“I know,” I said. “But I promise it won’t take long before someone opens that door and lets us out.”
“I hope so,” he said with a sigh. Clearly, he wasn’t a big fan of Harriet’s talent.
Harriet, undeterred, opened those formidable pipes of hers and burst into song. The sound was enough to rattle the window panes and though I thought I could see the wallpaper coming loose on the walls and falling to the ground, that could have simply been my imagination. Before long, the sound was so devastating that I wished I had brought along a pair of earplugs. But then no earplugs can contend with the sheer power of Harriet’s voice. People started pounding the walls of the adjacent rooms, and not even five minutes into her concert suddenly the door swung open and the hotel manager strode in, looking perturbed. When he saw Harriet sitting on top of the bed singing at the top of her lungs, he pressed his hands to his ears, a grimace distorting his features, and approached her the way one approaches a hurricane or twister or some other natural disaster zone. The moment he had reached her, he tentatively removed one hand from his ears, screwed up his face in an expression of sheer agony, and managed to grab Harriet by the neck and pick her up, then drag her bodily from the room.
“Hey, what do you think you’re doing!” she yelled.
“This man is saving us, Harriet,” I pointed out. I didn’t specify who he was saving, but it was enough to make her stop singing, which was a big relief for all of us, and also the hotel manager, who trudged off with Harriet still firmly dangling from his hand.
“We better follow her,” said Brutus. “Before we get locked up in here again.”
And so we followed the manager as he traversed the hotel with Harriet suspended from his outstretched arm. It was a curious sight, and plenty of guests watched us stride off. When they saw the manager holding Harriet in a firm grip, they broke out into spontaneous applause.
In other words: we had been saved from imprisonment and would soon be reunited with our humans. But instead, the hotel manager took Harriet into his office, and since we were all following him, like those kids chasing after the pied piper, before we knew what was happening, we were locked up again, only this time in the manager’s office!
In other words: we’d gone from bad to worse.
CHAPTER 10
Andy Pettey glanced out of the window of his hotel room and shook his head. This town was going to the dogs, and fast. They’d been vacationing in Hampton Cove for close on thirty years now, he and his wife Brandy, but it had never been as bad as it was this year. Caterwauling cats in the next room, people being shot in broad daylight, and now even a murder of an actual prince across the corridor. What was going on? He retracted his head.
“Are they still there?” asked Brandy, who had been glued to the television set in a corner of their room.
“Still there,” he confirmed. “Looks like you were right, sweetest. We shouldn’t have come this year.”
“But where else are we gonna go?” she lamented. “This is our home away from home.”
“Well, it’s time we found a new home away from home then,” he said. “They actually shot a man across the corridor, honey. Shot him stone-cold dead!”
The hullabaloo had been so overwhelmingly loud that they’d both stepped out of their room that morning to see what was going on. Normally not all that interested in meddling in other people’s affairs, this time he felt they couldn’t stay away, as the noise was preventing them from mapping out their day. And that’s when they discovered that their neighbor, an actual prince, had been shot. Shot dead with an actual gun! Right there. In their favorite hotel in what was supposed to be a fairy town. And in the middle of their vacation, no less.
Before long, they’d been interrogated by two police officers, who had peppered them with questions that Andy frankly found extremely insulting. Almost as if they thought they were the murderers! Now why would they go about murdering people? He was a retired shoe salesman and Brandy a former nurse. So they were both in the business of saving lives—he through supplying them with the proper footwear, a mission he had always taken very seriously. And she through the loving care she lavished on her patients throughout a long career.
The moment this whole business with the prince was over and done with, they were out of there, Andy thought. And if it was up to him, they’d never come back.
“I don’t get it,” said Brandy as she half-turned to him. “A drive-by shooting? In the heart of Hampton Cove? But why?”
“I didn’t even know they had organized crime here,” said Andy, shaking his head.
“They didn’t have it last time we were here,” said Brandy. “I’m sure of it. Must have traveled over from the big city when things got too hot for them over there.”
It certainly seemed as if the ills of the big city were spreading to the country now.
He got up and opened the door a crack.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Looking to see if they’re gone,” he said. As far as he could tell, the room had been sealed off with that yellow crime scene tape the police liked so much, but of the officers themselves there was not a single trace.
“Looks like the coast is clear,” he said.
“Good. Then we can finally go down to the beach. Did you order that packed lunch like I told you to?”
“What?”
“Packed lunch, Andy.”
“Why are you talking about a packed lunch, woman?” he snapped. “There’s been a murder right under our noses, and another one around the corner. We’re probably in the middle of a gang war so I think it’s time we got out of Dodge. Before these maniacs target us!”
“But why would they target us? We’re not rich or anything, like this dead guy was.”
Prince Abdullah had been more than merely rich. He had been of noble and royal heritage, according to the one conversation Andy had had with him over breakfast a couple of days ago. He was part of the royal family of Abou-Yamen, he had said, and had plenty of brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and uncle and aunts, and all of them were princes and princesses, as far as Andy understood. Hundreds of them. But when he asked the prince if he was in town for business or pleasure, the prince had clammed up on him, and had merely smiled and bid him adieu. It was all very mysterious, he thought. And now the guy was dead. So maybe the reason he was in town had something to do with why he had been killed?
“But I don’t want to go,” said Brandy. “We just got here, and we paid for two whole weeks.”
“It’s not safe here anymore, honey.”
“I don’t care! Just look at the streets. They’re still teeming with tourists. So why can’t we be like them, huh?”
“Because whoever killed the prince must have been keeping an eye on him. And if they saw that he talked to us, they might come after us as well.”
“I don’t see why they would,” she insisted stubbornly.
“Whatever the reason they killed the prince, maybe they figure he told us about it. And they can’t have any witnesses.”
“Witnesses to what! We don’t know anything!”
