The Mystery of the Cat Who Will Not Act Like a Dog

Franklin opens this one himself, which is unusual, because usually the house opens them for him.

The house has not noticed anything wrong. The house is fine. It is Franklin who has been turning something over for several days and has finally decided it constitutes a case, and the case is this:

There is an animal in this residence who will not behave correctly.

He lays it out in the front room, at volume, to an audience of one large yellow dog who is lying down and one Shnug who is delighted to be included.

Item. She does not come when the food makes the sound. The food makes the sound and everyone comes, because that is what the sound is for, and she does not come. She is already there. Nobody has ever seen her travel.

Item. She does not go outside. Ever. Not once. There is an entire outside and she has declined it.

Item. She goes up. Franklin considers this the most serious of the charges. Up is not a direction that animals are supposed to have. Up is for birds and for the tops of things, and she is on the tops of things constantly, looking down, which is a thing he has decided he does not care for.

Item. When he barks at her, nothing happens. Nothing happens. When he barks at anything else in this house, something happens. A person comes, a door opens, the small yellow one wags, the big yellow one lifts her head. He barks at her and the world simply continues.

He wants to know why.

“He seemed nice,” offers Abby, who has not been asked a question.

The Duck lifts her head.

She lifts it about two inches, which for the Duck is an outburst, and she looks at Franklin for a long moment, and what she is thinking is: oh no.

Because she already knows the answer. She has known the answer since roughly her third day in this house, and it took her about four minutes to work out, and it is not complicated:

She’s a cat.

That’s all. That’s the whole solution. She is a different kind of animal, she was here first, and she is not to be approached.

The Duck knows this the way she knows most things. By having lain quietly near a wall for a long time and watched. She has watched Cookie for years now, from six feet away, always six feet, and she has never once needed the arrangement explained because she understood it in a single look around a corner on a day nobody else remembers.

She would like to explain this to Franklin.

She has, in fact, tried. Twice. Both times she got about as far as lifting her head before losing her nerve, because explaining things requires being listened to, and being listened to requires being looked at.

So instead the Duck does what the Duck does, which is the actual work, which nobody sees.

At 11:40 Franklin sets off for the good chair, where Cookie is, at a determined trot. The Duck gets up, which she almost never does, walks four steps, and lies back down directly across the route. Franklin walks into her, is annoyed, forgets what he was doing, and goes to check whether anything has appeared in his bowl in the last ninety seconds.

At 1:15 he tries again, from the other side, along the wall. The Duck is already in the hallway. She is not doing anything. She is simply, enormously, there, fifty pounds of yellow dog occupying the entire width of a hallway, apologizing quietly to nobody. Franklin gives up and sits on her instead.

At 3:50 he gets past her.

She is asleep. It happens. She wakes to the sound of small determined feet on hardwood and she is up faster than she has moved in a year, and she is still four steps too late, and Franklin is at the base of the good chair looking up at the cat and he is going to bark.

And the Duck stops where she is, because there is nothing else to do, and watches.

Cookie looks down at him.

That is all she does. She does not hiss. She does not stand. She does not move a single part of herself except her eyes, which come down and rest on Franklin and stay there.

The room gets very quiet.

Franklin, Emperor of the Rug, Keeper of the Crumb, an animal who has never in his life been talked out of anything, sits down. Then he gets up. Then he turns around and walks back across the front room with tremendous dignity, at a pace he would describe as unhurried, and lies down next to the Duck and puts his chin on her leg.

The case, he announces, is closed.

He does not say what the finding was. He does not appear to feel this is necessary.

And the woman of the house, who has come in halfway through this and seen the last part of it, says the thing that will be repeated at dinner and again on the phone that weekend:

“Aw. Look. He finally figured out to leave Cookie alone. Good boy, Franklin.”

He accepts this.

He accepts it entirely, and by the time she has finished saying it he remembers the whole day as an investigation, and the investigation was thorough, and it concluded, and the conclusion was his.

The three interceptions are not in the version he remembers. They are not in anyone’s version. Nobody in that house will ever know that a large yellow dog spent an entire Tuesday putting herself between a pug and a twenty-year-old cat, four steps at a time, and got it right twice out of three.

From the good chair, Cookie settles back down into a loaf and closes her eyes most of the way.

“Twice,” she says. “I was watching.”

And the Duck, with a pug’s chin on her leg, lets out a breath she has been holding since 11:40.

Good boy.