No, if she was going to keep Frances as her keeper and carer, she needed to make sure he didn’t fall off the wagon again. And as she listened to this woman Betsy Brogue drone on and on about the twelve steps, the first glimmer of an idea started to form in her mind. Step one: convince the others. But in light of recent events, she didn’t think that would be hard. Step two… But beforeshe could come up with a twelve-step program of her own, Betsy Brogue announced that Francis’s sponsor would be none other than… Scarlett Canyon!
Oh, dear, Shanille thought as she closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, Scarlett was covering the priest’s face with kisses. Very inappropriate! Not to mention probably borderline blasphemous! Clearly Miss Canyon saw in Marigold’s departure a chance to bag herself a man of the cloth!
And so for the next half hour, cat choir’s conductor came up with a revised version of the twelve-step program. In her personal view, a superior version.
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You know that things are returning to normal when cat choir is being conducted by the one and only Shanille once more. After an absence of several nights, one of which had dissolved into turmoil and recrimination, Shanille was back! And she came filled with plans. Though those plans, oddly enough, had nothing to do with music, and everything to do with alcohol!
“I attended the AA meeting this evening,” the iconic conductor revealed, “and things are looking bad, you guys.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Did you know that Vesta is attending these AA meetings, and Tex, too?”
“Yeah, I did know that,” I said. “Marge made them. She found some empty bottles in the recycle bin and so assumed her husband and mother had become alcoholics.” Though to be honest I thought she was probably exaggerating. Neither Tex nor Gran were exactly the epitome of the raging drunk. But then Marge tends to overreact sometimes. I had the impression she would make them go for a while, and then forgive and forget and things would return back to normal.
“It’s not enough,” said Shanille decidedly. “In fact it won’t do!”
“What’s not enough?” I asked.
“Yeah, what won’t do, Shanille?” asked Dooley.
“Let’s wait until the others are here,” said Shanille, cleverly building up the suspense. “Where are Harriet and Brutus? And where is Kingman?”
We glanced around, and saw that Harriet was surrounded by a group of her admirers. She was regaling them with the tale of how she had personally saved not only Father Reilly, but also Shanille herself from a terrible fate. Shanille would surely have died, if Harriet hadn’t gone into those woods, with considerable risk to her own personal safety, and had found Shanille, and had rescued her.
Brutus now wandered in our direction. He didn’t look all that happy, I thought.
“Is everything all right, Brutus?” I asked.
“Fine, fine,” he grumbled, indicating not everything was fine.
“It’s Harriet, isn’t it?” said Shanille. “She’s telling everyone how she saved my life and she’s not even mentioning you.”
“No, she is not,” said Brutus with a deep sigh.
“She didn’t actually save me, you know,” said Shanille “I was just so worried about Francis that I didn’t want to leave him alone for even one second.”
“Oh, let her tell the story,” said Brutus. “If it makes her feel better.”
“Okay, so maybe we’ll start without her,” said Shanille. She must have realized that once Harriet gets going tooting her own horn, it can take all night.
“Wait, there’s Kingman,” I said. And true to form, Kingman came waddling up, greeting cats left and right, and waving to everyone like the Pope riding around in his popemobile. “Hiya, fellas,” he said once he’d joined us. “Glad to see you looking so fit and healthy, Shanille. Good thing Harriet saved your life, isn’t it? Who knows what would have happened if she hadn’t. Probably eaten by wolves. Or a bear.”
“I was fine!” Shanille cried. “Nobody saved me!”
“Sure, sure,” said Kingman quickly. He turned to me. “What’s this I hear about some wine merchant being gunned down by a Chicago hit squad? Or was it the Columbians?”
“He wasn’t a wine merchant,” I said. “And he wasn’t gunned down. Well, he was shot, and so was the woman he was with.”
“Not his wife, eh?” said Kingman, giving me a wink. “Found in the bed of some prostitute, mh? Saucy stuff. Your human writing a front-page article, no doubt?”
“It wasn’t like that,” I said with a touch of exasperation.
“What’s this town coming to, huh?” said Kingman as he glanced in the direction of a pretty female. “Mobsters and hitmen, shootings and prostitutes. Pretty soon this place will be the crime capital of the country, if you ask me.”