Misty Hollow Cat Detective (Darcy Sweet Mystery) (A Smudge the Cat Mystery Book 1) (7 page)

Corvin
twists his head at me in that annoying way that crows do.  "The sky.  The sky.  Where else would I come from, friend Smudge?"

I blink at him.  He's serious.  "That's not what I… 
Nevermind.  Go away, will you?  I'm trying to enjoy the sunshine."  It was still early, but I wondered if I could find Twistypaws out and about somewhere.  Have a walk or a run through the trees. 

Just thinking about her made my tail twitch. 
In the good way.

Corvin
hops around in front of me again, breaking up my daydream, leaning in and twitching his head back and forth to stare at me with either eye.

"Don't do that!" I tell him.  "You know that freaks me out."

"Sorry, sorry!" he screeches.  "Can't go away.  Can't go away.  Need your help.  Need your help, friend Smudge!  Caw!  Need your help!"

With every word he's getting louder and louder, flapping his wings still, all black-feathered agitation.  At this rate he's going to wake up the entire neighborhood.  As much as I'd like to see Jon Tinker's sleep get interrupted like mine was, I don't need anyone seeing me with a crow.

"Shh!" I hiss.  "Keep it down, already!"

"Need your help!" he repeats in a loud whisper that wasn't much better than what he'd been doing before.  I swear it's like crows can only hold one thought at a time and even that was too much for their little bird brains.

Me and Corvin have a complicated, uh, arrangement.  He's one of the crows who live in the town center near the park.  Now, don't get me wrong.  I can't stand crows.  They're less annoying than dogs, more annoying than…well, you know the rest.  But Corvin here has been a help to me more than once.  So I tolerate him, and bring him a sparkly bit of broken necklace or bright piece of string every once in a while, and he acts like I'm his only friend in the world.  Which, for all I know, I am.

Why do I need help from a crow, you might ask?  Trust me.  Some days I need all the help I can get.

"Okay, okay," I say quickly, looking around and hoping that no one has seen us.  There's any number of cats in this town but where Darcy and I live—and the bed-stealing Jon Tinker, too—is on a lonely road that doesn't really go anywhere.  There's exactly two houses here, and the neighbors don't have animals.  No reason for anyone to come over this way.  Still, I'd be more comfortable somewhere else.  "Meet me in our tree, all right?  We'll talk there."

"The tree, the tree!"
Corvin cries excitedly.  "Yes, the tree!  Meet ya.  Meet ya!"

He flaps his wings hard and then he's aloft, not exactly gracefully, flying off toward our secret meeting spot.

For just a moment, I look up toward Darcy's bedroom window, growling at how Jon Tinker has ruined my day.  I'd still be in bed sleeping next to Darcy if not for him.  Not having early morning meetings with a crow.

***

It took me a little longer to get to our arranged meeting spot than it took Corvin.  He can fly.  I can't.  I wish I could, sometimes, but I wouldn't give up being a cat to be a bird.  Not ever.  Even if it would be cool to know what it felt like to soar over housetops and swoop down on mice from above…

Ahem. 
Anyway.

I have to run through the trees surrounding the town, from one to the other, sniffing out a trail that I know very well but isn't marked in any way.  I don't want anyone seeing me and
Corvin together.  Might give certain cats the wrong idea.

When I get to one particular tree with hoary bark on a narrow, straight trunk rising high up above the ground, I stop to get my breath.  I hear
Corvin up there in the branches, cawing at me to hurry up.  My eyes narrow.  This had better be worth it.

Scrunching down on my back legs, I wiggle back and forth, tensing, getting ready to spring straight up in the air like this just as high as I can.  I grab the trunk with my claws and then look back down at the ground. 
About nine feet.  Not bad, but I've done better.  Scooting up a little bit at a time now, digging in with each inch, I make it to the lower branches and stop to lick my front paw.  This one's been bothering me.  Can't say why.  Maybe it's going to rain milk.

Cat joke.

Leaping gracefully from one branch to the other I get to the one Corvin and I use for our clandestine meetings.  He's already there, cleaning out his wings with his beak.  I flop down on the branch, one leg hanging over into space, tail flicking back and forth.  "All right, Corvin, I'm here.  What's up?"

He holds up his one wing, still preening the other with his beak, telling me to hold on until he's done.

Oh, for Pete's sake, as Darcy would say.

"
Corvin, I'm not hanging out with you all day while you take a beak bath.  What was so important that you had to come get me off my own lawn?"

"It's gone!" he screeches, hopping toward me, no warning, just there in front of my face and screaming.

I'm not afraid of heights.  No cat is, really.  We've got an internal sense of balance that makes one hundred feet up in the air no different than five.

What I am afraid of, is falling. 
From a tree branch.  With a crow jabbering away like a lunatic.  That, I'm afraid of.

I scrambled to keep my hold.  I'm pretty sure I was upside down at one point and hanging on for dear life. 
Corvin had nearly scared away another one of my lives, and I've only got eight left as it is.  The branch I was on is narrow, but thankfully strong enough to hold a cat desperately clawing himself back upright.

When I got back up, I wrapped my arms tight around the branch, claws sunk in deep, breath heaving in my chest, and glared at
Corvin.  "Do that again, and I'll eat you for breakfast."

He had the good sense to hop backward away from me, but he was still screeching at the top of his bird lungs.  "Sorry.  Sorry!  Just upset.  So upset.  It's gone it's gone it's gone!"

"Corvin!" I snap at him.  He stops as I scream his name, my heart just starting to calm down, the angry frustration that's sweeping through me pushing aside the fright I'd just had.  With a deep, slow breath, I lower my voice and try to speak calmly.  "Corvin.  Tell me what's wrong.  What is gone?"

"My sparkly!" he cries, throwing back his head and shaking himself all over.  "Someone took my sparkly!"

Oh, for the love of catnip.

Crows collect things.  That's why I can pay
Corvin with junk I find on the ground.  Give him a sparkling piece of pyrite from the creek, he'll do anything you ask.  Bring him a lost earring, and he'll be your friend for life.  I found that out the hard way.  They're very possessive about their collections, too.  Kind of like that dragon Smaug in The Hobbit with his gold.

Hey.  Darcy owns a bookstore.  Some of us cats can read, you know.

Anyway, if one of Corvin's "sparklies" has gone missing, it's no wonder he's so upset.

"Did you maybe drop it?" I ask him.  "That hole in your tree doesn't have a door or anything.  Did you check the ground around the tree?"

He hops a little bit this way, then a little bit that way, obviously upset.  "Thought of that.  Thought of it!  Not in the grass.  Didn't bounce away.  Didn't fall.  Someone took it!"

"All right, all right."
  I can see I'm not going to get anything else done today unless I help Corvin with this.  "Let's start over.  What did you lose?  What did this sparkly look like?"

He goes on to describe it, in halting details like a crow will, and with lots of questions from me to clarify what he's talking about.  "Sparkly string" could mean anything.

In the end, I've got a pretty good idea of what he's looking for.  A necklace (people feather, Corvin had called it) made of diamonds (star stones).  There was something else about it, too, something that looked like a sparkly snake.  One of those necklaces that are shaped like a letter S, or a flower or something.  I can only translate Corvin-speak so far.

"Where is it?  Where is it?" he asks me after I'm satisfied with the description.  "Need it.  Need it!"

I can't remember ever seeing Corvin this agitated.  There's something more to this than just losing one of his many baubles.  There was something special about this one.  "Corvin, I'll help you find your necklace.  Er, sparkly people feather, I mean.  Why is this one so important?"

He looked away from me, his beak open just a little and his tongue flicking inside his mouth.  His deep black eyes won't stop moving.

"You have to tell me," I insist.  "If I'm going to help you then I need to know everything."

He puffs out his chest and then lets the breath go.  "Need it."

"Sure.  You told me that.  But why?"

"Need it!" he repeats.  "Need it for her!  Want to give it to her."

Her?  "Wait a minute.  Corvin…do you have a girlfriend?"

If crows were capable of blushing like people do, that's what
Corvin would be doing right now.  "New crow.  Just moved in to the park," he explains.  "Pretty.  Pretty crow.  Want her to notice me.  Want her to like me."

"Oh.  I get it.  You want to give her the sparkly as a gift."

He caws once, softly.

Maybe I'm a sucker for anyone in love, but that did it for me.  Now I had to help him.  I'd had my own adventures in love, after all. 
Me and Twistypaws had been seeing each other for a while, and things just kept getting better between us, but I remember when I had to chase her cute gray tail all over town just to get her to look at me.  I know what that can be like.

"Tell you what," I say to the sulking black crow.  "I'll race you to your tree.  Let's find this girl her present."

***

I was a lot more careful about getting up Corvin's tree.  If he got agitated or excited again, I wasn't going to risk falling to my death.  I've heard a fall like that can wipe out all of the lives you have left, all at once.  This cat isn't dying today.

Corvin's
tree is at the edge of the park.  It's tall, with lots of branches to climb in.  Right above one branch is a knothole big enough that I could have crawled inside and curled up for a good nap, with no Jon Tinker bothering me.  This was where Corvin lived, and where he hid all of the things he found.  The hole was full of string and shiny bits of foil and other things I could see from the ground.

"Was here, was here,"
Corvin explained to me once we got up there.  "Now it's gone.  Need it back."

I listen to him with one ear as I peer over the edge of the branch to the ground below. 
Yup.  If the necklace had fallen it would have landed in short grass, making it easy to spot.  It wasn't anywhere to be seen.  "Do you think maybe it fell down there and someone found it?  A person, I mean.  Someone might have picked it up from the ground."

Like you did in the first place, I almost added to
Corvin.

The crow was already shaking his head emphatically.  "No.  No, no, no.  I found my sparkly fair and square.  Put it in my tree. 
Right there.  Right there!  Saw it last night.  Still there.  Sun went down, still there.  Went for breakfast this morning.  Sun still down.  Down, down, down.  I came back.  Came back, it was gone.  All dark still."

I understand what he's saying.  People can't see in the dark.  Not like cats can. 
Or crows, for that matter.  So, if the necklace had dropped out of the tree after dark, and if it was gone before sunrise, the chances of a person picking it up off the ground were slim.  There were lights in the park after dark but not in this area.  This part was always in shadows.

So.
  It wasn't taken by a person.  On to the next idea.

If you think it's weird for a cat to be solving problems in his neighborhood, well, you might be right.  This is me, though.  I'm a different sort of cat.  The
animals in Misty Hollow all know that they can come to me with their problems.  I can't always help, and I don't always want to help them either, but I do what I can.  I enjoy it, actually.  Darcy has her ways of helping her human friends, and I kind of do the same for the cats and the birds and the others that don't have anyone else to turn to.

Except dogs.
  I have to draw the line somewhere.

Anyway.
  If Corvin didn't drop his necklace out of the tree, then where did it go?  That's the question here.  There's not a whole lot around here, just trees and the open area of the park and…

The trees.

Corvin isn't the only crow who lives here.  Crows like to take sparkly things.  They aren't choosy about who they steal from, either.  Add all that together, and I'd be willing to bet that one of Corvin's neighbors saw his sparkly and took it for themselves.

"
Corvin, I'm going to go talk to some of your neighbors, all right?"  He nods, miserably, still looking into the knothole as if the necklace would spontaneously pop back into existence there.  Poor guy.

Whoa. 
Poor guy?  Let's not get carried away.  He's still a crow.

I sigh to myself.  Doesn't mean I won't help him.

From this branch it's a short jump to another that leads to the branches of a different tree and then over to another one across a five foot gap of open space.  I land in the limbs of a tall birch tree with peeling bark.  My presence doesn't go unnoticed.