Misty Hollow Cat Detective (Darcy Sweet Mystery) (A Smudge the Cat Mystery Book 1) (8 page)

"You leave!"  A plump, heavy crow whirls on me in a menacing way.  Where
Corvin is all jittery energy, this crow looks old and slow, like a big bloated lump with feathers.  His beak is tucked into his chest, and his chest is puffed out to make him look even more swelled up.  "You leave!  Go somewhere else."

"No, I stay," I mock the crow.  No feathery balloon is going to tell me what to do.  "I'm looking for something for my friend
Corvin.  Maybe you've seen it?"

At the mention of
Corvin's name the crow suddenly comes to life, feathers flapping, neck craning, eyes bulging.  He stands up and only then do I get a true sense of how big he really is.  Huge, is the word that comes to mind.  He easily stands head and shoulders over me, with a beak as long as my paw and a nasty glint in his eye.

"
Corvin!" he shouts.  "Do not speak to me of Corvin!  He is not welcome in my tree!"

"Um," I say, backing up, "
Corvin isn't here.  Just me."

"Do not speak the name of
Corvin!" he repeats in his loud, deep bird voice, starting to turn slowly in a circle.  As he does, I see how crows in the other trees have popped their heads out to watch the commotion.  There's only about a dozen of them in the park altogether, and it looks like every single one of them is here now.

Here,
and glaring at me.

Fantastic.

"Oh, good," I say, trying to make the best of a bad situation.  "Since you're all here, let me ask you a question…"

Quickly I describe the necklace as
Corvin had described it to me.  Using crow-speak I tell them how the sparkly was lost and asked if anyone had it.  Actually, what I asked was if anyone had found one just like it.  You can't ask a crow if he's stolen something.  The answer is always no because in their minds they just find things.  They don't steal.  If they happen to find something that looks just like a thing someone else lost, that isn't stealing.  Not to a crow.

I get several caws in response to my question, all of the crows telling me one after another that they don't have anything like that.  They all offer to show me things they do have, unable to resist showing off how much better their stash is than their neighbor's, but none of them have what I'm looking for.  To make matters worse, big monster crow is still shouting about
Corvin and trying to menace me off his tree.

"Will you calm down?" I finally say to him, frustrated and annoyed that I'm spending my whole Sunday on this.  "I just wanted to ask, all right?"

"Corvin!" the crow shouts again in that slow, resonant voice.  "You must leave my tree!"

"Oh, for the love of catnip."
  I've had just about enough of this bird.  I don't care if he does have size on me, I think he needs to learn some manners.  Maybe if I bite off a few of his tail feathers he'll just shut up.

"Father!" a softer, feminine voice says, interrupting my thoughts of maiming the big blowhard.  Along the branch a girl crow hops toward us and flaps her wings at the bigger bird. 
"Father!  Stop it.  Don't speak of Corvin so!"

Oh.  This is the girl crow that
Corvin is sweet on.  Okay.  I can kind of see it, I guess, with those sleek feathers and that beak with its little curve.  Cute.  In a bird sort of way.

Her father isn't backing down, though.  "Jessamine, you will not be with
Corvin!  I forbid it!  I forbid it!"

Does this guy have any volume other than obnoxious?

Jessamine knocks her head into her father's chest a few times until he deflates, his feathers settling back down, his beak parting as his breathing slows.  "You are my only daughter," he says to her.

"I know.  I know."  If I didn't know birds couldn't smile then I would have sworn that was what Jessamine was doing.  "You told me.  It doesn't matter. 
Doesn't matter.  Corvin will win my love.  Will.  Or will not."

"Will not," her father repeated, apparently satisfied with that thought.

"Okay," I said, glad that was over.  "I'm just going to go now.  If you happen to see something that looks like Corvin's, uh, people feather, can you show it to him?  He'd love to see it."

I'm guessing that was one mention of
Corvin too much for the old bird, because he suddenly charged at me screaming and screeching, all flapping wings and slashing beak.  I could have taught him a lesson, but I chose not to.  I didn't figure eating the father of the girl Corvin had a crush on would be the best course of action.  No matter how tempting it was.

So, down the tree I went.  Climbing and sliding on my claws, I lost my grip and hit the ground a little harder than I meant to.  Actually, I fell the last few feet.  Cats always land on their feet.

Yeah.  Right.

"What are you doing?"

Oh goodie.  Someone saw me.  Twisting around onto my belly, sort of with my feet under me, I looked over to find a younger cat watching me.  All black, with long whiskers and feet that were still too big for his body.  He'd grow up to be a huge tomcat, probably.  For now he was just a pipsqueak.

"I'm falling out of a tree, obviously," I answer him sarcastically.  "What are you doing?"

He snuffed a little breath like a laugh, or a smirk.  "Watching you.  I usually take my walks through here in the morning.  I don't usually see full grown cats falling out of trees.  Were you pretending to be a walnut or something?"

"No!" I protest.  "I was not
—  I was looking for something.  That's all."

The black cat looked up into the branches above.  "What in the world were you expecting to find up there?"

"A people fea—I mean, a necklace.  A necklace."

He stared at me, then blinked once and turned away.  "Oh."

"Hey wait," I said to him.  "What's your name?"

"Samson," the cat answered.  "My human named me after herself.  Samantha's her name.  She lives over that way. 
The red house with the green roof." 

He pointed his nose off to his left.  I know the house he means. 
Next to that apartment building.  "Okay.  Well, good to meet you, Samson."

The young cat pranced away quickly and was gone.  Like I
said, lots of cats in this town.

The crows up above suddenly began cawing loudly again as they argued with each other.  Thankfully they were staying up there instead of coming down here to bother me. 
Best not to take chances, though.  It felt like a good time to be somewhere else.

***

"Can't you just give
Corvin some other shiny thing?" Tony asked me. 

Tony is a friend of mine. 
A tiger-striped alley cat who likes to eat chicken wings from the dumpsters.  Not my idea of dinner, but it works for him.  I found him behind the Bean There Bakery and Café, where the shade kept the ground cool and lunchtime was sure to bring him lots of tasty table scraps.  He sat back on his haunches now, dividing his attention between me and the back door of the place.  He didn't want to take a chance on missing the garbage when it came out.

"I'm not a jewelry store," I said dismissively.  "If he wants to get this girl crow a gift then he can do it himself."

"Speaking of that, how's things with you and Twistypaws?"

That, at least, made me want to smile.  "We're good.  I'm supposed to take her out tonight."

"Oh yeah?  Anywhere special?"

"Like I'm going to tell you.
  We're going there by ourselves, Tony.  To be alone."

I'd made the mistake of telling Tony where
me and Twist were going last time.  He'd shown up, hoping that we'd brought some fish with us or something.  No amount of explaining it could make him understand that we wanted to have a private moment.  A private moment that didn't include him.

The back door opened and a woman with her long auburn hair in a net and scars on one side of her face swung out from the doorframe.  She tossed a bag into the dumpster without noticing us sitting here.  The odor from the bag smelled of cheese and bread and stuff I couldn't identify.  I looked at Tony, waiting for him to pounce on the bag.  He just shook his head instead.

"The good stuff gets tossed out later.  That's the garbage from yesterday.  Blech."

I guess when you live the life of an alley cat you can tell the difference between the good garbage, and the bad garbage.

"Anyway."  I got back up onto all four of my feet.  "This has been really helpful and all, but I need to go.  I don’t know what I'm going to do about Corvin.  Maybe there's nothing I can do.  The necklace is gone.  Maybe he just needs to accept that."

"Wasn't that what I said?" Tony asked, his one ear flopping down.

I ignore him, although I have to admit he's right.  There was nothing else I could do.  I'd interviewed the crows, for all that it mattered.  I was pretty sure none of them had it.  They either would have brought it out to brag about it, or attacked me to keep Corvin from getting it back.  So not the crows.  Not humans either, because it happened after dark.

It was possible that Jessamine's father had stolen it to keep
Corvin from giving it to her.  I suppose I'll have to keep that in mind.

I'd c
onsidered the possibility that a squirrel was the thief, but squirrels are always too busy collecting food for the winter to steal other things.  They couldn’t care less about a necklace when there's nuts to gather and a family to feed.  They work too hard, in my opinion, but then again they don't have someone like Darcy to make sure their food dish is always full.

Nothing else big enough to carry away a necklace could get up into that nest of
Corvin's.  Not all the way up there in that tree like that.  I mean, did you see how far up I had to climb to get there?  Who in the world could get up there like I did or even…

Oh.

Right.

***

Sometimes, I'm not as smart as I think I am.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm pretty smart.  Smarter than your average cat, to coin a phrase.  But sometimes I could stand to be a little smarter.  Birds can get up into trees.  Squirrels and chipmunks can get up into trees, although chipmunks were too small to carry away a diamond necklace and squirrels were too busy, like I'd said.  So.  Who else climbs trees?

Cats climb trees.  That's who.

I'd climbed two different trees myself today.  I know cats can climb trees.  I really should have put cats on the list of suspects sooner.

Maybe if I hadn't been kicked out of bed early this morning, I would've put it together sooner.

Now, two questions.  Which cat, and why.

I have a pretty good idea which cat. 
The one who always takes his walks past Corvin's tree.

As to the why…yeah.
  I've got nothing.

Samson had told me exactly which house was his. 
The red one with the green roof.  Easy to find.  Once I'm there, I jump up onto a windowsill and peer inside.  It's a simple home, nice and cozy, with mismatched furniture and wallpaper that's peeling at the seams.  Pictures on the wall.  I don't recognize the family in them.  Even so, a photograph of a young girl draws my attention.  She's got spiky blonde hair and freckles and oversized dangly earrings.  Her clothes are plain but stylish.

In every photograph of her, she's wearing a necklace.  A gold necklace with a hanging letter S embedded with diamonds.

"It belonged to Samantha all along," Samson said to me.  I'm not sure when he got here, but he's sitting on the ground below me at the window, watching me.  "She was devastated when she lost it.  That necklace was a gift from her dad just before he died.  The necklace is the only thing left she has to remember him by.  I've been combing Misty Hollow for a week looking for it.  Imagine my surprise when I found that crow had it in his nest."

"I can imagine," I agreed.  That explains why Samson took
Corvin's sparkly.  "I don't blame you for wanting it back.  Samantha looks like a good kid."

He jumps up easily to sit next to me.  "She is.  She's real good to me.  I'd do anything for her.  You can understand that, can't you Smudge?"

"Sure," I answer easily.  "The human I live with is more than just my owner.  She's my friend.  I understand that completely."

He sighs and looks away into the house, cool indifference masking his obvious relief.

I regard Samson, measuring him again in my mind.  The kid might be young yet, but he's going to grow into a fine cat someday.  I'll have to make an effort to watch over him and make sure he doesn’t fall into the wrong crowd here in town.  I'll have to tell him about the dogs, and maybe introduce him to Tony and a few of my other friends.

Hey.  It's what I do.

"So you won't tell Corvin what I did?" he asks.

"You
mean, that you climbed up into his tree without him noticing, without the other crows seeing you, and stole back something that didn't belong to him, all in the dark of night?"  I flick my tail, amused.  "No.  I won't tell him.  A friend of mine suggested that I just get something else for Corvin.  To replace the necklace.  Besides, it wasn't even his to begin with."