Meow or Never (Vanessa Abbot Cat Protection League Cat Cozy Mystery Series Book 3) by Nancy C. Davis

closed her eyes, and the next thing she
knew, the sun was streaming through the room and birds chirping outside the
window. She glanced at the clock. 7:00am. She slept the whole night without
waking once. So much for keeping alert.

    She kicked herself when she looked
around the room and noticed Julie gone. Some watchdog she turned out to be. She
sat up on the edge of the bed and straightened her hair just as someone knocked
on the door. She peeked through the window and found Pete Wheeler on the
doorstep. “Did you get him?”

    Pete shook his head. “He wasn't there.
We even posted a guard, but he won't come back to the flour mill. He knows
we're onto him now. He'll find some other place to hide.”

    “So we're back to square one,” Vanessa
remarked. “..and we lost Julie, too. I mean, I lost Julie. She slipped
out while I was asleep.”

    “No,” he told her. “I came by to tell
you we missed Walter, but you were asleep, so I decided not to wake you up.
Julie said she had to go into the office, but she would let me know if she
heard from Walter again.”

    “And you believe her?” Vanessa asked.

    Pete shrugged. “She seems genuinely
sorry for putting you in danger. At least, she seems genuinely sorry for
putting herself in danger. I'm willing to give her a chance to redeem herself.
After all, she's the one who told us he was in the flour mill in the first
place.”

    “She could have made that up to throw
you off the track,” Vanessa pointed out. “She could have told you that to get
the police to run over there looking for him while Walter committed some other
heinous deed.”

    “We can only wait and find out,” he
replied. “In the meantime, I have a different place for you to stay tonight.”

    “Oh? Where?” she asked.

    “Somewhere you can take your cats with
you,” he told her.

    Vanessa clapped her hands and jumped up
and down. “Oh, Pete! You are a treasure. Where is it?”

    “It's Mrs. Harris's house,” he replied.

    “What? Your place?” she exclaimed.

    “Well, you'll have your own room,” he
explained. “You know how Mrs. Harris is. She wouldn't stand for us sharing a
room, since we aren't married. But I explained the situation to her, and she
agreed to give you and the cats a place to stay, just until you figure
something out.”

    Vanessa threw her arms around him. “Oh,
thank you so much. You don't know what it was like, spending the night without
my cats.”

    “From what I saw,” he told her, “you
didn't have any trouble spending the night without your cats. I showed up
around eleven o'clock, and you were sound asleep.”

    Vanessa grinned. “You're right. But I
have to get back to the shop now. They'll want their breakfast, and I have to
get them ready to move.”

    “Do you have enough crates for them?”
he asked.

    Vanessa nodded. “I have all the cat
crates anyone could want in the basement. We're the Cat Protection League,
after all.”

    He drove her back to the Opportunity
Shop and dropped her off on the sidewalk outside. “If any of them gives you a
hard time, you tell them to talk to me. I'll straighten them out.”

    Vanessa slammed the car door. “Don't
worry. I think they'll be happy to get out of the apartment for a while.”

    He called through the open window.
“I'll be back in three hours to pick you up.”

    Vanessa let herself into the shop, and
the cats greeted her with their usual hungry meows.

    “Did you have a quiet night?” she
asked. “Apparently I did, although I don't remember much of it. I must have
been a lot more tired than I realized. I'm not surprised, after that scare I
had with Walter yesterday. Anyway, we're going to be staying with dear old Mrs.
Harris for a while, at least until I can find another place to live.”

    She set out their breakfast as usual on
the back wall of the shop. Henry sat up on the book table and stared down at
the other cats eating. The sight of his placid face and squinted eyes set
Vanessa's mind at