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.
She looked around and found nothing special about the room she was in. A single bed, a table, a chair, and a stack of old newspapers and magazines piled high in a corner. It all looked a little shabby. There was dust on the hardwood floor, and the curtains were a drab olive green. Yuck. Whoever the interior decorator had been clearly had no taste.
She got up from the bed, then plunked down again, as a wave of nausea immediately washed over her.“Darn hangover,” she said. After her head had settled a little, she gave sitting up another shot. She finally managed to get up without falling over, and went to the window to look out. Someone had boarded the window shut, but she could still look through a crack. It looked pretty green out there. So where the heck was she?
She proceeded to the door, but when she tried to open it, found that it was locked. She frowned to herself, and suddenly bits and pieces of last night’s revels drifted back into her memory. Partying hard with the girls, then she’d set off along the road home, and then what? Try as she might, she simply couldn’t recall. But clearly she must have arrived here at some point. But how? And why? Suddenly a key turned in the lock, and the door swung open. Much to her surprise, a very large man stood before her, clad in black jeans and a black turtleneck sweater. His face was obscured by a mask, and he carried a tray, which he proceeded to plunk down on the table, then grunted, “Eat up before it gets cold, princess.”
And before she had a chance to respond, he was already returning to the door.
“Hey, wait,” she said as he made to close the door. “What’s going on? Where am I?”
He chuckled lightly.“Don’t worry your pretty little head about that. Just sit tight, and eat your food.” He slammed the door shut again, and turned the key in the lock.
She sank back down on the bed, and realized how this looked.
Had she been… abducted?
15
When Tex arrived at the senior center, he fully expected to find a bunch of tables set up where old folks were playing cards, but instead he found the main room devoid of local inhabitants. With a frown, he walked on through, in search of the two men he wanted to have speech with. And he finally found them in a backroom of the center, where they were teaching a class of tango to a dozen or so eager learners—all of them women!
Dick Bernstein and Rock Horowitz could have been brothers: both were handsome men in their seventies. But what set them apart from the other members of their age group were their perfectly preserved full heads of hair. Granted, those hairs had turned a vivid white, as Tex’s own hair had done, but at least they still had all of it.
Tex took a seat at the edge of the dance floor, and watched how first Rock, then Dick glided across that floor, a lucky dame in their arms, and tangoed as if they were born Argentinians. Amazing was one of the words that came to mind as he watched the spectacle. The other word was one he wouldn’t have said out loud, and probably stemmed from a deep-seated jealousy that suddenly manifested itself. Why was it that some men seemed to have it all? As far as he knew, neither Dick nor Rock had lived a healthy lifestyle. Instead they’d drunk, gambled, taken illegal substances, and had flitted from girlfriend to girlfriend like butterflies from flower to flower, sampling all the nectar they could find.
Finally Dick noticed the doctor’s addition to the audience, and graciously thanked his dance partner for the dance, then came over to take a seat next to Tex. The man wasn’t sweating, Tex saw to his consternation—he wasn’t even panting from the exertion!