“Oh, don’t look so glum,” said Harriet.
“You would look glum if you were about to be kicked out of your home.”
“Brutus won’t kick you out of your home.”
“He will, too. First he kicked me out of the park, now he’ll kick me out of my house. The cat’s a genuine natural born bully.”
“He’s not. He’s simply… a natural born leader.”
“And what does that make me? A natural born loser?”
Harriet merely grinned.
“Oh, I can see what’s going on here,” I said. “Odelia is hooking up with hot new cop, and you’re hooking up with hot new cat. Is that it?”
She shrugged and sashayed in the direction of the pet door. “Time for my beauty nap, boys. See you later.” And with a swish of her tail, she gracefully disappeared through the door and was gone, leaving me alone with Dooley.
“So who’s this Dr. Phil?” Dooley asked after a pregnant pause.
“Oh… just go away, Dooley.”
Chapter 3
I resisted the temptation to take a long nap on my favorite blanket, the one Odelia had put on the couch to protect it from my habit of digging my nails into any soft tissue I encountered. I needed to check out this cop character first. If this guy decided to put the moves on my human and foist Brutus on me, I needed to stop him dead in his tracks before that happened.
So I bade goodbye to Dooley and waddled out the pet door and into the backyard. After sniffing at a couple of trees, just to make sure no one had dared trespass on my domain, I set out along the road, slowly making my way into town. It didn’t take me long to reach the police station, which was just around the corner. I knew it as the place where cops liked to gather to snack on glazed donuts and coffee before starting their job of catching bad humans.
Not that there are a lot of bad humans in Hampton Cove. In fact it’s probably the most peaceful town on the North Shore. Apart from your occasional rowdy tourist collapsing on the beach or wrapping his car around a tree, it’s a pretty peaceful little town, and we like to keep it that way.
I hurried across the road, narrowly being missed by a speeding car, past the doctor’s office where Odelia’s dad Tex works, and the library, where her mom works as a librarian, and finally reached town square, with the giant clock the mayor had installed a couple of years ago and which has proved such a hit with locals and tourists alike, and then I was homing in on the police station. A squat one-story building, it sported the letters ‘Hampton Cove Police Department’ above the entrance. Behind those double doors, Dolores sat, presiding over the vestibule and always ready to take note of any complaint the citizenry might have. Since technically I wasn’t part of the citizenry, and couldn’t very well waltz in through the front door, I walked around back instead, and headed straight for the window of Chief Alec’s office, where I’d picked up many a private conversation over the years.
I hopped up onto the windowsill and once again praised Chief Alec’s good sense always to leave the window open a crack. Someone must have told him once that fresh air was good for him, and I could only agree wholeheartedly.
One peek inside the office of the good chief told me that I’d hit the jackpot. He was in there with a hunkish male I’d never seen before. His long limbs stretched out languidly, his athletic body casually draped across the chair, he was listening to Chief Alec intently. He was definitely a handsome guy. He had one of those square jaws and chiseled faces that were all the rage with the ancient Greeks. A lock of dark brown hair dangled down his brow, his hair a little too long for a cop, which gave him a rebellious look.
His white cotton shirt was stretched taut over bulging chest muscles, and his arms were all biceps and triceps and his belly was perfectly flat, unlike the beer belly Chief Alec had going for himself. If I’d had to venture a guess, I’d have pegged the guy in his early thirties, and never had the words ‘ruggedly handsome’ been a better description for any human male. Odelia was definitely in trouble, if my limited experience was anything to go on.
I hunkered down and pricked up my ears, hoping to find confirmation that this guy was, indeed, Chase Kingsley, and not simply a tourist filing a complaint about a stolen wallet, or a traveling salesman badgering the chief.
“So what do we know so far?” the guy was saying.
“I just called the ME’s office,” said Chief Alec, “and they told me they’re expecting the results from the autopsy sometime this morning.”
The chief, a mainstay in this town for over thirty years, was the embodiment of law and order. He was also a very large man, easily twice as big as the man seated across from him. Everyone knew him as a kind-hearted, fair-minded police officer, never one to throw his weight around. He liked to settle disputes with a smile and a kindly word, ever the courteous diplomat.
And then it dawned on me. Autopsy? Had someone died? I turned my antennae-like ears toward the window, my eyes narrowed in concentration.
“Good thing Adele Pun found the body. The poor guy might never have been found otherwise,” said the one I assumed was Chase Kingsley.
“You’re right about that, Chase,” grunted the chief.
Bingo! I stared at Brutus’s owner, and couldn’t resist uttering a growl.
“That body was never meant to be found, and if the Pun woman hadn’t gone snooping around, the killer would have pulled off the perfect crime.”
I blinked. Killer? Crime? Oh. My. God. They were talking murder!
“So how did Adele Pun discover the body?” asked Chase.
The chief barked a curt, humorless laugh. “Well, that’s a writer for you, Chase. They will go sticking their noses where they don’t belong.”
At this, the chief directed a long, lingering look at me, and I froze. Not that I minded too much. Chief Alec was Odelia’s uncle on her mother’s side, after all, and I was pretty sure he was aware of his sister and niece’s secret.
He looked away again, and continued his story. “She says she was taking a dump a couple of days ago and suddenly started wondering where the product of her bowel movements went. Curious, she went and got herself a flashlight, to examine the bottom of the well, and shone it down into the abyss where generations of Hampton Covians have done their thing.”
“You should have been a poet, Chief,” remarked Chase dryly.
“Thank you. Imagine her surprise when she discovered a laptop sticking out of the tranquil surface of the brown pool below. Being a writer, holed up at a writer’s lodge, she naturally wondered what that laptop was doing there.”
Chase made a disgusted face. “Don’t tell me. She retrieved the laptop?”
The chief grinned. “She most certainly did. Though I have no idea how she did it. I imagine she used a shovel or a rake or something. Then she put the garden hose on it and dumped it into a bucket of salt for three days.”
“And what? It booted up?”
“It sure did. Just goes to show those cheap Korean laptops are a lot sturdier than you’d give them credit for. Reminds me never to spend two thousand bucks on a computer ever again.”
“And that’s how she discovered it was Paulo Frey’s laptop.”
“Yes, sir. None other than the elusive Mr. Frey.”
“The missing writer.”
“The missing writer,” the chief agreed.
I almost fell off the sill at this point. Paulo Frey was a famous novelist who’d gone missing some time last year. He’d been in the habit of renting the Writer’s Lodge once a year, a fixed-up old cabin in the woods on the edge of Hampton Cove. It was popular with writers, as there were no distractions out there, and they could work on their masterpieces undisturbed. There was even an old-fashioned outhouse, which for some reason seemed to appeal to the writing classes. Many a writer confessed they got their best ideas while seated on the john and allowing nature to run its course. Weird but true.