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“I doubt whether we’ll stand a chance,” I said, shaking my head at so much naivet?. As if we could ever compete with the likes of Brutus.

“Why not?” he asked stubbornly. “It worked for Babe, didn’t it?”

I frowned.“Babe? Who’s Babe?”

“Don’t you remember that movie we saw the other night? About a piglet that grows up on a farm, and the farmer trains him to be a sheepdog? And since he was so nice and polite all the sheep loved him and did exactly what he told them to do at the animal show? He didn’t even have to bark at them or bite them or any of that horrible stuff. So if Babe can do it, so can we.”

“Do what, exactly? Become sheepdogs?”

“Not sheepdogs,” he said with a laugh. “Perform at a cat show!”

Become a cat model? Never!“I really don’t think so, Dooley.”

“But we’re special, Max, just like Babe. I just know we are.”

“Look, that was a Hollywood movie. In Hollywood movies animals are always special. Penguins have happy feet and pigs can corral sheep and cats eat lasagna and sound like Bill Murray. In real life? Not so much.”

“But we can talk. We can talk to Odelia. And to Marge. And Gran.” He gave me a grin. “I’m sure that Brutus can’t talk to Chase Kingsley.”

Well, that was true enough. Brutus might get prime chops, but I doubted whether he could chat with his human. Dooley and I might not be pedigree cats, or have the appeal of a sheepherding pig or silly dancing penguins, but we could help Odelia solve this murder, and that definitely made us special.

We’d arrived at the Writer’s Lodge, and saw that the place was completely cordoned off with crime scene tape, the yellow kind.

“Come on,” I said as I followed the scent of human excrement. “Over there.”

We hurried to the place where the crime had been committed and stopped at the demolished structure that had formerly been the outhouse. The entire thing had been taken apart, the boards piled up high next to a sizable hole dug into the earth. A small crane stood parked next to it, which had probably been used to get the body of Paulo Frey out of the hole. When we took a tentative peek into the abyss, I saw it was pretty deep. And smelled horrible.

“Crap,” I said. “This stench is hard to bear.”

Unlike humans, us cats can’t pinch our noses, which are a lot more sensitive to begin with, so the foul stench emanating from the former latrine was an assault on my senses that was worse than I’d imagined. Generations of writers had taken a dump right here in this pit, and so had generations of Hampton Covians, as the Writer’s Lodge outhouse was as popular with the locals as it was with writers. When nature suddenly called, hikers had the choice between relieving themselves in the bushes or this outhouse. But why wipe your tush with a piece of bark or a clump of grass when you can use Hetta Fried’s velvet comfort triple-layered tissue instead? After all, what’s good enough for bestselling writers is good enough for the local yokels.

Luckily for the lodge’s paying guests, they got preferential treatment. So when a desperate hiker came running, ready to burst, and he found the outhouse occupied by a writer, he simply had to hold and wait until the scribbler had done his business before adding his own contribution.

“So this is where they found the guy, huh?” asked Dooley, his face twisted in a grimace as he tried to endure the horrible stench.

“Yeah. Looks like,” I croaked.

The pit had been completely emptied out, and I couldn’t even see the bottom now, nor did I feel inclined to jump in and investigate.

“Do you smell the killer?” asked Dooley, gagging slightly.

“I smell shit,” I wheezed, and quickly removed myself from the scene.

And that’s when I bumped into another cat who was lurking around. I recognized her as one of the wild felines that roamed these woods, and lived as nature had intended it: free and untethered, roaming the earth alone.

“Hey, Clarice,” I said by way of greeting. “So what are you doing here?”

Clarice, who was rail thin, with gray hair matted and twisted in knots, had a wild look in her eyes. She was feral, and we usually tried to avoid her. But this was not a regular social call. We needed answers and we needed them fast and maybe Clarice had seen something out here.

“Do you have any idea who killed this guy?” asked Dooley, who’d joined me. The stench of human dung had become too much for him as well. At least where we lived humans used a flush toilet, and the smell never got as bad as out here, where they still adhered to a more primitive waste disposal method.

“I saw nuthin,” said Clarice now in a vicious snarl.

“You mean you weren’t around when the murder happened?” I asked.

She shook her head.“I saw nuthin.”

“Maybe you saw this Paulo Frey character when he was still alive. He was a regular at the Writer’s Lodge, right?” I asked, probing a little further.

She stared at me, looking more feral than ever. It gave me the creeps. The longer Clarice lived out here, the weirder she seemed to get.