I’m sitting in the living room watching Pandora type on her laptop when I smell something strange. At first I ignore it because Pandora has been working on the same project for weeks, Mr Whiskers is asleep on the windowsill, and John Mercer stopped by about twenty minutes ago and is currently standing in front of our bookshelf looking for an economics book he claims he loaned me several months ago. Everything is perfectly ordinary except for the smell, which is faint enough that I can’t identify it but strong enough that once I notice it, I can’t stop smelling it. It’s earthy, slightly sour, and vaguely organic, like somebody left a salad in a gym bag. I sniff the air again. Pandora looks up from her laptop and asks what I’m doing. I tell her nothing. She watches me sniff again and says, “You’re smelling the room.” I explain that I’m not smelling the room; I’m trying to determine what I’m smelling in the room. She tells me that distinction probably matters more to me than it does to anyone else and goes back to work.
There are three small potted plants sitting on the coffee table, which gives me my first reasonable suspect. They belong to Mrs Jenkins. She brought them over yesterday because she was repotting several plants and wanted Pandora’s opinion about which pots looked better. Why Pandora’s opinion matters in a gardening decision is something I didn’t ask at the time, mostly because Mrs Jenkins had arrived carrying plants and asking questions before I fully understood what was happening. She left the three smaller ones behind because she had run out of potting soil and said she would collect them later. I lean toward one and smell it. Dirt. I smell another. Also dirt. The third one smells suspiciously like dirt pretending not to be dirt. Mr Whiskers opens one eye from the windowsill and watches me conduct the examination, then closes it again. After yesterday, I no longer assume closed eyes mean he isn’t paying attention.
The smell gets stronger near the coffee table, which immediately makes the plants more interesting. I inspect the leaves for anything unusual and notice that one plant is leaning slightly to the left. I’m almost certain it wasn’t leaning yesterday. There’s also a small amount of soil scattered beside the pot. That could have happened when Mrs Jenkins carried it over, but Mr Whiskers has a documented history of interfering with anything involving soil, leaves, boxes, paper bags, string, unattended food, and objects that appear to be minding their own business. I look at him. He remains asleep. Or appears to remain asleep. I haven’t decided which anymore.
John walks back into the living room holding a book and announces that he found what he was looking for. I point out that the book was on the shelf, which is where I told him it would be, and he says, “Yes, but not where you said on the shelf.” Apparently this distinction is important enough to him that I don’t challenge it. Then he stops and wrinkles his nose. “What’s that smell?” That changes everything. Until that moment, there was still a possibility that I was imagining it. Now I have independent confirmation. I ask John what he thinks it smells like, and he sniffs the air before saying, “Something rotten?” Pandora looks up and says she doesn’t smell anything. John and I look at each other. I don’t particularly like the implications of being the only two people in the room who can smell it, but at least I’m no longer alone.
My first thought is Karen’s cooking, which admittedly makes no geographical sense because Karen is at work and nowhere near my house. The reason my mind goes there is that Karen brought something into the office yesterday that produced almost exactly this smell when she heated it in the break room. I never figured out what it was. Nobody did. Dave walked into the break room, stopped, backed out, and decided he wasn’t hungry anymore. Karen insisted it was some kind of healthy vegetable dish, but she refused to provide enough details for independent verification. The smell currently occupying my living room has the same earthy quality, which makes me briefly wonder whether I somehow carried it home on my clothes. Then I remember I changed clothes last night. I also showered. Unless Karen’s lunch possesses adhesive properties that modern science has failed to document, this cannot be Karen’s cooking.
I mention the similarity anyway. Pandora stops typing and looks at me. “Karen isn’t here,” she says. I tell her I’m aware of that. She asks how Karen’s cooking could therefore be responsible for a smell in our living room. I explain that I have already ruled Karen out and am merely establishing a comparative odor profile. John sits down in the chair and says, “You have an odor profile?” I tell him I do now. Pandora closes her eyes for a moment, which I interpret as her accepting that this investigation is going to happen whether she participates or not.
The obvious next suspect is the plants. I move them one at a time from the coffee table to the far side of the room, then wait to see whether the smell moves with them. John watches me do this without offering assistance. Pandora continues working. Mr Whiskers remains on the windowsill. After approximately thirty seconds, I sniff near the coffee table and can still smell it. I cross the room and sniff near the plants. Nothing unusual. This eliminates Mrs Jenkins’s plants, which is reassuring because involving her would have expanded the investigation considerably. I return the plants to the coffee table in roughly their original positions, although I make a mental note that the leaning one still requires explanation.
That leaves the couch, the rug, John, Pandora, and Mr Whiskers. I eliminate Pandora immediately because I’ve been sitting near her for half an hour and would have noticed. John becomes a temporary suspect because he arrived from outside, but the smell was present before he came into the room, so he has an alibi. The rug smells like a rug. The couch smells like the couch, although I discover a quarter between two cushions and consider the search productive regardless of outcome. That leaves Mr Whiskers.
I walk toward the windowsill. His eyes remain closed. I lean closer. One ear rotates toward me. “I know you’re awake,” I tell him. Pandora doesn’t even look up when she says, “Please don’t interrogate the cat.” I explain that I’m not interrogating him. I’m conducting an examination. John asks what the difference is, and I tell him an interrogation requires questions. Then I smell Mr Whiskers.
He opens both eyes.
I immediately regret the decision.
Not because Mr Whiskers smells bad. He smells like a cat. The problem is the expression he gives me afterward, which somehow communicates that I have crossed a boundary neither of us knew needed to be formally established. He gets up, stretches, jumps down from the windowsill, and walks toward the kitchen with his tail held high. Halfway there, he stops beside the coffee table and sniffs the floor.
All three of us see it.
I move closer.
There’s nothing obvious on the floor, but the smell is definitely stronger there. I get down on my hands and knees and look underneath the coffee table. Pandora finally stops typing. John leans forward. Mr Whiskers sits beside me as though he has been assigned supervisory responsibility.
That’s when I see it.
A small brown object is wedged beneath the edge of the couch.
For approximately two seconds, nobody speaks.
I reach underneath and pull it out.
It’s a potato.
Not an entire healthy potato, either. This potato has experienced things. It’s soft, wrinkled, and beginning to leak something I don’t want identified. There’s a shallow claw mark across one side.
I slowly turn toward Mr Whiskers.
He looks away.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
Pandora starts laughing before I even say anything. John asks why there’s a potato under the couch, which is an excellent question and exactly the one I intend to pursue. Pandora manages to explain between laughs that Mrs Jenkins had brought over a bag of vegetables with the plants yesterday. One of the potatoes must have rolled out while she was setting everything down. That explanation accounts for the potato reaching the floor. It does not account for the potato reaching several feet underneath the couch.
We all look at Mr Whiskers.
He begins washing one paw.
There it is.
The missing piece.
At some point after Mrs Jenkins dropped off the vegetables, Mr Whiskers apparently discovered a potato on the floor, decided it was either prey or recreational equipment, batted it around the living room, and eventually sent it underneath the couch. It had remained there ever since, slowly transforming itself into the smell I had spent the last twenty minutes investigating.
John starts laughing. Pandora is laughing hard enough now that she has to put her laptop aside. I’m not laughing because, from a methodological standpoint, I was right. There was something unusual in the room. The smell did have an identifiable source. The plants were relevant because they arrived with the same delivery as the potato. Mr Whiskers was involved. The only incorrect part of my reasoning was everything between those facts.
I carry the potato to the trash while Pandora opens a window. John says he’s impressed that I managed to connect Karen’s lunch, Mrs Jenkins’s plants, and a cat to a decomposing potato without leaving the living room. I tell him that’s because I followed the evidence. He says I followed everything except the evidence. I disagree. The evidence was simply distributed in a way that made the investigation unnecessarily complicated.
When I come back, Mr Whiskers has returned to the windowsill and curled up again. His eyes are closed. His paws are tucked beneath him. He looks peaceful, innocent, and completely removed from the entire affair. Pandora has gone back to her laptop. John is reading his economics book. The window is open, the smell is already fading, and everything in the room has returned to normal.
I sit down and look at Mr Whiskers.
One ear twitches.
I knew he wasn’t asleep.