It started with a coffee mug. That’s how all bad ideas seem to start. Pandora left her favorite blue coffee mug in the sink, and for most people that would have been the end of the story. Everybody forgets a dish once in a while. I’ve certainly forgotten a plate or two. All right, more than two. There was that cereal bowl I accidentally left behind the toaster last winter, but we agreed never to discuss that incident again. The difference is that Pandora isn’t like me. She usually rinses her mug before the coffee has even finished cooling, so seeing it sitting there in the sink felt… wrong. Not dangerous wrong. Just enough to make the little voice in the back of my head whisper that something wasn’t quite adding up.
The mug stayed there all afternoon. Every time I wandered into the kitchen, it was waiting for me exactly where I’d left it. I kept telling myself she’d probably gotten distracted. Work gets busy. Phone calls happen. People forget things. It wasn’t until I noticed John Mercer’s sock lying in the hallway that my brain decided it had enough evidence to launch a full investigation. John has an almost supernatural ability to leave exactly one sock on the floor while its partner somehow makes it into the laundry basket. I don’t know how he does it. I’ve watched him carry laundry before, and there doesn’t appear to be any sleight of hand involved. Maybe he’s just messy. Or maybe the sock is supposed to stay there. No… that’s ridiculous. It’s a sock. Probably.
Still, one abandoned coffee mug and one mysteriously abandoned sock felt oddly connected. Individually they meant absolutely nothing, but together they formed the beginning of what my imagination insisted was a pattern. That’s the dangerous thing about patterns. Once your brain starts finding them, it refuses to stop. Before long, I wasn’t looking at a mug anymore. I was looking at evidence. The sock wasn’t laundry anymore. It was a clue. I hadn’t actually discovered anything, but my imagination was already halfway through writing the detective novel.
Then Mrs. Jenkins mentioned she’d heard people talking in our apartment rather late the previous evening. She laughed about it, saying it sounded like we’d been solving the world’s problems after midnight. I laughed too… right up until I realized I had already gone to bed early that night. That meant the voices had probably been Pandora and John Mercer. There was nothing unusual about that. They live in the same apartment. People talk. Apartments have walls that seem to be made from recycled tissue paper. They were probably discussing dinner, weekend plans, or whether pineapple belongs on pizza. Perfectly ordinary topics. Unfortunately, the conspiracy department in my brain had already opened for business and immediately concluded they were discussing me.
Mr. Whiskers wandered into the kitchen while I was making dinner and leapt onto his favorite chair beside the table. He’s John’s cat, and normally he’s only interested in food, naps, and pretending not to like anyone. This time, though, he looked at Pandora’s mug, then looked at me, and then slowly looked back at the mug again. Cats really ought to stop doing things like that. If you’re trying to convince people you’re innocent, don’t dramatically glance back and forth between the suspicious object and the person investigating it. He blinked once, stretched, and casually knocked my grocery list onto the floor before walking away. It was almost certainly an accident. Unless… no. Stop it, Hal. He’s a cat. He’s not destroying evidence. Probably.
By dinner time, I’d managed to convince myself everyone knew something I didn’t. Pandora smiled every time I glanced toward the sink. John seemed unusually cheerful when he walked through the living room. Mr. Whiskers kept following me into the kitchen whenever I checked on the mug. Every individual event had a perfectly reasonable explanation, but my brain had stopped evaluating them individually somewhere around the second sighting of the sock. Instead, it gathered them into one enormous, wildly implausible conspiracy that somehow revolved around household cleanliness.
Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Pandora,” I asked as casually as I could manage, “why is your mug still in the sink?”
She looked up from her book with a puzzled expression. “Oh,” she said, as though she’d just remembered something obvious. “I made hot chocolate last night. The marshmallows melted onto the bottom of the mug, so I filled it with hot water to let it soak.”
I blinked. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
She walked into the kitchen, scrubbed the mug clean in less than fifteen seconds, dried it, and put it back in the cabinet as though she’d just solved the world’s least interesting mystery.
Almost at the exact same moment, John Mercer came through the hallway carrying a laundry basket. The missing sock tumbled onto the floor in front of him. He sighed, bent down, picked it up, and smiled. “There it is. I’ve been looking for that all day.”
Just like that, two mysteries disappeared in the space of about twenty seconds.
Mr. Whiskers watched the entire exchange from his chair, flicked his tail once, and walked away with what I can only describe as visible disappointment. I swear that cat had been hoping the conspiracy was real.
I’m still keeping an eye on those socks, though.
You can never be too careful.