CHAPTER 37
“IMPOSTER!” I heard a yell as I ducked behind a wall and hid.
“Where is she?” Greta sounded frantic, and then I heard a familiar voice.
“What’s going on here?” the voice asked.
I peered around the pillar and looked.
Oh my God! It was him.Why was he everywhere I went? Why couldn’t I escape this man, no matter how much I ducked and dived? I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled behind a mountain of cat cages.
I couldn’t hear what was being said, now, as the general sound level in the room shot up. I peered around the corner again and saw, with horror, that Mike was walking in my direction. I needed to hide. I needed to get out of here or I was going to be in such trouble. I looked around, trying to find a way out. The stage wasn’t that far in front of me and, if the details in the letters were correct, all I had to do was crawl under it and there should be a small door there that led to a secret room. It was only a few meters away; I decided to make a run for it, but Mike was coming closer and closer—too close. I needed a disguise, I needed something to hide behind, something big, something that would cover me, something like a . . .
I turned. A massive black face stared at me from behind the bars of its cage. Our eyes locked for a moment, and I knew what I needed to do. I opened the cage and pulled the massive black thing out. I held it up to my face and stood up slowly. My timing was perfect, because, at that precise moment, Mike walked right in front of me. He was so close that I could smell him as he went. That soapy, clean smell; that musky, spicy . . . And then, instead of walking off, he stood there—stopped and looked around the room, right in front of me.
He was no more than a few feet away from me, standing so close that, if I reached out an arm, I would be touching him.Touching him.Suddenly, the desire to do that overwhelmed me. I held my breath and kept the cat in front of my face (please, don’t sneeze) and waited, still as a statue. I really needed to get out of here; if Mike turned around and looked behind him, he was sure to recognize me. So, I did the only thing I could think of: I started walking straight to the stage, with the cat to my face. But, as I reached the stage . . .
“Countess Catatonia!” A piercing shriek brought the entire place to a standstill; even I looked around to see what was wrong.
“Countess Catatonia is gone! SOMEONE TOOK HER!”
Oh my God, who would have taken a ca—?I stopped.I turned my head slowly and looked back at the cat in my hands. It glared at me with a look of total and utter disdain. “Oh!” I said flatly, as I looked at the name tag hanging from her pink collar. The cat slowly licked her lips, as if she was contemplating taking a chunk out of my finger.
“What does Countess Catatonia look like?” I heard Mike’s voice again. God, he was such a busybody. Always coming to the rescue of something—a mythical mating bird, a fat black cat.
“She’s a black Persian!” The scream was so frantic, so panicked, that you would have thought the woman had lost her child in an aisle at the shopping center.
The black cat blinked at me, as if she knew exactly what was going on, as if she knew that everyone was now talking about her. And then chaos and pandemonium broke out once more. I heard another voice, and I wanted to cry.
“I know who took her! It’s that Sam woman who’s pretending to be a groomer.”
“Oh shit,” I mumbled, and looked at the cat.
“What does she look like?” It was Mike again.
I couldn’t stand there any longer. I ran to the edge of the stage, put the cat down on it, and then, as quickly as I could, I threw myself under the stage and crawled to the back of it. Once I was there, I collapsed with my back against the wall and closed my eyes. I could hear the madness in the hall. People rushing around. People calling out to each other. Loud whispers and gossip spreading like wildfire through the room, and I had caused it all.
“I found her. I found her!” I heard the frantic woman scream when she’d clearly found her cat on the stage. I opened my eyes and looked around. It was dark everywhere, except for a small shaft of light rushing through a hole in the wood. I crawled towards it and stuck my eye to it to see what was going on outside. I could see legs—a lot of them. One pair of legs belonged to Greta—I recognized that pattern on her pants—and another pair definitely belonged to Mike. I held my breath as I looked through the hole at what was happening. So many voices were talking at once and I couldn’t make anything out clearly, until a phrase jumped out at me and my heart thumped in my chest.
“Press charges?” I heard Mike say. “What would the charges be?” he asked.
Exactly!
“Animal cruelty. Impersonating a professional groomer. Emotional distress for both me and especially my cat.” It was Greta, and she was so beside herself.
Oh, please! This was such an act.
“Do you remember what she looked like? The woman who pretended to be a groomer?” Mike asked, and my blood stopped pumping. I held my hands over my mouth for fear that a squeal might slip out.
“YES! Absolutely.” She said it so emphatically that my whole body stiffened up. “She had these wicked eyes. You know, eyes you can’t trust. I should have known.”
At that, I rolled them.
“Can you give me some more details, please?” he asked.
There was a pause, and then she spoke again. “And there was something about her mouth, too.”
“Her mouth?” he asked.
