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“Oh, come on,” I said, “it isn't
that
bad.”

“Speak for yourself,” Chester croaked.

On the other side of Chester, Howie piped up, “Hey, Pop! Here's a joke that's right up your alley.”

Chester groaned. Howie went on anyway.

“What do you call a fancy dance for rabbits?”

“I give up, Howie. What do you call a fancy dance for rabbits?”

“A hare ball.”

Chester hissed. Howie chortled. I tried to get us back on the subject.

“I'm telling you, Chester,” I said. “There
was
a sound coming from under the ground. We all heard it”.

“Mass hysteria,” said Chester. “It's common among dogs.”

“I heard it too,” The Weasel said from the other side of me.

“If that's your star witness,” Chester told me softly, “your case is in serious trouble, Harold.”

I was all set to express my astonishment at Chester's failure to be excited by my discovery when the reason dawned on me. It was just because it had been
my
discovery that Chester couldn't get excited. He's usually the one who's onto some mystery or other while I'm home napping. Well, today the tables had been turned and Chester wasn't happy about it. I decided to try a different approach.

“I wish
you
had been there, Chester,” I said. “
You
would have known what was going on.”

Chester began to purr. “Wellll,” he said, “purrrrhaps.” I love it when he tries to sound modest.

“Say,” I said, “you don't suppose it could
be one of those paranormal things, do you, Chester?”

It took a moment for him to reply. “Possibly,” he said.

“Maybe a UFO has landed on the other side of the fence.”

“These things
do
happen.” I could hear the excitement building in his voice. “There are recorded cases. Why, in southern California alone, Harold—”

“Do you think we should investigate?” I asked. I knew if I didn't interrupt he'd be telling me about every UFO sighting he'd ever read about.

“In time, in time,” he answered, in a tone that let me know he thought he was back in charge and he intended to
stay
in charge.

That was okay with me. To tell you the truth, I was just as glad he didn't want to investigate anything at that moment. Full of bad but filling food, I was groggy and ready for a little shut-eye. It wasn't long before I'd fallen fast asleep.

The sound of hushed voices woke me some time later. I'm not sure how much later, but it was dark and the moon was out. I strained to hear.

“No! I've already told you—”

“Come on, be a pal. You're the only one who—”

“Shh, not so loud. You wanna wake up the whole joint?”

I recognized two of the voices as Felony's and Miss Demeanor's, but whose was the third?

“Look, leave me alone, will you? You just don't understand.”

“Yeah, yeah, tell it to the judge.”

“Listen, we can't do this thing without you.”

“And I told you—”

Suddenly, I heard Chester's voice joining the others.

“What's going on out there?” he demanded. That's when I realized the voices were coming from just outside our bungalows.

“Oohh,” I heard Miss Demeanor purr. “It's
the one with the cute whiskers. How're you doin'? Want some 'nip?”

“Some what?” Chester said.

“‘Nip, 'nip. Want some 'nip to chew? Here.”

There was a spitting sound and Chester said, “Good grief, I don't want your used catnip.”

I moved to the front of my bungalow and looked out. Miss Demeanor was retrieving something from the ground. “I prefer to think of it as sharing,” she muttered.

Chester sighed. “That is so gross,” he said. “But you didn't answer my question. What's going on out there?”

“Just gettin' a little air,” said Felony, coming into view. “What's it to ya?”

“It sounded to me like you were scheming something.”

“We're always scheming something,” said Felony. “We're cats.”

Chester didn't have an argument for that one.

Just then, Linda's voice rang out in the night air, “But, Bob, we can't just do
nothing.
We
must
find out what's happened to them!”

Before Bob or anyone else had a chance to react, there came a second voice: tiny, plaintive, and so out-and-out weird that it sent a shiver of fear through every part of me.

At first it barked. Then it began to cry out in a strangled sort of way, “Let me out! Please . . . let . . . me . . . out . . . of . . . here!”

“A
H-OOOOOOOOOOO!” Howie's frightened howl—the kind Chester likes to describe as werewolvian—seemed to make the very walls of our bungalows quiver and shake.

As fast as we could, we unlatched our doors and hurried across the compound, where we gathered in a hushed semicircle around that curious mound of dirt. I glanced to my left. Bob and Linda were huddled together, their teeth rattling. Next to them were the two cat burglars, looking a little more like timid
pussycats than they might have wished. To my right, The Weasel was softly singing an inspirational tune in a tremulous voice while Hamlet whimpered and Howie woofed.

Chester, meanwhile, stared unwaveringly at the mound of dirt, his head thrust forward in the classic feline stalking position or, as he prefers to call it, his don't-make-a-move-I've-got-you-covered look.

“What do you think?” I whispered.

“I think there's someone in there,” he said.

At that, the general level of rattling, whimpering, and woofing rose sharply and The Weasel burst out singing: “I will be brave, I will be strong, I will be right, unless I am wrong.”

If this was some sort of weasel anthem, it was pretty wishy-washy. No one bothered to comment, however. We were all much too busy listening to our own hearts thumping wildly in our chests.

“Let me out!” called the voice from beneath the ground.

“Oh, Bob,” I heard Linda say, “why couldn't they have gone to a Club Med and taken us with them?”

“I don't know about anybody else,” said Chester, “but I think it's time we did a little
digging.
Harold.”

“What?”

“You're a good digger. I've seen you.”

“Why is it you only compliment me when you want something?” I asked.

Chester turned, a surprised look on his face. “That isn't true. Just the other day, I told you I liked your eyes.”

“Yes, but when I got up to look in the mirror, you took my spot on the rug.”

“Would you two get on with it?” the voice in the ground snapped. “You sound like an old married couple.”

Chester and I looked at each other. This was getting weirder by the minute. I asked Howie to help me and we began to dig.

It didn't take long before we'd found something suspicious.

Bones. Small, white, dry bones.

The others gasped as Howie and I laid them out in a line on the ground. Then Howie noticed something else, a pinkish something studded with shining stones that glittered in the moonlight.

Howie extracted it carefully with his teeth and dropped it at Chester's feet.

“What do you make of it?” I asked.

“It's a collar,” Chester said. The crowd bandied the word about in amazed whispers as Chester struggled to read the dirt-smudged gold letters embossed on the side.

“R-O-S-E-B-U-D,” he read. “Rosebud”.

“But what does it mean?” I asked.

Chester began to pant, a sign that he was either very excited or dehydrated. The fact that he didn't ask for a glass of water led me to believe it was the former.

“This is incredible!” he exclaimed. “Harold, we're having a real paranormal experience here.”

“Are you sure it's not mass hysteria?”

Chester gave me a cool look, which was no mean trick considering he was still panting. “Cats don't participate in mass hysteria, Harold. If we're going to be hysterical, we do it on our own. We're individuals, not groupies like you canines. No, this is the real thing. Talking bones! And Rosebud! Rosebud, Harold!”

“But what does it mean?” I asked again.

“It was my name,” said the voice.

Howie was a couple of feet away from me, but I could feel him trembling as he whimpered, “I want to go home, Uncle Harold. I don't want to stay in a place where bones and collars talk.”

“I am not a talking collar,” said the voice. “I am the spirit of Rosebud. These are my bones. In life I was a Yorkshire terrier.”

“Good heavens!” Hamlet exclaimed.

“What is it?” I asked.

He turned his anguished face to me. “Alas, poor Yorkie,” he said. “I knew her, Harold.”

“You did?”

“She was being boarded here when I first came. She was supposed to stay seven days, but on the morning of the fourth day she was gone. We all assumed her owners had come for her during the night. But apparently . . .”

Chester nodded his head slowly. “Apparently, she met with foul play,” he said.

“Foul play?” The Weasel repeated. “Surely you don't mean—”

“Murder,” said Chester. I gulped. Chester had said the same thing the last time we stayed at Chateau Bow-Wow and had been so far off base he may as well have been in a different ballpark. But this time, the evidence was right before our eyes.

“Murrr-der,” Rosebud echoed eerily. “Murrr-der.”

Chester inched his way toward the talking bones. “But why?” he asked. “Why were you murdered?”

It took a moment before the voice spoke again. “Because . . . I stumbled upon . . . the truth.”

A cold wind blew. No one dared to speak. No one, that is, but a pile of bones and a worn pink collar named Rosebud.

“It happened one morning when the door to the office had been left open by mistake. Curious, I followed my nose in and poked about, hoping to find something good to eat.”

I noticed Felony and Miss Demeanor nod appreciatively.

“One door was locked,” Rosebud went on, “but another door—a door at the end of a hall—was open just a crack. This was the door that led to my demise. When I pushed it open, I sealed my fate.”

She stopped to clear her throat, which was more than a little bizarre, since she didn't have a throat that I could see.

“Be warned,” she said when she resumed, her voice now full of fear and foreboding. “None of you is safe! Get out while you can,
escape
. . . before the secret of Chateau Bow-Wow does to you what it did to me.”

“But, um, excuse me,” The Weasel said, “I
don't mean to interrupt Your Ghostiness, but if we stay out of the office, away from that forbidden door, how can we get in trouble?”

There was a long pause. And then: “The secret is bigger than the place that contains it. If you do not find it, it may find you. Escape, all of you, before it is too late.”

“But—,” Chester said.

The voice, faint now, fading into the darkness of the night, cut him off. “Remember me,” it said, “Rosebud, the blossom that never opened. The terminated terrier. Remember me, remember me.”

“But, wait,” Chester said, “the secret of Chateau Bow-Wow, why can't you just tell us what it was?”

“There is . . .”

We all moved in to listen. The voice was so tiny now we could barely make out the words.

“There is a—”

“What is going on out here?”
a new voice thundered.

Terrified, we turned. There in the doorway to the office stood a giant of a man. A beam of light stretched out from his hand and caught us all in it like a net.

I swallowed hard as the man began walking slowly toward us.

“On the whole,” I said to Chester, “I think I might have preferred oral surgery.”