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One of the workers now emerged from the rubble carrying a litter box and, after a moment’s hesitation, placed it in front of us, then gave us a kindly nod in greeting, and walked off again.

“Hey, what do you know? It’s your litter box, Brutus,” I said.

“Yeah, what do you know,” said Brutus somberly. “Even though I’m homeless, at least I can still do my doo-doo,” he added, though he didn’t sound particularly happy about it.

“Look, you guys,” said Harriet. “It’s all going to be fine, just you wait and see. In fact if anything, the new house they’re building will be better and bigger and nicer and more modern than before.”

“Yeah, it was a pretty old house,” I said, feeling we’d had enough of this doom and gloom for one morning. “The new house will be better built, better quality building materials, state-of-the-art insulation, roomier, lighter and brighter… All in all, I think we’ll look back on this day as the beginning of something new and pretty darn exciting.”

“They say that building from scratch is always cheaper and better than renovating,” Harriet said, giving me a grateful look.

“I guess if you look at it like that, you just might be right,” said Brutus after a pause.

“I like roomier and brighter,” said Dooley, nodding.

And so we quickly turned what could have been a tragedy into a good thing. It’s the power of resilience, you guys, something us cats have got in spades. And while we were talking about turning a bad thing into a good thing, just then Odelia came walking up to us, a frown furrowing her brow, and obviously needing our urgent assistance.

“So I need your advice,” she said as she pulled up a lawn chair and sat down next to us. “Karl Bunyon is in jail, right?”

“Oh, is this about the murder case?” asked Dooley. “Cause I thought we were discussing the new house they’re building.”

Odelia darted a quick glance at what had once been her parental home, then dismissed it with a gesture.“No, this is about the murder,” she confirmed. “I want to run something by you and see what you think. I’ve got a couple of suspects for Pete’s murder.”

“Pete?” I asked.

“The homeless person’s name was Pete, according to another homeless person named Charlie, who knew him and to whom he owed money, by the way.”

“Okay,” I said. I confess the whole murder business had momentarily been relegated to the back of my mind, and the collapse of Marge and Tex’s home had everything to do with that, of course. But if Odelia needed our sleuthing prowess, she got it, of course. “So Pete was killed,” I reiterated, “and Karl Bunyon is one of the suspects.”

“He is. Likely motive would be that he didn’t want people to know that he enjoyed dumping cats in the woods, because if that became known it could cause him to lose his kids. So he panicked and killed the witness and tried to hide the body.”

“Okay, so the problem with that,” I said, “is that a clever killer would also get rid of the murder weapon, and definitely not put it back in his own gun safe.”

“I like that, Max,” said Odelia, pointing at me. “That’s why I want to run the other suspects by you one by one and see what you guys think. The first one is Charlie himself, who was seen hanging around the Bunyon residence, and could easily have gained access to the house and grabbed the gun from the safe.”

“Possibly,” I agreed, “though highly unlikely.”

“Charlie’s motive would have been to get the money Pete owed him, and they could have gotten into some kind of tussle and the gun could have discharged by accident.”

“Who is Charlie?” asked Dooley, who had trouble following the barrage of different names pertaining to the case.

“He’s the bum who might have killed the other bum,” said Brutus, who was able to keep up.

“Oh,” said Dooley. “Okay.”

“And then there’s the stepdaughter,” Odelia continued. “Suzy could have taken her stepdad’s gun and given it to her raver boyfriend Darryl, or any of his friends, who could have used it to kill Pete. So let’s suppose that Todd Park, for instance, shot and killed Pete. Then Darryl, who was hard up and needed the money, could have blackmailed his friend, at which point Todd pushed Darryl down that shaft to get rid of him.”

“I like this theory,” I confessed. “Though it doesn’t necessarily have to be Todd Park. It could be any one of Daryl’s raver friends.”

“We probably should talk to some of these raving friends,” Harriet said.

“Raver friends,” Brutus corrected her gently. “Though they might be raving, too, of course,” he quickly added when she shot him an angry look.

“And that brings us to my final theory,” said Odelia, “and this is the one Kathleen Bunyon suggested: Grace Kramer could have taken the gun and killed Pete so she could put the blame on her ex-husband and take the kids from him once and for all.”