Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology Read online

  * Denial is the first stage of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief. Here the grief-stricken party refuses to believe the terrible news.

  Then, map by map, the lines began to fall inward, like a black hole might begin to collapse. He no longer walked the backyard. He narrowed his search to the house itself. Then he simply walked less, lay down more.

  In this stage, the party dealing with emotional upset can be angry with himself, and/or with others, especially those close to him.

  The lines thinned into simple overlapping triangles as his energy drained and it slowly dawned on him: Fibby was nowhere to be found.

  The bargaining stage was not as clear-cut for Tibby, though it may have manifested itself when he stayed close to home: “I promise I won’t wander anymore if I get my twin back.”

  Finally, on map 13, all the lines stopped. He wasn’t moving now. His track for that ten-hour period was a single, sad trapezoid.

  Meanwhile, the humans weren’t doing well either. I had a hole in my chest that was Fibby-shaped. I would lie on the sofa and then wake with a start, certain that Fibby was resting her head on my neck.

  Tibby had given up.

  But there was no Fibby. There was just the phantom imprint of her, her residual weight and heat, a cellular memory.

  The cat that left was here. The cat that didn’t leave was now gone forever.

  Fibby’s ashes arrived in a plain wood container. I told Wendy we would pour her into the backyard when I was ready to face it. I didn’t tell her it would probably be never.

  Wendy walked around in a daze. She had been indifferent to animals most of her life. But now she was wiping her eyes and talking to herself.

  “I miss Fibby,” she said to the air.

  “I miss Fibby,” she whispered to the silence in the house.

  “I miss Fibby,” she said to me, gripping my arm

  and blinking back tears. “It’s like a kitty light has gone out.”

  “Did you mean cat light?” I asked.

  “No,” she snuffled. “I mean a kitty light.”

  * When my father moved to San Francisco, his cremated animals came with him, packed in various decorative boxes and baggies. He hadn’t gotten around to spreading them, he told me, but he would, very soon. When he died, I gathered all the urns, still unopened, including his. Goodbye Molly, Goodbye Divvy, Goodbye Twiggy, Goodbye Cleo, Goodbye Pru, Goodbye Itty Bitty Kitty, Goodbye Dad. I dipped my hand into the silky remains and scattered them, coughing, onto the flowers, doing for my father what he could not bear to do himself.

  12.

  Weeks passed. Slowly the maps began to glow again. The pink lines came back to life, larger and wilder, palpitating like EKGs.

  Tibby was back on the move.

  “Now what?” I asked Wendy without much enthusiasm. Would we really continue this quest? Something had gone out of us at Fibby’s death.

  Yet I wanted a distraction from the lead weight that had been dropped on my heart.

  “Maybe a pet detective,” Wendy murmured. “Like Jim Carrey.”

  She couldn’t be serious, I thought. A pet detective? They didn’t really exist. But I went online and, lo and behold, there were trillions and trillions of pet detectives.

  I found America’s Most Recognized Pet Detective. I found Electra the Psychic Pet Detective. I found the Law-Enforcement-Based Pet Detective. I found the Top Lost Pet Detective in the United States. There was even a group unfortunately named Missing Pet Detectives, as if the detectives themselves had disappeared.

  Eagerly I dug deep into the Web. Here are some things I gathered from my research on pet detectives:

  • They like khaki.

  • They use FBI profiling techniques.

  • They know the most effective poster size and placement.

  • There is an optimal methodology for flyer distribution.

  • Most first realized their skill at pet detecting at a tender young age.

  • Many use tracking dogs.

  • Some also use their sixth sense.

  • One or two use ESP.

  • They wear floppy hats.

  What is an FBI profiling technique? I put this question to a psychic pet detective on the phone who, despite her extrasensory abilities, also used traditional investigation methods. “We hask huestions about the personality of your pet, like police in crime,” she replied with an unidentifiable accent, which may or may not have been fake.

  “So there is a kitty profile database?” I probed.

  “No, no, we use hexperience,” she replied. “For exhample, I can tell you your cat eez in the past just lost, can’t find heez way home. This eez the way of cats.”

  “He didn’t seem lost. He was fat and happy when he returned. He seems to be still going back.”

  “Yes, yes,” she insisted, “Verhy lost.”

  I sent an e-mail to another pet detective, explaining the situation and requesting his help. Cat! Injury! Cat disappearance! Despondence. Cat return! Cat tracking! Help? The pet detective didn’t seem to grasp the predicament. He asked me to fill out an attached questionnaire about my lost cat, and to send money.

  My cat was not lost, I re-explained, he was previously lost. But this pet detective was baffled by the meaning of “previously lost,” or maybe he simply did not approve of my quest; he had real lost cats to find. We stopped corresponding.

  The next detective didn’t answer at all. “She thinks you’re crazy,” Wendy teased.

  “I’m not sure an animal private eye has a say about crazy,” I retorted.

  Finally, I contacted a pet detective who used tracking dogs. She told me that by now Tibby’s old scent was gone. Stick with the GPS tracker, she told me, if you really want to do this.

  So I hobbled to the library and took out a book called Secrets of a Private Eye, or, How You Can Be Your Own Private Investigator. I read it, and then I wrote down what I knew so far:

  • Tibby is eating somewhere else.

  • This place is the place he had been living before.

  • This place is far away, out of earshot. At least two blocks, possibly twenty.

  Wendy looked at my list. She was silent for a while. “None of this is proven,” she finally said.

  “It’s called deductive reasoning,” I sniffed. I brandished the PI book.

  “Well, this, in particular,” she said, pointing. “The out-of-earshot, two-possibly-twenty-blocks part. The GPS doesn’t indicate Tibby being anything close to twenty blocks away.”

  “I CALLED HIM EVERY NIGHT,” I told her patiently. “If he had HEARD me, he would have come home, clearly. I mean, I was WEEPING. He would never have ignored me, not for five weeks, not when I was WEEPING. This is a THIRTEEN-YEAR RELATIONSHIP. Therefore. Ergo. Clearly.” I looked at her as if she had been held back in class a year and I was sorry to be the one who had to tell her.

  Wendy seemed momentarily impressed by my tactical reasoning.

  “Okay,” she finally agreed, in a soft voice used for armed people on ledges. Then she put a hand on my shoulder, looked me soulfully in the eyes, and said, “Perhaps I should take it from here.”

  13.

  It was time for Wendy to step in. Psychics, cameras, an animal communication class, and pet detectives? My ideas had failed us.

  “We’re going back to the GPS maps,” she told me. “We now have twenty-two of them. The answer is in there somewhere.”

  “But they’re just gobbledygook!” I whined.

  It was true. Too much information was, well, too much. The volume and geometrics of the pink lines looked more like abstract art pieces than evidence.

  Wendy patted my knee and agreed that, yes, the lines zigged and zagged like a tachycardic EKG. Yes, GPS was prone to anomalous lines because its signal ricocheted off buildings, foliage, and Tibby’s chin. Yes, at this point it was impossible to make heads or tails of the mess of tracks, no matter how hard we stared at them.

  “But there’s another way,” Wendy sai
d.

  She ushered me to the computer and settled me in like she was a flight attendant overseeing a minor, ignoring my crossed arms and downturned mouth. She sat beside me. She pecked at the keyboard. The monitor came to life. She summoned the first map, which opened like a firework display, the pink lines, green trees, and gray streets exploding outward, taking over the screen. She called forth the second map. It, too, burst open. Then she began a series of clicks and sweeps with the computer mouse. With the adroit wrist flicks of a ringmaster, she directed lion after lion after lion to jump through a flaming hoop. When she finally sat back, the streets and trees and houses had faded from the second map, but the tracks remained.

  She dropped this map onto the first. There were now two sets of tracks superimposed onto our neighborhood.

  She repeated this magic with the third and fourth maps, then the fifth and sixth. Clicks and sweeps of the mouse rendered each translucent, stripping it of everything maplike except the pink lines of Tibby’s travel. Then each was dragged, one on top of the next, until they were aligned neatly into a cyber-pile.

  Suddenly we could see all the tracks on just one tableau.

  “Amazing,” I cried. If this were a different century, I would have had to turn her into the town council for witchcraft. “But it still looks like a mess.”

  “Point to the places where there are the thickest lines,” Wendy commanded.

  I leaned forward, squinted. “There,” I said, putting a finger delicately on the screen. “Maybe there”—another finger smudge. “There?”

  Wendy nodded, and at each place I had indicated, she dropped a computerized blue dot.

  She then gathered the next six maps, denuded each, and made a new pile. And the next six maps. Then the final four.

  Now we had four sets of maps on which we had marked where Tibby went most often. In a final dramatic flourish, Wendy dragged these together and made one master map.

  “Holy moly,” I said, and put my head in my hands.

  “I don’t believe it,” I whispered in a voice as small as a mouse.

  14.

  Wendy looked at the map in front of us. She looked slowly and carefully, to humor me.

  She said, “I’m sorry, honey.”

  “No!” I wailed. “There must be some mistake.”

  But there was no mistake.

  Tibby had not ventured to Antarctica, or to a big city in Pennsylvania, or to the Aboriginal outback.

  No.

  Instead the map clearly showed Tibby tracks that ended just down the block, again and again and again. Ten houses away.

  Ten houses away!

  “I don’t understand,” I whispered with a tubercular wheeze. “This is terrible news.”

  “This is what you wanted,” Wendy said. “To figure out where he had been.”

  Yes. But also no.

  “And he was so close—isn’t that a comfort?” Wendy turned away from the computer and leaned toward me. She tilted her head and widened her eyes to show she was going to be patient and kind, but only for a little while.

  “But he heard me calling him each night,” I mewled.

  Private investigator manual: Do not take on the case if the client seems unwilling or unable to handle information that is humiliating, unsavory, or devastating.

  Wendy still didn’t understand. I persevered.

  “It’s as if I phoned you, and you saw my caller ID and you ignored it.”

  “Well . . .” Wendy looked away. Sometimes she did see my caller ID and ignore it.

  “Okay, but it’s as if I phoned you, and you saw my caller ID and you ignored it, and so I texted you in capital letters that I was stuck under a train and the left wheel was on my elbow and I needed medical help, and you still didn’t pick up the phone.”

  “It is?” she said. “It’s like that?”

  Yes, it was. Or maybe it was like a monster had put a large hairy hand into my rib cage and twisted my aorta and pulled out my heart and stomped on it. Maybe that’s what it was like.

  15.

  When the high emotions had subsided, we looked closer at the map. Yes, Tibby had been nearby. But where exactly? There was a three-house-long margin of possibility. Since the backyards abutted one another, there were six houses in all to consider. Wendy labeled this the Suspicious Area.

  “We should go door-to-door,” Wendy said. “We’ll talk to people directly, ask some questions, get some answers.”

  Wendy had changed in the past few months. She’d gone from being a no-cat person to a cat person. Soon she would be a bona fide kitty person. She had the quest’s best interest in mind now. Nevertheless, I vehemently disagreed with her plan. This was a sensitive time. We were getting close; we couldn’t blow it.

  “We have only one chance to reel them in. After that they get lawyers and clam right up,” I said. I had been watching too much TV since my injury. I was now the expert on police procedurals.

  “So what’s the next step?” Wendy asked.

  “We make them nervous,” I said darkly. “We use complex psychological pressure.”

  Wendy leaned in, interested.

  “Okay,” she said, and waited.

  I paused to give her time to get comfortable. Actually, I paused for dramatic effect. Then I said, “We write up a flyer.”

  Wendy stared at me a long time.

  “Do you mean, like the pieces of paper we put in mailboxes and on telephone poles all those weeks he was missing?” she asked.

  “Right!” I cried, happy that she was understanding me. “We’re going to write a flyer for those six houses and put it in their mailboxes.”

  “And where exactly does the complex psychological pressure come in?” She was enunciating each word carefully in case I was not just stupid but also deaf.

  “Leave that to me,” I said, with a wave of my hand. “You’ll see.”

  16.

  Here is the note I wrote:

  Dear Neighbor, Thank you for feeding my cat Tibby. I’m curious what he’s eating. He’s finicky as hell here. Also did you have him for five weeks? [Cute picture of Tibby here.]

  Please call me: [phone number here.]

  Caroline

  Wendy frowned. After a long pause she said that I sounded angry.

  “But I am angry,” I said.

  I agreed to start over.

  Dear Neighbor, You might remember my cat Tibby went missing this summer. I put a flyer in your mailbox about it.

  Wendy: Take that out. It sounds accusatory and aggressive.

  We removed this sentence.

  Luckily he returned after five weeks, safe and sound. However, he is no long eating at my house. I have reason to believe, due to GPS tracking technology, that he has been hanging out in your vicinity and perhaps even eating there.

  Wendy: You can’t write about the GPS. You sound like a stalker.

  Me: I’m not a stalker! I’m a pet owner!

  We left this sentence in, but only after an intense battle.

  If you are caring for him personally, I really appreciate it. If he is sneaking your own cat’s food, then I apologize. But one way or the other, I’d love to know what food he likes so that I can feed him here at home. You will know him by his blue collar. And the blinking GPS unit that is attached.

  We eventually removed these last two sentences.

  Could you please contact me with any information you might have on this matter?

  Caroline Paul [phone number]

  “It’s perfect,” I said. “It’s firm but friendly.”

  Wendy was doubtful. But I pointed out that this was the moment to show my hand. It was time to reveal that I had something close to proof on this matter. I wasn’t fooling around. I wasn’t a weird stalker person. I had GPS.

  “Actually, you sound like a weird stalker person,” Wendy replied.

  “Put it in a nice font,” I said.

  That afternoon we stuffed a flyer into the mailbox of each house in the Suspicious Area.

  “S
omeone is going to call very soon,” I crowed. “You just wait!”

  17.

  18.

  After five days without a response I admitted that my attempt at subconscious manipulation had failed. Curiously, though, Tibby had begun to eat at home.

  “Aha!” I said.

  Even Wendy looked a little pleased.

  I said, “He’s eating here now because the food elsewhere has suddenly been withdrawn. Therefore . . .”

  “Therefore we know that the perp is in one of those houses!” Wendy finished for me. We grinned at each other.

  Finally, some headway.

  A few days later, Wendy again argued that it was time to talk to neighbors face-to-face. We would knock, she said, and ask straight-out if the person who answered the door recognized Tibby.

  “I hear what you’re saying,” I said, deftly employing couples-counseling-speak and a generous smile. “And I respect you and all the thought that has gone into that.”

  Wendy smiled back, not fooled. This was just the sleight of hand that came before the rebuttal.

  Rebuttal: “But here’s the problem. This is the city. No one answers their door, unless they’re expecting a package.”

  I went on to explain what a ringing doorbell meant in the urban jungle.

  1. Con artists holding gas cans, with a story about a car, an empty tank, and the ability to pay back whatever you would loan.

  2. A trio of greasy-haired environmentalists with clipboards and pamphlets, poised to guilt-trip you into donations for whales and trees.

  3. Imminent home invasion.

  In sum, a ringing doorbell signaled someone who had neither your phone number, e-mail, or Twitter

  account. Why would you want to speak to them?

  Wendy listened with her customary patience, and then she lifted an eyebrow.