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Mr. Gardner studied the picture closely, pinching his fingers to zoom in and narrowing his eyes as he did. Then, finally, his eyes widened.“It’s her!” he said. “Vicky had a tiny birthmark underneath her left eye. Very faint. I always thought it made her even prettier. This girl has the exact same birthmark in the exact same spot!” He almost dropped the phone. “I-I don’t believe this. And you say she was… murdered?”

“Broke her neck,” said Uncle Alec, still busy with his handkerchief. “Nothing in the vicinity of the body suggests it happened there, so someone moved the body after she died. Which suggests foul play for sure. We’ll know more in the next couple of days.”

Mr. Gardner shook his head.“This is a nightmare. An absolute nightmare.” Then he glanced up. “Do you have any idea who did this to her, Chief Allen?”

“Alec,” Uncle Alec corrected the man. “No, sir. Not yet, anyway.”

“Please find out and let me know,” said Quintin, staring off into space. He waved a hand. “Could you please… leave now, Chief Jack? I would like to be alone.”

“Of course, sir,” said Uncle Alec.

Moments later they were out on the driveway again, looking at each other with confusion written all over their features.

“What just happened?” asked Chase.

“I think Quintin Gardner positively identified the victim as his wife,” said Uncle Alec. “Which we all know is pretty much an impossibility.”

“But the birthmark,” said Odelia. “What about the birthmark?”

“Yeah, that’s got me stumped, too,” said the police chief, mopping his red neck.

“Where are your cats?” asked Chase suddenly, glancing around.

And it was only then that Odelia noticed that her cats hadn’t made it out of Mr. Gardner’s house yet. So she stepped up to the front door and rang the bell again. Only this time there was no answer.

“Oh, crap,” she said. “They’re in there.”

“Let me try,” said her uncle, and slammed the door with his fist. “Mr. Gardner, open up. This is the police!”

But Mr. Gardner, if he had heard, was giving every indication of not wanting to acknowledge this visit from the constabulary a second time in a row.

Chapter 14

While the humans talked, Dooley and I had wandered off, as we usually do. The house where Mr. Quintin Gardner lived was huge. Plenty of rooms and corridors, and all of them pretty gloomy, I might add. Almost as if Mr. Gardner would have preferred to live in Victorian times, if given the opportunity.

The walls were bedecked with paintings of what I could only assume were ancestors of Mr. Gardner or his missing spouse. All of them gargoyles, I must say, with not a redeeming aspect to be found.

“Some humans are really ugly, aren’t they, Max?” asked Dooley, as he studied the portrait of a woman with no less than three hairy warts on her face.

“It’s all a matter of perspective, Dooley,” I said, with what I hoped was the right modicum of censure. It doesn’t do to call humans ugly. They rarely appreciate it.

“Odelia is pretty, though, isn’t she?”

“Odelia is very pretty,” I allowed.

“But if we’re allowed to call Odelia pretty, then we’re also allowed to call these people ugly, aren’t we?”

“Um…” It was the kind of irrefutable logic that sometimes makes it tough to argue with Dooley. Lucky for me we’d finally come upon something to distract our attention from the gargoyles: a stuffed marmot was sitting on top of a sideboard in the corridor. We both stared at the marmot as the marmot stared back at us with its beady eyes.

“It looks alive but it smells dead,” said Dooley aptly.

“That’s because it’s been stuffed,” I said.

“Stuffed? What do you mean, stuffed?”

“Well, some people love their pets so much that even after they die they like to keep them—as a reminder of the love they shared. And so Mr. Gardner must have really liked this marmot, for he had it stuffed.”

“I don’t understand,” said Dooley, shaking his head.

“You’ve heard of mummies, right?” I asked, wondering how to explain it to my friend in a way that wouldn’t freak him out.

“Oh, of course. I’ve seen plenty of Discovery Channel documentaries on mummies. The Discovery Channel loves a good mummy. Almost as much as it loves sharks.”

“Well, stuffing is more or less the same thing. They, um, first remove the, um, organs, and then replace them with, well, the stuffing.”

Dooley gaped at me, then opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, before crying,“No way!”

“Yes, unfortunately so.”

“But…” He glanced up at the marmot, still looking as if it might come to life at any moment. “But what about the eyes? It looks so alive!”

“Glass,” I said. “They remove the actual eyes and replace them with glass beads.”

“But Max, that’s horrible!” he yelled.

“Yeah, I guess it is,” I agreed.

“You mean that when we die Odelia is going to have us both stuffed?”

“Um…”

“Oh, no!”

“Well,” I murmured, giving the marmot a dark look. The darn thing had caused my friend to become upset. Then again, sometimes the realities of life have that effect on a cat, and no matter how much you try to shelter them, it’s hard to protect them all the time.