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“We can always ask her,” Dooley suggested.

Sometimes Max was a little conservative in his views, he thought, and he liked to think it was his task to make him a little more open-minded.

They were staring up at the trailer that appeared to be the home of Madame Solange. A very large man stood sentry in front of the trailer, and looked like the kind of person who brooked no nonsense. As usual, though, he wasn’t paying any attention to them, and why would he? Two cats and a fly probably didn’t pose a threat to the instructions he was dutifully carrying out.

“I’ll bet she can talk to flies,” said Norm. “So what say if I go in first and start asking questions?”

Flies had such an easy time, Dooley thought. They could just come and go undetected, whereas cats, because of their size, were usually noticed right away.

“Let’s stick together,” Max now suggested. “It wouldn’t do to split up the team now.”

“Fair enough,” said Norm a little begrudgingly. “So how do you want to play this, Max?”

“We simply slip through the legs of that big man over there, and go and talk to Solange.”

“Great idea!” said Dooley, who hadn’t thought of that. But then that was why Max was in charge, of course: he always got the best ideas. A kernel of doubt suddenly entered Dooley’s mind, though. “What if this big man catches us, Max?”

“Yeah, he looks like the kind of guy who wouldn’t mind wringing your necks,” said Norm, carefully studying the man, “and stuffing you in his stew.”

“Stuff us in his stew!” said Dooley. “He wouldn’t!”

“Oh, yeah, he would,” said Norm. “Humans eat everything, Dooley, haven’t you learned that by now? If it lives and breathes, they don’t mind killing it and putting it in their stew.”

“But they’d never put us in their stew!” said Dooley, absolutely horrified at the prospect of ending up in the big man’s stew tonight. “Besides, we’re too hairy. Humans don’t like hairy things.” He’d witnessed this strange aversion of all things hairy only a couple of days ago, when Odelia had screamed the house down when she caught a hairy spider in the shower. Chase had had to catch it and put it outside.

“I didn’t say he’d eat you with hide and hair now did I?” said Norm. “First they skin you and then they put you in the stew.”

“Oh, no!” said Dooley, starting to panic. “Max! Let’s get out of here! I don’t want to lose my skin and end up in that big man’s stew!”

“Relax, Dooley,” said Max, as usual the epitome of chill. “No one is ending up in anyone’s stew. Not you, not me, and not Norm.”

“Oh, don’t you worry about me,” said Norm. “Humans don’t eat the likes of me. On the contrary, they can’t wait to get rid of us when they find us floating in their soup.”

He was right, Dooley thought. He’d heard the expression ‘A fly in the soup’ before, and always it was spoken with a certain distaste. As if flies in the soup were a bad thing.

“Look, I’m sure Madame Solange doesn’t eat cats,” said Max, “and neither does her bodyguard, or whatever this guy is to her. So let’s just keep our cool and follow the mission plan, shall we?”

Dooley nodded, but his mind wasn’t at ease as he closely watched the big muscular man for any signs of cat-eating behavior. If there was one thing he’d learned about humans after associating with the species for all of his life, it was that they were highly unpredictable.

So as they approached the trailer now, and got ready to slip between the man’s legs, Dooley had to really screw up his courage to the sticking point, and follow Max’s lead lest he chickened out and ran for his life.

But as luck would have it, just then the man was distracted by a passerby saying hi, and as he was smiling at the woman, who was very pretty indeed—at least by human standards—Dooley and Max easily slipped into the trailer and then they were inside!

“We did it!” said Dooley. “And we didn’t get eaten!”

“Or maybe he let you pass, and now you’re stuck in here,” said Norm, ruining the moment with his pessimistic views.

“Let’s just go and find this Solange person,” Max suggested, “and we’ll worry about the rest later, shall we?”

“Good idea, Max,” said Dooley, casting a dark look at Norm, who was already buzzing off to inspect every nook and cranny of the trailer.

They were in some sort of waiting area, where several chairs had been placed. One woman sat waiting there, along with what looked like her daughter, both staring at their phones, and a curtain was hung where presumably Madame Solange held forth.

So they simply slipped through the curtain and then they were in the presence of greatness—or at least the now famous Madame Solange.

From up close and personal she looked even younger than from afar, and not like the kind of fortune tellers Dooley had seen on TV. For one thing she didn’t have a hook nose or a wart on the tip of that nose. And she didn’t smell of sulfur and camphor either.

“Are you sure this is Madame Solange?” he whispered.

“Yeah, I think so,” said Max as they both studied the fortune teller.