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“Well, it’s all ancient history to me,” said Marge, closing the photo album and coughing at the cloud of dust this stirred up. “Want to help me clean up?”

“I can’t. I have a meeting with Dan. He told me to come down to the office pronto.”

“Did something happen?”

“No idea. Usually when it does he tells me over the phone.”

“Better get going then. You know Dan doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

“Are you sure you’ll be able to handle this, Mom? If you keep going down memory lane, you’ll never get this finished.”

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” said Marge. “I’ll ask your dad to give me a hand when he gets home.”

Odelia descended the creaky stairs and Marge put the photo album in a box with stuff she intended to keep, then took a deep breath and tackled the attic with renewed fervor, this time vowing not to let the ghosts of her dead past snag her attention again.

The Jock episode was ancient history. She’d long ago forgiven him for dumping her for Grace and she now decided not to devote another minute of her time to the man.

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“Slow down, Victor,” said Chase. “You’re not making any sense.”

Chief Alec had walked into the interview room and took a seat on the edge of the table.“Still drunk, huh? I thought a night in the drunk tank would have sobered you up.”

“I’m not drunk, Chief!” said Victor. “I’m stone-cold sober!” His eyes were wide and red-rimmed, and his large mustache was trembling.

“He’s drunk,” said Chase. “He just told me the same story he told the desk sergeant last night.”

“About the werewolf?” Alec grunted.

“Itwas a werewolf, I swear!” said Victor. “I saw it as clearly as I’m seeing you! He was standing not ten feet away from me, growling and howling and he had these claws, at least three inches long, and his teeth were glittering and dripping with saliva!”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Alec. “I think it’s time for you to head on home, buddy.”

“But I really saw it! It was going to attack me but I was too quick. I ran and ran and I came straight here—but when I told them what happened they didn’t believe me!”

“I know you came straight here, and my desk sergeant put you straight into the lockup, as you were drunk out of your skull, Victor.”

“I had a few too many to drink, that’s true,” Victor allowed, “but as soon as I saw that monster I sobered up. I swear I’m telling you the truth, Chief. You have to believe me.”

Chief Alec exchanged a look of understanding with his deputy, and Chase got up.“Let’s get you out of here,” he told Victor.

“But… aren’t you going to finish taking my statement? People need to be warned. You need to call in the army—the National Guard—the FBI!”

“We’ll call in Mulder and Scully,” said Chase, as he clasped a heavy hand on the man’s shoulder. “And you can tell them all about your encounter with that nasty werewolf.”

“And while I talk to this Mully Sculder, you’ll hunt that beast down, won’t you?”

“Oh, of course we will, Victor,” said the Chief with a grin. “We’ll go after that thing with everything we’ve got—don’t you worry. This is now my number one priority.”

“When the reporters show up, tell them I saw it first, will you? And make sure they spell my name right. That’s Victor with a C. And Ball with a B.”

“Let’s go, Victor with a C,” said Chase, and led the man out of the room.

“What a nut,” Alec muttered.

Chapter 3

“Just look at it, Max, Just take a good, close look.”

I didn’t have to take a good, close look. Even from a distance I knew what it was: dog poo.

“It’s a disgrace,” said Shanille. “An absolute disgrace.”

“You’re not wrong,” I said.

Even though Shanille had come to us with the problem, depositing it in our laps, so to speak, she wasn’t the first one to have noticed an issue that was troubling the entire feline community.

Dog poo was a problem that had long irked me, and I’d mentioned it to Odelia many, many times.

“You have to talk to your human,” Shanille said now. “She has to write an article about this. These dogs are defacing our beautiful town—they’re turning Hampton Cove into the garbage dump of the Hamptons. If this keeps up no tourist will want to visit our beautiful town and then where will we be? In the scrapheap of history! The doldrums!”

“It would be very peaceful,” said Dooley, who didn’t seem to grasp the big picture.

“I think Shanille is right,” said Harriet. “Dog poo is the biggest issue of our time. A major menace to public health and safety. Something we desperately need to address.”

“It’s pretty nasty,” Brutus agreed.

The five of us were standing around what could very well be the largest dog turd I’d ever come across in my long and illustrious career as a cat sleuth. And I didn’t even need to take a sniff to know whom it belonged to either: Marge and Tex’s neighbors had recently gotten a dog, and I had every reason to believe this turd belonged to that dog.

“People step in it,” Shanille pointed out as a man carefully sidestepped the pile of steaming dog dung and shook his head in annoyance. “Cats step in it. We all step in it.”

“I don’t step in it,” I pointed out.