Have You Seen My Cat?

By Robert P. Hansen

When Detective Frank Primrose woke up this morning, he never expected to investigate the disappearance of cats. Police detectives simply don't do that sort of thing. But when it's the chief's niece's cat that's gone missing, what else can he do? Besides, it isn't just her cat that's gone missing; all of the cats in her building have disappeared. They aren't even the first ones he's heard about, either. So, what happened to them? Where have the cats gone? Who took them? Why did they take them? These are the questions he has to answer, and his search for those answers takes him on the strangest investigation he has ever had, one that may prove to be his last.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert P. Hansen
• Release date: Nov 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311316967

Robert P. Hansen

Robert P. Hansen has taught community college courses since 2004 and is currently teaching introductory courses in philosophy and ethics. Prior to that, he was a student for ten years, earning degrees in psychology (AA, BA), philosophy (BA, MA-T), sociology (MA), and English (MA). Writing has been a hobby of his since he graduated high school, going through several phases that were influenced by what he was doing at the time.In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he played Dungeons and Dragons, read fantasy novels, and wrote fantasy short stories. He was also influenced by country music, particularly ballads, and wrote a number of short fantasy ballads that were later incorporated into the long poem "A Bard Out of Time."In the mid-1990s, college and work did not leave him much time for writing, and he mainly wrote poetry. It was during this period that he learned how to write sonnets and became obsessed with them. Since he was focused on developing the craft of poetry, it was a recurring theme in many of the poems from this period ("Of Muse and Pen"); however, as a student of psychology, psychological disorders were also of interest to him, and he wrote several sonnets about them ("Potluck: What's Left Over"). He also began to submit his poems for publication, and several appeared in various small press publications between 1994 and 1997.Most of the poems appearing in "Love & Annoyance" (both the love poems and the speculative poems) were written while he was a student (1994-2004), and relate to his romantic misadventures and his discovery of philosophy, the proverbial love of his life.The poems in "A Field of Snow and Other Flights of Fancy" do not fit into a specific period; they are humorous poems reflecting momentary insights or playful jests, which can happen at any time. However, most were written before 1999.In 1999, his interest shifted to writing science fiction short stories. Most of these stories were a response to a simple question: Why would aliens visit Earth? The majority of these stories appeared in magazines published by Fading Shadows, Inc. He later returned to this question in 2013 to finish his collection, "Worms and Other Alien Encounters."In 2003, he discovered the poetry of Ai as part of a project for a poetry workshop. Ai is known for her persona poems written from the perspective of serial killers, murderers, abusers, and other nasty characters. Her work inspired him, and he entered a dark period, writing several macabre persona poems similar to Ai's and compiling his thesis, "Morbidity: Prose and Poetry", which focused on death, dying, and killing. ("Last Rites ... And Wrongs" is an expansion of that thesis.)While a graduate student at the University of Northern Iowa, he twice won the Roberta S. Tamres Sci-Fi Award for his short stories "Exodus" (2003) and "Cliche: A Pulp Adventure Story" (2004).He did very little writing from 2004 to 2010; he was too busy developing or refining the courses he was teaching. From 2010 to 2013, he focused mainly on organizing, revising, and submitting the work he had already completed, which resulted in several poems and short stories being published. He wrote sporadically until the spring of 2013, when he finished the initial draft of his first full-length novel "The Snodgrass Incident," which expanded upon and integrated three short stories he had written in the fall of 2012.In the fall of 2013, he prepared several collections (poems and stories) for publication on Amazon and made a final revision of "The Snodgrass Incident." These were posted early in 2014, and he redirected his attention to other projects, including revising a short fantasy novel and a collection of suspense-oriented fantasy/horror/science fiction stories.

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Have You Seen My Cat?

By Robert P. Hansen

Copyright 2014 by Robert P. Hansen

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Acknowledgments

Cover copyright 2014 by American Book Design.

Special thanks to Ronda Swolley of Mystic Memories Copy Editing for the copy edit.

Dedication

For Rick Meyer, a friend misplaced.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

Have You Seen My Cat?

Six

Eleven

Sixteen

Twenty-One

Twenty-Six

Thirty-One

Thirty-Six

Connect With Me

Additional Titles

Have You Seen My Cat?

ONE

Louisa Anderson stepped into her apartment and turned sideways just far enough to shut and lock the door behind her. She took a deep breath, savoring the pine forest of her air freshener, and set her keys and purse on the small table in her foyer. She slipped off her work shoes and leaned down to rub the toes of her left foot, and then she walked into the kitchen and stopped. Something was wrong.

She looked around the kitchen but couldn’t tell what was. She frowned. Her door had been locked, but she had the distinct impression that someone had been in her apartment. Nothing seemed to be out of place, but she still took a few steps back and slipped her hand in her purse to get the pepper spray. She wasn’t scared, exactly, but she was uneasy.

What was it that troubled her? Prissy? she muttered, wondering why her calico hadn’t greeted her. She always greeted her with a soft little mewl and friendly rub against her calf. Here kitty, kitty, she called, her voice higher than normal, softer than normal. She smiled and asked, Where are you, you little rascal?

She palmed the pepper spray with her finger on the nozzle and went back into the kitchen to look for her. But Prissy wasn’t near her food dish, and there weren’t many places for a cat to hide. She searched them quickly, calling, Here, Prissy, a few times, but the kitten was not there. She turned to the living room—what she called a living room; it was barely large enough for a pair of chairs, a dining table, and a few wall-length bookshelves—and did another quick search. No Prissy.

That left the bedroom and bathroom, neither of which yielded the little calico.

The windows were closed. The door had been locked.

Where are you, Prissy? she asked, shaking her head and putting her hands on her hips. She frowned and mumbled, I know I didn’t let you out this morning. She gave her apartment another quick search, ending with the same results. By the time she had finished searching for the third time, she was getting somewhat frantic, wondering where her kitten was. She took out her smartphone and searched through the text messages she hadn’t gotten around to reading, but none of them mentioned Prissy or her apartment. She hadn’t expected them to, since the only other person who had a key to her apartment was her landlord, and he always called well ahead of time if he needed access to it. Still…

She called her landlord.

This is Tom, he answered.

Hi Tom, she began. This is Louisa Anderson in 22B.

Hi Louisa, he said.

Were you here today?

No, he said. Is there a problem?

I don’t know, she said. I can’t find my kitten. I’ve looked everywhere in the apartment, but she’s not here.

Did he you let her out when you left?

No, she said, shaking her head.

Are you sure?

Positive, She said, nodding. She’s too skittish to go outside the apartment.

Did you lock your door when you left?

Of course, Louisa said. I had to unlock it when I got home.

Who else has a key?

Only you, she said.

Is there anything else missing?

I don’t think so, she said. But I haven’t really looked.

Look then, he said. If there is, you should call the police. Other than that, I don’t know what you want me to do.

Louisa thought for a moment, Well, if anyone finds a calico kitten—

I’ll keep you in mind. Is there anything else?

Louisa pinched her lower lip and shook her head. No, just my kitten’s missing.

All right, Tom said. Goodbye, then.

TWO

Louisa sat on her couch and scrolled through the photos she’d taken of Prissy, trying to find the right one to use on the flyer. She smiled at the one in which Prissy had been tangled up in a ball of yarn, and then she remembered why she was looking through the photos. She needed one that showed Prissy’s profile and face, and that one didn’t. Most of them didn’t. Most of them were funny little incidents Prissy had gotten into, the ones she had put on Facebook for her friends to chuckle over.

Once she chose a photo, she wondered about the content of the message. HAVE YOU SEEN MY CAT? was the easy part, but she didn’t know if she should give a reward, use her e-mail, phone, Facebook, or twitter for the contact information. Should she give her name? It was complicated, more complicated than she’d expected, and it took several minutes for her to settle on using her phone number and offering a $50 reward that she couldn’t really afford. She saved the file and opened the printer menu.

How many copies? she asked herself, counting them off on her fingers. The Laundromat. The front door. The back door. The bulletin board in the park. Telephone poles. Hadley’s Bar & Grill. In the end, she decided Prissy was just a kitten