Purrfect Sparkle Read online

  Purrfect Sparkle

  The Mysteries of Max 37

  Nic Saint

  Puss in Books

  Contents

  Purrfect Sparkle

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Death in Suburbia (The Kellys 2)

  About Nic

  Also by Nic Saint

  Purrfect Sparkle

  Sign up for Nic’s no-spam newsletter and get FREE stories!

  nicsaint.com/news

  Diamonds are not this cat’s best friend!

  I have a confession to make. I’ve never been a big fan of diamonds or other gems. Frankly I don’t see the attraction. Okay, so they’re nice to look at, but when your tummy is rumbling, jewels aren’t going to feed you, are they? No, give me a nice bowl of kibble over a collection of gemstones any day. So when the world-famous Pink Lady diamond was found on a Hampton Cove beach, frankly I didn’t care. But then of course Odelia decided to get involved and find out where this precious gem had suddenly come from, and before I knew it I was up to my neck in diamonds—literally!

  1

  “Max?”

  “Mh?”

  “Do you think the earth is round… or flat?”

  I opened one lazy eye and instructed it to take in my friend Dooley, who was lying right next to me on the lawn. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, I was talking to Buster last night, and he told me that Fido has become a member of the Flat Earth Society. And now Buster is wondering if his human is off his rocker, or if he’s onto something. And since he knows I’m a specialist, he decided to ask me for advice.”

  “You’re a specialist?” I asked, quirking an amused eyebrow.

  “Well, everyone knows that I watch the Discovery Channel, Max, which makes me a specialist in pretty much everything. So they all come to me with the tough questions.” He made a face. “Though I have to admit that even with all of that knowledge under my belt, some of these questions still get me stumped, like now with Buster.”

  I yawned and stretched out on the smooth lawn. Ever since Chase decided to borrow his father-in-law’s lawnmower from time to time, he kept the lawn manicured to perfection, almost like a golf course. And he wasn’t getting any complaints from me. I like those golf course lawns: smooth like a billiard table, with no excess blades of grass tickling those sensitive body parts.

  “So what do you think, Max?” Dooley insisted. “Flat or round?”

  “Hasn’t there been a documentary about the Flat Earth Society recently?” I asked, not in the mood for this philosophical stuff. When the sun is tickling my belly, and I’m on the verge of diving headfirst into a relaxing slumber, the kind of slumber that refreshes and makes you feel like a new cat, I try to avoid interruptions that will stand in the way of the perfect napping experience.

  “I don’t think so,” said my friend, frowning. “Unless I missed something.” His eyes went wide. “Oh, no, Max! Maybe I missed this all-important documentary! Now I’m suffering from POMO!”

  “It’s FOMO, Dooley, not POMO.”

  “No, definitely POMO. Pair of missing out.”

  “That makes no sense at all.”

  “Oh, it does, Max. You see, if you miss out once, it’s fine, but if you miss out twice, it’s bad. So a pair of missing out, see?”

  All I saw was that my friend had been misinformed, either by some joker who was pulling his paw, or with good intentions. But since I was too relaxed to bother, I decided not to engage.

  Dooley is a gray raggamuffin, by the way, and a good deal smaller than myself. I’m a tabby with fur the color of the setting sun. I call it blorange, a contraction of blond and orange, though there have been folks who don’t always see the distinction and simply call me orange. I’m what you might call a full-bodied cat, on account of the fact that I was born with big bones. Don’t let my sizable appearance fool you, though. I’m generally a sweet-natured feline, not inclined to cause bodily harm to anyone, man or beast, unless they try to cause me harm first, of course, and even then.

  “I think the answer is very simple, Dooley.”

  “It is?”

  “Sure. Tell Buster to start walking in any direction, and just keep on walking. If after a while he falls off the face of the planet, the earth is flat. If he ends up back where he started, it’s round. Easy peasy.”

  Dooley thought about this for a moment, which gave me the opportunity to drift off into the refreshing sleep I just mentioned. Unfortunately, just when I was about to plunge headfirst into oblivion, he spoke once more.

  “I think that’s brilliant, Max.”

  “Of course it is,” I said, deciding not to bother with humility for once.

  “I’ll tell him tonight, and he can start his experiment immediately.”

  “You do that,” I murmured, the warmth of the sun now having a profoundly soporific effect on me.

  For a long moment, things were quiet there in Odelia’s backyard. Odelia Poole is my human, and Chase Kingsley her husband. Together they take good care of us, and in return we take good care of them. The perfect example of you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, though it’s easier for them—and less painful—to scratch my back than it is for me to scratch theirs.

  “Max?” suddenly my friend piped up again.

  I released a tired sigh. “Dooley?”

  “So I was thinking, maybe we can join Buster on his trip.”

  “What trip?” I asked, having long forgotten the topic of our recent conversation.

  “Why, his trip around the world, of course. We start off here, and we just keep on walking until we get back where we took off, and that way we’ll have settled once and for all that the earth is round, not flat, like Fido seems to think.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Dooley,” I said, this time not even bothering to open my peepers.

  “Oh, and why is that?”

  “For one thing, the earth is very, very big, and for another, how are we going to survive, traipsing all around the globe without our daily dose of kibble?”

  “We could ask Odelia to prepare us a snack?”

  I smiled at my friend’s naivety. He may watch the Discovery Channel on a regular basis, but that doesn’t mean he’s wise to the ways of the world yet.

  “Dooley, do you have any idea how long it would take us to travel all around the world?”

  “Um… a day? Maybe two?”

  “At the rate of speed we travel, it will probably take us a couple of years.”

  “Years!”

  “Sure. Like I said, the world is a big place, Dooley, and we’re small in comparison.”

  “Oh,” he said, his excitement somewhat dampened. But if I thought he’d give up now, I was of course mistaken, as I should have foreseen. Once my friend gets a thought into his tiny nut, it’s very hard to dislodge it, even with the assistance of a monkey wrench. Or a cat wrench, if such a d
evice exists.

  “So what if we ask Odelia to come along with us? She has a car, and that way it won’t take us years but maybe just a couple of days, right?”

  “Even if Odelia took us along in her car, it would still take us months to travel around the world,” I said. “Also, since a large portion of the earth is covered in oceans, we’d need to swim across those oceans. And I don’t think Odelia will be up for such a challenge.” I knew I wasn’t. Wild horses couldn’t drag me away from the small town I like to call home—or even tame ones.

  “So… what if Odelia and Chase built a boat, and we traveled across those oceans by boat?” He shivered at the thought. Cats aren’t entirely fond of traveling in a small metal box that bobs up and down on the waves. We’d recently allowed Odelia and Chase to drag us along on their honeymoon, which they’d chosen to spend on a cruise ship, and we still hadn’t fully recovered from the ordeal.

  “Look, Odelia has a job, and so does Chase,” I pointed out. “Their respective bosses aren’t going to allow them to go on some crazy trip trying to prove what everyone already knows to be true anyway.”

  “And what’s that?” Dooley asked, interested.

  “That the earth is round!”

  “Fido doesn’t seem to think so.”

  “That’s because Fido is an idiot,” I said, starting to lose my patience.

  “So… the earth isn’t flat?” asked Dooley, just to make sure.

  “No, it’s not. And now can I please take my nap? Thank you.”

  For a while, things were pleasantly quiet. Birds were chirping in the background, crickets were rubbing their wings, and I was about to engage in a kibble-filled dream when Dooley said, “Or we could ask Odelia to charter a plane. If we don’t fly too high, and keep an eye on the ground, we’ll know when we reach the world’s edge, wouldn’t we?”

  “There is no edge,” I said.

  “I know, and that’s what we need to prove to Fido. So we’ll take him along in our plane so he can see for himself.”

  “Honestly? I really don’t care what Fido thinks.”

  “But Buster does. He’s really worried about him.”

  “Worried in what sense?”

  “Well, he’s online all the time, talking to his flat earth friends, and he’s been neglecting his business, except when he’s trying to convince his customers about some of his ideas. They’re already starting to go elsewhere for their haircuts.”

  “Fido is losing customers?”

  “In droves, Max. The talk in town is that you can’t get a haircut without having Fido trying to fill your head with all kinds of nonsense, and who needs that?”

  I certainly didn’t. Then again, I’m not the kind of cat who likes to go to the hair salon, so I can’t really speak from experience. But the Pooles are all very fond of Fido, especially the ladies. Odelia visits him once a month, her mom Marge twice a month and Gran even schedules weekly visits to make sure her little white curls are always in tip-top shape. The men are a different story. Uncle Alec never goes, since one of the requirements of going to a hair salon is that you actually have hair on top of your head, which I’m sorry to say is not so much the case anymore for Odelia’s uncle. His girlfriend Charlene Butterwick, our local mayor, doesn’t seem to mind, though. She herself is an avid Fido fan, and then there are Odelia’s dad Tex, who’s a lukewarm salon goer, as is Chase.

  Chase is a cop, you see, and cops, since they are in constant contact with the members of the public, need to look presentable to some extent, so as not to scare them off too much. And Tex Poole is a doctor, and no sick person likes to visit a doctor who looks like a hell’s angel.

  “So maybe we’ll drop by the hair salon later,” I told my friend. In spite of myself, this whole Flat Earth Society business had piqued my curiosity, and I wanted to see firsthand what effect Fido’s affiliation was having on the man’s state of mind. If he was scaring off his clientele, maybe Dooley and Buster were right, and something needed to be done. Hair hygiene is a serious business, and if Fido scared away all of his customers, soon Hampton Cove would turn into a hippie town, where the greasy mane ruled supreme.

  Though to be perfectly honest I didn’t see how three cats could possibly be instrumental in rectifying this situation. It’s hard to make humans change their minds about something once an idea has taken root in those big noggins they precariously balance on their necks. And I may be a lot of things but I’m not a shrink, so I wouldn’t know how to treat delusional behavior even if I tried.

  Still, Buster was our good friend, and so it behooved us to try and find a way to help him in his hour of need.

  2

  Odelia Poole sat hunched over her small desk, frowning at the screen of her laptop computer. From time to time she glanced up to look out the window, which offered a view of the backyard of her own house and that of the neighboring houses. It had been Chase’s idea to install this modest office for her, so she could work from home when she wanted to. And it certainly was a very pleasant little space, located in the bedroom. Before it had been turned into an office it had been a spacious closet, but since Odelia wasn’t a beauty queen or felt the need to spend her hard-earned cash on fancy outfits, she’d used it as storage space, and a place to store her ironing board. On Chase’s instigation they’d relegated most of the stuff to the attic or Goodwill, and while Chase and Tex put up some shelves, Odelia and her mom had gone shopping for a nice desk, a decent office chair and even an armchair where she could think and thresh out ideas—if her cats allowed her to use it, of course, since they’d discovered the space, too—and loved it!

  “Diamonds, diamonds, diamonds…” she murmured as she intently gazed at her screen. “Bring me your diamonds, good sir or madam, whether they be white, pink, yellow, orange or black.”

  Lately a peculiar story had developed right in the heart of Hampton Cove. A little girl collecting seashells on the beach had picked up what looked like a sparkling piece of glass, and had excitedly handed it to her mommy, who was reading a book nearby. The piece of glass had looked too polished to be part of a broken bottle, and when the woman had studied the item more closely, she’d discovered that it was very nicely cut like a gemstone of some kind.

  So she’d taken it into town to a local jeweler to have it looked at, and the jeweler’s jaw had practically dropped to the floor when he indulgently studied what he figured was a piece of colored glass with his loupe, and had discovered that it was a flawless pink diamond of exquisite cut, and probably worth a small fortune.

  Of course the news had traveled fast, and plenty of people had soon taken up vigil on the beach, looking for more diamonds where that first one had come from.

  The police had gotten involved when the jeweler had declared the stone to be of extreme value, and the hunt was on to find its owner. Oddly enough, no one came forward to claim the stone.

  Odelia’s editor, who smelled a great article, had put his star reporter on the story. And since it wasn’t inconceivable that the stone had been accidentally dropped there by thieves, Odelia had been scouring the web in search of stories of people having been robbed of such a valuable gem. She leaned back when she realized that she was suffering from that typical malady of your intrepid journo: she didn’t have enough information to write a decent piece. Yet. An omission that could easily be remedied by going into town and finding out what she needed to know.

  And it was with the kind of swiftness and alacrity typical of the dynamic young woman that she was, that she rose from her chair, closed her laptop, tucked it into her shoulder bag, then lightly darted down the stairs and out the door. She paused on the threshold, though, and smiled as she retraced her steps.

  Crossing over to the sliding glass door, she opened it and called out, “Max, Dooley—I’m hunting down a story. Wanna join me?”

  And it was a testament to her two cats’ spirit of adventure that they didn’t need to be told twice.

  Immediately both cats came tripping up to her, looking ea
ger to partake in her latest adventure.

  “What is it?” asked Dooley excitedly. “Are you going to try to prove that the earth is round?”

  She laughed at that. “Now why would I want to prove something that’s a known fact, honey? No, I want to talk to a jeweler.”

  “A jeweler?” asked the small gray cat. “Are you going to buy a ring?”

  “Not exactly,” she said as she headed out the door, her two cats in tow. “I need to ask him a couple of questions about a diamond that was found on the beach yesterday.”

  “Diamonds!” said Dooley, his eyes shining as brightly as she imagined that diamond had shone.

  “Diamond, singular,” she said as she held open the door of her aged pickup truck, to allow both cats to hop up onto the backseat. She closed the door, and assumed her position behind the wheel. ”Though of course where there’s one diamond, there may be others.”

  “Cool!” said Dooley, who never stinted for pretty excitement and youthful zeal.

  Max, more laidback and assuming the attitude of an elder statesman, said, “Is this the diamond nobody knows the origin of?”

  “Yep. They call it the Pink Lady.”

  She started up her engine, and soon was tootling along the road into town.

  “Why do they call it that, Odelia?” asked Dooley.

  “Well, mainly because it’s pink, I guess,” she said, “and also because it looks exactly like a famous diamond called the Pink Lady.”