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“Max, try to wiggle your butt,” said Dooley. “Try to shift your balance to your head.”

Good advice, but not very practical, since my head isn’t the largest part of my anatomy. My butt is, unfortunately, and so is my belly. And if you’re going to tell me there are no bones in a butt or even in a belly I’ll tell you that you’re being extremely rude.

“Maybe we should catch it and keep it,” a third voice now added itself to the chorus. “A cat always comes in handy.”

“Handy for what?” asked what I assumed was the cook.

“Catching mice, of course. And I can tell you we’ve got plenty of those.”

“If only you would take the garbage out when I tell you to, Bernice,” said the maid. “Then we wouldn’t have any mice.”

“So now it’s my fault all of a sudden is it? If you wouldn’t sneak outside for a smoke every other second the critters wouldn’t have managed to get inside!”

“Mice don’t walk in through the door, Bernice,” said the maid acerbically.

“I still think we should keep it,” said the third voice, who could have been a housekeeper of some kind.

“Let’s ask Mr. G.,” suggested the maid. “After all, it’s his house, and his mouse.”

“Let’s not bother Mr. G. with such a trifling matter,” said the housekeeper. “I say we keep the cat, at least until it’s caught the mouse, and then we let it go.”

Yikes!“Dooley, help me!” I cried. “They want to keep me and feed me mice!”

“Wiggle, Max! Wiggle!”

So I wiggled.

“Oh, look, it’s shaking its butt,” said the maid with a giggle. “How cute. Oh, please can we keep it, Bernice?”

“No,” said Bernice, proving herself to be a woman after my own heart. “Cats in the kitchen is a recipe for disaster. Let’s get rid of the filthy beast before it infests the place with its parasites.”

So maybe not a woman after my own heart after all. Still, obviously her intentions were good, if her way of expressing herself a little rough around the edges.

And then, before I could prepare myself, suddenly a hand had attached itself to my rear, and shoved—hard!

“The damn beast is stuck,” grunted the cook.

“Push harder, Bernice,” giggled the maid.

“Yeah, put your back into it, Bernice,” chuckled the housekeeper.

“What’s going on in here!” suddenly boomed a male voice.

“Oh, Mr. Gardner, sir, there’s a cat in the kitchen, sir,” said Bernice, halting all proceedings and disattaching herself from my butt.

“A cat? In my kitchen? Where?!”

They must have parted like the Red Sea, and offered the master of the manor a clear view of my dangling rear end, for suddenly something hard and unyielding placed itself against my bottom and pushed.

There was a rending sound, as my belly protested against this harsh treatment, and then I was propelled forward and was flying through the air, describing a nice arc.

I crash-landed on all fours, and when I glanced back, I saw an irate face appear in the windowpane I’d just vacated.

“And stay out!” the face yelled, and slammed the little pane shut for emphasis.

I heaved a sigh of relief, and only then noticed that Dooley was staring at me a little strangely.

I was sitting on my butt, my hind legs stretched out, much like a human sits, but that couldn’t possibly be the issue, as cats often like to position themselves that way.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Dooley pointed at my belly, and only then did it come to my attention that something was missing. I yelped once more—I was doing a lot of yelping today—when I saw that my recent adventure had shaved off quite a bit of fur from around my midsection, which was now ostensibly hairless. There were also numerous scratches, where the glass pane had scraped against my sides. All in all I looked as if I’d been shaved with a blunt knife.

“Oh, no!” I cried. “This is terrible!”

Dooley smiled.“You’re pink, Max. Underneath all that orange you’re actually pink.”

My cheeks were burning with righteous indignation.“He shaved me. The brute shaved me!”

Dooley’s smile was widening. “Looks like Wilbur Vickery isn’t the only one getting a shave,” he said with a light snicker.

I gave him a foul look.“It’s not funny, Dooley.”

“It’s a little bit funny,” he said.

And he was right. It was a little bit funny. And as I examined my corpus for puncture holes, I decided that it probably wasn’t the end of the world. Fur has a tendency to grow back, and scrapes and scratches can heal. The worst part was that I looked exceedingly foolish, and soon I’d be the laughingstock of the entire town!

“Dooley, not a word about this, you hear me? No one can know this happened.”

“But why, Max? I think it’s a great story.”

“Not a peep!” I said as I got up.

“Peep,” said Dooley, the big joker.

Chapter 16

Odelia was just about to suggest that Chase break down Quintin Gardner’s door when Max and Dooley emerged from behind the house, cool as cucumbers. Though when she looked closer, she saw that Max must have suffered some kind of incident.

“What happened to Max?” asked Chase, who must have noticed the same thing. “Looks like he had a close encounter with a sheep shearer.”