Pun Detectives and the Case of the Kidnapped Kitten! (Part 5)

Lily and I had our work cat out for us.

Err, sorry. Cut out for us.

As grandpa had explained it, our cases were supposed to revolve around puns. After all, it was puns causing all the problems around here. I didn’t exactly see where the pun factored in to all of this, but I sure as heck wasn’t complaining. I didn’t want to complicate things. We would come at this one straight: search around for Teabone the good, old-fashioned way. That’s what I had decided. It couldn’t be that hard to find a missing kitten could it? We would wrap this case up in no time, right?

Wrong. After our visit to the karate non-club, Lily and I met at HQ every day after school for the better part of a week. From there, we meowndered— err, meandered across town, scouring everywhere we could think to scour for traces of Teabone.

Put bluntly, it was a catastrophe. What we found was a whole lot of nothing. Zip. Zilch. Zero. No Teabone to be found, anywhere.

At first, we pulled out all the stops. Cat food. Cat toys. Scratch posts. Even one of those cat trees, a maze inside a soft pylon, said to keep cats busy for hours upon hours. Everywhere we went, everything and anything a cat could ever want in life was sure to go… because we hauled it all with us. And by we, I mean me. Lily led the way, guiding us where cat behavior videos on the internet told us cats were sure to go. I was the one left to lug all the cat junk (meant to lure Teabone out of course) around with us. It may not have been so bad if I hadn’t had to balance it all in both hands. If there was one thing cats didn’t like, it was crates. Carrying all the goods in anything that even resembled one — you know, like a box or a wagon of some kind — would have sabotaged our mission. Cats are very discerning creatures, you see.

Anyway, the balancing act had me channeling my inner cat, that was for sure — my inner Cat in the Hat, that is. Balancing a lifetime supply of cat equipment made me feel about as stable as if I were teetering on top of a big rubber ball.

Somewhere along the way, Atlas must have shrugged, because I ran out of whatever luck had kept me stable so far. Me and the stack of junk collapsed into a topple, an entire mountain made of everything cats liked, an Olympus Mons fit for felines.

After that, I made the executive decision to ditch the toys and do things by the books.

“Pshpshpshpshpshpsh…” I whispered. Aloud. In broad daylight. With other people watching.

Ugh. Just bury me now.

“Teabone,” I called. “Ohhhhh Teeaaaabooooone. Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

“Psh. Psh. Psh. Psh. Psh. Teabone. Teabone. Your immediate appearance is requested and is of utmost importance. Linger no longer.” Lily was, uh… “helping” too.

It didn’t work. Days went by and still we saw neither hide nor hair of Teabone.

Wherever we looked, we asked around to find out whether anyone had seen a calico cat lately. Nobody had.

We even scratched a few wanted posters together and put them up all over the place. In the process I found out that Lily’s artistic ability was maybe even more meager than mine, and our approximation of Teabone looked more like fungal infection than a cat. In the end, we got Wednesley to send us a picture of Teabone instead. We pasted the posters on streetlights, the walls of buildings, the corners of windows where we could get away with it, trees, sidewalks, online.

No luck.

Finally, we had no choice but to pull out the big guns: catnip.

In a shocking turn of events, it actually worked. Catnip in hand, we played pied pipers to an entire horde of cats  — more than I’d ever seen in one place before. Cats and kittens of all shapes, ages, sizes, colors, and breeds came prowling out of the woodwork, following in our wake like a pulsing wave of whiskers and hairballs. Thinking things were finally looking up, we led the mewing congregation all the way back to the karate club room, where we found Monty, Tuesday, and Wednesley practicing.

Cats flooded the room, overtaking Lily and me, as soon as we opened the door.

“Are any of these Teabone?” I managed to call from where I was currently being scratched into painful submission by a tidal wave of cat claws.

Nope. Teabone wasn’t there. We should have known. Not a single one of the cats we’d led on was a calico.

On the bright side, meeting Lily every afternoon after school gave me the chance to freshen up our new HQ. Slowly but surely, I scrubbed away all the grime, beat about a pound or two of dust from the curtains, cleansed the windows of their filthy fog, and generally tidied the place up a bit. Lily lent a hand of course.

The one thing I was too lazy to do was change that pesky lightbulb. I had gotten used to it, and so the incessant flicker of the loose, dying bulb wasn’t all that noticeable anymore. It wasn’t bothering me anymore at least, and if it was bothering Lily, she didn’t say anything. So I left it where it was for now, dangling by a thread right above the makeshift table. Why do today what you could put off till tomorrow, am I right?

On the not-so-bright side though, a few days into our search for Teabone, my life took a turn for the even more annoying. But this had nothing to do with cats or karate.

It had to do with the aftermath of a language arts class that was slowly but surely reaching its final absurd form, and a nerd with eyesight worse than a visually impaired earthworm’s.

And of course, it all went down because I had gone and opened my big mouth when I should have known to keep it clamped tighter than that time I bought a pair of jeans at Hot Topic.

The end of Pun Detectives and the Case of the Kidnapped Kitten! (Part 5)!
To be continued in Part 6!