I was making breakfast when I noticed the coffee beans were almost gone. That immediately struck me as suspicious because I could have sworn we’d opened a brand-new bag yesterday. I picked up the container and gave it a hopeful shake anyway, as though a few extra beans might appear out of sympathy. They didn’t. There was barely enough left for one pot. Pandora hadn’t come out of the bedroom yet, John Mercer was still asleep, and Mr. Whiskers was weaving figure eights around my legs in the universal language of, “You appear to be preparing food and have forgotten that I exist.” It was shaping up to be a perfectly ordinary morning, except for the rapidly disappearing coffee.
My first suspect was John Mercer. Every now and then he’d make coffee with his French press, a device that somehow required twice the coffee and three times the explanation. The man approached caffeine like he was presenting a graduate thesis. If he’d emptied half the container, though, I’d almost certainly have received an unsolicited lecture about bloom time, grind consistency and water temperature. Since I hadn’t endured one recently, I reluctantly crossed him off my list. Pandora wasn’t much of a suspect either. She was the kind of person who noticed we were running low on toothpaste before anyone else realized we’d opened the last tube. If she’d emptied the coffee container, there would already be another bag waiting in the pantry.
That left Dave.
Which immediately created a problem.
Dave worked with me.
Dave didn’t live here.
Dave didn’t have a key.
As far as I knew, Dave had never even been inside the apartment.
I stood there for a moment.
Those were admittedly significant flaws in my theory.
Still…
Dave liked coffee.
I’d seen him drinking it at work nearly every morning. More importantly, he’d complimented my coffee before. Maybe a little too enthusiastically. What if he’d somehow developed an appreciation for our beans? I had absolutely no idea how he’d be secretly using our coffee without ever coming into the apartment, but every investigation reaches a point where the facts appear to resist the truth.
Mr. Whiskers meowed loudly from the living room. I hurried over, expecting he’d discovered the missing coffee beans or, at the very least, an important clue. Instead, he was sitting beside his empty food bowl looking at me as though I’d committed an unforgivable act of negligence. “I’m in the middle of an investigation,” I explained. He blinked once, completely unimpressed. I filled his bowl, and the moment food appeared he lost all interest in me. Typical witness. Helpful only until his immediate needs had been met.
A few minutes later John Mercer wandered into the kitchen looking like someone who hadn’t yet consumed enough caffeine to participate in society. He opened the coffee container, frowned, and looked at me. “We’re almost out.” I nodded. “Exactly.” He shrugged. “We should buy more.” I leaned against the counter. “Or…” He sighed immediately. “No.” “You don’t even know what I was going to say.” “I have a pretty good idea.” “I think Dave’s secretly using our coffee.”
John stared at me for several seconds before speaking. “Dave.” “Yes.” “Dave from work.” “Correct.” “The Dave who has never been here.” “As far as we know.” John rubbed his forehead. “Hal, are you suggesting Dave is breaking into the apartment just to make himself coffee?” I considered it. “When you say it out loud, it does sound slightly unlikely.” “Slightly?” “All right… moderately.”
Pandora walked into the kitchen just in time to hear the last part of the conversation. She looked at the nearly empty coffee container, then at me, then at John, who looked like he wanted to pretend he lived somewhere else. “What’s going on?” she asked. John answered before I could. “Hal thinks Dave is secretly using our coffee.” Pandora blinked once. “How?” “That’s the only part I haven’t worked out yet,” I admitted. She smiled, opened the pantry, reached behind a box of pancake mix and pulled out a brand-new unopened bag of coffee beans. “I bought this yesterday.”
I stared at the bag. Then at the empty container. Then back at the bag.
“When were you planning to tell me?”
“I did.”
“You did?”
“You nodded while watching Mr. Whiskers chase a dust bunny across the kitchen.”
That…
actually sounded familiar.
“I was multitasking.”
“You were watching the cat.”
“I was multitasking while watching the cat.”
Pandora laughed, opened the new bag and poured fresh beans into the container while John quietly celebrated the end of another unnecessary investigation. “There,” she said. “Coffee crisis solved.”
I nodded slowly.
“So Dave’s innocent.”
“I would certainly hope so,” Pandora replied.
I looked down into my freshly refilled coffee container.
“I still don’t know why he likes our coffee so much.”
John looked at me.
“Hal…”
“What?”
“He drinks the coffee at work.”
I stopped.
I’d completely forgotten that.
There was a long silence.
Then Mr. Whiskers walked into the kitchen, looked at all three of us, meowed once, and headed straight for the pantry where the actual coffee had been sitting the entire time.
Sometimes I wonder if that cat understands more than I do.
I’m becoming increasingly concerned that the answer is yes.20260728