“Back so soon?” Nan asked when Charles and I trudged into the house an hour after departing. Even our brief outing, however, had seemed to take forever. Charles had insisted we give our forest investigation a solid effort before calling it a total bust. But even he could see we weren’t making any progress, despite the fact he couldn’t talk with the animals himself.
“Yeah,” I grumbled, kicking my shoes off by the door. “We accomplished absolutely nothing. How’d you guys fare?”
“I sent Cal home,” Nan said with a dramatic sigh, anger flitting across her normally controlled features. “He lost at least ten points in my book when he suggested we find an Octo-doppelgänger. Talk about a terrible idea!”
Well, I couldn’t disagree with her there. Joke or not, what Cal had said hurt us both, and it would have enraged Octo-Cat had he been around to hear it.
Nan now sat alone in the living room with a giant sheet of poster board sprawled across the floor in front of her. A row of colorful Sharpie markers lay nearby, and she clutched an angry-looking red one tightly in her hand.
“What are you doing?” Charles asked, moving in for a closer look.
“And where did you get all these crafting supplies?” I added as I trudged along after him.
Nan kept her attention on the spread before her as she explained, “I always keep a stash nearby. You never know when you’re going to need to papier-mâché or pottery wheel your way out of a disaster.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, of course,” I said, making sure Charles caught my giant eyeroll. I loved Nan dearly, but sometimes her priorities seemed a bit out of whack—like deciding to play matchmaker when we had a missing cat to find.
She lowered the marker to the bright yellow poster board and began to write while she mumbled, “I’m gathering all the facts we have so far in one place and all our suspicions, too. Consider this poster board command central. Now, look here. Red is for the things we know for sure. Blue is for the things we aren’t quite sure of yet.”
“And black?” Charles asked as he reached for the last marker.
“Black are ideas we’ve already eliminated. Things we know for sure aren’t true,” Nan said, bobbing her head as she continued to write in large, looping letters, then stopped to yank the Sharpie away from Charles. “That’s mine, thank you very much.”
“Nan…” I warned. Even though she had raised me, sometimes I felt like the mom in our relationship.
Charles just laughed it off. When he’d finished, we both stood in silence watching as Nan completed her project.
“Okay, kids. It’s time to get serious here,” Nan said a few minutes later after she’d finished making her list and recapped the final marker.
“What do we know so far?” I asked. The poster board had remained depressingly light on text, showing just how far we had yet to go.
Nan straightened up tall and folded her hands in her lap. “Octo-Cat is missing. Fact,” she began. “He disappeared between the hours of ten and one yesterday. Fact. He may have been taken against his will. Suspicion. A letter also arrived yesterday announcing the arbitration thingy. Fact. It could be related. Suspicion.”
“I don’t see any black,” I said, doing my best to read Nan’s teeny tiny handwriting on the bright poster board but coming up short. “What have we been able to rule out?”
“Nothing yet,” she announced with a frown. She spun the black marker between her fingers, and I could tell she desperately wanted to use it for something.
“Chin up,” Charles said, gracing us both with a mega-watt albeit super-fake smile. “We’re making progress. Even if it feels slow.”
“Oh, let’s make a list of all the places we’ve checked,” Nan shouted with glee and began to push herself up off the floor.
I placed a hand on her shoulder and shook my head. “You already gave that to me this morning with your note. Remember?”
“Yes, but it’s not on the poster board with all the other case info yet,” she moaned.
“Hang tight. I’ll go get it for you.” I decided to just go with whatever Nan wanted in this case. At least she was getting us organized. All I’d done so far was go in circles around the forest, making myself both dizzy and frustrated in the process. I was also down one jar of peanut butter.
After retrieving the note from the kitchen, I read Nan the list of places she’d checked last night. She chose a green marker to note the places we’d already explored. Finally, the poster board began to look a little fuller, although I suppose that wasn’t exactly a good thing. It meant we were running out of options.
“We’ll find him,” Charles assured everyone for what felt like the hundredth time that morning, and while I appreciated his optimism, I also kind of wished he’d just keep quiet already.
“Did you ask the neighbors?” he asked us.
Nan clucked her tongue. “Of course we asked the neighbors. That was the first thing we did yesterday afternoon.”
“Well, what about—?” Charles began, but was cut off by the unexpected buzz of our electronic cat door lifting open in the nearby foyer.
Could it really be? Had he come home all on his own?
“Octo-Cat!” I cried, pushing myself to my feet and stumbling as fast as I could toward the door. His cat door had been programmed to open whenever it sensed the little chip on his collar, which meant it could only be Octo-Cat trotting through the door now. I began to cry softly as tears of relief pricked at my eyes.
Maybe he had just stayed out too late, or perhaps he’d strayed too far and then had a hard time finding home again. Oh, he had some major explaining to do, that kitty boy of mine.
I thrust a hand on my hip as I took the last few steps toward the door, ready to go full-on angry pet parent on his furry behind.
I turned the corner, and sure enough, the first thing I saw was that familiar striped tail of his. It seemed puffier than usual, which meant that he was also upset and scared.
Next I spotted a pair of fat gray haunches, which definitely did not match my brown tabby’s fur. That’s when I realized it wasn’t Octo-Cat making his triumphant return. No. Instead, we had an imposter.
But how? How could it have possibly gotten inside without the special collar that interfaced with the pet door?
I was still puzzling over this when the creature turned around and stared at me from deep, masked eyes. A raccoon!
In one hand, he held Octo-Cat’s broken collar and in the other an empty can of Fancy Feast. Where had this intruder come from, and why did he have my cat’s things?
“You have some serious explaining to do!” I shouted, realizing too late that my anger may cause him to flee. Despite my anger and fear in that moment, this raccoon was our best lead. I had to play nice, even though I wanted to keep screaming until I got the answers I craved.
The raccoon wasn’t afraid of me in the slightest. He held tight to both items and then stood on his hind legs, tilting his head to the side as he studied me. “Did you just talk?” he asked with a quizzical expression.
A brief moment of silence passed between us. I could feel Nan and Charles at my back, but neither said anything as the three of us stared the trespasser down.
Suddenly, our raccoon visitor burst out laughing in a high-pitched, squeaky giggle that immediately grated on my nerves. “Aww, you can talk! That’s so cute!”
I hated to think what might have happened next had Nan and Charles not each grabbed one of my arms and held me back. It would have been a very low moment, indeed, if I’d gotten into a fight with a raccoon—especially since I was pretty sure that I would have lost.