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“Could be that Angel found out that Father Reilly is her dad and decided to run away,” Rufus offered. “Without leaving a trace, which is why she jumped into that pond, dumped her phone, and this way managed to wipe every trace of herself.”

“But why would she do that?” asked Dooley. “If Father Reilly were my dad, I’d be very happy. He’s such a nice man.”

“I don’t think it’s that simple, Dooley,” I said. “If she found out—and that’s still a big if—we have no idea how she felt about it.”

“Okay, so if she did run away,” said Fifi, “why would she go out with her friends first? That doesn’t sound like a person in distress. No,” she said, shaking her head. “I smell a rat.”

Dooley looked up at this.“A rat? Where!”

“Not an actual rat, Dooley. I smell foul play.”

“Yeah, me too,” I said.

“Definitely foul play,” Rufus agreed.

“Rats always smell foul,” Dooley offered. “So I find it very weird that you guys can all smell that rat and I can’t.”

Before long we’d reached the road, and Odelia and Chase proceeded to hop into Chase’s pickup, followed by five cats and two dogs. But then Ted and Marcie brought up the rear, and they needed transport, too. Lucky for them Father Reilly had arrived in his own car, and after some negotiations the final tally was as follows: me, Dooley, Harriet and Brutus rode with Chase and Odelia, while Ted and Marcie, Fifi, Rufus and Shanille, and of course Marigold, squeezed into Father Reilly’s modest little Peugeot. And so the entire group who’d joined the expedition returned home, and still we weren’t any thewiser as to what had happened to Angel Church. But at least now we knew why she hadn’t answered her phone: it had been lying at the bottom of that pond all this time.

14

While Chase drove his pickup with a steady hand, Odelia engaged us in conversation so she could pick our brains.

“So what do you think, Max?” she asked.

“Max, Max, Max,” Harriet grumbled. “Always Max. What are we, Odelia? Chumps?”

“Okay, so what do you think, Harriet? What are your conclusions?”

“I actually think that Angel ran away from home because she was upset when she discovered that Father Reilly is her dad,” said Harriet.

Odelia blinked at this.“Wait, what?”

“Oh, you didn’t know? Yes, Father Reilly and Marigold have been a couple for the past twenty years or so, and Angel is their daughter.”

“I don’t think Angel knows, though,” said Brutus.

“No, she doesn’t,” I said. “Shanille specifically told us that they never told her, even though Marigold has often asked Father Reilly to sit down with her and tell her, but he feels that she wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret.”

“So… Angel is Father Reilly’s daughter?” asked Odelia.

Chase looked up at this.“Angel is Reilly’s daughter?”

“Yeah, that’s what the cats just told me.”

“Do you think this is connected with her disappearance?”

“I don’t know. The cats seem to think she ran away after she found out who her father is.”

“It’s a possibility,” Chase allowed. “Kids have run away from home for less.”

“I think she was abducted by aliens,” said Dooley. “And now they’re doing all kinds of experiments on her, and when they’re done, they’ll give her back to her mom and dad, but not before they wipe her memory, so so she’ll never know what happened, and she won’t be able to tell us, which is a good thing,” he added with a knowing nod, “since this means she won’t be traumatized.”

“Did you get all that from the Discovery Channel?” asked Brutus with a slight grin.

“Oh, absolutely. They have all kinds of interesting stuff on the Discovery Channel, and I discover new things every day.”

“So now what?” Odelia asked.

“Now we send a team of skilled investigators out there,” said Chase, “Who are going to comb through every square inch of those woods, and hopefully they’ll come up with something—anything—that will lead us to Angel.”

[Êàðòèíêà: img_2]

Angel Church woke up suffering from a splitting headache.

“Ouchie,” she muttered as she brought a distraught hand to her aching head. That’s what you get from partying all night with the girls, she thought. Every time she woke up with a hangover like this she swore it would never happen again, but after a couple of days the memory of that hangover dissipated, and she was ready to do it all over again.

When she opened her eyes she was surprised to find she wasn’t lying in her own bed, but in an unfamiliar room. The curtains were drawn, and she immediately knew this wasn’t her cozy room in the apartment in Bickersfield she shared with her mom. So where was she? Had one of her friends collected her at the side of the road where she’d collapsed and taken her to their place? But she’d been in all of her friends’ houses and none of them had looked like this. At least not that she remembered.