Smudge the Misty Hollow Cat Detective (Darcy Sweet Mystery) (A Smudge the Cat Mystery Book 2) Read online

  COPYRIGHT

  First published in Australia by South Coast Publishing, June 2015.

  Copyright K.J. Emrick (2015)

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and locations portrayed in this book and the names herein are fictitious. Any similarity to or identification with the locations, names, characters or history of any person, product or entity is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

  - From a Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations.

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  A Smudge the Cat Mystery

  Box Set 2

  Copycat

  Have you ever noticed how many saying have the word ‘cat’ in them?

  Cat got your tongue.

  Like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

  Letting the cat out of the bag.

  Cat on a hot tin roof.

  Scaredy-cat.

  Then there’s one other that I hear people say a lot: When the cat’s away, the mice will play.

  Mice, and rats. Sometimes the rats have two legs.

  That’s how I look at it, anyway. Then again I’m different than most cats.

  But in a lot of ways I’m just like every other cat out there. Like how I enjoy a good nap in the mid-day sun. Today was the most perfect day for napping I’ve seen in a long time. It was the middle of summer, and the sun was up high in a cloudless sky, and the grass was long and soft under this tree. I was out late last night chasing ghost dogs away from a playground, and this was just what I needed. Rest. Relaxation. The warm, warm sun…

  Ooof.

  The breath blew out of me and I snapped awake in a most unpleasant way when a cat’s four paws landed hard on my vulnerable midsection. It took me a moment to squirm to my feet and when I did I was ready to tear into whoever had just done that with all my claws. Maybe my teeth, too.

  Until I saw who it was that had pounced on me.

  Of course it would be him. Sometimes it’s hard to have friends.

  “For the love of catnip, Tony!” I take a breath, then retract my claws, real slow like. “This is getting to be a habit for you and me. Next time, how about I jump on you?”

  Tony is this big tiger-striped cat with one ear that flops over. He’s an alley cat, but don’t let that fool you. I’ve never had a better friend.

  “Sorry,” he purrs with his eyes narrowed. “Couldn’t see you in all that long grass.”

  Yeah. He’s not sorry at all. “Uh-huh. Sure. Is there a reason you woke me up or did you just feel like playing bouncy-house on my chest?”

  “Got a friend needs your help, Smudge. It couldn’t wait.”

  Okay, see, I don’t mind helping out other animals. I really don’t. People either. My human, Darcy, never turns someone away when they need her help. I try to do the same, in my own small way, because a cat’s work is never done.

  I just prefer to help people when I’m not in the middle of a peaceful nap on a warm summer’s day, is all.

  Besides, I’ve been helping Tony out a lot recently. “How many friends do you have, anyway?” I mean, really. Tony is an alley cat. How does a loner like him get to know this many people?

  And by people, I mean cats.

  “I’ve got friends all over town,” is his answer, and he sniffs as he says it, like I should have known about how popular he is with every single cat in town. “This friend’s name is Sheba. She’s, um, really cute. Got pretty blue eyes and this brown fur that turns white down at her paws. Wears this bead collar that her human puts on her. Her human likes to dress her up. It’s, uh, kinda cute.”

  He curls his tail around his feet and looks away from me. It isn’t hard to see how much he likes this Sheba. Imagine that. An alley cat in love with a house pet. Will wonders never cease.

  Now I can’t turn him down. Not that I was going to anyway. Because it’s also easy to see how upset he is.

  “You know I’ll help however I can, Tony.” I stretch, and yawn, and give up on the idea of going back to my nap. “So what’s the problem?”

  “Someone stole her collar.”

  “All right. Well as problems go, that one seems pretty simple. Let’s go talk to this friend of yours.”

  “We can’t,” he tells me.

  “That’s sort of going to make it hard for me to help her. Why can’t we go see her right now?”

  “Because,” he says, his ears drooping. “I can’t find her.”

  ***

  There’s a lot of different houses in Misty Hollow. It’s a small town, as small towns go, but there’s lots of people who live here and each of them has their own sort of place to live.

  This house that Tony has brought me to is perfectly square. Four equal sides. Flat roof. Even the windows were square. Weird looking place. Out in front there were garden plots with blue flowers and red ones and ones with yellow petals. At least they aren’t square.

  “Is anyone home right now?” I ask Tony as we sit across the road, watching and waiting.

  “Nope,” he says. “There’s just the mother and a little girl. Marka, I think the girl’s name is. The father moved out years ago. He and the mother did that…thing that people do sometimes.”

  “Divorce,” I supply for him. “The parents divorced. You sure know a lot about this family.”

  “Sheba told me everything. We used to talk all the time.” He stands up and starts across the quiet street. “That’s the problem.”

  I have no idea what he’s talking about. What problem? Getting information out of Tony is like pulling a cat’s tail sometimes. “So just the mother and the daughter. They aren’t home?”

  “Mother’s at work. Daughter goes to a babysitter’s during the day.”

  I have to ask. “Then why are we here?”

  He stops us under an open window. “Come with me. I’ll show you.”

  Cats can jump about seven times as high as their tail is long. Some of us even higher. It wasn’t hard for either of us to make the windowsill from the ground and then jump down to the floor inside. The landing is soft thanks to a plush carpet.

  It’s a nice house. Plain brown sofa. Overstuffed easy chairs. A television on a long media cabinet. L
ots of pictures on the wall. Some standing up next to the television, too. There’s pictures of a little girl with pigtails and freckles. Some of the pictures have the little girl and an older woman, too. Mother and daughter.

  Then there’s pictures of a brown cat with white front paws. In the pictures, she’s wearing a little string of what looks like pearls. Of course. The “bead collar” that Tony had been talking about. A collar made of pearls.

  “Is that Sheba?” I ask him.

  He looks up at the photos. “Yes. That’s Sheba.”

  “And she’s missing?”

  “Yes.”

  “So first her collar goes missing and then she does, too?”

  “More like both at the same time.”

  Like I said, Tony has always been a cat of few words, but even for him this is cryptic. “It would help if I could just talk to Sheba.”

  “I told you,” he says. “She’s not here.”

  “Then where—”

  “Meow?” a soft, female cat voice says to us. “Can I help you two big boys?”

  A brown cat with soft fur that faded into white at her front paws was stepping into the room, very smoothly, with her head and tail held high. Around her neck was a shiny metal and glass collar thing that I thought was way overdone.

  Sheba. In the fur.

  I turn to Tony with a smile. “Found her. What else you need?”

  But he shakes his head. “That’s not her.”

  I blink, and one of my ears develops an involuntary flick. “What do you mean, that’s not her?”

  “It’s not her,” he repeats.

  The brown cat sits down, licking one paw, watching both of us from lidded eyes.

  “That looks like her,” I point out.

  “Yes, it does,” Tony agrees.

  “But it’s not her?”

  “No. Not her.”

  So I turn to the girl. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Sheba,” she says.

  And I turn to Tony. “She says she’s Sheba.”

  “It’s not Sheba,” he growls, his one droopy ear standing straight up. “Look at the cat in the photos. That’s Sheba.”

  If you’re following this so far, you’re doing better than me. Tony said to look at the photos, so I look at the photos.

  To a person’s eyes, a lot of cats look exactly alike. Every gray cat looks like every other gray cat. Every white cat is every other white cat. You get the idea. Cats, on the other hand, don’t make that mistake. There’s little differences in even the most identical felines. Those Siamese cats, for instance.

  Looking up at the photos now, then looking at the cat sitting in front of us, I see that Tony is right. The brown color in the fur is just a little bit different. The white on her left paw goes up just a little bit further than it does for the cat in the photos. And there’s something about the eyes.

  “You’re not Sheba,” I say to her.

  “Don’t be silly.” She stops licking her paw and shines those pretty blue eyes on me instead. “Of course I’m Sheba.”

  “No you aren’t,” Tony argues with her. “I knew Sheba. We spent time together. I told her lots of things about me. What’s my favorite food? Where do I live?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. Then she rolled one shoulder. “I remember you. You were here yesterday. You’re kind of cute, but I’ve never seen you before that. I don’t know anything about you.”

  “See?” Tony says to me, like that settled the whole thing.

  Truth be told, I think it did.

  Sheba wasn’t Sheba. Not the real Sheba, anyway.

  Sheba was a copycat.

  I step closer to her, and she purrs just a little bit. This cat isn’t afraid to be, well, catty…but I’m not interested. I already have a girlfriend. Not to mention there’s a big mystery here that I need to figure out.

  No time to be frisky.

  “Sheba,” I ask her, “who’s that cat up there in the pictures?”

  She looks up, then back at me. “Is that what this is all about? That’s not me, silly boys.”

  “Then who is it?” Tony demands.

  “That’s the first Sheba,” she explains. “I’m Sheba the Second. You can tell because Sheba the First always wore those pearls. Marka likes to put me in diamonds.”

  She purred again and licked at her shiny collar. I don’t want to be the one to tell her, but the diamonds on her collar are actually chips of colored glass. On the other hand, from what I can see in the pictures, the pearls Sheba the First is wearing are the real thing.

  Interesting.

  Tony puts himself nose to nose with Sheba the Second. His voice is low and not friendly. “Where’s my Sheba?”

  She licks his nose. I can’t believe she just did that.

  Jumping back from her, Tony wipes a paw at his face, over and over. Sheba laughs at him. “Oh, dear boy. I have no idea where your Sheba went, and I couldn’t possibly care less.”

  ***

  “So she’s a real treat.”

  Tony flicks his ears at me. “She’s nothing like my Sheba.”

  “The little girl in the house—Marka—didn’t notice she wasn’t the same cat?”

  He shakes himself all over. “No. You know how humans are. The girl seems to know something’s wrong but the two Shebas look so much alike…who would do such a thing, Smudge? Replace one cat with another?”

  “Good question. Now you’re starting to think like me.”

  He snorted, and it came out like a sneeze. “Lot of good that will do me. Come on, Smudge. We need to find Sheba. My Sheba.”

  “That’s what we’re going to do,” I tell him. “I promise.”

  Like I said, cats know every single thing that goes on in a house. Sometimes even when the house isn’t ours. Good thing, too. Tony had noticed the cat in Marka’s house wasn’t the real Sheba right away. I’m glad he came to me for help. Maybe there was still time to fix things.

  There’s lots of shops in Misty Hollow. People seem to need all sorts of things that cats never worry about. Cats don’t need restaurants or grocery stores. We don’t need libraries, although I admit that I enjoy a good book myself. We don’t need to buy clothing, or shoes, or those little scented candles. Cats have very simple needs.

  We don’t have a reason to sell our stuff, either. Humans do.

  At the far end of Main Street is a shop that opened up a few years ago. It goes unnoticed for the most part by everyone who lives here. At least, until they want to sell something. It’s called a pawn shop. I’ve watched people go in there with little things to sell, or big things to sell, and seen them come out with money. Sometimes they come out with a smile. Sometimes they come out crying.

  People are strange.

  It’s a small place, this pawn shop, just room enough for a door and a single display window in the front. In that window, the man who runs the pawn shop displays little things that people have sold him. Advertising that the things are for sale again. I suppose it might be a good way to make money. If I needed to make money.

  I stop outside the shop, on the sidewalk, looking up into the display window at trumpets and men’s watches and things like that.

  “Smudge, what are we doing here?” Tony asks me. “I thought we were going to find the real Sheba?”

  “We are.” There’s a woman’s necklace. A set of used books.

  “Then what are we doing here? I don’t think we’re going to find her here, do you?”

  “No.” Glass figurine. Snowglobe. “I don’t know where to find Sheba. Not yet.”

  A-ha.

  “But,” I tell him, “I do know where to find her collar. Look.”

  Sure enough, sitting toward the back of the display on its own little hook, is a cat’s collar made of pearls.

  “That’s it!” Tony exclaims. “Ha! Smudge you found her collar. Um. That’s amazing and all, but how does that help us find her?”

  “People sell things when they need money. The man who runs this shop keeps a reco
rd of who sells him things. All we have to do is find the receipt.”

  “Uh, Smudge? That’s a great plan and all, but I can’t read.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I can.”

  I nudge his shoulder and move him away from the front of the building. I need to get inside without anyone noticing. Quick in, quick out. Find the information I need. That means sneaking in through the back.

  I think I know where this is heading. I’m just not sure yet. I won’t be sure until I find the receipt for that pearl collar. Then I’ll be able to prove who took Sheba the First.

  Simple.

  ***

  The trash can in the back of the store was made of plastic but it still made a horrible crashing noise as I dropped down on it from above, jumping out of a narrowly opened window to keep from getting hit over the head with a broom.

  I came flying out of the pawn shop, gracefully landing on three out of my four feet on top of the brown and green trash container, knocking it over sideways, rolling off onto the ground, yeowling and hollering like a cat in a dogfight.

  So much for simple.

  “Come on!” I shout to Tony as I run past him. “Let’s go!”

  “Go? Go where?” He catches up to me as I slow down a little bit. “Smudge, what’s going on?”

  “The man at the pawn shop didn’t like the idea of a cat on his desk.”

  “What? Why were you on his desk?”

  “Because,” I said. “That’s where he keeps all his important papers.”

  Running alongside of me, Tony whips his striped tail back and forth. “See? Nothing good comes from a cat reading.”

  “This time it did. I think I’ve found where Sheba is. Your Sheba,” I clarify. “Not the copycat.”

  His mouth hangs open and I know he wants to say something, but he keeps it to himself. Silently he follows me across town to a little house that matches the address I found in the pawn shop paperwork. This is the home of a rat.

  A rat of the two-legged variety.

  The place is kind of a dump, actually. The siding is falling off in places and the lawn hasn’t been mown in I don’t know how long. The windows are a little dirty, too. It’s the home of a man who doesn’t have the time, or the desire, to keep it clean.