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“Okay,” he said without conviction. “I just don’t think we’ll be able to get you out of this wall all by ourselves. We’re going to need tools and we’re going to need Odelia.”

“Brutus, read my lips. No one can know.”

It was hard to read her lips, as they were stuck along with her head inside the wall, but Brutus could see where she was coming from all the same.

“Look,” she said, “can’t you just… pick away at the wall until you’ve dug a hole big enough to get my head out?”

‘Trust me, I’ve been picking away like nobody’s business, but the only thing that’s worn down by now is my claws. This old wall is a lot tougher than it looks.”

“I’m hungry, Brutus, and I’m getting a cramp. Literally a pain the neck.”

“I know, sweet peach. Just hang in there. At some point someone will come and they’ll get you out of your horrible predicament in a snap.”

She was silent for a moment. She hated to be exposed to ridicule. If there was one thing she feared more than anything else in life, it was to be the object of mirth, to be laughed at, to be the laughingstock of the town’s cat population. And laugh they would.

“I could get Max and Dooley,” said Brutus. “If you tell them not to tell anyone, they’ll do it, right?”

“I wouldn’t be too sure,” she said softly.

“But they’re our friends. And Dooley adores you.”

“I know he does. And it’s not his loyalty that worries me. It’s the fact that he’s not smart enough to keep his big trap shut. He can’t help it. He’ll promise me not to tell a soul, and the next moment we’ll be down in the park for cat choir and he’ll be shooting his mouth off. Not because he means bad, but just because that’s how he is.”

“What about Max? Do you think he’ll blab?”

“Oh, no, he won’t. Max is true to his word, and smart enough not to talk.”

“We could always tell Dooley a story.”

“What story?”

“We could tell him… you’ve been exploring. That you decided to explore what’s behind these walls, and now you need help getting your big discovery out of there.”

“Could work,” she admitted. “Dooley is probably dumb enough to believe it, too.”

“I don’t think Dooley is necessarily dumb,” said Brutus. “I just think he’s… naive.”

“Well, whatever he is, he can’t be allowed to blab about this. He just can’t.”

Brutus nodded, even though Harriet wasn’t in a position to see it. “You know, I’m the latest addition to the team, right?”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“But I want to tell you how much I’ve come to appreciate you, and Max and Dooley, too,” he said, suddenly feeling maudlin. He glanced around the basement, which looked dark and dank and, with Harriet being stuck in the wall, a little scary, too.

“I know, Brutus. And I also know that you and Max didn’t get along at first, but that you’ve become fast friends, and I can’t even begin to tell you how happy that makes me.”

“It does?” he asked, smiling. “That’s great.”

“Yes, and I also understand you’re suddenly feeling talkative and philosophical and ruminating on life and all of that, but right now I need you to focus, all right, wookie? And I need you to get me out of here, for even though we can try to tell Dooley that I’m an urban explorer, I’m not sure the story will stick, so if you can get me out of here before anyone shows up, that would make me love you even more than I already do.”

“Okay, great,” he said, getting up. “I’ll give it another shot.”

And as he took a firm hold on her shoulders and pulled, while she wriggled to try and get her head dislodged, in a corner of the basement sat an entire family of mice watching the scene and snickering freely. They consisted of Molly and Rupert and nearly all of their four-hundred-strong offspring. Molly had felt this was a sight they’d never seen before and she was right. It rarely happened, at least outside Tom and Jerry cartoons, that a cat was bested by a mouse, and she felt this had an educational value that was hard to overstate. And as they all chuckled and snickered at Brutus’s attempts to free his lady love, all Molly could think was that she would give a million bucks if she had a phone right now and could film the whole thing and throw it up on YouTube.

She was pretty sure it would set the cause of cats against mice back about a millennium, or even more, and give mice the world over fresh hope in their eternal battle against their age-old nemesis. It might also deal a significant psychological blow to cats everywhere, and make them think twice about trying to attack mice in their lair.

But mice don’t carry smartphones, and it’s hard for them to create a YouTube account, so for now she’d have to suffice with her four hundred kids prodding each other in the midriff and rolling on the floor laughing and generally having a grand old time.

Chapter 18

The lights in the kitchen had been turned on, and from the noise inside and the sound of voices it was clear that our humans had finally returned home from work.