“Yeah, don’t be fooled, Dooley,” said Harriet. “A baby is, for all intents and purposes, the worst thing that can happen to a cat. The absolute worst.”

  “Yes, this is war, Dooley. War against a vicious enemy!”

  “And what do you do with an enemy, Dooley?” asked Harriet.

  “Um… you negotiate a peace treaty?” Dooley suggested.

  “No!” Brutus cried. “You attack! No mercy! And that goes for you, too, Max.”

  “It does?” I asked.

  “Yes. This is the time to show what you’re made of.”

  “It is?”

  “Absolutely. It’s either us… or it.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling a little queasy all of a sudden.

  “If it’s a boy we’ll name it Frank,” said Gran.

  “No, let’s name it Jack,” said Scarlett.

  “Let’s put a pin in it for the moment,” said Gran, who was in too good a mood to argue with her best friend. “And if it’s a girl? Franky.”

  “Or Jacky,” Scarlett suggested. “And of course I’ll be the godmother.”

  “Of course,” said Gran good-naturedly.

  In fact they were so busy discussing possible names for the baby that they didn’t seem to be paying all that much attention to potential criminals roaming our streets and engaging in all kinds of nefarious activities. But then suddenly a young man came running out of a house and right in front of the car! He was barefoot and only wearing a pair of boxers. The headlights of the Peugeot lit up his features, which were contorted in a look of sheer and utter panic. Maybe he’d seen a baby.

  “Stop!” he cried as he waved his hands frantically. “Please, stop!”

  And so Gran stopped the car and poked her head out of the window. “What do you think you’re doing, Sonny Jim!” she yelled. “Jumping in front of my car like that.”

  “It’s my friend!” the kid cried. “I think he’s dead!”

  “What friend? What are you talking about?”

  “Todd,” said the kid. “I think he drowned!”

  Chapter 19

  It was as the kid said: when we hurried out of the car and followed him around the back of the house, we came upon a pool, next to which a body was lying. Immediately Scarlett and Gran started CPR, but it was too late. It was clear that Todd Bond had been dead for some time.

  “When did you find him?” asked Gran as Scarlett called the police.

  “Just now,” said the kid, who was seated on a pool lounger, hugging himself and rocking backward and forward, clearly in some kind of a state. “I’d gone to bed, and Todd had decided to stay up, saying there was something he needed to do. I woke up to go to the bathroom, and saw that the pool lights were still on—my parents like us to switch them off when we go to bed. And that’s when I saw him. Floating in the pool. I dragged him out, and tried CPR, but it didn’t work!”

  “Looks like he was in that pool for a while,” said Gran, studying the dead boy.

  A young woman came out of the house, looking sleepy. “What’s going on?” she asked. But then she saw the body of the teenager lying next to the pool, and a look of horror crept up her face. “Oh, my God, Todd!”

  She moved forward, but Scarlett held her back. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing you can do,” she said.

  “What happened!” the girl cried, tears springing to her eyes.

  “I don’t know,” said the kid. “I went to the bathroom ten minutes ago and saw him in the pool.”

  “Oh, my God!” the girl screamed, and looked beside herself with what could only be terrible grief.

  “Who are you?” asked Gran, addressing the girl.

  “She’s my sister Layla,” said the kid.

  “And you are?”

  “Scott,” said the kid. “Scott Walcott.”

  “And you’re a friend of Todd?”

  The kid nodded. “Yeah, we’ve been friends forever.”

  “So what happened?”

  Scott shrugged. “I don’t know. He must have accidentally stumbled into the pool.”

  “And you didn’t hear anything?”

  “No, our bedrooms are on the other side of the house.” He buried his head in his hands. “If I hadn’t gone to the bathroom, we wouldn’t have found him until tomorrow morning. He’d have been in that pool all night.”

  Sirens could be heard, and moments later the police arrived, and an ambulance. It was as we’d surmised, though: nothing could be done for Todd, and the doctor pronounced him dead at the scene, estimating that he’d probably been dead for over an hour.

  Gran glanced at her watch. “It’s two o’clock now. Which means he died around one. What time did you go to bed, Scott?”

  Scott was rubbing his face, while Scarlett had taken his sister inside, so she wouldn’t have to be confronted with the turmoil that followed these terrible events.

  “Um… must have been before midnight. Eleven thirty, eleven forty-five, I think.”

  Chase now arrived, followed by Odelia, and when Odelia saw the dead boy’s body, she grimaced. “Todd Bond,” she said immediately.

  And as Gran brought Chase and Odelia up to date, Dooley and I, along with Brutus and Harriet, decided to head inside, and see if the Walcotts had any pets that could tell us what happened.

  Unfortunately for us they didn’t. No dogs, no cats—not even a goldfish.

  “Odd,” said Dooley as we headed up the stairs. “Most families have at least one pet.”

  “Yeah, not everybody likes pets,” I said. All was quiet upstairs, as the activity was now focused outside and in the downstairs kitchen, where Scarlett had made Layla Walcott some hot tea to drink. We came upon what was presumably the bedroom of Scott, and saw that a second bed had been slept in. “Looks like Scott and Todd were bunking,” I said as we studied the room, which was a big mess.

  Nothing immediately drew our attention, though, and so we moved to the other rooms on the second floor: one was clearly a girl’s bedroom, and a third room was the parents’ room, which was neat and tidy, the bed not slept in.

  “Looks like the parents aren’t home,” I said.

  Which would explain why Todd was staying there and nobody knew about it.

  “So Tilton Bond was right,” said Dooley, “when he told Odelia that Todd was probably staying with a friend.”

  “Yeah, but that still begs the question: how did he drown?”

  “Maybe he couldn’t swim, and he got drunk and stumbled into the pool?” Dooley suggested. “It happens a lot.”

  “It does happen a lot,” I agreed.

  “About the baby, Max,” said Dooley, giving me an anxious look. “What are you…”

  “Trust me, Dooley, I’m not going to do anything to stop Odelia from having a baby. In fact I’m absolutely convinced that if Odelia and Chase do have a baby, they won’t kick us out, like Harriet and Brutus seem to think, but will make other arrangements.”

  “What arrangements?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we’ll all have to go and stay with Gran for a while?”

  “That wouldn’t be so bad.”

  “No, it wouldn’t.” I gave my friend an encouraging smile. “I’m glad to see you’re taking the news so well, Dooley.”

  And he was. Once upon a time he’d been the one to get all in a tizzy over the news that Odelia might be having a baby.

  “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, Max, it is that Odelia is very fond of us, and so is Chase, so I don’t think she’d ever kick us out, whatever Harriet and Brutus think.”

  “No, you’re absolutely right. They wouldn’t kick us out. Baby or no baby. And for what it’s worth—I don’t think there even is a baby. Otherwise Odelia would have told us.”

  We had returned to the bedroom Scott had shared with Todd, and Dooley sighed. “Poor kid.”

  “And poor Rosa. Not only did she lose a husband, now she’s losing a son.”

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs, and moments later Chase arrived, along with Odelia, and followed by Scott. Scott showed them the bedroom, and said, “Todd often stayed over, so when he called me and asked if he could spend the weekend, I figured his mom knew.”

  “He didn’t mention that he hadn’t told her?” Odelia asked.

  “No, he didn’t. Though he did look tense when he arrived.”

  “Tense, how?” asked Chase.

  “Well, Todd has never been the life and soul of the party. He’s always been this serious kid, you know. But now he was even more quiet than usual.”

  “Did he tell you why?”

  “He said he’d had a fight with his stepdad. But that wasn’t so unusual. Todd and his stepdad didn’t get along very well.”

  “They often fought?”

  “Yeah, they did. Todd didn’t like it when his stepdad laid down the rules. He wouldn’t accept that from a man who wasn’t his dad.”

  “What did they fight about?” asked Chase.

  “The usual,” said Scott. “Todd wanted to go to a concert, and Tilton had told him he couldn’t go since his grades weren’t good enough. They had some kind of arrangement that when he was doing well in school, he could go out on the weekends, but not on a school night. But this concert was on a school night, so Todd had hoped to get special permission, just this once, but Tilton put his foot down, and said that he couldn’t go.”

  “He wasn’t doing well in school?”

  “No, lately his grades had slipped.”

  “And why was that, do you know?”

  “He seemed preoccupied.”

  “About what?”

  “He didn’t tell me. I asked, but he said it had something to do with his family.”

  “But he wouldn’t say more?”

  “No, he wouldn’t. I just figured it was his stepdad.”

  “Those fights they had.”

  “Yeah. I was surprised that he was allowed to stay out all weekend, though, especially since last weekend he’d been grounded.”

  “What for?”

  “Bad grades, I thought. Both Tilton and Rosa were very strict about that kind of stuff.”

  “How did Todd end up in your pool, Scott?” asked Odelia.

  “I don’t know, I swear.”

  “Did you have a party?” asked Chase.

  “No, absolutely not. We were going to have a party tomorrow night, and I’d already invited some friends, but tonight was just a regular night.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing special. We just hung out by the pool.”

  “How much did Todd have to drink?”

  “Not much. A couple of beers, maybe. We cooked together, then had dinner out by the pool, then just hung out for a while.” When he saw that Chase didn’t believe him, he said, emphatically, “I’m telling the truth, sir. You can ask Layla. We just hung out and then we played some video games, watched some television, then went to bed.”

  “But not Todd.”

  “No, like I already told that old lady, he wanted to stay up, said he wasn’t tired, and wanted to sit out by the pool for a while.” He shrugged. “I just figured that he needed to clear his mind, you know—with everything that was going on between him and Tilton.”

  “Did you use any drugs, Scott?” asked Chase. “And remember that we will find out.”

  “No, drugs, sir.” When Chase gave him a hard stare, he relented. “Maybe a little weed.”

  “So can you explain to me how Todd ended up dead in your pool, Scott?”

  “I swear I don’t know, sir.”

  “He was a good swimmer?”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “Did he ever talk to you about his real dad?” asked Odelia, trying a different tack.

  “His real dad? No, ma’am, he didn’t. Well, just to say that he was out of the picture, and had been a real scumbag for leaving him and his mom like that.”

  “But he never told you he was in touch with him or anything?”

  “Or that he wanted to look him up?” asked Chase.

  “No, sir. He never mentioned anything like that. Not to me, anyway.” He hesitated, then shook his head decidedly. “When I went to bed he was fine—just fine. So I have absolutely no idea what happened. Not a clue.”

  Chapter 20

  Even though it was the middle of the night, we made our way to the Bonds, to inform them of the death of their son. It was a task that couldn’t be put off until the morning. It was also a task that no one likes to perform, but it had to be done, and so we rode in the car with Chase and Odelia and stood by as they rang the doorbell and waited patiently until Mrs. Bond and her husband appeared, looking sleepy and not a little bit rattled.

  When the police show up on your doorstep in the middle of the night, it is never a good sign. And when you’ve just informed them of your son going missing, even worse.

  I could tell from Rosa’s expression that she already knew that Chase and Odelia weren’t harbingers of glad tidings, and already Tilton Bond was supporting her as Chase said, in somber tones, “I’m sorry to have to tell you that we’ve found Todd, Mrs. Bond.”

  “Oh, no,” said Rosa, clasping a hand to her mouth. “He’s not… dead?”

  “I’m afraid he is.”

  “No!” she cried, then wordlessly opened and closed her lips, even as she staggered back. We all moved inside, and there, seated on the cozy couch in the living room, Odelia and Chase took turns to inform the parents of the boy that Todd had died that night.

  “I knew he hadn’t left for Mexico,” said Tilton softly. “I should have gone looking for him, instead of relying on his good sense to come home again when he felt he should.”

  “But how?” asked Rosa. “How did he die? He was such a good swimmer.”

  “The investigation will have to bear that out,” said Chase.

  Todd’s sister Aisha, awakened by the voices, now also came down and joined us. When she was informed, by her stepdad, of what had happened to her brother, she went very quiet and very, very pale. She just sat there, looking thoroughly shocked, and I think it was understandable that Odelia and Chase left soon after. There was no point asking a lot of questions now, coming so soon upon the terrible tragedy. Todd’s parents and his sister needed to process what had happened, and maybe in the morning questions could be asked, and the investigation begun in earnest as to what had happened to the boy.

  For now, at least, it was time for us to go home, and get some rest.

  I still couldn’t help, though, to ask, while we were driving home, “Odelia? Is it true that you’re having a baby soon?”

  In spite of the tragic events, Odelia smiled. “I knew you were going to ask that, Max. And no, for your information, I’m not pregnant. So you can put all your concerns to rest, and also those of Gran and Scarlett and the others. If or when the time comes, I promise you’ll be the first to know, all right?”

  “Pregnant?” asked Chase.

  “Somehow the cats have gotten it into their nut that I’m having a baby,” said Odelia. “Don’t ask me how.”

  “But you said so,” said Dooley. “When Rosa asked if you were thinking about starting a family, you said, ‘Oh, absolutely.’”

  “And I wasn’t lying, Dooley,” said Odelia. “But that doesn’t mean we’re starting a family right now.”

  “Oh,” said Dooley, and shared a look of relief with me.

  “Look, Harriet and Brutus are going to ask you a lot of questions,” I told my human. “In fact they even told me to do anything that lies in my power to prevent this baby from joining our family, and I think you should probably know that they’re extremely worried.”

  “And why is that, pray tell?” asked Odelia, that look of amusement still playing about her lips.

  “Because they think you’ll kick us out the moment the baby is born,” said Dooley.

  “Oh, please,” said Odelia. “You know I would never do that, don’t you?”

  “But cats and babies don’t mix, Odelia,” said Dooley. “Everybody knows that.”

  “But you’re not like other cats, are you?”

  “We’re not?”

  “No, you’re very special kitties, and I’m sure that if I had a baby, you would never think of harming a hair on that baby’s head, now would you?”

  “No, of course not,” said Dooley, cutting me a look of concern.

  “Harriet and Brutus did seem very anxious,” I said. “And I do mean very, very anxious.”

  “I’ll have to have a talk with them,” said Odelia. “But I can promise you right now, that when Chase and I decide to have a baby…”

  “Which will be soon, if it’s up to me,” Chase added with a slight grin.

  “Very soon,” Odelia confirmed, sharing a knowing glance with her husband, “you can rest assured that you won’t be kicked out. But you have to promise me to take good care of this baby, all right?”

  “Of course,” I said warmly.

  “We will take very good care of the baby, Odelia,” Dooley intoned.

  “But you will talk to Harriet and Brutus, though, won’t you?” I asked once more.

  “Oh, you can bet on it,” she said, and I had the distinct impression that a few home truths were about to be dispensed to that fearsome twosome.

  Chapter 21

  The next morning, we found ourselves the guests of the Bond family once again. Tilton and Rosa sat where they’d sat last night, and so did Aisha.

  “I don’t understand,” said Rosa, and it was clear she hadn’t had any sleep, and neither had Tilton. “Todd was such a good swimmer.” She was holding a picture of her boy, probably aged twelve at the time, holding up a medal which he’d won in a swimming competition. She showed it to Odelia and Chase, to prove that her boy couldn’t have possibly drowned.

  Tilton had placed a comforting arm around his wife’s shoulder, but he, too, looked badly affected by what happened.

  “Do you think he might have… done this to himself?” asked Odelia.

  Rosa looked up. “You mean did he kill himself?”

  “He would never do that,” said Aisha. “Never.”

  “He did seem unhappy lately,” said Tilton.

  “You had an argument with Todd before he ran off?” asked Chase.