“Betty who?”
“Forget about it.”
“Is she Bob the butcher’s fine feline?”
“No, she is not,” I said rather more fiercely than I should have.
“Oh. All right.”
Just my luck, I thought, that Dana would saddle me up with the biggest boob this side of Brookridge.
“I resent that,” the boob now said.
I started. He couldn’t have heard what I just thought? “What?”
“That wisecrack about me being the biggest boob this side of Brookridge,” he said, sounding wounded. “I may be a boob but I’m sure there are bigger boobs out there.”
“D-did you hear that?”
He eyed me censoriously.“Nothing wrong with my ears, you know.”
“But I didn’t speak.”
“Sure you did.”
“No, I didn’t. It was just a thought.”
“That’s all right. I forgive you.”
“A thought that I didn’t say out loud,” I said with some exasperation.
Once again he eyed me dubiously.“Look, I may not be the smartest cat on the block, but that’s no reason to keep joshing me.”
“I’m not joshing you. Here, watch my lips.”
“Why would I want to watch your… Hey!” He now stared at me, wide-eyed, as if he’d seen the ghost of Lucy Knicx, for I’d just formulated the thought that a right-winged chicken’s right breast was probably meatier than its left breast due to the muscular development in the favored limb.
“How do you know I was thinking about chicken breasts?” he said, somewhat flabbergasted. Then a second thought crushed into the first. “And why can I hear you even though your lips aren’t moving?”
I put a comforting paw on his shoulder.“Buddy, I think we’re in for a world of weirdness. You and I are now able to read minds.”
He shrugged off my paw and licked he spot where it’d been placed. “Read minds? Are you nuts? And stop doing that!”
I had just thought that if I was nuts, so was Stevie.“I’m not doing anything. I’m just thinking.”
“Then don’t!”
Well, you know how it is. Tell someone not to think about pink elephants, and the thought will spring up like lilies of the valley come springtime. For a moment silent reigned while thousands of thoughts simultaneously crashed into my consciousness, 50 percent mine and the other half Stevie’s. We both groaned an agonized groan as our synapses fired on all cylinders.
“It’s the FSA,” I finally managed to say over the din, and instantly the mental noise died down. “Hey, when I speak I don’t think.”
He looked at me keenly.“I notice. It’s as if the volume knob is suddenly turned all the way down.”
“Looks like the trick is to keep talking,” I said.
“Not a problem for me,” he said, bright-eyed.
“So Dana wasn’t pulling my leg when she fed me all that stuff about planting thoughts in humans,” I mused.
“We can plant thoughts in humans?” Stevie said with sudden enthusiasm.
“Be forewarned, Agent Steve,” I said sternly. “Our powers are given us to aid and protect the human race, not induce them to provide us with more and better kibble.”
“Oh, all right,” muttered Stevie. “Though if I could just plant one teensiest tiniest suggestion that he switch brands? He’s been buying me the same brand of chicken for three years now, and I’d give my right paw to have a change of menu once in a while. I mean, how long can you keep eating the same thing over and over and over—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, interrupting what promised to be a lengthy harangue about the pros and cons of the different brands of cat food. “I wonder who that call came from…”
“Can’t you go upstairs and plant a thought in Sam’s head that he needs to give you the name of his correspondent?” suggested Stevie.
It was not a bad idea, I mused.
“Thanks,” said Stevie. “I do get them from time to time.”
Dang, if my fellow agent was going to read my mind the whole time, there was nothing I’d be able to keep a secret from him anymore. Not that I had such big secrets to hide, but one does like to harbor one’s little mysteries.
“Don’t worry,” he said, as if he’d read my mind, which he had. “I won’t tell a soul.” And he gave me a fat wink that almost made me slap him over the head.
19
Dreams
Before we snuck upstairs to perform our FSA brand of brain surgery on Father Sam and discover all his secrets, I quickly perused the Murder in the Park script lying on the priest’s desk for any clues pertaining to the case. What I was most curious about was the Zoe Huckleberry-Jack Mackintosh scene I’d been a prime witness to.
As I’d suspected, the scene didn’t end with a large butcher’s knife being strategically placed between the Huckleberry shoulder blades but rather with a prolonged kissing sequence that would have all the female audience members heave with delight. The bepimpled murderer had definitely missed out on a good thing.
The one thing conspicuously missing from the screenplay was any reference to this mysterious Bluebell, whoever of whatever it might be.
I closed the script with a frown, now wondering who would replace Lucy Knicx in the play, which I knew to premiere in one week if all went well.
“I can tell you that,” said Stevie, who had been closely following my thought processes. “Jamie Burrow from next door was Lucy Knicx’s understudy, so it stands to reason she’ll take over as Zoe whatsername.”
“Huckleberry,” I said automatically. “You know this Burrow girl?”
Stevie, who’d sat licking his belly—you don’t retain that snowy-white complexion without a goodish amount of grooming—inclined his red-whiskered head. “Sure I do. Comes round here all the time. She used to be a choirgirl and an acolyte when she was little.” He grinned. “She’s not so little anymore, though. Quite the catch, apparently. Not that I would know about these things,” he quickly added. “But as the parish cat one hears rumors, doesn’t one?”
“One certainly does,” I assented, making a mental note about Jamie Burrow’s essential catchness.
Since Father Sam had left the study door open, we didn’t have any walls to scale or acrobatic feats to perform to reach his upstairs bedroom and sneak in. We both took a seat on the bedside mat and stared up at the figure lying not three feet away. Apart from the fact that Sam was softly snoring and that he drooled in his sleep, at first glance there wasn’t much information to glean. I actually didn’t catch a single thought at first.
“Are you picking up anything?” I thought.
“Not a peep,” Stevie thought. “No, wait. He’s thinking something. A red clown is jumping through a yellow hoop and bowing to thunderous applause from a massive audience.”
I was also getting this.“Probably a dream,” I thought. “The clown is probably Sam, and the audience his congregation.”
“Yes,” thought Stevie thoughtfully, “but then why is the clown buck naked all of a sudden and trying desperately to hide behind the podium curtains?”
“Stage fright,” I thought. “Typical Freudian stuff. Father Sam must suffer from some form of stage fright. It can’t be easy standing in front of a congregation every week and having to come up with a fresh sermon each time.”
“I think it’s that play,” thought Stevie. “Ever since they asked him to be the director, he hasn’t been himself. Fretting, moody, jumpy. Like you saw, he even forgets to put out my food.”
“At least it wasn’t a love letter he was writing, but merely the script for the play.”
We watched on as Sam slept. I really wanted to plant a thought in his head but since Dana had summarily dismissed us from the Brookridge Park crime scene without giving any further instructions or even a time table for our FSA agent training, I had no idea how. The mind reading thing was something we’d accidentally stumbled upon, but I had the distinct impression planting thoughts in people’s heads required more skill than we possessed.