“Marge!” said Tex, extremely distraught. “Please, Marge, wake up!”
But Marge didn’t respond. What was more, she was white as a sheet, and looked as if she’d already passed on to meet her maker.
“Oh, dear,” said Harriet in hushed tones. “This is bad, isn’t it? This is very, very bad.”
And immediately Clarice’s words came back to me, and when I turned and saw Dudley hovering in the doorway, looking on, I thought I saw a small smile flit across his handsome face. Then, when he saw me looking at him, he gave me a wink, and put his finger to his lips in the universal gesture of ‘Keep quiet…’
Oh, dear. So Clarice had been right all along!
Chapter 38
It was only when the ambulance siren stopped right outside the house that Odelia woke up with a start. She swung her feet from between the covers and hurried to the spare bedroom, which had a window looking out onto the street. When she saw that the ambulance was parked right outside her parents’ house, her heart skipped a beat.
And then she was crying, “Chase! Wake up!” and was thundering down the stairs, hurrying next door. As she flitted through the kitchen door, she almost fell over Harriet.
“I was just coming to get you,” said the Persian. “It’s your mom. I think she’s… dead.”
“Oh, God, no!” she said, and arrived upstairs just in time to see the paramedics strap her mother onto a stretcher and then carry her downstairs.
“What happened?” she asked her dad, who looked as white as her mom did, maybe even whiter.
“I don’t know,” said Dad. “She… started convulsing—woke me up. And then suddenly she breathed a long rattling sigh and… was gone.”
“Oh, Dad! Don’t tell me she’s…”
“I managed to bring her back, but she’s practically unresponsive.” He shook his head. “Looks like catatonic shock to me.”
“But how?”
“I don’t know, honey. Could be something she ate that she responded badly to, or something she drank…”
“But you both ate the same thing, right?”
“We all ate the same thing,” said her grandmother. “And drank the same thing, too.”
“Mom does get up sometimes, in the middle of the night,” said Odelia. “And she usually makes herself a glass of warm milk, right? Could that be…”
“I don’t know,” said her dad, and then he was following the paramedics. He turned, and said, “I’m going to the hospital. If you want to come, better come now.”
Chase, who’d arrived at the bottom of the stairs, raked his fingers through his shaggy mane. “What’s going—Marge? What the hell!”
“Drive my daughter to the hospital, will you, son? “said Tex, placing a hand on Chase’s shoulder, then hurrying off so he could ride along in the ambulance.
Chase glanced up at Odelia, and she must have looked extremely distraught, for his face fell.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Gran, and gave Chase a pointed look. “You drive. I’ll call Alec and tell him to meet us at the hospital.”
“If you want, I can drive,” said Dudley.
Gran gave him a grateful smile. “Thanks, Dudley. That’s very kind of you. Now let’s go, people. And don’t forget to lock up the house. There will be no neighborhood watch tonight.”
“I think they may have forgotten about us, Max,” said Dooley as we watched the car drive off, Dudley behind the wheel and the rest all strapped in tight.
“Yeah, I think you’re right,” I said.
We’d thought they would surely take us along to the hospital, but now it looked like they’d totally forgotten about us.
“It’s only natural,” said Harriet. “They’re not thinking straight—none of them are.”
“I hope Marge is all right,” said Brutus. “I like Marge. In fact I think she’s probably the best of them.”
“Yeah, she is,” I agreed.
I wondered if I should tell the others about what I saw, then figured it was my duty to. So I told them about what Clarice had said, and also about the scene I’d witnessed when I got back from saying goodbye to Clarice, and even Dudley’s eerie little smile.
“Maybe Clarice is right,” said Harriet now. “If she says she saw Dudley trip up Tex, that’s what must have happened. I mean, why would she lie about a thing like that?”
“And you say this person gave something to Dudley?” asked Brutus.
“Yeah, I was too far away to see what it was, but it looked like a small parcel.”
“Does Amazon Prime do midnight deliveries?” asked Harriet.
“I doubt it,” I said.
“But… why would Dudley try to kill Marge?” said Dooley, and we all looked at him, as he’d said what we’d all been thinking, and now the words hung heavy in the air.
“I don’t know, Dooley,” I said. “But it’s too much of a coincidence for this to happen the day after he moved in.”
“Too much of a coincidence for all these accidents to happen all of a sudden,” said Harriet. “Odelia’s car, Vesta falling down the stairs, Tex almost slicing off his ear, Marge getting electrocuted…”
“What is this guy playing at?” asked Brutus the million-dollar question. “What does he want?”
Suddenly Rambo came waddling through the hole in the dividing hedge, looking sleepy.
“What’s going on?” he asked in his big, booming voice. “Did I miss something?”
“Rambo, you’re a police dog, right?” I said.
“And you better believe it,” he said with a yawn as he sank down on his haunches and started licking his ass.
“What do you make of Dudley?”
He shrugged. “Looks like a nice kid.”
“What if we told you that he might have just killed Marge?” said Brutus.
He frowned at this. “Killed Marge? You mean Marge is dead?”
“Not yet, but it’s not looking good,” I said.
“Oh, Max,” said Dooley. “I don’t want Marge to die. She’s so nice!”
“I know, Dooley. I know.”
Rambo frowned some more, which caused his eyes to disappear into the swaths of skin that formed his face. “Well, if he did try to kill Marge, he probably did it when he dumped those drops into her milk.”
We all stared at the big dog. “What?!” I asked, once I’d recovered from the shock.
“Yeah, I saw him through the kitchen window. Dumping some kind of drops in a glass of milk, then turn around and offer it to Marge. They were laughing and talking so nice I just figured he’d given her something to help her sleep.”
“Maybe that was the parcel he received,” said Harriet, turning to me.
“Must be,” I said.
So there you had it. Dudley had tried to kill Marge. But why? And, most importantly, how were we ever going to convince our humans that Dudley was the bad guy?
Chapter 39
The ambulance raced along the deserted streets, Dudley driving the car that carried Odelia, Chase and Gran, following right in the ambulance’s wake.
It didn’t take them long to arrive at the hospital, which was located one town over, in Happy Bays. As luck would have it, Tex’s friend and colleague Denby Jennsen was the duty doctor, and immediately he and his team started working on Odelia’s mom.
Meanwhile, the rest of the family were left nervously pacing the waiting room, anxious for some news.
Dudley made himself useful by fetching coffee and sugary snacks. He seemed to be least affected by the terrible events as they unfolded. A rock amid all of the turmoil.
Odelia felt grateful that he was there, providing some much-needed support for her dad, who looked devastated by his wife’s sudden collapse and brush with death.
Suddenly a familiar figure dropped by in the form of Uncle Alec, followed by Charlene. They’d both clearly been fast asleep, as Uncle Alec’s few remaining hairs stood akimbo, and Charlene’s own curly blond tresses were plastered to the side of her face.
“Any news on my sister?” asked Uncle Alec the moment they swept into the room.