I’ve been trying to brush it off, but Pandora’s behavior has me on edge. She’s been distant lately, and I’ve noticed she’s been checking her phone an awful lot—usually when we’re in the middle of a conversation or watching television together. At first, I figured she was stressed about work. Everybody gets distracted sometimes. But the more I thought about it, the harder it became to ignore.
What if she was hiding something from me?
The thought made me glance over at Mr. Whiskers. The orange tabby was stretched out on the windowsill, soaking up the morning sunlight and looking completely unconcerned with the world around him. Too unconcerned, if you ask me. That’s the thing about cats—they always look innocent. They have thousands of years of practice.
Pandora looked up from her phone and smiled at me.
“Everything okay?”
“Fine,” I said.
Which, now that I think about it, is exactly what someone says when they’re conducting an investigation and don’t want to reveal their suspicions prematurely.
My attention drifted back to the sugar packet sitting on the counter. It should have been next to the coffee jar. Pandora always put it next to the coffee jar. The fact that it was six inches away from its usual spot shouldn’t have mattered, and yet it seemed increasingly important the longer I stared at it.
That’s when I thought about John Mercer.
John had been over a few days ago. He was the kind of person who couldn’t resist touching things while he talked. He’d pick something up, examine it, set it down somewhere else, and immediately forget he’d done it. If anybody in my social circle was capable of relocating a sugar packet and accidentally triggering a household mystery, it was John.
But that explanation raised another question.
If John had moved it, why hadn’t Pandora moved it back?
Pandora noticed things. She was the sort of person who straightened crooked picture frames and adjusted coasters that were half an inch out of place. A misplaced sugar packet should have lasted about three seconds under her supervision.
Unless she wanted it there.
I glanced at Mr. Whiskers again.
The cat yawned.
A little too casually.
Over the next several minutes, I began reviewing recent events with what I considered remarkable objectivity. Pandora had been checking her phone more than usual. John had been spending a lot of time at the apartment lately. Mr. Whiskers had sat on my keyboard twice in the same week, once on Tuesday and again on Thursday. Any one of those things, viewed independently, was perfectly normal. Taken together, however, they formed a pattern that was difficult to ignore if you were willing to lower your standards for evidence.
The pieces slowly began falling into place. Pandora was strangely tolerant of Mr. Whiskers, even when he knocked things over. John always seemed to appear shortly before something in the apartment ended up where it wasn’t supposed to be. And now there was the sugar packet, sitting in plain sight like a message waiting to be decoded.
I wasn’t entirely sure what the message meant, but I was becoming increasingly convinced that there was one.
By the time twenty minutes had passed, I had developed a surprisingly detailed theory involving Pandora, John Mercer, and a highly organized feline intelligence network operating out of my apartment. I couldn’t prove any of it, of course, but that’s often the challenge with sophisticated conspiracies.
Then Pandora stood up, walked over to the counter, and picked up the sugar packet.
“Oh,” she said. “I knocked this over while making breakfast and forgot to put it back.”
She placed it beside the coffee jar, exactly where it belonged.
I stared at her for a moment.
Then I looked at Mr. Whiskers.
The orange tabby opened one eye, blinked slowly, and went back to sleep.
Which, frankly, felt rehearsed.
I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy. I’m just saying that if there were a conspiracy, that’s exactly how the people involved would explain it.