Authors: Nic Saint
I
don’t know
if you’ve ever noticed how cats have these soft pads under their paws? You have? Then you probably also know what they’re there for. Not to hurt ourselves when we land? Whoever gave you that idea? No, the reason we have those nifty little pink cushions is so we can quickly and quietly sneak out of the room whenever a human catches us doing something we’re not supposed to. That’s why, when Sam suddenly surprised us by bursting into his study, we were safely behind the gas stove before he so much as had an inkling we were ever there.
“What is he doing here?” I hissed, as I darted a quick glance from behind the stove.
“He lives here,” hissed back Stevie reasonably, and I saw his point.
From our hiding place we could see how Sam was staring at the love letters I’d smoothed out and laid side by side on the carpet.
“Dammit,” I groaned, for I’d completely forgotten the cardinal rule of espionage: never leave a trace behind.
“Too late now,” said Stevie, as he eyed every move of his master in tense concentration.
Father Sam Malone was a handsome fellow, as men go, or at least that’s what I keep hearing from my female associates. He’s tall, lean and muscular, with the kind of chiseled features and full head of hair most commonly found on the covers on display in the supermarket romance novel section. The fact that Brookridge is one of those small towns where the church still fills up nicely every Sunday morning attests to the man’s powers of attraction. That the force is strong in this one, is attested to by the fact that it’s mostly women occupying the pews and hanging on every word that rolls from this wonder man’s sensual lips—don’t blame me for this last adjective. Blame Dana, for she’s the one nauseating me with that description of the man’s chops. She also told me the padre’s got a nice singing voice, though that’s probably neither here nor there. He was now looking slightly disheveled, as if he’d just rolled out of bed, which he probably had.
Sam was now collecting the fruits of his penmanship with trembling hands and laid them carefully on his desk. He stood staring at them for a space, probably wondering what had induced him to destroy them in the first place, when it was so obvious fate wanted them preserved for posterity, then he heaved a deep sigh and uttered the single word both me and Stevie had come to dread: “Bluebell.”
“Oh, my God,” moaned Stevie.
“You can say that again,” I muttered.
Something of our verbal utterances must have reached the good father’s ears, for he turned to stare in our direction. Then Stevie, the mutt, couldn’t resist the temptation of a cuddle, and walked over to his master to stroke himself against the latter’s leg.
I groaned at the sight of an agent giving free rein to his baser impulses. And I was just making a mental note of this utterly unprofessional behavior on the part of my new partner, when the telephone rang. The sound seemed to startle Sam—a clear sign of a bad conscience—and it was with marked nervousness that he picked up the receiver. Then again, since the night was now well advanced, he was probably simply wondering who the hell was phoning him at this hour.
“Hello?” he said tentatively, as if expecting someone to jump from the earpiece and snap his head off. Then he visibly relaxed and took a seat at the desk. “Oh, it’s you. What do you want? Yeah? Well, you’re not going to get it.”
Very mysterious, all this, don’t you think? At least I thought so, and so did Stevie, for he threw questioning glances in my direction. I merely shrugged, indicating I, too, had no idea what was going on.
Meanwhile Sam had risen, and so had his temper. “Then tell him I’m in charge here and if he doesn’t like, he can lump it!” he said in the tones of one who’s had about all he can take and can’t take no more. “Now listen here, you… you… Hello? Hello? Hell and damnation!”
And on this last word, he slammed down the receiver. It doesn’t often happen that you see a man of God lose it like that, and the spectacle was a fascinating one, to be honest.
“Who does he think he is, calling me up in the middle of the night?”
The voice intruded upon my reverie and for a moment I wondered where it had come from. It sounded like Father Sam, only more subdued somehow, as if spoken in an undertone.
“I’m in charge and I don’t have to take this.”
Once again I had the impression Sam had spoken, only this time I’d been watching him carefully, and his lips hadn’t moved! I threw a quick glance over at Stevie, to see if he was experiencing the same phenomenon, but my Ragamuffin friend was licking his butt, lost to the world.
“Next time he phones I’ll tell him his suggestions stink. That’s right. Stink. Ha! That’ll teach him.”
A jagged lump that seemed to have inserted itself into my throat prevented me from crying out in terrified horror, and I swallowed it down with some effort. My eyes and ears hadn’t deceived me: I was hearing Sam, even though he wasn’t speaking!
“
N
ow where did
I put that final draft?” Sam thought, as he started rifling through his desk drawers.
As clear as if he was enunciating the words, I could hear Sam’s every single thought! I sat staring at the man from my hiding place, slowly shaking my head. This wasn’t possible. This wasn’t… Then I remembered something Dana had said. Something about planting thoughts in people’s heads. Could it be? Nah, of course not. Or could it?
“Ah, here it is. Now where were we? Mh, yes. Jack Mackintosh is relaxing in his den, watching a game, when suddenly the doorbell rings. He goes to open the door and finds Zoe hovering on the mat. He quickly steps outside, trying to induce the girl to take a hike, when…”
My eyes were bubbling and my ears were ringing. This wasn’t really happening. And yet it was.
Sam had taken out a pencil and was jotting down notes in the margin. “Mrs Mackintosh isn’t home,” he was saying to himself. “So why doesn’t Jack invite Zoe in?” He sat back in his chair, and tapped the pencil thoughtfully on his papers. “Of course. He doesn’t want the neighbors to see.” He smiled and wrote another note as he stuck out his tongue and spelled the note in his head. “He doesn’t want the neighbors to know about the affair. Especially Mrs. Mueller. There. Not bad.” A wide smile creased his face as he admired his own cleverness. “I’m so smart!” he thought.
For a moment I’d had the distinct sensation I was going mad, but now I knew this was really happening; only humans could act this silly.
“Jesus, I’m clever!” the man was thinking.
“Jesus, he’s an idiot!” I was thinking.
“I’m a frickin’ genius!” Sam thought.
“He’s a frickin’ moron!” I thought.
“I’m hungry,” Stevie thought.
It was the first thought of Stevie’s that had penetrated my consciousness, and I only had two answers as to why that was: either Sam’s mental processes had dominated my cerebral cortex to the exclusion of all else, or Stevie simply didn’t think all that much. I leaned towards the latter, especially since Stevie’s next thought was, “I wonder what tastes better, left chicken breast or right chicken breast?”
I was drowning in a sea of imbecility and for a moment toyed with the idea of simply exiting the scene stage left, then fought down the inclination and decided to hang in there, lest I missed vital information pertaining to the case.
Father Sam seemed to have exhausted his creative faculties, for he threw what I now knew to be the screenplay for Murder in the Park on his desk, raked his fingers through his hair, and thought, “Better get some more sleep. Beddy-bye-bye, baby.”
He flicked off the light in the room and stumbled out, presumably back to bed. I shook my head, dazed and confused.
“Did you hear that?” I said, leaving my perch behind the stove to confer with my fellow espionage expert.
“Huh?” said Stevie intelligently. “What’s that?” he added for good measure.
“Didn’t you hear what Sam just thought?” I specified my question, though from Stevie’s vacuous expression I already had my answer.
“How would I know what Sam thought? I’m not a mind reader.”
Reluctant though I was to pursue a line of questioning fraught with embarrassment, I persisted. “Didn’t you hear…” For a moment I struggled with myself, then I was strong again. “… beddy-bye-bye?”
“Betty who?”
“Forget about it.”
“Is she Bob the butcher’s fine feline?”
“No, she is not,” I said rather more fiercely than I should have.
“Oh. All right.”
Just my luck, I thought, that Dana would saddle me up with the biggest boob this side of Brookridge.
“I resent that,” the boob now said.
I started. He couldn’t have heard what I just thought? “What?”
“That wisecrack about me being the biggest boob this side of Brookridge,” he said, sounding wounded. “I may be a boob but I’m sure there are bigger boobs out there.”
“D-did you hear that?”
He eyed me censoriously. “Nothing wrong with my ears, you know.”
“But I didn’t speak.”
“Sure you did.”
“No, I didn’t. It was just a thought.”
“That’s all right. I forgive you.”
“A thought that I didn’t say out loud,” I said with some exasperation.
Once again he eyed me dubiously. “Look, I may not be the smartest cat on the block, but that’s no reason to keep joshing me.”
“I’m not joshing you. Here, watch my lips.”
“Why would I want to watch your… Hey!” He now stared at me, wide-eyed, as if he’d seen the ghost of Lucy Knicx, for I’d just formulated the thought that a right-winged chicken’s right breast was probably meatier than its left breast due to the muscular development in the favored limb.
“How do you know I was thinking about chicken breasts?” he said, somewhat flabbergasted. Then a second thought crushed into the first. “And why can I hear you even though your lips aren’t moving?”
I put a comforting paw on his shoulder. “Buddy, I think we’re in for a world of weirdness. You and I are now able to read minds.”
He shrugged off my paw and licked he spot where it’d been placed. “Read minds? Are you nuts? And stop doing that!”
I had just thought that if I was nuts, so was Stevie. “I’m not doing anything. I’m just thinking.”
“Then don’t!”
Well, you know how it is. Tell someone not to think about pink elephants, and the thought will spring up like lilies of the valley come springtime. For a moment silent reigned while thousands of thoughts simultaneously crashed into my consciousness, 50 percent mine and the other half Stevie’s. We both groaned an agonized groan as our synapses fired on all cylinders.
“It’s the FSA,” I finally managed to say over the din, and instantly the mental noise died down. “Hey, when I speak I don’t think.”
He looked at me keenly. “I notice. It’s as if the volume knob is suddenly turned all the way down.”
“Looks like the trick is to keep talking,” I said.
“Not a problem for me,” he said, bright-eyed.
“So Dana wasn’t pulling my leg when she fed me all that stuff about planting thoughts in humans,” I mused.
“We can plant thoughts in humans?” Stevie said with sudden enthusiasm.
“Be forewarned, Agent Steve,” I said sternly. “Our powers are given us to aid and protect the human race, not induce them to provide us with more and better kibble.”
“Oh, all right,” muttered Stevie. “Though if I could just plant one teensiest tiniest suggestion that he switch brands? He’s been buying me the same brand of chicken for three years now, and I’d give my right paw to have a change of menu once in a while. I mean, how long can you keep eating the same thing over and over and over—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, interrupting what promised to be a lengthy harangue about the pros and cons of the different brands of cat food. “I wonder who that call came from…”
“Can’t you go upstairs and plant a thought in Sam’s head that he needs to give you the name of his correspondent?” suggested Stevie.
It was not a bad idea, I mused.
“Thanks,” said Stevie. “I do get them from time to time.”
Dang, if my fellow agent was going to read my mind the whole time, there was nothing I’d be able to keep a secret from him anymore. Not that I had such big secrets to hide, but one does like to harbor one’s little mysteries.
“Don’t worry,” he said, as if he’d read my mind, which he had. “I won’t tell a soul.” And he gave me a fat wink that almost made me slap him over the head.
B
efore we snuck
upstairs to perform our FSA brand of brain surgery on Father Sam and discover all his secrets, I quickly perused the Murder in the Park script lying on the priest’s desk for any clues pertaining to the case. What I was most curious about was the Zoe Huckleberry-Jack Mackintosh scene I’d been a prime witness to.
As I’d suspected, the scene didn’t end with a large butcher’s knife being strategically placed between the Huckleberry shoulder blades but rather with a prolonged kissing sequence that would have all the female audience members heave with delight. The bepimpled murderer had definitely missed out on a good thing.
The one thing conspicuously missing from the screenplay was any reference to this mysterious Bluebell, whoever of whatever it might be.
I closed the script with a frown, now wondering who would replace Lucy Knicx in the play, which I knew to premiere in one week if all went well.
“I can tell you that,” said Stevie, who had been closely following my thought processes. “Jamie Burrow from next door was Lucy Knicx’s understudy, so it stands to reason she’ll take over as Zoe whatsername.”
“Huckleberry,” I said automatically. “You know this Burrow girl?”
Stevie, who’d sat licking his belly—you don’t retain that snowy-white complexion without a goodish amount of grooming—inclined his red-whiskered head. “Sure I do. Comes round here all the time. She used to be a choirgirl and an acolyte when she was little.” He grinned. “She’s not so little anymore, though. Quite the catch, apparently. Not that I would know about these things,” he quickly added. “But as the parish cat one hears rumors, doesn’t one?”
“One certainly does,” I assented, making a mental note about Jamie Burrow’s essential catchness.
Since Father Sam had left the study door open, we didn’t have any walls to scale or acrobatic feats to perform to reach his upstairs bedroom and sneak in. We both took a seat on the bedside mat and stared up at the figure lying not three feet away. Apart from the fact that Sam was softly snoring and that he drooled in his sleep, at first glance there wasn’t much information to glean. I actually didn’t catch a single thought at first.
“Are you picking up anything?” I thought.
“Not a peep,” Stevie thought. “No, wait. He’s thinking something. A red clown is jumping through a yellow hoop and bowing to thunderous applause from a massive audience.”
I was also getting this. “Probably a dream,” I thought. “The clown is probably Sam, and the audience his congregation.”
“Yes,” thought Stevie thoughtfully, “but then why is the clown buck naked all of a sudden and trying desperately to hide behind the podium curtains?”
“Stage fright,” I thought. “Typical Freudian stuff. Father Sam must suffer from some form of stage fright. It can’t be easy standing in front of a congregation every week and having to come up with a fresh sermon each time.”
“I think it’s that play,” thought Stevie. “Ever since they asked him to be the director, he hasn’t been himself. Fretting, moody, jumpy. Like you saw, he even forgets to put out my food.”
“At least it wasn’t a love letter he was writing, but merely the script for the play.”
We watched on as Sam slept. I really wanted to plant a thought in his head but since Dana had summarily dismissed us from the Brookridge Park crime scene without giving any further instructions or even a time table for our FSA agent training, I had no idea how. The mind reading thing was something we’d accidentally stumbled upon, but I had the distinct impression planting thoughts in people’s heads required more skill than we possessed.
“Who was the man who called you?” I mentally projected at Sam’s inert form. “Who was that man on the phone?” Or, more important still, “Who is the man with the pimple?” And, most importantly, “Who is Bluebell?”
But no thought emanated from Sam other than that the clown had now discovered a trap door on stage and was lowering himself through it in order to affect his escape. Raucous laughter from the audience spurred him on, and after a last wave and a sad smile, he dropped himself through the hatch and was gone.
“Discouraging,” whispered Stevie, returning to a more classic mode of conversation. “The man is impervious to our methods of interrogation.”
I sighed. “Impervious is right.”
“Perhaps if we wait long enough, something will come up? I mean, it’s not as if we have somewhere to be.”
Once again my esteemed colleague was right. There was nowhere else to go and nothing else to investigate right now. Brookridge Park was off limits, and the only other person who could shed some light on the Bluebell mystery was Zack, who was also fast asleep. But waiting by his side or continuing our Sam vigil amounted to the same thing.
“Let’s make it a night out with the boys!” whispered Stevie, after I’d mentally consented to his idea. “I’ll bring the kibble, you bring the milk.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?” I said, already regretting the whole scheme.
Stevie scratched his scalp. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I know.”
The night went as most nights do: uneventful to a degree. I would have liked to say we came up with some great new insights into the mind of man, or some clue or vital piece of evidence that solved the whole mystery with a snap, but it didn’t exactly turn out this way.
As far as insights into the human psyche go, after the clown episode Sam went on to dream about a frog reciting a poem in front of a crowd of thousands, and suddenly noticing he hasn’t brought his hat. Feeling terribly naked without his hat, he then hops off the stage, leaving the crowd roaring with laughter. So yeah, the guy definitely had issues. But since I’m not the Freudster, they didn’t really grip me.
Frankly, by the time he started dreaming about a rabbit, standing in front of a football stadium and reading from his collected works during the break, I called it quits.
“Hey, where are you going?” said Stevie, who was following the rabbit story with rapt attention.
“I’m going home,” I said.
“But don’t you want to know how the story ends?”
“It starts to rain. The rabbit discovers he came out without his umbrella. He disappears into a left field rabbit hole. The crowd laughs its collective fanny off. See ya later, partner.”
Stevie, who was still tuned into Sam’s reveries, turned to me with an awed expression on his mug. “You’re right!” he said. “It just started to rain! How did you know?”
I merely gave a tired shrug. Though sitting up nights is a mainstay of any cat’s life, it usually doesn’t involve having to psychoanalyze a sleeping man’s dream world. Somehow it just didn’t feel right, intruding upon his private space like that. And it sure as heck didn’t feel productive.
I ambled through Father Sam’s small vegetable garden—tomatoes and lettuce—as the sun slowly rose, heralding a new and glorious day for all of Brookridge—and probably the rest of the word as well, though that was of no concern to me, per se. I stretched, arching my back, and wondered when I’d hear from Dana. Considering the fact that both Stevie and I featured pretty low on the FSA totem pole, I had a feeling this would be later rather than sooner. She was probably too busy solving the Brookridge Park murder case. Or had perhaps already solved it. She and her three Peterbald heavies.
By now she had probably planted the information about the man-with-the-pimple in Bart Ganglion’s policeman’s brain and that most capable officer had made an arrest and the case of Lucy Knicx’s unfortunate demise was closed.
I yawned; what did I expect? That two rookies, not even having started on their first day of spy school, would crack this case wide open? Fat chance. I strolled homeward, passing the back yards of the few houses that stood between Father Sam’s presbytery and the end of Tulip Street, and was once again on familiar turf: Bellflower Street. I passed through the back yards of Tanner Tompon’s place, Terrell McCrady and Lexie Moonstone’s dwelling, and past Royce Moppett’s house. And this is where the trouble began.
As you may or may not know, Royce Moppett is the human who once must have made a grave error in a previous life. Whether it was accidentally poisoning his King and Queen whilst working as a castle cook or invading the wrong country whilst crusading for the Pope, Karma, that humorless equalizer, has now saddled him with the dubious honor of being the caretaker of Brutus, that blot on the Brookridge scene. And Brutus, having not much else to do than bully his own kind, is always on the prowl for potential victims. He was so now, for I hadn’t crossed halfway through the Moppett yard, when his raspy voice rang out behind me.
“Where do you think you’re going, meatball?”