So earlier this evening, there’s a knock on my door, and I open it to find a woman I don’t recognize. She’s wearing a turban and some kind of Sikh-looking caftan thing. She’s alone.
She’s holding the “lost cat” poster that’s been gracing our neighborhood bulletin boards since early May.
Earnestly, gazing at me with an open and sincere look, she says, “Someone told me you might have this cat here.”
Now I’ve been through this before, and I’m starting to get a weird feeling. In fact, flat-out surreal.
“No,” I explain, perhaps a bit more abruptly than an observer might expect. “The cat we have is a different cat. He’s black and white, but he has a mustache, unlike the cat in that photo, and his ear is nicked.”
“Are you sure?” she says, politely doubting me.
“Yes,” I say, “We’ve had him a lot longer than the cat in the poster has been missing. Who told you we have the cat?”
She doesn’t answer, says her goodbye, and leaves.
I look out the window and I see her with two older adults. They’re gazing at our bedroom window, where our cat often lounges, and she’s explaining something to them. The man, heavy-set and mustachioed, turns to glance at our kitchen window – I can’t tell if he sees me – and shakes his head as if in disgust.
What’s weird about this conversation is that I’ve already had it, with the cat’s “owner,” a young woman from a few buildings down. TWICE. She’s already come to our door, already asserted “someone told her” the cat was here, already doubted me. It was practically the same conversation on her end. I had been nicer that time, because I hadn’t been troubled by weird deja-vu.
Then later on we met her on the sidewalk while walking our dogs, and had almost the same conversation with her, which was weird, because it’s like she didn’t remember or wouldn’t acknowledge she’d talked to us just a few days previously.
You see, I think the woman I talked to today is the same woman, now dressed and made up completely differently, having the same conversation, a third time.
So I called my wife.
She called the phone number from the poster and spoke to the “owner,” whom we had previously spoken to. The woman confirmed she had visited me today, wearing a turban, and said “I don’t wear it all the time.” She then asserted that she’d lost the cat when a maintenance man left a hole in her screen and he chased a squirrel out.
I got cut off from talking to my wife (she’s at an event and had to speak with some people) so I don’t know any more right now.
However, when we’d talked to her the second time, while walking the dogs, she’d said at that time that “There’s a hole in my screen and the cat goes in and out all the time, but I haven’t seen him in a few days.” I said at the time, “if the cat comes and goes as he pleases, you don’t have a cat, you’re just near a cat.” That’s why I put quotes around “owner.”
So it looks to me like this woman has changed her story to make herself look more responsible. More to the point, three times now she’s asserted that someone she won’t name TOLD HER we have her cat. She can SEE our cat in the window, and obviously has, since she was looking for him today. She doesn’t need to say anything about being told, she could just say, “Hey, I saw that cat in the window.” She can SEE the cat LOOKS DIFFERENT from her cat – anyone who loves an animal can identify it from another similarly-colored animal with significantly different facial markings. She knows we know she’s looking for her cat and she knows we know she doesn’t fully believe us – so she comes back IN DISGUISE and acts like she’s never talked to me before? And says exactly the same things?
To be fair, we did take our cat in after finding him wandering outside, so someone may be misinterpreting that to her. However, we took our cat in during DECEMBER, five months before her cat disappeared. Furthermore, we went around the neighborhood talking to people before we took him in, and found out that everyone was slipping him food, but no one knew where the guy who had “owned” him had gone. When the weather hit ten degrees one night, the cat was crying piteously on the sidewalk, shivering and thin, and we decided we’d had enough and took him in. He’s been sitting in our window quite frequently over the last five months before her cat disappeared.
Now if I was a cat person, and someone came around asking about a cat who looked a lot like mine, then said they’d taken him in, then I saw the cat who looked a lot like mine sitting in a window for months, I think I’d remember it, and not ask with a blankly earnest face if it’s my cat. I’d know.
Is this woman stalking our cat? Why does she think we don’t remember her visits? Who are the angry-looking older people she kept in hiding outside my view while talking to me…her parents, maybe? Is she just bereft and grasping at straws, or bunny-boiling crazy?
