Molly Moon & the Morphing Mystery

then she played. Heavenly music drifted about the room and the women fell quiet, in awe. Then Miss Hunroe suddenly stopped. “But, Miss Speal, you should be ashamed of yourself, losing control like you did. I’ve asked you not to rub that piece of stone while we are here. You behaved like an idiot. It was as if you wanted them to know our secret!”

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself,” the thin spinster mumbled, staring at the ground.

Miss Hunroe tutted nastily and then narrowed her eyes and impersonated her. “‘I couldn’t help myself.’ Pathetic.”

An awkward silence filled the room. Miss Suzette broke it, trying to change the subject. “I’m sure de Moon girl is a mind reader,” she said excitedly, bobbing about from foot to foot like some overkeen lapdog so that her frilly clothes started to flap. “Did she mind read you, Miss Hunroe? Did you see de way she looked at us? It was very good we knew how to take precautions and bar her probing mind from our true thoughts.”

Miss Hunroe nodded matter-of-factly and replied sourly, “She was most certainly attempting to read my mind. I felt it. It was as though a window had been opened into my head and a breeze was coming in. It took all my strength to invent the things she should see and keep her out of my real thoughts.”

“Yes, yes! For me it was a tickly feeling all over my forehead!” Miss Suzette declared.

“Do you think she’s a natural morpher? Do you think she can body borrow?”

“You couldn’t learn without that book,” Miss Speal replied. “Unless you had a teacher. For instance, I taught you all to morph into animals, but I originally got my lessons from the book.”

“Where are the cats?” Miss Hunroe asked impatiently. She looked at her watch.

As if on cue, the door opened, and led by a beautiful short-haired, blue-eyed white Burmese cat, the two other female hypnotists, Miss Oakkton and Miss Teriyaki, entered. Miss Oakkton held two cats, a big ginger tom and a gray hairless sphynx cat, while Miss Teriyaki, with a crutch under her right arm, held a fluffy white Persian cat under her left arm. A gray Siamese followed her.

Miss Teriyaki spoke. “Oh, Miss Hunroe, you were so clever to make the story up that my skiing-accident scar was from a trip into the casino! I’m sure those gullible children believed it completely!” Miss Hunroe blinked at Miss Teriyaki, then glared at Miss Oakkton.

“You’re late, Miss Oakkton. Just like you were last week when we were in Black’s Casino. May I remind you that your lack of punctuality then upset our whole plan. If it hadn’t been for you, we would have the book by now. Because of your sloppiness then, we were caught inside the casino. Because of you, the guard you were supposed to deal with was left unhypnotized. But there was a reason, wasn’t there? Ah, now, what was it you were doing? Buying tobacco? So all in all, because of your dirty pipe habit, we have all had to go to these ridiculous lengths to persuade these horrible Moon children to help us.”

“Ze cats ver difficult to round up,” explained Miss Oakkton.

“You always have an excuse,” whined Miss Speal.

“You ought to set your watch five minutes fast, like a child dat is always late.” Miss Suzette laughed patronizingly. “That would teach you!” Miss Oakkton growled at her under her breath.

Miss Teriyaki passed the big-eyed, white, fluffy-haired Persian cat to Miss Suzette and bent down to pick up the gray Siamese.

“Oh, daaaahleeeng!” Miss Suzette exclaimed, pressing her nose up to her pet’s.

Miss Oakkton kept the large, hairy orange cat firmly tucked under her arm, while giving the thin, hairless sphynx to Miss Speal.

“Ready?” Miss Hunroe asked as her white Burmese cat rubbed against her ankles. The women murmured yes. Miss Hunroe frowned irritatedly. “Not you, Miss Speal. I’ve ordered the plane. It takes off at five thirty. You should be in the chamber by eleven tomorrow morning our time.”

Miss Speal dropped her head apologetically. “Thank you for forgiving my stupidity, Miss Hunroe.”

“We will meet you there as soon as our business is finished here,” Miss Hunroe added. Then she turned her attention again to the other three women. They were all now staring at a patterned rug on the floor. “Let us go,” Miss Hunroe decided. In the next second, an astonishing thing happened. She and the women staring at the rug disappeared as instantly as blown-out flames. All that was left was their clothes—a pile of frills of cotton and silk, of wool skirts, trousers, shirts, and jackets, of old-fashioned bras and pants of varying sizes, and of nylon tights. Scattered about under the mounds of material were an odd assortment of shoes, as well as a crutch. Four cats sat on the belongings as though they owned them.

The cats stared at the floor as they adjusted to their insides. For each of them now had two beings inside them—the original cat beings, and the women who had just entered, and who were now taking them over.

The real cat characters shrank back and down like sea anemones reduced from blooming flowers to tiny balls. Miss Hunroe, Miss Teriyaki, Miss Suzette, and Miss Oakkton took control of the cats’ minds as quickly and as thoroughly as an egg cup of black ink might color a small mug of water.

The white Burmese was the most difficult of the feline creatures to take command of. And today, as was often the case, it resisted Miss Hunroe’s control. It fought hard, refusing to let its identity be squashed and replaced by Miss Hunroe’s personality. But it was no use. Miss Hunroe won the tug-of-war, and the blue-eyed cat succumbed to Miss Hunroe.

“Miaaww,” Miss Hunroe mewed. And then, in the language of cat—for once in an animal, it was possible to speak to other animals of the same sort—she asked, “Are you ready?”

Miss Speal, sitting on a stool with her hairless sphynx in her arms, watched as the four cats before her twitched their tails and nodded to the white Burmese. Then she stood up and opened the door for her feline friends.

The cats descended a straight, steep, thirty-step staircase and came to an open fire exit onto the main roof of the museum. Nimbly they leaped out onto the slated tiles there and, in an ordered fashion, trotted along the full length of the roof down to the museum’s central towers. Here, traversing the triangular peak of the roof, they came to the front of the museum, where they negotiated a wrought-iron fire escape that descended until they were at ground-floor level. They each leaped onto a balcony and walked along a thin, granite windowsill before hopping from