Chapter 40 #2
As luck would have it, the back door was ajar.
Once we had made our way past that first obstacle, we found ourselves in a kitchen that was a far cry from the cozy one back home.
In fact, it looked more like an abattoir.
Several cuts of meat lay scattered across the table, and judging by the smell, they had been there for quite some time.
“Not a pleasant environment,” Brutus concluded.
“Why is this guy leaving all that meat lying around?” asked Harriet.
“Maybe he’s curing it,” I suggested. “People do that at home, you know.” When the others regarded me skeptically, I added, “They do. Ham, bacon, sausages, salami, pancetta, corned beef…”
“Maybe he has two jobs?” Dooley suggested. “During the day he is a police academy instructor, and at night he sells meat?”
“Yeah, doubtful that one man would need to eat so much meat,” I agreed. “Unless, of course, he is a bodybuilder. Bodybuilders do eat lots and lots of protein.”
“Mostly chicken breasts,” Brutus knew. “Bodybuilders love chicken breasts. They eat them all the time. Sometimes they even put them in a blender and drink them in liquefied form.”
“Yuck,” I said.
“Let’s get out of here, you guys,” said Pippy. “I don’t like it one bit. It’s very… creepy.”
It was a little creepy, but then we hadn’t come there to find a home away from home, but to find out more about the man that Odelia was falling in love with. And so we persisted.
Beyond the kitchen, we discovered that the state of the rest of the house wasn’t much of an improvement. There was plenty of refuse strewn around the living room, and the space looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in months.
“This is a dump,” said Brutus. “If this guy takes Odelia home with him after a date, she will run away screaming.”
“He will probably tidy up first,” said Harriet. “Though it is going to need a pretty thorough scrub.”
“Let’s check upstairs,” Brutus suggested.
“Are you sure?” asked Pippy, who looked terrified at this point. “What if he sees us? What if he captures us and doesn’t let us go?” She gave me a look of pure terror. “What if he decides to put us in a blender and eat us?”
“If he puts us in a blender, he wouldn’t need to eat us,” Brutus pointed out. “He could simply drink us.”
“It’ll be fine,” I told Pippy, giving Brutus a look of slight reproach. He was scaring the poor thing. “We just need to make sure he doesn’t hear us go up those stairs. And since we’re cats, he won’t hear us.”
“I’m a dog,” she pointed out. “Though you’re probably right, Max. With those pads under our paws, he isn’t likely to hear us, is he?”
“That’s the spirit. Let’s go. The sooner we get this over with, the sooner we can leave.”
And to prove how eager she was to get out of this house of horror, Pippy was the first to move up the stairs, and she did so in a flurry of activity. One moment she was downstairs in the hallway, the next she was on the landing on the second floor.
“Nothing here,” she whispered. “Oh, and also: what are we looking for, exactly?”
“Evidence that the man is a terrorist,” I reminded her. “So Gran can go to the police and have him arrested. And then Odelia will never want to start an affair with him.”
“Gotcha,” Pippy’s voice sounded from upstairs.
“Who goes first?” asked Brutus.
“I’ll go first, shall I?” Harriet suggested. “After all, I want to get out of here just as much as Pippy does.”
She hurried up the stairs, and then it was our turn.
As we did, I thought I caught a strange smell.
It wasn’t the meat in the kitchen, and it wasn’t the fact that the living room hadn’t been cleaned in months, though that didn’t help.
It was the smell of something I had never smelled before. Something… tangy.
“Do you smell that, Brutus?” I asked.
“What?”
“I’m not sure. It smells like… something chemical. Like… cleaning product?”
“Fat chance. This house hasn’t seen any cleaning products in a really long time.”
But as we moved up those stairs, the smell intensified, and by the time we arrived on the landing, I knew for a fact something was stashed up there that might be of some interest.
Brutus stuck his nose in the air and sniffed. “You’re right, Max,” he said. “It does smell like ammonia or something.”
“It’s coming from behind that door,” said Pippy, who had noticed the same thing. She shivered. “I just hope it isn’t a body. Like… a dead body.”
“Why would there be a dead body here?” asked Harriet.
“I’m not sure. But this house is scary. And a dead body wouldn’t look out of place.”
She was right. The house did look a little like a house of murder and mayhem, and I certainly hoped there wouldn’t be any dead bodies waiting for us behind that closed door.
I volunteered to reach the handle and press down, while Brutus pushed the door with his paw so we could take a peek inside.
It wasn’t the bedroom, as I had feared, and we didn’t come upon the owner of the place either. Instead, it looked like some kind of storage space, and that powerful smell of chemicals was back. In fact, the entire room reeked of it.
“Oh, what is that smell!” Harriet cried.
“I think it’s bleach,” said Dooley. “When Marge cleans the kitchen, it often smells like this.” He smiled. “I like the smell of bleach. It smells so nice and fresh.”
As we carefully inspected the room, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. There were lots of boxes stacked up on racks, and everything was neatly labeled with stickers that announced ‘training courses’ or ‘police academy admin’ and suchlike.
“Looks like Mr. Hunkoff keeps his police academy stuff in here,” I said.
And since nothing in there screamed terrorist, we left to inspect the other rooms.
So far we hadn’t seen a sign of Zeke himself, and I was glad for it. But then he was probably fast asleep, as most of the inhabitants of Hampton Cove were at that time of night.