The Case of the Disappearing Neko

(I love the old Perry Mason mystery books by Erle Stanley Gardner; the titles all begin with The Case of the …..).

Thursday afternoon we bought a bag of dry cat food for the Neko-chan. 

When we got home we saw it in back of the apartment building.  Before we could take the bowl of food down the stairs, a dog on a long leash chased Neko-chan up a tree.  It was all the way up even with our third floor apartment!

I went out with some food to try to call it down, but it stayed put.

The lower 20 feet of the tree has no branches and I didn’t know how it would get down. Ted said leave it alone and it would get down.  I kept going out to the balcony to look at it and after dark, I shined a flashlight on it to look at it.  Finally, around nine o’clock, I heard some scratching bark noises and looked out to see the Neko-chan running away.

Friday morning the maintenance man from the university was cutting the grass/weeds around the apartment building with a loud weed eater, so the Neko-chan stayed away. 

We didn’t see it all afternoon. That night when we came back from the moving sushi restaurant (Friday has become Sushi Date Night), we saw it run across the parking lot of the next apartment building. We saw a boy looking under a car and thought it must be there, but it wasn’t.  It disappeared!  We looked all around both buildings and under cars, but it was gone.  We did see a cardboard box with a hole cut for a door that someone must have put out for it.

Ted thinks it could have gone inside someone’s apartment, but I don’t think so.  For one thing, it’s not allowed, but also the cat was kind of skittish.  I don’t know if it would follow someone inside.

We haven’t seen the Neko-chan since.  So, for now, it’s a mystery… the case of the disappearing Neko-chan.