Yesterday morning started with an empty coffee creamer container and Mr Whiskers yelling at me from the kitchen, which, in retrospect, should have been enough warning that the day was going somewhere unpleasant. I was standing in front of the open refrigerator trying to decide whether black coffee constituted breakfast when Mr Whiskers planted himself beside my feet and produced the sort of meow normally reserved for starvation, abandonment, or the discovery that someone had closed a door he preferred open. The strange part was that his food bowl was full. I checked. Twice. He wasn’t interested in it. Instead, he kept looking at me, then at the refrigerator, then back at me with an expression suggesting that I was embarrassingly slow. The empty creamer bothered me because Karen was usually the one who drank it. John Mercer had recently developed some inexplicable loyalty to black coffee, Pandora preferred tea most mornings, and I generally used enough creamer to make coffee question its original purpose, but I knew I hadn’t finished the container. Karen had been around the apartment recently, though, so there was an entirely reasonable explanation sitting right in front of me. Naturally, I rejected it almost immediately. Mr Whiskers was still staring at the refrigerator, and I had learned enough about that cat to know that when he stared at something for longer than thirty seconds, either there was food involved or civilization was about to collapse.
Pandora and I were supposed to meet John for lunch at noon, and everything seemed perfectly normal until, about twenty minutes before we were supposed to leave, Pandora texted to say something had come up and she couldn’t make it. That should have been the end of it. People cancel plans. Things come up. Unfortunately, Mrs Jenkins had mentioned seeing Karen having an animated conversation with someone in the hallway earlier that day, and once my brain placed those two facts next to each other, they became legally inseparable. I started wondering whether the person Karen had been talking to was Pandora and whether whatever they discussed had caused Pandora to cancel lunch. Then I remembered the empty creamer, which technically had nothing to do with either event but had now become evidence. John was no help. When I asked whether he thought Pandora had seemed strange lately, he looked at me for several seconds before asking whether this had anything to do with the coffee creamer. I hadn’t mentioned the coffee creamer, which was concerning until I remembered that the empty container was sitting on the counter directly between us. John suggested that someone had probably finished it and forgotten to throw it away. I told him that was exactly the kind of explanation someone would give if he wanted me to stop asking questions. He stared at me again, picked up his coffee, and went into the living room. I wrote that down mentally as evasive behavior.
Then Mr Whiskers followed him, and that changed things. I watched the cat stroll into the living room, jump onto the couch beside John, and settle down as if the two of them had just concluded a successful intelligence briefing. John scratched him behind the ears without looking away from his phone, and Mr Whiskers purred contentedly. Five minutes earlier, the cat had been screaming at me in front of the refrigerator, and now he was perfectly comfortable beside John Mercer. I knew there were innocent explanations for this. In fact, there were probably hundreds. Unfortunately, none of them were as interesting as the possibility that Mr Whiskers knew exactly what had happened to the creamer and had chosen John’s side. Things became worse when Pandora came home later that afternoon. She apologized for missing lunch, kissed me on the cheek, and said the whole thing had been a last-minute problem she needed to handle. I asked what kind of problem, and she said, “Nothing exciting,” which was perhaps the least convincing phrase anyone could have used under the circumstances. Before I could ask another question, Mr Whiskers appeared from the hallway. He looked at Pandora. Pandora looked at him. Then she smiled and said, “Hi, troublemaker.” Mr Whiskers walked away. I stood there staring after him until Pandora finally asked what was wrong. “Nothing,” I said, because apparently we were all keeping secrets now.
By evening I had constructed what I considered a fairly restrained theory. Karen had been in the apartment sometime before lunch and finished the creamer. She had then spoken to Pandora in the hallway about something important enough to cause Pandora to cancel our plans. John either knew about the conversation or had learned about it afterward, while Mr Whiskers had witnessed at least part of this sequence and was now behaving differently around everyone involved. There were still some holes in the theory, admittedly, including motive, opportunity, evidence, and any reason whatsoever for four adults to communicate through a domestic cat, but the basic architecture was solid. Then Mrs Jenkins stopped by looking for her gardening shears. I told her we hadn’t seen them. She thanked me, glanced toward the living room, noticed Mr Whiskers sitting beside John and said, “There you are.” I froze. Not hello. Not what a handsome cat. There you are. Mr Whiskers blinked at her, Mrs Jenkins left, and I remained in the doorway for several seconds trying to process what I had just witnessed.
John eventually noticed me staring and asked whether I was okay. I asked him why Mrs Jenkins had been looking for Mr Whiskers. He reminded me that she hadn’t been looking for Mr Whiskers; she had been looking for gardening shears. I explained that this was precisely why her saying “there you are” to Mr Whiskers was suspicious. John opened his mouth, apparently considered several possible responses, and decided that drinking his coffee was safer. By that point the creamer was no longer the issue. The creamer had merely been the first loose thread. Pandora’s canceled lunch, Karen’s hallway conversation, Mrs Jenkins’ mysterious greeting, John’s refusal to recognize any of this as suspicious, and Mr Whiskers moving freely between all of them formed a pattern I could no longer ignore. Even Dave’s appearance later that evening seemed questionable. He stopped by, talked to John for a few minutes, scratched Mr Whiskers under the chin, and left. Nobody exchanged secret documents. Nobody whispered a password. Nobody even behaved strangely. Somehow, that made it worse.
I barely slept that night, but by morning I had decided to approach the situation rationally. There would be no accusations, no theories, and absolutely no interrogating the cat. I would make coffee, observe my surroundings, and wait for actual evidence before deciding that everyone I knew belonged to an underground organization coordinated by Mr Whiskers. It was a sensible plan, possibly the most sensible plan I had developed all week, and it lasted approximately twenty seconds. I walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and found a brand-new container of coffee creamer sitting on the shelf. I hadn’t bought it. I stood there for a moment looking at it before slowly turning around and discovering Mr Whiskers sitting silently in the doorway. He looked at me. I looked at him. His tail flicked once. “Who bought the creamer?” I asked. Mr Whiskers lowered his head and calmly began licking his paw, refusing even to acknowledge the question. I stared at him for another few seconds, and suddenly everything about the previous day seemed perfectly clear. Karen, Pandora, John, Mrs Jenkins, Dave, the canceled lunch, the hallway conversation, the mysterious greeting—it had all led me right back here, to this kitchen, this refrigerator, and this suspiciously well-informed orange cat. I still couldn’t prove anything, of course, but I didn’t need to. Mr Whiskers knew exactly what was going on. The little bastard knew everything.
