“Are you coming?” his voice echoed from inside the wall.
“Yup,” I said, and in two bounds I had joined him. We were now inside the wood paneled wall and were heading South again. As I took in the sights—dust and mouse droppings—I asked him the one question that had been on the forefront on my mind. “Any good mice around here?”
“Nah,” he said, looking over his shoulder before taking a leap from one supporting beam to the next. “Sam’s a great Christian, or at least that’s what everyone tells me, but the part of his scripture about turning the other cheek, doesn’t seem to apply to mice. He’s managed to chase them all away by putting mousetraps everywhere. Word about these heavy-handed tactics spread fast—mouse to mouse so to speak—and pretty soon they stopped coming.”
I shook my weary head. This deplorable attitude towards members of the rodent population pained me and I said as much.
“I know,” he said, with a dejected twitch of his tail. “But what can you do? I rip open a garbage bag once in a while, but before the little buggers can catch a whiff of the stuff, Sam has fixed them with one of his traps. Ah, here we are.”
He slid gracefully through a small crack in the wall and we came out behind an old gas stove in the corner of what I assumed to be Father Sam’s famous study. Instantly Stevie hopped up onto an outsized desk taking up most of the space, and I took a closer look at that wastepaper basket Stevie had been telling me so much about. The one with all the discarded drafts of his sermon.
“Nothing here,” said Stevie from his perch on top of the desk. In the meantime I was having better luck sorting through Sam’s trash. I had smoothed out a few of his crumpled drafts and my eye had spied the magic word not once but dozens of times on every page: Bluebell was pretty much ubiquitous. I read the first sentence aloud—yes, cats can read. You didn’t know that, did you?
“Oh, my love. I yearn for you with every fiber of my being. I lust for you with every corpuscle in my body. I long to hold you in my arms and hug you, caress you, kiss you, love you with every—”
“Please,” said Stevie, holding up a paw. “If you don’t want a mess on the carpet better stop it right there.” He made a gagging sound and I saw what he meant. It was pretty soppy stuff.
“Um…” I hesitated to clothe my next thought into words. “Are you sure this is the draft of a sermon?”
“Of course it is. Sam doesn’t work on anything else. He’s devoted to his flock.”
I pursed my lips. I’d heard of a priest’s devotion to his parishioners before, but this was really taking things to the next level. I tried to break it gently. “Sounds to me like a love letter, Steve.”
Stevie let out an agonized wail.“So it is true after all! The silly goop has gone and fallen in love with some ghastly female. I knew it!”
I didn’t know what to say. “Tough luck,” I finally managed to mumble, and put a comforting paw on Stevie’s back. I sympathized with the poor sod, having gone through the same horrifying experience many times myself. In fact every time Zack falls in love—once a month, like clockwork—I fret andworry until the danger passes. Luckily so far it always has, but one never knows that some day some half-witted member of the opposite sex will take a fancy to the silly poop, move in and boot me out on my red fanny. I suppressed a shiver at the mere thought.
“I’m done for,” sighed Stevie, stooping his shoulders in dejection.
“Yah, well…” Then something occurred to me. “Look, have you ever seen the wench? I mean, actually seen her come round here?”
Stevie shook his head.“Only Zada Sellar drops in from time to time. She’s one of Sam’s most faithful parishioners. And Mathilda Bladder of course. Chairwoman of the church council. But as far as I can tell Sam has never harbored any romantic notions about either of them.”
Since Zada Sellar is about a hundred years old and Mathilda Bladder the worst gossipmonger Brookridge has ever harbored, this didn’t surprise me. “It occurs to me that perhaps it’s not too late yet. I mean, if he’s still in the writing stage of the proceedings, it stands to reason nothing has happened yet.”
He looked at me with hope and confusion nicely blended in his clear blue eyes.“What do you mean?”
“Well, you know how it goes. When humans fall in love they start writing letters, dozens of them, each one soupier than the next.”
“Like this one.” He pawed the exhibit with distaste.
“Exactly. But this is only in the early stages of the disease. Once the virus spreads, and they’ve gone on several dates together, there’s the kissing stage—”
He closed his eyes.“Please. Spare me the details.”
“—and then, finally, they move in together.”
His tail quavered visibly.“Must you remind me?” he said, pained.
“All I mean to say is that the letter-writing stage is usually situated somewhere between the kissing stage and the cohabitation stage. Which means…”
His eyes lit up.“Which means there’s still hope!”
“Sure there is,” I said encouragingly.
“And then there’s the fact that Zack was also murmuring the ghastly female’s name.”
I started at these words. I’d forgotten all about that. “I wouldn’t exactly say murmuring,” I corrected this misinterpretation of the facts pertaining to the case.
“I do say murmuring,” he went on. “And I’ll say more. Zack can’t stop thinking about the Bluebell menace, Sam can’t stop writing her long and ghastly letters and Lucy Knicx mentions her as she heaves her dying breath—”
“It wasn’t her dying breath,” I corrected him once again. “She was already dead.”
“Still.”
“Still,” I agreed. He had a point there. Now that I came to think about it, Zack had indeed muttered the Bluebell name like he does when he’s just fallen truly, madly, deeply in love again.
“I’ll bet you a can of tuna that the Bluebell is one of thosefemme fatales who waltz into a place and leave a pile of dead bodies and broken hearts in their wake.”
“You know what?” I said, musing. “I think you’re on to something there, Agent Steve.”
“Of course I’m onto something,” he said very immodestly. “And you know what we’re going to do, Agent Tom? We’re going to find out who this Bluebell dame is and put a stop to this femme fataling she’s been doing.” He extended a claw. “One. We solve the Lucy Knicx murder, which is probably some sort ofcrime passionnel.”
I was impressed Stevie had words likecrime passionnel in his vocabulary.
He extended a second claw.“Two. We drive the Bluebell out of town and…” He extended a third claw. “… three. We save our homes from being wrecked and our butts from being evicted. What do you say?”
I had to hand it to him. It sounded like a good scheme. I only saw one flaw.“How are we going to drive La Bluebell out of Brookridge?”
He deflated a little.“That’s… something we need to think about.”
“Let’s first find out more about her, shall we?” I suggested. “We can figure out the rest as we go along.” I still thought the girl was an enemy spy but since I didn’t want to blow Stevie’s bubble, I refrained from saying so.
“Great scheme!” he said.
And it was as we sat congratulating one another on a fine piece of espionage work, that the door suddenly opened and Sam walked in.
17
Sam the Night Crawler
I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed how cats have these soft pads under their paws? You have? Then you probably also know what they’re there for. Not to hurt ourselves when we land? Whoever gave you that idea? No, the reason we have those nifty little pink cushions is so we can quickly and quietlysneak out of the room whenever a human catches us doing something we’re not supposed to. That’s why, when Sam suddenly surprised us by bursting into his study, we were safely behind the gas stove before he so much as had an inkling we were ever there.