The now-deserted home of Old Ada Phillips was built on the rocky shore just west of the wharf in Victoria-by-the-Sea. Villagers, Nigel Stump knew, called the dilapidated structure the Pitiful Place.
Indeed its peeling blue paint did appear to be weeping. The windows were shaded and sad. A bare, warped board above the door resembled a frown.
With the thin silver heart clenched in his teeth, Nigel scrambled up a wooden ramp that led to a one-hinged door. He squeezed through a space between the door and its frame, pausing to inhale the deliciously pervasive ratty smell.
Even into her mideighties, Old Ada had rescued white mice and rats discarded by biomedical laboratories. After the good-hearted but eccentric woman died, village councilmen filled burlap sacks with a few heavy rocks and—what they believed was—every last one of the rodents. Mice, rats, and rocks were tossed into the sea.
Nigel found the other cats—Axel, Tate, Leftie, Flint, and Briar—lounging about in the main room. Amid stacks of decades-old newspapers, trash, bones, broken lamps, and bird skulls were dozens of empty rodent cages, both steel and glass.
On his very first scavenger hunt, Nigel found a set of car keys that he’d hung on one of the cages. He’d been scavenging and decorating ever since, trying to make the place feel like a real home.
Axel, a brown-striped tabby with a sharp tongue, was the cats’ self-appointed leader. His former owner had chopped off the tip of Axel’s tail with—you guessed it—an ax, a brutal act which Axel vowed never to forget.
Axel insisted that Nigel adopt the name Stump to prove that he, too, had renounced the domesticated life.
In Nigel’s heart and mind, Nigel was still Nigel.
Tate, Leftie, Flint, and Briar had their own tales of maltreatment. It was part of the glue that held the gang of cats together.
Nigel drooled in anticipation of the envy the silver charm would evoke. He leaped from the back of a wing chair to the fireplace mantle—no easy feat for a three-legged cat.
“What’s up, Stump?” asked Axel.
Nigel revealed the heart-shaped piece of silver that crowned the tip of his tongue.
“For me?” asked the blue-furred female named Briar.
Tate, a black cat with an even darker spirit, eyed the charm and, with a casual flick of his seriously long tail, dismissed its value.
“Way to go, Stump,” said Leftie, who’d lost his right ear to a Pit Bull Terrier. “Where’d ya find it?”
Nigel let the heart drop onto a cracked saucer. “On the beach. Washed up in the storm, I guess.”
“That was a whopper of a storm,” Leftie commented, pointing his orange paw at a puddle of water by the refrigerator, which lay like a white coffin in the middle of the room.
Somehow, the discovery of the shiny charm had empowered Nigel. Something had been eating away at him for weeks. It was time to speak up.
“Hey, guys …”
Not a single eye turned in Nigel’s direction.
“Guys?”
“Say what ya gotta say,” Tate hissed. Nigel glared at the cats until he had their complete attention.
“We have a problem,” he announced. “The village has a problem. For all I know, the whole island has a problem.”
Grins broke out all around. The cat pack loved problems, troubles, sorrows, and other states of anxiety and fear.
Briar stopped grooming her luscious blue fur. “What’s the problem, Stumpy?”
“Outsiders.” Nigel curled the word off his tongue with disgust. “They’re invading our village.”
“Stump, what’re you talking about?” demanded Axel.
“As you know—today is the opening day of lobster season,” Nigel continued.
More grins. The cats loved lobster season—all the succulent scraps that littered the wharf after the fishermen unloaded their traps.
“Just a little while ago, at the wharf,” explained Nigel, “one of the men saw—I mean, he thought he saw—a rat tangled in a lobster trap.” He puffed out his chest. “Fresh meat.”
Briar smacked her lips. “I love rat steak.”
“But it turns out, it was a dog. A very small dog.”
“A dog in a lobster trap?” Axel sneered. “You gotta be kidding. Where’d it come from?”
“My point exactly,” said Nigel. “Where are all of these foreigners coming from? And why?”
“Who else,” asked Briar, “besides the dog?”
“That girl—the one with long black hair. She’s strange, I tell you—always hanging around our beach, stealing our stuff.”
“No stranger than any of the other two-leggers in the village,” Leftie noted. “Who else?”
“The fox,” Nigel snarled. “That foul creature showed up on the same day as the girl. No coincidence, if you ask me.”
“Strange. Very strange indeed,” agreed Tate.
“A strange girl, a fox, and now this Rat-Boy,” Nigel complained.
Flint, a Siamese Cross, yawned. “Who’s Rat-Boy?”
Fur on end, Nigel bared his brownish teeth. “Flint, listen up! Rat-Boy’s the name I gave the new dog! We’ve got to call him something.”
With narrowed eyes, Axel stroked his Whiskers with a paw. “Three outsiders moving into the village since the snow melted. If this keeps up, by next spring, that’s—”
“Too many,” Briar declared.
“This calls for a plan,” concluded Axel, switching his tipless tail.
An odd smile skewed the tabby cat’s face—a sinister look that Nigel hadn’t seen before.
“The Scram Plan.” Axel sniggered. “Effective immediately.”