Chapter 8
“What are you doing?” asked Dooley curiously.
Shanille, who hadn’t been aware that she was no longer alone, jumped about a foot in the air, vaulted from her perch on the stone structure and landed on all fours on the granite floor below. She clutched a paw to her chest. “You scared the living daylights out of me! What are you doing here?”
“We’re looking for Patient Zero,” Dooley explained helpfully. “And Max seems to think you’re she—or her—or it.”
“What is that thing?” asked Brutus, staring up at the monument Shanille had just made such a nice running dive off of. “And why were you taking a bath in it?”
“I wasn’t taking a bath,” said Shanille, directing a scornful look at Brutus. “I was merely repenting. And for your information, that ‘thing’ is a baptismal font.”
“An abysmal font?” asked Dooley. “What is an abysmal font?”
“Baptismal, not abysmal,” Shanille corrected him. “It’s used to baptize babies.”
“You’re not a baby,” said Brutus, keenly detecting the fatal flaw in Shanille’s logic.
“I know I’m not a baby, Brutus,” she said haughtily. “I was merely...” She pressed her lips together and closed her eyes. “I was merely expressing contrition, that’s all.”
“Be that as it may,” I said, deciding to get this interview on the right track again. “We’re on a mission to find out who Patient Zero is who brought this flea pandemic to our community, and, like Dooley mentioned, we have reason to believe that this Patient Zero is in fact you, Shanille. So what do you have to say to that?”
She drew back a little. “What do I have to say to that? That you’re talking through your hat, Max.”
Dooley laughed. “That’s impossible. Max doesn’t even have a hat. Have you, Max?”
“No, I don’t have a hat,” I said, locking eyes with Shanille. This was where all those late-night cop shows came in handy. Interrogation technique. I pointed a paw at Shanille. “Isn’t it a fact that on the night of Thursday the sixteenth you stepped into a limo that stood idling on the side of the road? And isn’t it also a fact that the very next morning you woke up with a terrible itch that wouldn’t go away no matter how hard you scratched?” Shanille gasped, but I wasn’t done yet. “And isn’t it also true that Father Reilly discovered, upon closer inspection, that you were infested with a small army of fleas and as a consequence called in Vena Aleman who diagnosed you as having contracted this terrible affliction?!”
Shanille drew herself up to her full height. “Where did you get this information?”
“Kingman told me,” I lied. “And he also told me Limo Cat seduced you and subsequently infested you!”
“Lies!” Shanille cried now, her composure crumbling under this onslaught. “All lies! It wasn’t an entire army of fleas—just a few of them.” She bowed her head, defeated. “It’s true though that I came upon a limo idling on the corner of Franklin and First that fateful night. And it’s true that I injudiciously hopped into that limo and joined that cat. And it’s also true he must have given me this flea affliction that unwittingly turned me into your Patient Zero.”
Dooley gasped. “So it’s true, then. You are Patient Zero!”
Shanille nodded, wringing her paws. “Yes, I am! I am Patient Zero!” she cried, her voice echoing through the church’s nave, bouncing off the stony-faced saints who all seemed to stare down on her with condemnation written all over their unforgiving mugs. “I did all this. I hurt my community and now I must pay the price for my sins.” She tapped her chest and once again began to murmur that strange oath, “Through my fault, through my fault...”
“Hold it,” I said, and she halted her sad lament and looked up. “You’re not Patient Zero. You’re merely a victim of Limo Cat. He’s Patient Zero. He’s the one who should be repenting and taking a bath in Father Reilly’s abysmal font.”
“Baptismal font,” she corrected me, then shook her head. “Limo Cat is not from around here. I am. I’m responsible for this outbreak. I brought this pandemic upon us.”
“But he’s the one who gave you fleas!”
“And I should have known better than to get into a limo with a stranger!”
“Stranger danger,” Dooley muttered automatically.
“So he was a stranger, was he?” I asked, curious to ascertain the identity of this mystery cat. “You never saw him before?”
Shanille hesitated. “He... seemed familiar somehow, though I can’t say why.”
“You didn’t recognize him?”
“He was wearing a mask.”
“A mask!”
She nodded pensively. “It was such a strange experience. There was something electric about him—something utterly mesmerizing. He was perhaps the most charming cat I’ve ever met. And not in an unctuous or cheap way. He was... wonderful. Simply wonderful.” She uttered a little sigh. “When I asked his name he told me to call him Love Symbol.”
I frowned. “Love Symbol. Like Prince.”
She nodded. “He said he’d dropped his name. Claimed names were a tedious and bourgeois convention and that the name humans had given him was now a distant memory of his dead past. A past where he was a mere household pet.”
“As opposed to...”
“He said he was now master of his own fate. Ruler of his domain. King of his home.” She shrugged. “He said a lot of things—that night is almost like a blur to me now. And a moment in my life I’d much rather completely forget. Love Symbol led me to heights I’d never thought I’d experience. And then into the lowest depths the very next morning.” She buried her face into her paws. “And now if you would leave me alone. I need to repent.”
I touched my tail to hers. “It’s all right, Shanille. It wasn’t your fault. No need to repent. As far as I can make out this Limo Cat—Love Symbol—is the one who brought these fleas into our lives, not you.”
“Please go away, Max,” she said in a strangled voice. “I would be alone.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Shanille,” I said. “And stop splashing yourself with water. It’s very uncatlike and frankly a little creepy.”
She nodded, her face still hidden. “I know. But I have to do it. This is all my fault, Max. If I hadn’t succumbed to the temptations of sin, this would never have happened. If I hadn’t fallen for the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye and the pride of life, Hampton Cove would have been spared this terrible ordeal.” She looked up, a sad look in her eyes. “I’m a sinner, Max, and now I must repent and hope I will be forgiven.”
“I forgive you, Shanille,” I said magnanimously.
She clucked her tongue. “Would that it were so simple, Max.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, for lack of anything better to say. I am, after all, not a confessor.
We watched as Shanille made the leap back up to the edge of the baptismal font, and started splashing water over her head once more, murmuring incantations to herself.
“She’ll get over it,” said Brutus.
“Would that it were so simple,” Dooley said.
Chapter 9
As we left the church, I wondered what the odds were for the Most Virtuous Cat in the World to meet the Most Charming Cat in the World and together turn Hampton Cove from a bucolic little town into a flea-infested hellhole. Slim, probably. And still it happened.
“So what’s the plan, Max?” asked Dooley.
“Yes, we need to confront this Love Symbol,” said Brutus. “Teach him a lesson he’ll never forget.”