The Mysteries of Max: Books 25-27

Chapter 25

As we walked out of the house, to go for our midnight stroll, strange noises drew our attention to the next-door backyard. And even though we are by no means guard dogs, we decided to go and have a look anyway. We may not be watchdogs but we are very, very curious, in case you hadn’t noticed.

“Do you think it’s burglars, Max?” asked Dooley when we set paw into the backyard belonging to Marge and Tex. The noise was coming from the garden shed, and for a moment I thought that Dooley just might be right. Then again, what burglar would target a garden shed? Unless hoping to fetch a nice price for a bunch of gardening tools that have seen better days and a lawnmower that has been in service for so long it will fetch more when sold as an antique than an actual mower.

But still we approached the shed, anxious to find out what was going on. When we took a peek inside, we discovered to our surprise that it was none other than Tex who was making all the noise. He was holding up a painting of a garden gnome for some reason, positioning it here and there, apparently looking for the perfect place to put it.

The best place to put it, I could have told him, was six feet under, although subjecting moles and earthworms and other creatures of the freshly dug soil to the hideousness of the painting would probably be considered cruelty to animals so that was out, too.

I’d never understood Tex’s obsession with gnomes, and this was taking his love for all things garden troll to new and increasingly worrisome heights.

“What is he doing, Max?” asked Dooley.

“I think he’s looking for a place to hang up his painting,” I said.

“Did he paint it himself, you think?”

“Odelia told me he bought it off a guy named Jerome Metzgall, who specializes in gnome art. He paid twenty-five thousand dollars for it and now Marge is upset with him.”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars is a lot of money for a painting,” said Dooley.

“It is. Tex reckons it’s an investment, and he’ll double his money in due course.”

“It’s not a very nice painting though is it, Max?”

“No, it’s not,” I agreed.

“So that’s a gnome?”

“Yeah, Tex seems to have a thing for gnomes lately.”

“Poor Marge,” said Dooley, taking the words right out of my mouth.

We decided to leave Tex to it. We had an appointment at the park for cat choir, and we didn’t want to be late. Shanille, cat choir’s conductor, hates it when cats are late, and we don’t want to provoke her ire.

So we took a late-night stroll along the roads and pathways that crisscross our fair town, and soon were inhaling that bracing ocean air the Hamptons is so rightly famous for. The park is close to the ocean. In fact you can walk from the park down to the beach in next to no time. Not that we’d ever do that. Cats are not all that fond of the ocean, you see—or water in general, I should probably add. Water makes you wet, and we hate wet.

We arrived at the park and found it already teeming with fellow felines. Harriet and Brutus had arrived, of course, and so had Shanille, and Kingman, Wilbur Vickery’s cat, but also Buster, the barber’s Maine Coon, and many other friends and acquaintances. In fact it isn’t too much to say that the feline population of Hampton Cove is one big family. I almost said a big happy family, but since that isn’t always the case, I won’t.

“Did you hear what happened this afternoon?” asked Kingman the moment he clapped eyes on us. “My human caught two serial killers!”

“They’re not exactly serial killers,” I said. “Or even regular killers. They’re thieves.”

“Well, they’re bad news anyway, and Wilbur caught them.”

“The way I heard the story Wilbur accidentally stepped in front of the crooks as they were running along the sidewalk,” I said. “So it’s not that he actually caught them. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Or the right place at the right time,” Dooley said.

“That, too,” I said.

“I don’t care how you want to tell the story,” said Kingman. “I’m still sticking to my version of the truth.” He’d spotted another cat—a female one, of course—and I could hear him tell her the same story he was probably going to tell cats all night, and all the nights to come: “My human caught two serial killers. Caught them red-handed!”

“My human was there, too,” said Shanille. “Father Reilly happened to step out and got in the way. They all tumbled to the ground and by the time he knew what was happening, Chief Alec had already made the arrest.”

“Well, good riddance,” I said. “Let’s hope this spate of burglaries will now finally be over and done with.”

“Of course it will be over and done with,” said Harriet, who’d also joined the conversation. “We caught the killer, Brutus and I. Isn’t that right, baby boo?”

“Yeah, we caught the bad guys,” said Brutus.

“So many people caught the bad guys,” said Dooley admiringly. “They really didn’t stand a chance, did they?”

I smiled at this. He was right. But then of course success has many fathers—or mothers—and failure none.

Still, it was time to give credit where credit was due. “I think you guys did a great job,” I said therefore. “And Hampton Cove is a safer, better place because of it.”

“Why, thanks, Max,” said Harriet, pleasantly surprised. “And I still haven’t thanked you properly for saving us from that monstrous device.”

“Monstrous device?” asked Shanille. “What monstrous device?”

“A Roomba,” I said. “You know, one of those vacuum cleaners that are fully automated.”

“It was terrible,” said Harriet. “I thought for sure it was going to kill us.”

“Max jumped on top of it and destroyed it,” Dooley said. “He saved our lives.”

“I could have jumped on top of it and it wouldn’t have put a dent in the thing. It needed a fat cat like Max to do real damage,” said Brutus, quite nastily, too, I thought.

“It’s not my weight that made me successful,” I pointed out, “but my technique.”

“Yeah, you have to know where to jump, boogie bear,” said Harriet. “And Max must have studied the intricacies of the machine long enough to know its weaknesses and to know exactly where he should land to put it out of commission. Isn’t that right, Max?”

“Oh, sure,” I said, though of course I’d simply jumped the thing and, like Brutus had indicated, my sheer big-bonedness had done the rest. Though I’d never admit it—ever.

I could tell that Brutus wasn’t happy, though.

“Cheer up,” I said, clapping him on the back. “The next Roomba is yours to tackle.”

“There won’t be another Roomba,” he grumbled. “I heard Marge tell Odelia she wasn’t buying a second one.”

“Father Reilly has a Roomba,” said Shanille now, surprising us all. “I love it.”

I blinked. “Love it?” I asked. “How can you love a Roomba?”

“It’s great fun,” she said with a shrug. “He uses it to clean the church, and I like to ride it from time to time. Very entertaining.” And with a light laugh, she assumed the position of choir director and raised her voice. “Gather around, cats! Rehearsal is about to start!”

“She likes the Roomba,” said Harriet, flabbergasted. “Shanille really is a weird one.”

“Maybe she’s a terminator herself?” Dooley suggested. And for the rest of choir practice he didn’t let her out of his sight, just in case she turned out to be a killer robot from the future.

I felt a little bad now. Maybe I shouldn’t have destroyed the thing. Now what was Odelia going to do about her dust bunnies?