The rest was easy, especially since Moishe followed along at her heels, batting at the hem of her robe. In her efforts to stay ahead of him, she must have been stretching out what was supposed to be stretched, because by the time she arrived at the kitchen, she felt almost human again.

Garfield’s face grinned up at her from the bottom of Moishe’s food bowl. He’d eaten it all during the night and she had just turned toward the broom closet to fill it up again, when she remembered that the instructions on the Kitty Valet had said to let your pet empty his old bowl once and then put it away so that he would switch to the new, improved feeder.

“Here you go, Moishe,” Hannah said, picking up the Garfield bowl and hedging her bets by tossing a few fish-shaped salmon-flavored kitty treats into the Kitty Valet bowl. “That’s your new bowl. Try it, you’ll like it.”

Never one to turn down his favorite treat, Moishe approached the bowl with the feed tube and extracted one fishy treat with a well-placed claw. Once that was gone, he extracted another and, as Hannah watched in amazement, he started to chow down on the kitty crunchies in the bowl.

“You like it!” Hannah said, pouring herself a life-giving mug of coffee from the pot that brewed automatically every morning, and then grabbing the phone to punch in the sheriff’s department number. Mike would be pleased when she told him that Moishe was using his gift. When the desk sergeant answered, she asked for Mike’s extension and waited until he picked up.

“It’s Hannah,” she said, “I just called to say…he likes it! Moishie likes it!” And then she waited to see if Mike had been watching the oldie but goodie commercials KCOW television had been rerunning.

“Moishie likes…oh!” Mike gave a little laugh. “I get it. It’s a takeoff on Mikey, the little brother who’d eat anything on those cereal commercials. Does that mean Moishe’s eating out of his new Kitty Valet?”

“That’s exactly what it means. I picked up his regular bowl, just as it said to do in the instructions, and tossed in a couple of treats to get him started. Now the treats are history and he’s chowing down on his regular food.”

“It’s nice to get good news for a change.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Rough night. A blue spruce jumped out in front of Wade Hoffman’s car at sixty miles an hour.”

“Wade Hoffman?” Hannah began to frown. “Wasn’t he Ronni Ward’s fiancé?”

“Yeah. Wade’s passenger said he was despondent and he’d been drinking heavily. The passenger tried to get the keys, but Wade insisted on driving.”

“Were they badly hurt?” Hannah hated to ask, especially before she’d had her second cup of coffee.