“Well, Uncle Alec wants me back,” said Chase. “He’s made that abundantly clear. The problem is that I won’t be a detective anymore. I’ll either be attached to Mick as his sidekick, or I’ll be a regular cop like the rest. No more detective.”

  “So be a regular cop,” said Marge. “There’s no shame in that, is there?”

  “It’s a demotion,” said Odelia. “And a humiliation, after having been a detective for years. The chief of police position would be a step up.”

  “But you’re not even sure if they’ll consider you,” Marge said. “I say you tell Alec you messed up, and that you’d love to be a cop again. And who knows? Maybe something will shift, and you’ll be a detective again at some point. Seems to me that Mick is very inexperienced, so this promotion is probably political in nature.”

  “It’s a PR operation,” said Chase.

  “Talk to my brother,” said Marge. “He’s a good man and he loves you. He’ll go to bat for you. And if he can’t win this round, he will win the next one—and so will you.” She patted her son-in-law on the back. “Buck up, Chase. We don’t want you to leave Hampton Cove.”

  “I don’t want to leave Hampton Cove. But they’re not giving me much of a choice.”

  “Stay,” she said. “And swallow your pride. Being stubborn has never done anybody any good—ever. That’s the best advice I can give you.”

  He gave her a grateful nod. “Thanks, Marge. You’re a very wise woman.”

  She laughed. “Oh, I don’t know about that. But I do try to do the right thing. Most of the time.”

  “Okay, now that that’s settled, what’s going on with Gran?” asked Odelia. “Where is she, and why isn’t she picking up her phone?”

  It had been a while since Tex had met with Dick Bernstein. The last time was when Tex had been dealing with a marked thinning of the hair on top of his head. And since Dick was one of those men who had always boasted a full head of hair, even at his advanced age, Tex had figured he’d better ask for his secret.

  Which had turned out to be mayonnaise.

  He still had his doubts about the effectiveness, and Marge seemed to think that Dick had been pulling his leg, but it was true that the thinning had stopped, and as far as he could tell, he wasn’t losing his hair anymore.

  He found the retired oceanographer at the senior center, where he was holding forth, with his best friend, Rock Horowitz, as his captive audience.

  “Doctor Poole!” Dick cried when he caught sight of him. “Pull up a chair! Join us!”

  Tex was touched by this display of bonhomie and gratefully accepted the invitation.

  “Can we talk in private for a moment, Dick?” he asked.

  “I don’t have any secrets from Rock, Doctor Poole,” said Dick. But when Tex made a face, he quickly reconsidered. “Ah, but you have secrets from Rock, don’t you?”

  “Well, not secrets, exactly,” said Tex. “It’s just… a little delicate, that’s all.”

  “Say no more,” said Rock graciously. “I’ll go get us something to drink from the bar. What’s your poison, Doctor Poole?”

  “Coffee for me, please,” Tex said. The moment the other man had left, he leaned in closer to Dick. “The thing is, Dick, that Marge seems to feel that our marriage needs to go through…” He glanced left and right. “Well, through some sort of renaissance, if you know what I mean.”

  “Not really,” said Dick. “Care to elaborate?”

  Tex grimaced. “She has this book, see?”

  “What book? The Kama Sutra?”

  Tex saw the other man’s eyes twinkling and realized he’d been had. “Very funny, Dick. This particular book is called One Hundred Tips for a Happy Time Between the Sheets, and Marge has been following it meticulously. There are one hundred tips in the book⁠—”

  “As the title indicates.”

  “—and she insists on doing one exercise every night. The problem is, I’m not as young as I used to be, and…”

  “You’re feeling the strain,” Dick said, nodding. He gave the doctor a look of scrutiny. “You do look a little pale and drawn, Tex. The color’s drained from your cheeks.”

  “I won’t lie to you, Dick. It’s been tough,” Tex confessed.

  Dick nodded sagely and thought for a moment. “And now you want my advice on how to keep your energy levels up?”

  “I don’t want to disappoint Marge. This project is very important to her.”

  “I see,” said Dick, and Tex could tell that he really did. Which was such a relief. “Okay, I’m going to share a secret with you, Tex,” said Dick. “I want you to trust me. Don’t question it, and don’t tell another living soul.”

  “Absolutely, Dick,” said Tex, leaning in a little closer still.

  “What I’m about to tell you is something I’ve never told anyone. So listen very carefully.”

  “I’m listening,” he said with bated breath as he practically crawled into the other man’s lap.

  “What you need to do is cut up half a pound of raw onions.”

  “Raw onions, got it,” said Tex, committing it to memory.

  “Add half a pound of raw garlic, chopped.”

  “Garlic, check,” he said, fascinated to be learning this secret from a man who had lived through so much. A man who had traveled the world. A man who had seen things!

  “Then add half a pound of ground-up red peppers, half a jar of mayonnaise, and a pinch of salt and a splash of vinegar. Stir it all together into a paste and put it in the fridge. Then, every night—right before Marge pulls out that book—excuse yourself and head to the bathroom. Smear the mixture on your chest. You should be good to go.”

  “I love it,” said Tex. Then he considered something. “Should I maybe put something over it? Like a bandage or something? Otherwise it’s going to be sticky.”

  “Oh no, I want you to rub this in really well, Tex. Rub it in until it’s completely absorbed into the skin.” He smiled and patted the doctor on the back. “You’ll see. You won’t have any trouble completing all one hundred routines in the bedroom. You’ll be able to go for hours. Just like the Energizer Bunny.”

  “This is great, Dick,” said Tex. “I just want to thank you. This is gold.”

  “It is,” Dick confirmed. “I used it when I was in the Congo, you know. Learned it from one of the tribal elders. It’s served me well over the years.” He tapped the side of his nose. “Trust me, Tex. Once you start using this mixture, you’ll never have trouble keeping up with Marge in the bedroom ever again. You’ll be her darling prince from now on.”

  “That’s all I want,” said Tex. “I just want to make her happy, you know.”

  “And you will, Tex. You will. You can be absolutely sure of that.”

  CHAPTER 47

  “Idon’t want to go into that hole,” said Brutus. “No way. We’ll drown!”

  “Not only that,” said Harriet, “but we’ll get wet!”

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” said Kingman, though he didn’t sound all that sure, I thought.

  “All we need to do is pray,” said Shanille. “Pray our little hearts out and we’ll sail right through on the wings of angels.”

  “Can angels swim?” asked Dooley. “I thought they could only fly?”

  “Angels can do anything their little hearts desire,” said Shanille. “They’re magical creatures that answer only to God.”

  “I’m not going in there,” said Clarice. “Unless you can promise me there’s piranha. For the chance to catch myself a live piranha, I’m willing to take a chance. If not, there’s no way I’m going down that hole. Who knows what’s on the other side of that thing?”

  “More water, probably,” I said, for I didn’t really see us going down this hole either.

  “Pray!” said Shanille as she squeezed her eyes tightly shut. “Pray with all your might, my sweet kittens!”

  “You pray,” said Clarice as she started wiggling in her human’s arms. “I’m getting out of here.”

  And with these words, she made the leap from Scarlett’s protective embrace and jumped straight into the water. We watched her swim away, even as Scarlett yelled, “Clarice! Come back here, Clarice! Where are you going?! Clarice!!!”

  But Clarice paid her human no mind at all. And probably she was right. It’s one thing for us to be dragged along on some adventure, looking for a treasure that may or may not exist, but quite another to be stuck down some hole filled with water. I mean, you have to draw the line somewhere, right?

  And so I decided that Clarice had set a pretty good example and quickly followed suit. After some hesitation, Kingman did the same thing, and so did Brutus, and even Shanille.

  The last one to resist the urge to get out of there was Harriet. “I hate getting wet,” she confessed. “I hate it, hate it, hate it!”

  “Either you get wet,” said Kingman, “or you get dead. Your choice, honey.”

  And so Harriet took a deep breath and took the leap.

  “Hey, get back here, you guys!” Gran yelled.

  “Looks like the cats are leaving the sinking ship,” said Wilbur sadly.

  “Our cats are no rats, Wilbur,” said Gran through gritted teeth.

  “We should probably follow their lead,” said Scarlett. “I have a feeling this is a dead end.”

  “There is a hole down there… somewhere,” said Gran. “I’m sure there is. I can feel it… maybe.”

  As we swam after Clarice, soon we felt the ground reemerge beneath our paws, and I for one was extremely relieved. As we moved on, I felt sorry for our humans, but then all they had to do was follow our lead, and they’d be safe and sound—and reasonably dry within minutes. Okay, so maybe not minutes—hours, more likely.

  Just then, a familiar figure emerged before us. It was none other than Ida Baumgartner, along with Minnie.

  “Where did you guys go?” asked Ida, looking quite cross. “One moment you were right in front of me, and the next you were all gone. What gives?”

  Behind us, finally, our humans appeared to have seen sense and brought up the rear.

  Ida studied them with a look of astonishment. “You’re all wet! You look like drowned rats!”

  “We are wet because we kept following the corridor and it just went down and down and down,” Scarlett explained. “And filled with more and more water, until it just stopped.”

  “We hit a dead end,” Wilbur said.

  “It wasn’t a dead end. There was a hole,” Gran insisted. “If only we had gone through that hole, we might have found the treasure by now.”

  “The treasure isn’t there,” said Ida. She pointed behind her. “It’s down there. Or at least Mick Harper seems to think so. He and his girlfriend took that way, so I followed them, and I figured you guys did too, until I discovered that you were gone. To take a swim.”

  “We weren’t taking a swim,” said Gran. “We were following a solid lead!”

  “Clarice told us to go that way,” Scarlett pointed out. “She smelled the huskies.”

  “I don’t know what she smelled, but it wasn’t the huskies,” Wilbur grumbled.

  “Okay, so I made a mistake, all right!” said Clarice. “I’m not infallible, you guys! All this water is seriously messing with my sense of smell,” she grumbled, and then sneezed.

  “You want to watch out with those wet clothes,” said Ida. “You’ll catch your death.”

  And with these words of encouragement, she took off again, this time with the rest of the company on her heels.

  We did not want to find ourselves in a watery dead end again!

  “See?” said Shanille. “I told you to pray. We found the way out, didn’t we?”

  “We found the way out because we followed Clarice,” I pointed out. “If it hadn’t been for her, we’d probably still be in that hole.”

  “But why did we follow Clarice? And who put the idea into Clarice’s head to go look for a way out? It was the angels. And why did the angels come to our rescue? Because of my prayers. Trust me, if we pray hard enough, we will find that treasure.”

  She could have had a point, and since at this particular juncture I was starting to wonder if we’d ever see daylight again, I decided to try this thing called prayer on for size. And I would have asked Shanille to teach me how it was done, when Ida said, “Quiet! No more chatting for now!”

  I had a feeling her words were meant for me, so I quickly closed my mouth and was as quiet as a mouse. Though in my personal experience, mice aren’t very quiet at all. On the contrary. The mice I’ve met were all quite the conversationalists.

  “It’s them!” Ida whispered. “Mick and Smilla!”

  She was right. As we emerged from behind a rock, we saw that we had reached a large cave and at the bottom of this cave we saw light play on the wall of the rock. Something had been written there, and Mick and Smilla were trying to decipher it.

  “I thought they had a map?” Scarlett whispered. “So why do they need to read the writing on that wall?”

  “I can read the writing on the wall,” said Gran. “And it’s telling me that this whole thing smells fishy.”

  Clarice stuck her nose in the air. “I don’t smell fish,” she declared. “If there was fish, I would have smelled it. I have a well-trained nose and I can smell a fish a mile away. A rotten fish two miles.”

  “Maybe the map only led them to this point, and not further?” Scarlett suggested.

  “Yeah, some maps do that,” said Wilbur. “Like my GPS—it will simply conk out right before I’ve reached my destination. The rest I have to figure out myself.”

  We all watched with fascination as Mick and Smilla took pictures of the wall with their phones and then started to process the information.

  “They’re probably using some kind of AI app,” said Gran. “Feed it the intel and hope that the AI spits out the location of the treasure. Very clever. Very clever indeed!”

  As we all sat huddled behind that rock, suddenly someone cleared their throat behind us. When we turned, we saw that a man stood there, dressed in the same type of outfit that our humans were dressed in. Only this man was holding a gun, and it was trained directly at us!

  I recognized him as the attractive man we had seen boarding a fancy yacht in the marina last night.

  “Get a move on,” he growled, looking none too friendly, I had to say. “Do it now!” he added for good measure, and waved that gun of his, as if to say: if you don’t do what I’m telling you, I will shoot a little hole in one of you.

  And since nobody likes to have holes shot into them—whether small or large—we got up from our hiding place and started walking.

  Looked like we were in something of a pickle!

  CHAPTER 48

  “Dad!” Smilla cried when she caught sight of the man holding us all at gunpoint. He had forced us to walk up to where Mick and Smilla were still investigating the rock face at the far end of the cave, and the moment of truth seemed to have arrived: the moment we were going to be made privy to the identity of the mysterious assailant.

  “Mr. Pinkerton,” said Mick, and he seemed oddly pleased to see the other man. “It’s an honor to finally meet you, sir. I’m Mick Harper.”

  “I know who you are,” said the man with the gun gruffly. “Now stick ‘em up, son. The same goes for you, honey.” When Mick’s dogs started to growl at him, he added, “And keep those dogs away from me if you know what’s good for you.”

  “But Dad, you can’t do this,” said Smilla, clearly reluctant to do as her dad said. She was, after all, a grown woman, and at her age girls didn’t follow their daddy’s orders anymore.

  “I should have known you’d steal that map from me,” her dad said.

  “You shouldn’t have left it lying around,” said Smilla with a shrug.

  “Stick ‘em up—now!” he yelled, brooking no opposition from these two. Or from us, for that matter. “Move over there, the lot of you.”

  He carefully set down his backpack and started removing something from it. All the while he kept his gun trained on us—and also his eyes.

  Finally, he threw the item he had removed from his backpack in our direction, and now I saw that it was a set of zip ties. “Tie each other up,” he instructed. “Nice and tight. And no funny business. I’ll check myself if you’ve fudged.”

  “Um… how do you propose we do that, Mr. Pinkerton, sir?” asked Father Reilly. “There don’t seem to be enough of these for all of us.”

  “That’s because I didn’t consider that the entire town of Hampton Cove would come looking for my treasure,” the man growled as he dug into his backpack again and took out another set of zip ties. “Here. Is that enough for you, wise guy?”

  “We’re not the entire town of Hampton Cove,” said Gran. “We’re the Neighborhood Watch.”

  “Looks like you’re far from home, Neighborhood Watch,” said the man. “Meddling where you’re not wanted.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” said Ida, holding up a hand like she was in school and Mr. Pinkerton was her teacher. “I’m afraid I’m allergic to plastic. I get a very bad allergic reaction. My skin goes all red and scaly and then I have to go and see a doctor.”

  “I don’t care,” said Mr. Pinkerton.

  “But—”

  “I don’t care! Now do as I say or I’ll have to start reducing the numbers here. And don’t think I won’t do it,” he added, waving the gun dangerously.

  “I hope you have a license for that,” said Wilbur. “The laws in Hampton Cove are quite strict on carrying an illegal handgun. You might get in trouble with the police.”

  “Yes, Mick here might arrest you,” added Father Reilly. “He’s a detective, you know.”

  “Some detective,” scoffed Mr. Pinkerton. “Taking the first opportunity he’s got to come and steal my treasure.”

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Pinkerton,” said Mick, looking rueful. “It’s just that when Smilla told me about the treasure, I figured it would be great for us to look for it together. Solidify our bond, you know.”