The Cats Are Up To No Good

It was not in Liza Bean’s handwriting – there’s no mistaking her writing, after all: the spiky, Old-World flavor to her tidy, practiced script. It was her book, but this was not her handwriting, nor were these her words.

It didn’t take much reading to determine whose words they were. The handwriting was loopy, large girly letters, the “i”s dotted with little circles, the exclamation points punctuated with little hearts.

Liza Bean Bitey (of the Minneapolis Bitey), of whom I’ve written before, is a tiny Mata Hari of a cat, a known flirt and a suspected spy. The late-night calls to Televiv she used to take in the bathroom with the water running to mask the sound (she knows how I hate that!) have ended, but she’s been taking my car more and more often and returning it later and later… I have seen her in a fist fight, and I’ve seen the attraction she gets from the media. I have suspected this cat of being a jewel thief, a smuggler of things bound to be charged as felonies, a cat with shadowy connections to the world’s underground.

How this has happened is beyond me, and I’m ashamed to admit that it’s happened on my watch.

So you can only imagine my surprise when I found her notebook in the bathroom this morning.

And you can imagine my further surprise to find, upon opening the book, not Liza Bean’s thoughtful, measured strokes but the spastic, bubble-gum script of a junior high student.

Was this Dolly G. Squeaker (formerly of the Humane Society Squeakers)?

Wait. The last time I opened this notebook I found her notes to someone named Radu, something alluding to a security vault in Val D’Isere. Has this notebook been purposely left behind?

I must examine this possibility further…

The following is a verbatim transcription of the words written in Liza Bean Bitey’s journal. I think you’ll agree with me that something’s afoot:

Helloooooo! You said you would and now you is and I am so happy!

Meow-meow! Meow-meow!

You’re going OVERSEEZE. OVERSEEZE! That sounds so far away! I’ll bet it is far away. You’re going to bring me a present, aren’t you? I’ll hide hide it behind the teevee, back where no one cleans, with the other things you bring back! Ooooh, bring me something good to smell. Ooooh! What will you bring me from OVERSEEZE? Meow-meow! Meow-meow!

It was signed with the print from a paw that appears, actually, to have first been in the butter..

Something’s going on here, people. The cats are up to something.