Brutus. “So you played with her a lot, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. Board games, mostly. She loves Scrabble, and so do I. We played Monopoly once, and she was very good at that. Of course she would be, being one of the richest cats in the world.”

Brutus and I shared another look.“So you played… Monopoly?” I asked.

“Yeah, are you sure you didn’t play another kind of game?” asked Brutus with a grin.

“Um, oh, that’s right, we played some online games, too,” said Dooley after some thought. “We played Tetris, of course, and Minecraft, and Battleship. But she kept winning so we dropped it. We were more evenly matched with Scrabble, so that’s what we played the most.”

“You mean to say you never… um… did anything… more?” asked Brutus with a wink.

“No, I think that’s it,” said Dooley. “Of course we didn’t have that many games at our disposal. And we didn’t see each other much, either, only when Gabe came over for a visit.”