I’m lying on the bed watching Pandora do her hair in front of the dresser when I notice Mr Whiskers sitting beside her, staring at the floor. Normally this wouldn’t concern me. Cats stare at things. I’ve accepted that. They stare at walls, ceilings, empty corners, closed doors, and occasionally directly over your shoulder in a way that makes you reconsider everything you’ve ever believed about the supernatural. Mr Whiskers is particularly good at this. The problem is that after everything that’s happened over the last few days, I’ve begun to suspect his staring has categories. There’s the ordinary stare he gives birds through the window, the disappointed stare he gives an empty food bowl, the contemptuous stare he gives me whenever I move him from my chair, and then there’s this one. This is the focused stare. The same kind of stare he had yesterday when I became convinced he and Pandora had developed some kind of private communication system. I was probably wrong about that, although Pandora’s immediate ability to identify when I’m about to develop a theory remains unexplained.
I try to ignore him. This is something I’ve been working on. Yesterday I spent half the day investigating Pandora’s behavior only to discover that something really was wrong with her work project, while almost every piece of evidence I’d collected had absolutely nothing to do with it. The experience taught me an important lesson about distinguishing instinct from interpretation. My instinct that something was wrong had been correct; my interpretation involving Karen, John Mercer, Mrs Jenkins, a scarf, a pigeon, and possibly Mr Whiskers had been less successful. So today I’m attempting a more disciplined approach. I observe the cat. I acknowledge the cat. I do not construct a theory about the cat. This works for approximately forty-five seconds.
“What is he looking at?” I ask. Pandora doesn’t turn around. She tells me she doesn’t know. I ask whether she noticed him staring before I mentioned it, and she says no. That answer bothers me slightly because Mr Whiskers is sitting about three feet away from her and has been staring at exactly the same spot for nearly a minute. I ask if she can see anything on the floor. Pandora finally looks down, then at Mr Whiskers, then back at the mirror. “No.” I ask whether she thinks that’s strange. “No.” I point out that she didn’t really look. She tells me she looked sufficiently. I’m not sure how one determines the sufficient duration for examining a potentially significant area of bedroom floor, but apparently Pandora has developed standards.
Mr Whiskers hasn’t moved. His ears are pointed forward and his eyes are fixed on the narrow space beneath the dresser. Now we have specificity. He’s not staring randomly at the floor; he’s staring under something. That matters. I sit up and lean forward to get a better look, but from the bed I can’t see anything except darkness and a little dust. Pandora notices what I’m doing in the mirror and says my name in that particular tone she’s developed over the last few days. “I’m only looking,” I tell her. She reminds me that looking is how these things always start. I tell her that’s ridiculous because looking is also how people find things. She asks what I’m expecting to find beneath the dresser. I tell her I don’t know, which is why I’m looking. She says that’s exactly the answer she was afraid of.
I get off the bed and crouch beside Mr Whiskers. He doesn’t acknowledge me. I wave one hand slowly in front of his face, and he shifts his head just enough to continue looking around it. That’s interesting. Whatever has his attention is apparently more important than me, which narrows the possibilities considerably because Mr Whiskers generally considers interrupting me one of his primary responsibilities. I lower my head and look beneath the dresser again. Nothing. I reach for my phone and turn on the flashlight. Pandora asks what I’m doing. “Establishing whether there’s anything under here.” She tells me there isn’t. I ask how she knows. She says because it’s a dresser. I explain that being a dresser does not prevent objects from existing beneath it. She tells me that’s not what she meant. I know that’s not what she meant, but I also know she hasn’t answered the question.
There’s something under there.
I can just barely see it near the wall, a small dark shape partially hidden beneath the dresser. I can’t tell what it is from this angle, but the discovery immediately changes the situation. Mr Whiskers wasn’t staring at nothing. He was staring at something I couldn’t see. This is exactly the sort of distinction Pandora keeps insisting I should make, and for once I’m pleased to report that the evidence is cooperating. I tell her there’s an object under the dresser. She doesn’t seem impressed. I tell her Mr Whiskers located it before either of us did. She says he’s closer to the floor. That’s technically true but unnecessarily dismissive of his contribution.
I reach underneath, but the object is too far back. Mr Whiskers watches my hand with intense concentration. When I pull it out empty, he looks at me in a way that I can only describe as professionally disappointed. I get a coat hanger from the closet and straighten it enough to reach beneath the dresser. Pandora stops doing her hair and turns around. “You’re using a coat hanger now?” I tell her we’ve moved beyond visual inspection. She asks what stage we’re in. “Retrieval.” She stares at me for a moment before turning back toward the mirror. I hear her mutter something about marrying a normal person in her next life, which I choose not to address because I’m making progress.
The hanger touches something. Mr Whiskers immediately lowers himself into a crouch. I stop. He stops. I move the hanger again. His tail twitches. That’s a response. I do it a third time to establish repeatability, and his tail twitches again. Pandora sees this in the mirror and tells me to stop conducting experiments on the cat. I’m not conducting experiments on him; I’m using his reactions as supplemental observational data. There’s an important ethical distinction. She tells me there isn’t. I drag the object slightly forward, and Mr Whiskers moves with it. Whatever is beneath the dresser clearly matters to him. Yesterday he knew when Karen was arriving before I did because he’d apparently been watching a pigeon outside. The day before that he somehow ended up exactly where Pandora and John were preparing my surprise cake. At the time I’d considered those coincidences. Now I’m starting to wonder whether I’ve been underestimating him.
The object catches on something and disappears back into the darkness. Mr Whiskers looks up at me. “I know,” I tell him. Pandora stops and looks over her shoulder. “Did you just apologize to him?” I explain that I didn’t apologize; I acknowledged a setback. She asks whether Mr Whiskers is now part of the investigation. I tell her there is no investigation. We’re retrieving an unidentified object from beneath our furniture. She asks who “we” refers to. I look at Mr Whiskers. She closes her eyes for a moment and goes back to her hair.
I eventually get the object close enough to reach with my fingers. Mr Whiskers stands immediately and moves beside my hand as I pull it out. For a moment I can’t tell what I’m holding. It’s small, black, slightly dusty, and shaped vaguely like a piece of electronic equipment. My brain begins supplying possibilities before I’ve even examined it properly. A component. A transmitter. Something that fell from someone’s pocket. Maybe John dropped it the last time he stopped by. Maybe Karen did. Mrs Jenkins was here earlier in the week. Pandora has been carrying her phone everywhere because of the trouble with her work project. There are several entirely reasonable explanations, and I’m proud of myself for remembering that before jumping to—
Pandora starts laughing.
I look at her. Then I look at the object.
It’s one of her hair clips.
Not an ordinary hair clip, apparently, because this particular one has a little decorative piece on it that catches the light when I turn it. Pandora tells me she’s been looking for it for two days. She must have dropped it while getting ready and kicked it beneath the dresser without noticing. That’s it. That’s the entire mystery. No transmitter, no hidden message, no unexplained connection to John, Karen, Dave, or Mrs Jenkins. Pandora dropped a hair clip. Mr Whiskers saw it beneath the dresser. I found it because he was staring at it.
I hand the clip to Pandora and sit back on the edge of the bed. She thanks me, still smiling, and says something about being glad we solved another major case. I ignore the sarcasm because there’s a more important point here. Mr Whiskers knew. Not in the conspiratorial sense, obviously. I’m not suggesting he understood that Pandora had lost a hair clip or that he had deliberately positioned himself there to help recover it. I’m simply saying he possessed information that neither Pandora nor I possessed. He knew there was something beneath the dresser. We didn’t. I followed his behavior, investigated the location, and recovered the missing object. That’s not paranoia. That’s successful intelligence gathering.
Pandora tells me it’s called being a cat.
I tell her that’s exactly the sort of attitude that causes valuable sources to be overlooked.
She puts the hair clip on the dresser and goes back to fixing her hair while I look down at Mr Whiskers. He’s still sitting beside me, although now that the object has been recovered he seems completely uninterested in the investigation. I scratch behind his ears and tell him he did good work. Pandora says, “Please don’t encourage yourself.” I explain that I’m encouraging the cat. She says that’s somehow worse.
Mr Whiskers jumps onto the bed, walks across my pillow, and settles down near the headboard. For the next few minutes everything is normal. Pandora finishes her hair. I check my phone. Mr Whiskers starts washing one paw. The case, such as it was, is closed. I actually feel pretty good about how I handled it. I observed something unusual, gathered evidence, considered multiple explanations, identified a physical object, and reached the correct conclusion. There were no accusations. Nobody was implicated in an international conspiracy. Mrs Jenkins remained entirely uninvolved. This might be progress.
Then Mr Whiskers stops washing his paw.
His head turns slowly toward the closet.
He stares.
I follow his gaze.
Pandora sees me.
“No.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“No.”
“He’s looking at the closet.”
“He’s a cat.”
“He was a cat when he found your hair clip.”
“He didn’t find my hair clip. You found my hair clip.”
“Because he showed me where to look.”
“He stared under the dresser.”
“Exactly.”
Pandora puts down her brush and turns toward me. I can tell she’s preparing an argument, but I’m no longer paying attention because Mr Whiskers has gotten off the bed. He walks toward the closet, stops directly in front of the closed door, and sits down.
Pandora and I both look at him.
For once, she doesn’t say anything.
I slowly stand.
“Don’t,” she says.
“You saw that.”
“I saw a cat sit down.”
“In front of the closet.”
“Cats sit in front of things.”
“He chose that specific location.”
“Hal.”
I reach for the closet door.
Mr Whiskers looks up at the handle.
Pandora tells me not to open it. I ask why. She says because if I open that closet and find absolutely nothing, I’ll spend the rest of the afternoon trying to determine what was there before we looked.
That’s ridiculous.
I open the door.
Mr Whiskers darts past my legs, jumps onto the bottom shelf, and emerges two seconds later with one of my socks in his mouth.
Pandora starts laughing so hard she has to sit down.
I stare at the cat.
He stares back at me with my sock hanging from his mouth.
Apparently, he’d hidden it there himself.
I take the sock away from him and look at Pandora, who is now laughing too hard to speak. I would like to point out that this doesn’t invalidate my theory. If anything, it makes the situation more interesting. Mr Whiskers knew exactly where the missing sock was because Mr Whiskers was responsible for the missing sock.
That’s knowledge.
And I’m starting to think he has more of it than he’s letting on.