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  “You were saying, Cornelius?” the Madame inquired.

  “The door swings open fast,” he finished.

  From the other side of the room, Archie weakly said, “Thanks for the heads up.”

  While Archie regained his footing and shook off the canaries circling his head, I gathered some extra candles and took a cautious step into the pitch black hallway that we had been revealed behind the bookcase. Madame Buttercup lit a couple of my candles, and I handed one to Archie.

  “I go first into the kitchen and get clocked with a frying pan,” Archie complained as he took his candle and led the way into the hidden hallway. “l go second into here and still get clobbered. There’s no way I’m going third this time.”

  Madame Buttercup quickly followed him as she said, “I’m not sure there’s any safe place.”

  I laughed as I took up the rear. “That’s the Archibald Wigglebutt I remember,” I said under my breath, fondly reflecting on how he could get flustered at the slightest setback.

  We didn’t walk too far when we came upon a staircase. After ascending the steps, we walked about ten feet and turned a corner where the hallway came to an abrupt end. In the candlelight, it looked more like a wall than a door, but there were three hinges running down the wall to our left. In front of us were two small holes, which let in a scant amount of light. I stepped closer to the wall and looked through the holes. They were perfectly shaped and spaced for my eyes to look out each hole simultaneously.

  I could only imagine what it looked like from the other side. My guess was I was looking through the eye holes disguised in a painting hung on the wall. I had only seen something like this on TV, but it seemed appropriate for Mr. Hashimoto’s house.

  With my face pressed against the wall, I scanned the room and deduced that it was some type of bedroom. Maybe it was Mr. Hashimoto’s?

  Faintly, I could see the makings of an ornately decorated room, which featured a four-scratching-post bed against the far wall. It was the kind you see in those high-end furniture magazines. I also noted another security camera with its steady red light. It seemed to me that the number of cameras throughout the house was a bit over the top even for a multi-millionaire.

  Scanning the rest of the room, I spotted a dark figure huddled in the corner, but I was unable to see who it was or what it was doing.

  “What do you see?” Archie asked in a hushed tone.

  I stepped back from the wall to let him have a look. Archie peered through the holes as Madame Buttercup inched closer with hopes of getting a glimpse too.

  “Look in the corner,” I whispered.

  “What is it?” the Madame excitedly asked.

  “I can’t tell,” Archie said as he stepped back to let her look. “I think we’re just going to have to go in there and find out.”

  It was Archie’s favorite way to approach a situation. Head on. But this time he was right. How could we answer any of our questions by observing a nondescript figure on the other side of a dark room from two eye-holes in the wall?

  “That has to be an apparition,” Madame Buttercup expressed in a soft, but excited tone. “Follow my lead.”

  Even though there wasn’t a handle to pull the door open, I was able to dig my claws into the seam between the door and wall and pry it open. For a door I would have thought was rarely used, it glided open quietly. Maybe it wasn’t used so infrequently after all.

  Madame Buttercup led the way into the room followed by Archie and me. As we stepped through the doorway, I realized it was surrounded by a picture frame and the door was a painting of the Cat of Monte Cristo. We had been seeing the room through his eyes as I suspected.

  We quietly stepped through the picture frame and approached the mysterious figure from behind. Madame Buttercup pulled her ghost catching jar from her bag when she lost grip, and it fell to the floor with a glass-shattering crash. Each of us stopped in our tracks, wide-eyed with expectation and curiosity to see what the ghost would do.

  But it did nothing. It didn’t turn around or float through a wall. It didn’t howl or shriek. It didn’t move at all except for the fluttering of its gently flowing skirting.

  I held my candle out to get a better look. That was when we all simultaneously realized that it was not a ghost or a person or any animate being.

  “It’s a coat!” Archie exclaimed.

  He was right. It was just a simple suit coat hanging on a valet next to a window that was slightly open. The wind was causing the jacket’s hem to wave back and forth.

  “You said you were sure it was an apparition,” Archie accused Madame Buttercup.

  She looked a bit embarrassed as she shrugged.

  “It appears that our ghost hunt has come to a dead end,” I mused. “If that really is what we’re doing.”

  “What do you mean?” the Madame asked.

  “It seems to me that we are wandering around Mr. Hashimoto’s house looking for a ghost that no one has ever seen. Where is this particularly, pesky ghost?” I challenged.

  “What about that rush of wind and the books falling on Cornelius?” the Madame pointed out.

  “And the disappearance of Dr. Flufferton and Fiona?” Archie added.

  “All mysterious, but not ghostly,” I countered. “Same with the timely power outage and magical vanishing of Mr. Hashimoto, which most likely is the result of a well-placed trapdoor.” I noted that I’d seen how trapdoors can be used in stage shows like the one at that Fat Cat Café. “Mr. Hashimoto introduced this evening as a competition, but I’m beginning to think that it’s really just a game. We have yet to see any evidence of a ghost. Instead we’ve experienced rain, lightning, thunder, rushes of wind, strange disappearances, mysterious crashes, and hidden passageways, which are all classic concepts of a haunted house.”

  “This has become more of a wild goose chase than a wild ghost chase,” I quipped, which elicited a laugh from Archie. Surprised to hear him laugh, I looked over at him and laughed too. It was another moment of resurging memories of the many good times we had while working as Cat Cops. We laughed for a few moments until we were shocked back into the moment when the window slammed shut with a rattling bang.

  Casting our looks to the window, we were silent as we assessed what had just happened. Was it just the wind that had made the window close? Or was it something more mystical? Windows slamming shut in an old house usually isn’t too much of a mystery, but what happened next was. Our eyes were still focused on the window when it started to rattle. At first it was just a faint tap… tap… tap…, but within seconds the vibration had increased to the level of an entire percussion line. And then right before our eyes, the window started to open. Wider and wider until the bottom pane rose all the way up.

  Once the window was open as wide as it could go, a wind started blowing, but it wasn’t from outside in. The wind was blowing from inside the room and out the window. We were being sucked from the room.

  “Hold onto something!” Archie yelled over the deafening sound of a roaring wind.

  The wind first knocked me down as it pulled me to the open window. Digging my claws into the wood floor, I was able to resist the tug of the treacherous tempest. Archie was able to wrap himself around one of the bed posts securely. However, Madame Buttercup

  was not so fortunate as she lost her footing and was only able to grab hold of the ghost-impersonating jacket. With only a firm grip on the jacket, she was swept out the window like a piece of dust sucked up by a vacuum cleaner.

  Holding onto the wood floor with every bit of strength I could muster, I was forced to helplessly watch her tragic flight out the window. And then almost as quickly as it started, the window slammed shut, and the wind ceased.

  As I worked to pry each of my claws from the flooring because I had dug them in so deeply, Archie lightened his grip on the post and slid down to the floor. Once we were both to our feet, we ran to the window, but Madame Buttercup was nowhere to be seen. Now it was only Archie and me.

  �
��What was that?” I questioned incredulously. My heart rate had reached a pace like never before.

  “I don’t know.” Archie replied as he gasped for air. “How does a wind come from inside a house?”

  “It was more like a tornado.”

  “And now what do we do? Where do we go from here?”

  I pondered our situation. We had finally experienced something that could be classified as “paranormal” even though we didn’t see a ghost. But our numbers were decreasing with every room we entered, and now we had lost our ghost expert as well as the ghost catching jar. “I guess we do what we were trained to do,” I proposed. “We look for clues, and if we don’t find any, we look until we do.”

  “Right,” Archie said, “follow the clues.”

  Fortunately, it didn’t take long to find a new clue. In fact, the clue found us.

  We exited the room and into a long hallway that appeared to lead to other bedrooms. At the end of the hall was a stairway leading up to another level. That seemed like a good direction to go, so we started toward the stairway when we noticed a figure blocking our path.

  “Please tell me you see it,” Archie asked me without looking away, fearful it would disappear.

  “I do,” I replied, nodding.

  Our eyes were fixed on the figure. It hovered about a foot off the ground and had a white and pinkish translucent glow. The shape was unmistakably catlike, but different than any cat I knew.

  Slowly, we started to move closer to the ghostly figure. I would have expected Archie to be more aggressive in his approach to a situation like this, but he stayed by my side. This seemed a little out of character for him. I was the cat from the school of caution and stealth when approaching a curious situation. I knew him as a pounce first sort of cat.

  Step by step we silently inched closer to the possible answer to our mystery.

  “What do we do once we get close to it?” Archie asked in a whisper.

  “I’m not sure,” I quietly replied.

  “I guess we’ll do what we used to do.”

  I looked over at Archie and nodded. Then simultaneously we both said, “Improvise.”

  Just like old times, we were on the same page. Each bringing a unique approach to solving a mystery while having a clear goal and understanding of what the other might do. And at that moment, Archie reverted to the pounce first cat I’d always known.

  Leaving me behind, he started running toward the apparition at breakneck speed, which meant any element of surprise was gone and left me with two choices. I could either join him or wait to see what happens. While in the past I may have waited, I decided to spring into action with Archie.

  We were halfway down the hallway when the ghostly figure heard us coming and turned its attention to us. Its hollow eyes flared as a horrific howl came from its mouth. Then it started flying in our direction, bringing us both to a sliding halt on the slick floor.

  “I think we better find a different

  approach,” Archie sputtered.

  With my fur standing at attention, I looked at Archie with wide-eyes and yelled, “Run!”

  We turned and moved our feet as fast as we could on the ice-like newly polished floors. Finally, we got traction and up to speed, but as I looked back it wasn’t much good because the ghost was closing in fast.

  “We’re not going to out run it,” I exclaimed.

  “Look over there,” Archie pointed to a framed opening in the wall. “Let’s try and ditch this thing in there.”

  With a new found destination, we sprinted with paw-pounding energy toward the opening. Why it was there and where it led didn’t matter much at the moment. I was a good six or seven feet from the opening and a step ahead of Archie, so I leapt head first through the air and into the hole.

  Inside, I was caught by a steeply angled slide, which sent me gliding down and around until it dumped me out into a steamy room and plopped me into a cart full of white sheets. Taking a quick glance around my new location, I realized I was in the house’s expansive laundry room.

  I quickly jumped out of the sheets cart and looked for Archie to follow. He was hardly a step behind me as we ran toward the laundry chute, which meant he should have fallen into the pile of sheets only a second after me. I waited and watched, but he never came sliding through the opening.

  Could Archie have been captured by the ghost? How would a ghost actually capture a cat, and what would a ghost do with someone it captures? These and other questions filled my mind as I tried to figure out what was really happening. Why had I been invited to Mr. Hashimoto’s house? Why did he have Archie, Madame Buttercup, and Dr. Flufferton join me? Was it really about finding a ghost? Was it possibly just a rich cat’s folly?

  The pieces were starting to come together. If my hunch was correct, I would be able to solve this mystery by locating one specific room in the house. It was the key to Mr. Hashimoto’s puzzle and may answer the question of what happened to my missing companions.

  One thing I knew for sure. That room wasn’t the laundry room, and it did me no good to continue waiting for Archie because it was apparent that either he didn’t or couldn’t make it through the laundry chute opening.

  Leaving the laundry room, I entered another of many maze-like halls. Using my keen cat sense, I sniffed the air to see if I could catch the scent of my unfinished plate of salmon. Finding the dining room would point me in the direction of the entry and front door, where it all began. That would be the best place to start piecing together the clues.

  Fortunately, my nose was already on the case and quickly guided me down the hallway to a set of stairs. Having taken the laundry chute down, I realized that I was now in the basement of the house, so I started up the stairs to the main level.

  At the top of the stairway, I was greeted by another security camera watching me. It was all starting to make sense. What I needed to find was Mr. Hashimoto’s room where he viewed the video footage. I expected that he would have an elaborate set up of multiple monitors with views of practically every room in the house. I also suspected that room was on the same side as the truck that had been parked outside the house.

  Within a minute I was back in the dining room looking at my now cold salmon. I grabbed a pinch of the fish and popped it into my mouth, reminding myself what I had missed out on. Mmmmm, the morsel melted in my mouth. That’s the great thing about salmon; it’s great hot or cold, but once again, I had to remind myself that I was not back in the dining room to eat. I was only passing through.

  On the opposite side of the entry, there were a couple doors. I knew one led to a coat closet because that was where Cornelius had hung my coat and hat. The other, I suspected, was to the security monitoring room.

  Standing in the grand entry of the house, I scanned the area noting even more cameras positioned throughout than I had noticed when I arrived. There had to be at least six cameras, which made me question why someone would need so many angles of the same room. For security purposes it might make sense to have two cameras but six seemed excessive. This information confirmed in my mind what I’d been suspecting, and I was ready to solve the mystery. Now what I needed was an audience, and I knew exactly where to find one.

  Walking to the opposite side of the entry, I selected the door that I was pretty sure was not the coat closet. I had a pretty good memory for those types of things, but I have to admit I was bit enamored with Mr. Hashimoto’s house and was not paying as much attention to the details as I normally would. I only vaguely remembered where Cornelius had hung my coat.

  As I opened the door, I confirmed that it was not the coat closet and was indeed as I suspected. It was a room filled with TV monitors. The entire wall to my right was covered end to end and floor to ceiling with them. But it wasn’t the monitors that I was looking for. It was the short, round-faced cat, Mr. Hashimoto, standing behind four other cats who were seated at tables covered with electronic video and audio equipment. This room was more than just a place to monitor the home’s secu
rity. It was a TV studio control room.

  Entering the space, I caught Mr. Hashimoto’s attention. He looked over to me from one of the monitors and smiled. I was pretty sure my appearance was not the ending he was hoping for, but he still glowed with enthusiasm. “Mr. Katz, you are impressive!”

  Not being a cat to shy from compliments, I said, “Thank you,” even though I wasn’t sure what was so impressive.

  Mr. Hashimoto quickly made his way across the room to greet me with another of his awkward hugs. Letting me go, he looked behind me and then around the area before asking, “Where are the others?”

  I turned to look with him and laughed, “I was about to ask you the same question.”

  “Are you saying that you have lost my other guests?”

  “I wouldn’t say that I lost them,” I explained. “I think it’s more that they lost me.”

  Mr. Hashimoto looked at me a bit puzzled, but by my estimation, he was just pretending. I was pretty sure he knew exactly where the Madame, Dr. Flufferton, and Archie were. And it was a gamble I was willing to take.

  “If my skills haven’t failed me, I suspect my three ghost hunting partners are close by if not already here.”

  “Here?” Mr. Hashimoto innocently feigned.

  “Yes, here in this room,” I confidently proclaimed. “In fact, being a cat who likes a good guessing game, I suspect that Dr. Flufferton is hiding behind that door there. I assume it’s a closet.” I have to admit that I was taking a wild guess at who might be in the closet, but I figured I had a one in three chance of being right about who had chosen the closet as a hiding place.

  “Hiding? Dr. Flufferton?” With each question Mr. Hashimoto’s ability to pretend he was unaware of Dr. Flufferton, Madame Buttercup, and Archie’s presence worsened; and his enthusiasm faded.

  I walked over to the closet door and grabbed the knob. “My guess is that right before I entered the room, the doctor stepped in here.” I turned the knob and opened the door, revealing Flufferton standing there with a sheepish look on his face.