Cat Trick

Hercules was sitting on one of the Adirondack chairs in the backyard when I came around the side of the house after work. “What are you doing out here?” I said. He squinted up at the big maple and meowed. I leaned over and scooped him into my arms. “Is Professor Moriarty back?” I asked.

The grackle seemed to think Herc should sit somewhere other than the small wooden bench under the maple tree and dive-bombed the cat to make its point. Herc had pretty fast paws, and more than once he’d almost grabbed the bird. That hadn’t dissuaded it at all.

I’d thought that maybe the grackle had a nest in the tree, and once the babies were gone it would give up on trying to chase the cat, but so far that hadn’t happened. Hercules made a point of sitting on the bench at least once a day, and the bird, for its part, made at least one low-flying pass over the cat’s head whenever they were both in the yard, with appropriate sound effects from both sides. Both the grackle and the cat seemed to know how to hold a grudge.

One of these days one of them was going to win. I still wasn’t sure which one to put my money on.

“How was the rest of your day?” I asked as I carried Hercules into the house. He muttered and murped the whole way, so I guessed it had been busy. I set him on the kitchen floor, hung up my sweater and put my briefcase on one of the chairs.

The basement door opened and Owen appeared. He had the end of my favorite purple scarf in his mouth. I’d been looking for the thing for more than a week. He dragged the scarf across the floor and dropped it at my feet, looking up at me with a self-satisfied expression on his gray face.

I picked up the length of woven fabric. “Thank you,” I said. I reached down and patted the top of his head. “I searched everywhere for this. It didn’t enter my mind to check in the basement.” Owen ducked his head. “You don’t have any idea how this scarf ended up down there, do you?”

His furry head dropped even lower over his paws, as though they were suddenly the most fascinating appendages he’d ever seen.

“That’s what I thought,” I said.

I filled the boys in on Oren finding the knife inside the tent. Mostly I just wanted to say everything out loud to see if it made any more sense than when I just rolled what had happened around in my head.

“The knife wasn’t there when you found the button,” I told Owen. He was trying to snag part of a Funky Chicken that was poking out from under the stove and lifted his head only long enough to murp his agreement.

“Oren thinks it was probably just kids goofing around.” I picked up my fork and then set it back down again. “You know, I can see the attraction of sneaking into the tent for a look around, but what was the point of sticking that knife or whatever it is in the ground? What kid carries something like that around?”

Hercules had been carefully washing his face. He gave one last pass behind his right ear; then he walked over to the coat hooks, jumped in the air and with one swipe of his paw pulled down the scarf that his brother had brought up from the basement. He grabbed one end with his teeth and dragged it across the floor to me. He gave me what I would have called a pointed look if he’d been a person and not a cat, and then he went into the living room.

“Is this supposed to mean something?” I called after him. Since he was a cat and not a person, I didn’t get an answer. “Does this mean something?” I said to Owen. He was too busy eating to do more than just glance at me. In other words, “You figure it out.”

I picked the scarf up from the floor. I knew Owen had swiped it for cat knows what reason. I suspected he’d pretended to discover the scarf in the basement to divert suspicion from himself. Cat or not, he was more than capable of doing that.

I stared at the woven tangle of purple fabric shot with silver in my hand. If Owen, a cat, was capable of a little subterfuge and diversion, why not the person who had killed Mike Glazer? It felt a little like something from an old Nancy Drew mystery, but maybe that silver-handled knife was a plant designed to reroute the police’s interest on to someone else. It was a little outlandish—okay, it was a lot outlandish—but it didn’t mean I wasn’t on the right track.

“I get it,” I called. After a moment there was an answering meow from the next room.