It has been forever and fifteen years since I’ve bitten into my squeaky Banana Dog, so long that I’ve forgotten what his skin feels like when I give him a big bite. Where or where has my Banana Dog gone? We had to find him!
Whiny placed the case board on the floor and I sniffed each suspect with my trusty nose. But the trail to Banana Dog had grown stale and I could find no trace of him among the pictures and clues listed on the board. Was Banana Dog never coming home?
Pouting, I played dead on the living room rug, declaring that I would stay like this forever, never eating, never chasing squirrels or Shere Khan the cat again. Then I caught a whiff of Whiny’s dishwasher cleaner on the breeze stirred by the ceiling fan. My eyes popped wide open as I remembered BD was coated in that fragrance the last time I held him. I began to search the living room.
Banana Dog wasn’t riding around and around on the fan blades, he wasn’t to my left on the fireplace mantel. I couldn’t see him anywhere near the towering China cabinet to my right, but wasn’t the odor stronger on that side of the room? I began yapping furiously until Whiny came to see what all the fuss was about.
She first looked on the floor, the walls and on the outside of the cabinet incase a stinging scorpion was present. Not seeing one she began peering inside the three big wooden drawers that made up the cabinet’s bottom and then proceeded to search the shelves inside of the tall glass doors. She found nothing amiss but I kept assuring her something was there with my constant barking.
Fetching the step ladder, she steadied herself by holding onto the side of the cabinet and peered over the fancy wooden scroll work of the top rail. Whiny let out a whoop! She’d found my beloved Banana Dog.
Holding him once again in my mouth, my eyes filled with tears and my nose burned with the strong scent of dishwasher cleaner from his hot, soapy bath just before he disappeared.
Someone had been tall enough to place Banana Dog up there as he’d been sitting there on all four legs. Which Whiny said meant that our original six suspects were dismissed as all of them were way too short to reach the top.
Only two people in the household could reach that high; Admiral Longlegs and the Booga-man. Admiral Longlegs had been at sea at the time of the theft. Booga-man had to be the guilty one!
Whiny and I thought hard about the last time we’d seen the Banana Dog. We were all in the kitchen on the closing day of Camp of Two Wishes. Whiny had just removed Banana Dog from the dishwasher and he was wet and very fragrant from the soap. I was mad over BD losing all the grime I had lathered onto him for several months and I was squeaking him and making lots of racket. The suspects dressed in their Clue outfits were jostling each other for pieces of the delicious, big round cheesy food that Whiny had taken out of the hot box.
The Booga-man was seated in his magic chair that goes up and down listening to all the racket going on in the kitchen. I’d forgotten that he called me over and told me to stop playing with Banana Dog and fetch a quieter toy like my rabbit Fred. I had ignored him and gone back to biting BD until he was squealing like a pig.
Whiny said she put food on a plate for the Booga-man and that he’d left his chair and sat on a stool around the kitchen island to eat. The campers were all seated around the table and I had abandoned BD and searched for any dropped crumbs.
When Whiny was turned toward the sink, Booga-man must have taken the opportunity to snatch BD, stick him inside his shirt, and on his way out of the front door he’d placed BD on the top of the China cabinet. Whiny declared that we would ask the Booga-man about the theft tonight.
I spent the day packing BD from room-to-room, and inside and out of the house. Never letting him loose from my sharp little teeth, afraid he would scamper off and I’d be without the feel of his rubbery skin once again.
That night Whiny announced, “Look what we found today on top of the China cabinet!”
The Booga-man had grinned from ear-to-ear and said, “It took you two long enough to find it.”
Whiny fussed at the Booga-man and told him he wouldn’t get any ice cream for dessert as he had not been a good boy. Me, well my payback lasted longer. When the Booga-man left the remote on the table by his magic chair during dinner, I nudged it off and nosed it all the way underneath Whiny’s loveseat beside the pair of tweezers that had been sitting there for twenty-three fourth hundreds years. Most of the news broadcast on the big black noisy box was over by the time the Booga-man found it.
While he was searching, I stayed right in the middle of the rug, holding Banana Dog tightly in my mouth, gently making him squeak in rhythm with the turning of the ceiling fan. It was so good to have him back.
Never, ever, not even for one-eleventh hundredth of a second will I turn him lose again. Well, maybe I will. At least for long enough to share scrambled eggs and buttered toast with Whiny in the mornings.
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