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“Please be kind!” said Harriet, bursting into another bout of laughter. “I’ll be kind if you stop looking so ridiculous!”

“I think Odelia put him in the wash but forgot that his clothes aren’t shrink-resistant,” quipped Brutus.

“It’s un-belly-vable,” roared Harriet.

“It’s called a six-pack, Max,” said Brutus. “Not a sixteen-pack!”

“Come on, Max,” said Dooley with an angry glance at our two friends. “Let’s get out of here.” And to Harriet and Brutus he said, “You’re both big fat meanies, you know that?”

That didn’t stop them from laughing, though, but I appreciated Dooley’s attempt to make them think about their behavior.

“Maybe I should wear a belly toupee for the time being,” I said to Dooley, feeling a little dejected after the treatment I’d just been awarded. “Or a scarf or a little cat vest?”

“I don’t think that would make much of a difference,” said Dooley, as he guided me out into the backyard and into Odelia’s backyard and past the inflatable pool of shame.

It had been a really interesting day, what with the inflatable pool disaster, the pooping pigeon and now this. How much humiliation can a cat take before it becomes too much? And I was about to find but, for just at that moment Moses was back, and performing a fly-bombing maneuver that would have elicited cries of admiration from my lips if his bombs hadn’t been squarely aimed at my head and Dooley’s!

“Duck, Dooley!” I yelled, and we both ran for cover as fast as our legs would carry us.

“Almost got you there!” bellowed Moses as he took another aim at us. But this time we were too quick for his attack, and as we sailed in through the pet flap, we could hear him scream, “I’ll get you next time, suckers!”

“Whatever did we do to deserve this?” I asked.

“Next time we have to ask him,” said Dooley.

“I sincerely hope there won’t be a next time,” I said as I took a breather in the kitchen, then gobbled up a few bits of kibble, then a few more, and ended up emptying my entire bowl of wet food.

Look, I know stress-eating is not a good way to cope, and I know I probably shouldn’t have eaten two bowls in a single sitting, but I needed the comfort, okay? I was feeling low, and eating my fill always has a positive effect on me. Besides, my brain needed the nutrients, as I was being confronted with a tough case.

“So Vicky Gardner wrote a cry for help on the inside of a little figurine—”

“Which turned out to be a cheap knockoff,” Dooley pointed out.

“—one month before she officially went missing. So why didn’t Quintin report her missing before?”

“Because he was the one she needed help against?” Dooley ventured.

Marge and Tex had told Odelia all about the startling discovery they’d made, and it had certainly made my head spin thinking about the implications, and Dooley’s, too.

So I lay down on the couch and allowed my little gray cells to work with the information we had at our disposal.“So a woman who looks exactly like Vicky Gardner was found dead today, having been murdered two or three days ago,” I said, closing my eyes and giving myself up to contemplation. “Vicky disappeared twenty years ago, after writing a message of distress on a figurine, that also contained her wedding ring, and that somehow made its way into Marge’s cupboard.”

“Along with a spider,” said Dooley. “Don’t forget about the spider, Max. I have a feeling it plays a very important role.”

“Fine. A spider and a figurine of a goatherd. Then there’s Quintin Gardner, who hates cats but loves stuffed animals, and says the dead girl is a dead ringer for his wife—birthmark under her left eye and everything. What else do we know about that man?”

“Only that he’s very, very rich.”

“And that he probably killed his wife because she couldn’t give him an heir,” suddenly a voice intruded upon my reverie. When I opened my eyes I saw that Gran had joined us. She smiled at me. “Playing detective again, Max?” Then she noticed the state my tummy was in and she gasped in shock. “Your belly! What happened!”

“I was in an accident,” I said tersely, and gave Dooley mental signals to keep quiet about the exact details of said accident.

I should have known that mere mental signaling isn’t sufficient to make Dooley keep his mouth shut. Happily he proceeded to lay it all out for Gran, in every gruesome detail recounting my tale of shame.

To Gran’s credit, she didn’t even crack a smile. On the contrary, she gave me a comforting pat on the head. “It’ll grow back,” she said finally, when Dooley had finished shooting his mouth off. “You’ll be your old furry self again in no time. Just you wait and see.”

“In the meantime I think I’ll stay here,” I said.

“What, no cat choir?” asked Dooley.

“No cat choir for the foreseeable future,” I said. “I don’t want to go through what Harriet and Brutus just put me through.”

“What did they put you through?” asked Gran, her eyes narrowing.

“They laughed at me,” I said sadly. “And cracked a lot of very unpleasant and inappropriate jokes at my expense.”