Purrfect Secret

Chapter 17

Brutus watched as Harriet watched Max who was watching Dooley study a brownish smear on the wall. Next to him, Milo suddenly emerged, like a genie from a lamp, and tsk-tsked mildly.

“What’s going on?” asked Brutus. He’d only been away for an hour but it felt more like a day. He’d popped around the corner to have a sniff at his favorite tree, only to discover three tomcats and two queens had tried to claim it as their own. To trump them all, he’d given the tree a rub and then, to finish things off, had sprayed it for good measure.

“It’s a sad story, isn’t it?” said Milo.

“What is?” asked Brutus.

“Harriet. She’s gone full nympho.”

He stared at Milo, goggle-eyed. “Full nympho? What are you talking about?”

“You do know what a nymphomaniac is, don’t you, Brutus?” asked Milo kindly.

“Um… a female who likes… nookie?”

“A female who has an uncontrollable or excessive sexual desire.”

He frowned at the cat. “And you’re telling me Harriet is… that?”

Milo nodded mournfully. “Alas. She’s always had a touch of nymphomania but lately she’s gone full nympho, I’m afraid. She craves, Brutus—and it would appear you no longer have what it takes to satisfy those powerful cravings.”

He looked back to Harriet, who was indeed looking at Max with the kind of fervor he hadn’t noticed in her before. Almost like a mixture of repulsion and… rapt fascination.

“She can’t possibly be in love with Max!” he said, thinking the idea laughable.

“She’s not in love with Max. She craves him—like she craves any male. Look at her. See how she’s yearning? How she’s gobbling him up with her eyes? Devouring him?”

He did see, and he didn’t like it. Time to put a stop to this nonsense. But then he noticed he’d stepped into a poop smear. Yuck! “What’s up with this crap?!” he cried.

“I’m afraid Dooley’s gone mad. It was bound to happen sooner or later. His is a mind that was going to become unhinged at some point in time. Soon he’ll start covering himself in feces and it’s only a matter of time before he becomes violent.”

“Violent?”

“Out of control. He’ll start attacking cats willy-nilly. Scratching, biting, trying to gouge out the eyes of any cat he considers a threat. When that happens there will be no alternative but to have him put down, I’m afraid.”

Brutus shivered. No cat likes to contemplate having to be put down. In fact each time Odelia took them to the vet, Brutus couldn’t help feeling this could very well be the last time. And when Vena took out those syringes she seemed to like so much, that liquid she filled them with could very well be some sort of little-known poison designed to euthanize.

“So Harriet wants to jump Max’s bones and Dooley has lost his marbles and is about to turn rabid. Anything else I should know about?” he asked, shaking his head.

“I’m afraid there is, Brutus. Have you seen the look on Max’s face?”

He had. The otherwise tame feline looked pissed off. “He looks… angry.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” said Milo. “Max has just gotten the results back from that test.”

“What test?”

“The test Odelia had Vena run on him.”

“Oh.” He didn’t know nothing about no test but wasn’t prepared to admit it. Sometimes stuff happened around here that nobody bothered to tell him about. Probably because he was the last acquisition—the last one to join Odelia’s merry band of pets. With the exception of Milo, of course, but then he wasn’t a fixture but a drifter passing through.

“I’m afraid the results of the test were conclusive.”

“What did the results say?”

Milo took a deep breath. “Max is your brother, Brutus.”

“What?!”

“I’m afraid so. The test doesn’t lie. And not only that, Harriet is your aunt.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me? How did this happen?”

Milo placed a paw on Brutus’s shoulder. “And—are you ready for this?”

“Ready for what?” What could be worse than what this cat had already told him?

“Dooley… is your son.”

From the shock, Brutus sank through his paws and dropped heavily onto the floor. For a moment, he merely stared mutely before him, then he finally managed to drag his head up and say, “Tell me all, Milo. Don’t hold anything back.”

And Milo did, and happily so. “See, the thing is that when your and Max’s mother was very young, she had an affair with Harriet’s brother, which resulted in the litter that contained you and which was subsequently rejected by the cat your mother had been seeing before the affair. Your mother went on to have Max, who ended up growing up in a warm nest, while you, the illegitimate spawn of a doomed affair, were rejected and left to die.”

“I was left to die?” asked Brutus, dazed. This was the first he ever heard of this.

“You grew up without a mother, without a father, unloved, unwanted, and forced to fend for yourself on the mean streets of New York, where a cat’s life is worth nothing.”

Odd. He couldn’t remember these mean streets. He liked the story, though. It held a strange kind of fascination. Almost like the soap operas Granny liked to watch. “Go on.”

“You became strong—because you had to be strong to survive. You became… Brutus.”

“You mean I wasn’t always Brutus?”

“Your mother christened you Whiskers.”

Ugh. “What a dumb-ass name.”

“Right? You’re a self-made cat, Brutus. You even adopted a new name. To better indicate the kind of cat you’d become. Tough. Butch. A real cat’s cat. Top of the heap.”

He liked this story better and better. He was tough. And he was a cat’s cat. The only thing he didn’t like was the part about him being Dooley’s dad. He watched as Dooley sniffed his own poop now and shook his head. No way was he that sad dude’s dad. Milo must have sensed his discomfort, for he said, “If it’s any consolation, Dooley’s mother passed on a long time ago, Brutus.” He quickly crossed himself. “May she rest in peace.”

“Who was she?”

“Oh, just some bimbo you met on those mean streets of New York. You wouldn’t remember her. Just one of the many, many—many—notches on your collar.”

It was true. He’d had a few conquests in his time—and Milo was right. He didn’t remember any cat he ever met and knocked up on those mean streets—he didn’t even remember those mean streets. Or New York. “So how did Dooley end up in Hampton Cove?”

“That’s a very interesting story.”

But the story would have to wait for another time, for at that exact moment Harriet suddenly made a pass at Max and that was something Brutus could not allow to happen!