I was watching Pandora make breakfast when I noticed that she had left the cap off the coffee creamer. Under ordinary circumstances, this would not qualify as an event. It probably wouldn’t even qualify as an observation worth remembering. Pandora was standing at the kitchen counter making pancakes, Mr Whiskers was sitting near her feet waiting for gravity to deliver something edible, and I was supposed to be making coffee. Instead, I found myself staring at the open container of creamer because Pandora was normally the kind of person who put caps back on things immediately. Toothpaste, shampoo, mustard, anything with a lid—Pandora closed it. I had once watched her reach across me while I was still using the ketchup because apparently I had exceeded the acceptable amount of time for leaving it unsecured. Yet there sat the coffee creamer, completely open, while Pandora behaved as though nothing unusual had happened. There was another problem. The creamer was new. I knew this because we had run out, and John Mercer had said the day before that he would pick some up while he was at the store. John being John, he came back with whole milk instead because it was on sale and apparently saving eighty-seven cents was worth destabilizing the entire coffee situation. I distinctly remembered Pandora laughing when he told us, which meant she knew we still needed creamer. Now, less than twenty-four hours later, there was a brand-new container sitting on our counter. The obvious explanation was that Pandora had bought it. I understood this. I accepted it intellectually. What bothered me was that I couldn’t remember her saying she was going to buy it, and the more I thought about that, the more significant it became.
“You bought creamer?” I asked. Pandora looked at the container and then at me. “Yes.” I asked when. “Yesterday.” I asked why, and that was when she stopped flipping the pancake and looked at me properly. “Because we were out of creamer.” It was a strong answer. Concise. Internally consistent. Almost suspiciously so. I decided not to pursue it because I have learned that asking too many follow-up questions before Pandora has finished her first cup of tea creates an unnecessarily hostile investigative environment. Instead, I poured coffee and watched Mr Whiskers. He had positioned himself between Pandora and the refrigerator and was staring upward with intense concentration. Every time Pandora moved, his head followed her. When she crossed the kitchen to get a plate, he followed. When she returned to the stove, he followed again. Pandora eventually looked down and said, “You know you’re not getting any,” and Mr Whiskers responded with a long, dissatisfied meow. She laughed. I did not, because there was clearly a communication taking place and I was the only person in the kitchen who didn’t understand it.
The pancakes complicated matters further. We usually made pancakes on weekends, when breakfast could occupy forty-five minutes without causing anyone to resent the passage of time. This was not the weekend. Pandora had simply gotten up and decided that pancakes were happening. When I asked why, she said, “I felt like pancakes,” which technically explained the pancakes while explaining absolutely nothing about why she suddenly felt like pancakes. I began considering whether there might be some relationship between the unexpected pancakes and the unexpected creamer. Both were breakfast foods. Both had appeared without advance notice. Both involved Pandora. I realize that sounds weak when stated plainly, but most patterns sound weak before somebody recognizes them as patterns. Mr Whiskers seemed to recognize it. He sat beside Pandora throughout breakfast, watching every movement she made with an attention he normally reserved for tuna. At one point she reached down and scratched behind his ears, and he immediately stopped meowing. That bothered me more than it should have. Five seconds earlier he had apparently been desperate to communicate something; one touch from Pandora and suddenly he had nothing to say. I looked from him to her and back again. Pandora caught me doing it and asked, “What?” I told her nothing. She narrowed her eyes slightly, which suggested that she knew it wasn’t nothing, but she let it go. Mr Whiskers did not look at me at all.
Later that morning Karen stopped by. There was nothing unusual about that by itself, but she went straight into the kitchen with Pandora, and within a few minutes I could hear them talking quietly. I wasn’t eavesdropping. I want that clearly established. I was sitting in the living room, which happened to be within auditory range of the kitchen, and it would have required deliberate effort not to hear them. I caught fragments about “tomorrow,” something that needed to be “taken care of,” and Pandora saying, “I’ll handle it.” None of those phrases is inherently suspicious, but together they have a certain texture. When Karen came back through the living room, she smiled at me in a way that was probably completely normal and therefore immediately concerning. I asked if everything was okay, and she said, “Of course.” There are very few phrases less reassuring than of course. By lunchtime I had developed a preliminary theory, although I was careful not to call it an investigation. I was observing. There is an important distinction. Pandora had independently purchased coffee creamer after John failed to buy it. She had unexpectedly made pancakes. Mr Whiskers had displayed unusual interest in her activities. Karen had arrived for a quiet conversation involving tomorrow and something Pandora intended to handle. Individually, these facts meant nothing. Collectively, they still probably meant nothing, but there were more of them, which made the nothing increasingly difficult to ignore.
John stopped by that afternoon, and I decided to approach the subject indirectly. I asked whether he remembered buying whole milk instead of creamer. He said yes. I asked whether Pandora had seemed upset about it. He said no. I asked whether she had mentioned buying creamer herself. He said he had no idea. Then he looked at me for a moment and asked why we were having a conversation about dairy products with the seriousness of a congressional hearing. I told him I was establishing a timeline. “Of the creamer?” he asked. I told him that was an unnecessarily reductive description of what I was doing. Mr Whiskers walked into the room while we were talking, and John looked at him and said, “Maybe he knows.” I stared at John. John laughed. Mr Whiskers did not. That was the moment I began considering the possibility that the cat had information. I wasn’t suggesting Mr Whiskers understood grocery logistics. I’m a reasonable person. But cats notice things. They know who comes through the door. They know who opens the refrigerator. They know when someone gets up at three in the morning. They can hear a treat bag being opened from somewhere beyond the known limits of physics. If something unusual had been happening around the apartment, Mr Whiskers was actually the one member of the household most likely to have observed it without anyone modifying their behavior because he was present. People lower their voices when another person enters a room. Nobody stops talking because the cat walked in.
That evening Pandora was sitting on the couch reading when Mr Whiskers climbed up beside her and settled against her leg. I watched from the other chair. Pandora turned a page. Mr Whiskers looked at me. Pandora scratched his head without looking down. Mr Whiskers continued looking at me. I had the uncomfortable sensation of being excluded from something, although I recognized that accusing my girlfriend and our cat of forming a private alliance would probably not improve the evening. Instead, I asked Pandora whether Karen needed help with something tomorrow. Pandora looked up from her book and asked what I meant. I reminded her that she had said she would handle something. “When?” she asked. “This morning.” She stared at me for a second, then laughed and explained that Karen had asked if she could return something for her tomorrow because she would be busy. That was disappointingly reasonable. I asked what she was returning. “A sweater.” I asked where. Pandora lowered her book and said, “Hal.” I took the warning. “Right. Sorry.” Then I went back to pretending to watch television.
The problem with reasonable explanations is that they resolve individual questions without necessarily resolving the larger feeling that caused you to ask them. Karen’s sweater explained Karen. John’s whole milk explained why Pandora bought the creamer. Wanting pancakes explained the pancakes, at least according to Pandora. Every mystery had an answer, yet I still had the unmistakable sense that I was missing something. I began to wonder whether the problem wasn’t any single event but the fact that everyone else seemed completely comfortable with events I had only recently learned about. Pandora knew about Karen’s sweater. Karen knew what Pandora was doing tomorrow. John knew we needed creamer. Mr Whiskers seemed to know where everyone was at all times. I was somehow the last person receiving updates in my own apartment. Before bed, I went into the kitchen for water and found the coffee creamer sitting on the counter again. The cap was off. I stopped and looked at it, then noticed Mr Whiskers sitting beside the refrigerator. I looked at the creamer. Then I looked at him. “Did she do that?” I asked. He meowed. It was one meow. Short. Deliberate. I crouched down and asked, “Do you know something?” Mr Whiskers stared at me for several seconds, then walked past me into the living room.
I put the cap back on the creamer and returned it to the refrigerator, but the exchange stayed with me. Maybe Pandora wasn’t hiding anything. Maybe Karen’s sweater really was just a sweater, John’s milk really was just discounted milk, and the pancakes had simply happened because sometimes people want pancakes on a weekday. I was prepared to accept all of that. What I was not prepared to accept was Mr Whiskers’ behavior. He had been watching Pandora all day. He had been present for conversations I hadn’t heard. He had seen who came and went, who opened the refrigerator, and who left the creamer sitting on the counter. For the first time, it occurred to me that I might have been investigating the wrong person. Maybe Pandora wasn’t hiding something in the coffee creamer. Maybe Mr Whiskers knew who was.