Purrfect Cut

Chapter 25

We’d been wandering around the petting zoo for a while, absolutely lost, I don’t mind confessing. The problem with being locked up and then escaping by the skin of your teeth is that you’re so pumped up on adrenaline that you don’t know which way is up or down. We were so elated to be out of our temporary prison that we’d simply been trucking along, without really looking which way we were going. And we were still pottering about the zoo when suddenly loud voices greeted us. They sounded awfully familiar.

“No, I’m telling you, Max would never be seen dead in a pigsty,” a female voice said.

“And I’m telling you that Max loves all creatures great and small, so this petting zoo is exactly where we’ll find him and Dooley.”

“Hey, isn’t that Harriet?” asked Dooley.

“And Brutus!”

We made for the voices, and when we emerged from a bush found ourselves gazing at a wondrous scene: Harriet and Brutus, sitting next to a very sizable pig!

The pig was munching on something located in a trough, while Harriet and Brutus were arguing back and forth about the strategy they needed to employ to find me and Dooley.

“You guys!” I cried as we burst onto the peculiar scene. “You found us!”

“Max! Dooley!” yelled Harriet, and streaked forward and actually pushed her wet nose into my neck, overjoyed to see me. Displaying affection has never been Harriet’s strong suit and it surprised me to see so much of it now.

“Hey, Dooley, old buddy,” said Brutus with a grin.

“How did you find us?” asked Dooley.

“Well, you found us,” said Brutus, making a good point, “so you tell me.”

“Can you guys take this meeting elsewhere?” suddenly spoke the pig in a deep rumbling voice. “You’re interrupting a perfectly good meal.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. Pig,” said Dooley. “I apologize for the intrusion.”

“Yeah, it’s okay,” said the pig. “Just don’t do it again, will you?”

“Of course,” I said.

We moved away from the pigpen and soon found ourselves wandering near a small duck pond. “So what happened?” asked Harriet.

“Oh, we’ve been hanging out all day in a chicken coop,” said Dooley.

“See?!” said Brutus, giving Harriet a light shove. “What did I tell you?”

“The chicken had fled the scene, you see. Her name was Samson,” Dooley continued the narrative. “But then we got tired of eating chicken feed, and so we went in search of something tastier and that’s when we met Pussy.”

In a few words, Dooley and I told the tale of meeting Pussy, attending the conference from the confines of Leo’s secret control room, and being locked up and threatened with death by lethal claw by Leonora Flake, Chris Cross and the very scary Tank. Harriet and Brutus were hanging on our every word.

“So they were going to kill you?” asked Harriet. “Actually kill you dead?”

“Yeah, and bury us in a very deep grave,” said Dooley.

“Gruesome,” said Brutus, duly impressed by our harrowing adventure.

“These are not very nice people,” said Dooley. “And Leo’s mother is the worst of the bunch.”

“Is she behind the whole thing?” asked Brutus.

“You mean did she kill her son?” I said. “That wouldn’t surprise me.”

“If she can kill a cat, she can kill a human,” said Dooley with iron logic.

“She’s mean,” I agreed. “Capable of just about anything.”

Just then, we heard screams and shouts coming from the other side of the pond, and to my surprise it was the same woman we’d been verbally filleting, and who seemed to have landed herself in hot water herself now. Though I should probably say cold water, for as a rule duck ponds are not hot tubs.

“It’s Mrs. Flake,” I said as we hurried over to where the screams seemed to be coming from. And just as we reached the spot, the woman was going under for the third time, and the only thing that remained were bubbles reaching the surface. Then all was quiet as the watery grave closed above her head…

“We have to save her!” said Harriet.

“Yeah, but how?” I said. Cats, to their detriment, are not equipped with the type of accessories that allow for a waterlogged existence: webbed toes and gills and such. Even if we braved all and jumped into the water, what good would it do? We’d probably perish ourselves, and end up at the bottom.

Then Dooley suddenly started yelling his head off. “Heeeeelp!” he screamed. “Heeeeeeelp us!”

I felt bad for the kid. Obviously the day’s many brushes with danger and peril had gotten to him, and now he’d lost what little sanity he had left.

Soon, though, a cow waddled up to take a closer look.

“What’s going on?” she asked in her customary amiable way.

“Somebody’s drowning!” Dooley said. “You have to help her!”

“Ooh, that’s a job for Francis,” she said, then displaced a wad of grass from one cheek to the other and hollered, “Francis! We’ve got a jumper!”

Francis the donkey came toddling up, and directed a curious look at the pond. “No can do,” he said after a moment’s deliberation. “Too deep for me, I’m afraid. But maybe Streaker can handle it. Streaker! Come here a minute, will ya?”

Streaker the horse came cantering up. “Yes? Yes?” she said, eager for any fate. It was obvious that here was a horse dying to get some serious action.

“Jumper,” said Francis, indicating the pond with his hoof.

“Ooh, wee!” said Streaker happily, and jumped headfirst into the pond!

Moments later she returned grabbing the old lady between her large teeth, then proceeded to drag her onto the shore!

“Way to go, Streaker,” said Brutus with admiration.

“Now we need to do CPR,” said Dooley, happy that his plan was working but still not fully satisfied with the outcome.

“CPR?” asked Streaker eagerly. “What is CPR? Can I do it? Please?”

“Thump her chest and then put your lips on hers,” said Brutus, “and blow.”

“Thump, lips and blow,” said Streaker excitedly. “I can do it.”

“Let me handle this, fellas,” said the pig, who’d joined the festivities. “I have the build for this kind of thing.” And so she heaved herself down on the woman’s chest for a moment, then put her lips to Leonora’s and blew hard.

“Nothing doing,” she said after a moment. “Looks dead to me.”

“Well, don’t you just stand there!” Francis told two sheep who’d come shambling up. “You perform heart massage while Empress does her thing.”

The pig, whose name appeared to be Empress, gave a curt nod of agreement, and soon the sheep showed a side of themselves I’d rarely seen in the Discovery Channel’s nature movies: they gently put their front hooves on the woman’s chest and started performing heart massage while Empress kept blowing into the woman’s mouth.

“Let me do it!” said Streaker. “I can do it! Let me do it!”

“Shush,” said Francis, who seemed to be the donkey in charge. “Empress is a natural. She’ll pull this off—just you wait and see.”

And then, suddenly, a miracle! The corpse came to life again with a start: first she spewed out a stream of mucky pond scum, and then she actually started sputtering and coughing. The ducks, who’d been awakened by all this activity, waddled up onto the shore, took one look at the drowning victim, then waddled off again. They obviously had no sympathy for landlubbers.

“Yesss!” said Francis. “We did it, you guys. She’s saved!”

“How are you doing, ma’am?” inquired Empress politely. “Anything else I can help you with? I have some nice slop in my trough you’re welcome to.”

Mrs. Flake stared at the pig with a horrified expression on her face. Unfortunately the pig mistook the look she gave her for a cry for help, and so put her lips to Mrs. Flake’s again, and blew some more hot air into her lungs.

“Blech!” the woman uttered curtly, and frantically wiped her lips. And then she threw up some more pond scum, showing us how alive she really was.

“A success story, you guys,” said the cow happily.

“A miracle,” said one of the sheep, and bleated its delight.

“Teamwork!” said Francis the donkey.

“Is there anyone else in the water?” asked Streaker. “A man? A girl? A boy? I can get them for you! I can do it—I swear! I can do it!”

“You saved me?” Mrs. Flake asked, glancing around at the nativity scene.

“Yup, we sure did,” said a goat, who’d only now joined the gang.

Two rabbits came hopping up. “What’s going on? Did we miss the party?”

“If you like I’ll jump in and save you all over again!” Streaker cried excitedly.

“It’s all right, Streaker,” said Francis. “You did good.”

“I know I did—and I can do it again in a flash!”

Mrs. Flake now stared at the four of us, seated in a neat row: Dooley, yours truly, Harriet and Brutus.

“You saved me?” she asked again. “After everything I did to you?”

“Oh, well,” I said. “We don’t like to hold a grudge.”

“Yeah, we’re all human, after all,” said Dooley.

“Forgive and forget and all that,” added Brutus.

And then, to my surprise, Leo’s mother actually burst into tears!

“She’s probably just realized she lost her wheelchair,” said Dooley.

“A wheelchair?” asked Streaker. “Where is it? Where! Tell me!”

“Still in the pond,” I said. “Must have sunk to the bottom by now.”

“Hop in, Streak. Fetch,” said Francis with an indulgent smile.

“I’m on it!” Streaker cried, and jumped into the pond. Moments later she came out with the wheelchair clasped between her teeth. “Here you go, ma’am!” she said as she deposited the contraption next to the old lady.

The wheelchair was covered in muck and looked a little worse for wear.

“Some love from the high-pressure hose and it’s as good as new,” said Francis, who’d noticed the same.

“Oh, I’m such a horrible person,” said Mrs. Flake, shaking her head mournfully. “I killed my own son!”

“You did?” I said, surprised at this impromptu confession.

“He was doing such a lousy job with the company and I had a feeling he was dragging us all down and if I didn’t get rid of him I’d go down with the ship. I own thirty percent of the company, and my shares were going to be worthless if Leo kept this up—or at least that’s what my advisors told me.”

“Killing your own son, huh? That wasn’t very nice of you,” grunted Francis.

“Can she understand what we’re saying?” asked Harriet.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “But I guess she feels like confessing.”

“She almost died,” said Francis. “It’s a pivotal moment for her.”

“I didn’t kill him myself, of course,” Leonora said now. “I told my nurse to do it for me. I could never have held the knife that took my son’s life. Besides, I was persona non grata at the chateau. But Helga wasn’t. She simply swapped shifts with one of Leo’s nurses and gave Gabe a sedative. She then planted the knife in his hands and made sure he was at the scene just as the maid walked in. The whole thing was arranged like clockwork. Helga is German, you see,” she said, as if this explained everything. “She’s been with me for so long she’s like a daughter to me. She’d do everything for me. So when I told her I needed to get rid of my boy, she immediately understood and arranged the whole thing with impeccable precision and efficiency.”

“So she was the one who plunged the knife into your son’s chest?” I asked.

“It was a little hard to juggle all the different elements, of course,” Mrs. Flake went on. “But I knew for a fact that my son is a stickler for punctuality, and liked his maid to wake him up every morning at seven o’clock on the dot. So all Helga had to do was make sure that Gabe was standing there, knife in hand, at seven o’clock sharp, and the deal was done. It wasn’t hard. The hard part, she later told me, was to drive that knife into his heart. She hit bone, you see, and since she only had a very short window of time, she got a little nervous at some point. Especially since my son woke up at that moment and started to scream. She managed in the end, though. It all worked out fine.”

“Define fine,” mumbled Brutus.

“We should probably call the police,” said Dooley.

“Take out your phone, Dooley,” said Harriet. “I forgot mine at the house.”

Dooley actually reached around, before realizing Harriet was playing a little joke on him. “Oh, ha ha,” he said. “You don’t have a phone, do you?”

“No, I don’t. And neither do you.”

“Oh, no,” said Leonora, burying her face in her hands. “What have I done?”

All the animals were quiet as they listened to the woman unburdening her soul. It wasn’t a pleasant tale to hear, and I’m sorry to say I didn’t feel a lot of compassion for Mrs. Flake. The only thing I was sorry about was that we didn’t have anyone to witness her confession, for as you may or may not know, the word of a cat, or a cow, a pig, a horse, a donkey or even a sheep, goat or rabbit, for that matter, doesn’t carry a lot of weight in a court of law.

And for a moment I feared that this whole exercise was in vain, when suddenly two people popped up from a nearby bush, one of them holding a camera, the other a microphone, and abruptly descended on the scene.

“Are you sorry now, Mrs. Flake, that you gave the order to murder your son?” asked the woman, whose eyes were glittering with excitement.

Leo’s mom stared at the woman, then at the camera, then broke down into a flood of tears again.

Yep. The jig was up.