I was making toast that morning when something immediately felt wrong. The loaf of bread we’d bought the day before was already stale. Not completely stale, mind you. It wasn’t the sort of bread you could use as a doorstop, but it certainly wasn’t fresh enough to justify the word “fresh” that had been printed across the package in cheerful blue letters. I squeezed a slice between my fingers, frowned, and looked at the expiration date for the third time. Everything suggested the bread should have been perfectly fine. The bread itself strongly disagreed.
John Mercer wandered into the kitchen just as I was conducting what I considered a thorough inspection of the loaf. He poured himself a cup of coffee and watched me turning slices of bread over as though I expected one of them to confess. “Something wrong?” he asked. I held up a slice. “Feel this.” John pinched the corner, shrugged, and dropped it back onto the cutting board. “It’s bread.” “It’s stale bread.” “Then toast it.” That was his entire contribution to the investigation. I sometimes wondered how a man could move through life so completely unbothered by obvious mysteries.
The toaster clicked away while I continued examining the loaf. We had only bought it yesterday. I remembered because grocery shopping alternated between John and me, and we’d both been standing in the checkout line joking about how we’d somehow managed to buy everything except the one thing we originally went to the store for. Eventually we’d remembered the bread and tossed a loaf into the cart at the last minute. At least, I was almost certain we had. The more I thought about it, the less certain I became. Had we actually picked up the loaf ourselves, or had it already been sitting in the cart? I didn’t remember. That bothered me far more than it probably should have.
Mr. Whiskers wandered into the kitchen, sniffed the bread with great seriousness, and then looked directly at me before walking away. He didn’t sniff anything else on the counter. Just the bread. That struck me as significant. Cats have instincts, after all. Maybe he had detected something I couldn’t. Then again, he also spent ten minutes the previous evening trying to catch the reflection from John’s wristwatch, so perhaps I was giving his investigative abilities a little too much credit.
A few minutes later I looked out the kitchen window and saw Mrs. Jenkins watering her flowers. She waved cheerfully, and I waved back. There was nothing unusual about it. She watered those flowers almost every morning. Even so, I found myself wondering whether she’d noticed anything odd about the groceries we’d carried in the day before. Maybe she’d seen the bread. Maybe she’d remembered which bag it was in. Maybe she’d noticed whether John or I carried it inside. I immediately recognized how ridiculous those thoughts were, but once they appeared, they refused to leave. It wasn’t Mrs. Jenkins who seemed suspicious. It was the fact that I suddenly wanted to interview a perfectly innocent neighbor about a loaf of bread.
By the time breakfast was finished, I had developed several possible explanations. One was that we’d accidentally bought an older loaf without realizing it. Another was that I’d somehow left the bread bag open overnight, though I couldn’t remember doing that. The third involved a conversation I’d had with Karen at work the day before. Karen had mentioned the grocery store while telling me they’d rearranged several aisles again. At the time it had seemed like harmless small talk. Now I found myself wondering whether there had been something more to it. Why had she brought up that particular store? Why that particular day? I knew there was absolutely no connection between Karen discussing supermarket renovations and the condition of my toast, but once my mind started drawing lines between unrelated events, it became surprisingly difficult to erase them.
Pandora stopped by later that afternoon, and I immediately asked the only question that still mattered. “Does this bread taste stale to you?” She took a bite of a piece of toast, chewed thoughtfully for a moment, and nodded. “A little.” Finally, someone else had noticed. I began explaining my various theories, starting with the grocery store and gradually working my way toward the possibility that we’d somehow ended up with yesterday’s loaf instead of today’s. Pandora listened patiently until I finished, then walked over to the breadbox, picked up the bag, and turned it around.
“You closed it with the twist tie underneath instead of over the opening,” she said.
I stared at the bag.
Sure enough, the top had been folded over but never actually sealed. It had been sitting open the entire night.
John looked up from his book just long enough to smile.
“So,” he said, “the bread wasn’t part of a conspiracy?”
I sighed.
“No.”
He nodded once and went back to reading, clearly satisfied that the case had been solved. Mr. Whiskers jumped onto a chair, sniffed the bread one more time, and walked away without another glance. I still maintain he knew the answer long before the rest of us. He just wasn’t interested in explaining it.