“You don’t have to be nervous, Max,” said Harriet. “We all want you to succeed. Isn’t that right, you guys?”
Brutus and Dooley nodded seriously. “We’re with you, buddy,” said Brutus. “Wherever you go, we go, and if you want us to apply some of our own saliva to grease up that pudgy midsection, I will gladly make the donation.”
This seemed a little too much, and I said so. I didn’t need the saliva of all my friends on my precious bod. “I’ve got this,” I said, as I gave a few tentative licks to my tummy.
“More, Max,” said Harriet. “You can’t sell yourself short now.”
“Yeah, a lot more,” Brutus agreed. “You need to really get in there and slather it on. Like the gladiators used to do.”
“Did the gladiators use saliva before their fights?” asked Dooley, intrigued.
“Well, not saliva, maybe. They rubbed oil on themselves, so other gladiators couldn’t catch them. Oil makes you slippery, see, and then it’s a lot harder to get caught.”
“Maybe you should use oil, Max,” Dooley said now.
“Or some other form of lubricant,” Harriet added. “I hear duck fat is good.”
“I’m not going to put duck fat on myself,” I said, starting to get a little indignant.
“Just saying, Max,” said Harriet. “If you want this, you have to do whatever it takes.”
I stared at her. She was right. If I was going to do this, I needed to go all the way. “Okay,” I said. “So where is this duck fat?”
My three friends all started chattering amongst themselves about where they could procure duck fat on such short notice, and finally Harriet had the solution. “I don’t think Odelia stocks duck fat, but there’s a tub of motor oil in the garden shed. I saw it there myself. Chase uses it to grease up the lawnmower, but I’ll bet it’ll do the trick just fine.”
“Guck,” I said, closing my eyes. But I’d told my friends I was fully on board with this endeavor, and I wasn’t going to back out now, or show them I was a pussy, which of course I was, and not just in the literal sense either.
So we moved to the garden shed and walked in. And as Harriet had indicated, there was a nice big tub of motor oil waiting for me to apply a liberal helping to my corpus.
“Do you want us to do it?” asked Brutus. “Cause we will, isn’t that right, you guys?”
“Of course,” said Harriet, though she glanced at the black motor oil with a horrified expression. Her nice white paw would no longer be as pristinely white as it was now.
“I’ll do it,” said Dooley. “I’m gray, so no one will notice a few smudges.”
“No, I should do it,” said Brutus. “I’m black, so it will blend right in.”
“I’ll do it myself, thank you very much,” I said, and after a short hesitation in which I had to overcome a certain hesitation, I stuck my paw into the black slurry and applied a nice helping to my blorange coat. It looked horrible, and it smelled even worse, but I had the support of my friends, so what could possibly go wrong?
“More,” said Harriet when I paused after the first pawful. “You need to rub this stuff on your entire torso, Max, or it won’t work.”
I grimaced as I applied more of the gunk on my gorgeous fur. Yuck. But finally I was done, and wiped my paws on a patch of grass outside the garden shed. Then, accompanied by my friends, I walked back to the house. I stood there, poised and ready like an Olympian, as I stared down that flap.
“You’re mine,” I growled, psyching myself up. “I’m going to take you down, you flap.”
And then I planted my paws firmly on the ground and took a running leap and then I was zooming—flying!—towards that pet flap like a chunky cruise missile.
And as I zipped in and zipped through, suddenly my progress was abruptly halted.
Yep. I was stuck again.
I had fought the flap and the flap had won.
Chapter 29
When the doorbell jangled and Rita Baker saw Odelia Poole’s face on her intercom, along with those of Detective Kingsley and Chief Lip, she knew this wasn’t a social call.
For a moment, her heart sank, but then she decided to buck up and not postpone the inevitable. So she pressed the buzzer and opened the door.
Moments later, Odelia, Chase and the Chief walked into her modest but nicely furnished apartment. Odelia was the first to speak. “Rita, something has come to our attention so we decided to have a little chat, if that’s all right with you.”
She was friendly, Rita had to admit, and even the two cops were eyeing her with something akin to compassion, something that wasn’t what she’d experienced before. It all brought her back to those stirring events fifty-five years ago, when her dad had gone missing, and the police had also dropped by. They hadn’t been friendly then, practically accusing him of running off with the proceeds of the loot he stole from that woman.
She took a seat and invited the trio to join her. “Tea?” she asked, her voice slightly tremulous, but Odelia shook her head, then placed an object on the coffee table that she hadn’t set eyes on since the night her dad had disappeared.
“Do you recognize this?” asked Odelia, who was taking the lead.
She nodded, and swallowed away a lump of uneasiness. So they knew.
“Yes, that’s my old diary. Where did you find it?” She’d looked for that thing all over the place, and when she hadn’t been able to find it her mom had vaguely thought she might have thrown it out with the trash.
“It was bricked inside the wall of my mother’s basement, not that far from where your father was bricked in,” said Odelia.
She nodded nervously. “Have you… read it?”
“Yes, we have, especially those glued-together pages.”
She swallowed again. “Isn’t there a law against reading other people’s diaries?”
“I don’t think so,” said Chase. “But there is definitely a law against killing your father and burying him in your basement.”
“I didn’t kill my father,” she said. “None of us did. It was an accident, I swear.”
Odelia had picked up the diary. “My mom found it, and when she told me what you wrote in here I wasn’t even surprised. Your father was not a nice man, was he, Rita?”
“No, he wasn’t. He was horrible, and treated us like crap. Especially my mother.”
“Did he beat her?”
She nodded, as tears trickled down her cheeks. “He almost killed her that night, and when we dragged him off her and he hit the edge of the kitchen table I knew he was dead before he hit the floor.” She straightened. “And you know what? I’m not ashamed to admit it. My dad was a monster, and he deserved exactly what he got. So we thought it over, and decided unanimously to make sure his body was never found, and that the brooch he stole disappeared along with him, so people would come to the only logical conclusion: he’d sold the brooch and had run off with the money, never to be seen again. And good riddance, too.”
“You told me you lived a happy life. That you had a warm and loving father. None of that was true, was it?”
“My father was a thief and a bully and a wife beater. He even raised his hand against me and my brother, but at twenty-one I wasn’t prepared to take it anymore, and at sixteen neither was my brother. We made a pact. If he hit Mom one more time, we’d…”
“Kill him?” asked Chase.
“No, not kill him. But we’d make sure he never hit her again. We’d kick him out of the house and make Mom file for divorce, whether she liked it or not. So when Tom dragged him off Mom that night, and I shoved him, the combination of those movements made him hit his head. So basically, if you want to be accurate about it, we both killed him.”
For a moment, no one spoke, then Odelia said, “I talked to a couple of people who knew your father back then. And they all agreed he was a pretty horrible person. In fact I haven’t met anyone who had a kind word to say about him.”
“We’re returning the brooch to Nate Clifford, by the way,” said Chase. “He’s the great-grandson of Aurelia Clifford, the woman your father stole from.”